I heard voices in the drawing room as soon as I reached the landing from the stairs. Despite the unseemly early hour, there was quite a gathering. My cousins and Grandmama sipped their tea while my uncle sat empty-handed on a narrow wooden chair, his hands loose in his lap. Lady Berri spread her bulk across a chaise longue, and Herr Steinberg stood against the wall nearest my uncle.
I nearly ducked back out of the drawing room. But I was ravenously hungry and could smell the pastries from the doorway. I squared my shoulders and marched into the room. I collected a plate full of food from a sideboard before squeezing onto a sofa between Mátyás and Noémi. My cousins’ warmth made me feel marginally less exposed.
“Welcome, cousin,” Mátyás said. “We’re in the midst of a rather brilliant confabulation about your future.”
I glared at him. “My future? I was not the one in a stranger’s bedroom after midnight attempting to murder her with a spell.” Grandmama always said the best defense was to attack.
“Too true,” Mátyás murmured. “And therein lies part of the scandal. Where exactly were you, Anna, when you were supposed to be abed?”
I elbowed him. He knew well where I had been. I had told him. Then I took a bite of a walnut-filled rétes and turned my attention to Grandmama, who spoke with Herr Steinberg and Lady Berri. Her back was stiff, her voice full of militant politeness.
“This is unconscionable,” Grandmama said. “That you, Lady Berri, should have coerced my granddaughter into participating in dangerous magic, and that you, Herr Steinberg, should take it upon yourself to punish her!”
“Notice the prodigal daughter bears no blame in this,” Mátyás murmured.
“Mátyás!” Noémi warned.
He grinned at me.
The door opened, one of the maids with a fresh tray of pastries, and Gábor slipped in behind her to take up silent vigil beside the door. He caught my eye and smiled reassuringly.
“I very much regret the necessity for Pál’s actions,” Herr Steinberg said. “But I cannot allow risk to the Binding, and your granddaughter broke her promise.”
“Surely that is for the Circle to decide, not you,” Grandmama said. “Surely she is entitled to a trial, at the least. And why is Anna to be punished, and not the spell-binder who drove her?”
Herr Steinberg glanced at Lady Berri, his gaze flat with loathing, and said nothing.
Lady Berri laughed. “What the distinguished herr means to say is I outrank him. He cannot touch me.” Her voice turned serious. “But I do very much resent what he tried to do. It is only the mercy of God Anna was not hurt.”
I stiffened, affronted. I had been saved through my own efforts, not divine intervention—though it was not, perhaps, the best moment to say so.
“And to use her own uncle against her…” Lady Berri’s voice trailed off.
I glanced across at my uncle Pál, who fiddled with the cuff on one sleeve. As if he felt my gaze, he looked up. His eyes were incongruously pale against his dark hair and skin. There was a light in them that was not quite right. Fear skittered across my skin.
“I did not realize,” Herr Steinberg said gruffly, “he was her uncle.”
“Zrínyi is not a common surname,” Grandmama said. “You might have guessed.”
“I would not have killed you.” Pál’s pale eyes drilled into me. “I know what you are.”
My heart pounded. Beside me, Noémi gripped my hand in hers.
“What did you see?” Herr Steinberg asked. His eyes were on me, so he did not notice the look Pál unleashed on him: dark, cold, contemptuous.
“Nothing,” Pál said. “And everything. She will break the world, as her kind has done since the beginning.”
A wave of ice flashed through my body. My kind. What was I?
“And the Binding?” Lady Berri asked.
“She could break it if she chooses.” Pál shrugged, as if it did not matter to him whether I undid the spell or not.
Lady Berri looked pleased, Herr Steinberg grim.
I thought of going back into the Binding, and a frisson that was equal parts pleasure and terror shivered through me.
“She must not be allowed to do so,” Herr Steinberg said.
“I should like to see you stop her,” Lady Berri said, her chin high.
Herr Steinberg sprang to his feet, his glasses trembling on his nose. He lifted his hands, his fingers already weaving the beginnings of a spell. “Watch me.”
My body flashed cold. No.
Lady Berri surged upward, her own fingers flickering.
“Hajrá! My money is on the thin one.” Mátyás leaned forward, his eyes bright.
Grandmama pounded her cane on the floor. “Enough! I won’t have you quarreling over Anna as if you were a pair of mongrels and she a bone between you. Now, I think you should leave.”
Herr Steinberg dropped his hands, two spots of color appearing high in his cheeks. His cravat had come askew, the first sign of sartorial untidiness I had ever seen in him. “But the Binding?”
“I think you may trust me to keep my granddaughter away from that spell, and from Lady Berri. But I will not allow you to stay in my house, threatening my flesh and blood. Anna is a child still, and under my care.” I wondered if anyone else saw the sliver of a glance she shot at Pál, the shadow of pain that flashed across her face. “I won’t shirk my duty.”
Herr Steinberg looked as though he would protest, but Lady Berri nudged him. “Come, you heard the lady.” She did not look in the least discomfited at being thrown out of Grandmama’s house. Her lips curled, catlike. What was she plotting?
Lady Berri apologized once more to Grandmama and departed, leaving behind her a message that sounded in my ears with a puff of air: “Herr Steinberg will send for reinforcements from Vienna who will try to stop us. I must go into hiding until the Binding is broken. Watch for my letter.”
Herr Steinberg took my uncle away, and we all breathed a sigh of relief.
But Herr Steinberg returned four days later with a sealed letter from Vienna.
Grandmama tried to have the butler turn him away at the door.
“Circle business,” said Herr Steinberg, flashing the seal and nodding at the two Austrian soldiers who’d accompanied him, and the butler let him in.
To Grandmama, who sat with lips pursed and arms tightly folded, he said, “The Austrian Circle appreciates your concern for your granddaughter. But you must also appreciate that we cannot let her become embroiled in any plots to break the Binding. I have come with a solution.”
He held out his hand, revealing a ring in his palm: a hideous gargoyle with a faintly glowing green stone in its open mouth. “I know that spells cast around Anna are sometimes unpredictable, so I have asked Pál to cast a spell on this bauble. It will register where Anna goes and what spells are cast around her. If she goes into the Binding, the spell will immobilize her.”
“No one will be hurt?” Grandmama asked.
“No one. Though the ring, once worn, cannot be removed save by the caster, and if Miss Arden attempts it, it will pain her. And if, by chance, she breaks the spell on this ring, we will have no alternative but to keep her under personal supervision.”
“Imprisonment, you mean?” I asked.
“Nothing so crude. House arrest, rather.”
I thought of Hunger waiting in the Binding: prison was prison, no matter how appealing the bars. “I won’t wear it.”