“Never mind that now.” Her voice was grim. “You must get out of here. I’ll hold them.”
A slit appeared in the air beside me, dark against the darker night. I hesitated. Fear and despair washed over me, so thick I could taste their bitterness, so heavy my arms hung limp at my sides. Some part of my mind recognized it as a Coremancer’s work, and I struggled free of it. “I can’t leave you.”
“You’re no good to me here. Go!”
I went.
I emerged on the street before Grandmama’s house, and the slit sealed shut behind me.
The heavy wooden gates to Grandmama’s courtyard hung askew on their hinges. Shock held me immobile for a moment. I had been gone only a few hours. What had happened? I sprang up the stairs leading off the courtyard, my skirts clutched in my fists, and stopped in the vaulted entryway.
The silence in the house was tangible, a crouching beast with glowing eyes and sharp teeth. The lovely parquet floor of the entry hall was charred and buckled. Here and there small fires flickered in the gloom.
Grandmama. My heart stuttered. Ginny. Noémi. I gathered up my skirts again and picked my way across the ruined floor before rushing up the stairs. I should have been here. My single-mindedness had left the people I loved exposed, unguarded.
Grandmama’s drawing room was empty, and I raced up the stairs to her bedchamber. It was also vacant, though ash was tracked across the carpet and chairs overturned. I released the breath I held, a slow hiss of air between my teeth. Perhaps Ginny saw her safely away before the attack came.
But whose attack? Was this the Circle, punishing me for my temerity? Or William and Pet?fi’s revolution, gone horribly awry?
I had not broken the Binding. There should have been no signal for a revolution.
I pressed down the hallway to my bedchamber. Clothes were strewn across the floor. The round cheval glass over my dressing table had been flung down. Glittering shards winked up at me from the rug.
Noémi’s room bore similar signs of ransacking.
“Anna?” I heard, and paused, my hand on the door. My cousin wormed her way out from underneath the massive four-poster.
“Noémi.” I rushed to help her up. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine,” she said, though her face was pale, her curls in disarray around her head. “Only a bit shaken. Where are the others?”
“I’ve seen no one else.” I put my arm through hers and helped her out of the room.
“The servants fled as soon as the men broke through the door.”
“Luminate?” I asked, heading toward the library.
“No. They were young. Workers mostly, I think.” Her voice was bitter. “Part of William’s mad revolution, no doubt.”
“This isn’t what we planned.” Had Pet?fi started the revolution without waiting for a signal?
“Some people need only a small excuse to spread violence,” Noémi said. But she didn’t sound vindicated, only sad and tired.
I fell silent, my heart not in the argument, and pushed open the door to the library. Ginny lay facedown on the rug.
With a cry, I dropped to my knees beside her. I could see no blood—and her chest still rose and fell. Together, Noémi and I turned her over. I took a cushion from a chair and placed it under Ginny’s head. Dark blood, still oozing sluggishly, matted her hair to her temple. Her face was so pale, so still. While Noémi tore a strip from her petticoat to bind the wound, I fetched some blankets from my room to cover her. Had I not come to Hungary, Ginny would not have followed. She would not have been hurt.
I pushed the thought away. I did not have time to tally all my guilt: James, the Romanies, now Ginny.
“I must find Grandmama,” I said, returning to the library and handing the blankets to Noémi. “Where was she when you last saw her?”
“In the drawing room.”
I raced down the hall, shivering. The house was cold. The fires had gone out, and I did not know how to relight them. Only servants and Elementalists knew that.
I scoured the drawing room, examining scuffed, ashy footprints on the Turkish rug, righting fallen chairs, putting Noémi’s tangled embroidery skeins back in her basket. Grandmama’s customary chair had fallen at an odd angle, held up a few inches from the floor as if by magic. I pulled the chair upward and frowned at the floor. Something shifted, a trick of shadow on shadow. A faint rasp sounded, out of tempo with my own breathing.
I stooped, reaching for the carpet.
But my questing hands never touched it. Instead, I felt the plush nap of velvet. Patting upward, I touched the cool, paper-texture skin of Grandmama’s hands. Exploring still further, I found her face, the smooth coils of hair behind her ears, the faint, warm puff of air as she exhaled. My first response was a welling of profound relief.
But my hands looked as if they were shaping air.
Invisible.
Grandmama was invisible—and I had never known she had such magic. If I had thought of her magic at all, I thought her to be a Coremancer like Mama, though one who disliked magic and never used it. But she was Animanti, like my cousins. What other secrets had she kept from me? Rather, not secrets—what questions had I failed to ask? Because she had always been so constant in my life, I had failed her in the worst of ways: I had not seen there might be something to her beyond the needs she met for me.
I had to get her somewhere safe. Karolina Károlyi’s home was perhaps a half mile distant. I had walked there only a few days previous with Noémi.
I slid one arm beneath Grandmama’s head, another beneath her legs, and awkwardly hoisted her upward. I staggered back down the hall, to the library, where I had left Ginny and Noémi, which was marginally warmer than the drawing room with its shattered windows. I set her gently on the floor beside Ginny and borrowed one of Ginny’s blankets. Beneath the covering, the familiar set of Grandmama’s contours took shape.
“I found her,” I said. “She’d gone invisible.”
“Really?” Noémi looked interested, kneeling beside Grandmama and putting her hand to Grandmama’s head. “The spell she used will wear off eventually. Her biggest danger now is taking cold. I’ll keep her warmed.”
“We cannot stay here,” I said. “I’ll see if Karolina has a place for us.”
“The streets aren’t safe,” Noémi said, her eyebrows contracting.
I swallowed. “There is no one else to go.”
The streets were dark—the usual lamplighters had not been out. But I knew the way. I could hear distant shouting, and once I had to draw back into the shadows of a doorway as a troop of Austrian soldiers trotted down the empty roadway. Aside from that, I saw only other single travelers who paid little mind to me, being as eager as I to reach their destinations.
There were still lights on in the Károlyi palace when I approached, and I sighed with relief. The ornamented iron gates were closed, but a pair of footmen stood sentry just inside.