“Is Lady Károlyi within?” I called in Hungarian.
One of the men approached the gate, his eyes sweeping my gown, torn and stained from the Binding and the fight on the hill. Doubtless the dress and my accent made me suspect. “Please, I must speak with her. My name is Anna Arden. My grandmother is Lady Zrínyi, my cousin Eszterházy Noémi.”
Apparently the names were sufficiently prominent, for he lost his doubtful look. “I’m sorry, but I’ve orders to open the gate to no one.”
“Will you at least tell Lady Karolina I wish to speak with her?”
He nodded shortly and disappeared into one of the twin entrances flanking the gate. I slid my hand into my pocket, my fingers questing for the golden falcon. But it was gone—lost somewhere in that night’s madness.
A few minutes later, Karolina rushed out to the gate, wearing a traveling gown and hat and pulling on her gloves as she crossed the cobblestones to me. “Anna! Why are you still here?”
“You’re leaving?”
“Something has gone wrong. The revolution has turned; it is no longer for us. My children are already away. I stayed only for word of my husband’s safety. You should leave as well.”
“My grandmother has been hurt. She needs help.”
Karolina shook her head, biting her lower lip as though she were genuinely troubled. “I’m so sorry, Anna. I can’t help you. I wish I could. The carriage is already waiting. I must think of my family first.”
Rage and grief boiled in my stomach, a bitter kind of alchemy. “Please.”
Karolina fished in her reticule, then pressed a handful of notes through the bars of the gate into my hand. “I wish your grandmother well. Truly. Isten áldjon!” God bless you! She picked up her skirts and swept back the way she’d come, leaving me staring after her.
I didn’t want her money. I dropped the notes on the ground and spun on my heel.
I wept tears of rage all the way back to Grandmama’s. I was furious with Karolina—and with my own helplessness. I had no means to send for a doctor, and no assurance one would come could I summon him. I wished I had not been so quick to spurn Karolina’s money, satisfying as the gesture had been.
Across the street from Grandmama’s, I spotted a solitary figure lighting a pipe, the flare burning in the darkness. Though I reasoned a Circle spy would not betray his presence so carelessly, the sight sent barbs of fear up my spine.
I climbed the stairs in silence and darkness. I could not stay here: it would be the first place the Circle hunted for me. But I could not leave Noémi alone to tend to Grandmama and Ginny while they were still so weak.
In the library, I curled up beside Grandmama and listened to her labored breathing. I watched her form, initially invisible save for the drape of the quilt, gradually take on color. She looked pasty and waxen, not like a real person at all. And eventually, against every expectation, I started drifting. The corners of the room swam around me—one, two, three, four—and I closed my eyes.
I found myself in a strange forest, surrounded by tall pines. They filled the air around me with their clean scent. My heart lightened, as if all the horror of the night were only a dream and this were real. I followed a path between snowdrops, their white petals blazing in the gloom cast by the towering trees. The path led eventually to a clearing, where a lady sat plaiting her dark hair. At my arrival, she looked up and smiled a welcome.
The Lady was a stranger to me. I had never seen anyone who shone so brightly, her entire body emanating light as if she were made of sunbeams. Yet there was something familiar about her. Maybe it was her smile, which held all the maternal warmth I had longed to see in my own mother. Maybe it was the clarity in her look. She stood and came toward me, her long gown scarcely bending the grass beneath her. A great gold falcon perched on her shoulder, much like the one I’d seen in the Binding. The turul bird.
I stood still, trembling. Hope can sometimes feel very much like terror.
“Well met, daughter.” She cupped my face in her hands, and the warmth of her touch pushed away the fear and exhaustion I carried with me. “Be at peace. You have traveled far, and the hardest road is still before you. But remember there are those who love you. You shall not be alone, nor forgotten. Who you are, what you shall do, all these matter.”
Her words fell like balm against cracked skin. They stung a little, with their reminder of hardship to come, but they healed too. A hard kernel of fear, buried so deep I had almost forgotten I carried it, softened and dissipated. I was loved: by Grandmama, by James, by my cousins. By Gábor too, though he fought it. I mattered. With a gentle finger, the Lady wiped a tear from my cheek before bending forward to kiss my forehead. A flicker of warmth built against my skull, radiating down to fill my entire body.
“I set my blessing on you,” she said, releasing me.
“Thank you.” I met her star-bright gaze without flinching.
“Have courage. We are both of us bound in different ways. You are bound by your fears—but do not let them shackle you. You are stronger than you know.”
I studied her serene face, like a Madonna in a Renaissance painting. “You are bound? Where? How?”
“In the same Binding spell you troubled so recently. I can only reach you thus in dreams.” She touched my cheek again. “That spell contains a host of creatures, just as your world does. We are not all of us dark, or all light. I am the Boldogasszony.” The Joyful Woman. “Once, before I was bound, I was mother-goddess to Hungary.”
“But the creatures—” I began. A sound like a gunshot fractured through the dream. The Lady’s face began to waver, cracks of light splintering across her. “Wait,” I said. “Don’t go.”
“Anna.” Noémi was shaking my shoulder. “Someone’s here.”
And then I was wide awake, blinking in the first grey light of dawn, my heart pounding an erratic rhythm in my chest. I sat upright. Noises drifted up from the entryway below. Voices. Footsteps.
Noémi scrambled to her feet. “Perhaps it’s Mátyás.”
I listened for a moment. I heard crashing, then the lilting refrain of a spell. “No. The Circle.”
“What have you done?” Her face turned the color of bone. “Surely I would have felt the Binding shatter.”
“Lady Berri killed someone.” And where was she now? I stooped to gather Grandmama as best I could. “Help Ginny.” My maid was awake but weak still.
The three of us staggered down the hallway to the back of the house, then descended the narrow servants’ stairs to a door at the back of the courtyard. We struggled through the rear gate and into the mew. Light though she was, Grandmama was not easy to carry. My muscles pulled and burned.
Please, I prayed as we stumbled toward the street. Please let there be a carriage. Behind us, I heard a door slam, then shouts.