It took only a little time to acquaint János with the circumstances. When he heard of Mátyás’s imprisonment, he turned a ghastly shade, and Noémi ran to the kitchens to find some tea. After he revived, János set wards on the house to warn us if the Circle was coming, and we got to work.
As the sun broke fully across the horizon, we gathered in the Sala Terrena, the great ballroom turned sheepfold. The sheep paid us no mind as Pál grounded the spell, treading a circle across the floor and murmuring incantations. Noémi tried, unsuccessfully, to shoo them from the room.
I watched and waited, a yawning coldness swallowing me. What was I doing?
I thought of Gábor and Mátyás and William, and the dozens of others imprisoned with them, awaiting execution. And the creatures, imprisoned for centuries in a different kind of jail. Something like peace swept over me, nestling under my heart. The fear didn’t vanish entirely—I could still feel it stirring in my middle—but it was gentler now, less hungry.
A crow cawed from the shaggy garden beyond the empty-eyed windows. Distantly, bells rang.
János started. “The wards!” He stumped toward the pillared opening at the far end of the room.
“Another portal?” I asked, fear leaching through my body. How had the Circle found us so quickly?
Noémi, Grandmama, and I swiveled toward Pál. He stood with his eyes closed, arms extended, fingers splayed. Light winked off a heavy signet ring on one finger.
“You are my son,” Grandmama said. “Why should you help us and then lead our enemies here?”
Pál opened his eyes, the unearthly blue blazing. “I have not been your son since I was nine years old. And I want to see Herr Steinberg’s face when he knows I have betrayed him. I want him to see that in me he has wrought a tool that will destroy everything he values.”
If we survived this, I would kill Pál myself.
Grandmama stood shrunken, her shoulders bowed under the weight of a new disappointment. I wanted to throw my arms around her and tell her if Pál was not the son she yearned for, I would be a granddaughter to make her proud. But she was too far away. I hadn’t time.
Footsteps pounded across the marble floor beyond the room. János stumbled and cried out.
“Anna, go now!” Noémi hissed at me.
I hesitated. “But the spell—it could be anything.”
Pál’s eyes flashed. “The spell is sound.”
I would have to trust that his desire for revenge on the Circle was greater than his desire to betray us. I stepped toward the Grounding spell and closed my eyes, preparing for the imminent falling sensation. Instead, an electric shock ran through my entire body. My knees collapsed underneath me, and I found myself staring at the vaulted ceiling covered in writhing rose vines, wondering why my arms would not stop shaking.
Grandmama cried out.
I gritted my teeth and struggled upright.
Four men stood in the doorway of the Sala Terrena. Three were masked. Herr Steinberg was the fourth, his hands extended before him in a spell-caster’s stance.
Deep lines scored his face, though his mouth was set. I knew he did not want to be here, did not want this confrontation.
I also knew he would kill me if he could.
The fear I had pushed aside gushed outward, flooding through me. I scrambled to my feet and pulled Grandmama backward, away from the portal. Behind me, I heard the crackle and hiss of electricity. Something exploded, sending a pulse of light through the darkening room. The sheep moved, finally, surging around our feet and heading for the broken glass doors. I pushed Grandmama toward a crumbling sculpture.
Grandmama trembled on her feet, but would not move. “I will not hide.”
“But you might be killed.”
“So might we all. I am an old lady. And you have a spell to break.”
I stared at her, my heart racing. Grandmama took my hand, rubbing her papery fingers against mine. “Anna. All your life, your mama and I have tried to fit you into a shape too small to hold you. But you are two souls, not one, and you have always been meant for greater things. Let yourself free. Be who God intended you to be. Now go. We will hold them.”
She withdrew her hand, and her outline blurred and became transparent.
I darted back to the portal. A ball of fire shot toward me. At the last moment, I leapt aside and tumbled to the ground. The fireball exploded scant inches from my head. I struggled to rise from the tangle of my skirts.
The light abruptly winked out as something vast and shadowy passed between our small group and the arched ceiling. Then it swooped down, a rush of wind and something cool like mist. I had a confused impression of long, dagger-sharp teeth before one of the men began screaming.
“An illusion!” Herr Steinberg shouted. “It is only an illusion! Hold fast!”
A flash of light illuminated the dark room. For that half second, the world seemed shrunk to a small, bright sphere: Noémi’s pale face, János’s determined one, Herr Steinberg’s grim one. The light faded, and I blinked against the afterimages, trying to regain my bearings. Grandmama and Pál had both vanished.
Another flare of light, this one racing toward me. Just before it hit me, I was struck from the side by something warm and solid. I fell, and Noémi’s weight landed across my legs. Her eyes, when they met mine, were bright, and her face twisted with pain. She took a deep, ragged breath.
“Anna, you must go! No one can help us if you are killed.” She rolled away from me as I stood once more and ran.
The explosion of a second fireball lit the room behind me. I heard János’s cry and my heart twisted, but I did not stop. I dove into the middle of Pál’s anchored spell and closed my eyes.
I braced myself for impact with the ground, but the impact did not come at once. When I opened my eyes, I was falling through a field of stars.
When I landed, at last, the Binding was both strange and familiar.
There was no grass-carpeted hill, no flowers, no distant turrets rising above a silver-leafed wood. Instead, I found myself standing in a narrow valley, great rock mountains rising all around me, their tops shrouded in mist. Fir trees sprouted from the mountains at improbable intervals. The ground around me was strewn with rocks, boulders heaved from the mountains by storms or heavy snows. Or giants. Winds howled, tugging at my hair, keening in my ears.
I’d never seen this aspect of the Binding. Was this the heart of the spell—or had Pál’s spell merely taken me to the part of the Binding nearest Eszterháza?
I needed to find out. The only vantage point in all that windswept valley was a great stone slab. I made my way toward it.
I struggled to remember all I knew of breaking the Binding. Before, it had seemed enough that I was chimera, that if I drew the spell into me, my very nature would shatter the spell as it had at Sárvár. But walking through a lonely valley, dwarfed by solitary mountain pines and rocks, I felt acutely how foolish we had been to think this might work. How could I pull something so vast into my souls?