Mátyás nodded at Hunger. “He promised you an army. I don’t believe even Luminates could stand against the creatures here.”
I shivered. I did not say, How am I supposed to set a knife against your heart, to thrust it in? I hugged Mátyás once more, then let him go.
I was not eager to begin the spell that might end with Mátyás’s death, however willing he was, but I did not know how much time had passed in the real world. I explained to Mátyás everything I knew. It did not take long.
I did not know nearly enough.
Mátyás rubbed one hand over his jaw, thinking. “You cannot perform spells because the double souls in you repel spells—but you cannot reach spells unless you are angry or strongly moved.” He looked at me. “Are you angry now?”
I was angry, a simmering fury at the unfairness of the situation. But it was not the raw, overwhelming anger I’d used to break Catherine’s spell. “No.”
“Even if she were to draw the magic in, her soul would begin to break it down immediately, before she could hold the entire spell,” Hunger said. “It would be like unraveling a weaving. It might take weeks.”
“We don’t have weeks,” I said.
“If we could separate your souls somehow, maybe you could draw all the magic into one soul and then bring the souls back together….” Mátyás rubbed his face again.
The beginnings of an idea glimmered. “How does your shapeshifting work? Do you change matter, or something else?”
“I change matter. Usually my own, but I can sometimes shift things I touch.”
I thrust my wrist out to Mátyás. “Could you shift one of my souls into something else? Into power that might be drawn into this?” The Romani bracelet jangled.
He studied me for a long moment, his blue-eyed gaze clear and unflinching. “Hold still,” he said finally, and took my left hand.
A faint warmth crept from his fingers into mine. But then, as it had done with so many other spells, the heat intensified. It blazed up my arm, following the tracery of blood vessels, and spreading through my lungs like fire. I tried to scream and wrench my hand free, but Mátyás held me fast, and I had no air left in my lungs for sound. I could feel my souls reaching for his spell, to tear it open, and I pushed them down. I must stay calm. I must let this work.
Then something closed around my other wrist—long fingers that were somehow both human in the soft touch of skin and inhuman in the not-quite-right shape. His touch scalded, as it had in Sárvár, but the burning was only a drop to the pain pouring through me. The bone blade fell from my fingers. At my side, Hunger murmured strange words in a lyrical, molten tongue. After a moment, the heat began to leave me, sliding through my fingers into Hunger. His grip tightened. The fire did not go out, but it dampened enough I could bear it.
“Anna, I can’t reach you. I can feel your second soul, but it’s like a shadow. I can’t hold it,” Mátyás said.
Grandmama’s last words floated back to me. Let yourself free. She was right about me. All my life I had been dimly aware of my dual souls, wearing one soul as my public face and pushing everything dark into the other, keeping her, like Macbeth, “cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d, bound in / To saucy doubts and fears.”
I reached beneath the haze of pain and pried the bars of my heart open.
I let my shadow self wing upward, strong and fine and falcon-free. She was not, as I had feared, malformed and dangerous. Only imperfect.
Only me.
“Got her,” Mátyás said. Then, “Confound it, Anna, this will hurt—”
The fire flared up, searing through me, tearing through soft tissue, shearing through muscle and bone. And then the final great clap of pain: agony so intense it moved beyond pain into a kind of pleasure, anguish so deep that white sparkled at the edge of my vision, and only the twin grips on my hands held me steady.
As abruptly as it had built, the fire burned away. I was cold, as cold as I could ever remember being. Even the sun on my face carried only a memory of warmth. Mátyás saw me shivering and wrapped his arms around me.
I wept into his shirt.
“It’s done, Anna,” he said. “Look.” With one arm still draped around me, he lifted my wrist with his other hand. The agate blazed—so bright it hurt to look at.
My soul.
And now I could feel the spell around us—not as a faint tremor, but as a living, pulsing thing. It streamed around me in the wind. It shifted in the shadows between the trees. And it danced inside me, warmth blossoming through my body like sensation returning to chilled limbs after a winter storm. This—this was the Luminate birthright, the awareness the Confirmation made possible. No wonder the Circle members were desperate to keep it for themselves.
I laughed with relief and threw my arms around Mátyás, then released him and danced a jig around Hunger. And because I could, I crafted a Lumen light and then sent it spinning off into the sky.
“Careful.” Hunger frowned. “This power is not to be wasted.”
“I will not,” I promised, sobered by the reminder.
My gaze caught on the shifting darkness beyond Hunger, and I discovered that what I had first taken to be simply shadows cast by the trees were not shadows at all, but creatures of every shape and size watching us from the fringes of the wood. Some were of beast aspect, ragged tusks and fur and gleaming red eyes. Others were so beautiful I could not look on them. The Lady blazed like white fire against the green, the golden wings of the turul bird flashing above her.
I would not think about them. I could not afford the distraction.
Closing my eyes, I extended my arms and fingers, trying to put as much of myself as I could in contact with the spell. I cast my thoughts inward, seeking for the calm center where my soul should be.
I found my center, though it was anything but calm. My soul was wild and agitated, the edges raw and wounded, a great, gaping hole bearing mute witness to my missing soul. I closed my eyes tighter and concentrated not on the wounded soul, but on that gap. I reached through it and outward toward the knotted center of the spell. With my invisible sense, I grasped the spell and pulled. One strand of the great spell followed my tug, and I reached for another, then another, and finally too many to count.
When I was full of the spell, so full I could scarcely breathe, so full even blinking hurt, Mátyás released his grip on my other soul.
It slipped back into place, pulled by an irresistible force. The spell inside me creaked and shuddered, an old house caught in the grasp of a strong wind.
A fissure opened across the dome of the sky revealing a band of blackness, night stars incongruous against the blue. The ground trembled, and a handful of boulders shook loose from the rocks above us. One cracked against the stone slab behind me.
A winged creature launched itself from the fringes of the woods, disappearing through the fissure with a cry that reverberated along my bones.