My entire body began to shake, my teeth rattling against each other. The spell fought to free itself, to stay whole, and I could no longer contain it.
The magic flowed back into the Binding spell, and I collapsed on the ground.
“Well,” Mátyás said, “I believe that might work.”
I could not do this.
I retrieved Lady Berri’s bone knife from the ground and looked from the blade to Mátyás’s pale face. I did not want to endure that soul-searing pain again. And I could not—I shied away from the end of that thought. The blade hung heavy in my hands.
Hunger caught my eyes with his golden ones. Something flickered deep within them that might have been compassion. “This is the only way.”
I took a deep breath and tried to center myself. I thought again of Gábor, of William. I called to mind all the people and places in Hungary I had come to love. If I did not do this thing, I was abandoning all of them to the casual cruelty of the Circle and the Hapsburgs. I would be abandoning all the creatures standing just out of sight, those creatures terrible and beautiful and strange.
Creatures like me.
“Not all of us are monsters,” Hunger said, as if he knew my heart.
“It is the right thing,” Mátyás said, and took my left hand again. His fingers shook beneath mine.
I took another breath, trying to keep my rebellious stomach in place. I did not want to do this, even if it was the right thing.
“Anna,” Mátyás said, dropping my hand and cradling my face with both hands. His eyes were like a spring of water: clear, calm, fathomless. I drank them in. “It will be all right.”
I remembered a phrase I’d heard at the café, between students discussing the injustice of Hapsburg rule: Mátyás is dead, justice is gone. They were referring to the great Renaissance king, but they could have been speaking of this moment.
If Mátyás dies, how can anything be right?
His eyes held mine. “I chose this, Anna. An honorable death is more than most men hope for. I won’t die my father’s death.” A smile haunted his face. He slipped his good-luck cross from his neck and handed it to me. “Give this to Noémi. She might even forgive me.”
My heart twisted as I slipped the cross over my head. “All right.” It is not all right.
As before, Mátyás peeled one of my souls away and forced it into my talisman. The pain crawling through my body was worse the second time, because I knew to anticipate it. Hunger took my right wrist, careful to avoid the bone blade in my hand, and siphoned some of the fire away from me. I called the spell into the emptiness left by my missing soul, and the spell followed, though not willingly.
Magic hummed through my body. Electricity sparked down my veins, lifting my hair away from my arms, from the back of my head. The slightest touch would shatter me into a million shining pieces.
I looked through that power and pain to Mátyás. He leaned against the great stone slab, his face white, his lips set.
“I am ready,” he said.
My heart compressed into a tight mass.
“Mátyás,” I said.
There weren’t enough words. I wanted to thank him and apologize in the same breath. I wanted to tell him I was horrified and sad and angry and honored all at once to be here with him. I wanted to tell him I loved him like a brother, but those were not the words he wanted to hear, and I could not lie to him. Not here, not now. And Hunger was listening.
So I left the words unsaid and leaned forward, closing the space between us. I kissed him. Into that kiss I put all my gratitude and love and the beginnings of the grief pushing at the back of my throat. His lips moved against mine, our breath mingling for one splendid, wrenching moment.
I blinked against the burning in my eyes and pulled back to look at Mátyás. “I wish…”
He shook his head minutely. “No wishes. Just truth. Tell Noémi I love her. And—remember me.”
“Always.” My voice caught. His face swam before me through a glaze of tears. I wanted to memorize this moment, to engrave it on my mind and heart.
Hunger released my arm, and the full weight of the spell rushed back into me. I nearly dropped the knife. I squeezed my fingers around the hilt and raised it. Hesitated.
“The spell must have heart’s blood,” Hunger reminded me, but his voice was gentle, as though he knew what this would cost.
I placed the tip of my knife against Mátyás’s breast, above his heart. His eyes met mine, and his fingers, still holding mine, tightened.
“Please.” My voice broke. “Close your eyes or I cannot do this.”
Mátyás closed his eyes. I studied the tracing of blue veins on his eyelids, the mole beneath his left eye, the way his brown lashes turned gold at their tips.
I looked up at the great cracked vault of the sky, the arching upward thrust of the stone mountains.
I cannot do this.
“God have mercy,” I whispered. My hand on the knife wavered.
“The Binding breaks,” Hunger said in my ear. He set his hand on mine and shoved the blade home.
I released the hilt as if it scorched me and shook off Hunger’s hand.
Mátyás’s eyes flew open. He gasped and dropped my hand, his fingers fluttering up to the hilt protruding from his chest. His legs buckling, he slid to the ground, his back against the stone slab.
I had a brief moment to wonder whom I hated more—myself or Hunger—before Mátyás lost his grip on my soul.
That second soul winged back into its place like a dove to its dovecote.
And—nothing.
I brimmed with power, my veins blazing fire through my body. But the spell had not broken. Mátyás watched me with agony-bright eyes, patient, trusting. Then his head listed, his eyes tipped shut.
No.
“You need more power,” Hunger whispered.
But where was I to find more power? My body already contained the whole of the spell. It fought against my souls.
My souls.
My essence.
I brushed my fingers against the Romani bracelet I wore. Make yourself vulnerable, Gábor had said, all those weeks ago. Open your essence to the thing you would persuade. I had struggled to find magic because I did not know who—what—I was. I knew that now.
I was not powerless.
I was chimera.
I had the power to break worlds.
Lumen, I thought, opening my souls to the rushing current of the magic. Be what you will. Be free.
And the world fell apart.
The sky erupted—the crack blossoming outward like a firework, a great bloom of destruction. The fissures radiated down to the ground. A thunderclap shook the valley, then another, and chasms snaked toward me through the bent grass and boulders. The mountains trembled and shivered apart, great hunks of rock raining down.
The stone slab broke, the crack down its heart exactly above Mátyás’s head.
The Binding breaks.
The Circle ends.
All the maledictions of my childhood coming to fruition on the plain before me.
The creatures at the edge of the woods disappeared, vanishing through the cracks and fissures, screaming their elation.