“Noémi,” I said again, my eyes leaking. “You’re hurt.” She could not heal herself: few healers could hold a spell through the pain of healing. The fire in my bones was spreading, a lake, an ocean of pain. Grief washed over the fire, threatening to swamp me.
So many dead. Herr Steinberg. Lady Berri. Grandmama. Mátyás.
Noémi brushed aside my concern. “I cannot see, only bits of light and shadow, but I will live. Is the Binding broken? We heard a horrible screeching, and there were…things…in the hall, claws dragging and clicking. They’re gone now.”
“Yes,” I said, wondering why the affirmation felt more like failure than victory. I needed to tell Noémi about Mátyás, but my throat kept closing around the words. The room dipped suddenly. No. I struggled to hold on to consciousness, using the pain to focus. “The others?”
“Gone. After your uncle killed Herr Steinberg, they fled,” János said.
No caged thing loves its captor. Had that been a warning? The creatures I’d released swarmed the edges of my vision. “And Pál?”
János shook his head. “Gone too. He left just after the Circle fled.”
“Did he know about Grandmama?”
János didn’t answer, and I wept. For Grandmama, whose son left as she lay dying. For Pál, whose rearing by the Circle had warped something fundamental inside him. For Mátyás.
Noémi turned her unfocused eyes toward me. Her fingers curled and uncurled on Oroszlán’s fur. “What now, Anna? Where is your army?”
I could not breathe. Grief and despair were like a massive stone crushing my chest. “No army. I broke the Binding and freed them—and they vanished. They didn’t keep their word. And, oh, Noémi.” I stopped, sucked in air.
She waited, her hand stilling on Oroszlán. Her skin puckered around her eyes, blistering near her temples, and peeling in bare red patches on her cheeks. I would not let myself look away. Whatever injuries she had sustained, they were on my behalf. Noémi’s vizsla, uncharacteristically solemn, thumped his tail against the floorboards.
I said, “Mátyás followed us from Buda-Pest. He flew into the Binding as a crow.”
The hope in her face slashed at my heart.
“Mátyás escaped? Where is he?”
I pulled the cross from my neck and pressed it into her hand. “He helped me break the Binding. But he—” I stopped abruptly, swallowing hard. “We needed a blood sacrifice. I could not be the sacrifice and break the spell.”
Noémi’s fingers curled around the ornament. Her blue eyes flickered and flattened. “He is gone, then?”
“The szegény lad,” János whispered.
“He wanted you to know he loves you.” Tears burned hot trails down my cheeks.
I waited for Noémi to shout at me, to blame me. Instead, she sat silent, shrinking into herself. I shifted away from the bed, kneeling beside her, and put my arms around her. She melted into me, shaking. Oroszlán laid his head in Noémi’s lap.
“How did he die?”
“He was stabbed.” I rubbed my hand against my sleeve. Noémi could not see the dried blood there, but I feared she might sense my omission: I stabbed him.
“Where is his body?”
I saw Mátyás’s eyes again in memory: dark with pain but steady before they closed, and then the wall of roses hiding his body as the world collapsed. “I couldn’t bring him out. One of the creatures pulled me out before I could reach him.”
Silence stretched between us, thick and tangled.
Noémi broke the quiet. “Mátyás sacrificed himself?”
“Yes,” I said. “He wasn’t like your father after all.”
And in a shadowed room beside my grandmother’s body, we sat and wept together. Outside, the rain fell, thin drumbeats against the roof. I was vaguely conscious of János leaving, of him returning later with cups of tea.
At length, I wiped my eyes. “I have to try to save the others. I must go back to the city.”
Noémi put her hand on mine, her cold fingers curling around my scratched palm. “We must go back. We must save the others. You don’t have to do this alone, Anna.”
Her quiet assurance brought tears once again prickling the back of my throat. We was a small word, a tiny one, but its meaning was infinitely expansive.
János cleared his throat. “Beg pardon for disturbing you, but there is something you need to see.”
The seam in the corner of the Sala Terrena was scarcely visible against the mottled pink marble of the walls, barely noticeable above the ruin of the room. I had not seen it when I rushed from the room after returning from the Binding, but János had.
“I found it when I came down to inspect the damage.”
“Where does it go?”
“A drawing room someplace. I can’t tell where.”
I peered through the slit, and my heart thumped. I recognized the burgundy chairs, the Turkish rug, and the faint scuff against the molding where Mátyás had kicked the wall.
Grandmama’s drawing room in Buda-Pest.
Home.
Pál had left it for us. Why? Perhaps it was his kind of apology. Or perhaps it fed into some larger plan of his I could only guess at.
It would take two days to ride to Buda-Pest by carriage—and the executions were set to begin today.
We would have to risk the portal.
I stepped into the seam of the Portal spell, my body tight with nerves, anticipating a trap. I exhaled slowly, willing myself calm. Faint heat prickled my skin, and then I was across. A fine layer of silt covered everything in the drawing room, dust blown in through the broken windows.
A heartbeat later, Noémi was beside me. János stayed in Eszterháza with Grandmama’s body. Later, when this was over, I would have to return to fetch her for burial. But I could not think about that now.
I had to save Gábor.
Pál had abandoned us; so had Hunger with his army. I was not entirely certain what to do now: Find Pet?fi and beg him to help me? Or march to the prison and demand the Circle release my friends? After all, I had destroyed their Binding. I was a woman to be reckoned with.
Or, more likely, a woman to be thrown in the prison and executed with the rebels.
My ignorance pressed down on me like a weight. I did not know what had happened to the Circle in the wake of the broken Binding. Were they confused, anxious, vulnerable? Or already regrouping? When I had envisioned challenging the Circle before, it had always been with allies: Mátyás, Lady Berri, William. We would pit our strength and confidence against their confusion.
But Noémi and I were the only ones left, and Noémi was injured.
Lady Berri and Papa believed that a broken Binding would return magic to everyone with the ability to wield it. By that logic, some of the Circle ought to be weaker, as not all Luminate could have a strong innate ability, just as not all people could sing well. And if individuals were the source of their own power, as Papa believed, that would place additional limits on the Circle’s power, as they could not draw from the endlessly renewing Binding.
Would it be enough?