The enormity of what I had done snatched my breath away.
When I could breathe again, I gripped Noémi’s hands and led her into the hallway and down the stairs. We found Ginny in the kitchen, nursing a cup of tea. After hugging us both and exclaiming, she pressed tea on us, and while I gulped mine down—too hot, too fast—she told us, “There’s rebels fighting up on the hill near the castle.”
My heavy heart lifted a fraction. Maybe something could yet be salvaged. “And the prisoners? Are they still alive?”
“I don’t know. I think so.” Ginny eyed me uncertainly. “But, Miss Anna, the fighting. You can’t go up there. It’s dangerous.”
I laughed, not unkindly. “To be safe, I might have stayed at home.”
Noémi and I thanked Ginny for the tea, and I led Noémi from the house. The street was carpeted with squares of paper like a printer’s snowfall, the leaflets slowly turning to paste in the grim October rain. I scooped one up and read it aloud to Noémi, who helped me translate the Hungarian.
Rise, Magyar, your homeland calls!
The time is here: now, or never!
Shall we be slaves—or free?
This is the question. Answer it!
This was Pet?fi’s work. I was certain of it. The rebels on the hill must be his as well. He had raised an army through the alchemy of words.
A dozen paces away, a young girl in peasant dress, her hair covered by a kerchief, stood in the middle of the street and flickered on and off like a lantern. She laughed with delight.
Though a dozen errands pulled at me, Noémi and I crossed the street to her. “How are you doing this?”
The glow in her face came and went. “I don’t rightly know, miss. Lady. I was midway through my morning chores, and something felt different, like someone had set a charge in me. Then I found I could do this. It’s like magic, isn’t it?”
The Binding breaks. Already, non-Luminate were feeling the effects: no longer barred by the spell, a girl in the street could draw magic into her soul and channel it. “It is magic,” I said. “But promise me you won’t try a larger spell without help. You could get hurt.”
“I won’t, miss,” she promised, and then turned her attention back to her hands, relighting and then extinguishing them, over and over again.
There would be work to do later, training all these new magicians. But it was not my work.
Half a block from Grandmama’s house, we hailed a hansom cab. The driver took us as far as the river.
“Sorry, miss.” He touched his cap. “But if there’s fighting, it’s no business of mine. Nor of yours, I should think.”
Ignoring his unsolicited advice, I thanked him and paid him.
Noémi and I crossed the pontoon bridge, though it bucked and twisted beneath us. I gripped Noémi’s hands, and we slipped and lurched on the rain-slick boards, grim and determined. The silent pressure of grief accompanied me, pushing against my eyelids and stealing my breath, closing my throat when I tried to form words. But I hadn’t the time to do more than look at it askance, to shove the pressure aside and plunge forward.
We stumbled through the streets below Buda Castle. A ragged group of men and women clustered on the steep road before the palace gates, struggling with the Austrian guards. Smoke and gunfire filled the air.
Misgiving seized me. It was one thing to talk of braving the fighting, to imagine the smoke and fire like something out of a Turner painting.
It was something else entirely to stand on the streets, the cobblestones hard beneath the soles of my shoes, the smoke pressing thick against my nose, the taste of it bitter on my tongue. The gunshots echoed down the street and reverberated in my bones.
And the blood. I had not imagined there could be so much blood. I had seen pig killings in the village when I was young, how the blood seemed to go on and on and the pig twitched and twitched before it was finally still.
That was nothing to this.
This was the ruined castle in the Binding. The slaughtered sheep in the Sala Terrena.
A young man fell a half dozen paces from us, his jaw blown off. My stomach revolted, trying to fight its way free of my body.
Noémi made a small, anxious sound, her eyes fixing vaguely on the dead boy. “What is happening?”
I turned my eyes away from the corpse. “A boy was shot.”
“Does he live? Perhaps I can help.”
I tried to unsee the blood spatter across the stones, the glinting white of bone in raw flesh. “There’s no help for him.” A bullet winged past us, blasting brick from the wall beyond us. I pulled Noémi down a side street where we would be shielded from the fighting. “And there’s no time.”
Boys dead in the streets. Mátyás dying beneath a cracked vault of sky. Gábor. I couldn’t let him be added to the litany of dead and dying. My heart might shatter.
“We can’t go this way,” I said. The castle gate was narrow, and the soldiers still held it. We would have to fight our way through the rebels and then the soldiers to reach the prison, and we couldn’t do it.
“The Vienna Gate?” Noémi asked, referring to the northeastern gate leading to the residential streets in the castle district, and the one closest to the prison where Gábor was being held.
“There will be guards there too, surely.”
“There might be another way,” Noémi said. “There are labyrinths under the castle, rows and rows of old connected cellars. There won’t be so many guards at the entrance, not with the fighting drawing them away.”
I tucked my arm more firmly in Noémi’s. We followed a road as it circled back around the castle hill. On the far side, away from the Duna, we began hunting along Lovas Street for an opening.
“Here,” I said, spotting a narrow wooden door set back in some kind of enclosure. I pulled the latch, and the door opened, groaning. I peered into the darkness, but I could see no sign of life. The chill air of the stony corridor wafted out toward us.
“I need light,” I said.
“Lumen,” Noémi whispered, and a light blossomed in her hand.
We walked into the labyrinth. The darkness seemed to close around us, and I knew a moment of panic. Here, buried under the earth, I had no sense of direction, no idea where we should go.
“This way,” Noémi said, tugging on my arm.
I followed. Our footsteps were muffled in the close air of the old cellars. When Noémi stumbled, I put one hand against the stone wall for balance and my fingers came away wet with water. A barrel stood empty in the corner.
Noémi continued forward, her direction sure.
“How do you know where you are going?” I asked.