She paused. “I’m not sure. It’s like the certainty of sunlight after a rainstorm. After the Binding—magic feels different to me somehow, Anna. A lit charge, like the girl said. As though I might heal, but do other things as well. I’m following the pull of the magic.”
The corridors sprawled all around us, other passageways reaching out to intersect intermittently, curiously shaped rooms periodically interrupting the narrow path we followed. Once, we passed a clump of frightened burghers, arguing about the best way out of the city, away from the fighting.
Just when I had begun to think Noémi was fooling herself with her surety, we came to some narrow stone steps. “Up,” Noémi said, and I helped her climb the stairs.
We emerged, blinking, into the grey mist of a street just beyond Saint Mátyás’s Church, the high Gothic tower light against a darker sky. I could hear shouting. As we crossed the square before the church, the shouting intensified. Turning a corner, we found the bulk of Pet?fi’s army. A knotted mass of soldiers and revolutionaries struggled before the rather plain, three-story yellow building serving as the prison, crammed into the narrow medieval street. I could not see any safe way through them, but I moved forward anyway, pulled by an instinct I hardly understood.
As we watched, an invisible hand plucked up a half dozen rebels and flung them against the building opposite the prison with a horrific crack.
Just ahead of us, a young woman crumpled to the ground. Her neighbor dropped beside her. The utter silence of their falls made them all the more terrifying. A Killing spell? There must be trained Luminate with the soldiers. Only the most powerful Animanti could close the lungs or stop the heart. And the Circle forbade such magic. Except in wartime.
I stumbled, nearly pulling Noémi down with me.
The broken Binding had not stopped the Circle. Perhaps it had not even slowed them.
Two more of Pet?fi’s cobbled-together militia fell. Ten paces before me, a young man in the white linen of a serf broke free of the crowd, his hands alight with fire. With a strangled yell, he thrust fireballs into the air. They smashed against the door of the prison in a glorious shower of sparks. Inspired by his success, he drew on more fire. Too much. He cannot hold it all.
I watched the young man lift his arms—and implode. The fire flashed out. A blackened, smoking hulk tumbled to the ground, smelling distressingly of roast meat. The released magic from the Binding might belong to Luminate and non-Luminate alike, but the untrained could not hope to match trained Luminate warriors.
Common Austrian soldiers in white and blue regimentals spilled out of the prison gate, fanning toward us. A Luminate spell plowed over us, a wall of icy air freezing Noémi and me where we stood with the others. A red-haired woman in the black and silver of a Luminate commander allowed her lips to curl as she watched.
My heart shrank. We were too little, too late. The Circle had come, and even a broken Binding couldn’t save us. The cold of the spell crept into my lungs, a knife stab of pain each time I drew breath. All around me, the members of Pet?fi’s army fell with military precision as the soldiers slaughtered them. Frozen as they were, it was as easy as shattering icicles on the eaves in winter.
I raged against the growing ice. I did not want to die. I wanted to feel Gábor’s arms around me again. I wanted to see Papa and James again—even Catherine and Mama. I wanted to raise a stone for Mátyás in a quiet sírkert, a weeping garden.
I had not killed Mátyás for this.
I remembered the creatures who’d gathered to watch the breaking, and raged again. Curse Hunger and his failed promise. Damn Pál for his capricious games. I needed their help now.
I let the anger and need overwhelm me, sweeping through me like ice-laced spring runoff.
The spell cracked. The redhead who had cast the spell looked astounded, then frightened.
As the air shifted around us, I shook my cramping fingers. First a current of warmth, then a tingling in my toes that spread through my frozen limbs. And finally, a yearning so strong it was like physical pain. Noémi’s hand tightened on my arm.
My heart lifted with recognition. I knew only one creature who could call this desire.
Hunger.
Light flared through the street, illuminating the rain-drenched cobblestones. Everything wooden caught fire, tinder to an inferno built of need and longing. Hunger flickered into being beside me, his gold eyes blazing.
My army had arrived.
“Why didn’t you come sooner?” I asked.
“I’m called by need,” Hunger said, his eyes intent on the Luminate before us. “Until your need was great, I hadn’t enough power. And the others required feeding.”
While the Luminate captain faced the new arrivals, shadows fell across the street, winged beings setting down to slaughter. Luminate and Austrian soldiers alike swung away from their human foes, their startled cries turning to screams as the newly freed creatures pierced their hastily spelled wards. A griffin plucked up a silver-haired gentleman in Luminate colors and sprang to the ornamented top of the palace beside the prison, plunging his beak into the man’s chest. I choked and dragged my eyes back to the street before me, where a being of light erupted into stone, crushing a half dozen men beneath his weight. Their screams hung in the close air of the street.
A high, piercing shriek sounded nearby, and one of the boszorkány sisters rushed by me, cackling to herself. “Put out their eyes, put out their eyes.” She cast me a sly smile as she passed.
A body slumped against a stone wall nearby. A woman hunkered above the corpse, something birdlike about her movements and the careful way she held her head, her arms bent at her sides. Fire flickered down her hair, and her shapely legs ended incongruously in webbed goose feet. Her lips, when she smiled at me, were bloody.
Lidérc. I felt again the remembered night pressure on my chest. Lidércnyomás. Nightmare.
This is what I asked for.
There would be time later for an accounting of all my guilt, but I had a task to do. I scooped up an abandoned knife from the street, trying to block the memory of the last time I’d held a knife. I tugged Noémi with me and slipped to the side of the street, hugging the wall as I inched toward the open prison door.
Though I felt exposed and vulnerable, the soldiers judged two girls no threat to them in comparison with the nightmare beasts. From the corner of my eye, I watched a Luminate soldier lift his hands to cast a spell, then stop, perplexed, to stare at his empty palms. At least the broken Binding had won us that much: not all the Luminate had their former power.
We slid through the doorway into the prison unchallenged. I gripped my knife in my free hand, my heart thudding.
The entryway was gloomy and cool after the heat of the street fire. No one stirred at our entrance—the soldiers must have all been drawn outside. Voices cried out upstairs and we followed the sound, Noémi clinging to the railing of the stairs as we climbed.
I peeked through the bars into the first room.