The street outside the prison, when we finally, reluctantly, emerged was devastating. The Austrian and Luminate soldiers who had guarded the prison were all dead. A handful of Pet?fi’s makeshift army and former prisoners remained in the streets, gently lifting the dead and carrying them back to the square before the church, where they would be collected for burial.
The creatures were gone—only Hunger remained, looking around at the carnage with a slight smile.
Gábor’s arm around me tightened.
“Our bargain is at an end, I think,” Hunger said as we approached.
“Yes,” I agreed. “And thank you.”
He shrugged, a delicate gesture that was somehow disturbingly human and inhuman at the same time. “I paid a debt.” His eyes fixed on me, and a tug of longing uncurled inside me. I stepped forward, unthinking, shaking off Gábor’s embrace.
As if this were a signal he’d waited for, Hunger swooped toward me, setting his perfectly carved lips against my forehead. Heat seared through me, and when he pulled away, I gasped. I touched my skin, fully expecting to find blisters, but found only coolness. Hunger laughed. “Fare you well. Perhaps we shall meet again.”
“Perhaps.” I hoped not.
There on the street, Hunger shifted, his too-perfect human form elongating, expanding, growing darker—like daylight dissolving into night. A draconian creature, pieced together of shadows and starlight and smelling of brine and smoke, shook itself delicately, one wing tracing a final caress across my cheek. Those sun-bright eyes met mine for a fraction of a second before Hunger launched himself into the air and vanished.
I could feel Gábor’s eyes on me, asking questions I did not know how to answer.
William and Noémi drew even with us in the street. William looked around, frowning, as though searching for something. “Where’s Mátyás?”
The Binding breaks—the thought slipped out reflexively. “Mátyás is dead.”
“Dead?” Gábor turned to look at me sharply. “But he escaped the prison. We watched him shift and fly through the bars.”
“He died saving my life.” That was true, though not the whole truth.
We wound our way toward the Duna. The streets around Buda Castle were crowded and noisy—Hungarian hussars, patriots, former prisoners all milling about in a mood of celebration. As we watched, the Hapsburg colors were lowered and the Hungarian tricolor flag lifted to the ramparts. Not all the creatures had gone after all: a great gold falcon soared above the castle. I wondered if the Lady were nearby, watching.
It would take time before the city settled into some semblance of normal life, but the signs were promising. Already enterprising women and men were mingling among the crowd, offering trays of rétesek, breads, meat pies, and drink.
The Binding had broken, and still the world turned on.
Papa had been right.
1 November 1847, Buda-Pest
We buried Grandmama on All Saints’ Day.
The whole of the two cities, Buda and Pest, seemed to throng the streets that day. It was a day of celebration—the Austrian Circle was disbanding; its head, Prince Metternich, had resigned; and the Hapsburgs had signed papers recognizing Hungary’s independence—and a day of mourning. Fog curled around the Buda streets as Noémi, János, and I walked, candles held aloft, toward the cemetery where Grandmama was to be buried beside my grandfather. János guided Noémi, as her sight had not yet returned, though her skin had healed. The streets were full of others with similar vigils, all those candles like so many stars in the mist.
Temetni tudunk, Noémi had said that morning. We know how to bury our dead. And, indeed, the air itself seemed subdued by grief. No wind blew to brush away the fog, and the moisture clung to our hair, our wool cloaks, our already damp cheeks.
The cemetery was at the end of a cloistered street. We passed through the wrought-iron gate, beneath the trees stretching bare fingers in supplication to the sky. Someone had swept the browning grass free of leaves, and we stood in silence beside the open pit as the grave workers lowered the burnished mahogany coffin into the ground. I wished my family could be with me, but the burial could not be put off any longer. Though Papa was en route to fetch me, on this afternoon, János, Noémi, and I were the only family to pay tribute.
I had not seen Pál since he created my portal into the Binding. I wondered if he knew his mother was dead. If he cared.
I had commissioned a stonemason to carve a monument to Grandmama: an older woman, strong and beautiful in the height of her power, her hands outstretched with a spell. In a few weeks, the monument would grace her grave, but I would be back in England. The mason had also promised to complete a second commission, a young man shifting into a crow. The last táltos in Hungary deserved that much.
After a brief ceremony, I sat silent with Noémi in the sírkert, the aptly named weeping garden, on a stone bench beneath a chestnut tree, the ground carpeted with fallen nuts. I thought of what I had lost: Grandmama, Mátyás, Lady Berri, those who had died fighting and in the prison. I had gone back to Attila’s Hill to look for Lady Berri’s body, but there was nothing there. I had heard, later, that her oldest daughter had made arrangements for her burial back in England. I thought of what I had won: the creatures’ release, a new future for the country I had come to love, Gábor.
A wind picked up, parting the branches of a nearby bush. In that shifting, I caught a glimpse of leaf-green eyes in a bark-brown face. The creature bared tiny needle-pointed teeth at me in what might have passed for a smile. Noémi murmured something about returning to the hotel where we were staying, and when I turned my attention back to the bush, the creature had vanished.
I wondered how such creatures would fare in our world, free from the Binding. Already rumors were filtering into the cities of strange fae sightings, of creatures with otherworldly voices and the eerie shush-shush of giant wings under cover of darkness. But so far, a kind of uneasy truce held: there had been no attacks on humans since Hunger’s army came to my rescue outside the prison.
I prayed it would stay that way.
That evening, I swept into the grand ballroom of the Károlyi mansion on Gábor’s arm, following Pet?fi and his young, dark-haired wife. Noémi and William were only a few steps behind us. Though we were a motley crew by any high society standards—two ladies, a middle-class poet, a Romani man, and a radical—the crowd in the ballroom erupted in cheers as our names were announced. Karolina, our hostess for the night, beamed at us from her station near the entrance to the ballroom.