When the invitation to the ball arrived, I had nearly declined it. I had not seen Karolina since she rejected my plea for help, and I did not want to be in company. I’d rather mourn in private, lick my wounds like an injured animal.
But Noémi had insisted I come. “They want to celebrate you as a heroine. It will give everyone great pleasure and cost you little enough. If I can attend, surely you can.”
After that, I could not refuse.
The walls of the ballroom were draped with great swags of Hungarian colors: red, green, and white knots were everywhere. Even the crimson and white flowers filling the room reflected the national theme.
I could not help recalling Catherine’s ball, six months earlier, when I had longed to join the dancing and had instead been banished to the schoolroom. Now I was a guest of honor. I wore a gown in the Hungarian style: a tight dark velvet bodice, laced across the breast with rows of pearls, and a flowing skirt. Over the skirt I wore a richly embroidered apron, the gold and silver roses repeating themselves across my full sleeves. Gábor looked striking in his brocaded, silk-damask dolman coat, worn long over embroidered trousers. The coat was not a perfect fit; it was too broad across the shoulders, and I suspected it may have once belonged to Mátyás.
Karolina rushed toward me, pressing my hands in hers and kissing my cheek. “I am so glad you were able to come. I have felt so wretchedly guilty about that night, turning you away as I did. And yet it has all ended well—here you are, a veritable heroine!”
My grandmother and my cousin are dead. I did not speak the words out loud—to deliberately cloud the celebration seemed churlish. I ought to have been in mourning, but I had decided to put off my mourning clothes until I reached England. There had been enough of death. I would rather celebrate the living and the good memories I had of the dead.
In any case, I could not hate Karolina. She had acted on an instinct to protect the ones she loved. I was no longer so certain that, in her place, I would have done differently.
Karolina waved her hand at the gathering guests in the ballroom. “Our new world, Anna. Now we are no longer Luminate and commoner, countess and serf, master and maid—but we are all Hungarian.”
We are all Hungarian. No more “us” and “them,” no more solitary “I.”
Karolina moved on to greet other guests, and Gábor pulled me forward into a csárdás. Noémi and William danced nearby, and as the crowd shifted and flowed around us, a curious lifting sensation filled me.
Happiness.
Despite everything, despite Mátyás and Grandmama and the inevitable cost of the breaking and the revolution, there was still joy in my world. Society was shifting, stretching and growing and becoming something bigger and better—better even than I had dreamed back in the days when I had begun to dream with Freddy. Doubtless there would be growing pains, but I had only to look across at Gábor to know the changes were good.
In a few days’ time, Papa would arrive. Shortly after, I would travel back to England and Noémi would return to her Eszterházy cousins in Vienna. Gábor had already found new work as an undersecretary for Kossuth Lajos, leader of the newly forming Hungarian government, whom Gábor hoped to persuade to pass Romani-favorable laws. A letter had arrived, overflowing—in very un-Papa-like style—with emotion. Papa seemed torn between elation and genuine grief at Grandmama’s loss. One line I had read over and over again until it was cemented in my memory: My dear daughter, I am more proud of you than I know how to say. I should be glad to see him again, and James. I missed even Mama and Catherine.
But I could not think of leaving Hungary—the country of my heart, h?n szeretett országom, as Grandmama had always known it—without aching.
Gábor smiled down at me. “Pensive?”
I smiled back. “Thinking of you.” I sighed. “Thinking of England.”
“I will wait for you,” he said. And there, before everyone, he kissed me. I kissed him back, pushing myself onto my tiptoes to reach him better. Fire lit in my belly and spread through my body. This, I thought. This is what I want.
There were so many things I did not know. I did not know what would happen to the creatures I’d released or what shape magic would take in the wake of the broken Binding. I did not know how the Romanies would fare under Pál’s curse. And despite Gábor’s promise, I did not know what would happen between us. But, for perhaps the first time in my life, I was content simply to be, to let things unfold as they would.
But I knew one thing. This was my home now, this country with the wide plains and the sere prairies, with the rolling Buda hills and the crowded streets of Pest and the mess of people: farmers, nobles, factory workers, students, and revolutionaries—Magyar, Croat, Wallachian, Austrian, Jew, even Romani.
“I will be back,” I said.
The truth of that promise sang in my bones.
Long ago, and far away, over forty-nine kingdoms, beyond the Operentsia Sea, beyond the glass mountains, and beyond that to a kingdom beneath a pearl sky, a tree grew between worlds.
Beneath the spreading canopy of leaves, the Lady sat waiting, soft hands folded in her lap, her gleaming face pensive. A young man with curling brown hair lay at her feet. He was neither dead nor alive, neither sleeping nor wakeful. He simply was, and the Lady waited for him to be.
The east wind rattled past them, shaking the branches of the tree and pulling at the Lady’s hair. The wind pressed at the youth, filling his nose and mouth and lungs with air from the Upper Realm.
A tremor passed through him.
All history writing is, to some extent, a work of fiction, an attempt to recapture an era that no longer exists, except in the imagination. This is particularly true of historical fantasy. While I tried, where possible, to ground the story in real historical details, I also tried not to let those details get in the way of telling a good story.