Flashes of other terrified eyes pulsed before her, and the settling knowledge all the others had been just as easy. They never really fought him.
So little time. She pushed the woman forward even as blood foamed at her lips, taking the knife and ripping down the back of her dress. She held her free hand to the neck and cupped blood from its fountain, smearing it across her canvas. In knifepoint, she began to write, whispering words she couldn’t know in a voice like the steady grind and scrape of a millstone.
The sacred thrumming deep beneath her stilled, the gold on the edges of her vision receding like the tide. The icy sigh that escaped her lips was hedonistic pleasure, joy in taking some control. It was never going to let go. It hungered for this, and her feet tapped and danced as the power of the words carved in flesh released another few links in the chain that had them shackled.
The part of Csilla that was still herself screamed, but no sound escaped her lips. They were set in a splitting smile.
You can wake up now. Any time.Her inner voice was tiny, a candle in a cavern of darkness.
Everything was broken. That was what her gut had been anticipating.
Her scars burned. Csilla dropped the knife as her breath left in a dark exhale, fast as if she’d been punched. The discordant buzzing drowned her, pressing afresh at her eyes, her ears, pushing down her tongue, desperation seeking an opening.
She clamped her jaw even as her eyes widened in horror. She wasn’t asleep.
And she was glowing. A sharp light, not the warmth of Arany’s gold but the cold far-watching fire of starlight. The blackness clumped together, struggling to maintain form, unable to touch her. It pulsed and writhed, and she saw it for what it was: the corrupted essence of a demon.
But Madame Varga. She moved forward with tiny steps, each somehow feeling like crossing a mountain.
The body. So much blood, and a torn-out throat, the white of the trachea startlingly clean among the yellow fat and red and broken veins. Every jagged detail was outlined in the unforgiving light, the gruesome feast of human matter lent a measure of divinity by the shine.
This couldn’t be real. The woman’s pale face, the blood smeared on her own hands. It wouldn’t be, it couldn’t be. Her heart pounded as she swallowed down the last notes of metallic bile.
She wouldn’t let it be.
It wasn’t.
Csilla blinked as the last of the dark confusion in her shrank then fled. Madame Varga sat up in her soaked and shredded dress, her throat knitted back together, her back unblemished save a few spots and creased lines from where clothing wrinkles had set themselves into skin over the night of sweat and dancing.
Csilla looked down at her hands. They were ordinary hands, only sticky-wet and red.
‘Madame?’ she whispered, willing herself to wake. She had seen herself asleep the whole time.
You can’t see yourself when you’re asleep. Not unless that’s the dream.
The woman clutched at the front of her dress, lifting a hand from the sodden couch. She touched her face, leaving a skeletal print in scarlet. But she was whole and alive.
‘Csilla?’
A miracle. There was no other word for what she’d witnessed: it was the violent transformative nature of the divine. A perfect death and resurrection in as much blood as a birthing bed.
There had been no official miracles since the Severing. There especially shouldn’t be one now. She’d felt the light die underneath her.
‘Just... stay still,’ she told the twisting woman, trying to collect her thoughts in some sort of order. ‘I’ll get...’
Tamas. Leading her to bed. Pushing her down the stairs.
Talking to someone in the room who wasn’t her. And then nothing until she was faced with a corpse, in a blankness of stolen dream time. That rejuvenated corpse, now talking to her.
Csilla choked back a cry, a hand slapping her mouth. She tasted salt and copper.
‘I feel lightheaded,’ Madame Varga was saying, voice slipping in the way of someone in the midst of hallucination. ‘Get me some water, please?’ At that her eyes slipped shut, and she slumped over, the red on her face an accusing badge.
Csilla slapped her own cheek, stinging against scratches she didn’t remember getting and drawing tears. There was no sudden jolt into waking, and when she looked down the dropped knife between her feet pointed back at her in accusation.
This was how the demon had been hiding, directed by Tamas’s knowledge from his years of walking the Union. Neither she norMihály would have knowingly said yes to Shadow. But Shadow was always willing to lie.
Asten Themself had intervened. They’d saved Madame Varga. It was worthy of praise. She’d felt the light herself, beautiful and far colder than anything she’d ever imagined.
