Chapter 26 Csilla
Csilla
‘Csilla.’
The sound of her name barely passed through the foggy haze spinning in her head. She stood at the window, hands resting on the sill just to feel something cold. Orange sun dipped through the little cracks between close-crammed buildings, drawing night in as it slipped down.
Time moved strangely. Her breaths were no longer than they had been, but every time she looked at the sky, the light had shifted.
Stars sprouted and moved like kicked-up sand, clouds melded into black and reappeared as if the divine had breathed them.
A door opened somewhere below, and she heard a voice she knew she should answer, but it slipped away into deep whispers lulling her back into stillness.
She must be ill. It was strange. She had never been truly ill before.
She’d never caught any of the outbreaks of scarlet rashes and spots that spread through the other children.
Even the oldest fish never sent her running to the privy.
None of her care had ever sent her to their own mercy wards.
ágnes always told her that her health must be proof that she was at least a little blessed.
And now that was gone, too. Her fingers curled, nails further cracking the web of tears in the old paint.
‘Csilla.’ Tamas’s hand closed around her upper arm. ‘Lie down.’ At his touch something seemed to crawl under her skin.
‘I’m doing better. I think.’ She smiled, though the movement set off another small pounding in her head, and her mouth felt coated in metal, like she’d been licking one of the old snow-chilled spoons they gave teething babies.
Whatever Tamas had fed her with in her lucid moments was certainly flavourful.
‘Indeed.’ Tamas came close and tilted her chin, pulling at her eyelids. His thumb only added to the pressure, and she flinched as he withdrew, black and purple spots blooming in her vision.
‘Drink this,’ he said, offering a bottle. ‘It restores the blood.’
She frowned, but politely downed it. The thick wash of liver-flavoured tonic hit her empty stomach in a jolt. It was certainly potent medicine. As she lay back down, he took her newly cut arm, scabbing over and flaking.
‘And he didn’t even think to heal it properly.’
She wanted to say that they’d been well distracted with Csilla perhaps dying, but her tongue was heavy, and everything was just out of focus, like the altered reflections in shifting water. From behind Tamas, she thought she saw a glimpse of someone clad in grey, moving like dust in the air.
Was she seeing ghosts now? She shook her head. No ghosts would care enough to come for her.
Below, a door slammed hard enough to feel through the floor. Tamas’s lips curved into a grim smile. ‘And now I will help you further.’
Heavy-limbed and dizzy, she couldn’t move as Tamas’s finger traced something on her arm, just as Mihály had.
The pressure behind her eyes increased, like there was something else aching to squirm out of her, thin fingers combing through her eyelashes, claws reaching behind her sockets. Burrowing in her like a new den.
His hand came to rest on her chest, the heel of his palm against her breastbone.
‘This is the best place for you. This vessel is disposable.’
‘What?’ She forced herself to sit up, wrenching her arms behind her to push up, shaking his hand off her and swallowing away the crawling under her skin. Tamas froze, hand suspended midair.
‘Csilla. You need rest.’
‘Who were you talking to?’ Because it didn’t sound like he was talking to her, even as he touched her. Even though she was the only person here.
She looked beyond him, but even the grey spectre had faded.
‘You, of course. Who else is here? You’re not well. You might be hearing things.’
Her arms were already shaking from supporting her. Something else. The words sat on her lips, something stopping them. The more she pushed, the more something inside gripped her by the throat.
‘Don’t worry, little Csilla,’ he soothed as she lay back down. ‘You’re fine. Rest.’
Rest. Whatever was inside her echoed the order. You’re serving your purpose.
When she opened her eyes again, he was gone.
But the knife on the bedside table was new.
She picked it up, her sallow face a reflected ghost in the blade, and her blood went dark and slow like chilled syrup in the vein.
Her skin prickled with gooseflesh and her vision dimmed around the edges.
She slipped out of bed, each barefoot step cold on the floor.
A deep thudding surrounded her; a heartbeat, pounding steadily against her skin. It wasn’t hers.
There were three other heartbeats in the house, pushing on her from different sides. They kept time in her eardrums, pounded through her soles. Three hearts meant someone had returned.
Mihály? But he would have come to see her.
Stay in bed, she told herself as the walls echoed.
She was in bed. She was sleeping peacefully, drifting in the blissful hazy cocoon the syrup had provided. She adjusted her face on the pillow, smoothing out a crease.
Her palm ached around the knife she was clasping. She tried to set it down, but her hand was cramped around it, refusing to obey. A black moment, and she was at the door. Another, and she was at the top of the stairs.
But she was asleep. Perhaps she woke for a moment, wrinkling her nose at the intrusion of moonlight she hadn’t shut the curtains against. Nothing a sheet over the head couldn’t fix. She’d slept in far more uncomfortable circumstances at the cathedral.
Tamas’s presence was heavy behind her. He reached out and brushed a hand through her hair, down her spine, to rest mid-back. Through the thin shift the imprint of his palm was as clear as if on naked skin.
‘Finish this.’
He pushed, and she took a half-stumble onto the first step, heel hitting hard. One heartbeat in the house began to slow, falling more and more out of time with the others.
She followed it like a dog tracking scent. Step after step, anticipation bubbling in every breath.
A dream. Csilla nodded to herself, even as her feet didn’t stop moving.
Best to sink into it, let it run its course like a fever until a breaking point woke her.
Because she was still in the bed. If she rolled her cheek, she could just feel the down, a hint of scratchy feather under the quilted cover.
She drifted down the stairs, where there was something other than cold wood under her feet.
Deep, deep below, past dirt and hollow tunnels, there were traces of something gold and Brilliant.
The last echo of holiness. She smeared her foot across the wood as if it could be rubbed out like a dropped cigar.
Such drenching satisfaction at the thought.
In the parlour, Madame Varga sat on the sofa, rubbing her forehead.
Her shoes had been kicked off, her hair half-unpinned and falling in greying waves.
All her finery was gathered on the table, golden rings and necklace chains in a careless tangle.
The slump of her shoulders spoke to weakness. Good. That would make it easy.
Make what? There was a block between her movement and her thoughts, like the dark curtain hiding hands pulling strings from the audience being entertained.
You’re dreaming, Csilla reminded herself as she approached. She couldn’t see the woman’s neck but a sudden image appeared, kissing it, whispering promises. A hand between her legs, saying not to worry, the girl is a child, show some charity. The voice speaking was deep and sweet and too familiar.
Her stomach turned. A nightmare, then.
The woman shifted, looking over her shoulder with tired eyes. The movement pushed the veins of her neck to the surface, the swell of a ripe fruit ready to burst under hungry teeth. Csilla’s mouth watered, her tongue against her lips.
‘If you’re looking for Misi, he’s not here.
’ Her powder was clumping and the wax was bitten off her lips, already done with its night.
‘There’s been a fire, and . . . you’re ill?
’ She shifted, the wax further crumbling at the corner of her mouth with her frown.
‘You should go back to bed. You look feverish. Didn’t he leave you with some caretaker? ’
But she was in bed. With every breath she took in the dried herbs Tamas had packed around her pillow. It was good of him to take such care of her.
The woman turned back to her discarded finery, muttering as she tried to unwind a knotted chain. Csilla stole closer.
She twisted in her sheets, pulling the quilt up against the sudden chill.
In the dim sitting room, she drew the knife across the woman’s neck.
Her arm was stronger in this dream, pushing through the resistance of flesh and muscle, the windpipe cartilage thick even as the corded veins and arteries spurted blood.
The woman turned with her last bit of strength, leaning into the knife but digging her nails into Csilla’s face.
There should be pain, but it was as if the woman were scraping clay as she spluttered through her sliced neck.
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 nor Mihály 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.
When she touched the back of her neck, all her old scars were gone.