Lost Crow Conspiracy

embroidered dolmans, smiled at my approach.

 

But neither the Austrian soldiers nor the Hungarian hussars knew the whole truth: that before I had freed the prisoners, I had broken the Binding spell, shattering elite control of magic and releasing the creatures held inside the spell. If they knew, they would do more than turn away. They would shun me entirely.

 

A particularly exquisite being floated past, as much light as solid form, bearing crystal goblets on a silver tray. I watched it pass, my gloved fingers curling. Of all the things I disliked about my new home in Vienna--from the overwhelmingly ornate buildings to the excessive formality--this new fashion of hiring inhuman beings distressed me most. I had not freed the creatures from the Binding for them to serve as ornaments for the nobility. Praetertheria, the scientists called them now. Praetheria for the nonscientists, for those who did not simply call them monsters.

 

Do you make a long stay in Vienna? my partner, a tall man with thinning hair, asked.

 

I wrenched my focus back. My inattention was rude, and he had done nothing--yet--to deserve it. I am not certain. I am visiting my sister, Lady Gower, and her husband. He is attached to the British embassy here. I did not tell him that it had taken a month of wheedling, after Catherine s yuletide wedding, before Mama allowed me to leave England, and then only because Mama thought gentlemen on the Continent might not be so particular, and the money Grandmama had left me might sweeten the pill of my forward nature.

 

My chimera nature, the dual souls fighting for dominance inside me. But Mama knew nothing of that.

 

I shivered, wishing abruptly that I had not come. I did not want to dance with strangers, to make small talk with snobs. I wanted to be in Hungary, among my old friends, walking alongside the Duna River with Gábor. But this was part of the d