by Lana Popovic
Hours later, I wake to flung-open shutters and the glare of high noon slanting in. Rising blearily, I stumble into the main room, where my mother kneads a paltry ball of dough on our cockeyed trestle worktable while the twins chase Klara all around the room, shrieking like demons. Andras is nowhere to be seen; now that he’s eleven, most days he apprentices with our father, though he never seems to acquire much skill to speak of.
“Out, you rapscallions!” Mama calls over their piping voices. “Out, or you will have not a bite of this bread once it’s done.”
“Mama lies,” Balint informs Miklos, flicking a devilish look at our mother. “Apu would not let us go hungry. Klara, maybe. She’s too skinny already, anyway.”
My chest tightens at the look on my mother’s face. It’s true that our father would hoard the last precious bite to make sure my three brothers were fed, even though Andras can be blockheaded as an ox, Balint a little bully, and Miklos an insatiable glutton despite our scant portions. Father dotes on them despite their faults, calls them his heirs as if they’ll inherit some vast fortune rather than a mountain of debt. Maybe if he didn’t swill most of his earnings at the public house, it would be easier not to resent my brothers for plucking the food out of our mouths. But though they are only little boys, one day they will be men just like our father.
Too often, it makes me loath to love them.
Mama’s eyes flash, for once, and she cuffs Balint so sharply behind the ear that he recoils, howling. “Mind the way you speak to your mother, and of your sister,” she scolds. “You are not so old yet that you’ll escape a hiding for your wicked tongue.”
Balint races past me with Miklos on his heels, tossing us both an outraged look over his shoulder. “I’m telling Apu!” he hollers on his way out. “I’m telling—”
His voice cuts off as the door bangs shut behind them. My mother and I exchange aggrieved looks, and finally she shrugs, defeated. “Even if he does, what of it? More likely than not, Istvan won’t remember by tonight anyway.”
“Would be a miracle if he did,” I mumble sourly, moving to stand beside her and sifting my hands through flour. Klara slinks under my arm like an overgrown kitten, nuzzling her cheek against my side. At six, she’s growing tall, too old to cuddle quite so much; she’s sweeter even than Zsuzsi, who has sauntered over to twine between her ankles now that the twin menaces have been banished. But I don’t have the heart to refuse her. “Shall I help you, Annacska?” she asks, blinking up at me with her startling blue eyes, the same vivid shade as mine and our mother’s. “The potage needs stirring.”
I glance over at Mama, who gives a tiny shake of her head and a significant look. She wishes to speak with me alone. “No, sweetling, but thank you for the offer. Why don’t you run out to the lake and see if you can cut some honeysuckle for us to have with supper?”
Her face brightens sunnily; there are few things my precious dandelion loves more than to please, but flowers are a close second. She presses an exuberant kiss into my side and flies out the door, the pale banner of her hair trailing behind her.
My mother watches her go, her face suffused with tenderness and apprehension. “We will soon be living on edible flowers, if Istvan keeps losing custom,” she mutters, and I can feel the pounding of her concern, the lash of relentless worry. This year’s harsh winter and poor harvest has blighted us all, and many of those who once bought my father’s metalwork have no coin to give him, little else to trade. “I worry for her especially. She grows so quickly, I can almost see it as it happens. She needs milk and bread and meat, not petals.”
Silently, I drop my bag of coin on a flourless spot on the table. Mama picks it up, agape, weighing it on her palm. “The countess . . .” she murmurs, marveling at its heft. “It went well, then?”
“Very well, and even more surprising.” I reach for the ball of dough to relieve her aching knuckles. I consider lying to her about Gabor’s identity, but decide against it. I dislike deceiving my mother, and she can keep a secret just as well as I. “Her son had taken ill, an inflamed puncture. I brought him through the worst of it.”
“Her son?” Mama cocks her head at me, eyes narrowing. “But the countess has no children. We would have heard of her confinement.”
I lower my voice, as if someone might overhear even in our cottage. “Not with her husband, at any rate. This one is a commoner’s get. Apparently she bedded their farrier’s son.”
Mama purses her lips, shaking her head. “I’d heard she was unruly in her youth, but a peasant’s by-blow—such brazenness, to enter wedlock defiled. She should hang her head in shame, not flaunt her wantonness to you.”
I try to imagine the countess with her head bowed, long neck bent, and cannot. “She wanted me to try my hardest for him, that is why she told me. And it worked out well enough for us, didn’t it?” I tilt my head toward the bag, sinking my fingers into the unyielding, salted dough. “As long as we make certain that Father never sees it, it should put proper food in our bellies for at least a fortnight.”
“And once it’s gone?” Mama asks, her tone uncharacteristically despondent. “What then, Annacska? I can almost smell the winter nearing.”
Her hopelessness unsettles me, this chill that seems to have seeped into her bones. I fumble for a solution, anything with which to reassure her. “The countess liked me. Perhaps she will call on me again to tend to Gabor.”
“Put that from your mind, Anna,” Mama says so harshly my head snaps up. “I’ve heard talk of her, from the women whose daughters are already there. They say the countess is unusual, uncanny, more given to the flog than any woman should be. Why do you think they are always short of servants at the keep? Even steady coin is hardly worth the risk of such bloody punishment.”
I think of the countess’s dark, compelling eyes, the silken touch of her palms on my face, her vehement love for her son. No, I do not believe that she would be harsh when uncalled for. Demanding, yes, and intolerant of failure. But not sharp for the thrill of it, not when she loves her bastard son so well. “I spent the night with her, by her boy’s side,” I say gently, unwilling to contradict my mother but unable to let it stand. “She was warm with him, tender. And kind to me.”
“Well, there is a reason why she cannot keep her help, and whatever it is, I would not have you find out for yourself,” Mama says crossly. “Besides, you should be thinking of marriage, not of servitude. It’s time, Anna. You’re of age, more clever with herbs than I ever was, and lovelier than any man could hope to take to wife. You should be wed already, and growing round with child. I see how you dote on your sister. You need a babe of your own.”
I wrinkle my nose with distaste, averting my face so she does not see it. Despite her years of catching babes, cauled or stillborn or so monstrously large they rend their mothers open before sucking their first breath, somehow she still loves children above all else. I can’t understand it. The last thing I desire is to be split open, to die shrieking and sundered on a scarlet wave of blood, delivering a child that would forever shackle me to my husband, should I have the misfortune to survive. Wed to a man, I would no longer belong to myself.
And my family needs me. They’re mine, they are my blood—even my loutish, largely useless brothers—and I will not abandon them when we teeter on the brink of destitution.
“Oh, you’ve heard how our neighbors’ lummox sons talk of me,” I say breezily. “They fear my salves and teas as if they’re poison or witchcraft, the devil’s work rather than medicine. They fear me, Mama—save for when they sicken. Then they come calling readily enough. And without a dowry to entice them, I’m afraid you’re stuck with me.”
“Is that so? And what of Peter Erdelyi?” she counters, lifting a skeptical eyebrow. My mother is nobody’s fool, no more than I am. “That boy has loved you since you were both babes. How long will you insist on turning a blind eye to him? You must know he means to propose soon—the village has been talking of nothing else for months.”
�
��Mama, please. You know how idle gossip spreads here. Peter loves me like a sister, no more and no less.” I slide the meager loaf back to her, keeping my eyes on it to hide the lie from her. Though Peti has not broached marriage with me yet, it is not nearly so inconceivable as I am making it sound. I haven’t seen him in weeks, the longest we’ve been apart in the course of our entire friendship. Perhaps he’s been purposely making himself scarce in an attempt to quash the rumors. “Besides, I can’t imagine wedding my best friend. It would almost be obscene.”
“Fine, Annacska,” she says, relenting. “But if not him, then someone. And soon. That is your lot, just as this family—and these blasted hands—are mine.”
I watch her warped back as she wraps the loaf and shuttles it over the embers in the hearth, sighing hoarsely as she straightens. And for the thousandth time I make a vow to myself, a blood oath with my own soul that I will not betray.
This life of hers, of toil and squalor, forever pinned under my father’s thumb—it will never be my life.
I will not allow it.
Chapter Three
The Summons and the Nest
When the knock comes, a week has shuffled past, and I have almost succeeded in putting the countess and her boy from my mind.
We are breaking our fast, the seven of us crowded around the table over four eggs, stewed plums, and stringy bread rinds. Mama and I exchange wary looks; the demanding cadence of the knock is familiar to us both.
“What’re you waiting for, then, woman?” Father grumbles, hunkered over his plate. “It’s sure to be one of your needy lot, come wheedling for grasses and leaves. Go see to it, will you, before their rapping rattles my brains.”
Mama rises and hastens to the door. Sunlight spills into our gloom, making me blink like a surfaced mole; Father has demanded the shutters be kept closed so he can cosset his ever-tender head. When my eyes adjust, I make out Janos’s strapping silhouette.
“Morning, mistress midwife,” he says to Mama, tugging his forelock. “Is your daughter Anna about?”
Grunting, Father levers himself up, shooting me a glowering, suspicious glance. As if I’m some notorious temptress, as if strangers have ever come calling at our door for anything but my healer’s hands. “She’s here, sure enough,” he says, stumping over to the door and shooing my mother aside. “What d’you want with her?”
Janos appraises him with an even, unflinching gaze. “My mistress wishes to retain her services.”
Father gawps at him, squinting. “Is that so? And who might your mistress be?”
“The Countess Báthory, wife to our liege. She summons your daughter to serve as her chambermaid. She—”
“Anna? For a lady’s chambermaid?” Father breaks in, casting a disbelieving look at me over his shoulder. I attempt to school my taut features, still the expectant pounding of my heart. Chambermaid to the lady herself; I can scarce believe it. To lace her stays, dress her lovely hair, sleep in her chambers should she wake in the night with any needs unmet. And if it pays remotely like the night I tended to her son, it would ensure a life so easy I could barely dream of it before it came knocking at my door. “I’ve never heard such rot. Even if she wasn’t lower born than good Magyar dirt, my girl’s needed here to mind her brothers.”
“The lady offers her a forint every fortnight, should she serve,” Janos adds evenly. “A more than generous sum.”
The amount momentarily sways my father. His eyes narrow, turn inward as he ciphers the difference this would make, how much food it would put in the remaining bellies once I was gone.
“No,” he finally says with a decisive shake of his head, though I can see the subtle flame of avarice leaping in his eyes. What is a forint every fortnight to a woman of bottomless coffers, he is thinking; if the countess truly wishes to secure my services, she will likely be willing to part with even more. How exactly like my father, I think bitterly, to overestimate his own cunning, gambling so readily with all of our fortunes on no more than a whim. “I’m afraid we can’t spare her, not for such a paltry sum. We would consider double but no less, not with my wife’s hands as they are. If your mistress wants my girl, then she should rightfully pay what the chit is worth to us.”
As if my father has ever considered my worth and found it to be so high.
As he moves to shut the door, Janos wedges a booted foot over our threshold, shouldering the door open until it forces my father back a step. The shock is such that all of us go deathly quiet. Even little Miklos, who’d been obliviously singing child’s nonsense to himself under his breath.
Everyone in the village knows not to court Father’s anger. It takes only the slightest, most passing of sparks to stoke its dry and ready tinder into roaring fury. And once it is lit . . .
Suffice to say that I have never seen another thing so monstrous.
“My lady brooks no refusal,” Janos says into the gaping silence, seemingly oblivious to the danger rushing at him headlong. “Especially not from the likes of you. What she desires, she always makes hers in the end. Now tell your girl to gather her things, and save yourself a world of trouble.”
“How dare you,” Father bellows, seizing Janos’s fine waistcoat. The fact that the other man towers over him like a mountain—Father is small, a bantam rooster of a man, but hammering iron into submission has left him with a strength much larger than his slight frame—does nothing to quell him. “Threaten me under my own roof, you blackguard? Try to steal my daughter? You will take her only over my steaming corpse, you whoreson thief!”
Borne up by the force of his fury, hangover all but forgotten, he heaves Janos bodily over the threshold, shoving him outside. The man stumbles only slightly before righting himself, then lifts his hands coolly to convey he wishes no violence, though I saw how his hand first quivered over his knife belt. He surveys my father, still puffing and blustering, with eyes icier than a mountain-fed spring. So blisteringly cold, my own neck prickles at their subdued menace.
“As you say,” he says with deceptive mildness, as if a blizzard were not brewing in his eyes. “But heed me, master blacksmith—the countess has marked your daughter for her own. Which means she already no longer belongs to you.”
He turns on his heel and strides away before my father can even muster a reply.
After Janos is gone, and once my father is satisfied that I have done nothing untoward to court the countess’s sudden favor—I do not yield the secret of her son, telling him instead that I tended to one of the lady’s chambermaids—I am finally left to the roiling of my thoughts. As we grind meadowsweet side by side, my mother steals slantwise looks at me, but does not trouble me with questions. She knows I prefer to keep my own counsel until I have sorted out my mind.
But I am besieged by questions, a flock of them swarming and pecking ruthlessly at me. Why is the countess so intent on pressing me into her service when she could summon me as healer or midwife whenever she desired? What has she to gain from my presence by her side—especially if she is already familiar with herbs in her own right? Why elevate me so suddenly to a position that I could not possibly have earned over the course of one night?
Whichever way I turn it, I cannot understand the shape of her thoughts on the matter. Unless the answer is something less concrete than I can easily grasp, something beyond the clear boundaries of reason. Something that does not cast the expected shadow.
Perhaps the countess has simply taken to me, the way I have to her. But if that is so, why can I not shed this growing sense of menace?
Finally, even my saintly mother reaches the limits of her patience.
“Out with you, fidget,” she orders, shooing me to the door. “You’ll turn these fine herbs bitter with all your fretting. Let the sun scour your overbusy head.”
I squeeze her forearm rather than her hand, and brush a kiss over her wizened cheek, smiling my thanks. With that I am out the door, my basket slung over my arm in case I spy anything worth gathering as I wander.
The w
orld outside opens wide around me, the hues of sky, leaf, and flower blazing vibrant as a peacock’s feather. No ill-fated wedding will transpire today, I think, not under this bright and blameless sky. Only the most faithful and loving of husbands will pledge themselves to blushing brides. Though no early moon is visible, I know exactly where it will rise—slightly south of east, above the lumpy hillock we call Boar’s Mound, rearing humpbacked on the horizon.
I cast my mind outward as I walk, beyond the cramped confines of my skull. Our patch of woods teems with birds, their unruly songs distinctive to my ear. I hear swallows, larks, and kinglets; nuthatches, wrens, and warblers; even an osprey whistling down with talons extended, seeking the tender flesh of some poor mouse. A fine, brisk breeze weaves itself through creaking branches like warp through weft, and sunlight paws sweetly at my cheeks.
All is well, or should be. And yet my mind stubbornly refuses to still, clamoring of a danger that I cannot pinpoint, and I amble down the path that leads to the village’s center, drawn toward the one person who might help calm the churning of my thoughts. Halfway to the village proper, a pale glint snares my eye, tangled among the undergrowth of ferns and rushes that scramble up onto the path. I wander warily over to it, parting the fronds with my hands—to reveal a magpie’s domed nest, half-crushed from the fall, a clutch of gristle-twisted skeletons curled together at its center.
I force down bile, my gaze lingering over the six pitiful heaps of fledgling skeletons, so impossibly fragile they draw tears into my eyes unbidden. Their mother is missing, the larger needles of her bones nowhere to be found. What happened to her, I wonder, leading her to abandon them? Was she killed elsewhere, or somehow injured and kept away from her brood, unable to fly back before they perished of hunger? Or did she simply choose not to return one day, bearing the gift of mother-love and worms?
Something about the nest, the macabre tenderness of it set against the breathless beauty of the day, crushes me with sadness and trepidation. As if today’s serenity disguises some dread peril beneath, a wolf’s snarl concealed behind a mild-faced sheep.
