by Lana Popovic
“We could hear her pitiful caterwauling all the way down here, pet,” Katalin drones. “You couldn’t mistake the clamor for aught but agony.”
“Was Lord Nadasdy here when it happened, by any chance?” I ask, another vile possibility occurring to me. I still remember the force with which he grabbed the countess’s wrist in the carriage on their wedding day, the look of implacable command in his eyes, barely restrained ferocity. What these women think to be the lady’s cruelty may very well be her husband’s doing, masquerading as her own.
Krisztina squinches up her freckled face in thought. “Far as I know, the lord’s away at war more often than not, but he comes home for visits, so he may have been? Why?”
“He doesn’t seem like a . . . kindhearted man,” I offer warily, reluctant to antagonize her. “I’m only wondering if these punishments might be at his bidding.”
“It’s possible, sure,” she concedes with a spindly shrug, pulling a dubious face. “Makes little enough difference, if you ask me. If she’s the one carrying them out.”
“And what if the lady has no choice in the matter?” I forge ahead, suddenly vehement, heedless of what Krisztina might think of me. “My father—he’s dead now, but he wasn’t a good man. My mother, sister, and I, we did everything we could to dodge his ire, and still we rarely managed to avoid his blows. It can turn you hateful, living like that. I wonder if such is the lady’s lot as well.”
Krisztina appraises me quietly, her shrewd green gaze shifting between my eyes. “You’ve a tender heart, chickadee,” she concludes, squeezing my shoulder. “You don’t look it, not with those cold eyes, but I see you do. Mayhap it makes you more willing to trust than you should be. But I’ll say this much—you weren’t there when she made Marta stitch her own skin.”
“And were you there?” I demand. “I mean, did you see it for yourself?”
She pauses, chewing on the inside of her lip. “Marta was gone before the morning,” she admits finally. “But I heard it from Judit, one of the lady’s own chambermaids. She’s a cousin—the reason I found work here in the first place.”
“And is Judit so honest?” I drill down, thinking of the countess’s smug triptych of maids, their poncey little faces. I remember the lady calling her chambermaids baby vipers when we first met. “Is she kind?”
“No,” Ilona chimes in softly, looking so tormented that I wonder what those uppity prigs have done to her. “Not always.”
“Well, then.” I lean back a little, vindicated, crossing my legs under my nightgown to warm them beneath my behind. “We have no idea what really happens behind her doors, do we?”
“I suppose we don’t,” Krisztina concedes shortly, with a jittery little shudder. “But I know what I’ve heard. And I’ve no wish to witness her ghoulish work firsthand.”
She rises from my pallet, flicking me a small smile to let me know there’s no ill will between us, then rejoins her chattering flock. Ilona resumes brushing my hair, then plaits it loosely for me. “There,” she says, her little voice so low it’s barely more than a whisper. “This way it won’t tug on you while you sleep, give you nightmares. You need proper rest.”
Her kindness draws tears to my eyes for the second time today. I need to watch myself, lest I become a fretful ninny weeping at every passing breeze, but I can’t help but be moved. Something in her sweet, self-effacing manner puts me in mind of Klara, though they look nothing alike and Ilona is much closer to my age.
“Thank you,” I say, impulsively brushing a light kiss over her cheek. “You’ve made me feel at home. I won’t soon forget it.”
“Oh, it was no trouble!” she responds, looking so star-struck I finally understand—she’s beguiled by my face, as if it somehow elevates me to a much higher station than the one to which I was born. “I was—I was glad to do it. May your dreams be sweet, Anna.”
I doubt they will be, I think as I settle onto my creaking pallet. I can still hear the others gossiping about the countess, spinning tall tales of her depravities. It seems she slapped one girl so hard her cheekbone cracked, forced another to play the lute until her fingers bled, had a third mercilessly lashed for breaking a plate. I listen because I cannot help but hear, but I do not believe a word. From the sound of it, our mistress simply does not countenance sloth or clumsiness, and I can find no fault with that.
They don’t understand her as I do, I think, shifting uncomfortably on the narrow bed. That is the trouble. How can they, when they know nothing of Gabor? When they haven’t seen Lord Nadasdy peel her smile from her face with his vicious grasp?
I lay there for hours, awake in the dark with my mind spinning. Burning like a stray ember in my bed.
Thinking of how I can show her that I understand.
Chapter Seven
The Toil and the Brace
I’ve worked hard all my life, by my mother’s side. Since I was little, I helped her tend to our hearth, grind her medicines, pull babies and dress wounds and do whatever else was needed to help the sick. At home, I wrangled my roughhousing brothers, cleaned and swept and baked, butchered animals when we had the luxury of meat.
None of it could have prepared me for the accursed drudgery that is a scull’s daily lot.
My main job is to scrub, which comes as no surprise. I clean mostly the floors, hunched over on my knees to scour the castle’s cold, begrimed stones. But I am also responsible for scrubbing the cavernous cauldrons that steam in the kitchens and the laundry, and the soiled serving platters that ferry delicacies to the lady’s table three to five times a day, depending on how often she and her retinue are feeling peckish.
As Krisztina promised, the end of my first day finds me dog-tired, swaying on my feet. I barely remember eating a tasteless dinner with the rest of the servants before collapsing fully clothed into my miserable bed, comforting myself with thoughts of the coin I will send home to my family before the month is done. Much less than I would have made as the lady’s chambermaid, but still more than they would have had otherwise. When I wake before dawn, I’m so sore that it seems unbelievably cruel that I should be expected to do it all again. In that respect, the second day is even more demanding. My knees are already tender from kneeling, my hands beginning to crack from the harshness of the lye we use to wash everything. My back feels like it must be a column made of the red-hot metals my father pounded with his blacksmith’s hammer. Even my scalp aches from how tightly Mistress Magda demands we keep our hair braided beneath our caps.
It all puts me hugely out of sorts.
“It gets better, Anna, you’ll see,” Ilona soothes, noting my grim-faced look as we half wrestle, half drag a cauldron that must weigh more than both of us combined outside for a thorough scrubbing. “I was plagued by aches and pains the first few weeks, myself, but you do get used to it. And you get stronger.”
“And will I sprout hands like hooves, too, do you think?” I grouse, unable to help myself. “To help withstand all this stinking lye?”
When her sweet face sinks and she bites the inside of her cheek just as Klara does, I feel so pained for snapping at her that I bend over backward like a contortionist to apologize. Ilona’s dauntless cheer puts me to shame. She hums under her breath as she works, a tuneless but endearing drone, and her smile is always ready, no matter how dreary and taxing our work. She is too good for this life, I often find myself thinking—especially when I see the lady’s overindulged maidservants swanning by, groomed and cossetted and more like ladies themselves than help. It makes me seethe over the unfairness of our respective lots.
And yet, I find it isn’t the arduous labor that grinds on me the most, but the sheer, dragging boredom of the days. None of the menial tasks set before me even begin to challenge my mind. I’m used to full and unpredictable workdays, being called upon to treat ailments that even my mother sometimes doesn’t recognize. Now the most challenge that I come across is a pot so stubbornly encrusted that I’m forced to scrape at it with my fingernails, cursing poisonously
under my breath. Nothing relieves the crushing tedium, not even the nightly chitchat in our cellar quarters. I could not care less about the other sculls’ dim-witted sweethearts back home, and while their talk of family stirs my heart, it’s my own kin’s plight that looms large in my mind. I find that I’ve precious little sympathy to spare.
Even if I had any to go around, it isn’t commiseration that my fellow drudges need, it’s more coin and less work. I can do nothing about that, either.
But what I can do, I find, is tend to their bodily wear and tear.
“Would you let me look at that for you?” I ask Krisztina one day, noticing the way she favors her left hand. We’ve been sent outside to pound the dust and dirt out of one of the castle’s splendid bearskin rugs. It’s much more pleasant to tread on, I think sourly as I batter the thick fur, than it is to maintain. “I might be able to ease the strain.”
She grimaces, rolling the offending wrist back and forth. “I doubt the good lord himself could do anything about it, short of cleaving it off for me and have done with it. It’s been keeping me up at night, aching fit to fall off—so maybe all I need do is wait to be free of it.” She snorts, then peers at me curiously. “Why, what is it you think you could do?”
I twitch one shoulder in a shrug. “My mother is the village midwife,” I say. “I know a bit about medicine.”
She grins mischievously, waggling her patchy ginger eyebrows. “Is that so? Shouldn’t a midwife’s daughter know that a sore wrist is no sign of being with child?”
I chuckle at that, shaking my head. “She sees to folks’ other ailments when she can, too,” I clarify. “I learned at her knee. Nothing too complicated, just the odd ache and twinge,” I hasten to downplay, remembering the trepidation on Zorka’s face when the lady called me a witch in front of her. No need to sow rumors here, where they might grow into nasty weeds to trip me.
Krisztina considers the offer a moment, the rug whip gripped in her good hand. “All right, then, might as well. Surely your tinkering can’t make it any worse,” she decides.
She allows me to examine her hand over our midday respite. I turn it over, marveling as I always do at the intricate truss of tendon and bone, the modest miracle hidden under a roughened layer of her pale, freckled skin. I run my fingertips searchingly over the splay of her hand, pressing at tender spots and pulling her fingers tight, until her muffled hiss assures me that I understand.
“Does your hand go numb, or tingle here?” I ask, sweeping my fingertips over the base of her thumb and then up toward the first three fingers. When I close my eyes, I almost imagine I see the pulsing flare of the inflamed filament throbbing beneath her skin, where it spirals around the central spoke of bone.
“Yes!” she exclaims, cocking her head with surprise. She’s gone pale under her cinnamon spatter of freckles, clearly pained by my examination, but she hasn’t uttered a word of complaint. “How did you know? Sometimes I beat it against my thigh to get the blood flowing again, but on the worst days, it turns so dead I can scarcely feel it.” She casts me a searingly hopeful look. “Can you fix it, do you think?”
I squeeze the fleshy pad under her thumb, working out the strain, and her eyelids flutter with relief. “Some things are soothed by a simple tonic or poultice, but I’m afraid this isn’t such an easy fix. I can rub it for you in the evenings, if you like,” I offer. “Sometimes massaging the shoulder, arm, and wrist will grant relief. But what it really needs is rest.”
“Oh, well then,” she jokes, but I can sense the tremor of fear beneath. If it progresses enough to incapacitate her, how will she work? Like me, she has a gawping legion of mouths to feed back home. “I’ll just ask for a fortnight of leave, shall I? Tell Mistress Magda I need to put my feet up, physician’s orders.”
“I can make a brace for you,” I say. “Immobilize the hand and let the wrist heal as it should. Your other hand will have to pick up the slack, but it’ll give you reprieve.”
Weaving the brace out of leather cords consumes my free hours for three nights after that, but I yearn for such constructive labor, and I don’t mind a single stitch of it. I instruct Krisztina to wear it all the time, even to bed, and I sit with her each night and rub her shoulder until my own fingers go numb. Her hand improves in a fortnight, and her gratitude is like a salve to my flagging spirits.
It takes me back to who I was before. No grubby scull, but a midwife’s clever daughter, with a leaping mind and nimble, healing fingers.
It reminds me that even amid all this clinging, inescapable muck, I’m still who I’ve always been.
After that, the requests come in droves. Acid stomachs, swollen hands, and itchy rashes abound. Ilona often suffers from headaches that she compares to a mallet splitting walnuts; old Katalin cannot shed the chesty cough that rattles the rafters above her bed. Though I feel for them, I’m also selfishly glad for these complaints—qualms like these, I can address. Tending to them begins to lend substance to my dull days. I slip outside the keep’s confines whenever I can steal a moment to myself, to gather fresh herbs. Fortunately, I also still have the contents of my midwife’s bag, full of ready remedies.
You’d think I was some saint dispensing miracles, so disproportionate is the gratitude I receive for the relief I can give them. But I also understand it. This life is desperately hard, so constantly crushing, that even a brief absence of discomfort seems a remarkable gift.
And just like that, I find these strangers, who toil by my side and sleep around me, growing into friends. I’ve never been so surrounded by women not of my blood; my village peers never took to me this way. But here, everywhere I turn I encounter friendship. An arm flung carelessly over my shoulder; an amiable squeeze of the hand; a shared, silly joke. Krisztina has them calling me Anna the Cunning, but there’s no malice in it—only heartfelt admiration for my talents.
I might be halfway content, had I managed to shed that sense of eerie sentience I’d felt the first night I came to the keep. But if anything, the feeling has intensified with time; the castle now seems to coil around me like something feral and serpentine, as if it’s more dragon than stone. Perhaps it’s the incessant darkness that preys on my mind and whips up such senseless fears, but I’ve come to hate any task that separates me from the safety of our little herd.
As though with one wrong step I might stumble into one of the many pitch-black recesses and lose myself forever.
Consumed by the keep, swallowed by its malign stones.
My constant unease translates into my dreams. Most nights I’m plagued by nightmares of a ravening beetle horde, a glistening flood that skitters over me and gnaws me down to the bone. I know what the dream portends—fear, starvation, death—but understanding does nothing to hold it at bay, not when I know the coin I make will barely scrape my family by when winter comes.
And beyond that, I cannot shake the feeling that this was never meant to be my life.
I know the lady knows it, too, that she saw the potential that teems in me, begging to be released. I need only find a way to remind her of it. But my path never intersects with hers. Why would the lady of the castle ever soil her slippered feet by stepping in the kitchens or the scullery? It leaves me aquiver with tension, ever searching for openings, paths that will lead me to the solar or her chambers. My eyes must always be wide open so I can leap as soon as I spot my chance. With every cauldron I clean, I can feel my teeth gritting, grinding together with resolve.
Because if I cannot see an opportunity, then I must learn to craft one for myself.
Chapter Eight
The Flux and the Tisane
I have been at the keep for three weeks when I learn, from one of the maids tasked with cleaning the countess’s chambers, that the lady herself has taken ill. My heart flutters hopefully at the news, like a moth brushing against a lighted window. Perhaps this is it, my coveted opening.
“What ails her?” I ask the maidservant as I prepare a settling tisane of peppermint, chamomile, and burdoc
k for her. Rumors of my skill have spread beyond the scullery, creeping like fast-growing vines, and now even the higher-ranking servants seek me out for their complaints. This woman has a nervous stomach, aggravated by the spicy foods she favors but staunchly refuses to give up, and I often see her thrice a week. “Do you know?”
“I’m not sure,” Agata says, wariness stealing over her weathered features. “It isn’t my place to know. I only make the lady’s bed, stir her coals, and fill her washbasin—she does not confide in me as she does in the chambermaids.”
“Still,” I push. “You’re there every day. Surely you’ve heard something.”
Her thin lips press together, forehead furrowing with discomfort. “Like I said. It isn’t my place to speak of what passes behind her doors.”
“But perhaps I could help the lady!” I argue, keeping my voice low. The maidservants’ quarters are not so crammed as the cellars, but I don’t know these women, nor do I trust them as I do the sculls. “As I help you. And if I ease her pain because you have told me of it, it would only do you credit, don’t you see?” Of course, this would only be true if I weren’t out of the countess’s favor, but that much I keep to myself.
Agata’s eyes cloud over as she considers it, grappling mightily with the opposing sides. Bless the woman’s good intentions and devotion, but a sharp mind does not count among her talents.
The thought of ingratiating herself finally seems to sway her. She leans toward me, dropping her own voice. “It’s her flux, I think,” she reveals, hushed. “It pains her something awful, worse than I’ve ever seen. Sometimes she writhes in her bed like a worm on a hook, for a week or more. It’s as if the devil himself has sunk his claws into her womb.”
Realizing what she’s said—or rather, how she’s said it—her eyes flare wide and she claps her chapped hand over her mouth, staring at me with mute horror.
