by Lana Popovic
So I force a smile, gentle my face into the admiration she’s accustomed to from me. “Of course,” I appease her. “She broke a precious thing. She must—she must be taught.” I almost crumble at the short sound of Ilona’s betrayed gasp, but I must hold fast. For both our sakes.
Elizabeth examines me a moment longer, her gaze flicking shrewdly between my eyes. Barely breathing, I keep my face rigorously placid until her own relaxes. “Good,” she says, her eyes softening. “I knew you would understand.”
Then she lets me go and heaves Ilona up, clucking at her like a mother over a foolish, awkward child, rolling her eyes almost indulgently when the girl’s legs buckle. “Go fetch a broom, and wrap up your knees before you ruin my rugs, you silly girl,” she says, giving Ilona a little push toward the door. “And try not to bring the rest of the castle crashing down around our ears if you can help it.”
To her credit, Ilona does not need to be told twice. Flicking me a wounded dart of a look, she stumbles by me and pelts out the door, dropping her skirts to conceal her cuts.
Suddenly there’s a commotion from the courtyard below: the bellows of men, the creak of carriage wheels, the high-pitched whinny and stamp of stallions. Elizabeth’s delicate face hardens, grows taut. “It’s Ferenc,” she says darkly, stepping away from me. “Damn the stars. My husband has come home early.”
While I help her get ready to greet her husband, trying to hide the residual trembling in my hands, she talks to me in a desperate stream, words tumbling over each other like rocks swept by a river. We’ve avoided speaking of Ferenc until now, but something has slipped loose inside her; I hear her loathing for him laid bare, splayed out and dissected like a butchered beast. How cruel he is, how pedestrian, how far beneath her. How her flesh recoils from his grasping, icy touch.
“I shudder to think what he would do, if he ever learned of Gabor. And he thinks I am too lenient with servants,” she adds, fidgeting nervously in her lap as I plait her hair. “That I do not punish them properly in his absence. That is why I scolded Ilona as harshly as I did, you understand. I . . .” She falters. “I cannot afford to incur his displeasure in that, too.”
“Of course, my lady,” I murmur soothingly, my heart turning over with such sympathy and relief that it quashes the sour tang of my lingering misgivings. I knew such naked bloodlust over a minor misdemeanor could not have come naturally to her. “You did only what you had to do.”
“Elizabeth, please,” she corrects with a dismayed pout. “Else it will make me feel as though this has driven a wedge between us. And I could not bear such a distance from you.”
I smile at her, taking the liberty of stroking the thick fish tail of her braid before I coil it up around her head. “No such wedge exists, or ever could,” I comfort. “My lady Elizabeth.”
“You will dine with us, then,” she declares, flinging me an entreating look in the mirror. “I need you there, my sage.”
“But he’s been gone for so long,” I protest, uncertain. “Would it not rile him to have me there, if he wishes to be alone with you?”
“Hang what he wishes,” she says mutinously, setting her jaw. “And I have already claimed you as my cousin. He cannot keep you from your rightful place by my side.”
So I take a seat beside her in the great hall, drowning dry mouthfuls with rich, red wine. We’re eating the finest food, tender dumplings stuffed with braised pheasant and simmered with paprika and leeks, but every time I think of Ilona’s bloody knees it all turns to sawdust in my mouth. At least Ferenc doesn’t seem any more comfortable than I am. He hasn’t washed, or even changed out of his commander’s regalia; his boots are still dull with the dust of the road. I catch him sneaking slantwise looks at me, his colorless eyes shrewd with thought.
I shift uneasily beneath his deceptively placid gaze; I can see it for the lie it is. He’s furious under that frosty veneer, all the muscles in his jaw drawn tight, notched like a ready bow. When he finally speaks, we’d been eating in dead silence for the best part of an hour, and both Elizabeth and I startle at the sound of his voice.
“My lady wife,” he says, wiping roughly at his mouth. “Why are the fields not freshly tilled?”
Elizabeth sets her fork down, very deliberately. She’s chosen a low-cut burgundy bodice for the evening, and candlelight gilds the creamy swell of her breasts above its rim. Her face is composed, but I’m close enough to see the frantic ticking of her heart in the hollow of her throat, like an insect trapped under her skin. “Excuse me, husband. Did you say ‘tilled’?”
“Yes, tilled.” He throws down his fork with a clatter, swaying his jaw from side to side. “The thing that must happen to the soil after harvest, before the land is planted in spring. Our land, Beth, which you’ve been stewarding in my absence. Or should have been, at least.”
I see her swallow, the convulsion of her slender throat. “I have been otherwise occupied,” she forces through clenched teeth. “With the four other estates that I manage, all on my own, while you are gone. Perhaps you recollect them? Or shall I list their names for you?”
He slams his fist on the table, once, a single controlled thump that still slops wine from our goblets. “Do not dare speak to me of our holdings,” he grates out, his voice rising. “I made the rounds today, spoke to the headmen of the Sarvar villages. We have seventeen of those, if you’ve bothered to count. You’ve not shown your face in a single one for the past month. Those are our people, our vassals. And as my wife, you’re meant to tend to them in my stead.” He flashes an enraged look at me. “Not play house with your new pet.”
“You forget yourself, Ferenc, if you think you can speak to me this way,” Elizabeth says softly, but I can hear the steel beneath that spun-silk tone. “I was a lady and a Báthory long before I became your wife.”
“That you wouldn’t take the Nadasdy name means nothing anymore, do you not understand that? I allowed it then only out of respect for your family’s greater standing.”
Ferenc’s face roils with subdued rage, growing thunderous, and his clouded, suspicious gaze flicks to me again. He pushes back from the table, mouth working, his words tolling in my head. The room seems to swell and throb with menace, pulsing around us like the chambers of a malevolent heart.
“But if you insist on carrying on like this—on abdicating your responsibilities—I will have no choice,” he goes on. “I have family, too, Beth. Unmarried uncles and cousins I could call upon, who would only be too pleased to watch over my holdings while I am gone. To watch over you.”
I can imagine how she must hate this, the thought of Nadasdy men roaming her domain. She bows her head, shining curls trembling in the candlelight, and when she looks up her lips quiver with anger. Her eyes are huge and glistening, but she does not trust herself to speak—not even when he stalks over to me.
I freeze where I sit, all my muscles turning taut. It takes everything I have not to tremble when he slides a cold hand over my shoulder and up my neck, twines my braid around his wrist. But when he yanks my head back, arching my neck, I cannot suppress a gasp. The smell of him, sweat and horse musk and the drench of the noisome cologne I remember, nearly makes me gag.
“Is this your doing?” he croons into my ear. “I have ears in this keep, you know. And I’ve heard tell of you, my lady wife’s snow-skinned sorceress, her favored dove. Have you been whispering sweet nothings to Beth, distracting her from her work? Helping her play her games?”
Elizabeth scrapes back from the table so abruptly the chair tips over, clattering against the stones. “Unhand her, you black-hearted bastard,” she hisses, eyes blazing, hands curling into claws by her side. I have never seen her so riled, so furious—and a warm vein of pleasure threads through my encasing terror, fissuring its surface. That she would attack him in my defense without a thought spared for her own safety. No one has ever done such a thing for me before. “It is not her fault that I prefer her company to yours, you wretched whoreson, you—”
Ferenc re
leases me in one fell swoop, so abruptly that I slither to the ground before I can catch myself. He storms over to Elizabeth and backhands her casually across the face. Though she doesn’t make a sound, I can see her lip split like ripe fruit from the force of the blow, a glistening spatter of blood raining across the pale skin of her chest.
“I see you’ve quite forgotten yourself in my absence, you feral little bitch,” he remarks, so composed he may as well be discussing the onset of winter. While I gape at them, disbelieving, he grasps her viciously by the upper arm and hauls her toward the doors. “It will be my very great pleasure to remind you whom you belong to, before I take my leave again tomorrow.”
She has the chance to fling one last, desperate look over her shoulder at me as he drags her through the doors.
Chapter Eleven
The Salve and the Kiss
The next morning, I dare slip into Elizabeth’s dark chambers only once Ferenc is gone, his company thundering out of the courtyard in a cloud of dust and churning hooves.
“Elizabeth?” I whisper warily, padding over to her bed. The velvet curtains are drawn; there is barely a chink of light, though I come with a candle to pierce the gloom. “Are you awake?”
She doesn’t respond beyond a low, anguished whimper. I creep up onto the bed on my knees, bending over her. She’s cocooned in covers, only the unruly mop of her hair peeking out at the top. Gently, I peel its corner off her so I can see her face.
“Shhh, it’s all right,” I soothe when she bites back a sob. “I just want to help . . .”
The words wither in my mouth, shrivel like dead petals, when she shifts out of the shadows enough to show her face.
Besides her crusted lip, half of her face is such a mottled mess that it seems grafted onto her from some feckless survivor of a barroom brawl. Her left cheek is a doughy mass of black and blue, and there’s an angry cut along her cheekbone, where that demon clad in human flesh must have struck her with one of his rings. Above it, her left eye is so swollen it nearly disappears, slitted closed so that her lashes mesh together.
“My God,” I manage, my heart pounding at the very base of my throat, as if it has lifted itself up with rage. “What has that monster done to you?”
She huffs a dry wisp of a laugh. “Nothing he hasn’t done before, Anna,” she croaks, a single tear sliding down her battered cheek.
“But the pain must be terrible!”
“It is not the pain that concerns me,” she says, stifling a groan when I graze the most glancing touch over her skin. She scrambles clumsily up to sitting, eyes flaring wide with panic as she turns toward me, offering her face for my inspection. “Tell me, does it look very dreadful? Do you—do you think I might scar? Do not lie to me, Anna! Oh, if that bastard has ruined my face—”
“He has done nothing that cannot be undone, do not fret,” I assure her with blithe confidence though I am far from certain this is the case, sensing that she has too much worry of her own to wrestle with my doubt. What she needs is my fortitude, my so-called healer’s heart of stone. “I’ll make you a tonic for the pain, and a poultice for the swelling. The worst of it will pass in a blink, you’ll see. And you will be yourself again, just as lovely as you were.”
She nods fretfully, worrying delicately at her burst lip with the tip of her tongue. “Is he . . . Has he gone?” she whispers. “As long as he is not here, I can bear anything.”
“He is, my lady,” I reply grimly, wishing he were truly gone, dead and buried like my own beast of a father. “We are alone, and I will take care of you.”
As I grind witch hazel, comfrey, arnica, mullein flower, and honey into a paste, I find myself seething, so engulfed in great gouts of anger that it feels as though I may drown every time a fresh wave of wrath breaks over my head. I know well what it is to fear for your life, cowering impotent while a man towers over you with his battering-ram fists, so much stronger that escape is but a dream and rebellion inconceivable. My mother and I made this very paste for each other so many times that my hands do the work of their own accord, leaving me to think. By the time I am done with the balm, I know what I need to do to heal Elizabeth. Not just her body, but her bruised and fragile soul.
I must show her what it is to be gently loved. To be treated with tenderness and care as she deserves.
I must be soft with her even when she acts out, when she channels the echo of her husband’s brute violence through the conduit of her own misdeeds. It is like my brothers, who learned their wildness at my father’s knee—only worse, because while they merely watched his blows rain down on me, Klara, and our mother, Elizabeth suffers Ferenc’s assaults herself. His cruelty seeps below her skin and festers there until the only way she knows to rid herself of it is to lance it open—by slicing into someone else.
But there is another way out, through gentleness. And I will guide her to it.
The strength of my assurance calms me, and I hum my mother’s favorite folk songs to her as I dab her crusted lip with water, apply the healing salve to her cheek. I’ve asked Margareta to fetch me ice from the cool house, and when she brings it I crush it with a mallet and wrap it in linen, then press it to Elizabeth’s face.
“Oh, that’s lovely,” she sighs, slumping against me. “So much better already. What a miracle you are, my little sage. Such a comfort in the bleakest times.”
Once I’ve cleaned and poulticed her, I tip lukewarm broth between her lips, followed by a citron tonic designed to heal her from within. She does everything I tell her, pliable as a child. “Will you hold me?” she whispers, curling onto her side. “I am so damnably cold, Anna.”
“Of course,” I whisper back through trembling lips as I slide under the covers and clasp my body around hers, cupping her in my warmth as Klara used to do to me.
“Could you stay while I sleep?” she murmurs faintly, nestling closer against me. I rest my chin on her shoulder and tip my forehead into her hair, which still smells faintly of her fine soap, plumeria and musk. “No one has ever taken such good care of me as you.”
“You know that I will,” I murmur back, tightening my arm around her waist. She reaches down to thread her icy hand through mine. Though the circumstances are dire, I cannot deny the searing thrill of being chosen to be so close to her, to give her what comfort I am able. “As long as you need me.”
“How fortunate am I,” she whispers, even as she begins slipping into sleep. “To have you by my side.”
It takes over a fortnight to bring Elizabeth back to her feet. But I persevere, keeping up her strength with a steady stream of porridge and broth, tending to her face every few hours. Nursing her, at what feels a creeping pace, steadily back to health.
And holding her as she sleeps. By the time she is ready to rise, I feel that my body has been turned to clay and bonded to hers, remolded to fit the contours of her silhouette.
“Let us have air!” Elizabeth demands as she dashes to the window in her nightgown and flings it open, though I see she will still not risk her skin by drawing the heavy damask curtains. They hang before the window like limp tongues, thwarting most of the breeze. Desperate as I am for fresh air and sunshine after two weeks of dismal torpor, I am so grateful to find her face unscarred by her ordeal that I do not have the heart to press her. “And merriment, and play! I feel as though I have been disinterred from an early grave—rescued by your own fair hand, Anna.” She turns to cast an elated smile at me over her shoulder. “And I intend to make the very most of my freedom!”
“Perhaps we start with a bath,” I interrupt mildly. “You should not overtax yourself, Elizabeth. Your body is still on the mend.”
“Hang my body, and any leftover weakness it may yet harbor!” she says cheerfully. “I feel quite myself again, all thanks to you. And I wish to celebrate!”
Still, I have Judit draw her a bath to wash off the sweat from her confinement. True to her word, she fairly frolics in it, splashing around and dipping beneath the surface like an otter. Giddily exubera
nt now that she is hale again.
“I wish you could join me.” She pouts, settling down into the steaming heat. The water in the tub grows so still it offers wavering replicas of the candelabras I’ve lit for her, down to the flickering points of their flames. I can even see the rippling path her breath takes when it skates across the surface. “It seems I’ve become accustomed to having you always with me.”
She dips lower, until her mouth is submerged, then her nose. Finally only her eyes remain above the surface, candlelight reflecting like diffuse pearls within them.
“I doubt there would be room for the both of us,” I demur, though my skin tingles at the thought of our legs entwined, the soapy length of her limbs silken against mine. It unsettles me, tips me off balance, how easily I can imagine the sensation. The thought of it brings an unfamiliar pulse to life at my very center, a sweetly aching throb. “Maybe once we procure you a larger tub.”
Both sets of her gleaming eyes, the true and the reflected, watch me unblinking. “Fine,” she grouses playfully, breaching the water. “But fetch my book, then, the Balassi. And come sit behind me.”
I drop the book into her damp hands, and she reads her favorite poems to me aloud while I reach around her, between stanzas, to tip a goblet of herbed white wine to her lips.
“‘Precious fortress, fastness dearest,’” she recites, a smile spreading like a sunrise in her voice. “Listen, Anna—it is as if Balassi’s Julia was to him just as you are to me. ‘Crimson rose of perfume rarest, violet daintiest and fairest, long be the life thou, Julia, bearest!’”
I tip my temple against hers. “You flatter me, Elizabeth. I am no dainty flower.”
“If anything, it doesn’t do you justice. Perhaps I will take up a quill and write one of my own. An ode to my steadfast sage, loyal above all others.” She tips her head back and forth, considering. “Though you are neither violet nor rose. Both are entirely too common, when you are something far more elegant and rare.”
