by Lana Popovic
With every new death, I grow increasingly convinced that I have made a graver mistake than I could have imagined in ridding us of Ferenc. The more I consider it, the more I believe that their relationship was more complex than I could readily understand. While he may have been a blight of a man, the only servants that died during his reign were the three he gave to Elizabeth as gifts, the night of their demonic banquet—and that was an olive branch, an indulgence, a tip of the hat. He was the ice to her fire, the cold, quelling gale, always tempering and holding her back. And that was why she hated him and chafed so, maddened by his restraint. Pinned under his thumb such that she could not kill at whim, whenever the choler moved her.
Had I not murdered him, all the women marked in her accursed black book might still be alive.
Too long, I have clung to the notion that her love for her son—and her passion for me—somehow tips her balance toward good, even if only slightly. But I can no longer deny what she is. A blade is a blade, cold and ruthless, forged only to draw blood. No matter how enticing its gleam in a certain light.
When she tests the potion on a little girl—the tiny, doe-eyed daughter of the head cook, only seven years at most—my heart breaks clean through. I again consider killing her myself, so vividly that when I am able to steal a snatch of sleep, I dream of little else. But Janos would not have it—my death would be certain, and my family’s demise along with it.
After the little girl dies like the rest, something vital seems to snap in Elizabeth. Some twisted offshoot of repressed guilt, perhaps, turning in on itself. Though I suspect even that may allot her far too much credit. More likely it is simple frustration at being thwarted, denied what she wants.
“What am I doing wrong?” she rages, pacing back and forth in the solar. At every step she seeks to destroy something—tip a glass beaker off a table, rip a book page in two. Her fury is insatiable, a devouring maw that sucks everything into itself. “I have tried everything, everything I can think. And still these accursed wretches fail to live, much less to thrive! How much am I expected to bear? What else am I to do?”
When I keep quiet, terrified that she will turn her wrath on me, she wheels around to glare at me, teeth bared. She has grown much thinner in her frenzy, her skin drawn taut over strong bones, and there is something fearfully stark and vulpine about her aspect. Even her teeth seem larger and sharper, though that is just because her lips have lost their plumpness. It is as if the bloodthirsty predator within her is rising to the fore, molding her flesh to match its own dread shape.
“Must you insist on standing there like some bedamned statue?” she spits through her teeth. “Do you truly have nothing to say for yourself, for your part in this abysmal failure? Is herb work not meant to be your province?”
I lick my lips, my heart beating so fiercely it feels mad in my chest, like a trapped hummingbird. “I am sorry to have disappointed you,” I murmur through numb lips, though of course it is a lie—for what I wish for most fervently is to kill her for what she has done, drive a stake through her monstrous heart. I quash the mutinous thought as quickly as I can, terrified that she will somehow read it in my eyes. “I do not know what else to say or do, my lady, save for keep trying.”
“Then try harder,” she roars at me, spittle flying from her lips. With a furious sweep of her arm, the glassware on the table comes crashing to the floor, shattering into a glittering shower of shards.
When there is nothing else left to smash or tear, she yanks at her own hair and shrieks up at the ceiling like a wolf, baying out her rage. It ripples my skin in gooseflesh from toes to temples, until I am so afraid I dare not approach her, fearing that she might slash at me with her nails.
My instinct is right, though it is not me she chooses to rend—at least, not yet, though I have no way of knowing how long her forbearance will last. Once she is through with the potions for good, that will spell my own end.
The next day, she has Janos string up three more maidservants in the courtyard. It is a wonder that any are even left, but we are so secluded up here, in Elizabeth’s aerie, that there is nowhere to run. Under the remorseless single eye of the sun, with the whole keep gathered to watch, she flogs and whips them ruthlessly for a list of invented misdemeanors. Their screams and sobs tear the balmy air, and every time a breeze blows by my nose, smelling incongruously both of blood and summer peaches, it is all I can do not to gag.
By the time she exhausts herself, they have no backs left to speak of. Only I stay to watch until the bitter end. When Janos takes them down to bury them, I must make sure that I am there to bear witness.
It is the very least that I can do for them, now that I have failed them in every other respect.
Chapter Nineteen
The Runes and the Peddler
After that, we have a brief, strange snatch of peace.
I use the time to think myself in circles, plotting how I might flee this place and keep my head. Each avenue leads me to the same dead end. But there must be some path leading out from this thorned thicket of a predicament, I tell myself. Even if I cannot see it yet.
Elizabeth leaves me to my own devices for the first time since I became her chambermaid. For there is a new presence in the keep, a skulking crow of a man whom she has hired as valet—though why she should need him, I have no idea, when Janos would gladly bury the whole world in the orchard if she paid him to do so. This Thorko has a pale, repellent face, gleaming as if coated with a scrim of oil, with fleshy red lips like a woman’s exaggerated pout. She does not tell me who he is, and I am too grateful for my reprieve to ask. I sleep in the solar while she sequesters herself in her chambers with him. Odd, rhythmic chants and shrill cries emanate from behind the closed doors, until I begin to wonder if she has taken him for a lover.
What feels like a very long time ago, it would have pained me beyond anguish to think that she had chosen to share her bed with someone else. Now, heartbroken and devastated as I am, I am merely relieved that I need not pretend that she does not revolt me.
And when I am summoned to attend to her late one night, I find that the truth is so much worse.
“My lady?” I call out, rapping on the heavy, bronze-hinged door. “May I come in?”
“Yes, my dove,” her voice trails out, with a silky note to it that immediately suffuses me with terror. She does not mean that endearment any more than I consider her to be a lady, and I know she uses it now only to toy with me, like a spider playfully dangling a fly over its maw. I have learned that Elizabeth is to be especially feared when she sounds like this. Like some lounging wildcat, her muzzle bloodied with her kill. “Go on, come in.”
I crack the door open and slip through—only to nearly stumble at the force of the reek. The room stinks of frankincense, such that I am first reminded of my village church. Though our holy house never smelled of charnel like this, as though it had been ransacked by janissaries. It is so dark I can barely discern the outlines of Elizabeth’s deep copper tub, illuminated by the faint light from a circle of candles ringed around it. They are rendered from black tallow, something I have never seen before. The darkness of their bases somehow dims the light even as it’s cast.
Elizabeth lounges in the tub, with Thorko behind her where I once used to kneel, his face shrouded by a heavy cowl. Her head rests against the rim, tipped back to let him paint her face and chest with his fingertips, leaving strange, angular markings like chicken scratch. The sigils seem to dance unsettlingly in the dim light, blurring and doubling when I peer at them too hard. The air above her coils with wreaths of incense smoke like dragon’s breath, and the dark water in the tub glistens with an oily sheen.
With a stuttering heart, I abruptly realize what it really is—followed by the even more sickening thought of how many people she must have killed in order to fill it to the brim. I have not seen Margareta or Judit in days; they both must have fallen to her blade.
“Elizabeth,” I manage to whisper, swallowing a ragged whimper, my han
d floating to my mouth like a ghost. “Oh, Elizabeth, what have you done?”
Elizabeth smiles beatifically at me, reaching up to smear more blood through her hair. “I should think it obvious to you, of all people,” she croons, turning to cast a conspiratorial look at Thorko. “I am working witchcraft, of course. Making magic with Thorko’s help. He is a teacher, a renowned priest of the occult. And a longtime family friend as well.”
“You flatter me, my lady,” Thorko says with false modesty, inclining his cowled head. His voice is low and dulcet, jarringly pleasant in comparison to his face, grotesque and striped by flickering shadow. “I am merely a guide. Any accomplishment is entirely your own.”
My heart shudders in revolt. Everything she’s done so far has been depraved enough, but this?
This is a transgression on an unfathomable scale.
“But—Elizabeth, this is Lucifer’s own work!” I force through quivering lips. My voice is high and hysterical, sure to madden her, but I cannot help myself. “How can you do this, entreat the adversary himself—”
She rolls her eyes, pursing blood-smeared lips. “Hardly the devil,” she replies airily. “We are calling upon the maiden Szepassony to bless me with beauty to match her own. Just as my mother used to do when I was young, with Thorko’s guidance. I thought it foolish at the time, but now that sciences and ciphers have failed me . . .” She shrugs a shoulder, pulling a helpless face. “My mother was a beauty until the day she died. What harm is there in trying, if it worked for her?”
“What harm?” I repeat, incredulous, crossing myself. How can she toy so casually with the profane, the forbidden and obscene? When she shied away from me as if terrified of possession, of specters lurking behind my eyes? “Szepassony is a demon herself! She is the white lady, seducer of men, abjured by the church! She lures children away and feeds them frozen death at her breast. She . . . She is wicked, Elizabeth—and you have killed for her!”
“Oh, what does wicked even mean, other than that she knew her mind? And the church,” Elizabeth scoffs, turning and spitting demonstratively over one shoulder. “That is what I think of the church and its mealymouthed priests, yet more sanctimonious men breathing down my neck. Long before Szepassony was named a demon, she was a goddess of beauty, a deity of storms, a wild maiden dancing in the rain. Does that sound like something to loathe or fear?”
“If that is true,” I counter, keeping my eyes trained on her, unable to bear Thorko’s smirk twitching under the candles’ writhing light, “why would she demand the blood of innocents from you?”
“Everything has a price,” she concedes with another infuriating shrug. As if that is all those women’s lives are worth, a heedless flick of the shoulders. “Especially a goddess’s favor. And blood is worth more than the finest gem.”
“Elizabeth, please,” I attempt desperately, one last time. “This is wrong, do you not see? Worse than wrong. This is infernal.”
“So you will not join me, then,” she murmurs with a furrowed brow and a pout, sighing gustily. “A terrible pity, though I’m afraid I suspected as much. I see that I have misjudged you badly, Anna, just as Thorko says.” Of course he does, I think with a surge of pure terror, catching the smug glint in his eye as he turns away from us to refresh the censer. He craves her favor entirely for himself, and what better way to secure it than by ensuring the demise of the lady’s disgraced former favorite? “You are merely clay where I thought you to be stone. And what is clay but something to be molded by another’s hand, with no native shape of its own?”
With that she turns away from me, shifting in that awful crimson tide to receive a goblet from Thorko’s hands. When she drinks, it overflows her lips, cascading down her chest as if her own throat has been slit.
“What is that, Elizabeth?” I ask in a warbling voice that does not even sound like my own. “What are you drinking?”
A blade-edged grin splits her face, revealing teeth streaked with glistening red. “My new elixir, of course,” she replies. “We had the crucial ingredient wrong after all, you and I. How could we both have been so blind? What better to maintain one’s own blood than the blood of the freshly dead, mingled with the finest of life-giving herbs? And that is where you come in. For whatever else has broken between us, you are still my little sage—and if anyone can marry magic and medicine, even if reluctantly, I have faith that it is you.”
I stumble back a step, awash with disgust that she should enlist my help with this obscene alchemy. “No,” I manage. “Never. I will not help you, not in this travesty.”
Her smile somehow widens, whetting itself, sharpening at the edges. “No?” she repeats delicately, savoring the word. “And what if I should send for your mother, your sweet sister, your fat little brothers? Do not forget that I know where they may be found, nor should you doubt my resolve. From a certain angle, it would almost be a kindness to you. As you have told me, your brothers may be little louts, but just think—would they not be veritable fonts of lifeblood for my use? I would merely be repurposing them!”
She blinks at me, self-satisfied as a fox with a sparrow in its jaws. I stand petrified, my heart more trembling than beating, my mind churning like a maelstrom. She will do it, I know better than to doubt her. Refusing her means certain death for my family—and I cannot bring myself to condemn them, not even if it means that many others must die in their place.
But perhaps there is another, subtler way to resist. For too long I truly have been nothing but her clay, warmed easily between her hands—but even clay hardens when exposed to too much heat.
And I am no stranger to poisons.
“Very well, my lady,” I say, inclining my head to hide the intention in my eyes. “I will assist in your endeavor as best I may.”
“Oh, I am so pleased to hear it,” she purrs, drawing her lip slowly between her teeth. “And should you think to perhaps offer me some sharper medicine, as you did my husband, do not forget that I have Thorko with me.” She arches her back and flings her arms above her head, allowing Thorko to paint her throat with more bloody sigils when he returns to kneel behind her. When she squirms under his trailing touch, I swallow another gout of disgust. How can she not see the lust playing in his gaze, nor divine his true intent? “Be assured that he is quite equipped to carry out my vengeance, should any ill befall me from your brews.”
“I would never consider it,” I force through clenched teeth, though of course that was precisely what I intended.
“Then we are decided!” she exclaims. “Thorko will fetch you when we are ready to incorporate your knowledge. For now, you are dismissed.”
Her gaze slides easily away from me. I can hear him murmuring to her, a trill of her laughter as I turn my back on them and leave, roiling with revulsion.
The two of them barely surface from her chambers, wallowing in their den of iniquity. They might as well be lovers for all the heed they pay to the outside world, save for plundering it for the victims Janos readily provides, and pestering me for different combinations of herbs every few days.
When I am not grinding herbs for them, I spend my time storming around the keep, lost in thought. The castle is already so empty, with so many fallen to Elizabeth’s whip and knife, that the corridors fairly echo. Only the cornerstones of Elizabeth’s household, Master Aurel and Mistress Magda and their handpicked favorites, seem safe from her depredations. The rest of the lower-ranked servants would have long since run, were there anywhere to go. But the castle perches upon its jutting peak, the drop-offs on either side sheer enough to preclude escape by anything but the main road, and that remains guarded day and night by Elizabeth’s sentries. Whether or not they are loyal to her, they are certainly faithful to her coin; I know as much from the unfortunate laundress who attempted to flee a fortnight ago. Once she was dragged back, Elizabeth had her beheaded to discourage the rest from growing so bold.
But though I still cannot think of how to run without imperiling my kin, perhaps I can be of some littl
e good while I languish here.
The next time the wine peddler makes his visit to the kitchens, I approach him when he’s done bartering with Mistress Magda.
“May I speak with you?” I ask softly, laying my hand on his linen sleeve. “Just for a moment? There is coin in it for you.”
“Certainly, mistress,” he replies, casting me a wary look. I still wear one of the finer gowns Elizabeth commissioned for me, after gleefully disposing of my simple smocks. Though I’m sure he has noticed the eerie silence of the keep, I look like someone of consequence. Someone he cannot easily brush off. “What can I do for you?”
I take him by the elbow and guide him to an alcove off the kitchens. “Do you know Peter Erdelyi of Sarvar?” I ask, my insides clenched tight with hope and impatience. “Son of Adorjan Erdelyi, the vintner?”
“Why, of course I do!” he says, his amiable face splitting into a grin. “Salt of the earth, is Adorjan, and could tease wine from water like the good lord’s son himself, beg pardon for the blasphemy. His son’s a fine, steady lad, too. Who are they to you?”
“Peter and I are fast friends, reared together. And if you hold him and his father in esteem, I would ask that you do something for me. A paid favor.” My voice quavers when I speak, trembling with held tears. “Please—it’s very important. I—I can give you good coin to see the task through.”
The man’s kind, brown gaze shifts between my eyes, heavy with such sympathy and warmth that my knees nearly buckle to see it. It feels an ashen eternity since I have seen a friendly face.
