by Lana Popovic
I rack my mind and can think of no alternative, save for offering to drink it myself. Which I know she would not allow.
“Ah . . .” Judit hems, uncertain. “Who, my lady?”
“It doesn’t really matter, but, someone plain, I suppose. Plain, but with potential. Ah!” She snaps her fingers with epiphany. “Don’t we have a redhead down there? Very green eyes, freckles, a veritable mop of ginger hair?”
So Krisztina was right, I think fearfully. Even now, Elizabeth remembers her hair.
Judit licks her lips, fear flickering in her eyes. Elizabeth clearly does not know that Krisztina is her kin. “Yes, my lady, I—I think I know of whom you speak. But she’s really quite plain, would someone with more classic color not suit better?”
“No, I want her,” Elizabeth demands, adamant. I can see Judit deflate, her shoulders sagging. Though she does not know what’s in store for her cousin, she knows it is unlikely to be good. “She is pale, but her coloring could be made vigorous. Fetch her, Judit.” And, when Judit hesitates, dithering, she adds with a whip crack in her voice, “Do you not know better by now than to make me ask you twice?”
A quarter of an hour later, Krisztina stands in the solar with us, nervously tugging a stray lock of her springy hair. Judit was dismissed immediately after she brought her, which leaves Krisztina all alone, marooned in enemy land. Her gaze keeps flitting to me, and I can almost see the whirling of her mind. She is wondering if this is my doing, if I am intending to exact my vengeance for all her whisperings of “witch,” the slantwise glances and baleful eyes always heavy on my back.
I wish to reassure her of my innocence—but how can I, when this elixir would likely not exist had I not piqued Elizabeth’s interest with what I know of herbs?
“Yes,” Elizabeth muses speculatively, circling Krisztina like a buyer examining the quality of a horse’s flesh. “She will do quite well.”
“Quite well for what, mistress?” Krisztina asks, a quaver in her voice despite her stalwart heart. I am so afraid for her that I can nearly taste my own heart at the base of my throat. It is all I can do to school myself when she looks at me, lest I frighten her further with my own barely restrained terror. “What would you have me do?”
“Drink,” Elizabeth says simply, offering her the flask. “It is a tonic meant to induce vigor, to promote beauty. You would like that, wouldn’t you? Brighter eyes, more color to your cheeks? If Anna and I have done well, it should even make you livelier. Better fit to carry out your duties.”
Krisztina balks, shying away from the flask. “I would rather not, mistress, if it’s all the same to you,” she rejoins, her freckles a dense constellation of cinnamon pinpricks against her sudden pallor. “I was never much for tonics.”
Elizabeth’s face dims, darkening in a fearsomely familiar way. She surveys Krisztina with her lower lip snapped tight between her teeth. “It is not all the same to me,” she spits. “You will drink it, as your mistress orders.”
“No,” Krisztina protests, and I can see panic beginning to flutter at the edges of her eyes. “No, my lady. I will work my fingers to the bone for you, but drink that purple mess without knowing what’s in it? I’ve never drunk anything that color in my life, and I’ll not start now.”
“You will drink it!” Elizabeth grates out, thrusting the flask under her nose. “Or I will garnish the last six months of your wages for insubordination.”
My hands have clenched into fists, nails biting into palms, because here she is again, resurfaced.
Dark Elizabeth, the shadow twin fueled by a furnace of choler. The other face that I have come to fear so well. Ferenc’s death should have expunged her, scoured her out, but she persists even without him. Capricious and unpredictable as ever—and still just as ravenous for blood.
And what a terrible fool I was, to think it could ever be otherwise.
“But . . .” Krisztina flails, blinking rapidly, her hands twisting into her coarse skirts. “But I don’t have those wages! I, I send most of my coin back to my family, they’ll have spent them—”
“Why should I care what your greedy kin do with my money?” Elizabeth retorts icily, her voice so cold I half expect to hear a gale howling outside. Winter clawing at the solar’s windows, summoned by her tone. “I am within my rights to do so, for a servant remiss in their duties. And then where will you be, you insolent chit?”
Krisztina stares back at her, eyes hollowing with fear. She knows this would drive her family to the poorhouse, if not to starvation and death. That coin is long since gone and cannot be gotten back. I can see the terrible moment when she makes her decision, the bleak hopelessness that descends to quell the remaining spirit in her eyes. She knows what she is doing. That she is likely condemning herself to die.
And she is willing, for her family’s sake.
“All right, my lady,” she says dully, taking up the flask. “I will drink.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth whispers, her rage subsiding like a watered flame, appeased. “You certainly will.”
Before Krisztina swallows, she flashes one last look at me, so steeped with anger, hatred, and betrayal that I nearly stumble as if I have been struck. Because she is right to hate me, I think blackly, barely able to watch her throat work as she drinks.
For all I delude myself as to my own good intentions, at the end of the day, everything I have done has helped Elizabeth alone.
And Elizabeth, for all my misguided love, is a far worse devil than her husband ever was.
Chapter Eighteen
The Book and the Whip
As we brew more batches of Elizabeth’s potion, I dwell feverishly on all I’ve given up, not least my sense of what is right.
And all for this thing I falsely took for love—the way her touch made my skin leap, my spirit surge toward her like a compass needle—though I know it now to be nothing more than the basest, simplest lust. The kind that even the most mindless of beasts may feel for each other. I can still conjure faint memories of that deceptive passion in our quieter moments, as I watch her slip into slumber with the small smile she always carries down with her into sleep.
But now I know the scarlet fury of the dreams that must surely play behind those eyelids. And I am terrified of her, of who she truly is, more than I have ever been.
Because now there is no more Ferenc, no catalyst to her cruelty, no one else to blame for her misdeeds.
Now her rampant darkness merely is.
For the first few days, as if by miracle, Krisztina actually flourishes. I do not know whether it’s due to all the good I’ve instilled into the tonic, or to her own stubbornly resilient disposition. Or perhaps the arsenic itself truly does provide some benefit, unlikely as this seems to me. But when she comes to the solar to be examined and Elizabeth quizzes her on how she’s fairing, she reports a sharp, whetted mind and buoyant spirits.
“I am quite well, mistress,” she mumbles, looking as surprised as I am. “Nothing amiss.”
“And look at her, Anna!” Elizabeth enthuses, smoothing the girl’s hair from her face with something close to fondness. She’s so rapturous over the results that she can barely contain herself, seems ready to burst into a jig. “Does her skin not glow, with such roses in her cheeks? And see how luminous her eyes are, like lanterns! We must be on the right track, don’t you think?”
“Perhaps we are,” I reply, struggling for equanimity. It is still so early that I am terribly afraid to hope, though Krisztina drinks this new dose readily. Is it possible that we have actually struck upon something good?
It is only three days later that she turns up listless, her cheeks still mottled with flush but her temples sweaty, her eyes more glazed than bright. “My stomach gripes,” she complains through gritted teeth. “Something awful.”
“Well, perhaps you ate something that does not agree with you,” Elizabeth says dismissively, waving her concern away. “Or overtaxed yourself with work. Whatever the case, we must keep at it. Perhaps the tonic will cl
eanse you, do you good.”
It does not.
Though Elizabeth perseveres with dogged conviction, Krisztina’s belly only worsens over the next few days, until she cannot work, taking to her bed. Elizabeth has her pallet brought up into the solar so she can circle over her like a vulture, keeping tabs on her state. All I can think of is how lonely she must be, how she must miss her friends.
“I’m so sorry, Krisztina,” I whisper to her, sitting on the edge of the pallet and folding her hand in mine as she sleeps fitfully. The worst of it is, I know that I could help her. Elizabeth still sleeps beside me every night, trusting as a babe; it would take so little to slide a knife between her ribs. But even if I escaped the castle alive I would hang for it, no mistake, or be drawn and quartered. A commoner cannot dream of laying a finger on a noble without courting such a grisly death. Perhaps it would even be worth it, ceding my life to extinguish hers, guilty by association as I am of her misdeeds. But I cannot consign my family to such a dismal fate, being kin to a murderess. For all I know they would be clapped in irons, too, and they asked for none of this. Even now, Elizabeth continues to pay me a salary beyond my family’s wildest dreams, and all of it I send to them—so that at least someone may benefit from this malignant, sprawling madness.
As if she can hear my thoughts, Krisztina stirs just for long enough to yank her fingers free, shooting me an accusing look before she sinks back into sleep.
“Perhaps we miss this dose, give her a chance to recover?” I suggest the next morning as Krisztina writhes, curled into an agonized apostrophe. She is deathly white save for those roses Elizabeth chases after with such grim determination, and she hasn’t managed to eat in days. Instead she vomits on the hour and lets loose a watery stool, like some dread echo of Ferenc’s torment come to haunt me again. When I sweep my hand through her hair to comfort her, great hanks of it come out in my grip. For whatever foolish reason, that devastates me more than anything else—this ruination of her beauty, the evidence of how we are destroying her.
Yet again, Elizabeth is stealing my old friend’s coveted hair.
“It does no good to ply her with it if she continues to sicken,” I continue, desperate to sway her. “It will—it will skew the results.”
“To the contrary,” Elizabeth grumbles, flicking me a disgruntled glance. “We must stay the course. Otherwise how will we know what to change, how to improve our work?”
“But . . .” I pitch my voice lower, though Krisztina is in such agony she isn’t likely to hear me. “She will surely die, if we keep on.”
“And what of it?” Elizabeth snaps, lifting her chin. “What’s one lazy scull, in the face of our progress?”
“She isn’t lazy,” I mumble under my breath, turning away from her. “And she is a person, just as you are.”
“What was that?” There it is again, that subtle hiss, the sound of the snake coiling up within her. Surging up with its black, blank eyes, testing the air with its tongue. “I’m not sure that I heard you, Anna.”
“Nothing, my lady Elizabeth,” I say, lifting my voice to hide the bitterness. “Nothing at all.”
Krisztina dies later that night.
I insist on helping Janos bury her body in the orchard. There, at least, what remains of her may one day become trees, live anew as their leaves and flowers and fruit.
It is cold comfort, the bitterest dregs of consolation. I weep silently as we dig the hole, lower her shrouded body into it. Not a single member of her family is here to see her off, nor a priest or any of her friends. I know better than to count myself among the latter anymore. Not when I couldn’t stave off her death.
Not her death—her murder, at Elizabeth’s hand. And my own.
“How many like this have you buried in unmarked graves?” I ask Janos, knuckling sweat off my forehead, thinking of all the girls who “disappeared” from Nadasdy Castle overnight, allegedly sent home to recover after a punishment. The seamstress with stitched-together fingers and the chambermaid with the crushed ribs are only two that I can think of. Perhaps Krisztina has always been right. “Do you even care to remember?”
“Not while the lady lines my pocket with heavy coin, I don’t,” he retorts, shrugging his broad shoulders. “And you should strive to do the same.”
It is too much to hope that her death might have dissuaded Elizabeth. Instead, she jots down the course of Krisztina’s demise in a black leather-bound book, hunched over it with a frantically scratching quill.
“It will be different next time,” she mutters abstractedly, more to herself than me. “It worked to begin with, so perhaps we merely overwhelmed her. A smaller dose should do for our next try.”
For a mercy, our next subject is not a former friend, though I recognize her face; she is one of the kitchen servants. Alida flourishes at first just like her predecessor, and even longer, for a full fortnight.
She dies much slower, too. Languishing for so long that I begin to think slitting her throat would be a kindness.
I have barely helped Janos bury her before Elizabeth requests another victim.
This time, she thinks, we should triple the dosage. “We have learned what does not work, haven’t we? Perhaps their bodies must push through the poison, by seizing upon that first flush of vitality and riding it forward,” she insists, her eyes bright with renewed zeal. Now that she has latched upon this pursuit, nothing seems to subdue her. The sleeplessness is playing havoc with her face, painting lurid blue stains of fatigue under her eyes, turning her skin wan and hair lank.
Sometimes I wonder what she would do if I told her that this frenzied pursuit of youth and beauty seems to be stealing her own. But I am much too afraid to test her.
“Well?” she urges, impatient. “What do you think?”
“I think she will die faster,” I answer, not even attempting to hide my despair. “And in more pain. I think that we must stop, Elizabeth.”
The fire tempers into a smoldering anger, tinged with disappointment. “Do you truly give up so easily, Anna?” she demands, glowering. “I thought you were made of much sterner stuff. Has your fabled, stony heart deserted you so soon?”
“Because it’s weak, not to wish to cause death?” I retort, unable to restrain myself. “It’s unbecoming to save others from inhuman torment?”
“If you have such sympathy for them,” she rejoins, her eyes cooling and lips thinning into nothing, “perhaps you would like to take their place, hmm? Be the next experiment yourself?”
A cold panic, like a sheath of ice laid over my body, tightens around me. Would she truly do it? I wonder, looking into her familiar dark eyes, as lovely as they always were, but no longer beguiling in the least. Would she sacrifice me so easily? Perhaps even a few months ago, I might have said she never would. But I have seen far too much since to entertain such a pretty delusion.
I no longer believe that she ever truly cared for me at all. I have been no more than a plaything to her—an amusing diversion, perhaps even an experiment myself. I can imagine her thinking about me in those early days, her mind aflame with plots and schemes with me trapped in their very center. How far will this foolish girl go for me? she must have wondered, so gleefully. What can I make her do, now that she is so helpless, trapped by my coin and wrapped around my finger?
If she did not think she needed my wisdom for her own alchemy, I would likely be dead already. And as soon as I fail to amuse her, she will hunt me down like another stag.
She doesn’t waver, doesn’t even blink, holding me fast with her dread gaze. When the tension intensifies until I cannot stand it, I move toward her and wrap her hands in mine, terrified that she will recoil from me.
“Please, Elizabeth,” I entreat as sincerely as I can, though I can feel my heart beating so savagely that she must surely see its imprint against my skin. “It is only that I am worried for you. You have not been eating as you should, or resting enough. Perhaps we should take some time. Recalibrate our plans.” It is not just my own lif
e I fight for in this moment of playacting. As the air grows even more taut and delicate between us, thin-skinned as an expanding bubble, I know that my family’s lives hang in the balance, too. My heart fists miserably at the thought of my sweet dandelion Klara, who would blow away so easily without me to shield her.
Elizabeth surveys me for a moment longer with that brittle, tempered gaze. Then her face thaws, softens into a mimicry of warmth; I know now that she is no more capable of true warmth than a chill-hearted lizard clinging to castle stones, sucking in the sun. “Of course you are worried,” she concedes. “I have been pushing us both so very hard. You know I didn’t mean it, don’t you? That I would never give up my dearest dove?”
The relief is so great it turns my knees to water. “Of course,” I say softly, struggling to keep my jittering voice even, because I know no such thing. All the certainty I have is this temporary reprieve.
“Then you must know, also, that I will not give up,” she replies, sweeping her thumb over my knuckles. I grit my teeth at the feigned fondness in her touch. “I am dwindling by the day. No, do not deny it, you said so yourself, and I can see as much. And I need it, Anna, do you understand? I need this face, I need my spirits high. Without my beauty and my choler to sustain me, I am nothing. And that is something I cannot tolerate.”
“I understand,” I say numbly, though I understand nothing save that this is lunacy, the worst kind of calculated madness. She is prepared to sacrifice them all for the sake of something so inconsequential as beauty. Which is fleeting by nature and design, meant to desert us all. Even a longer life cannot possibly be worth the expense of so many others.
But I can do nothing save rack my head feverishly for some desperate stratagem—and stand aside until I can think my way out of this murderous maze.
Try anything rash and I will be the next to die.
Dorottya follows in Alida’s footsteps, and then Angyalka, Borbala, Fanni, Jazmin, and Iren. I learn all their names so that someone might remember them. Elizabeth certainly doesn’t bother with such trifles, beyond her obsessive recording of the “results” in that accursed black book. With each new death, she tweaks the potion in some way, but always the arsenic does its foul work. Yet she remains monstrously unswayed, her conviction seemingly impervious to doubt.