by Lana Popovic
“She’s not a witch!” Peter grinds out. “And she’s hurt, look at her! Have you struck her, you lout? A defenseless girl in your care?”
“Just the once!” he replies, indignant. “She was ranting and raving, calling on demons and the like. Raising an unholy racket. And whether she’s a witch or no isn’t mine to say, but I don’t like the look of her eyes. Like I said—mind that you not touch her.”
“How much time do we have?”
“For what you gave me? Ten minutes.” A crafty look oozes over his pockmarked face. “But could be a quarter of an hour, for another thaler.”
Fuming, Peter rummages in his coin purse and tosses the man another coin. The turnkey snatches it out of the air like a snapping dog. He favors me with another contemptuous glare, then strides back into the dark, leaving us alone.
“Bee,” Peter exhales, surging forward and wrapping his hands around the bars. The sincere concern on his face is almost unfamiliar, after the morass of malevolence, suspicion, and deceit I’ve inhabited for so long. I’ve almost forgotten what it looks like to have someone simply care for me. “What have they done to you?”
“I’m all right,” I reassure him through a hot wash of tears, though the groan that wheezes out of me when I try to scoot closer to the bars proves me a liar. I’m manacled to the wall anyway. Despite the turnkey’s fears, Peter couldn’t touch me if he tried. “They’ve done nothing worse than beat me. Oh, Peter, thank you for coming, it’s so good to see you, I thought I might die in this hell without ever seeing . . .”
I dissolve into tears, and for a moment I simply slump and sob, while Peter watches me helplessly, his own eyes glossed. “How did you know to look for me here?” I manage when I can speak again.
“A fortnight ago we heard news that you had been arrested, accused of witchcraft and the murder of Lord Nadasdy. Your mother came to beg me to watch your brothers while she came to you.” His face warms with tenderness. “As if I would not have gone to you at once myself, as soon as I knew.”
“Mama?” Hope flares painfully inside me, alongside a childish yearning for my mother. “Is she here, too, then?”
He shakes his head, brow furrowed. “I convinced her to let me come alone so she might stay back with your brothers. And I promised to fetch Klara for her, bring her back with me.”
My shoulders hunch at the mention of my sister, my stomach fisting.
“The countess won’t let her go so easily,” I whisper brokenly. “She’s a monster, Peter. A devil, a beast. I barely escaped her myself, and then the damned magistrate wouldn’t even believe me. I don’t think they’ve so much as searched the keep. She’s poisoned the well so thoroughly against me, made me into her scapegoat. Implicated me from the start.”
“So it’s all true?” he asks. His eyes are unreadable in the flickering torchlight, his tone almost wary. “She is truly a murderer and devil worshipper? She has killed and tortured her own servants for leisure? Murdered her husband?”
“Peti . . .” Trepidation closes my throat like a vise. “You—you believe me, don’t you?”
“That you are no witch?” he scoffs. “Of course I believe that, bee. You’ve one of the purest hearts I know.”
I look away from him, my insides clenching. “I’m not sure you’d still think so, if you knew all that I’ve done for her. With her.”
“Bee, look at me.” When I meet his eyes with an effort, I find them wary but receptive. “I already know she has a son—your mother told me that much was surely true, so why would I doubt your word on the rest? But it is said the lord died of poison. And I know you know poisons like any other midwife, just as you know life-giving herbs.”
“That part is complicated,” I admit, heaving a painful sigh that strains my aching lungs. “The countess asked me to kill him, and I . . . I made a terrible mistake. He was a cruel man, given to violence. I thought I was doing good, keeping others safe from him. I didn’t realize that it was always her. That she was the rotted root.”
Peter’s regard shifts between my eyes. He slides down the bars, gingerly sits on the soiled floor with an arm draped over his knee. “I’m not sure I understand. Will you explain?”
I tell him everything, casting back to my first days with the countess and how she tested my commitment, by setting obstacle after obstacle in my path before she even allowed me to become her chambermaid. Though my gorge rises at the retelling of all the torture, especially the poor women who fell to arsenic and the ones skinned and bled dry for Elizabeth’s spells, I spare him no details. It is crucial, more important than anything I have ever done, that I make him not just believe me but understand the full measure of the threat.
By the time I am done, my placid friend is beside himself with wrath. He stumbles to his feet, pacing back and forth in front of the cell.
“That fiend,” he rages, hands balled into fists. “That, that depraved, barbaric ghoul! I will go immediately to the keep and wrest your sister from her hands.”
“Peter, no,” I hiss ardently, scrabbling to edge nearer to the bars though my manacles bite into my skin. “She will not simply give you Klara; she will set her men on you, and I have seen them kill without a second thought at her command. And even if you succeed against all odds, what then? You may save Klara, but I will still go to the rope or stake—and what of all the others who will fall victim to her? We must be careful in this, more clever than she is. We must trap her, just as she trapped me.”
“How?” he questions, his face suffused with fear and uncertainty. “When she is a countess, and we are common? How are we to fight her?”
“Listen to me, Peti,” I instruct, fixing my gaze on his. “Here is what we must do.”
Once he is gone, I settle in for the wait. With an end in sight—or at least, some kind of purpose beyond merely languishing in this squalor—the days seem even more interminable.
But in a fortnight, my plans bear fruit. I have another visitor.
Elizabeth does not come in as quietly as Peter did, but rather streaks in like a feral cat.
“Where is he, you conniving bitch?” she screeches through the bars, lips peeled back from her teeth. Her eyes flare with a firestorm of wrath and terror, and a surprising scrim of tears. My heart swells at the sight of her emotion, expanding with hope. Perhaps I have judged her aright for once; perhaps my desperate, foolhardy scheme actually has some scant chance of success. “What have you done with my son?”
“What have I done?” I lift my eyebrows innocently, cocking my head to the side. “Mistress, I mistake your meaning. As you can see . . .” I sweep my hand to encompass my cell, the rotted straw, slimed stone, and the carcasses of the rats whose necks I snapped for their presumption to gnaw at me. “I have been somewhat indisposed.”
“You know what I mean,” she grinds out, gnashing her teeth together. She looks a fright, her hair tumbling tangled over her shoulders, her corset mislaced and awkwardly bulging under her gown. Her cheeks are streaked with the dried salt of tears, and it pleases me savagely to see that her fabled beauty has deserted her. “I’m well aware it was your lackey who spirited him away, at your urging.”
A trill of misgiving sours my rising triumph. “My lackey?”
“Your Peter,” she snarls, eyes flashing. “Your best friend, so clearly, pathetically enamored of you. He said to tell you that he hopes you will still love him. Though he has somewhat less skin now to call his own.”
“Wh-what?” I fumble, my heart beginning to race. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh, was his capture not part of your stratagem?” She snaps, sucking frantic breaths through her nose, her nostrils flared like a bull’s. “He barged into my keep, the very face of insolence, to announce that he had stolen away my son, stashed him somewhere known only to himself—and you. He demanded that I give him your sister in return. And that I turn myself in and answer for your accused crimes, like some common criminal.” She spits over her shoulder, her jaw grinding. “The bloody chee
k of him.”
Why would he have gone to Csejthe Castle, I think desperately, when I urged him not to? The plan had been for him to send a letter to the countess, making those same demands anonymously—enclosed with a lock of her son’s distinctive hair, so she would know beyond a doubt that he was in our keeping. I never meant for him to strut into her stronghold and declare himself her enemy. He may as well have slit his own veins open himself.
I slump against the clammy stone, reeling with despair, castigating myself. I should have known Peter would be unable to restrain himself from charging in for the rescue as soon as he had Gabor hidden. He loves Klara like his own blood, and he does not know Elizabeth, perhaps cannot even fathom the confounding reality of her even after all I told him. He would have believed she might be reasonable when faced with the loss of her son, open to making the exchange.
Even after all I said, he does not know her vicious, shiftless heart as I do. That even her mother-love for her own child is no certain thing.
“Though I will say he has remarkable fortitude,” she remarks, clicking her nails against the bars, her composure slipping back into place at the scent of my burgeoning distress. “Thorko has a way with needles—an affinity, one might say. He applies them to particular places to tease out rather exquisitely agonizing pain. And yet your gray-eyed boy would not let anything slip. Not even when Thorko thrust them under his fingernails.”
I flinch at that, as if I have been needled myself. “He is a good man,” I reply quietly, as though I am not quaking within. “Better than you will ever understand.”
“He is not a man, but a mutton-headed imbecile!” she bursts out, smacking a fist against the bars. “And I swear I will kill him, make him rue the day his parents rutted him into existence, if you do not tell me where to find my son! And don’t forget, I still have your sister, too.” She clasps her hands under her chin, purses her lips, flashing in an instant from rage to snide mockery. “Precious little darling that she is. Every bit as sweet and pliant as you say. I haven’t touched a single hair on her head, you know. Not yet.”
Her face hardens, and she presses her forehead hard against the bars, spearing me with her eyes. “But I will,” she says darkly, low and hoarse. “You know I will. Oh, how I shall hurt her, once I have made her watch me pluck out your boy’s pretty gray eyes.”
“You won’t,” I counter, struggling to contain the manic thumping of my heart. “Because if you do, I will have your son killed.”
This is a tremendous gamble on my part, the biggest of my life. While I doubt that Elizabeth is capable of any sentiment verging on genuine love, I also know she prizes her son for what he represents—the very distillation of the youth and beauty she fears is sieving through her hands. The physical perfection she equates with power and respects above all else.
But how far does this esteem extend? What is she willing to give up for him? I am betting my life, and Klara’s—and now Peter’s as well—that she would yield her own to save her son. It makes me ill to gamble thus, downright sick with fear, when I have no assurance that this is true, and colossal misgivings that it will not be enough.
But it is the only hope we have, the last hand left for me to play.
“I will snuff him out, Elizabeth,” I continue, purposely testing her with the familiar use of her proscribed name. “Your living legacy will die and be forgotten.”
Her eyes narrow, shifting between mine. Assessing my own fortitude. I do not let myself so much as blink. “You would never kill a child,” she finally pronounces. “Not even to save another, nor yourself. That is not your way.”
“Do you really know me so well as that, my lady?” I ask glibly, marshalling every muscle to keep calm. If my coolness deserts me now, all is lost. I must summon every fiber of fortitude still left to me, apply them all at once. “I’m not sure that you do. Perhaps that might be true, were we speaking of some other child, a true innocent. But he is your son, with your foul blood surging through his veins. He is destined to grow into an abomination, and the world will be better for being rid of him. And don’t forget . . .” I lean forward, trap her in my wintry gaze. “I am a quick study, my lady, and I have learned a thing or two from you. And you know I have killed before, when I thought it for the greater good.”
“I don’t believe you.” It’s a dry whisper, a leaf skittering over the ground. She stares at me unblinking, and even in the faltering light I can see how her pupils have expanded to consume her eyes. “You wouldn’t dare, and what’s more, you couldn’t manage such a murder. Do you not remember how you suffered even after Ferenc, who deserved the death you gave him a thousand times over? And a child? No, you would not. It is not how you are built.”
“I assure you that I would. And even if mercy got the better of me, can you be sure my accomplices, his jailors, will be so soft of heart?” I shake my head a trifle, as if ruefully. “You cannot imagine the force I have already had to exert to encourage them into restraint. Instead of that lock of hair? You would have received your sweet boy’s ears, had they been allowed their way.”
In truth, her son is imprisoned in a cave near our lake, watched over by some of Peter’s cousins. My mother brings him food every day, and knowing her, rocks him to sleep in her lap.
But Elizabeth cannot imagine such mercy in another, not when she is incapable of it herself.
She sways in place, all the blood draining from her face, as the thorn I’ve planted under her skin twists its way toward her heart.
“It’s over, Elizabeth,” I continue, drilling down. “If you do not free my sister and my friend, and confess to Ferenc’s murder in my place, your son will die. And you along with him—for what good will you be, already so old and pale, when the best part of you is gone?”
She crumples to the floor at that, sinking down with something close to grace. On her knees, she nods mutely, her hair slipping forward to hide her face. Relief begins to unfurl cautious tendrils inside me, though I am still too afraid to hope that I have won.
“Well, you have done it,” she says tiredly, after a long moment, massaging the bridge of her nose. “You clever, clever girl. Gotten the best of me. I hope it brings you joy, Anna, to have achieved something no one else ever has.”
“It doesn’t,” I answer, though I still keep my face composed and back straight, unwilling to reveal the enormity of relief finally coursing through me. She cannot know I ever doubted that I would triumph, or that alone may convince her to retract. And yet it seems that I truly have prevailed, bored my way down to the core of her and struck upon the only friable fault line that she has. “But it will bring me peace, knowing you are not free to have your way with the world. Brutal as it is, it is no match for you.”
She exhales a dry husk of a laugh. “I should have known you would be my undoing, the first time I looked into your eyes,” she breathes, leaning against the bars. “I knew you were a danger to me even then, useful though you could be. Too alive, too single-minded, too much yourself. It was part of why I loved you.”
I scoff under my breath, shaking my head. “Come now, my lady. It is much too late for such dissembling. We both know there was never any real love between us.”
“Well, I didn’t loathe you, at any rate,” she says tartly, rolling her eyes with a shade of her old spirit. “Which is much more than I can say for anyone, save my son.”
“In that case . . .” I incline my head and allow my lips to quirk. “I did not loathe you either. At least, not to start. I have since rectified my regrettable lapse in judgment.”
She snares my gaze with hers, and I feel an implacable flicker of the old compulsion when her lips curve faintly, her fingers curling around the bars. “Oh, I know that you did not loathe me, Anna. Though it may be well snuffed, I do not doubt that your love for me was true once. Just as you should never doubt how truly I enjoyed you.”
I recoil a little, surprised that she should offer me such an unselfish assurance that at least what we shared between our
bodies was genuine. “That is good to know, I suppose,” I say stiffly, loath to reveal how much the admission means to me, or how much I believed in my early love for her.
Surely another shoe is left to drop.
Her gaze shifts, liquid, between my eyes, an eyebrow lifting. “And for whatever that is worth, will you make me a promise? Grant me one final favor?”
And there it is, landing me back on solid ground. “What would you have me do?”
“Will you bring Gabor to see me?” she asks, her face shattering, threading through with cracks like that porcelain vase Ilona once broke. Slow, glistening tears begin rolling down her cheeks, and I realize with a shock that this is the first time I have ever seen her cry. Though it is always possible that even this display is for my benefit. “Just, just one last time, when I am in here instead of you? I wish to look upon him, see what I shall leave behind.”
“I will,” I say. “I swear it.”
“Good,” she replies thickly. “That is all I can ask.”
With an effort, she lurches up to her feet and dusts off her dress, neatly swallowing the last of her tears.
“Guard,” she calls out in her imperious tone, as if she were not about to condemn herself to death. “I need to see the magistrate.”
Before she leaves, she turns to cast one last look at me over her shoulder, her clean profile limned with firelight. Though I could not swear it, I almost think I see one eyelid drop.
A parting glimmer of a wink.
A final secret shared between us, like a swallow of wine passed from mouth to mouth.
Epilogue
Ten Years Later
I would like to say I never think of her.
But how could I tell such a lie, when I see echoes of her not only in Gabor’s face, but in the face of the squalling, black-eyed babe my sister bore only six months ago? Gabor and Klara have been wed for a year now; Peter’s family kept him with them once everything was done, and he grew up loving my sister. Elizabeth’s bloody tapestry unraveled quickly once she confessed. Emboldened, even her most loyal servants turned against her, and the orchards readily yielded the yellowed skeletons of her secrets. Csejthe’s tallest turret was made into her prison; she was locked into it, sealed away with bricks.