Prologue
SARVAR, HUNGARY
May 8, 1575
The day our Lord Nadasdy weds the countess, the sky above us is the color of bleached bone.
They say the sky on a wedding day portends the marriage to come. Even my mother, usually so scathing of superstitions held by lesser minds, believes this to be true. What then, I wonder as I gaze up, does this bode for our lord and his mink-haired new wife? As their grand wedding procession wends its way through our village, the heavens leer down on us, unforgiving and leached of sun. Low on the horizon, where the clotted scrim of clouds breaks open, a mean sliver of crescent moon already perches though it’s barely afternoon. It looks as though some divine hand has scored a sharp fingernail into the flesh of the firmament.
A bitter sky, I think, near as squalid as the day itself. Even though the year has just rounded into spring, it is unnaturally hot, without a breath of wind to cut the unwashed reek of massed bodies.
The torpor does little to deter the crowd from making merry, jostling and calling out bawdy well-wishes to the newly wed lord and lady. The heave and swell should unsettle me, but it doesn’t. I may be little—so small that Peter once likened me to the innermost kernel of a nesting doll, the kind Romani peddlers bring from Russia—but my legs are strong and my elbows sharp. I don’t budge even when the countess stands in her open carriage, emblazoned with a dragon crest and drawn by two splendid chestnut geldings, and begins to toss handfuls of glinting filler coins to children in the crowd.
What must that be like, I wonder with a pang of envy in my hollow belly, to have coffers so full you could dispense with them freely, make them rain down into grasping hands like a shower of minor stars?
The countess laughs as she metes out this bounty in unbridled peals that easily reach my ears, though I cannot quite make out her features from where I stand. The sound is so inviting and infectious it makes me wish I were close enough to properly see her face.
The basket tucked into the crook of my arm twitches in my grip. I glance down to see owl-round eyes, a brindled face nosing its way out from beneath the swaddle of cloth. “Shh, sweetling,” I croon down at the kitten, running my thumb down the silken slope of its nose. It meows plaintively up at me, its tiny, needle-fanged maw gaping with each cry. “You’ll be out as soon as we are home.”
Before the procession began, I’d been foraging for mushrooms in the woods behind our cottage. Instead I’d found the baker’s son, a notorious little ruffian, tormenting a mother cat and her litter nestled inside a former foxhole. He’d caught one of the kittens by its scruff and was holding a flaming stick to its tail, while the harrowed creature twisted helplessly in his grubby grip. I’d cuffed him upside the head and sent him running back to the village, howling at the injustice of being upbraided by a girl.
The kit’s tail was scorched, raw and seeping. Rather than letting nature tend to it, I tucked it into my basket to take home, where I’d dress the burn with a salve of comfrey and marigold. I could even make a gift of it to Klara, I’d thought, my heart buoyed by the notion. My little sister was a tender touch, easily moved to tears by an animal’s plight. She would love this bedeviled little darling.
The kitten squirms again, overwhelmed by the rumble of the crowd. My own brothers are likely in the thick of it, stomping on toes and driving scrawny elbows into sides as they scrounge for fallen coins. As I think this, I catch a flash of Miklos’s towheaded curls, my heart stuttering with alarm. He and Balint are the youngest, much too little to be here; Andras is meant to be watching them. If anything should befall them, Papa would fall upon the rest of us like a thunderclap, unstinting in his rage.
I’m so distracted by the blood-well of my dismay that when the kitten bolts from the basket, I’m too slow to catch it.
It spills over the basket’s rim like something boneless and oiled. I fall to my knees to snatch it back, but it vanishes in an instant into a spindly forest of shins and ankles. Scrambling back up to my feet, I begin shoving my way gracelessly in pursuit through the milling crowd. It’ll be crushed underfoot if I don’t find it, by a wayward boot snapping its spine or splitting its fragile skull. And after what it’s already suffered in its little life, I find that I can’t stomach the thought of such a brutal end.
Work-worn faces glower down at me as I push past, spewing a fug of liquored breath and indignant challenges at being jostled. I ignore them all, plowing onward. I’ve nearly reached the crowd’s lip when the kitten lollops out ahead of me—darting directly into the path of the countess’s chestnut geldings, between their falling hooves.
One of the steeds goes rigid, while the other rears a little, hooves stamping, eyes rolling white with senseless panic. The carriage lurches to a stop, abruptly enough that the countess loses her feet and thuds down to sitting with a startled, undignified yelp.
A chorus of gasps races through the crowd, followed by a silence so deafening that it somehow makes commonplace sounds—the creak of branches, the phlegmy clearing of throats, snatches of birdsong—unspeakably profane. My heart scrambles up my throat, wedges there like a mouthful gone awry. Though the countess is a new arrival, rumor has preceded her. By all accounts, she is sharp even by blue-blood standards, uncommonly quick to take umbrage to any perceived slight.
And I have disrupted her wedding day.
My heart cudgels my ribs as one of Lord Nadasdy’s soldiers leaps from his saddle, nimble despite the weight of his armor. He dashes out between the geldings, snatching up the kitten with one gauntleted hand. It dangles pitifully from his fisted grip, tiny limbs flailing as he offers it up to the countess, who has alit from the carriage in a dizzying swirl of damask skirts.
“What would you have me do with the creature, my lady?” he calls out, giving the kitten a careless little shake. A bored, desultory ruthlessness underpins his tone. “Will you suffer it to live?”
The inside of my mouth prickles with trepidation, as if I’ve been chewing on nettles. Please, I beg silently. Please don’t let her kill it.
The countess holds her hands out for the kitten, then cradles it to her chest, tipping its tiny face up to hers with a finger under its chin. I can see it go rag-doll limp in her grasp, ears flattening as if it knows its life might well be forfeit. “That depends, I suppose,” she muses as she strokes its head with long, pale fingers, each caress prolonged and deliberate. Finally, her eyes lift to spear mine. “On what its owner has to say.”
She crooks a slim finger at me, beckoning me closer. I stumble forward on legs like stilts, my knees threatening to give way. My vision shudders in rhythm with every heavy heartbeat. Not even my father’s explosive furies have ever left me this afraid.
“Now,” she says briskly when I stand before her. “Let us see what we have here.”
I dip into a clumsy curtsy, fearing for a breathless lurch of a moment that I will overbalance and tip forward. But I right myself at the last moment, licking my lips as I meet her eyes.
The world beyond us wavers like a heat mirage, until it seems to vanish altogether. Leaving me alone, marooned, pinioned by her gaze.
Her eyes are captivating, large and lustrous with a distant glimmer, like very deep wells—almost black, even darker than her raven hair. So dark, the pupils barely show beneath the swoop of shadow cast by her lashes. They fix on mine, unabashed in their appraisal, and my insides fist tight with surprise. I know who she is, of course. We commoners know all those who own the lands we occupy only by their leave. Countess Elizabeth Báthory, daughter of a baron, niece of the Polish king. Yet, highborn as she is, her beauty somehow takes me unawares. So formidable and unyielding that it seems to exert its own force. Though she’s only a few years older than my thirteen, she already wields it like a scepter.