I can see the answering flicker of recognition as she surveys me in kind. Her gaze trails over my eyes, which are cold and clear as a winter sky, then down the pale sluice of my hair, swept over one shoulder and only loosely braided. A boy whose attentions I spurned once told me I looked untouchable, like something carved from ice. Though my blood runs common as the silty mud of the riverbed, I know my face commands much the same response as hers.
I wait with bated breath to see if it will make her hate me.
“Anna Darvulia,” she says in that same speculative tone, a faint dimple creasing her smooth cheek as the corner of her carmined mouth turns up. “The midwife’s elder daughter, if I am not mistaken.”
Shock knells powerfully inside me. I curtsy again, a bobbing twitch of a movement. “You—you know me, my lady?”
“Of course,” she says, tipping her head to the side. “Several of my new chambermaids speak of you and your mother in the same breath. They say you are both healers. Herb women, the likes of which this village—perhaps even all of Sarvar, and Hungary beyond—has never seen.” Her face warms appreciatively. “Though they failed to mention you were a beauty, too.”
“I’m not . . .” I fumble, a scalding rush of blood filling my cheeks, uncertain whether it’s seemly to accept such lofty praise. “They are too kind.”
She rolls her eyes playfully, casting me a conspiratorial look. “I daresay few have had cause to describe Margareta or Judit as ‘too kind,’ baby vipers that they are. Nor does honesty tend to trouble them overmuch. But in your case . . .” She leans forward, takes a long and measured inhale of me. I can smell her, too, the heady spice of some dark, extravagant perfume. “I can smell the truth of it on you.”
Her eyes sparkle secretively at the last, and a flurry of tingles suffuses my skin. Could she somehow know about the pennyroyal I stirred into the seamstress’s tonic this morning, when she begged me to rid her of the unwanted child waxing in her womb? Her eighth, sired upon her by an uncaring husband, a babe whose birth she is certain she would not survive? I had scrubbed my hands after handling it, but perhaps its reek had somehow lingered in my hair.
“Do not fret, little sage,” she whispers as the blood plummets from my face. “Your secret is safe with me. For we are both women, are we not? And some things are better kept between us.”
“Dearest Beth,” Lord Nadasdy drawls lazily from the carriage. Beneath the carelessness of his tone, I can hear something ironclad and uncompromising. “Must you insist on tarrying further? They are expecting us at the keep.”
“Of course, my husband,” she replies sedately over her shoulder, but I spot the telltale tightening at the corners of her mouth, a bright bloom of fury in the depths of her eyes. The countess does not take well to being enjoined by a man. “Just a moment.”
She turns back to me, gently pressing the kitten into my waiting hands. I clasp it gratefully to my chest, nearly sagging with relief. The countess wheels back to the carriage as three attendants swarm to help her up. Before she steps up, she flicks me a glance over her shoulder—a warm secret of a wink, likely invisible to everyone save me.
But I see it. Just as I see Lord Nadasdy’s hand close around her wrist, the skin paling with the force of his grip. I can see how it hurts her, in the way her smile slides off her face.
For all the gold and silver in her coffers, in some ways the countess is just like me.
A woman, with a man’s cruel hand around her wrist.
Chapter One
The Thorn and the Taint
Three Years Later
“Anna. Annacska. Wake up, my sweet.”
I rise from the murky depths of sleep, my hands lifting of their own accord to guard my face. The voice isn’t my father’s, and the words themselves far too tender to be his. But he’s woken me with a slap so many times that my body responds by rote, rising to protect me before I even come awake.
My mother gingerly grasps my hands with one of hers, lowering them. “Come,” she says quietly, grazing a knuckle down my cheek. “The countess calls for you.”
I blink as the dim outlines of the cottage resolve into focus, my mother’s shadowed face hovering above me. My mind turns over sluggishly, mired in confusion. I haven’t seen the countess since the day she returned Zsuzsi the cat into my arms, tossed that glimmer of a wink over her shoulder.
But even so, I have never forgotten the dark pools of her eyes.
“The countess?” I say blearily, dragging a hand over my face. “The Lady Báthory needs me? What for? She is not with child, is she?”
My mother glances over her shoulder to the door, and even by the light of the single candle I see the glint of fear spark up in her eyes. “Her man did not say,” she replies, keeping her voice to a whisper. I can hear my father snoring in their pallet by the hearth in rattling grunts that might have belonged to the wild boars that charge through the woods in rutting season. He’d staggered in long after we’d already had our dinner, so stupefied with rotgut drink he barely reached the bed. Waking him now would be unwise. “But he insists it cannot wait for morning.”
The urgency seeps into me then, lights my belly like a flagon of spring wine. I rise and dress as quickly and quietly as I can, stepping into my coarse, homespun work dress. My mother drapes her own cape over my shoulders to ward against the nighttime chill as I belt my herb bag around my waist. I pause for a moment, turning back to her. “Why me, Mama?” I ask in a voice just above a whisper. “Why did she not send for you?”
She adjusts the hood over my head, tucking a wayward lock behind my ear. “My hands are not what they once were, Annacska,” she replies, casting the gnarled knots of her knuckles a rueful look. “Surely the lady would have heard as much.”
A sharp rap at the door jolts us both; the countess’s man is growing restive.
“Quick,” my mother urges as my father stirs, groaning. “Before we wake him.”
I press a hasty kiss to her swollen knuckles; even at the barest brush of my lips she sucks in a pained breath. Then I step outside into the bracing night. The countess’s man is no more than a hulking shadow under the cloud-cloaked sky, and when he moves toward me it is somehow sinister, as if a portion of the night has snipped itself loose to assail me. I take a reflexive step back toward the shelter of our eaves, my hands clenching at my sides.
It is not the dark itself that I fear, but the men who come creeping under its cover. Though I am often just as leery when approached even at high noon. It seems many of them are not safe at any time in our lord’s creation.
“Took your sweet time, girl,” the man sneers, lifting his head so the dim light from the cottage spills across the overhang of his brow, revealing the crude-cut features that cluster beneath it. “The lady does not take well to being kept waiting. Let’s go.”
I hear the reassuring nicker of his horse tied to our fence, her musky smell carried on a breeze already sharp with night-blooming plants; I’m much more inclined to trust this mare than her owner, but there is little I can do about sharing her with him. I slip my foot into the stirrup and move to mount her, but the mare is broad-bellied and tall, and I can’t quite sling my leg over. With an irritated grunt, the man clasps me by the waist and heaves me easily up onto the saddle.