He mounts behind me, my back pressed tight against his front as his arms circle me to grasp the reins. To his credit, there is nothing untoward about his touch. And he’s called me nothing worse than girl, though “trull” and “twit” and “slattern” roll so easily off my own father’s tongue.
“Hold on,” he orders gruffly into my ear as I wrap my hands around the saddle horn and tighten my thighs. His breath smells faintly of ale, apples, and dried meat. He isn’t drunk, at least. “I won’t be putting you back together should you topple off and break your bones.”
“I can ride,” I retort stiffly. “And mend my own bones just fine, should the need befall me.”
“See that it doesn’t, for your own good.” He spurs the horse into a canter, and soon we flash between the trees and onto the main road ahead.
As we ride across Sarvar’s rolling plains, shrouded in night, I find myself tilting my face reflexively toward the sky, searching for the moon. I always know where the moon is, even when I cannot see it for the clouds. The midwife’s sight, my mother used to call it, this knowing. The moon holds sway over all women, over our monthly fluxes and the cycles of our wombs, waxing, waning, ripening with child. When I was small, she’d take me to the lake with her long after nightfall—only once my father and brothers fell asleep, my sister too little to join us, too. This gathering was not for men, she said.
I’d help her harvest the herbs that grew by the banks, the ones best pulled after midnight.
Before we began, she’d put her hands over my eyes, her rough palms smelling of valerian and yarrow. Back then, her hands were still unmarred by pain, her fingers fine and nimble. “Find the moon, Annacska,” she’d whisper in my ear. “Go on—tell me where it is.”
I’d tip my face up and scan the sky through closed eyes. And then there it would be—a pale, blazing imprint of an orb, against the muddy darkness of my eyelids. It had a halo to it, like the dark opposite of flame, a corona of tendrils that writhed and pulled. I could feel the way they tugged at everything. At the rippling surface of the lake, the sap inside the herbs we’d gathered in our aprons, even the pit of my own belly.
I told her, once, that I could see it in this way, thinking she could, too. Her mouth had thinned, eyes cinching at the corners. “You’re running wild with imagining, Annacska,” she’d said lightly, but tension crackled through her tone, like lightning forking through clouds before it struck the ground. “You do not truly see such a strange, devilish thing, do you?”
I’d denied it, frightened by her fear. Most likely she was right, and I only imagined that I could see it because she’d taught me to track the moon so well, to follow its steady progress across the heavens. And the sight did fade as I grew older and willfully tamped it down. But sometimes I still think I spy its echo in the living things I tend to, in uncut herbs and vegetables and even our spavined goat, and especially the ailing who call on me and my mother.
Sometimes I even let it guide my hand to where it is needed most.
I’m so rapt that I barely notice our gradual slowing, the changing of our course as we trot into another silent, drowsing village, much smaller than my own. The countess’s man pulls the horse to a halt in front of a small wattle-and-daub cottage with a straw-thatched roof, so cramped it nearly makes our own look grand. A fat plume of smoke wafts from the chimney hole, and I frown, wondering why their hearth would be blazing in the dead of night when everyone with sense tamps their fires down to embers.
“But where are we?” I ask, misgivings roiling up. “I thought I was wanted at the Nadasdy keep.”
“Never said any such thing,” he rumbles in my ear. “As to what the countess needs, she’ll tell you so herself—she’s inside, waiting.”
Confusion ratchets up inside me. Why would the countess be here, in this grim hovel? Before I can ask, he dismounts with a thud and unceremoniously hauls me off the mare’s back, without bothering to wait for me to attempt the landing on my own. I pointedly straighten my disheveled dress, casting him a glare as I turn to the door. I can hear the faint, high note of muffled weeping from within even before I swing it open.
The inside is stifling with the heat of a roaring fire, candles clustered thick and dripping on every surface, throwing trembling stripes of shadow over the walls. I spot the countess first, on her knees on the beaten-earth floor with her skirts rucked up around her. She kneels beside a low, shabby pallet, clutching the hand of a flush-faced little boy. Her head lifts at the sound of the door, and I’m struck by her salt-streaked face, the skeins of hair unraveling from their complicated twist beneath a net.
“Anna Darvulia,” she says faintly, terror and relief coiling together in her tone. “You’ve finally come, thank our maker. I was beginning to contemplate despair.”
I dip into a curtsy, then hasten over to the bedside. “Of course, my lady,” I murmur. “Please forgive the wait. He’s—this boy is ill, I take it?”
She hooks a piercing look at me, hearing my silent question. “His name is Gabor. He’s my son,” she adds bluntly. Her eyes alight on me, intent as a falcon plummeting toward its prey. She waits to see what I will say.
I catch my breath; I cannot help it. “Your son,” I repeat, careful to temper my tone lest I betray any censure even as my mind races ahead. He is clearly not Lord Nadasdy’s son as well, else we would all have been treated to the fanfare that surrounds the arrival of an heir. Besides which, this boy looks to be nearly five, only a little younger than my sister. He would have been conceived and delivered years before the countess’s marriage.
Whoever this boy’s father is, her pregnancy must have been concealed.
She rolls her eyes skyward, as if she finds my hesitation deeply tiresome. “His father was a peasant,” she snaps. “Our farrier’s son, back home in Ecsed. I was very young, and he had a winsome face. And a back like one of the thoroughbreds his father broke for us. I—briefly and misguidedly—believed that I loved him. He was disinclined to refuse his mistress, and that is how Gabor came to be. I could not keep him, of course, so he became my wet nurse’s son.”
“I—I see, m’lady,” I stammer, taken aback by how baldly she speaks of this transgression, as if taking pleasure with a man unwedded is her divine right. I’m even more astonished that she would see fit to share her indiscretion with me.
“You wonder of my husband, and why I am being so candid with you,” she says, as if she can read my mind. “No, Ferenc does not know of Gabor. No one does, save for myself, my mother back home, and Zorka. And now yourself—only because I need you to understand how imperative it is that he should live.” She scrutinizes me for a long moment, lifting an eyebrow. “I trust this will remain between us. Am I correct in thinking so?”
“Y-yes, m’lady,” I choke out. “Of course. But, why call for me at all? My mother is the one who—”
She slices through my question with an imperious hand. “She is not the one they speak of, at least not any longer.” Her eyes lock onto mine, coal-black, boring into me. “You are. It is known that you’re a witch, more deft with herbs than any mortal has the right to be.”