“Morning, mistress midwife,” he says to Mama, tugging his forelock. “Is your daughter Anna about?”
Grunting, Father levers himself up, shooting me a glowering, suspicious glance. As if I’m some notorious temptress, as if strangers have ever come calling at our door for anything but my healer’s hands. “She’s here, sure enough,” he says, stumping over to the door and shooing my mother aside. “What d’you want with her?”
Janos appraises him with an even, unflinching gaze. “My mistress wishes to retain her services.”
Father gawps at him, squinting. “Is that so? And who might your mistress be?”
“The Countess Báthory, wife to our liege. She summons your daughter to serve as her chambermaid. She—”
“Anna? For a lady’s chambermaid?” Father breaks in, casting a disbelieving look at me over his shoulder. I attempt to school my taut features, still the expectant pounding of my heart. Chambermaid to the lady herself; I can scarce believe it. To lace her stays, dress her lovely hair, sleep in her chambers should she wake in the night with any needs unmet. And if it pays remotely like the night I tended to her son, it would ensure a life so easy I could barely dream of it before it came knocking at my door. “I’ve never heard such rot. Even if she wasn’t lower born than good Magyar dirt, my girl’s needed here to mind her brothers.”
“The lady offers her a forint every fortnight, should she serve,” Janos adds evenly. “A more than generous sum.”
The amount momentarily sways my father. His eyes narrow, turn inward as he ciphers the difference this would make, how much food it would put in the remaining bellies once I was gone.
“No,” he finally says with a decisive shake of his head, though I can see the subtle flame of avarice leaping in his eyes. What is a forint every fortnight to a woman of bottomless coffers, he is thinking; if the countess truly wishes to secure my services, she will likely be willing to part with even more. How exactly like my father, I think bitterly, to overestimate his own cunning, gambling so readily with all of our fortunes on no more than a whim. “I’m afraid we can’t spare her, not for such a paltry sum. We would consider double but no less, not with my wife’s hands as they are. If your mistress wants my girl, then she should rightfully pay what the chit is worth to us.”
As if my father has ever considered my worth and found it to be so high.
As he moves to shut the door, Janos wedges a booted foot over our threshold, shouldering the door open until it forces my father back a step. The shock is such that all of us go deathly quiet. Even little Miklos, who’d been obliviously singing child’s nonsense to himself under his breath.
Everyone in the village knows not to court Father’s anger. It takes only the slightest, most passing of sparks to stoke its dry and ready tinder into roaring fury. And once it is lit . . .
Suffice to say that I have never seen another thing so monstrous.
“My lady brooks no refusal,” Janos says into the gaping silence, seemingly oblivious to the danger rushing at him headlong. “Especially not from the likes of you. What she desires, she always makes hers in the end. Now tell your girl to gather her things, and save yourself a world of trouble.”
“How dare you,” Father bellows, seizing Janos’s fine waistcoat. The fact that the other man towers over him like a mountain—Father is small, a bantam rooster of a man, but hammering iron into submission has left him with a strength much larger than his slight frame—does nothing to quell him. “Threaten me under my own roof, you blackguard? Try to steal my daughter? You will take her only over my steaming corpse, you whoreson thief!”
Borne up by the force of his fury, hangover all but forgotten, he heaves Janos bodily over the threshold, shoving him outside. The man stumbles only slightly before righting himself, then lifts his hands coolly to convey he wishes no violence, though I saw how his hand first quivered over his knife belt. He surveys my father, still puffing and blustering, with eyes icier than a mountain-fed spring. So blisteringly cold, my own neck prickles at their subdued menace.
“As you say,” he says with deceptive mildness, as if a blizzard were not brewing in his eyes. “But heed me, master blacksmith—the countess has marked your daughter for her own. Which means she already no longer belongs to you.”
He turns on his heel and strides away before my father can even muster a reply.
After Janos is gone, and once my father is satisfied that I have done nothing untoward to court the countess’s sudden favor—I do not yield the secret of her son, telling him instead that I tended to one of the lady’s chambermaids—I am finally left to the roiling of my thoughts. As we grind meadowsweet side by side, my mother steals slantwise looks at me, but does not trouble me with questions. She knows I prefer to keep my own counsel until I have sorted out my mind.
But I am besieged by questions, a flock of them swarming and pecking ruthlessly at me. Why is the countess so intent on pressing me into her service when she could summon me as healer or midwife whenever she desired? What has she to gain from my presence by her side—especially if she is already familiar with herbs in her own right? Why elevate me so suddenly to a position that I could not possibly have earned over the course of one night?
Whichever way I turn it, I cannot understand the shape of her thoughts on the matter. Unless the answer is something less concrete than I can easily grasp, something beyond the clear boundaries of reason. Something that does not cast the expected shadow.
Perhaps the countess has simply taken to me, the way I have to her. But if that is so, why can I not shed this growing sense of menace?
Finally, even my saintly mother reaches the limits of her patience.
“Out with you, fidget,” she orders, shooing me to the door. “You’ll turn these fine herbs bitter with all your fretting. Let the sun scour your overbusy head.”
I squeeze her forearm rather than her hand, and brush a kiss over her wizened cheek, smiling my thanks. With that I am out the door, my basket slung over my arm in case I spy anything worth gathering as I wander.
The world outside opens wide around me, the hues of sky, leaf, and flower blazing vibrant as a peacock’s feather. No ill-fated wedding will transpire today, I think, not under this bright and blameless sky. Only the most faithful and loving of husbands will pledge themselves to blushing brides. Though no early moon is visible, I know exactly where it will rise—slightly south of east, above the lumpy hillock we call Boar’s Mound, rearing humpbacked on the horizon.
I cast my mind outward as I walk, beyond the cramped confines of my skull. Our patch of woods teems with birds, their unruly songs distinctive to my ear. I hear swallows, larks, and kinglets; nuthatches, wrens, and warblers; even an osprey whistling down with talons extended, seeking the tender flesh of some poor mouse. A fine, brisk breeze weaves itself through creaking branches like warp through weft, and sunlight paws sweetly at my cheeks.
All is well, or should be. And yet my mind stubbornly refuses to still, clamoring of a danger that I cannot pinpoint, and I amble down the path that leads to the village’s center, drawn toward the one person who might help calm the churning of my thoughts. Halfway to the village proper, a pale glint snares my eye, tangled among the undergrowth of ferns and rushes that scramble up onto the path. I wander warily over to it, parting the fronds with my hands—to reveal a magpie’s domed nest, half-crushed from the fall, a clutch of gristle-twisted skeletons curled together at its center.