While I puzzle over this, mother collapses against my side as if her bones have dissolved all at once. “What will we do, Anna?” she keens into my shoulder, reaching for my arms with her gnarled, pitiful hands. “How will we fare when winter comes, without the coin from the smithy?”
“What will we eat?” Balint wails, having retained firm hold of his priorities. It nearly, but not quite, stirs me to smile despite myself. “We will be hungry!”
“We will not,” I counter firmly. My mind has been whirling, a leaf tossed about by the ferocious winds of fortune, but it settles all at once. Peter’s offer of marriage flares up for one last, hopeful moment before I stamp it to cinders under my heel. No matter how well he loves me, I cannot burden my best friend with six more mouths to feed, not without a dowry; such a strain would rupture even the most enduring of friendships. Even if I could bring myself to do it, I find I do not wish to wed him, not even now.
And even if I redouble my efforts, seek the sick beyond our village, I cannot feed all of us by myself.
Not as the midwife’s daughter, anyway.
But as a lady’s chambermaid, perhaps I could.
“I will go to the countess,” I say, unwavering. “I’ll leave on the morrow.”
Chapter Five
The Journey and the Gauntlet
Klara’s plaintive entreaties follow me out onto the road. “Please don’t go, Anna,” she’d begged before I set out that morning, her little face wretched with tears. “Please do not leave me, nővér, I love you!”
“I’ll be back, dandelion,” I’d soothed past the lump in my own throat, hugging her tight against my midriff. I love her pet name for “big sister,” but today it claws cruelly at my heart. “Before you know it, and with plenty of coin for bread and cheese and roast chickens.”
My mother had embraced me, too, sliding her hand over my braid. “Will you be all right catching babies without me, what with your hands?” I’d whispered low into her ear so my sister wouldn’t hear my concern. “I wouldn’t want you to lose that coin, too.”
“I’ll take Magdalena’s middle daughter as an apprentice, Annacska, don’t fret,” she’d murmured back. “She won’t fill your shoes, but she’s done well enough before when we’ve called on her for help. And you take care at the keep, my sweet. If anything is amiss, anything at all, come back to us, do you hear? We’ll find some other way.”
Except there was no other way, I thought grimly, even as I nodded and made her an empty promise to ease her mind.
There was only me.
Now I walk with my midwife’s bag bumping against my hip, a cloth satchel slung over my shoulder, and a small knife tucked into my boot. Fortunately the terrain is flat, as most of Hungary is; a land held in God’s own green palm, as people say. It certainly makes it easier to foresee danger coming, without any need for omens. Whenever I hear the rattle of carts and thump of hooves approaching, kicking up dust at the horizon, I melt out of sight like a snake into the roadside undergrowth. I know what may befall a woman traveling alone, and even with my sharp little companion at hand I see no reason to tempt fate. And though the sky threatens rain, a roiling black bank of clouds marching across the blue like an invading army, none falls as I walk.
Without pounding sun, storm, or skulking footpads to stall me, I make good time even with my caution. Still, I do not reach the keep until well after dusk, as the dregs of the day deepen into night. The temperature drops precipitously once the sun has sunk. It leaves the eve brittle-bright with cold, as if a slim pane of ice has been laid across the sky to sharpen the outlines of the stars and moon, bring them into finely cut focus. I feel as if I could crack it open by reaching up and tapping a fingernail against it. Bring it all tumbling to the ground in a shower of glittering shards.
Such silly thoughts, I chide myself as I hasten across the castle bridge that leads to the Nadasdy castle. As if a creature small as me could be big enough to break the sky.
In daylight, the keep is sprawling and lovely, its square, whitewashed towers snowy and roofed with a rich red. I remember its splendor from the one time I came here with my mother, to tend to one of the candlers. At night, I find it much less enticing. I have not dared rest while on the road, and now I am so tired that my exhaustion seems to be playing tricks on my sight. The keep rears up before me like something wicked, a beast lying in wait. Firelight glimmers behind the dark windows, but in my fatigue, I find an infernal tinge to this inner glow. Even the thick copse of trees all around, looming like sentinels, whisper of menace.
Worst of all, there is an unsettling, illusory flatness to the keep. The more I look at it, the more it seems like a mirror image. A reflection rather than something real.
Perhaps if I lifted my hand, I think, I would see myself already in one of the windows.
Already inside the belly of the beast.
“Get a hold of yourself, Anna, for God’s sake,” I hiss to myself under my breath, reaching up to pinch my cheek. “There is nothing here to fear!”
When I approach the gate tower, heart still rampaging in my chest, I find the great wooden door already bolted for the night. No one answers my knock. I step back, perplexed; it had not even occurred to me that I might not be able to gain entry once I arrived. Visions begin to swarm of a night spent outside in the biting cold. It’s much too late to set out for home, and I can’t sleep out here, with no shelter. I’ll freeze long before morning, and tomorrow they’ll find me, blue-lipped and glass-eyed, my lifeless flesh encased with ice, like a child’s discarded doll.
There is no need to panic yet, I tell myself, as if I have not already begun to quail. Perhaps the castle is preoccupied with dinner, and I need merely wait.
So I settle in, huddling by the door in the hope of catching a balmy waft through the cracks. I try to warm myself with thoughts of heat; sated honeybees drifting lazily over fat and drooping flowers, the thick, dizzy warmth of a high summer day. But hours pass, and no one comes. I’m so frozen through, my hands and feet numb and my nose dripping salt, that the last measure of decorum deserts me, giving way to a scorching flush of panic almost welcome for its mimicry of heat. Abandoning restraint, I fling myself at the door, battering it with my fists.
“Hello!” I cry, wincing at the high-pitched despair in my voice. I sound like a fretful child, but I’m unable to contain it. Great gusts of my breath billow around me. So cold, so cold, so cold beats in my mind like a second, frigid heart. “Is anyone there? Will you let me in? The countess has called for me, and I, I’m so cold, I’ll catch my death out here, please . . .”
Finally, when my hands are bruised to tenderness from pounding, I hear the groan of the bolt being lifted, the scrape of the wood against the iron brackets. I step back, half tripping over my own numb feet, as the door swings outward to reveal a beetle-browed guard with lank scraggles of graying hair. He peers at me churlishly, glowering over a harelip.
“What d’you want at this hour, girl, with your ungodly racket?” he demands, spitting by my feet. “The castle’s sleeping, as are all decent folk.”
I’m so weak with relief that my entire body fractures into trembling. My teeth chatter so hard I can barely force the words through them. “I have c-c-come to be the l-lady’s chambermaid,” I stutter, hugging myself. “Sh-sh-she has summoned me, and I arrived earlier, b-b-b-but no one has come for me. Did you not h-h-h-hear me knocking?”