When she instructs me to return the next morning with all my belongings, so that I may sleep on a pallet by the foot of her bed as her chambermaid, I can scarcely believe my own good fortune. I will be receiving two forints each month, just as she originally promised.
Finally, my family will have nothing to fear from the encroaching winter.
I barely sleep that last night in the scullery, feeling like I have swallowed stars, brimming with their fiery aether. When I wake the next day and begin gathering my things from the wooden chest beneath my pallet, I already know my departure won’t be met kindly. The mutterings have grown in volume each day that I am called upstairs, though none have challenged me to my face. But they call me a witch when they think I can’t hear them, whispering behind their hands. They think I’ve compelled the countess, caught her in my thrall. Somehow forced her to dredge me up from the muck of the scullery and stitch me to her side.
If there is a thrall, I wasn’t the one who cast it.
I can feel all their eyes on me, but I don’t care, not with my heart swelling inside me like the sun vaulting over dawn’s horizon. Me, the Countess Báthory’s new chambermaid. Me, Anna Darvulia, born in a village so small it wasn’t even worth a name. Me, whose only lot would have been to catch babies like my mother, and eventually grow fat with them myself.
Instead, I’m here; I’m hers. And now that I’ve steeped in the fragrant darkness of Elizabeth’s chambers, I’ll never let myself sink back to these rancid depths.
Krisztina watches me fold my smocks, her green eyes baleful. “Won’t you tell us all about it, Anna the Cunning, your new milk-and-honey life?” Krisztina finally spits when she can no longer restrain herself. Her thorny tongue is now bent toward me, as if I’ve somehow betrayed her, despite all I’ve done for her health. The thoughtless expanse of her ingratitude astonishes me. “How does our lady’s newest lap cat spend her days? Tell us, does she have you purr for her while she reads to you from her wicked books? Do you lick cream from her cupped palms?”
“Krisztina,” Ilona chides, darting a glance at me. “Let her be. Anna has no choice in it, and you know you’d be up there in a whit yourself if the lady had wanted you.”
“I wouldn’t,” Krisztina retorts coldly. “That snake doesn’t even know my name, and I pray she never learns it. Besides, I don’t look the part, not like our Anna, with her corn-silk hair and twilight eyes. Half a lady herself already. And I’m no—”
I cut her off before she says it out loud. They can think what they want of me, but I won’t let them speak brashly, breathe words like “witch” out into the wind, where the devil himself can snatch them. “Then I suppose you have nothing to fear,” I snap, though I’d promised myself I’d be gracious with them.
“All of us have something to fear, from her,” old Katalin intones from her spot in the shadows. “You’d do well to remember it, Anna. Whatever it is she truly wants from you.”
I can’t listen to them any longer. They seethe with envy, boil with it. Perhaps I would, too, if I were them. If she hadn’t chosen me.
But she has. I don’t belong down here, not anymore, and I’m not bound to listen to their welling poison.
Silent, I gather up the rest of my smocks and ball them carelessly into my cloth satchel. Then I leave this dank pit behind me, and step out onto the stairs that lead only up.
It’s early yet, hours before Elizabeth likes to rise. So I head outside into the crisp November morning, my breath rising above me like fog as I gather milk thistle and motherwort to replenish my supply. I think of Elizabeth as I cut them with my little sickle knife, and feel the tugging of the still-invisible waxing moon in the velvety sky.
The midwife’s sight has been stirring in me of late, uncurling and stretching like a waking cat.
I never saw that shadowy opposite of glow in a person, not before I met Elizabeth. But now, when I close my eyes and look at her, I can almost see it, writhing like smoke all around her silhouette. I feel that same dark pull that the moon exerts, and I surge toward her helpless, like the tide.
Maybe they’re right, when they call me a witch. After all, it’s only a fearful name devised by the rabbit-hearted for what truly I am—Elizabeth’s little sage, delivered unto her by the stars.
Thinking of her makes me eager, and I rush back inside, fairly trotting up the tower steps that lead to her chambers. Outside her door, the faintest sound draws me up short. It’s both muffled and high-pitched like a mewl, a still-blind kitten crying for its mother.
Her door is heavy but well oiled, and it doesn’t so much as squeak when I crack it open, just enough to see. Her bed is empty; so is her plush settee, and her vanity. But there are flowers strewn across the floor, crushed into the bearskin rug and scattered over the stones. A vase lies shattered among them, in a winking spill of shards.
“What did you think, hmmm? Tell me again. That because I have so many, it would not matter? That maybe I would not even notice?”
At the sound of Elizabeth’s voice, my mouth goes dry. It’s the same as always on the surface, rich and low and creamy-sweet. But beneath, there’s a vicious, cutting rasp, a chill that slithers like shifting scales. I’ve never heard her like this before, but it’s so familiar all the same. As if this is the voice that lives within her voice, the one that always lurks beneath.
My skin bursts into gooseflesh, from my nape to my soles, and for the first time I know why Krisztina calls her a snake.
“No,” someone whimpers back. “I swear, my lady, it was an accident. I was putting a shine on it, and it—it slipped through my fingers—”
I crane my neck to glimpse farther, past the door—and then I see them both. Ilona, sweet-faced, cheery Ilona—so like my dandelion sister—kneels on the floor, her dun skirts hiked up so that her legs are bare. Why is she even here, I wonder desperately, when sculls have no business in the lady’s chambers? And then I know. She must have come under the pretense of some invented task, in search of me, to let me know there was no ill blood between us. Just as my own sister would have done.
Her face is pale and tear-streaked, and every time she shifts she lets out that awful mewling sound, biting down on her bloodied lip. Because she’s kneeling on the shattered remains of the vase; I can see where they’ve bitten into her skin, thin scarlet rivulets dripping onto the polished stones. Behind her, Elizabeth stands with one slim hand on Ilona’s shoulder. Pressing, pushing, bearing down, grinding Ilona’s bare knees harder into the shards.
Her face is avid, almost gleeful with delight. More rapt than I’ve ever seen, even when she reads her beloved books to me.
“It sounds as if your fingers are more trouble than they’re worth, doesn’t it, you clumsy little sow?” Elizabeth is smiling now, dimpled and wide, so sweet I can’t understand how these barbed words fit with her face. “But don’t fret, for it will be a very simple fix. I’ll fetch my pruning scissors, the heavy ones—then you’ll give me your hands, and snip snip snip!”
Ilona’s face turns ashen with terror, and I can’t help it. A gasp hitches in my throat.
Elizabeth’s head snaps up. Her eyes fly to mine, slitting narrow and dangerous. I should turn and run, but it’s far too late; I can’t pretend that I haven’t seen. That I haven’t heard.