I see her swallow, the convulsion of her slender throat. “I have been otherwise occupied,” she forces through clenched teeth. “With the four other estates that I manage, all on my own, while you are gone. Perhaps you recollect them? Or shall I list their names for you?”
He slams his fist on the table, once, a single controlled thump that still slops wine from our goblets. “Do not dare speak to me of our holdings,” he grates out, his voice rising. “I made the rounds today, spoke to the headmen of the Sarvar villages. We have seventeen of those, if you’ve bothered to count. You’ve not shown your face in a single one for the past month. Those are our people, our vassals. And as my wife, you’re meant to tend to them in my stead.” He flashes an enraged look at me. “Not play house with your new pet.”
“You forget yourself, Ferenc, if you think you can speak to me this way,” Elizabeth says softly, but I can hear the steel beneath that spun-silk tone. “I was a lady and a Báthory long before I became your wife.”
“That you wouldn’t take the Nadasdy name means nothing anymore, do you not understand that? I allowed it then only out of respect for your family’s greater standing.”
Ferenc’s face roils with subdued rage, growing thunderous, and his clouded, suspicious gaze flicks to me again. He pushes back from the table, mouth working, his words tolling in my head. The room seems to swell and throb with menace, pulsing around us like the chambers of a malevolent heart.
“But if you insist on carrying on like this—on abdicating your responsibilities—I will have no choice,” he goes on. “I have family, too, Beth. Unmarried uncles and cousins I could call upon, who would only be too pleased to watch over my holdings while I am gone. To watch over you.”
I can imagine how she must hate this, the thought of Nadasdy men roaming her domain. She bows her head, shining curls trembling in the candlelight, and when she looks up her lips quiver with anger. Her eyes are huge and glistening, but she does not trust herself to speak—not even when he stalks over to me.
I freeze where I sit, all my muscles turning taut. It takes everything I have not to tremble when he slides a cold hand over my shoulder and up my neck, twines my braid around his wrist. But when he yanks my head back, arching my neck, I cannot suppress a gasp. The smell of him, sweat and horse musk and the drench of the noisome cologne I remember, nearly makes me gag.
“Is this your doing?” he croons into my ear. “I have ears in this keep, you know. And I’ve heard tell of you, my lady wife’s snow-skinned sorceress, her favored dove. Have you been whispering sweet nothings to Beth, distracting her from her work? Helping her play her games?”
Elizabeth scrapes back from the table so abruptly the chair tips over, clattering against the stones. “Unhand her, you black-hearted bastard,” she hisses, eyes blazing, hands curling into claws by her side. I have never seen her so riled, so furious—and a warm vein of pleasure threads through my encasing terror, fissuring its surface. That she would attack him in my defense without a thought spared for her own safety. No one has ever done such a thing for me before. “It is not her fault that I prefer her company to yours, you wretched whoreson, you—”
Ferenc releases me in one fell swoop, so abruptly that I slither to the ground before I can catch myself. He storms over to Elizabeth and backhands her casually across the face. Though she doesn’t make a sound, I can see her lip split like ripe fruit from the force of the blow, a glistening spatter of blood raining across the pale skin of her chest.
“I see you’ve quite forgotten yourself in my absence, you feral little bitch,” he remarks, so composed he may as well be discussing the onset of winter. While I gape at them, disbelieving, he grasps her viciously by the upper arm and hauls her toward the doors. “It will be my very great pleasure to remind you whom you belong to, before I take my leave again tomorrow.”
She has the chance to fling one last, desperate look over her shoulder at me as he drags her through the doors.
Chapter Eleven
The Salve and the Kiss
The next morning, I dare slip into Elizabeth’s dark chambers only once Ferenc is gone, his company thundering out of the courtyard in a cloud of dust and churning hooves.
“Elizabeth?” I whisper warily, padding over to her bed. The velvet curtains are drawn; there is barely a chink of light, though I come with a candle to pierce the gloom. “Are you awake?”
She doesn’t respond beyond a low, anguished whimper. I creep up onto the bed on my knees, bending over her. She’s cocooned in covers, only the unruly mop of her hair peeking out at the top. Gently, I peel its corner off her so I can see her face.
“Shhh, it’s all right,” I soothe when she bites back a sob. “I just want to help . . .”
The words wither in my mouth, shrivel like dead petals, when she shifts out of the shadows enough to show her face.
Besides her crusted lip, half of her face is such a mottled mess that it seems grafted onto her from some feckless survivor of a barroom brawl. Her left cheek is a doughy mass of black and blue, and there’s an angry cut along her cheekbone, where that demon clad in human flesh must have struck her with one of his rings. Above it, her left eye is so swollen it nearly disappears, slitted closed so that her lashes mesh together.
“My God,” I manage, my heart pounding at the very base of my throat, as if it has lifted itself up with rage. “What has that monster done to you?”
She huffs a dry wisp of a laugh. “Nothing he hasn’t done before, Anna,” she croaks, a single tear sliding down her battered cheek.
“But the pain must be terrible!”
“It is not the pain that concerns me,” she says, stifling a groan when I graze the most glancing touch over her skin. She scrambles clumsily up to sitting, eyes flaring wide with panic as she turns toward me, offering her face for my inspection. “Tell me, does it look very dreadful? Do you—do you think I might scar? Do not lie to me, Anna! Oh, if that bastard has ruined my face—”
“He has done nothing that cannot be undone, do not fret,” I assure her with blithe confidence though I am far from certain this is the case, sensing that she has too much worry of her own to wrestle with my doubt. What she needs is my fortitude, my so-called healer’s heart of stone. “I’ll make you a tonic for the pain, and a poultice for the swelling. The worst of it will pass in a blink, you’ll see. And you will be yourself again, just as lovely as you were.”
She nods fretfully, worrying delicately at her burst lip with the tip of her tongue. “Is he . . . Has he gone?” she whispers. “As long as he is not here, I can bear anything.”
“He is, my lady,” I reply grimly, wishing he were truly gone, dead and buried like my own beast of a father. “We are alone, and I will take care of you.”
As I grind witch hazel, comfrey, arnica, mullein flower, and honey into a paste, I find myself seething, so engulfed in great gouts of anger that it feels as though I may drown every time a fresh wave of wrath breaks over my head. I know well what it is to fear for your life, cowering impotent while a man towers over you with his battering-ram fists, so much stronger that escape is but a dream and rebellion inconceivable. My mother and I made this very paste for each other so many times that my hands do the work of their own accord, leaving me to think. By the time I am done with the balm, I know what I need to do to heal Elizabeth. Not just her body, but her bruised and fragile soul.