“To the contrary,” Elizabeth grumbles, flicking me a disgruntled glance. “We must stay the course. Otherwise how will we know what to change, how to improve our work?”
“But . . .” I pitch my voice lower, though Krisztina is in such agony she isn’t likely to hear me. “She will surely die, if we keep on.”
“And what of it?” Elizabeth snaps, lifting her chin. “What’s one lazy scull, in the face of our progress?”
“She isn’t lazy,” I mumble under my breath, turning away from her. “And she is a person, just as you are.”
“What was that?” There it is again, that subtle hiss, the sound of the snake coiling up within her. Surging up with its black, blank eyes, testing the air with its tongue. “I’m not sure that I heard you, Anna.”
“Nothing, my lady Elizabeth,” I say, lifting my voice to hide the bitterness. “Nothing at all.”
Krisztina dies later that night.
I insist on helping Janos bury her body in the orchard. There, at least, what remains of her may one day become trees, live anew as their leaves and flowers and fruit.
It is cold comfort, the bitterest dregs of consolation. I weep silently as we dig the hole, lower her shrouded body into it. Not a single member of her family is here to see her off, nor a priest or any of her friends. I know better than to count myself among the latter anymore. Not when I couldn’t stave off her death.
Not her death—her murder, at Elizabeth’s hand. And my own.
“How many like this have you buried in unmarked graves?” I ask Janos, knuckling sweat off my forehead, thinking of all the girls who “disappeared” from Nadasdy Castle overnight, allegedly sent home to recover after a punishment. The seamstress with stitched-together fingers and the chambermaid with the crushed ribs are only two that I can think of. Perhaps Krisztina has always been right. “Do you even care to remember?”
“Not while the lady lines my pocket with heavy coin, I don’t,” he retorts, shrugging his broad shoulders. “And you should strive to do the same.”
It is too much to hope that her death might have dissuaded Elizabeth. Instead, she jots down the course of Krisztina’s demise in a black leather-bound book, hunched over it with a frantically scratching quill.
“It will be different next time,” she mutters abstractedly, more to herself than me. “It worked to begin with, so perhaps we merely overwhelmed her. A smaller dose should do for our next try.”
For a mercy, our next subject is not a former friend, though I recognize her face; she is one of the kitchen servants. Alida flourishes at first just like her predecessor, and even longer, for a full fortnight.
She dies much slower, too. Languishing for so long that I begin to think slitting her throat would be a kindness.
I have barely helped Janos bury her before Elizabeth requests another victim.
This time, she thinks, we should triple the dosage. “We have learned what does not work, haven’t we? Perhaps their bodies must push through the poison, by seizing upon that first flush of vitality and riding it forward,” she insists, her eyes bright with renewed zeal. Now that she has latched upon this pursuit, nothing seems to subdue her. The sleeplessness is playing havoc with her face, painting lurid blue stains of fatigue under her eyes, turning her skin wan and hair lank.
Sometimes I wonder what she would do if I told her that this frenzied pursuit of youth and beauty seems to be stealing her own. But I am much too afraid to test her.
“Well?” she urges, impatient. “What do you think?”
“I think she will die faster,” I answer, not even attempting to hide my despair. “And in more pain. I think that we must stop, Elizabeth.”
The fire tempers into a smoldering anger, tinged with disappointment. “Do you truly give up so easily, Anna?” she demands, glowering. “I thought you were made of much sterner stuff. Has your fabled, stony heart deserted you so soon?”
“Because it’s weak, not to wish to cause death?” I retort, unable to restrain myself. “It’s unbecoming to save others from inhuman torment?”
“If you have such sympathy for them,” she rejoins, her eyes cooling and lips thinning into nothing, “perhaps you would like to take their place, hmm? Be the next experiment yourself?”
A cold panic, like a sheath of ice laid over my body, tightens around me. Would she truly do it? I wonder, looking into her familiar dark eyes, as lovely as they always were, but no longer beguiling in the least. Would she sacrifice me so easily? Perhaps even a few months ago, I might have said she never would. But I have seen far too much since to entertain such a pretty delusion.
I no longer believe that she ever truly cared for me at all. I have been no more than a plaything to her—an amusing diversion, perhaps even an experiment myself. I can imagine her thinking about me in those early days, her mind aflame with plots and schemes with me trapped in their very center. How far will this foolish girl go for me? she must have wondered, so gleefully. What can I make her do, now that she is so helpless, trapped by my coin and wrapped around my finger?
If she did not think she needed my wisdom for her own alchemy, I would likely be dead already. And as soon as I fail to amuse her, she will hunt me down like another stag.
She doesn’t waver, doesn’t even blink, holding me fast with her dread gaze. When the tension intensifies until I cannot stand it, I move toward her and wrap her hands in mine, terrified that she will recoil from me.
“Please, Elizabeth,” I entreat as sincerely as I can, though I can feel my heart beating so savagely that she must surely see its imprint against my skin. “It is only that I am worried for you. You have not been eating as you should, or resting enough. Perhaps we should take some time. Recalibrate our plans.” It is not just my own life I fight for in this moment of playacting. As the air grows even more taut and delicate between us, thin-skinned as an expanding bubble, I know that my family’s lives hang in the balance, too. My heart fists miserably at the thought of my sweet dandelion Klara, who would blow away so easily without me to shield her.
Elizabeth surveys me for a moment longer with that brittle, tempered gaze. Then her face thaws, softens into a mimicry of warmth; I know now that she is no more capable of true warmth than a chill-hearted lizard clinging to castle stones, sucking in the sun. “Of course you are worried,” she concedes. “I have been pushing us both so very hard. You know I didn’t mean it, don’t you? That I would never give up my dearest dove?”
The relief is so great it turns my knees to water. “Of course,” I say softly, struggling to keep my jittering voice even, because I know no such thing. All the certainty I have is this temporary reprieve.
“Then you must know, also, that I will not give up,” she replies, sweeping her thumb over my knuckles. I grit my teeth at the feigned fondness in her touch. “I am dwindling by the day. No, do not deny it, you said so yourself, and I can see as much. And I need it, Anna, do you understand? I need this face, I need my spirits high. Without my beauty and my choler to sustain me, I am nothing. And that is something I cannot tolerate.”
“I understand,” I say numbly, though I understand nothing save that this is lunacy, the worst kind of calculated madness. She is prepared to sacrifice them all for the sake of something so inconsequential as beauty. Which is fleeting by nature and design, meant to desert us all. Even a longer life cannot possibly be worth the expense of so many others.