But I can do nothing save rack my head feverishly for some desperate stratagem—and stand aside until I can think my way out of this murderous maze.
Try anything rash and I will be the next to die.
Dorottya follows in Alida’s footsteps, and then Angyalka, Borbala, Fanni, Jazmin, and Iren. I learn all their names so that someone might remember them. Elizabeth certainly doesn’t bother with such trifles, beyond her obsessive recording of the “results” in that accursed black book. With each new death, she tweaks the potion in some way, but always the arsenic does its foul work. Yet she remains monstrously unswayed, her conviction seemingly impervious to doubt.
With every new death, I grow increasingly convinced that I have made a graver mistake than I could have imagined in ridding us of Ferenc. The more I consider it, the more I believe that their relationship was more complex than I could readily understand. While he may have been a blight of a man, the only servants that died during his reign were the three he gave to Elizabeth as gifts, the night of their demonic banquet—and that was an olive branch, an indulgence, a tip of the hat. He was the ice to her fire, the cold, quelling gale, always tempering and holding her back. And that was why she hated him and chafed so, maddened by his restraint. Pinned under his thumb such that she could not kill at whim, whenever the choler moved her.
Had I not murdered him, all the women marked in her accursed black book might still be alive.
Too long, I have clung to the notion that her love for her son—and her passion for me—somehow tips her balance toward good, even if only slightly. But I can no longer deny what she is. A blade is a blade, cold and ruthless, forged only to draw blood. No matter how enticing its gleam in a certain light.
When she tests the potion on a little girl—the tiny, doe-eyed daughter of the head cook, only seven years at most—my heart breaks clean through. I again consider killing her myself, so vividly that when I am able to steal a snatch of sleep, I dream of little else. But Janos would not have it—my death would be certain, and my family’s demise along with it.
After the little girl dies like the rest, something vital seems to snap in Elizabeth. Some twisted offshoot of repressed guilt, perhaps, turning in on itself. Though I suspect even that may allot her far too much credit. More likely it is simple frustration at being thwarted, denied what she wants.
“What am I doing wrong?” she rages, pacing back and forth in the solar. At every step she seeks to destroy something—tip a glass beaker off a table, rip a book page in two. Her fury is insatiable, a devouring maw that sucks everything into itself. “I have tried everything, everything I can think. And still these accursed wretches fail to live, much less to thrive! How much am I expected to bear? What else am I to do?”
When I keep quiet, terrified that she will turn her wrath on me, she wheels around to glare at me, teeth bared. She has grown much thinner in her frenzy, her skin drawn taut over strong bones, and there is something fearfully stark and vulpine about her aspect. Even her teeth seem larger and sharper, though that is just because her lips have lost their plumpness. It is as if the bloodthirsty predator within her is rising to the fore, molding her flesh to match its own dread shape.
“Must you insist on standing there like some bedamned statue?” she spits through her teeth. “Do you truly have nothing to say for yourself, for your part in this abysmal failure? Is herb work not meant to be your province?”
I lick my lips, my heart beating so fiercely it feels mad in my chest, like a trapped hummingbird. “I am sorry to have disappointed you,” I murmur through numb lips, though of course it is a lie—for what I wish for most fervently is to kill her for what she has done, drive a stake through her monstrous heart. I quash the mutinous thought as quickly as I can, terrified that she will somehow read it in my eyes. “I do not know what else to say or do, my lady, save for keep trying.”
“Then try harder,” she roars at me, spittle flying from her lips. With a furious sweep of her arm, the glassware on the table comes crashing to the floor, shattering into a glittering shower of shards.
When there is nothing else left to smash or tear, she yanks at her own hair and shrieks up at the ceiling like a wolf, baying out her rage. It ripples my skin in gooseflesh from toes to temples, until I am so afraid I dare not approach her, fearing that she might slash at me with her nails.
My instinct is right, though it is not me she chooses to rend—at least, not yet, though I have no way of knowing how long her forbearance will last. Once she is through with the potions for good, that will spell my own end.
The next day, she has Janos string up three more maidservants in the courtyard. It is a wonder that any are even left, but we are so secluded up here, in Elizabeth’s aerie, that there is nowhere to run. Under the remorseless single eye of the sun, with the whole keep gathered to watch, she flogs and whips them ruthlessly for a list of invented misdemeanors. Their screams and sobs tear the balmy air, and every time a breeze blows by my nose, smelling incongruously both of blood and summer peaches, it is all I can do not to gag.
By the time she exhausts herself, they have no backs left to speak of. Only I stay to watch until the bitter end. When Janos takes them down to bury them, I must make sure that I am there to bear witness.
It is the very least that I can do for them, now that I have failed them in every other respect.
Chapter Nineteen
The Runes and the Peddler
After that, we have a brief, strange snatch of peace.
I use the time to think myself in circles, plotting how I might flee this place and keep my head. Each avenue leads me to the same dead end. But there must be some path leading out from this thorned thicket of a predicament, I tell myself. Even if I cannot see it yet.
Elizabeth leaves me to my own devices for the first time since I became her chambermaid. For there is a new presence in the keep, a skulking crow of a man whom she has hired as valet—though why she should need him, I have no idea, when Janos would gladly bury the whole world in the orchard if she paid him to do so. This Thorko has a pale, repellent face, gleaming as if coated with a scrim of oil, with fleshy red lips like a woman’s exaggerated pout. She does not tell me who he is, and I am too grateful for my reprieve to ask. I sleep in the solar while she sequesters herself in her chambers with him. Odd, rhythmic chants and shrill cries emanate from behind the closed doors, until I begin to wonder if she has taken him for a lover.
What feels like a very long time ago, it would have pained me beyond anguish to think that she had chosen to share her bed with someone else. Now, heartbroken and devastated as I am, I am merely relieved that I need not pretend that she does not revolt me.
And when I am summoned to attend to her late one night, I find that the truth is so much worse.
“My lady?” I call out, rapping on the heavy, bronze-hinged door. “May I come in?”
“Yes, my dove,” her voice trails out, with a silky note to it that immediately suffuses me with terror. She does not mean that endearment any more than I consider her to be a lady, and I know she uses it now only to toy with me, like a spider playfully dangling a fly over its maw. I have learned that Elizabeth is to be especially feared when she sounds like this. Like some lounging wildcat, her muzzle bloodied with her kill. “Go on, come in.”