“Forgive me, my lady,” I repeat, trembling so hard I can feel my flesh tugging minutely at my bones. “But it’s as you say.”
She watches me keenly, shaking her head in tiny, almost involuntary movements. “How could I have thought you to be so different than you are?” she wonders in a tone of genuine curiosity. “You know why I require them—and yet you value their paltry, meaningless lives over my needs. How can you say you ever loved me and not make yourself a liar?”
“I did love you, my lady,” I say simply, my voice hoarse with grief. “At first, when I knew no better. But whatever guise you choose to take, you kill for sheer pleasure just as much as any gain beyond it. Because you like it, revel in their pain.”
“And what if I do?” she demands, blazing with fury. “They are mine, to do with as I will. How dare you judge me for it?”
I shake my head, so awash in devastation I can barely stand. “I do not know whether you have always been so—or whether it is this woman’s life that cages your spirit, that has twisted you into a creature so misshapen by choler. But whichever it is, it does not excuse you in my eyes.”
She is across the room like an arrow, my ear ringing from her slap almost before I register that she has moved. The crack of her palm against my face echoes through the room.
With that first blow, the only time she has laid a hand on me in anger, she shatters even the memory of any fondness between us.
“How can you be such an ungrateful bitch, after all the good I’ve done you?” she hisses into my face, spittle flying between us and flecking my cheeks. “Lifted you from that village’s godforsaken muck? Wrested you out from your father’s grip when he would have crushed you to death?”
“But . . .” My lips have gone so numb I can barely feel the words escape through them. “What do you mean? My father died, else I could have never—”
“Oh, don’t be such an imbecile,” she spits, rolling her eyes. “Of course he did not die by accident. What, you think the cosmos revolves around you, caters to your whims such that it would strike him dead the very day you needed him to be so?”
“You killed him.” The truth of it tolls inside me, undeniable as church bells. “To get to me.”
“Not with my own hands, but yes, of course I did. Thorko was in my employ even then—he accompanied Janos to fetch you, should there be any trouble. When that blasted ruffian wouldn’t yield you to me . . .” She shrugs elaborately. “Well. Stirring a horse into pique can be a simple thing, and Thorko is a man of many talents. From what I am told, the world did not much mourn your father’s passing. You certainly did not.”
I glance over at Thorko, where he skulks in the shadows by the hearth. As if feeling my regard, he looks over at me slyly, a glimmer of satisfaction flashing across his face. My father’s murderer—or the hand that slayed him, anyway.
“That may be true,” I say, marveling at the breadth of her depravity. That she would so blithely kill a man just to win possession of a person, as if I were no more than a coveted toy. “But you are worse, far, far worse than he ever was. You did mean for me to kill your husband. And you never truly believed me to be deranged, did you? All of it—just a ploy to hide your intentions, and your own true nature from me.”
“And if that is true, does it really matter?” she murmurs, her dark gaze still locked on mine. She reaches out and draws a strand of my hair through her fingers, twirling it around her knuckle. “You cannot deny that I also treated you like a queen, like my own equal. Festooned you with finery, elevated your mind, tended to you when you ailed. Why can you not simply set aside your useless scruples, let things be as they were?”
“That is impossible, my lady,” I say, shaking my head, though it tightens her grip on my hair, sets my scalp to prickling. “Because we are not equals. Unlike you, I have never killed or maimed for pleasure.”
Her face twists, contorts into that draconic visage that haunts my days and dreams. She whips me tight against her, my back to her front, and I freeze when I feel the icy edge of a blade beneath my chin. “Then perhaps it has come time for you to serve me better, little traitor,” she hisses into my ear, breath rushing through her gritted teeth. I can feel her heart battering against my back, and I don’t dare move a muscle for fear of provoking her. “Silently, for once, with your blood rather than your tiresome mind.”
Thorko materializes beside us as though from the ether, his hand alighting on her shoulder. “Do not forget that we still need her, my lady,” he mutters to her, even as I tremble in her grip. “To work her magic with the herbs. And perhaps beyond that as well . . .”
She holds me tight for an endless, agonizing moment, shuddering with indecision—then releases me abruptly and steps back, twitching her head at her men. As one, they unsheathe their knives and twist the women to face them—plunging the blades into their bellies.
I stifle a gasp as they crumple, falling to their knees before collapsing onto the unforgiving stones.
“It is a terrible death, you know,” she whispers, moving to stand beside me, her lips hovering near my ear. My skin crawls in revulsion, stirring in response to the warm fan of her breath. “To be run through the gut. Hours of agony. And you will sit here and watch it all unfold, and not move so much as a finger to ease their suffering. Or I will have Janos make you wish you were in their place.”
I stand like a stone while she sweeps out of the room, two of the men trailing after her. Janos sprawls his bulk into a chair, blithely unconcerned.
I do not allow myself to weep until I’m sure she cannot hear me—then I sink to the floor myself and dissolve into sobs like I have never known.
It takes the women hours to shuffle off this mortal coil, just as she said. By the time their pitiful moans whittle away to nothing, I have drained myself dry of water, shed all my salt. The sky is fracturing with dawn when I come to my feet, rising reborn and newly forged. No longer caring if she kills me, nor what miserable end I shall come to once she’s finished with her games.
As long as I can somehow take her with me at the end.
Wrestle her, screaming, into the deepest pit of hell.
Chapter Twenty
The School and the Sister
I haunt Csejthe’s corridors, drifting through them like a specter through fog, unable to sit still. Tormented by the relentless torrent of my thoughts. Nobody disturbs my wandering; Elizabeth must be either distracted or still too wroth to summon me for any herb work. And I am content to keep out of her sight for as long as she will allow it.
But I cannot stop thinking of her schemes, her many machinations, wondering how far back they stem, winding into the loam of our shared past like spidery rivers. Did she plan all this, I ask myself, in the held-breath moment when our eyes first met? When she saw me snared like a fish on the hook of her beauty, did a vision rush over her in the space of a breath—all the ways in which a pet witch could be put to use? Did she think even then to seduce me, beguile me into killing her husband for her? Was she already dreaming of the elixirs I might devise and brew?
Though it makes me shudder with mortification and self-loathing, I begin to believe that our lovemaking was always for some other gain. Feigned from the very inception.