It feels like much longer, here where natural light does not exist and even torchlight is mean and scarce, but I have been marking my imprisonment by the frequency of the meager meals they give me. The food is putrid, so rank I can barely choke it down, and my ribs stand stark beneath my skin. The water is befouled as well. When I first arrived, I spent several days violently emptying my guts out in the corner, but what I drink tastes somewhat fresher now. The grizzled turnkey who tends to me either took pity on my misery, or grew tired of the constant stench of my pooled vomit.
Given the way he looks at me, with dour suspicion, spitting over his shoulder and crossing himself every time he nears the bars, I suspect it was the latter.
At least it isn’t cold down here, I tell myself. Though perhaps the reek would be less in winter, and my cell not so rife with fleas. I often wake myself from fitful sleep by scratching so hard I draw blood.
If nothing else, my captivity has given me plenty of time to think. At first, I dwelled incessantly on Klara’s fate, sometimes growing so helplessly furious that I would tear my own hair just as Elizabeth once did, wailing and pounding the walls until my knuckles seeped with blood. The reservoir of rage inside me never seemed to empty, nor did my rumination on other possibilities. Other lives my sister and I might have lived. If only I had never found that kitten, nor caught Elizabeth’s eye with my accursed face and healer’s hands. If only I had been unwilling or unable to save her son. If only I had been accosted on my way to her, and now lay rotting in some ditch along the road with buzzards picking at my bones. If only I had not killed Ferenc.
If only, if only, if only. If only I had died before I met that twisted bitch, my sister would be safe.
The turnkey did not approve of my displays. After a particularly impassioned bout of cursing my lot, he conquered his fear of me long enough to venture into my cell and beat me so brutally I feared a splinter of rib might have pierced my lung. I quieted after that, allowed my wrath to fester into a seething rage instead.
When Peter arrives, I have begun thinking of something else.
I can hear him coming long before I see him. The abiding dark has sharpened my ears, and I recognize the steady tone of his voice even before he draws close enough to my cell that I can see his anguished face. At the welcome sight of him, tears surge up in an instant, and I strain against my shackles, scrabbling to come closer to the bars. Beside him, the turnkey casts me a grim look.
“Careful not to touch the witch, nor give her nothing,” he cautions Peter. “Anything you leave with her, she can use to ensorcell you or harm herself. And the magistrate would be wroth were she found hanged before her trial.”
“She’s not a witch!” Peter grinds out. “And she’s hurt, look at her! Have you struck her, you lout? A defenseless girl in your care?”
“Just the once!” he replies, indignant. “She was ranting and raving, calling on demons and the like. Raising an unholy racket. And whether she’s a witch or no isn’t mine to say, but I don’t like the look of her eyes. Like I said—mind that you not touch her.”
“How much time do we have?”
“For what you gave me? Ten minutes.” A crafty look oozes over his pockmarked face. “But could be a quarter of an hour, for another thaler.”
Fuming, Peter rummages in his coin purse and tosses the man another coin. The turnkey snatches it out of the air like a snapping dog. He favors me with another contemptuous glare, then strides back into the dark, leaving us alone.
“Bee,” Peter exhales, surging forward and wrapping his hands around the bars. The sincere concern on his face is almost unfamiliar, after the morass of malevolence, suspicion, and deceit I’ve inhabited for so long. I’ve almost forgotten what it looks like to have someone simply care for me. “What have they done to you?”
“I’m all right,” I reassure him through a hot wash of tears, though the groan that wheezes out of me when I try to scoot closer to the bars proves me a liar. I’m manacled to the wall anyway. Despite the turnkey’s fears, Peter couldn’t touch me if he tried. “They’ve done nothing worse than beat me. Oh, Peter, thank you for coming, it’s so good to see you, I thought I might die in this hell without ever seeing . . .”
I dissolve into tears, and for a moment I simply slump and sob, while Peter watches me helplessly, his own eyes glossed. “How did you know to look for me here?” I manage when I can speak again.
“A fortnight ago we heard news that you had been arrested, accused of witchcraft and the murder of Lord Nadasdy. Your mother came to beg me to watch your brothers while she came to you.” His face warms with tenderness. “As if I would not have gone to you at once myself, as soon as I knew.”
“Mama?” Hope flares painfully inside me, alongside a childish yearning for my mother. “Is she here, too, then?”
He shakes his head, brow furrowed. “I convinced her to let me come alone so she might stay back with your brothers. And I promised to fetch Klara for her, bring her back with me.”
My shoulders hunch at the mention of my sister, my stomach fisting.
“The countess won’t let her go so easily,” I whisper brokenly. “She’s a monster, Peter. A devil, a beast. I barely escaped her myself, and then the damned magistrate wouldn’t even believe me. I don’t think they’ve so much as searched the keep. She’s poisoned the well so thoroughly against me, made me into her scapegoat. Implicated me from the start.”
“So it’s all true?” he asks. His eyes are unreadable in the flickering torchlight, his tone almost wary. “She is truly a murderer and devil worshipper? She has killed and tortured her own servants for leisure? Murdered her husband?”
“Peti . . .” Trepidation closes my throat like a vise. “You—you believe me, don’t you?”
“That you are no witch?” he scoffs. “Of course I believe that, bee. You’ve one of the purest hearts I know.”
I look away from him, my insides clenching. “I’m not sure you’d still think so, if you knew all that I’ve done for her. With her.”
“Bee, look at me.” When I meet his eyes with an effort, I find them wary but receptive. “I already know she has a son—your mother told me that much was surely true, so why would I doubt your word on the rest? But it is said the lord died of poison. And I know you know poisons like any other midwife, just as you know life-giving herbs.”
“That part is complicated,” I admit, heaving a painful sigh that strains my aching lungs. “The countess asked me to kill him, and I . . . I made a terrible mistake. He was a cruel man, given to violence. I thought I was doing good, keeping others safe from him. I didn’t realize that it was always her. That she was the rotted root.”
Peter’s regard shifts between my eyes. He slides down the bars, gingerly sits on the soiled floor with an arm draped over his knee. “I’m not sure I understand. Will you explain?”
I tell him everything, casting back to my first days with the countess and how she tested my commitment, by setting obstacle after obstacle in my path before she even allowed me to become her chambermaid. Though my gorge rises at the retelling of all the torture, especially the poor women who fell to arsenic and the ones skinned and bled dry for Elizabeth’s spells, I spare him no details. It is crucial, more important than anything I have ever done, that I make him not just believe me but understand the full measure of the threat.