By the time I am done, my placid friend is beside himself with wrath. He stumbles to his feet, pacing back and forth in front of the cell.
“That fiend,” he rages, hands balled into fists. “That, that depraved, barbaric ghoul! I will go immediately to the keep and wrest your sister from her hands.”
“Peter, no,” I hiss ardently, scrabbling to edge nearer to the bars though my manacles bite into my skin. “She will not simply give you Klara; she will set her men on you, and I have seen them kill without a second thought at her command. And even if you succeed against all odds, what then? You may save Klara, but I will still go to the rope or stake—and what of all the others who will fall victim to her? We must be careful in this, more clever than she is. We must trap her, just as she trapped me.”
“How?” he questions, his face suffused with fear and uncertainty. “When she is a countess, and we are common? How are we to fight her?”
“Listen to me, Peti,” I instruct, fixing my gaze on his. “Here is what we must do.”
Once he is gone, I settle in for the wait. With an end in sight—or at least, some kind of purpose beyond merely languishing in this squalor—the days seem even more interminable.
But in a fortnight, my plans bear fruit. I have another visitor.
Elizabeth does not come in as quietly as Peter did, but rather streaks in like a feral cat.
“Where is he, you conniving bitch?” she screeches through the bars, lips peeled back from her teeth. Her eyes flare with a firestorm of wrath and terror, and a surprising scrim of tears. My heart swells at the sight of her emotion, expanding with hope. Perhaps I have judged her aright for once; perhaps my desperate, foolhardy scheme actually has some scant chance of success. “What have you done with my son?”
“What have I done?” I lift my eyebrows innocently, cocking my head to the side. “Mistress, I mistake your meaning. As you can see . . .” I sweep my hand to encompass my cell, the rotted straw, slimed stone, and the carcasses of the rats whose necks I snapped for their presumption to gnaw at me. “I have been somewhat indisposed.”
“You know what I mean,” she grinds out, gnashing her teeth together. She looks a fright, her hair tumbling tangled over her shoulders, her corset mislaced and awkwardly bulging under her gown. Her cheeks are streaked with the dried salt of tears, and it pleases me savagely to see that her fabled beauty has deserted her. “I’m well aware it was your lackey who spirited him away, at your urging.”
A trill of misgiving sours my rising triumph. “My lackey?”
“Your Peter,” she snarls, eyes flashing. “Your best friend, so clearly, pathetically enamored of you. He said to tell you that he hopes you will still love him. Though he has somewhat less skin now to call his own.”
“Wh-what?” I fumble, my heart beginning to race. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh, was his capture not part of your stratagem?” She snaps, sucking frantic breaths through her nose, her nostrils flared like a bull’s. “He barged into my keep, the very face of insolence, to announce that he had stolen away my son, stashed him somewhere known only to himself—and you. He demanded that I give him your sister in return. And that I turn myself in and answer for your accused crimes, like some common criminal.” She spits over her shoulder, her jaw grinding. “The bloody cheek of him.”
Why would he have gone to Csejthe Castle, I think desperately, when I urged him not to? The plan had been for him to send a letter to the countess, making those same demands anonymously—enclosed with a lock of her son’s distinctive hair, so she would know beyond a doubt that he was in our keeping. I never meant for him to strut into her stronghold and declare himself her enemy. He may as well have slit his own veins open himself.
I slump against the clammy stone, reeling with despair, castigating myself. I should have known Peter would be unable to restrain himself from charging in for the rescue as soon as he had Gabor hidden. He loves Klara like his own blood, and he does not know Elizabeth, perhaps cannot even fathom the confounding reality of her even after all I told him. He would have believed she might be reasonable when faced with the loss of her son, open to making the exchange.
Even after all I said, he does not know her vicious, shiftless heart as I do. That even her mother-love for her own child is no certain thing.
“Though I will say he has remarkable fortitude,” she remarks, clicking her nails against the bars, her composure slipping back into place at the scent of my burgeoning distress. “Thorko has a way with needles—an affinity, one might say. He applies them to particular places to tease out rather exquisitely agonizing pain. And yet your gray-eyed boy would not let anything slip. Not even when Thorko thrust them under his fingernails.”
I flinch at that, as if I have been needled myself. “He is a good man,” I reply quietly, as though I am not quaking within. “Better than you will ever understand.”
“He is not a man, but a mutton-headed imbecile!” she bursts out, smacking a fist against the bars. “And I swear I will kill him, make him rue the day his parents rutted him into existence, if you do not tell me where to find my son! And don’t forget, I still have your sister, too.” She clasps her hands under her chin, purses her lips, flashing in an instant from rage to snide mockery. “Precious little darling that she is. Every bit as sweet and pliant as you say. I haven’t touched a single hair on her head, you know. Not yet.”
Her face hardens, and she presses her forehead hard against the bars, spearing me with her eyes. “But I will,” she says darkly, low and hoarse. “You know I will. Oh, how I shall hurt her, once I have made her watch me pluck out your boy’s pretty gray eyes.”
“You won’t,” I counter, struggling to contain the manic thumping of my heart. “Because if you do, I will have your son killed.”
This is a tremendous gamble on my part, the biggest of my life. While I doubt that Elizabeth is capable of any sentiment verging on genuine love, I also know she prizes her son for what he represents—the very distillation of the youth and beauty she fears is sieving through her hands. The physical perfection she equates with power and respects above all else.
But how far does this esteem extend? What is she willing to give up for him? I am betting my life, and Klara’s—and now Peter’s as well—that she would yield her own to save her son. It makes me ill to gamble thus, downright sick with fear, when I have no assurance that this is true, and colossal misgivings that it will not be enough.
But it is the only hope we have, the last hand left for me to play.
“I will snuff him out, Elizabeth,” I continue, purposely testing her with the familiar use of her proscribed name. “Your living legacy will die and be forgotten.”
Her eyes narrow, shifting between mine. Assessing my own fortitude. I do not let myself so much as blink. “You would never kill a child,” she finally pronounces. “Not even to save another, nor yourself. That is not your way.”
“Do you really know me so well as that, my lady?” I ask glibly, marshalling every muscle to keep calm. If my coolness deserts me now, all is lost. I must summon every fiber of fortitude still left to me, apply them all at once. “I’m not sure that you do. Perhaps that might be true, were we speaking of some other child, a true innocent. But he is your son, with your foul blood surging through his veins. He is destined to grow into an abomination, and the world will be better for being rid of him. And don’t forget . . .” I lean forward, trap her in my wintry gaze. “I am a quick study, my lady, and I have learned a thing or two from you. And you know I have killed before, when I thought it for the greater good.”