Blood Countess (Lady Slayers) Read online

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Popović, Lana, author.

  Title: The blood countess / Lana Popovic.

  Description: New York : Amulet Books, 2020. | Series: Lady slayers | Summary: In 1578 Hungary, sixteen-year-old Anna is elevated from scullery maid to chambermaid by the young and glamorous Countess Elizabeth Báthory, falling completely under the Countess’s spell until Anna realizes that she is not a friend but a prisoner of the increasingly cruel and murderous Elizabeth.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019034842 (print) | LCCN 2019034843 (ebook) | ISBN 9781419738869 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781683356431 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Báthory, Erzsébet, 1560-1614—Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Báthory, Erzsébet, 1560-1614—Fiction. | Countesses—Fiction. | Murder—Fiction. | Household employees—Fiction. | Lesbians—Fiction. | Hungary—History—Turkish occupation, 1526-1699—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.P6444 Bl 2020 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.P6444 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Text copyright © 2020 ABRAMS

  Illustrations copyright © 2020 Jen Wang

  Book design by Hana Anouk Nakamura

  Published in 2020 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS.

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  eISBN 978-1-68335-643-1

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  For Taylor Haggerty, who literally makes dreams—and the best kind of nightmares—come true.

  Prologue

  SARVAR, HUNGARY

  May 8, 1575

  The day our Lord Nadasdy weds the countess, the sky above us is the color of bleached bone.

  They say the sky on a wedding day portends the marriage to come. Even my mother, usually so scathing of superstitions held by lesser minds, believes this to be true. What then, I wonder as I gaze up, does this bode for our lord and his mink-haired new wife? As their grand wedding procession wends its way through our village, the heavens leer down on us, unforgiving and leached of sun. Low on the horizon, where the clotted scrim of clouds breaks open, a mean sliver of crescent moon already perches though it’s barely afternoon. It looks as though some divine hand has scored a sharp fingernail into the flesh of the firmament.

  A bitter sky, I think, near as squalid as the day itself. Even though the year has just rounded into spring, it is unnaturally hot, without a breath of wind to cut the unwashed reek of massed bodies.

  The torpor does little to deter the crowd from making merry, jostling and calling out bawdy well-wishes to the newly wed lord and lady. The heave and swell should unsettle me, but it doesn’t. I may be little—so small that Peter once likened me to the innermost kernel of a nesting doll, the kind Romani peddlers bring from Russia—but my legs are strong and my elbows sharp. I don’t budge even when the countess stands in her open carriage, emblazoned with a dragon crest and drawn by two splendid chestnut geldings, and begins to toss handfuls of glinting filler coins to children in the crowd.

  What must that be like, I wonder with a pang of envy in my hollow belly, to have coffers so full you could dispense with them freely, make them rain down into grasping hands like a shower of minor stars?

  The countess laughs as she metes out this bounty in unbridled peals that easily reach my ears, though I cannot quite make out her features from where I stand. The sound is so inviting and infectious it makes me wish I were close enough to properly see her face.

  The basket tucked into the crook of my arm twitches in my grip. I glance down to see owl-round eyes, a brindled face nosing its way out from beneath the swaddle of cloth. “Shh, sweetling,” I croon down at the kitten, running my thumb down the silken slope of its nose. It meows plaintively up at me, its tiny, needle-fanged maw gaping with each cry. “You’ll be out as soon as we are home.”

  Before the procession began, I’d been foraging for mushrooms in the woods behind our cottage. Instead I’d found the baker’s son, a notorious little ruffian, tormenting a mother cat and her litter nestled inside a former foxhole. He’d caught one of the kittens by its scruff and was holding a flaming stick to its tail, while the harrowed creature twisted helplessly in his grubby grip. I’d cuffed him upside the head and sent him running back to the village, howling at the injustice of being upbraided by a girl.

  The kit’s tail was scorched, raw and seeping. Rather than letting nature tend to it, I tucked it into my basket to take home, where I’d dress the burn with a salve of comfrey and marigold. I could even make a gift of it to Klara, I’d thought, my heart buoyed by the notion. My little sister was a tender touch, easily moved to tears by an animal’s plight. She would love this bedeviled little darling.

  The kitten squirms again, overwhelmed by the rumble of the crowd. My own brothers are likely in the thick of it, stomping on toes and driving scrawny elbows into sides as they scrounge for fallen coins. As I think this, I catch a flash of Miklos’s towheaded curls, my heart stuttering with alarm. He and Balint are the youngest, much too little to be here; Andras is meant to be watching them. If anything should befall them, Papa would fall upon the rest of us like a thunderclap, unstinting in his rage.

  I’m so distracted by the blood-well of my dismay that when the kitten bolts from the basket, I’m too slow to catch it.

  It spills over the basket’s rim like something boneless and oiled. I fall to my knees to snatch it back, but it vanishes in an instant into a spindly forest of shins and ankles. Scrambling back up to my feet, I begin shoving my way gracelessly in pursuit through the milling crowd. It’ll be crushed underfoot if I don’t find it, by a wayward boot snapping its spine or splitting its fragile skull. And after what it’s already suffered in its little life, I find that I can’t stomach the thought of such a brutal end.

  Work-worn faces glower down at me as I push past, spewing a fug of liquored breath and indignant challenges at being jostled. I ignore them all, plowing onward. I’ve nearly reached the crowd’s lip when the kitten lollops out ahead of me—darting directly into the path of the countess’s chestnut geldings, between their falling hooves.

  One of the steeds goes rigid, while the other rears a little, hooves stamping, eyes rolling white with senseless panic. The carriage lurches to a stop, abruptly enough that the countess loses her feet and thuds down to sitting with a startled, undignified yelp.

  A chorus of gasps races through the crowd, followed by a silence so deafening that it somehow makes commonplace sounds—the creak of branches, the phlegmy clearing of throats, snatches of birdsong—unspeakably profane. My heart scrambles up my throat, wedges there like a mouthful gone awry. Though the countess is a new arrival, rumor has preceded her. By all accounts, she is sharp even by blue-blood standards, uncommonly quick to take umbrage to any perceived slight.

  And I have disrupted her wedding day.

  My heart cudgels my ribs as one of Lord Nadasdy’s sold
iers leaps from his saddle, nimble despite the weight of his armor. He dashes out between the geldings, snatching up the kitten with one gauntleted hand. It dangles pitifully from his fisted grip, tiny limbs flailing as he offers it up to the countess, who has alit from the carriage in a dizzying swirl of damask skirts.

  “What would you have me do with the creature, my lady?” he calls out, giving the kitten a careless little shake. A bored, desultory ruthlessness underpins his tone. “Will you suffer it to live?”

  The inside of my mouth prickles with trepidation, as if I’ve been chewing on nettles. Please, I beg silently. Please don’t let her kill it.

  The countess holds her hands out for the kitten, then cradles it to her chest, tipping its tiny face up to hers with a finger under its chin. I can see it go rag-doll limp in her grasp, ears flattening as if it knows its life might well be forfeit. “That depends, I suppose,” she muses as she strokes its head with long, pale fingers, each caress prolonged and deliberate. Finally, her eyes lift to spear mine. “On what its owner has to say.”

  She crooks a slim finger at me, beckoning me closer. I stumble forward on legs like stilts, my knees threatening to give way. My vision shudders in rhythm with every heavy heartbeat. Not even my father’s explosive furies have ever left me this afraid.

  “Now,” she says briskly when I stand before her. “Let us see what we have here.”

  I dip into a clumsy curtsy, fearing for a breathless lurch of a moment that I will overbalance and tip forward. But I right myself at the last moment, licking my lips as I meet her eyes.

  The world beyond us wavers like a heat mirage, until it seems to vanish altogether. Leaving me alone, marooned, pinioned by her gaze.

  Her eyes are captivating, large and lustrous with a distant glimmer, like very deep wells—almost black, even darker than her raven hair. So dark, the pupils barely show beneath the swoop of shadow cast by her lashes. They fix on mine, unabashed in their appraisal, and my insides fist tight with surprise. I know who she is, of course. We commoners know all those who own the lands we occupy only by their leave. Countess Elizabeth Báthory, daughter of a baron, niece of the Polish king. Yet, highborn as she is, her beauty somehow takes me unawares. So formidable and unyielding that it seems to exert its own force. Though she’s only a few years older than my thirteen, she already wields it like a scepter.

  I can see the answering flicker of recognition as she surveys me in kind. Her gaze trails over my eyes, which are cold and clear as a winter sky, then down the pale sluice of my hair, swept over one shoulder and only loosely braided. A boy whose attentions I spurned once told me I looked untouchable, like something carved from ice. Though my blood runs common as the silty mud of the riverbed, I know my face commands much the same response as hers.

  I wait with bated breath to see if it will make her hate me.

  “Anna Darvulia,” she says in that same speculative tone, a faint dimple creasing her smooth cheek as the corner of her carmined mouth turns up. “The midwife’s elder daughter, if I am not mistaken.”

  Shock knells powerfully inside me. I curtsy again, a bobbing twitch of a movement. “You—you know me, my lady?”

  “Of course,” she says, tipping her head to the side. “Several of my new chambermaids speak of you and your mother in the same breath. They say you are both healers. Herb women, the likes of which this village—perhaps even all of Sarvar, and Hungary beyond—has never seen.” Her face warms appreciatively. “Though they failed to mention you were a beauty, too.”

  “I’m not . . .” I fumble, a scalding rush of blood filling my cheeks, uncertain whether it’s seemly to accept such lofty praise. “They are too kind.”

  She rolls her eyes playfully, casting me a conspiratorial look. “I daresay few have had cause to describe Margareta or Judit as ‘too kind,’ baby vipers that they are. Nor does honesty tend to trouble them overmuch. But in your case . . .” She leans forward, takes a long and measured inhale of me. I can smell her, too, the heady spice of some dark, extravagant perfume. “I can smell the truth of it on you.”

  Her eyes sparkle secretively at the last, and a flurry of tingles suffuses my skin. Could she somehow know about the pennyroyal I stirred into the seamstress’s tonic this morning, when she begged me to rid her of the unwanted child waxing in her womb? Her eighth, sired upon her by an uncaring husband, a babe whose birth she is certain she would not survive? I had scrubbed my hands after handling it, but perhaps its reek had somehow lingered in my hair.

  “Do not fret, little sage,” she whispers as the blood plummets from my face. “Your secret is safe with me. For we are both women, are we not? And some things are better kept between us.”

  “Dearest Beth,” Lord Nadasdy drawls lazily from the carriage. Beneath the carelessness of his tone, I can hear something ironclad and uncompromising. “Must you insist on tarrying further? They are expecting us at the keep.”

  “Of course, my husband,” she replies sedately over her shoulder, but I spot the telltale tightening at the corners of her mouth, a bright bloom of fury in the depths of her eyes. The countess does not take well to being enjoined by a man. “Just a moment.”

  She turns back to me, gently pressing the kitten into my waiting hands. I clasp it gratefully to my chest, nearly sagging with relief. The countess wheels back to the carriage as three attendants swarm to help her up. Before she steps up, she flicks me a glance over her shoulder—a warm secret of a wink, likely invisible to everyone save me.

  But I see it. Just as I see Lord Nadasdy’s hand close around her wrist, the skin paling with the force of his grip. I can see how it hurts her, in the way her smile slides off her face.

  For all the gold and silver in her coffers, in some ways the countess is just like me.

  A woman, with a man’s cruel hand around her wrist.

  Chapter One

  The Thorn and the Taint

  Three Years Later

  “Anna. Annacska. Wake up, my sweet.”

  I rise from the murky depths of sleep, my hands lifting of their own accord to guard my face. The voice isn’t my father’s, and the words themselves far too tender to be his. But he’s woken me with a slap so many times that my body responds by rote, rising to protect me before I even come awake.

  My mother gingerly grasps my hands with one of hers, lowering them. “Come,” she says quietly, grazing a knuckle down my cheek. “The countess calls for you.”

  I blink as the dim outlines of the cottage resolve into focus, my mother’s shadowed face hovering above me. My mind turns over sluggishly, mired in confusion. I haven’t seen the countess since the day she returned Zsuzsi the cat into my arms, tossed that glimmer of a wink over her shoulder.

  But even so, I have never forgotten the dark pools of her eyes.

  “The countess?” I say blearily, dragging a hand over my face. “The Lady Báthory needs me? What for? She is not with child, is she?”

  My mother glances over her shoulder to the door, and even by the light of the single candle I see the glint of fear spark up in her eyes. “Her man did not say,” she replies, keeping her voice to a whisper. I can hear my father snoring in their pallet by the hearth in rattling grunts that might have belonged to the wild boars that charge through the woods in rutting season. He’d staggered in long after we’d already had our dinner, so stupefied with rotgut drink he barely reached the bed. Waking him now would be unwise. “But he insists it cannot wait for morning.”

  The urgency seeps into me then, lights my belly like a flagon of spring wine. I rise and dress as quickly and quietly as I can, stepping into my coarse, homespun work dress. My mother drapes her own cape over my shoulders to ward against the nighttime chill as I belt my herb bag around my waist. I pause for a moment, turning back to her. “Why me, Mama?” I ask in a voice just above a whisper. “Why did she not send for you?”

  She adjusts the hood over my head, tucking a wayward lock behind my ear. “My hands are not what they once were, Annacska,” she replie
s, casting the gnarled knots of her knuckles a rueful look. “Surely the lady would have heard as much.”

  A sharp rap at the door jolts us both; the countess’s man is growing restive.

  “Quick,” my mother urges as my father stirs, groaning. “Before we wake him.”

  I press a hasty kiss to her swollen knuckles; even at the barest brush of my lips she sucks in a pained breath. Then I step outside into the bracing night. The countess’s man is no more than a hulking shadow under the cloud-cloaked sky, and when he moves toward me it is somehow sinister, as if a portion of the night has snipped itself loose to assail me. I take a reflexive step back toward the shelter of our eaves, my hands clenching at my sides.

  It is not the dark itself that I fear, but the men who come creeping under its cover. Though I am often just as leery when approached even at high noon. It seems many of them are not safe at any time in our lord’s creation.

  “Took your sweet time, girl,” the man sneers, lifting his head so the dim light from the cottage spills across the overhang of his brow, revealing the crude-cut features that cluster beneath it. “The lady does not take well to being kept waiting. Let’s go.”

  I hear the reassuring nicker of his horse tied to our fence, her musky smell carried on a breeze already sharp with night-blooming plants; I’m much more inclined to trust this mare than her owner, but there is little I can do about sharing her with him. I slip my foot into the stirrup and move to mount her, but the mare is broad-bellied and tall, and I can’t quite sling my leg over. With an irritated grunt, the man clasps me by the waist and heaves me easily up onto the saddle.

  He mounts behind me, my back pressed tight against his front as his arms circle me to grasp the reins. To his credit, there is nothing untoward about his touch. And he’s called me nothing worse than girl, though “trull” and “twit” and “slattern” roll so easily off my own father’s tongue.

  “Hold on,” he orders gruffly into my ear as I wrap my hands around the saddle horn and tighten my thighs. His breath smells faintly of ale, apples, and dried meat. He isn’t drunk, at least. “I won’t be putting you back together should you topple off and break your bones.”