The Countess dropped her gaze and looked at her white hands cuffed in lace, her delicate fingers clasped in her lap. Then she turned her hands palms down and studied the blue veins of age that drew their tributaries across her skin.
She remembered another skilled rider, long since dead. A shiver coursed through her body. He was a stable boy and she was already betrothed to Ferenc Nadasdy. She—the daughter of both the Ecsed and Somlyo Bathorys, an incestuous inbreeding—was a valuable pawn in the union of the most powerful and the most wealthy families of Eastern Europe. Her cousin ruled Transylvania, her uncle was the king of Poland.
A marriage to the Nadasdy clan—not the highest nobility but immensely wealthy—was a propitious alliance. The Countess was betrothed at the age of nine and sent to her future mother-in-law’s castle in the southernmost reaches of Hungary.
So far from home, in the castle of her future in-laws, she had sought comfort with a peasant boy, a stable hand by the name of Ladislav Bende from the village of Sarvar.
Promiscuous and willful, she was also a victim of the falling disease. Her future mother-in-law complained that the Ecsed Bathorys of Transylvania had not warned the Nadasdy family of the brain fevers that seized the young Countess, causing the girl’s eyes to roll back in her head and making her soil herself. The fits were preceded by rage—rage that neither the Bathorys nor the Nadasdy family could control. She slapped and scratched her servants, screamed obscenities, and tore at her clothes, leaving them in shreds.
Then came the pregnancy. But the mistress of Nadasdy would not let her potential daughter-in-law’s defects spoil the union , and neither would her Bathory mother. The alliance was too valuable to the two families.
She was sequestered in a remote Bathory castle to wait out her shame. The squalling newborn that issued from the Countess’s fourteen-year-old body was banished forever.
The baby was taken away immediately. Her mother, Anna, could not allow a Bathory’s noble blood to be spilled—even a bastard Bathory. So she gave the red-faced infant girl, wrapped in a woolen shawl, to a peasant woman.
“Never let us hear of this child again,” she said. “Take her far away and raise her as your own. We will provide money to raise her in comfort, for she is of Bathory blood.”
The young Countess heard of her lover’s death a month later. Her father had traveled to Sarvar to kill him, but the plague had already carried the young man away.
The following year she married Ferenc Nadasdy as planned.
The Countess looked from the young rider to her hands. She reached for her silver mirror and studied her face, the flesh of her eyelids drooping despite Zuzana’s tending.
Her mind drifted to the night games, and the girls’ young, flushed skin.
Chapter 34
THE MEADOWLANDS BELOW
ČACHTICE CASTLE
DECEMBER 21, 1610
It was weeks after arriving at the castle that Janos first caught a glimpse of Zuzana. He rode the white stallion through the meadows below the castle and on beyond Čachtice Village to the edge of the dark forest.
Zuzana was digging in the banks of the stream, looking for the special gray clay she used in one of her potions for the Countess’s skin. Her straw-colored hair was covered by a kerchief, but as soon as he saw the pocked skin, he knew who she was.
“Zuzana,” he called, a smile spreading across his face. “Is that you?”
Startled, she screamed, her hand flying to her mouth. The stallion shied, taking a series of jumps sideways. Janos was a superb rider, but the horse was too quick for him and he tumbled to the ground, still holding a rein.
“You devil!” he cursed the horse, groaning as he scrambled to his feet.
“Are you all right?” said Zuzana. “I am sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten your horse.”
The horse, sensing his advantage, reared and pulled at the rein in Janos’s hand.
“Quiet, now!” urged Janos, grabbing the other reins. “Quiet.”
The stallion snorted at the girl with muddy hands, eyeing her warily. Instead of retreating in fear, she turned her palm up to his muzzle.
“Easy now, boy. Easy.”
She stood her ground, speaking to the horse in a singsong voice. Janos rubbed his sore ribs.
“It’s not your fault. He is not accustomed to unfamiliar sights and sounds. I am trying to train him, but it’s not an easy task.”
“The Countess thinks it a miracle you can ride him.”
Janos’s face tightened. “She does, does she?”
Zuzana flushed. The mention of the Countess had poisoned the moment.
“Your father told me you were her handmaiden. I was to look for you to give you your family’s love.”