I half expected Mátyás to laugh, or to meet my poetry with a line of his own. But he met my sidelong look steadily. “You already matter, Anna.” His eyes darkened and my heart skipped. “There’s something I—”
“And you?” I asked, turning the conversation away before Mátyás could say something we would both regret. “What do you fear?”
He was silent so long I did not think he would answer. Then, “Sometimes I’m afraid I will turn into my father, disappointing everyone around me with my life—and with my death. It’s easier when no one has expectations.”
And so he cracks jokes and resists responsibility. I wondered if Mátyás knew just how revealing his words were. I cradled them to me, wishing I could put my arms around Mátyás as I would James, when he was troubled at heart. But now was not the time or place. We’d come in sight of Sárvár.
We rode beneath the castle, which I found, frankly, disappointing. It was not the fairy-tale castle I’d been spinning in my brain, all crumbling walls and turrets, but a rather squat, sensible edifice clearly built for defense. A short tower rose from one corner.
I knew from my reading that the castle had belonged to the Nádasdy family, one of whom had married the infamous Blood Countess, Báthory Erzsébet. Rumor held she bathed in the blood of virgins to preserve her youth and beauty. I did not know if rumor spoke truth, but Papa had confirmed that she used blood magic. I looked at the moonlight-drenched walls of the castle and shivered. What would I find in this woman’s blood-soaked spell?
Mátyás led me unerringly to the remains of an old Roman bath, a small square building with an arched roof, a mile or so beyond the castle, confirming my belief he had been here before. Part of the roof and one side had crumbled away, leaving the bath inside exposed to the elements. A Latin inscription flowed across the keystone over the doorway.
We drew closer, trying to peer into the gloom of the interior. Two men stood near the shadow side of the building, talking softly.
“The Circle guards,” Mátyás said. “I’ll draw them off.”
He darted to one side of the bath, melting into darkness. A crow lifted to the air in his wake, crying wildly. It winged toward the two guards and plummeted down on top of them. They cried out, throwing their hands over their eyes as the bird attacked.
I sent silent thanks after Mátyás and plunged forward into the opening.
The interior of the bath smelled of sulfur and steam. As my eyes adjusted to the new gloom, I found I stood on a tiled ledge running around the four sides of the room. An intricately patterned mosaic covered the bottom of the shallow pool. Outside, the two guards shouted and the crow answered back. I took a half dozen careful steps along the ledge toward the back of the bath, where stars shimmered through the missing roof.
Something brushed against my face, cobweb-light, but when I brought my fingers up to rub it away, nothing was there. Voices echoed in the ruined space, whispers of laughter, the jagged note of a woman crying. Papa had described the spell here as a way station, a bridge between our dimension and that of the Binding. I wondered, a shiver convulsing through me, if the voices I heard belonged to my world—or to the Binding.
As I crept forward, the heat in the room intensified, seeping through the soles of my feet to permeate my entire body. I paused for a moment, my eyes drawn to a dark line across the tiles in front of me. What material could leave such indelible trace? Some kind of dye? Surely blood would have washed away long since.
The air around me was curiously dense, like fog on a winter morning. I had the strangest sense that if I thrust my hands forward, they would plunge through an invisible barrier. I lifted my hands: the radiating heat in my body erupted from my fingers, my eyes, my temples. The sharp smell of winter frost rose around me, and that invisible barrier tore open.
The space bloomed with darkness—and something clawlike closed over my wrist.
The clawed hands pulled me forward, and I stumbled, thrusting my free hand out for balance before I could fall into the pool. I half expected my fingers to snag against the stone wall, but nothing was there. Something brushed past me, bringing with it the scent of brine and smoke, and, so faintly I thought I might be imagining it, roses. My heart hammered. It smelled like the creature from Catherine’s debut.
Around me in the darkness, the voices crescendoed. The echoes of laughter were gone, replaced almost entirely by screaming. There were words too, but in a language I did not recognize. A cold wind caught my hair.
Still, that relentless grip pulled me forward, slipping and sliding across a stone floor. I could see nothing of my captor. The blackness was absolute—not just the absence of light but a presence itself.
The space around me had taken on the echoey quality of a cavern or cathedral. Though I could not see—even the stars had blinked out—I had the impression the space had expanded well beyond the confines of the tumbledown bath.
Countess Báthory’s spell. Somehow, I must have crossed into it.
I tried to look behind me, searching for the seam I’d come through, but blackness closed up my eyes. I took a deep, shuddering breath.
There were other creatures in the darkness with me. I heard faint splashing in water and the wet slap of limbs against the floor. Eyes glimmered briefly before their owners scrabbled away. Some distance from me, lit by a faint glow about his brow, a man with the head and horns of an elk strolled through the shadows. On his arm was a woman, naked except for the spiders skittering across her body, drawing the faintest skeins of silk webbing around her. Both of them wore shackles of silver, hammered to paper thinness. The woman turned a night-dark face to me, a third eye opening like a flower in her forehead.
“You must pay the forfeit,” she said before turning away into the blackness.
Her partner spoke, soundless words that curled in my head, intangible as smoke. You must set us free.
The clawed hand jerked me forward again. In the dim light from the elk creature, I glimpsed an almost-human monster, all long shanks and bones with scabbed skin stretched taut across a misshapen spine. Something crowded past us, a confusion of fur and scales against my palm and fingers. It hissed and I yanked my free hand back to my chest. A wave of cold washed over me, trickling down my spine, spilling down my throat and freezing my lungs.