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