Blood Countess (Lady Slayers #1) - Lana Popovic Page 0,2
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?”