paramour. All his titles, battlefield conquests, and wealth were proved unequal to the will of a frightened girl. When he had raped her and beaten her, he had her bound and, for a while, cast into a deep pit where she believed that the Archangel Michael, bringer of merciful Death, might find her and bear her away from this perdition unto the gilded clouds of Heaven.
“You have chosen to spurn the Light of my devotion,” István told Eõrsebet Soffia, his dry lips pressed to the hagioscopic squint of her cell door, murmuring through that “leper’s window” rather than allow her to glimpse even the flickering of torchlight. “Therefore, it seems more than just that I should aid thee in seeking out the lightless realms.” István went away, leaving her with no further explanation of intent, but at the dawn of the next day, upon the crowing of the cock, his jailer blinded the girl with an iron poker heated in glowing coals. The wounds were bound with the finest Chinese silk, taken from ravaged Ottoman caravans.
Her screams were nothing new to the rats, or to the mortar, the spiders, or the limestone blocks of the keep, for her Lord knew well the worth of torture, just as he knew the worth of a good warhorse or a Karabelá sabre.
In a greater darkness than she had ever imagined, and in greater pain than she’d had cause even to suppose could exist, Eõrsebet wept and prayed her delirious, fevered prayers to St. Michael. She knelt in filthy straw and dirt and offal, beseeching any angel or saint to intervene on her behalf. But, as before, all her supplications went unanswered.
And when another Transylvanian night had crept across the mountainside, the sun abandoning the steep Bârgu forests to the wolves, István Vadas came to her again. Her father told her, solemnly, that she might serve him still, for what need had he of a bride who could see? “You are not diminished,” he assured her, his voice as smooth as honey and cold as a serpent’s blood. “You may yet attend and obey me in matrimony, and know my mercy. Merely assent, and you will be set free, and never again know pain or the humiliation of imprisonment.”
But, straightaway, she named him a liar, and worse things, too, and made a grand show of having been stung through and through by her words.
“You murdered my mother, your own sister,” Eõrsebet whispered, her voice raw from tears and the wasted prayers. “I shall follow her, rather than submit and willingly permit thy seed to enter me. I shall make for thee a happy corpse, before I call thee husband or bear fresh imps to assume the strangling yoke of thy name.
“Only show me to the well,” she said, “for gladly will I go down into that gullet and be drowned. It would be a kinder fate than what you offer.”
“If this is as my belov’d wishes,” he replied, pretending to crushing disappointment. “If this is her last word on the matter, so be it. I will demonstrate to thee my complete adulation, in due course, and hold you here no more. I will break the shackles and throw open the door to this cell, and none shall risk my judgment by blocking thy retreat from me.”
Even in her agony and bewilderment, Eõrsebet was a girl wise beyond her ten and six years, and she saw through the boyar’s promises. Or, more precisely, she saw how it was that he said one thing and meant quite another, how it could be he would hold true to every syllable of these oaths he’d spoken, and still ensure her doom. It was only sport to him, a grim diversion which he would win even if he lost.
An old lobster once came near to guessing the truth of her, so she devoured him, leaving nothing but an empty shell to settle amongst the sausage weed and sea lettuce.
While Eõrsebet sat in her cell, awaiting whatever form her undoing would assume, the boyar called upon the dark gods to whom he’d always paid tribute. The true deities to which the Sárkány Lovagrend, King Sigismund’s Societas Draconistrarum, had long ago pledged itself, all the while hiding behind a proper papal mask. And by these agencies was the warlord and sorcerer István Vadas granted the power to rain down upon his daughter a terrible curse. He spoke it in her nightmares, as she managed to doze fitfully in that decrepit oubliette.