7.8

As he lay on the set of cushions set aside for him in his wife’s bedroom Paul Nádasdy tried to sleep but his thoughts would not settle. The slow breathing of the yards upon yards of wyrm furled up in most of the rest of the room was deep. He knew Jewel was already slumbering well. As was his ‘daughter’ gem, curled up in her own little nest of cushions.

The closeness his wife insisted on for them had been strange, at times frightening. But as the seasons went he found it welcoming in how different it was from his own childhood. This was no hollow bedroom where he was kept sequestered and alone.

Gem would not have to creep down cold hallways to find the comfort of her mother. Even Smithson, the humorously named ‘nurse knight’ was not very far if he was needed.

On the balance despite how strange his married life was Paul would say he preferred it.

But the closeness of his slumbering dragon of a wife could not sooth him tonight. The news roiled in his head even as he lay there trying to bring sleep like he had learned to as a child. To still himself and bring the next day through slow breathing. But he couldn’t bring dreams, and his brow furrowed with his anger at himself over it.

Why did he care this much?! Why was this keeping him up?!

Paul barely knew his mother and what he did inspired only his ire!

But now she had been slain, murdered in the most terrible of circumstances and greatest of betrayals.

Her own servants took her life while she slept.

The appropriate feeling should have been seeking vengeance, his mother’s guard had broken oaths and betrayed all honor. He should be furious and raging for violence and justice. If she had been a proper mother he should have been mad with grief.

Instead his heart was quiet.

His mood was still.

But sleep did not come. He had expected when this day arrived he would celebrate. In the words of his wife “Bathory was no one’s mother”.

But he was denied that too.

Paul was raised by Gróa his wet nurse and Clarita his governess. He could not recall even seeing his blood mother until after he was seven. The trip to Kaeketeh had been like a ballad to him then. He had imagined that she was somehow going to be even more than his caregivers had been.

After all, if she was his real mother surely that meant that everything they had done for him was somehow a lesser expression of love and caring? That all their warmth was but a pale shadow cast by the sun that was the love of Elizibeth Bathory!

He had expected an embrace somehow warmer than the women he had mistakenly called mother on more than one occasion.

He had expected something like how his elder sisters doted on him when they visited.

Elizibeth Bathory was none of those things.

She smiled in a way he had at first thought meant she cared for him. And she might touch his cheek or even embrace him when asked. She did not however sing to him, or speak to him fondly. At first he thought that she did love him as his mother because she also never scolded him. Always had treats for him, would indulge him with whatever gifts he asked for.

But he realized she didn't care about him at all when he was eight. He had taken a tumble while running through the halls of Kaeketeh in another annual visit. He’d broken his arm falling down the stairs! And she had been right there and looked down on him, her smile just the same as always.

The Wizard Jaksa the Red had shown more concern than his own mother! He’d spoken softly and soothed Paul's pain with a word of sorcery and then set the bone right and knitted it whole.

He’d been screaming in pain on the floor and his own mother had smiled!

That was the moment Paul realized his mother did not love him. She had no spite for him, no ill will. But she also did not care about him at all. Gróa had been furious when she found out. And then she was gone. Paul never saw her or her son again after the night he told her.

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No one would acknowledge she had ever existed.

On his ninth birthday Paul mustered up the courage to face his mother over it. He’d demanded to know what happened to Gróa and Bathory had shrugged and said she did not recall. She had claimed ignorance over the woman that raised him. Paul screamed at her for it and all she’d done was raise a brow and laughed at him.

He’d said things that should have counted as treason then. He’d wished her death. Instead of rebuking him Bathory had a sword commissioned to compliment his warrior spirit.

His blood mother had not shown a single hint of fear or worry over her own child declaring he wished for her death and instead encouraged him to train for it. All with that same smile. But when Paul told her he didn't want to see her on his tenth birthday the Countess Bathory had shrugged and he had never had to visit kaeketeh again until his wedding.

Simple as that, she made the woman that nursed him as a babe vanish like she never was for reasons she could not even be bothered to recall. But stayed clear of him on a single word!

Paul as a boy had wanted his mother dead then more than any other time. He’d never been able to find out what happened to Gróa. No one dared to even hint at it. She was simply gone, not even Clarita would say a word about the woman that she had spent nearly every day of Paul’s life with until then.

After that he could admit he hated his mother and though he had come to realize the impossibility of striking down the countess and the woman who birthed him in the coming years he still wished for her end. He’d imagined doing the deed himself on nights like tonight where he could not find sleep.

And now she actually was dead!

She was gone and despite how awful she was, how terrible a woman, was it not wrong to feel nothing but a strange stillness in her absence? Did she deserve as much dismissal from him as she had given Paul? Discarded by her own flesh and blood?

Did she deserve to have been stabbed, decapitated, quarted and burned to ash like the Weird said she had been?

His mother had never struck him.

She had given him almost everything he asked for, even her absence with not a word of complaint. But she had never reached out to touch him with anything close to the love and care that Gróa had. Bathory had not scolded or praised him for his failures or successes like Clarita did.

But she had done something which his nightmares haunted him with to poor Gróa. He should feel something now that he knew she was gone?

Where was his hate now? All he felt was cold and empty. Shouldn't there be satisfaction?

This is what he had wished for as a child wasn't it?

Paul didn't know, he had learned as he grew of all the terrible things his mother did to other people. More than just Gróa, women and men crumpled and bent at the thought of her wrath. He learned about her ‘larder’ and the women and what they became kept under Kaeketeh. She had never held back from him anything that she did. Not even Gróa, Bathory simply did not recall precisely what had been done with the woman that had suckled her own son.

But she had spared him and his sisters. She gave him a sword when he screamed in her face as a mere boy. But still his sisters were careful when they visited. Especially on the topic of Bathory even though they all lived farther away than Paul. Had husbands to protect them from her smiling wrath in foreign courts within the Realm and without.

Was this from similar indifferences and terrible disregard that their mother had enacted on them and theirs? Had she been crueler to her daughters then her son?

No one would tell Paul when he was a boy or even now as a married man.

The only one in all of Viznove that dared speak out in more than hushed whispers against Bathory was his wife, a tyrant wyrm like the ballads of the great war.

Who spoke to wizards like they were shepherds.

His wife the wyrm, who yet was sleeping there in a room with him more like a grand hall for the dimensions needed to comfortably house her. A space that seemed open and empty when she was not filling it with a mountain of shimmering scales that you could feel the warmth of like a hearth.

He could reach out and brush his fingers against her side and feel the hum of her blood and the rise and fall of her breath even though her face was settled on a pillow clear across the room. She alone had the courage to openly oppose his mother.

All others had been silenced at the terror of her cruel smile.

Well except not anymore, a conspiracy of some sort had been in play to see her murdered in her own bed. Word had not yet reached them other than by the Wizards and their mysterious circles. But he had no doubt of the truth.

Kaeketeh was celebrating. He felt like he should be there with them cheering her end.

Elizabeth Bathory.

His Mother.

Dead at last.

Be Paul Nádasdy felt empty and still. He had thought he hated his mother as much as anyone.

So he was all the more surprised to find the tears running down his cheeks.