7.I

Poor girl doesn't even smile anymore.

The shining joy she greeted me with two years ago is lost to utter exhaustion and wasting.

Her episodes are so intense that it can be days before she recovers enough to do more than suckle broth from sodden squares of cloth.

Little Bathory’s parents are already starting to mourn. I’ve seen the look before, a drawing back from her to try and make the pain more bearable when the morning finally comes that their child no longer wakes.

It is not helping the child in her sickness. Sickly and desperate for comfort she’s left alone with strangers when she most wishes for her parents.

This too I have seen before.

That separation from care and comfort is as much slaying the child as the ailment itself.

In simple peasants, rich merchant and noble I’ve seen it land as a final blow that culls the ill as certainly as a cut throat.

The girl will surely perish and be forgotten soon.

Her parents will undoubtedly try for another and make her just a painful and slowly forgotten memory. Leave her with me to watch another child perish because everyone around her gave up that she could be saved.

She will likely stop trying to eat after that.

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Stop trying to live.

I should declare her doom with calm certainty and save what reputation I can.

I should make some recommendations on how to balance the humors of their next child.

How to assure healthy blood runs true in their next offspring.

But I’m so tired of seeing children die!

The lore suggests there is a treatment that might help with the curse that plagues young bathory. If I suggest this and it does not work I will surely lose my position.

I may even lose my life.

My peers in medicine swear by it though.

That the bone and blood of a newly born infant can save those afflicted as this poor wasting child.

There are plenty of still born that could be procured for such this time of year.

But The treatments may need to be regular.

What will her parents do when conveniently dead infants are not available?

Such a price I cannot say if I could ever condone.

Yet how can I not act? When I close my eyes I still see the last time Bathory’s smile slipped away.

When all that life fled from her face.

And the seizing muscles of her illness took hold and wracked the poor dear in its totality.

No I cannot let another child perish from the callousness of a family unwilling to bear the pain of their passing!

I will bring the option of the treatment to her parents.

If they are going to slay their daughter, I will have them say it plainly instead of simply letting the poor thing slip away from them.

-Excerpt from the Journal of Jaksa Djuro, Physician & Surgeon of the Household Bathory