the torchlight from the open door flickering over her yellow hair, which was coiled in elaborate braids on either side of a cap sewn with pearls that had come all the way from Paris. “I’m glad we’ve had this little talk, Father. I think we will be useful to one another.” She smiled as sweetly as the Virgin in the chapel window.
“I hate her!” said Erzs’bet when the landgravine, followed by the Inquisitor, had disappeared across the courtyard. “I’ve always hated her. I looked out the window and saw her walking across the courtyard, so I thought she was going into the chapel. And I came down to ask her if I could go back to Hungary. She never liked me anyway, and I thought she would send me home, now that the landgrave is dead. But she wants me to marry that stupid son of hers, that Ludwig.” She hit the chapel wall with her hand and felt a cold pain run through her arm. “M’rta, I haven’t even seen him since I was a child! All I remember is that he used to collect bugs. He once put a caterpillar in my hair.”
“Erzsike!” said M’rta, catching her hand and examining it with care. “Erzsike, you’re speaking too loudly.”
“You know, I bet he’ll be just like Herman. Did you know that Herman used to call me a witch? He said my face was as white as the moon, and people with moon faces should be burned. M’rta, do you think I’m ugly?”
“Erzsike, remember the windows.”
“I don’t care.” Then, looking up at the shuttered windows, darker patches on the dark walls of the castle, Erzs’bet said, “Yes, I do care. M’rta, I’m going to run away, tonight. Don’t tell me not to, because I won’t listen. If I can reach Erfurt, perhaps I can stay at the Abbey and send a letter to the king—” she hesitated, then said, “—I mean, to Papa.” She looked down at the stones of the courtyard. “It’s been so long since he sent me away. Do you think he will recognize me, after all these years?”
M’rta said, “I won’t try to stop you, Erzsike, because I’m going with you. Do you really think you can run away from the strongest castle in Germany by yourself? Now go to your room and fetch your cloak and your bottle of ointment.”
“My ointment? Funny M’rta, to care about my complexion at a time like this!” Erzs’bet almost laughed, but she remembered the windows.
“I’ll pack some food. Meet me in the scullery.” M’rta sighed. “Oh, that I should see this time come again!” Then, more briskly and in her ordinary voice, she said, “Tell me, child, do you have any money?”
“I know this story,” said Csilla. “My grandmother told it to me. King Andr’s sent Princess Erzs’bet to Thuringia. She was supposed to marry the landgrave’s oldest son, Herman.” She remembered listening, in the kitchen of their apartment in Budapest, while her grandmother rolled the gingerbread dough.
“Remember this story, Csillike,” her grandmother had said. “It’s one of the most important stories to remember, almost as important as the Daughters of the Moon. That’s why I tell it to you again and again, so you will remember it when you need it most.”
When the gingerbread was in the oven, her grandmother had said, “Now you tell it back to me.” Csilla had repeated it, again and again. She had named one of the gingerbread men Herman, and while her grandmother had sat by the stove, listening and correcting her if she made any mistakes, she had slowly eaten Herman, starting with the feet.
“The king thought she would be safer there, especially after what had happened to the queen. But Herman died, so she couldn’t marry him any more. And then …”
“Yes?” said Mrs. Mad’r. “What happened to Princess Erzs’bet?”
Moonlight glimmered through the branches. Erzs’bet tried to avoid tripping over shadows on the path: rocks, or perhaps roots. In summer, the landgravine would go with her ladies to the forest. They would sit by a stream, gossiping and listening to one of the traveling minstrels that came to the Wartburg during the summer months, strumming his lute and singing about the landgravine’s hair. The landgravine, dressed rather implausibly as Flora, would lean back against her cushions with the satisfied smile that Erzs’bet always found so unsettling. She remembered the forest as a series of sunlit glades. This was not the same forest. There was a constant rustling and scurrying in the bushes around her. She smelled fallen leaves, and mushrooms and the cold smell that meant winter was coming.
She clutched M’rta’s cloak. “Are you sure this is the right way to Erfurt?”
The rustling and scurrying stopped, and the forest waited, unaccustomed to this new sound.
“We can ask the travelers ahead. I see a fire through the trees. Come on, Erszike.”
“I thought we were trying to avoid other travelers …” But M’rta was already ahead of her, walking toward the fire.
Hurrying to catch up, Erzs’bet stumbled over a shadow that turned out to be a rock. When she found her footing again and looked around her, she was standing in a clearing. The travelers were sitting around a fire at its center.
Once, Erzs’bet had gone to Erfurt with the landgravine, to a fair celebrating the new windows of the Abbey, which showed the Virgin and Saint Anne. On the road through the forest she had seen merchants, their wagons filled with glass vessels from Venice, brocades and damasks from the weavers of Flanders, holy relics from Rome. As the landgravine’s procession had drawn closer to the town, it had passed farmers carrying dried meat and heads of cabbage in nets. She had seen their wives and daughters walking beside them, their baskets filled with goose eggs, honeycombs dripping with brown honey, walnuts. Often the road ahead of the procession was blocked by travelers and sheep, who must be moved aside to let the landgravine pass.
These travelers were not like those she had seen going to the fair. On one side of the fire crouched a woman with white hair like a bird’s nest, whose legs were so twisted that she could scarcely have walked along the forest road. Yet surely Erzs’bet had seen her begging in front of the Abbey. And wasn’t that the scullery girl from the castle, still in her apron? Beside the scullery girl sat a man surrounded by children, from a baby to a girl almost as old as Erzs’bet who was holding the baby in her arms. They were dressed in rags, and the baby’s mouth was surrounded by sores. She had seen the man before as well; he had been the Devil in the play at the fair. She had seen him afterward juggling colored balls, while the boy who sat beside him, with the dirty cap on his head, had walked on his hands. The landgravine had forbidden her to watch such a vulgar spectacle.
“Hello, sister,” said M’rta.
“Hello yourself,” said a woman who was standing in the shadows beyond the firelight. “I see you’ve brought the girl.”
Beside the children sat a peddler, who grinned at her without teeth. Out of his sack spilled bottles of ointment and what looked like a mandrake root. And then she noticed that the baby’s curls, which at first had seemed yellow, were the color of spring leaves.
“Is that the way to talk to a princess? Where are your manners?” M’rta turned to Erzs’bet. “You’ll have to forgive her, Erszike. My sister is a queen in her own right, although her nation does not belong to the Holy Roman Empire.”
M’rta had a sister? A sister dressed in gray, like the habit of a nun. A sister whose hair cascaded over her shoulders like ivy.
“Where have you brought me?” She was surprised to hear her voice, so frightened. Her eyes stung from looking around the fire. She rubbed them. The woman’s hair was still green. “Is this a meeting of witches?”
“The Inquisitor would tell you so,” said the woman in gray. Surely Erzs’bet had seen her before. She remembered the mouth, with lines of laughter around it, and the nose, as thin and sharp as a knife. But where?
She felt M’rta’s arms around her, as comforting as when she was a child. “Erszike, these are the T?nd’r, and my sister Cec’lia is their queen.”
Later she remembered music, although she was not sure when it had started: the music of a pipe and drum. She remembered a dance, but it was not like any dance she had learned at court—a wild dance in which she bent and turned and spun as though before a great wind. Later there was bread with raisins and walnuts baked in it and a honey wine that warmed her to her toes. All these she remembered, sleepily, when the dancing had stopped and she sat among the roots of an ancient oak, with her head on M’rta’s shoulder, listening to the queen of the T?nd’r.
“Let us examine the facts,” said Cec’lia. Erzs’bet touched a strand of her hair, which was curling over a root. It was as green as the moss on the root, and as soft as—well, ordinary hair. “Item primum: that your mother was murdered by Hungarian counts while your father was visiting the emperor’s court. Afterward, they were absolved by the church, since the wound was so slight that it should not have killed an ordinary woman. Item secundum: that your father sent you to Thuringia, whose landgrave considered himself a man of science and forbade the burning of
