“You may not understand this,” he hisses, “but what I do, I do for the protection of this court. This safe haven for those who come here to remember who they are.”

“They aren’t remembering who they are!” I shout. “They’re forgetting! Or did you not notice that everyone out there is wearing a mask?”

“They are alive!”

“Yes—walled up alive, just as she was!”

He lets go. I shove myself up. And then his fist lashes out so fast it sends me sprawling.

“You’re just like her,” he spits.

My ears are ringing, two torches blazing on the wall where there had been only one. I lift my hand to my mouth, tasting blood.

“Enough, Nikola. Leave us.”

I sense more than see Nikola hesitate before striding to the door. It falls heavily shut a second later.

I stagger to my feet with a rolling wave of nausea. Try to assess the figure less than eight feet away as she casually withdraws a pistol, clicks off the safety, and sets it on the altar. My eyes drop to the weapon.

“Let’s not be primitive,” she says. “Even if you reached this pistol before me, my successor is already appointed. You would die within seconds, your memory would be harvested, and my guards would no doubt feel compelled to take out half the population here tonight. Nikola, such that he is, would no doubt find a way to survive . . . and where would that leave us?”

“You just let a man hit me and you’re talking about primitive?”

“If you were a man, would it be more acceptable?”

Slowly, she comes into focus. The side of my face is already beginning to swell, and the outside of my eye with it.

“I brought you what you wanted,” I say.

“A chart with a few names? That is what Nikola wanted. I have given him something better in exchange for the honor of meeting you.”

“And what is that?”

“A limited truce.”

“He didn’t bring me here. I did.”

“Yes. You are a woman who brokers her own fate. I’ve heard about such a woman before. You are so like her.”

“Everybody’s heard about my mother.”

“I mean Bathory herself.”

She leans a hip against the altar, gestures in the direction of court. “Every woman out there is her, in some way or another. Some genius. Some beautiful. Some sensual. Some brash. Each of you endowed with one sin for which she was punished, like the shattered shards of a single stone.”

“Her sin was that she wouldn’t be bullied,” I say, working my jaw and thinking I might not vomit after all.

“She was impolitic at the least, a traitor at worst. And she was crushed by the same power with which she abused others. Her sins were plenty. But I haven’t come to debate with you. Several years ago, Nikola recovered some pages of your mother’s.”