folie à famille — madness shared by a family.
She is born an unfortunate child, in an unfortunate time, in an unfortunate place. When the winter recedes and the slow freeze thaws, it will be too late; she'll be two months old on the very margin of spring, and she'll have outlasted what many children her age never do. Her mother names her Katalin, not because the girl is so very perfect but because the mountains around them are caught suspended in an atmospheric chill, and her skin is white as snow.
In the little house on the white hill, isolated from the arm's reach of the nearby village, her sisters spin thread and her brothers sleep away the cold. Her mother rarely sleeps at all. She’s gripped by a misery that cradles her even as she refuses to rock her own child; it’s possible to be soothed by grief, the woman learns, to hold legions of it within you. It’s possible to be happier being unhappy.
The sorrow never leaves her, and though as she grows Katalin isn’t foolish enough to carry the blame entirely, she also isn’t foolish enough to think herself an innocent. She is a timid, pretty child that grows into a timid, pretty girl, forgettable in every way save for the black hair caught always under a simple unornamented net — the color so dark it seems glossed with ebony lacquer — and her impossible stark-white skin.
The first time Katalin sees Juhasz Mariska in the village, she’s standing curved and rushlike around a fine-featured boy who Katalin can’t identify. They have the same sweet edges to their faces, that blank animal sharpness, clear and illuminated and bright; she grows to think of them as lovers, but later learns they’re twins. Upon closer inspection it becomes more apparent; they look more alike than she’d first observed, and their affection doesn’t surpass a familial warmth. There is another sibling, too, she learns — an elder brother of some twenty-six years, reclusive and proud who rarely leaves the stifled chambers of their castle. The twins, by the time Katalin turns eighteen, are twenty and still unmarried: strange enough. Stranger yet that their elder brother exerts no influence over them, lets them wander the village in their pale dove-gray clothing and touch the dirty hands of curious children.
It’s Mariska they’re most fascinated by, because her twin’s straightforward good looks are startling when replicated in her: the chestnut hair, bright and coppery and fine, the small slender hands always in movement. She’s like no girl (or woman, or man) that Katalin has ever seen, and so she fosters a bizarre curiosity about her — about the three siblings alone on the mountain.
Not everyone shares her keen awareness of them: or if they do, they mask it underneath disgust and fear. The siblings are called both zealots and heathens, saints and sinners, Christians and unbelievers. In truth, no one has a word for what they are, and no one wants to.
But rumors still flicker on some tongues: that they were the ones to poison their mother and father, that they speak to the devils that sleep under their floorboards, that they are gripped in the hold of a loneliness that is impossible to comprehend. But, as Katalin comes to grasp, there is a darker, more elusive truth within these fragments of lies that chills her like the very bone of winter: that they wet their lips on the blood of those willing, and let night destroy the rest.