The Enchantress of Bucharest

by Alex Oliver

  She yawned again, and yes, it was close and warm inside the room, and the heavy air smelled of old books and hot bodies wearing too much perfume, but still it made the regulars rustle, distressed.

  "Do you have such a spell?" Radu pressed, and she raised dulled eyes to his as though he was cruel to insist.

  "No."

  May the devil eat you, he thought uncharitably, but she was launched on another explanation, every bit the host and expert at this gathering, as he doubted any of them would have allowed, had she not been so literally enchanting.

  "We are working to collect such spell-books as are in existence, but it's a hard job getting hold of them. They’re so valuable now, even though most of them aren't accurate. Each spell recovered needs to be tested to see if it works, and then refined to work better. It is the work of lifetimes, and I... I really think we should start with better things than demons."

  At 'demons' her voice rose and cracked. Stiffly, she threw herself to her feet, pressing a handkerchief to her nose. Turning away from the concerned gazes she ran to the closest window, hid her face against the panes.

  One of the Roma women rose as if to go comfort her, then remembered her place and sat down again. It was Bogdan who went to her shoulder, leaned in, a good combination of bold and concerned, as though he had every right to ask. "Your ladyship? What is it? Are you ill?"

  She sobbed and spread the handkerchief over her face to conceal it, bowing her head into her hands. A headshake while she struggled with tears, and then a small, constrained voice. "No. But Stefan is. My brother. He lies at the point of death and no one... no one knows."

  Bogdan steered her to a seat, and Frank poured tea and folded her shaking hands around it. "Why is there..." she looked up, not focusing on any of them, her eyes awash with tears. "Why is there so little healing magic? I have a spell for closing wounds, but nothing against illness. Why is it all curses and demons when there is plague in our city's streets and there's nothing we can do?"

  "Plague," Radu repeated, his own breath punched out of him. He remembered his words to the Voivode only a week ago, and fought the temptation to close his eyes as the thin, fragile surface on which he'd been mincing this past month broke beneath him and revealed the pit.

  "So the doctor says. Stefan is not the only one to share the symptoms - a sudden collapse, like a heart attack, a struggle to breathe, and a coldness. Then... They are calling it 'the White Death.' Quicker, and at least more painless than the black. But he is so young. He was so well only yesterday. I can't... I'm sorry."

  She put the teacup down with a clatter, fled the room, and Radu felt the witches' eyes on the back of his neck as, with a chink of the coins around their necks and a clatter of bangles, they made the sign to ward off evil.

  Despair and shame tasted coppery as swallowed blood in the back of his mouth.

  Chapter Five

  In which Stefan is unwelcome at his own Wake

  ∞∞∞

  "We were going to send for you," Ecaterina's father met her at the door of Stefan's room, his generous frame looking soft and helpless, his face sallow. He ushered her inside with a hand in the small of her back, and she didn't know if the feel of it was comforting or fretful. Her own body felt strange to her, and the glamour held on top of it weighed her down like a coat of beaten gold. "But did it help - a few hours away? Do you feel a little stronger?"

  She felt sore, as though having exposed her grief to strangers they had driven its sharp edges further in. But Father looked so much in need of something soothing that she could not say so. "It was good to meet three new talents. One who may be something remarkable in time."

  Sinking to the side of the bed opposite her mother, she took Stefan's other hand. The thing in the bed didn't really look like him - it was shriveled, chill and sallow. A part of her wanted to run from it, even hit it, because she could still recognize his features in it, and it was wrong, wrong, impossible, for this silent thing to be her vibrant brother. It made everything else feel worthless, made her look back on an afternoon talking with fatuous people about unimportant petty little mysteries with utter self-contempt. How could she still be wasting her time with anything that wasn't Stefan?

  Mother turned a terrible, gentle smile on her. "The priest came. While you were out. He is... innocent, absolved. Ready to leave."

  Thence came the smell of attar of roses, she thought, tightening her grip on a hand that was curling itself up into a claw. Stefan showed no sign he was aware of her touch, his eyes half closed, only the eyeball showing beneath the slit, the breath rasping, slow and labored from his fallen mouth.

  Sunshine through the windows, and sounds of crows fighting on the lawn outside. They had been told to keep him warm, so a fire crackled in the grate and the whole room was golden-orange from the mingled lights. Eiderdowns of tawny velvet and coverlets of fur were heaped on top of him - every richness, every mark of royalty. And it didn't count, any of it. They were as weak before Death as any peasants.

  Father knelt by her side, and as she had claimed Stefan's hand, he grasped the boy's arm, too hard to be anything but painful. Stefan didn't seem to notice, though his breaths came slower, shallower.

  "Don't!" Mother had noticed it too, leaned forward urgently. "Don't go! You're too young. You've too much still to see and do. Stay with us, darling. Please!"

  It seemed unfair to have guilt be the last thing his family gave him. "Ssh," Ecaterina whispered, fiercely. "It's all right. If you have to, you have to. We'll be alright, don't worry about us. We love you. Go if you must."

  He didn't seem to be listening - didn't seem to be conscious at all - but she thought perhaps he'd heard. His breathing roughened. His brows twisted and his body jerked as if he was trying to sit up. A rattle in his throat. They eased him back down again and no more breath came.

  Silence, all three of them waiting for something. Waiting to know what to do. Ecaterina wasn't ready to cry yet, but she found she had lost all tolerance for lying. She only wanted real things here in this terrible place. What was the point of beauty, after all? She dropped the glamour, the command to 'love me, I'm perfect.' Saw her father, dry eyed, looking at her with shock, her mother across the tableau of corpse, give a little understanding laugh.

  "Magic lessons and unearthly beauty? I should have put the two together a long time ago." She rose, composed and in control, except for the numbness around the edges of her smile. "I am glad to see your true face again, darling. We shouldn't keep secrets from each other."

  Ecaterina hadn't been thinking clearly enough to fear her parents' rejection. It had seemed obvious to her that they of all people would know she was the same person she always had been. She was justified in that, because there was barely time to feel the startled jab of fear before her father's hand was once more gentle on her back, absolving her of the deceit before she'd even had time to feel it.

  Mother opened the door and in a firm, calm voice summoned in the priest to keep guard over Stefan's soul while it remained unanchored here on earth, devoid of a shell to house it.

  Ecaterina did not wonder at her mother's lack of grief. She was a boyaryshyna, as Ecaterina was herself - dignified, strong and fearless. She would not weep until she was alone. Ecaterina bit her lip to make sure she did the same, but allowed herself to lean into her father's bulk and slip her arms around his waist and hug. His presence at least was not hollow as the rest of the world had become. He even smiled at it. But when the safety, the sense of being a child again, betrayed her into hitching breaths, the beginning of tears, he took her by the arms and set her upright on her feet away from him.

  "Don't distress Stefan now. You know he still sees you. Save the weeping for the funeral, when we send him to his new home." He brushed two fingers reverently over the birthmark on her face. "I missed this. I know that a woman will always be as beautiful as she can manage, but I'm glad you chose to share this with us again. You are right to trust us." Sighing, he pulled his over-robe forward on his sho
ulders, looked down on his son's face, his expression weary beyond enduring. "But wear the glamour for our guests, when they call to say goodbye to Stefan. They have loved the illusion. They may not take well to losing that too."

  She did try. Truly, she tried until a vein burst in her nose and the headache forced her to lie down in the marble entry hall with her forehead pressed to cold stone. Easy as it had been to remove, she just could not put it back. Her soul seemed to revolt from it - from being admired and courted and flattered by men who should be paying attention to Stefan. If she could have done, she would have become invisible instead. Incorporeal, indeed – she would have flitted through the corridors of the house and kept Stefan's exiled soul company while he said goodbye to all he had known.

  Her father, as always, proved wise. After the Postelnic - the chief minister of the prince's court - reacted to her changed face with incredulity and barely veiled insult, she had tried to stay away from their guests altogether. But that too caused offense. Aware that she was failing her parents in their time of need, she tried harder to reapply the spell, but it carried on slipping through her fingers; a sly, happy little fish in a golden pond of feelings that she could not yet reach, numb as she was.

  By the time of the funeral, a week later, even those who hadn't seen had heard. Though her father was too important to shun, those who came to the service were cold and stiff with him, and having stared at her true face as though they had never seen anything so ugly, they would not even speak to her.

  They filed past at the graveside. Curt courtesies, hurried and cut short. She clung on to her father's arm and tried to say 'I'm sorry,' with every fingertip bruise.

  The earth was being smoothed and covered in flowers when her mother's control finally broke. She hurled herself onto the grave, sobbing in great breaths that seemed to scour her throat and break her ribs. "My son! My son! Now you have left us and all our light has gone out. What are we going to do without you? What can I do?"

  Father threw himself down beside her and for a moment Ecaterina felt unmade by panic, left all alone on the wooded slope of an empty hill, the only two people left who loved her preoccupied by the dead.

  "I am sorry. Truly sorry for your loss." She jumped, startled. It was the first voice to have addressed her in a week, and she hadn't known until then how very much she did not want to be invisible after all. Blinking tears from her eyes, she found the new man, Vacarescu, her father's latest project, looking at her with such horrified sympathy it almost looked as if he was afraid. It was not a look that sat well in his polished steel eyes. He didn't have the face for self-doubt, or even pity.

  "You didn't have the chance to get to know him," she said, her voice creaking with disuse and restrained sobs.

  "No. I would have liked to see this horse of his, go riding together. There are very few people in this place not playing their own games, but I don't think he was one."

  "Is that aimed at me?" She wasn't angry with him - shouldn't be angry with him. He was, after all, the only one who was talking to her. But that meant he was the only one making himself available to be angry with. His fault then that he was standing in for all the rest.

  He breathed a little humorless laugh through his nose. "I've never seen you in any other way than I see you now. But I hope that, even if I had been dazzled by whatever it was you did, I would not have been so ungenerous to shun you on the day of your own brother's burial."

  She should not blame her gift for being slippery and ungovernable - all her emotions were the same at the moment, her anger turning back against herself. "I fooled them into thinking me beautiful. They shamed themselves in pursuing me."

  This time the laugh was more definite. Cynicism suited him better than sympathy. "They were only telling me recently how beautiful Mademoiselle Giroux was, in her horsehair wig and her whalebone skirts and a face so thick painted with lead white she might have been wearing a mask. Why resent a little glamour on top?"

  "You say that because it didn't affect you. You can afford to be dismissive."

  "I can." He looked pleased with himself, and that was even more his style. Smug. She didn't think she should like him for it. "Because I am not a pompous, self-absorbed, weak-willed fool, like some I could name."

  It startled her into laughter too, and the fact that she could still laugh surprised her. "That is unfair," she said, smiling, "But welcome. Thank you."

  "You will tell me if there's anything I can do?"

  There was a feast to return to. All that anger and grief and alcohol in the same place. But she wouldn't have to be present for all of it, and hopefully respect for the dead would prevent too much unpleasantness. Father had already been at work, spreading soothing platitudes to those who would listen, getting the servants to talk to his neighbors servants, fighting insult with pity. "If you were a young girl and you looked like that, wouldn't you want to cover it up too?"

  She supposed that since she had earned contempt, she could bear it. "If you would tell those who complain of me that I fooled my parents too - that my father was not complicit in the deception? I never imagined that he could be harmed by this, that anyone could."

  "Of course," Vacarescu bowed over her hand as though nothing at all had changed. She supposed, for him, it hadn't. But then he hesitated again, and a hint of the emotion she had seen at first, the thing that looked almost like shame, surfaced in his reassurance. "And if there is anything else, call on me."

  She thought of the offer again later that night, so much later that the eastern sky was beginning to turn from charcoal to pewter. The wake had gone very much as she feared, as the drinking worsened and the ladies found excuses to leave. She had retired to her room early, but the noise of bellowing, and later the crashing and thudding of furniture kept her awake.

  Early on, her mother had sat with her, saying very little, but combing her hair and plaiting it for sleep as she had sometimes done when Ecaterina was a child and upset with her nurses. Later, as the last of the carriages rolled away, her father had come with reassurance that he was still alive, having avoided a dozen challenges to duels and negotiated a number of new truces. "The worst is passed," he'd said, and taken Sanda away to sleep.

  So Ecaterina was sitting by her window and gazing out at a garden where only last week goddesses had walked among the shrubbery and pegasii flown over the trees. There were still paper butterflies caught on some of the rose thorns, and mirror shards, reflecting the bright moon. A strange landscape in the dark, the statues gained an air of potential life, the shadows under the pergolas seemed just waiting for her to turn away - then they would slide out, and move, and colonize the bright places.

  She was just convincing herself her garden was full of inchoate horrors when one of the bright patches did move. Afar off, towards the road, something pale was walking. She strained to see and yes, it was an old man in old fashioned clothes of white silk, with a long silver beard and silver glittering around the crown of his tall hat. He might have been one of the mourners, he was well dressed enough for nobility, but she couldn't place him, and surely at this hour a mourner would be walking away, not towards the house.

  There was something uncanny about the way he moved, she thought. A fluidity as if his bones were not entirely solid—graceful, but not quite human. He had a shadow that did not move in tandem with him and was darker than a moon shadow had any right to be.

  Hackles she didn't know she possessed stirred along her spine at the sight of him, her magic recognizing something wrong. He stepped onto one of the paths lined with white gravel, and the moon shone doubled in the fountain behind him. The silver man almost disappeared against that backdrop, but his shadow was revealed. And it was not a shadow at all, but a boy, tall but gangling, his auburn hair the color of dried blood in the darkness, his rich purple robes black.

  She didn't need more light to know they were brocaded with a background of golden roses - she had smoothed them down only that morning, when his body lay gently decaying in the
heat of the church, the coffin open for his friends to say goodbye.

  There was a long, blessed period of disbelief before she found herself on her feet, hand pressed to the window, lips numb, face tight and her heart shaking her body like an earthquake. Pain in her chest was nothing at all compared with the titanic flood of denial and fury and disbelief that tried to burst her soul.

  Stefan had come to his own wake.

  He had been dead. She knew this. His eyes had sunk, the tips of his fingers had turned dark, he had smelled sweet and offensive as his cheeks began to puff up, and she'd had to wave the flies off. He had been dead for days before going into the earth. No doubt about that. No tragic possibility of being buried alive such as she had read of happening in other countries, who disposed of their corpses indecently fast.

  He was dead. And he was looking up at her window with puzzled eyes. She caught his gaze and ice lanced through her, made her throw herself to her feet, slam the shutters, back away and stand planted against the further wall, breathing like a bellows. That was not her brother!

  She should feel outraged, violated, on Stefan's behalf. She didn't. She was altogether subsumed in something more primal, the freeze and then the kick to act of a man confronting a wolf. There was nothing of Stefan in the thing. Something cold was wearing him. So cold it made Vacarescu's chilly smile seem like a hearth fire. And was it not odd that it reminded her of him? Why should it do so when he was so clearly just a man?

  Gathering herself, she picked up the icon of Saint Mihail which stood in the corner of her room, clutched it to her like a breastplate, and forced herself back to the window. Fingers tight around the shutters, wound up to throw them closed again, thrust the holy thing into any unwelcome face, she edged the right hand one slightly open. Peered.