The Enchantress of Bucharest

by Alex Oliver

  There was nothing in the garden that ought not to be there. She still took her lantern, tiptoed down to the kitchen and returned to rub garlic and salt around her window. Her parents were asleep - she could hear her father's snoring through the doors - so she crept into their room and did the same for them. Around the door too, when she left, and around her own when she returned to her room.

  She was an educated woman, and she had learned from her friends the witches that at least three quarters of folk magic was nothing more than play acting to overawe the superstitious. But some of it was true. She might simply be seeing things, brought on by guilt and grief and sleeplessness. If so, she would suffer garlicky rooms for the night. But if she had just seen a strigoi, perhaps two of them, outside her house, it was better to be safe than to be proud.

  She could test the matter tomorrow, and she knew just the skeptic to take with her to be sure.

  Chapter Six

  In which Vampire-hunting proves a Contentious Subject

  ∞∞∞

  The business of the banat still reached Radu even in Bucharest, letters arriving with the morning post from those he had left in places of stewardship over the running of his castle, his animals, crops and villagers.

  They dealt with the paperwork in shirt sleeves, Frank summarizing his letters, Radu pacing and dictating, Frank writing. It took half the time it had once taken Radu alone. 'Secretary' had been an inspired lie.

  Business concluded with breakfast, Frank left to visit Bogdan Ilionescu, who had offered to teach him more of what the Bucharest mages had already learned. It left Radu alone, but for a footman in his alcove, doing his best to blend in with the rest of the furniture.

  Radu went out to the balcony and looked over the garden to the small memorial chapel where his parents lay. It had now been a fortnight since he'd seen them, and he was beginning to miss them. They were monstrous and overbearing, and he knew they would kill him gladly once he had given them an heir. Still, he'd rarely passed a night, before without speaking to one or the other, mostly both. He even found himself worrying that something might have happened to them.

  Perhaps the soil in the the little chapel was too consecrated? Perhaps they had met with a priest or a holy man who had put an end to them. Or perhaps Bucharest had its own strigoi, older than they, who had put them down, as his parents did with any new bloodsuckers on their own territory. He should have checked before this. He would check, tonight. Sit by their shallow graves until they returned and make them speak to him.

  Strange how you could think you hated someone, all your life, and then when you were free of them, you could find yourself wanting them back.

  When he returned to his study, he found the housekeeper had brought in a pot of coffee, and the footman had been exchanged for the Roma girl, Mirela. She looked ridiculous, standing to attention in her thick peasant clothes, and waved at him as though she knew it herself.

  He had to laugh at the impudent little gesture, because he found it strangely hopeful that her people had been slaves for centuries and still retained so much self-will, so little subservience. It should have been galling, but he liked it.

  "Since apparently you could choose anything," he asked, "is footman your best option?"

  "It means I get to stand around all day being ornamental, and pocketing tips for opening doors," she grinned. "It's a good job. I'm fine with it if you are."

  He didn't like being coatless in a room with her. She could not stand still in the alcove, but moved in a constant slight undulation, bending her knees, swinging her hips. On others it might have looked like fidgeting, on her it looked as if she was moving to a drum-beat. Vivid and sensual and just a touch mocking. "What tribe are you from?"

  "Badi." She thought for a while and then conceded, "My lord."

  The Badi were entertainers, acrobats, sometimes - like the Lautari - musicians and dancers. He should have guessed.

  "What am I to do with you, Mirela of the Badi?"

  She shrugged one shoulder. "I don't know. Nothing."

  "You followed me all this way and you have no plans at all?"

  Her happy-go-lucky smile twisted into anger. "Your monsters demanded a girl from my village, and they sent me. They've all run away now - afraid of what you might do when you found out you'd been sent a tizganica in disguise. I'd like to go home, but my home isn't there anymore. I want my family, but I don't know where they are. Even if I was to find them, they're so scared of you they'd only hand me back. So what am I supposed to do? You're the lord, I'm the slave. You make the plans. You told me to wait and speak to you, so I'm here speaking to you. Now you tell me what to do next."

  He sat back at his desk, easing his hands out of fists under cover of the table top. She was fierce and frightened enough without knowing how much he wanted to smack her for speaking to him like that. And she was right, of course. His parents' plans for her had not included her surviving his rejection. She was a sacrificial victim who had got up again after the ceremony and said 'well, and what now?'

  He didn't know either, but it was not his place to admit it. His place was to take responsibility, even for... perhaps especially for, his parents' loose ends. "Then you may remain a footman for now, and I will consider to what better use so talented a shapeshifter might be put for later. You will receive a footman's salary. Where have you been sleeping?"

  "In the hayloft of the stables... lord."

  "The housekeeper will assign you a room of your own in the gatehouse." He wrote a terse note to that effect. There would be gossip, of course - it was rank favoritism. But if Mirela continued in the guise of a young man, he could hardly put her among the female servants, and it was out of the question to put her among the men.

  "You will accompany Mr. Carew whenever he attends Miss. Sterescu's salon and improve your knowledge and use of your talent, and you will hold yourself in readiness to use that talent in any way that I command."

  "Yes, lord." This smile had the sharp edges smoothed a little. Her braced shoulders came down and lines of tension he had not realized were there eased around her mouth and brow. He had not truly done anything except confirm the status quo, but it was a relief to have that loose end tidied into a new place. It seemed it was a relief to her too.

  "Go stand outside the door. I can't have you fidgeting in here. It's distracting."

  She grinned at him again, bright and cheerful as though he had actually done something good, before disappearing, and he walked back out onto the balcony to feel the strengthening sun with a feeling of achievement.

  Like most houses in Romania, this had a closed, windowless ground floor of sturdy stone. The balcony stretched all around the second floor, forming a colonnade onto which chairs could be taken in the summer's heat, to sit in a shaded place and catch the moving breeze. Radu looked down onto the river valley, where long reeds and sullen pools were the only evidence of a drying Dambovita. There was a blue haze under the distant trees and the lazy whine of mosquitos.

  He walked meditatively around the house. Turning the corner gave a vista of more park-lands, more sculpted gardens and formal flower beds, and a honey-colored villa in the distance surrounded by beeches.

  Plague. His thoughts returned to it whenever there was nothing to distract them. It was hard to look at such beautiful views - Bucharest rising up against the sky in forested swells interrupted by white churches and red roofs and the heavy fortified walls of monasteries - and imagine death in the streets. He breathed in, trying to loosen the weight that always rested on his lungs. Bucharest had always had plague. Every city in the world had the plague.

  He was jumping to conclusions if he thought this was his fault. It might yet not be. It might prove to be illness, some act of God. Not something he had brought with him in the back of a wagon, hoping against hope that reason and self-restraint would guide them as it had in the mountains.

  It might not be his fault.

  Around another corner and he could see the footbridge that gave
a shortcut across the river to anyone prepared to walk out of town. A woman under a parasol stood at the highest point of its slender arch. The pink silk gleam of the fabric was dimmed under a layer of black gauze, and her dress was like crow wings, even her lace black as ancient dust. As he watched, she resumed walking towards the house. He couldn't see her face beneath the sunshade, but guessed well enough who would be walking towards him under a veil of heavy mourning, alone.

  He ducked back into the house to put on a better coat, found a hat and hurried downstairs to be in the hall when she knocked.

  Radu was not sure what impulse had driven him to rattle down the stairs in time to intercept the housekeeper as she opened the door. When he saw the stiff way she greeted Ecaterina, and with what reluctance she took the lady's card, as if it might be bewitched, he was glad he had. He could substitute welcome for both of them. "Please. Come in. Georgiu will take your parasol."

  Thus instructed, the sour faced woman couldn't do anything else, and he rather enjoyed compounding her defeat with a quick command to bring lunch to the dining room. "I was just about to eat. You will join me?"

  Ecaterina made a striking figure, with the long black veil covering her head and shoulders, proclaiming her grief while hiding her face. At his smile she took the front corners of it and folded it back over the line of combs that held it firmly in place. She looked frankly appalling, with bruises of sleeplessness and lines of anxiety and grief added to her already average complexion. Even her good feature - those large, expressive hazel eyes - were dimmed and bloodshot.

  Offering food had rather exhausted what he knew about human interaction. She was no peasant to be comforted for a family member's death with a gift of coins and a mass paid for at the local church. Leading her to the dining room, he pulled out a seat for her while servants laid another place on the board and poured them both wine. "I take it the wake didn't go too badly? Unless you're here to ask me to answer a challenge on behalf of your father?"

  She sat as though she was containing several very sharp things and the slightest movement would allow them to slit her open and burst out. "Fortunately not."

  And now he had run out of things to say that were not 'tell me all your brother's symptoms,' and 'tell me you cut his head off and stuffed his mouth with garlic when you buried him.'

  Silence. She opened her mouth, closed it again. He sipped his wine, heard the front door open, and then quick footsteps coming towards them. Frank came in, shrugging off his outer coat, with his hat in one hand and a great green tome in the other.

  "Oh, I do apologize! I didn't realize you had company." He put the book on a sideboard, draped the coat over his chair and sat, only then taking a double-take at Ecaterina's wan face. "Miss Sterescu? Is that you?"

  She laughed, a glass sphere of sound filled with hollowness. "It is. I will understand if you'd prefer me to leave."

  "Of course not!" Bless his gentle heart, but Frank sounded appalled by the idea. Still, he had not fawned over her, nor tried to court her, and Radu had warned him to expect it. "My dear, you don't mean people are blaming you, even now?"

  "It's only now that they've found out," she said, and shifted a little to allow the servants to place a light lunch of salads, cheeses, cured meats and breads on the table. "But it’s not something I've ever done deliberately. I can see why it might trouble someone if I had woken one day and decided to fool the world, but it wasn't like that. The glamour developed as I grew; I didn't know I'd done it until everyone started treating me differently. Nor would I have stopped it, if I’d known it would cause such trouble, only with Stefan's death something within me decided it wanted to be ugly, for a while."

  "You are very far from that, I assure you." Frank ducked his head, as if embarrassed by his own chivalry. Radu and Ecaterina smiled at one another, agreeing to be charmed.

  "I don't care, really." Ecaterina pulled a bread roll apart on her plate, but did not eat. "Except insofar as it reflects badly on my father. If anything it may attract more women to our circle. Even the ungifted can help with research and reading, if they're willing. And I... it was amusing to have so many admirers, to always be the first to dance. But I think I'd rather have suitors who were interested rather than simply bewitched. There's always someone who will marry me for my money, after all."

  "So if there is no challenge, and you are not in distress because of your transformation, why did you come?"

  "Not that you're not welcome." Frank gave him a stern look, as if he was being unfeeling, but he couldn't see any other way to come to the point as quickly.

  Ecaterina added mititei to her plate of torn bread pieces and began to cut them up very small, to a scent of pork and anise and paprika. "You are fresh from the country, and however skeptical I hope you will not laugh at me when I mention the strigoi."

  Being prepared didn't seem to make things any better in his case. Indeed perhaps it allowed him to feel the full blow more quickly. It still may not be related, said the lying voice of his cowardice, but he ignored it, in favor of watching Frank's healthy color turn gray.

  Frank set down his knife carefully, pushed his plate away. Radu carried on eating; this was not a problem that could be solved by going hungry.

  "I will not laugh. I had meant to ask if the old, protective customs are kept up in burials in Bucharest, but it seemed tactless, under the circumstances."

  "I wish you had!" She flung herself out of her seat, retreated to the mantelpiece where she was not quite tall enough to see herself in the mirror. "I saw Stefan last night in the garden, in the company of a nobleman I do not know. He seemed... inhuman, a demon in the form of a boy, staring up at my window."

  Frank was looking at him, horrified. Trembling. Radu was happy that the thin blade of guilt was driven out of him almost entirely by anger. Don't look at me like that. You are more to blame than I.

  "I am not a priest," he said carefully. "I am not sure what I can do."

  "You can come with me to his grave. To watch." The black veil flicked like smoke behind her as she turned, fixed him with a glare. "I can't tell you how many envious women and rejected men there are in the court who might have gone to a witch to put the evil eye on me. I might be seeing things because someone is trying to drive me mad. But you see through magic as if it wasn't there. If you see my brother rising from the grave it will be because he is. After that..." she sagged against the wall, slurring with tiredness. "After that I'll know what to do."

  Having finished dinner, they made plans. Frank ordered a large mortar and pestle sent up from the kitchens, and was grinding cloves of garlic and salt in it, made into a paste with fish oil. The stench made Radu's eyes water. "Mirela told me they hunt by smell." Frank said, "so I'd feel better if we put some of this on. If it's plague it won't do any harm, but if it is the strigoi it may persuade them we're not worth snacking on."

  "My own brother would not..." Ecaterina cut herself off. Radu understood the impulse all too well and hoped devoutly that she was right. But he wouldn't have bet his life on it. It was far more likely that if Stefan had been turned then all she was to him now was meat.

  He scooped up two fingers of the stinking paste, holding back his own protest. My parents would not allow a fledgling of theirs to harm me. Did he know that? Best not to test it, perhaps.

  He and Frank had changed into dark clothes, the better not to be spotted by Bucharest's high society while lurking around the graveyard in the dark. And Ecaterina had insisted on going in the dark, rather than risk being spotted walking together at twilight. He supposed she was entitled to be shy of company at the moment, but he disapproved.

  Spreading the paste on face and hands; his nose burned and then went numb. After a little while the mind shut down the smell and it became tolerable, but it was again another good reason to hope they would run into no acquaintances.

  "Are there weapons that will kill them?” Frank asked. “Should I bring a gun?"

  "Decapitation will slow them down," Radu tossed h
im a sword he had brought from the armory. "Do you know how to use it?"

  Frank drew, tested the fit of the handguard, the weight and balance of the curved blade. "Yes, this is fine. Similar to the blades I used for fencing practice. And I have my trick with summoning sunlight. They've run from that in the past."

  Radu buckled on his own sword, considered the possibility of wooden stakes, looking up at the slim, veiled figure of his guest. "Would you feel able to walk away, if someone was driving a lump of wood through your brother's body?"

  He felt Frank look at him, as though he'd said something callous, and huffed in black humor as a reply. This was him being thoughtful.

  Ecaterina stiffened, clasping her hands together tightly in front of her. "I hope so. I am not generally subject to sentiment. I don't know that I'd be able to do it myself, but I think I'd be able to allow you."

  "Very well." The kitchen had also provided a dozen sticks of firewood whittled to sharp points. "The plan is to hide by his grave, strike his head off as soon as he emerges, and use the pause while he's trying to recover from that to stake him. After which, I suggest the body be burned."

  Ecaterina swallowed hard, a little green around the edges, and Frank got that disapproving look again. "Are you sure you want to be there? We know him well enough to recognize him. You don't need to put yourself through this. We can deal with it and then report back to you tomorrow."

  Radu wasn't sure how the glamour could have been an improvement on her naked bravery. She set her stubborn jaw. "He's my brother. I have to be sure."

  "But..." said Frank, and that was going too far. There was sympathy and then there was disrespect.

  “Enough.” Radu handed the stakes and a mallet to Ecaterina to carry - he and Frank would need their hands free - and ushered her out into the dark. “She's right.”

  They walked across the footbridge in silence, passed shuttered shops and quiet houses, the many cheerful colors of their plasterwork muted in the dark. Upper stories leaned close over the rough pavement and dusty dirt of the street, turning paths into tunnels. Strings of drying washing and window boxes of trailing plants hung down in cascades of darkness, the buildings standing too close to one another to see the stars.