“Beg.”
Vasilissa’s tiny frame trembled. Then she dropped to her knees, lowered her head, and took Vlad’s hand in her own. “Please. Please, I beg of you. Let me go home.”
Vlad put out his other hand and stroked Vasilissa’s lank, greasy hair. Then he grabbed it, wrenching her head to the side. She cried out, but he pulled tighter, forcing her to stand. He placed his lips against her ear. “You are the weakest creature I have ever known. Crawl back to your hole and hide there. Crawl!” He threw her down, and, sobbing, she crawled from the room.
The nurse looked steadily at the finely woven rug that covered the stone floor. She said nothing. She did nothing. She prayed that Radu would remain silent.
“You.” Vlad pointed at Lada. “Come out. Now.”
She did, still watching the door Vasilissa had disappeared through.
“I am your father. But that woman is not your mother. Your mother is Wallachia. Your mother is the very earth we go to now, the land I am prince of. Do you understand?”
Lada looked up into her father’s eyes, deep-set and etched with years of cunning and cruelty. She nodded, then held out her hand. “The daughter of Wallachia wants her knife back.”
Vlad smiled and gave it to her.
1446: Tirgoviste, Wallachia
RADU TASTED BLOOD IN his mouth. It mixed with the salt from the tears streaming down his face.
Andrei and Aron Danesti kicked him again, their boots sharp against his stomach. Radu rolled onto his side, curling in on himself, trying to become as small as possible. The dried leaves and rocks littering the forest floor scraped his cheeks. No one could hear him out here.
He was used to being unheard. No one heard him in the castle, which, after six years, still felt like a home only when he was in his room with his nurse. His tutors were engaged in a constant power struggle with Lada, and Radu’s exemplary work often went unnoticed. Lada was always either studying or off with Bogdan, and she never had time for him. Their older half brother, Mircea, forced Radu to seek out hiding places to avoid his blunt comments and even blunter fists. And his father, the prince, went entire weeks without acknowledging his existence.
The pressure built like steam until Radu did not know whether he was more terrified that his father would never notice him again, or that he would.
It was safer to go unnoticed.
Unfortunately, today he had failed at that. Aron Danesti laughed, a sound sharper than his boots. “You squeal like a piglet. Do it again.”
“Please.” Radu covered his head as Aron slapped his cheeks. “Stop. Stop.”
“We are here to get stronger,” Andrei said. “And no one is weaker than you.”
At least once a month, all the boys ages seven to twelve from boyar families—boyar was a word for nobility, to be said with a twist of the lip and a sneer if Lada were speaking—were left deep in the forest. It was a tradition, one most of the adults laughed at indulgently. A game, they called it. But they all watched with narrowed eyes, seeing who emerged first, looking as though he had been merely out for a stroll rather than tired and scared like a normal boy.
The Danestis, who had traded the throne back and forth with the Basarab family for the last fifteen years, were particularly interested in how Aron and Andrei, both a year older than Radu, fared. They were not overfond of the Draculesti usurpers.
Radu was the son of the prince, a Draculesti, the smallest boy and the biggest target. He was never the winner. And today, for the first time, he wondered whether he would make it back at all. Terror clawed in his throat. His breath came in short, painful gasps.
Andrei grabbed Radu, fingers digging into his arms as he dragged him up to stand. His mouth was against Radu’s ear, breath hot. “My mother says your father wishes you had never been born. Do you wish that, too?”
Aron hit him in the stomach, and Radu gagged.
“Say it,” Andrei commanded, his voice cheerful. “Say you wish you had never been born.”
Radu squeezed his eyes shut. “I wish I had never been born.”
Aron hit him.
“I said it!” Radu screamed, coughing and struggling for breath.
“I know,” Andrei said. “Hit him again.”
“My father will—”
“Your father will do what? Write the sultan to ask permission to scold us? Ask my family to donate to the throne so he can afford a switch to whip us with? Your father is nothing. Just like you.”
Radu had braced for another blow when Aron’s shout made him open his eyes. Aron was spinning in a circle, trying desperately to dislodge Lada. She was not supposed to be here, but somehow her presence was unsurprising. She had jumped on the boy’s back, clasping her arms around him and pinning his arms to his sides. Radu could not see her face through her tangled drape of hair until Aron twisted to the side, revealing Lada’s teeth sunk into his shoulder.
Andrei shoved Radu away and rushed forward to help his cousin. Lada released Aron, jumping off his back and crouching down. Her eyes narrowed. Andrei was eleven, the same age as Lada, but bigger than she was. Aron stumbled to a tree and leaned against it, crying and clutching his shoulder.
Lada smiled at Andrei, her teeth coated in blood.
“You demon girl, I—”
Lada stood and slammed her hand into Andrei’s nose. He screamed, dropping to his knees and sniveling. Lada walked after him, then kicked his side so that he fell onto his back. He stared up at her as he choked on the blood streaming from his nose. She put her foot on his throat and pushed, just enough to make his eyes bulge in panic.
“Get out of my forest,” she snarled.
She lifted her foot and watched, eyes hooded, as Andrei and Aron put their arms around each other, all traces of bravado gone. They ran.
Radu wiped his face on his sleeve, leaving behind a mess of blood and dirt. He looked at Lada, standing in the middle of a shaft of light that filtered through a gap in the thick branches. For once in his life, he was grateful for her vicious temper, for her strange instinctive knowledge of the best way to hurt someone with the least amount of work. He was so tired and so scared, and she had saved him. “Thank you.” He stumbled toward her with arms outstretched. When he was hurting, his nurse folded him into herself, sealing him away from the world. He wanted—needed—that now.
Lada hit him in the stomach. He doubled over in pain, sinking to his knees. She knelt next to him, grasping him by the ears. “Do not thank me. All I did was teach them to fear me. How does that help you? Next time you hit first, you hit harder, you make certain that your name means fear and pain. I will not be here to save you again.”
Radu trembled, trying not to cry. He knew Lada hated it when he cried, but she had hurt him. And she had tasked him with something impossible. The other boys were bigger, meaner, faster. Whatever made Lada better than them had skipped him entirely.
He spent the long, miserable walk out of the forest trailing his sister, wondering how he could be like her. The boyars sat waiting under tents, gossiping as servants fanned them. Mircea was there, talking with Vlad Danesti, and his expression when he saw Radu’s face indicated that he approved of the damage to it. And, perhaps, he wished to do more.
Radu stepped more fully behind Lada; all other eyes were on her anyway. The boyars were astonished to see the prince’s daughter walk out of the forest with her head held high. No one was surprised to see Radu filthy and bloodied, although he wasn’t as bloodied as Aron and Andrei. In their haste to flee Lada, the Danesti cousins had gotten lost and had to be rescued.
After that, the forest lessons were canceled, and the boyar families whispered among themselves about the prince’s daughter. She had always outpaced the boys her age with riding skills and demanded to be taught everything her brother was, but this was far more public. Rather than scolding Lada, their father laughed and boasted of his daughter, as wild and fierce as a boar. If it had been Radu who had come out of the forest victorious, would he have even noticed?
Radu heard it all, hiding behind tapestries, waiting in dark corners. He had seen Aron and Andrei watching him, but after two weeks they had yet to catch him alone. When adults were present, Radu could smile and charm and remain safe.
Lada had been right. She had not saved him. The looks in his enemies’ eyes when they saw him made that clear.
So he waited, and he hid, and he observed. And then, one crisp autumn evening, he made his move.
“Hello,” he said, voice cheery and bright enough to light up the twilight.
The servant boy startled, jumping as though struck. “May I help you?” His shirt was nearly worn through. Radu could see the sharp lines of his collarbones, the brittle length of his skinny arms. They were probably the same age, but Radu’s life had been much kinder. At least as far as having enough food.
Radu smiled. “Would you like something to eat?”
The boy’s eyes widened in wonder. He nodded.
Radu knew the value in being overlooked, because he himself was so often unseen. He led Emil, a servant so lowly he was invisible to the boyars he worked for, to the kitchen.
A rash of thefts plagued the castle. After every feast attended by the boyar families, someone would notice a necklace, a jewel, a personal token of value missing. It reflected poorly on the prince, so Vlad declared that whoever was discovered to be behind the crimes would be publicly lashed and indefinitely imprisoned. The boyars muttered angry, ugly things beneath their breath, and Vlad skulked through the castle, eyes narrowed and shoulders stooped beneath the weight of his shame at being unable to control his own home.
Several weeks later, Radu stood on the inner edge of the crowd as Aron and Andrei, faces covered in tears and snot, were tied to a post in the middle of the square.
“Why would they have stolen those things?” Lada watched, her mouth turned down in curiosity.
Radu shrugged. “All the missing items were found under their beds by a servant.” A servant who was no longer painfully underfed, and considered Radu his best and only friend in the world. Radu smiled. There had been no real reason to wait as long as he had, delaying the punishment of his enemies and prolonging his father’s embarrassment. The anticipation had been delicious, though. And now, the reward.
Lada turned to look at him, suspicion drawing her brows together. “Did you do this?”
“There are other ways to beat someone than with fists.” Radu poked her in the side with a finger.
She surprised him by laughing. He stood up straighter, a proud grin at having surprised and delighted Lada bursting across his face. She never laughed unless she was laughing at him. He had done something right!
Then the lashings began.
Radu’s smile wilted and died. He looked away. He was safe now. And Lada was proud of him, which had never happened before. He focused on that to ignore the sick feelings twisting his stomach as Aron and Andrei cried out in pain. He wanted his nurse—wanted her to hold and comfort him—and this, too, made him feel ashamed.
Lada watched the whip with a calculating look. “Still,” she said. “Fists are faster.”
1446: Curtea de Arges, Wallachia
DURING THE HEIGHT OF the summer of Lada’s twelfth year, when plague descended with the insistent buzz of a thousand blue-black flies, Vlad took Lada and Radu out of the city. Mircea, their torment of an older brother, was in Transylvania soothing tensions. Lada felt gloriously visible riding by her father’s side. Radu and the nurse and Bogdan rode behind them, and her father’s contingent of guards farther back still. Her father pointed out various features of the countryside—a hidden trail up the side of a mountain, an ancient graveyard with long-forgotten people marked by smooth stones, the way the farmers carved out ditches to pull water from the river into their crops. She drank in his words with more thirst than the greedy soil.
Stopping briefly in the small green city of Curtea de Arges, they paid their respects at a church her father had bestowed his patronage on. Normally, Lada chafed under religious instruction. Though she attended church with her father, it was always a political duty of being seen, being observed, allowing one family or another to be closest to them as a matter of prestige. The priests sang soporifically, the air was cloying, and the light was dim, oppressively filtered through stained glass. They were Orthodox, but her father had political ties to the pope through the Order of the Dragon, so it was even more important that she stand up straight, listen to the priest, do everything exactly as it needed to look to others.
It was a performance that set Lada’s teeth on edge.
However, here, in this church, her father’s name was carved into the wall. It was covered in gold leaf and positioned next to a massive mosaic of Christ on the cross. It made her feel strong. As though God himself knew her family’s name.
One day she would build her own church, and God would see her, too.
They continued traveling along the Arges River, which sometimes was narrow and violently churning, sometimes as wide and smooth as glass. It snaked through the land until reaching the mountains. Everything was a green so deep it was nearly black. Dark gray stones and boulders jutted out of the steeply rising slopes, and beneath them the Arges wandered.
It was cooler here than in Tirgoviste, a chill that never quite burned away clinging to the rocks and moss. The looming mountains were so steep that the sun shone directly on the traveling company for only a few hours each day before shadows reclaimed the passes. It smelled of pine and wood and rot—but even the rot smelled rich and healthful, unlike the hidden rot of Tirgoviste.
Late one afternoon, near the end of their journey, their father reached up to an evergreen tree that was growing sideways off a boulder. He broke off a sprig, smelled it, then passed it to Lada with a smile. It was a smile that made her feel as full and dizzy as the mountain air did. A peaceful smile. She had never seen such a smile on her father’s face, and being the recipient of it made her heart beat with a frenzied happiness.
“We are that tree,” he said, then rode ahead.
Lada pulled on the reins to make her horse, a docile and dull-brown creature, pause. She studied the tree squeezing life out of stone. It was twisted and small but green, growing sideways in defiance of gravity. It lived where nothing had any business thriving.
Lada did not know whether her father meant the two of them, or whether he meant all of Wallachia. In her mind, the two had become indistinguishable. We are that tree, she thought, holding the richly scented sprig to her nose. We defy death, to grow.
That evening they came to a village snuggled between the river and the mountains. The homes were simple, spare, nothing compared with their castle. But children ran and played in the lanes, and bright bursts of flowers were nurtured in tiny plots. Chickens and sheep roamed freely.
“What about thieves?” Radu asked. In Tirgoviste, their animals were kept carefully penned, with someone assigned to watch them at all hours.
Their nurse made a sweeping motion with her arm to encompass the whole village. “Everyone knows everyone. Who would steal from their neighbor?”
“Yes, because they would be immediately found out and punished,” Lada said.
Radu gave her a frowning sort of smile. “Because they care about each other.”
They were served food—warm, round loaves of rough bread, chicken blackened on the outside and scalding hot on the inside. Perhaps it was the travel, or the smell of green things all around, but even the food here tasted richer and more real to Lada.
The next morning Lada woke early, the straw under her cot poking through her shift and into her back. With the nurse snoring, and Bogdan and Radu curled up in the corner like puppies, Lada slipped out the window.
The cottage—cozy and neat, the nicest in the village—was built against the tree line, and it took only a handful of steps before Lada was enveloped in a new, secret world, filled with green-filtered light and the constant droning of unseen insects. The ground beneath her bare feet was morning-damp and littered wit
h striped slugs the size of her index finger. Mist clung to sections of the trees, greeting her with almost sentient tendrils. She climbed straight up, picking out a precarious path, winding her way with slow progress toward the top of the nearest jutting peak of solid gray stone.
There were ruins up there, an ancient fortress long since fallen. It teased her with glimpses through the fog, calling to her in a way she could not explain.
She had to get to it.
She climbed down a small ravine, and then straight up the face of the rocky peak. Her feet slipped, and she pressed her face against the stone, breathing hard. Hammered into the stone were the rusted remains of pegs that once must have held a bridge. Lada grabbed one, then another, until she heaved herself up and over the crumbling remains of a wall.
She crossed the foundation, jagged bits of brick and mortar digging into her feet. At the very edge, where even the wall had fallen away, nothing was left but a cobblestoned platform hanging over empty space. Her heart pounded as she looked down at the Arges, now a tiny stream, and the village, mere pebbles for homes. The sun crested the opposite peaks, falling directly on her. It turned the motes in the air to gold, and the mist into brilliant rainbow droplets. A spiky purple flower growing in the old foundation caught her eye. She plucked it, holding it to the light, then pressed it to her cheek.
A sort of rapture descended on her, a knowledge that this moment, this mountain, this sun, were designed for her. The closest she had come before to the exultant feeling—both a burning and a lightness in her chest—was when her father had been pleased with her. But this was new, bigger, overwhelming. It was Wallachia—her land, her mother—greeting her. This was how church was supposed to feel. She had never experienced the divine spirit within a church’s walls, but on this peak, in this countryside, she felt peace and purpose and belonging. This was the glory of God.
And I Darken Page 2
