Dread boiled up in his stomach, cold and fast. He swallowed the urge to retch. He clutched at the bedclothes, caught between fleeing and pulling them over his head. Where would he run if he even tried to? He didn’t think it was possible to run away from a prince in his own palace.
“Shh,” Mehmet murmured, and sank down on the edge of his pallet. The moonlight caught the white of bandages on his healing shoulder. Carved a line down his face: deep-set eye, high cheekbone, strong jaw losing the last of its puppy fat to manhood. His mother was Greek, all the rumors said; he looked it now. “It’s alright, little one. Don’t be frightened.”
Frightened wasn’t the word for it. Every sense he possessed told him to get as far away from him as possible – as far away from his pulsing energy as possible. Even when he smiled, teeth gleaming, Val read a threat into it. No, he was terrified.
“What were you dreaming of just now?” Mehmet asked. “Your lips were moving. And your brows were unhappy.” He leaned forward – Val held his breath and pressed back into the pillow – and touched the space between them, the little worried groove there. “Was it a nightmare?”
“Y-yes.”
Mehmet pulled back with a murmured sound of sympathy. He rested his hand on the edge of the feather mattress, right beside Val’s knee. “I have nightmares, too. The slaves tell me I shout in my sleep sometimes.”
Val’s heartbeat tapped out a rhythm in his fingertips, his throat; he felt it pound in his temples.
“Radu.” His voice was hesitant in a way Val had never heard before. Heavy and introspective. “You…you know what I am. Don’t you? Because you’re the same thing.”
Val held still.
“I can smell that you are. I can almost – I can almost taste it.” He inhaled deeply. “That’s been the strangest part of all this, the way everything is so intense. Your brother said that the two of you were born, and not turned. Is that so?”
He didn’t want to answer, but he didn’t think he had a choice. “Yes.”
“So that means both of your parents are vampires? My.” He smiled again. “That’s incredible. Your father is Remus isn’t he? Brother to the first king of Rome?”
“I…I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about that.”
When Mehmet laughed, it was a boy’s laugh. “You’re darling. What a sweet boy.” He moved his hand, so it covered Val’s knee; his tiny knee, the cap of which could have fit twice over in the heir’s cupped palm. It burned warm through the covers. “Your loyalty to your family is an admirable trait, Radu. But perhaps misplaced here. It was your uncle who turned me. Surely Vlad told you this?” He cocked his head, lifted a single brow.
Val nodded.
“Doesn’t that make us family, after a fashion?”
“I…don’t know.”
“Well, I think it does. My father is my father, but isn’t Romulus a sort of second father? The one who sired me into a new sort of life?”
“I suppose.”
Mehmet smiled again. “Romulus spoke so fondly of his nephews. He wanted us to be friends. To be brothers. Family.” He was beaming, moonlight glinting off his teeth. “It’s what I want as well.”
Vlad will never be your friend, Val wanted to say.
Romulus means to topple us with you – and then the world.
But he saw sincerity in that smile, heard it in the gentle laugh. Maybe Mehmet didn’t know. Maybe he was just another chess piece on the board.
The heir squeezed his knee and then stood; he held himself at awkward angles, still sore from his beating. “You should go back to sleep. I’m sorry I disturbed you.”
That’s alright, Val started to say, but he couldn’t form the words. He watched Mehmet walk to the door, and tried, unsuccessfully, to interpret the look thrown his way before the heir slipped out.
Much later, he would know that gaze had been predatory, and always question if he could have stopped the things that happened next.
19
OATH
1443
The bay mare was small-boned but quick, fleet-footed as a mountain goat. She flew across the grass, despite his weight. When he looked at his reflection in the mirror – lithe, ropey with muscle, sharp-faced and snakelike – Vlad didn’t think he looked heavy. But muscle counted more than fat; he tweaked the left rein with a flick of his fingers and the mare ducked that way. He could feel her tiring, but she was determined; maybe as determined as him. She was a hunter’s mount, and the hunt was not yet finished.
Overhead, his falcon wheeled, still searching.
And then she dove.
Vlad rode to the edge of the tree line, slowing his mare to a canter, then a trot, and finally halting her right at the edge. He listened for the sounds a human could never have heard: the rustle of wings, the shifting of leaves. He lifted his gauntleted arm and the falcon came winging out between branches, hare clutched in her talons. She dropped onto his arm and let him take the rabbit from her, and feed her a bit of meat from the pouch at his belt.
“There’s a pretty girl,” he murmured, and swore the bird preened.
Someone whistled for him, and he turned to see a rider cantering toward him across the field. In the distance, the palace walls rose in an unbroken white line, monolithic and impenetrable.
The rider was George, nearly as winded as his blowing horse.
“What?” The falcon shifted nervously on his arm, and he tightened his fist around her jesses.
George reined up alongside him, expression guarded in that careful way that meant he had news. “The sultan–” He hesitated, frowning. “The sultan has sent for you. I intercepted the slave on his way to get you. You have a formal audience.”
Vlad felt his features tighten. He tamped down on a growl, lest it spook his animals. “Why? What news from the north?”
George shook his head. “I don’t know. But there is…something else. You should talk to him. And you should hurry.”
~*~
He handed his horse off to a groom and washed hastily in the fountain of the stable yard. Pushed his damp hair off his face and followed the nervously waiting slave with water dripping down into his collar and off his cuffs.
Sultan Murat awaited him in a far corner of the shady part of the garden. A vine-choked pergola shielded a bench beside a chuckling fountain, and that was where the sultan sat, clothed all in white to combat the heat, gazing serenely into the tumbling water. Two guards and a vizier stood at attention a short distance away.
The vizier leaned forward as Vlad approached, and hissed, “Watch yourself, boy. This is an honor beyond imagining. If you so much as raise a finger toward him…”
Vlad gave him a flat look. Stared at him until the fussy little man turned away with a disgruntled sniff…and a slight tremor in his hand.
Then he ducked beneath the fragrant vines and faced the sultan. “Your Majesty,” he said. It wasn’t a respectful tone.
The sultan noticed. He lifted his head, expressionless save the raising of his brows. “Not Your Majesty any longer,” he said in Turkish, and Vlad understood every word, because he was fluent now.
Vlad didn’t ask what he meant. He waited.
“I’ve abdicated,” Murat said, finally, his gaze steady. “Mehmet is the sultan now, and he readies to leave Edirne.”
Vlad was shocked. He hoped it didn’t show on his face, and thought he succeeded in masking all emotion.
The sultan’s – former sultan’s – brows lifted a fraction higher. “You have nothing to say? Your rival will no longer be in the schoolroom with you; do you have no feelings on that?”
“No, sir. None.”
A subdued smile tugged at one corner of the man’s mouth. Or maybe it was just a tic. “I also wished to inform you that your father has been released back to Wallachia.”
Oh.
“He’s signed a new treaty with us. He swore an oath, on the Bible and the Quran, to be faithful. He paid a tribute of ten-thousand gold ducats, and has agreed to send us five-hundre
d boys for the Janissary Corps. Do those sound like agreeable terms to you?”
“It is not my place to have an opinion on the matter, sir.”
A chuckle that was like the scrape of metal over stone. “Where has the disobedient Vlad Dracula gone? Replaced instead with a mannerly boy of temperance, eh?”
“Sir.” The real Vlad, the disobedient dragon’s son, was alive and well. But he’d grown patient in his captivity, at the urging of his friend. He’d learn to rake dirt over his furious coals and let them smolder; he trained, and he learned, and he dedicated himself to knowing all that he could about his captors.
And he waited.
Murat studied him, head canted to the side. “It’s a shame,” he drawled, “that you and my son could never be friends. He could have learned from you – you have something which, despite all his wonderful qualities, he lacks.”
“Sir?”
That almost-smile again. “My Mehmet is made of fire. But you. You are made of steel.”
Behind his back, Vlad’s hands curled into fists.
“That will be all. Dismissed.”
He did not feel relieved as he walked away; that wasn’t possible for him anymore. But something inside him unclenched a fraction. Father was safe. Without Mehmet around, Val would be safe. And someday, they would get to go home. Maybe even in one piece.
~*~
Val could draw a bow now. He could nock an arrow and draw the string back to his cheek, hold it there, let out half a breath, and take aim. The thunk of the arrow landing in the bullseye filled him with a rush of rare satisfaction.
“Well done,” the instructor said behind him.
Val felt himself smile, and was surprised by the fact. Training had never before been a call for smiling.
The arrows waited at his feet, heads sunk in the grass. He plucked up the next and fired again.
When the target was bristling, he turned to ask the instructor about his form – and pulled up short. Vlad stood a few paces behind the old janissary, arms folded, gaze unreadable.
Val swallowed his leaping heart back down, handed his bow off, and went to meet his brother.
There had been whispers around the palace. A court couldn’t help but gossip – from dignitaries, to scribes and viziers, to soldiers and servants. Val had even heard the slave boys whispering in the secluded corners of the baths. His hearing was better than that of a human, and so he’d heard the wild speculation: chiefly, that he and Vlad were not full brothers. Vlad, with his pale face, and dark cascading hair, and Slavic bone structure, was believed to be Vlad Dracul’s trueborn son. But Val they called a bastard. They didn’t know that Mother was golden; that she was a secret; that she’d carried both boys in her womb, and kissed their brows, and sung them to sleep.
The other bit of gossip was that the Wallachian brothers – half-brothers, they all swore – hated one another.
In so many ways, that was the tale that hurt the most. Because Val feared that it was true. On Vlad’s side of things, at least.
They’d never argued. Vlad hadn’t even been unkind. But he was cold. No smiles, and no touches, no acknowledgement of any kind. It was if he didn’t regard them as brothers either – even half would have been better than this cold nothing.
Val had never met anyone as perfectly composed as Vlad Dracula.
“Brother,” he greeted quietly, formally, when he stood in front of him.
Vlad kept his voice low, out of human reach. “I just talked with the sultan. He’s abdicated.”
“What?”
“Keep your voice down. Yes, he’s stepped down. Old and tired, he said. Mehmet will be sultan now.”
A hard shiver stole over him. Vlad’s lifted brows told him all he needed to know: yes, Mehmet would be sultan, and that meant he would no longer be a fixture in their lives. A relief to be sure. Mehmet had never behaved aggressively toward Val; quite the opposite. He smiled at him, and sometimes, briefly, would pet his golden hair, grown out now halfway down his back. “Little one,” he called him, and his eyes stayed fastened to him for long moments; Val could feel their weight tracing the delicate wings of his collarbones.
But what did any of that mean? Being in Mehmet’s presence stoked anxiety deep in his gut. Some of that was thanks, no doubt, to the memory of a practice sword connecting with the side of Vlad’s head. The awful crack of bone breaking.
But some of it was personal. Disquiet moved over his skin like gooseflesh in the heir’s – the sultan’s – presence. Iskander Bey had squeezed his shoulder and told him that he shouldn’t worry on it…but his own eyes had been worried for him.
What sort of sultan would Mehmet be? What would it mean for the treaty? For Father, and for them–
Before he could get lost down that mental trail, Vlad said, “Father’s been released. There’s a new treaty, and he’s going home.”
Tears pricked Val’s eyes and he blinked them away. “Good,” he said unsteadily. “That’s good.” He didn’t dare ask about their own circumstances; he knew better than to hope. It was an almost-crushing relief just to hear that Father was well. In the past two years, Val had tried to visit him, but they’d cuffed Dracul with silver, and so Val had never been able to get within sight of him when he dream-walked. An old trick, Mother had said, and sworn under her breath. A dirty one.
“Father will be negotiating for our release soon. I thought you should know,” Vlad said.
“Thank you.”
He stayed a moment, and Val thought he might – but then he nodded and turned his back.
No, it wasn’t hate. It was worse than that; an absence of feeling altogether.
~*~
Val didn’t find Father in his study. That room was empty, so he passed through the hall and made his way to Dracul’s bedchamber. He hesitated a moment on the other side of the closed door, listening for voices, and then he passed through.
It was early, just after dark, but his father was already in bed. He sat upright, covers puddled in his lap, staring down at his hands. The silver cuffs had left pink marks on his wrists; they would probably scar.
A single lantern burned on the dresser. Cicero sat in a chair against the wall, statue-still, just beyond the light’s reach. If he’d been there physically, Val thought he’d be able to smell the wolf’s blended satisfaction and worry. His master was home; but his master was not yet himself.
“Father?” Val said.
Dracul’s head lifted. There were new lines on his face. Immortals didn’t age the way that humans did, but stress could still carve fissures in their smooth facades. Like rain eating slowly at marble.
A smile broke crooked across his face. “My son. You have no idea how wonderful it is to see you.” Tears glittered unshed in his eyes.
Val walked forward to the bed, projected hands suspended over the edge of the feather mattress, useless. “Father – Papa. Are you – you aren’t hurt, are you?”
He smiled. “No, no. Only tired. It was a long journey.”
Cicero gave a quiet chuff over against the wall, an animal sound of displeasure.
“What about you, my Radu?” He tilted his head. “You’ve grown.”
“I have?” Val looked down at himself with surprise. He knew his hair had grown, and his boots had grown too tight and been replaced. His face was perhaps narrower. But grown? He was still just a slip of a thing. Still Helga’s bouquet of flowers. He thought he always would be.
Dracul chuckled. “Of course. That’s what boys do.” When Val looked at him again, his face fell. “How have they been treating you boys?”
Val swallowed. “We are well-fed. Well-exercised. We can speak Turkish, and we’ve learned much of geography, and art, and warfare. We’ve studied Machiavelli, and the Quran. I can use a bow now, Papa. I’m even good at it.”
“That’s wonderful…but it’s not what I asked.” His face was pained.
Val took a breath. “We’re alright. We are.” Though he couldn’t keep the despair from his voice. “Vlad
. He – sometimes he’s willful. They use the crop on him.”
“Nothing he can’t handle, then.” But that wasn’t the point.
“He’s angry, Father,” he admitted. “Blisteringly angry. But he hides it deep, and is cold on the outside.”
Dracul sighed. “That’s how he is.” He shook his head. “I wish I could bring you home. I–” His voice broke, and he cleared his throat.
Cicero stood and went to the pitcher waiting on the dresser to pour a cup of water.
Val’s breath lodged in his throat. “Do you mean…” But he knew. He knew.
“Radu. I can’t rework the negotiations. The treaty only works so long as you’re hostages. I have to obey it, or else they’ll…”
Kill them.
“We can’t come home,” Val said, numb.
“I’m sorry, son. But no. Not yet.”
~*~
They sent Iskander Bey home.
Vlad sat on his usual pew in the chapel, gaze trained unseeing on the cross. In his two years here, the crawling ivy had never overtaken it. A more romantic soul than him would have called it divine intervention.
Vlad was Roman – half. But he was not romantic. He knew the ivy had been trimmed by the hand of a slave, some boy stolen from his home after his parents were slaughtered.
He heard the scrape of new boots over stone and did not turn.
George settled next to him; the pew creaked. He smelled of soap, and powder, and floral oils. A prince cleaned up and dressed in new finery from his homeland, set to return with a contingent of Ottoman cavalry and terms of lasting peace.
Vlad said, “They trust you, then.”
“I’ve worked hard to ensure that they do.”
Vlad turned to him, then. His beard had been oiled and combed; his hair fell in pale sheets down his back. He looked every inch the prince; the persona of hostage had been stripped away.
Dragon Slayer (Sons of Rome Book 3) Page 22
