Vlad snorted. “Will you still do it? Defy them?”
“In all my years here, that’s the only thing I’ve ever been completely sure about. Yes, I will do it. I said that I would.”
“People don’t always do what they say they will.”
“I do,” George said, gaze steady. Like he knew what Vlad was trying valiantly not to think. Like he could sense that Vlad’s stomach was folding in on itself, pulling tight with an emotion that he didn’t dare name loss, because he’d been taken from his home, how could this parting feel anything like loss?
“Vlad,” George started, voice gentle, and Vlad couldn’t stand it.
He jumped to his feet and put three paces between them, his back to the older boy, arms folded tight across his middle. He was afraid if he let go, the horrible thing boiling in his stomach might climb up his throat; might leave his mouth as a wounded sound, or burn his eyes with unthinkable tears.
“Vlad,” George said again, and got to his feet, followed him.
Vlad sensed the hand about to land on his shoulder and whirled, teeth bared, growling. His fangs were showing; he meant to be frightening.
But George’s expression was almost tender. “I’m sorry I’m leaving you,” he said.
“Leaving me?” Vlad scoffed. But the sound that left his mouth was more of a sob than a laugh. “Do you think that I care? What are we – friends? No. Do you think this hurts me?”
“I know that it does.” Calm and gentle. “I would spare you this, if I could, but I have to return to my people. And you have to continue being patient. Yes?”
Vlad looked away and growled. His vision blurred, and he blinked it clear, furiously.
“It’s alright to have friends,” George said. “And it’s alright to miss them.”
Vlad flashed his fangs again, and said nothing. It did hurt. It hurt. There were a dozen little ways that George had helped them, tempering the anger of the mullahs and viziers and even the sultan, probably. He’d watched over Val, and he’d known what Mehmet was, the kind of threat he’d posed. And, worst of all, he’d given Vlad hope that he could survive this; that he had the fortitude to learn, and scheme, and wait, and make his move once he was a free man. Not just a friend, but a light in the dark.
Vlad didn’t know if he could carry on alone.
“Don’t hate your brother,” George suggested. “You need him.”
“I don’t hate him,” Vlad said, honesty shaken loose by the rawness of his emotions. “I love him more than anything.”
“Then maybe you should tell him that.”
“No.” This moment now was proof enough that showing weakness – that he needed anyone – could be used against him to ruinous effect.
George sighed. “You are the stubbornest brat I ever met.” And then, before Vlad could shift away, George folded him into a strong embrace. “Take care, Vlad,” he murmured in his ear. “I’m holding you to your oath to be allies with me when you leave here.”
Despite the awful churning in his gut, and the sting of tears in his eyes, Vlad chuckled. “You had better.”
~*~
He was still sitting on the pew an hour later when Val found him. He sensed him coming long before his quiet footfalls struck the flagstones.
Val lingered back by the door, smelling of hesitation…and of hurt. The sadness of a little brother spurned for reasons he couldn’t understand.
Vlad’s hands trembled, and he laced his fingers together where they hung between his knees. His voice was steady, though. “What?”
A beat. “I’ve been to see Father.”
It took every ounce of Vlad’s self-control not to ask for specifics.
“He said–” Val faltered. Took a deep, unsteady breath. “He said that we’ll be held here as part of the treaty. And that he’s taken an oath to not lift so much as a finger against the Ottomans. Not in any way.”
“That’s generally what a treaty means,” Vlad ground out.
“We can’t go home,” Val whispered. Melancholy was too delicate a word for the emotion that colored his voice, small and hushed though it was.
Vlad stood. When he turned, he found Val dashing his sleeve across his cheeks, drying the evidence of a few hasty tears. He was still as soft-hearted as ever, tender as a bruise.
How will you ever survive this world? Vlad wondered. How will you grow into a man?
And internally, his own small, childish fear said, Father, why? How could you?
To Val he said, “Did you expect him to fight for us?”
Val reared back in surprise. “He’s – he’s our father.”
“And we’re his sons. His Roman sons. Were we not raised to understand that it’s us who serve Wallachia, and not the other way around? He won’t risk our whole people just to have us home.”
It was the truth. And it tasted vile on his tongue. He wasn’t sure he’d even really believed it until this moment, watching Val’s lip quiver, hearing the news from him straight-out.
Vlad swallowed a surge of bile and said, “Fathers who sacrifice everything for the sake of their own children belong in fairy stories, Radu.” Val flinched; the name had struck him like a blow. “This is reality. Don’t be such a baby.”
Val’s mouth worked silently a moment. Then he drew in a deep breath and shouted. “I’m not a baby! Stop calling me that!” It was the first time he’d ever said such a thing.
Vlad was glad to hear it. There. There was the beginning of the spark he knew must lay dormant in the boy. They were of the same blood; there must be some inner steel in Val, ready to be coaxed out. “Then stop acting like one,” he said.
He moved to brush past him.
A small hand latched onto his wrist and clung hard, blunt nails biting through fabric and into skin.
Vlad could have shaken him off, but he paused instead, turned to him. Was met with a snarl. And tear-bright eyes.
“Why are you so hateful? Doesn’t this bother you?”
Yes. I want to howl. I want to snatch up the nearest sword and slaughter everyone here. And when the blade is dulled, I will tear out their throats with fangs and claws.
He said, “I’ve always been hateful. It runs in the family.”
He twisted his wrist away and left his little brother standing, stunned, beneath the waving ivy and the silently judging cross.
~*~
Vlad saw his first impaled man that summer. A traitor. A vizier who’d intended to betray his sultan to Western forces, passing messages. Mehmet wasn’t at Edirne, so his men carried out the orders: they impaled the man on a long wooden stake, up his rectum and out through his chest, and mounted his moaning, half-dead personage on the palace walls. A warning to others. An attraction for flies and ravens.
As a very young boy in Sighișoara, he’d watched from the house’s second-floor windows as convicted criminals were led to the bank square and publicly hanged. He remembered the way their necks had sometimes snapped, and sometimes not. The last flailing of feet and hands.
This was more violent, more visceral. This was a spectacle. Like something from the gladiatorial pits; death at the whim of a dictator.
The breeze stirred his hair and he pushed it back off his forehead. I will do this, he decided. One day, I will do this to them.
And so he did.
20
BLOODSTAINS
Autumn, 1444
An evening breeze came in through the open windows of the Despot of Mistra’s study. It ruffled the curtains, and the pages of books left open, but Val couldn’t feel it against his skin. He sat cross-legged on a span of empty tabletop, watching the sunset ripen over the pine-studded hills and plateaus. The last fingers of light touched the pale stone buildings with the colors of tangerines and early lemons. The mountains lay quietly in the distance, the gentle spines of some sleeping dragon. He wondered if the air smelled like olive trees; like sap; like the water he could hear tumbling in a courtyard fountain.
George Sphrantzes no longer looked on Val a
s if he were a ghost or an abomination; he didn’t speak to him directly very often, but he’d come to accept his presence in his master’s study. Tonight, he had news.
“The message is old at this point,” he said, waving the bit of unrolled parchment in his hand. “The pope absolved the Hungarian king, Ladislas, of his treaty with the Ottomans. Murat stepped down, and now Mehmet is sultan. Ladislas,” he said, dread heavy in his voice, “has declared a new crusade. He and John Hunyadi are marching south to cross the Danube with Vlad Dracul’s blessing. They seek Wallachia’s aid in their campaign.”
Val sat up straight. His breath caught in his throat. “My father? He–” He choked on air, and both men turned to him.
Constantine studied him with open sympathy. Carefully, he said, “Just because they asked for your father’s help doesn’t mean he gave it.”
“He couldn’t.” Val’s lips – his whole face – felt numb. “If he breaks the treaty, they’ll…they’ll kill us.” The last he whispered, hands shaking where they’d knotted together in his lap.
Sphrantzes looked between them, gaze heavy with regret. His eyes dropped to the page. He read, “Prince Vlad Dracul of Wallachia sends his eldest son and heir, Mircea, along with a contingent of cavalry–”
Val couldn’t hear the rest over the pounding of his own heart. He dropped his head into his hands and gripped tight; his body must have been doing it too, back in his bed in Edirne, because he felt the rough scrape of the calluses on his fingertips at his temples; the throb of the veins there.
“…Val.” Someone had been saying his name. For a while. “Val.” Constantine, voice steady, but gentle. “Val, look at me.”
He did, but the familiar, kindly face was of no comfort now. “They’ll kill us. They will.” Maybe he should have been fearing for Mircea’s chances in battle, or for father should Ladislas and Hunyadi decide his inability to commit more troops was capitally offensive. But he was ten, and selfish, and right now, all he could think about was his body, and Vlad’s, impaled on pikes along the sheer white palace walls.
“You’re far too valuable to kill,” Sphrantzes said, reasonably.
Constantine sighed. “They won’t kill you,” he said, softer. “George states it bluntly, but he’s correct. You and Vlad are valuable.”
“Right.” His teeth began to chatter. “They’ll just burn out our eyes instead.” He closed his own then, swallowing the urge to retch as he thought of Stepan and Gregor, the linen covering the ruined, scarred sockets where their eyes had once been. That was worse than death, he thought.
“Maybe not,” Constantine said, sounding less certain now. “But Val, you must be prepared for them to threaten such things. They’ll let you think they mean to hurt you, even if they don’t. You have to be strong.”
Strong like Vlad, who’d bow up his back and take the verdict steely-eyed. Who’d spit in the viziers’ faces and call them cowards and monsters.
But Val wasn’t brave like that.
“What of their chances?” Sphrantzes asked his friend and master. “The sultan is young, and he’s had trouble at home.” He gestured to Val.
That was true. Amidst his panic, Val tried to grab onto the news he’d brought with him on this evening’s dream-walk, that Mehmet had been plagued with all the troubles anyone could expect for a boy sultan. Religious fanatics stirring up unrest in the city; doubting, back-stabbing viziers; push-back from some of the outer territories. And over it all hung the disquiet of a people who didn’t understand why Murat had abdicated. Val had seen the former sultan walking in the garden, offering bits of seed to the birds, sitting quietly on benches with his young, Serbian wife, Mara. He’d abdicated because he was tired, Val thought, and because he didn’t have the heart or the stomach for the kind of expansion that some members of his court salivated over.
Mehmet was different, though. Mehmet was ambitious, and full of fire.
Mehmet was a vampire; bloodlust was a part of him, body and soul.
“My brother means to give him more trouble,” Constantine said.
Sphrantzes lifted his brows in question.
“Orhan, the pretender – John is going to release him.”
Orhan. Val knew that name. For years, the Greeks of Byzantium had allowed the Ottoman pretender asylum within the city’s impenetrable walls. It was a part of the tenuous peace they shared with the Turks: Orhan got to live, and lavishly at that, but he wasn’t allowed to leave on his own recognizance, for fear he’d try to start a revolt.
“God,” Sphrantzes said, eyes wide. “How could he? The treaty…”
“It appears it’s a time for breaking treaties,” Constantine said, tone grim. “I’m afraid my brother still holds out some hope that Rome will send aid to the east.”
“There’s not much chance of that.”
“I’m afraid you’re right, old friend.” He turned to Val again, and Val had calmed himself enough to register the regret in the man’s eyes. “Is there anything else you can tell us?” He regretted having to ask, Val knew. Needing information from him, given the circumstances.
He shook his head. “No. There was gossip about Iskander Bey, but–”
“Who?”
“Skanderbeg,” Sphrantzes said. “That’s what his men call him. The Albanian prince sent home with a Turkish cavalry unit.” A bare smile touched his mouth. “He betrayed them immediately and swore an oath to spend the rest of his life fighting the Ottomans.”
“He was a hostage with us for a while,” Val said. “He’s been gone a year.”
“Doubtless Hunyadi’s tried to recruit him, too,” Sphrantzes said.
The two men fell into a conversation that didn’t exclude Val, per se, but which didn’t need him. He was only a boy, after all, and they had serious matters of state to discuss.
He knew he needed to go back, to wake up, go find Vlad and tell him what he’d learned here. Vlad probably wouldn’t respond; he might grunt, if Val was lucky, nod his head once. But they were brothers, and their inevitable demise was something he deserved to know.
But he lingered, here in his astral shape. Got up off the table and willed himself through the wall – his body tugged at him, trying to draw him back, but he pushed on, rematerializing out on the balcony.
The sunset had progressed, now kissing the mountains with lavender and indigo, colorless directly overhead. He lifted his arms and watched his sleeves rustle in the breeze…but still, he couldn’t feel it. He didn’t understand how projection worked in that sense. Maybe he never would. There were no Familiars at the Ottoman court, and no way to learn without admitting aloud what he was.
The scrape of shoes over stone heralded Constantine’s arrival a moment before the despot pulled up alongside Val. He leaned forward and rested his forearms along the railing. The wind toyed with the thick dark curls of his hair, swept them back from his face. He looked pensive, melancholy in that way that Val had learned was characteristic.
It was silent a moment between them. Down below in the valley, sheep baaed as they hurried toward their shepherds and the evening meal, bells tolling faintly around their necks. Doves called. A beautiful, tranquil Greek evening.
Constantine gathered a breath and said, “It’s an old tradition: hostage-taking. It’s not dishonorable. Even Alexander’s beloved Hephaestion was a political hostage to begin with.” He turned to face Val. “But tradition doesn’t make something more bearable, does it?”
Val turned away, swallowing reflexively. “They’re…fair to me. I am clothed, and fed, and I’ve had an education.”
“An Ottoman education.”
“Yes.”
Constantine’s sigh was so deep and heartfelt that, for a moment, Val forgot that he was incorporeal and expected the weight of a comforting hand to land on his shoulder. The words had a similar effect, nonetheless: “You are not Hephaestion, I don’t think. And no matter how much he studies him, I don’t think Mehmet is the Alexander he thinks himself to be.” Softer: “It’s perfectly a
lright to wish for home. For family, and for the education and upbringing of your own people. No matter how kindly treated, a hostage is still a hostage, and that is a bitter medicine to swallow, I’m afraid.”
Val’s chin trembled, and he clenched his jaw tight to stop it.
“If you would take some advice from a man who’s next in line to be emperor,” Constantine continued, “then I would urge you and your brother to courteously and carefully comport yourselves when you’re brought before the sultan. Cruel as it is to say, George is right: you are too valuable to kill. A little sweetness might dissuade them from maiming you, though.”
Val looked back to him, to the earnest sadness in his dark eyes. “Do you believe so?”
“I do.”
He nodded. “Alright. I can be sweet.”
When he slipped back into his body, he opened his eyes to an evening gone nearly full-dark. He sat up and blinked back the grogginess, rubbed a hand down his face. The last bit of color was fading in purple hues beyond the window, and there were only two places where Vlad might be at this time.
He hadn’t lied to Constantine: he could be sweet, and almost always was. It was why there were no guards posted at his door, and why none of the ones he encountered on his way out to the garden gave him more than a passing glance. He and Vlad were a part of the household at this point, but it was common to see a janissary lingering just out of reach whenever Vlad was present. To see the guards following him with their eyes; to see the thinly veiled contempt in the gazes of viziers and the higher-ups at court.
Vlad had a presence about him. He’d grown lanky and severe, his gaze arresting. His was not a magnetism generated by beauty, or conviviality. No; it was his stern, constant, prowling threat that sucked all the air out of every room he entered. Only a handful knew that he was a vampire, but everyone could tell that he was a predator.
The gardens lay in shadow, the last pale twilight catching on the metal chasing along arbors and benches, little topiary spires. It seemed another world, heavy with the scent of autumn’s first and last flowers. It was still warm, but the air held the promise of an oncoming chill.
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