by Alex Oliver
Alaya, seated on the opposite side of the hearth from Vacarescu and the old gentleman,carried on stitching at her embroidery frame. She scarcely glanced up either for Mirela's pride or the second girl's tears, or the nervous trembling of the third.
Vacarescu looked now as if he were carved from a single piece of ice, so rigid Frank could hardly see him breathe except by the faint glimmer of his waistcoat buttons. His face was equally frozen, the knuckles of his clenched fists white as bone. “Constantin, you are the head of my family, you are my honored father. Believe me, then, when I say it gives me no pleasure to ask you, have you gone mad?”
“It is a parent's duty to find you a wife. Pick one.”
“I am boyar of Valcea. But for the Turks, I would be a prince. And you bring me two peasant girls and a Roma slave?”
Though this set the third girl crying too, Mirela stiffened at it and looked at Vacarescu with narrowed eyes, blue as periwinkle, suspicious as a bull in a slaughterhouse.
“Three peasant girls,” Constantin corrected him, with an air of confused disdain. “You've only to look at them to see none of them is a gypsy. I would impale every member of any village that dishonored us by sending a slave.”
Leaning his arm against the mantle, Vacarescu stared into the heart of the fire, its amber light drenching the ends of his black hair with gold and softening the harsh edges of his expression. Braced there, tall and young and richly dressed, Frank didn't think he looked too bad a prospect. If marriage, rather than disgrace, were on the table, Frank thought he would take that bargain. Why should the girls be so upset?
He remembered shortly afterward that if he was desperate to escape this place after a week of kindness, perhaps it was not so unreasonable to fear being tied to it forever. Then he did not know what to think of his earlier willingness. He leaned his too warm forehead against the cold of the ancient stone wall, closing his eyes for a second.
When he opened them again, he caught a strange gaze exchanged between Vacarescu and Mirela. Something more complex than insult showed in the lines around the man's eyes. If this had been a debating society, Frank would have surmised that Mirela had raised a point Vacarescu had never thought of before, that he was pausing and wondering if he could afford to engage it with the curiosity it deserved. In exchange, Mirela's expression was uncertain, as though she had let some truth slip she had been long trying to keep secret. Her lower lip crept beneath her teeth, whitened as she bit.
“Anca?” Vacarescu said at last, visibly putting his curiosity aside.
The housekeeper stepped forward, and yes, that was disgust, barely veiled in the line of her back. Perhaps Vacarescu's outburst had encouraged her to show it more. “My lord?”
“Take the girls down to the kitchen. Give them food, drink, and send them home.”
“In the dark?” Mirela demanded, her voice tight and high with nerves. By her side, the other two girls broke out into fresh tears.
“You leave now, or you stay here ‘til morning. Do what you think is best.”
Constantin and Alaya gave matching little laughs at this, Alaya covering her mouth with a decorous hand. The housekeeper, Anca, began supporting her half fainting charges towards the door, looking alarmed. Mirela backed towards the far door, following them, passing out of Frank's sight. But he heard her voice once more, cold and shaking. “You are the only slave in this room, my lord.”
All the humanity ironed out of Vacarescu's expression, left it the perfect carved mask it so often was.
Constantin hissed and made to stride out in pursuit of the girls, but Vacarescu caught him by the arm and prevented it. “What was the meaning of this elaborate insult, sir? Not her taunt - hers is beneath my notice. But yours... You have been giving orders to my servants again--”
“My servants.”
“You handed the rule to me. They are mine. You cannot just take everything back when it suits you--”
“And you cannot speak to me like that, young man. I am your elder; I will have your respect.”
Vacarescu gave a short bark of laughter and pressed his hand to the side of his head, as though it hurt. The pause gave Alaya time to set her sewing aside and get between the two of them. Very tiny she looked, in comparison, and far too full of affectionate trust to be afraid.
“Radu,” she took his hand and pressed it. “We are your family; we want what's best for you. That's all. You should have someone to be there for you. It would make you happier.”
As any man would, Vacarescu softened at her gentle care. He sank wearily onto a stool with the fire at his back, stretched out his long legs. “I don't deny I'm lonely. But this? This was nothing more than a mockery, designed to humiliate me. You know it's as much for your honor as mine that I cannot wed some common drab. Why subject me to this?”
“As you two are so cozy,” Constantin smoothed down his beard and gave a wintry smile, “I will make trial of how matters stand with the girls.”
Again, he headed for the door and his grandson held him back. “No. I will have an explanation from both of you.”
The old gentleman stilled so thoroughly it was almost uncanny to watch. His garments, away from the light of the fire, were all white and silver like his hair, and to Frank he looked like a picture cut from a black and white storybook, pasted into an illustration from a colored volume. Vacarescu's hand tightened on his father's arm until the fingertips were equally white, but the old man showed no sign of discomfort at all.
“What do you expect?” Constantin said at last. “Do you desire us to summon an heiress by arcane magic? Or do you expect to discover a hidden princess among the goose-girls? If we may not journey to the capital to seek out our peers, this is the best you can hope for.”
“It's not just for our amusement that we want to go to Bucharest,” Alaya smiled. “It's for your sake too. Where else do you think the boyaryshnyas are?”
“This again?” Vacarescu's mouth primmed as though he had tasted something bitter.
“This again.” Constantin pulled his arm from the younger man's grip. They were of a similar height, but the elder still managed to give the impression he was looking down on a child. “It does you no good to be stubborn. We will go to the capital, where we may live as those of our status are meant to live. Or I will escort the girls home personally, and let their parents know what you have done to them.”
The bitterness seemed to explode in Vacarescu's mouth – he flinched as if at a blow. Turned his face away. “You will do as you must,” he said, heavily. “And so will I. We will not be going to Bucharest.”
A silence fell, as solid as iron, and then Constantin made a third attempt to leave the room, striding out unencumbered this time, with the flared skirts of his long coat flickering like moonlight behind him. A little later, Alaya too rose, patting Vacarescu's bent head as she went, and glided out. The brushing sound of her skirts lingered a while and then faded.
The lines of Vacarescu's slumped form hardened slowly from misery back into anger. Frank, who had at first been seized by a strange compulsion to go in there and ask him, honestly, man to man, what was going on, tiptoed away, padding back to his room to think. He made the mistake of sitting on his bed to do it. There a week of disturbed nights and injury overcame him and he slept.
Chapter Four
In which Mirela Badi takes on the World
∞∞∞
A death sentence, Mirela thought as she hurried out of the over-warm room on the heels of the other girls. The hindmost stumbled, her borrowed skirts that bit too long for her and her eyes streaming. As she sniffed, wiped tears and hair out of her face, Mirela slipped past, going down the good stairs two at a time, her unladylike gait at odds with the pale Vlach mask she wore. One gadji behind her meant time gained to find refuge for herself, and she refused to feel guilty about that. None of them would have stopped for her, if they knew what she really was.
On the landing, the oak paneled stairs took a sharp right turn as the wide staircase d
escended into another level of the noble house. Straight ahead, a single narrow panel opened on servants' stairs, gnawed through the heavy stone of the keep like the channels of mites in old cheese.
Run fast down the wide stairs, through the great hall and out into the dark? Or obey and totter carefully down the steep steps into the kitchen, where she would be surrounded by living servants? Did they make their thralls watch when they fed? Make them stand there cowed, helpless and resentful, the way Anca had stood, hating all, opposing nothing?
As she wondered, the second girl pulled out of the housekeeper's supporting arms. “No!”
Anca murmured something about food and rest, but the peasant girl hauled up her long skirts, tucked them into her decorative belt. Her face was swollen red with tears and her hands fumbled at the task, shaking too much to be of any use. “What's the point of food? Rest? You heard what he said! I'm no safer here than out there. At least out there I'll have a head start on the rest of you.”
She glanced at Mirela, flinched guiltily away and raced down the main stairs like a deer fleeing for the woods. It made Mirela laugh in a thin, desperate way, to think she was not the only one.
One behind her, and one visibly and obviously running, appealing to their hunting instincts. Good. One for each of them. That gave her at least half an hour before they came looking for her.
“I am sorry,” said the housekeeper, and gestured ahead of herself for Mirela to go down the servant's stairs first. They were steep and narrow and crooked, but she was a Badi. She could dance on a rope slung between two trees. An uneven staircase was nothing.
Oh, what a cheerless place the kitchens were tonight. Over the past week of semi-imprisonment, she had rarely seen them look so empty. No one was on the spit, no one in the scullery. A tray with soup and bread stood on a table next to the stairs, growing cold. The cook darted a frightened glance at her and looked away pointedly, concentrating on the housekeeper instead.
“How do they expect me to run a kitchen like this? There's Dika gone now. She and all her family packed up and running for the border. May the hounds of hell hunt her down.”
“Cook!” Anca grimaced. “What a thing—” she choked, and Mirela took advantage of her distraction to pocket the bread from the tray. “What a thing to wish on anyone. I hope they get clean away across to Transylvania, she and all her family.”
In other circumstances, Mirela might have told her plainly Your hope is of as little worth as her curse. It is your actions that count, and they condemn you. But this was hardly the time to start a debate on who to blame, and besides Mirela had had an interesting thought. A thought that just might save her.
“I won't stay for food,” she said, plucking at Anca's sleeve to remind her she still existed. “But thank you for dealing well with us this week.” Anca had been motherly with all three of them, as their bruises healed and the sallow marks of hunger and terror faded from their faces. As they had been washed and fattened up and made beautiful like prize ewes at a fair. She had no fondness for the woman, but little resentment either. Pity mostly, and contempt. “Show me out to the courtyard?”
Anca's smile was a timid little thing, wary as a woodmouse. She took Mirela by the elbow and led her through pantries and boot room to the outer door, opened it upon darkness. Distantly Mirela could hear the horses snorting in their stables and someone, even now, so far lost to her existence and the threat against her as to be laughing.
“I am sorry.”
Mirela grinned, because she had an idea in her hand, and that was all she needed to change the hunt from nightmare to challenge, to change the risk into a game. “I'm not dead yet.”
The door closed behind her with indecent speed. She guessed Anca did not want to risk witnessing what would happen if they caught her here. But she was glad of it. Waiting a moment for her eyes to adapt to the darkness, she picked out a candle-lantern burning in the stables. The dim light of it showed her the cell-like stalls, the bulks of hay, harnesses, plows and wagons. And the horses, of course, sidling in their confinement with white around their eyes and their ears flicking forward and back.
A cold night, and she was wearing finest lawn, so white it glimmered even under starlight. She let her skin return to its own native brown, her hair darken to black, changed the color of the dress to dark blue. Already infinitely harder to see, she hunkered down to look more dog-like in shape, waited for the poor sparse guard to pass, then loped over the empty courtyard and pressed herself into the closest horse's stall.
The animals gave her a comfort the gadje never could, solid and honest and understandable as they were. This was a lady's palfrey, an old and gentle beast whose color she could not tell in the brown light, but whose legs were socked to the knee with something paler, and whose eyes, framed by white lashes, looked blue. You'll do, Mirela thought fondly, and hopped up on her back, legs astride. Leaning down, she rubbed herself - her scent - all over the horse's back from shoulders to withers. It angled an ear at her inquiringly, but calmed under the contact, and she whispered thanks to it for what it was about to do.
When she slid down again, she lay in the gutter beneath the back wall of the stall and rolled to spread horse-muck and piss all over herself. There. Now she smelled like a horse and the horse smelled as though it had an enterprising horse-thief perched on its broad back. Lifting the gate from the stall, she encouraged the beast out into the courtyard with a gentle clucking and a hand in its mane. No one patrolled the walls, nor stood in the archway out from the castle's great entrance. The portcullis remained up and the bridge down. Who would want to invade, after all, a place that could so easily bite back?
There were stories of those who had. Whole villages, sometimes, treading up the serenely undefended path with torches and indignation. Fleeing– those who made it back – with minds overcome by fear and bodies that sickened over the oncoming months. Villages that had to be burnt to the ground afterward, their ruins seeded with salt.
The strigoi put no barriers between themselves and those who wished to visit. Normally the thought would fill her with an uneasy horror. Tonight it would work in her favor.
She lead the horse, hiding in its shadow, subsumed in its smell, out of the castle's courtyards to where it could see the long descent to fields ripe with juicy grasses. The horse sniffed the air, strained forward, and she let it go, out of the walls, out of the doors, out and away where anyone might expect a fleeing girl to head. Then Mirela, keeping to shadows and muddy places, dashed back to the keep itself and up to the main doors.
These were shut against damp and wind, but a guard lounged on either side, in the kind of waking stupor that comes with the attempt to stay alert all night when nothing at all is happening. Mirela had seen the one on the left before at a wedding, when her clan were asked to dance and sing for the bride. Fortune smiled on her. She'd been quite prepared to go in looking like herself – a slave looking for employment at the master's home? Nothing strange about that. But now she rummaged through her memories, found a cousin of his. Name? No, she couldn't recall. But she remembered well enough the unruly wiry hair and weak chin, the good cloth of her red skirts. The blue waistcoat, the slightly gormless look.
When she trudged up the steps towards him, into the light of the fire-basket that burnt above the door, she still smelled like a horse. But she looked like a completely different person.
“Crina?!” he exclaimed, straightening up with shock. Across the way, his partner too shook off apathy and gave her a look half outraged, half concerned. “What are you doing here? It's not safe.”
“I didn't mean to come in the dark,” she said, thinking quickly. “The horse fell – fell on me,” so don't ask me why I smell like this “– and ran off. I had to walk. Please let me in before...”
“It's no safer in here. You know that. You should be indoors.”
“I'm trying to be!”
“At home I mean. Why are you...”
A sensation as though the air had sucked bac
kwards out of their mouths, as though something was trying to pluck the soul out of her nostrils using frozen wire. The other guard looked up, his eyes as white rimmed as any horse's. “Petre, argue inside. Let her in.”
They cracked the door a little open. Petre pushed her through, making her stumble. She caught a brief glimpse of mist like powdered moonstone writhing out of the distant kitchen doorway. It raised its front end like a serpent testing the air, floated towards the stable. Mirela knew she shouldn't hold her breath – there was no reason to, it would make no difference – but it felt as though she would die if she ever inhaled again. A shiver of killing cold began beneath her breastbone and threatened to shake her skeleton apart.
The mist reached the stable and disappeared inside. Petre shut the door, silently, quickly. “What are you doing here?”
“I c-came for a job. Because... because they don't... they don't touch the servants. I thought I'd be safer here than anywhere.”
Mirela didn't remember how Petre's cousin spoke, but fear seemed universal, her shaky, high pitched babble could have been anyone's. He looked at her for a moment, blank eyed, and she had the sudden intense fear that he was another one like Vacarescu – who had somehow seen her for what she was when even the strigoi themselves had been fooled. But then he shook himself and said “Yes. Yes, quick. Kitchens. Before it comes back.”
So for the second time in as many hours she found herself down in the servants' domain. The cook looked at her intently, this time, though it may have been partially because she didn't wish to watch as the gardener and head groom went tramping up the stairs with a stretcher between them, came back down bearing a body.
It gave Mirela no feeling of triumph at all to turn her head and see the first girl...did she ever learn her name?...as limp and white as her dress, but for a small splash of red just above the heart.
