by Alex Oliver
A hand-clap smacked sharp next to her ear. She looked back at the cook, and didn't trouble to pretend she wasn't on the edge of throwing up. “What? That was... Is she...?”
Cook suited her job, a round, pallid woman flabby as an unbaked loaf. By the flaccid look to her jowls she must once have been even fatter. “She's nothing to do with you or me,” Cook said firmly. “What the folk upstairs do with themselves is none of our concern. But it so happens I do have a place you might fill. I expect you to work hard, not to complain, to scrub the stink of horse off you, and to be as virtuous as you would in your mother's house. I don't think I need to tell you what will happen if you prove unsatisfactory. Do not run that risk.”
It was going to be tough to keep this disguise up for any length of time. Petre would eventually get leave to visit his family, find out that his cousin had never been near the castle, and come looking for the impostor. That could not be helped. For now, she was happy to scrub the stables off her and savor the feeling of being safe, and more than that, of having won.
She had no time to fret over anything else. Tomorrow could worry about itself, and when it came, she would deal with it as she had dealt with this. She was Mirela Badi, and in a contest between herself and the world, the world had better watch out.
Chapter Five
In which, despite the Marvels of the Vril Accumulator, Frank's situation materially worsens.
∞∞∞
Frank’s door slammed open, and a woman's voice cursed beneath its breath as she tried to catch it with her foot before it struck the wall.
Frank watched curiously as a new chambermaid bustled through the gap, her arms burdened with three logs and a sack of coal. She stopped with a start as she looked down on him and her stare pulled him out of the melancholy into which he had been descending over the past weeks. This was the first person not of the family to look him in the eyes since he had come here. Like touching the coldest ice, he didn't know if it froze or burned, but it certainly woke him up.
“You!” she dropped the fuel with a clatter. “I thought he'd had you long ago.”
This was not at all appropriate behavior for a chambermaid. Frank felt quite dizzy with something very like relief.
The maid stooped and put the logs in the log basket, tipped some coal on the fire, some in the bucket. “He can't have turned you,” she said as if to herself, “because it's still light outside. Did you take service with him? You did, didn't you? Damn. I shouldn't have—”
“Wait!” Frank interrupted her before she could work herself into hysteria. She jabbed him with a pointy look for his raised hand, but fell silent. “Who are you? What are you talking about?”
“Of course, you don't know.” She laughed, with a small twist of condescension about her lips that Frank would have resented if he hadn't felt he deserved it so much. “It's probably best if we keep it that way.” Her voice sweetened and softened – an actress taking on a new role. “Forgive me, sir. I—”
“No, you don't!” Frank interrupted her as she was heading for the door, caught her wrist. Cold, and wider in his hand than it looked. Curious. But curiosity couldn't keep down the wild panic that was the other side of his relief. She couldn't look at him as though he was a real person and then just go away and leave him to his doubts. “Please stay and tell me what you mean. I am a stranger here. I don't know anything and I'm so... so lost. Don't just leave me here alone again. Please.”
She stood a moment, thinking. An utterly unexceptional young woman with curly brown hair beneath a peasant headscarf. The kind of local color he would have passed by without thought in his old life. Then she smiled and closed the door. Hunting through the fire basket for the smaller pieces at the bottom, she wedged an off-cut of ash into the hinges. Only then did she turn around and, shimmering like heat over water, turn into someone else.
Frank didn't recognize this woman either for a moment, mislead by the color-scheme. But the once white shift was the same – somewhat stained now, but still cinched at the waist with a belt stitched with little seed-pearls. Her stature was the same, tall, Amazonian, indomitable. Her features looked different now the skin was darker, with dark eyes, the tumbling hair black rather than flaxen, but they weren't. It took him a while to see it, but they weren't. “Mirela?”
He covered his mouth to keep in the cry of joy, but it escaped around the edges in the form of a laugh. “You're safe? Thank God, I thought...” He gestured at her, trying to encompass the change, crown to sole. “How?”
She hesitated again, then sank to the chair as if the explanation was to be a long one. Frank settled on the edge of his bed to listen. “The changing?” she shrugged. “I found out I could do that about ten years ago. That was when many of my clan began to be able to do small things – when the fortune tellers began to speak true. I don't know more than that. I woke up one day and knew I could. That's all.”
Frank looked at his hands, remembered grasping light and darkness in them as if they were swatches of silk and velvet, materials he could caress and hold, draw around himself at will. “I can do something equally unbelievable myself,” he confessed. “Though I only discovered it a month ago.”
“It hasn't made you strong.”
Frank laughed again, astonished at her insolence, and oddly pleased. Never had he more appreciated straightforwardness than after this week of doubt. “No. I doubt if anything could. But tell me what happened after I left you. I thought you'd got away.”
“They speak in thought to one another, the strigoi,” she walked envious fingers up the teeth of the comb he had been given, laid out on the desk along with shaving gear, pitcher and ewer.
“Strigoi?” Frank had heard the word many times, but none of his conversational partners had had the linguistic pedantry to define it to his satisfaction. 'Evil spirit' was his best guess. “The thing that attacked us? Wait, there's more than one?”
Perhaps because he had not rebuked her for touching the comb, she now picked it up and began unsnarling the tangles of her hair. “You really don't know anything, do you?” she said, half pitying and, he thought, half-pleased to be able to talk down to him. He found it an unexpected benefit of having forgotten most of his life, that he had no pride left to wound.
“Nothing. Please tell me what that thing was, and everything you know about it.”
With one side of her hair tended, bouncing into large, loose curls, she started on the other. “A strigoi is the spirit of an evil person. When the person first dies, the spirit is a mist, as all spirits are. But this one is too afraid of judgment to leave this earth. It slips back, instead, into the body it used to have. It cannot stop that body from decaying in the way of all flesh, but by drinking the blood of living men it can slowly build itself a new one – a better one. All day it sleeps in the grave. All night it is like the plague. It hunts by smell, it slays whoever it wills, and those it kills return as strigoi themselves. Just as the bite of a mad dog passes on madness, the bite of a strigoi passes on its evil.”
“A ghost that drinks blood?” Frank's back chilled. He twitched his shoulders to dislodge the prickly feeling of a cold gaze resting there, and winced at the ache. “And can become solid when it pleases?”
“Yes. When it is hungry it bites above the heart and pierces it, drinks you down fast. When it's playing it bites you above the eyes and drains you slowly from the top down.”
Frank felt inclined to say 'what nonsense!' but recognized that his fatuous faith in an enlightened world where these things did not happen was thoroughly disproved. “And that's what Vacarescu is?”
“Mm.”
Odd, how deep the sense of betrayal went. Surely this was no more than he had suspected himself. When had he begun secretly been hoping for something else? Then he stumbled back into clear thought. “Wait, though. You said they sleep in the day? I've seen Vacarescu in the day. Riding around.” He waved a hand at the window in illustration. “Out doing things.”
Mirela had given up on her at
tempt to plait her unruly hair – the plaits would keep springing apart at the end the moment she let go of them. Bold as brass, she was now rummaging in the clothes chest at the foot of Frank's bed, but she looked up in confusion when he said this. “Constantin Vacarescu?
Frank could have kicked himself. Could only hope that his idiotic slowness was the lingering result of head-injury and not his natural state. Of course! “No. No, the young one. Radu.”
“He's just a lackey,” she said, dismissively, coming up with the trousers and long shirt Frank had been wearing when he was rescued. They had been laundered and put away carefully, even though Alaya had been horrified at the thought of a gentleman of his caliber ever wearing such lowly garments again. “Thinks he's in charge, but it's they who are the true power. Constantin and his wife. May I have these?”
“Take them. His wife...?” Frank's head was still more than half hollowed out by forgetting, and it was true that a lingering headache made thoughts hard to string together. But really, when had he seen any other noblewoman in this household? 'Your mother and I,' Constantin had said, and she had been sitting there, sewing, with that look of ancient serenity on her child's face. “Not Alaya?” But of course it would be Alaya, whom he had never seen except at night. The little gilded porcelain doll with the gentle eyes.
“Yes,” Mirela pulled the shirt on over her shift. It came down to her knees, like an overdress, and she sighed, rubbing her hands together as if to get some warmth into them. “It was she who captured me the night we met. I thought for sure I was dead, but instead she wanted to make a daughter in law of me. I didn't expect that!”
Possibly some part of Frank had already known this. Looking back, he remembered Radu Vacarescu slumped in exhausted sleep on the end of his bed after trying to stay awake all night and all day too for a week. Silently, stubbornly and without any thanks from Frank, he had been trying to protect his guest from the monster in his house. Not a lackey, Frank thought, fiercely defensive, and felt no surprise at his sudden sea change of emotion. This made sense, and it was joy he felt at last, joy at finally having firm ground under his feet. Now perhaps he could stand up and begin to act.
“Would you have married him?” he asked, perhaps idly.
“Of course!” Mirela grinned at him, in the act of pulling on the trousers under her other layers. “And I would have found a way to kill the strigoi for good. Then my sons would be boyars, and my daughters would marry princes.” She laughed. “Can you imagine that? I would come back dressed in cloth of gold and make the village that once owned me kneel down at my dirty gypsy feet.”
Frank smiled at her vehemence. She made him feel braver, just being there, fierce and undaunted and irrepressible.
“But he didn't think I was good enough for him,” she finished, hard mouthed, with her head bent as she tied his unwanted green sash around it for a scarf.
“Then he's a fool,” said Frank, honestly enough. “I don't think they would really have let him, in any case. That wasn't about you. It was about them trying to get him to move them to Bucharest, and him refusing—Why can’t they just go on their own, by the way?”
“I don't know. I don't know why they can't make him do what they want with mind control. That's how they get around everyone else. But if they can't control him with their wills, then in the day time they must be vulnerable to him. Perhaps if they went alone he would follow and bring them back? I don't know. The only important thing for me is that they have sworn not to touch their own servants. So now I'm a maid here and I'm safe. What keeps them from eating you?”
Long nights of resentful card games, the young lord not leaving until dawn. But what had stopped Alaya that first time, when he woke to find her peering at him, her face close above his, her mouth half open and her eyes wide with fascination? “Maybe they like the thrill of the chase?” Unsettling thought. “Maybe they're just waiting until I can give them a better run?”
“They are cruel,” she agreed, her face clouding over as though she spoke from recent memory. “And you're right. They like to give their prey a head start. Though sometimes that doesn't work for them so well.”
She wriggled the wooden wedge out of the door, and as she did so she was abruptly a different woman – a much less fantastically dressed one. All the new courage on which he had been congratulating himself seemed to run out of Frank's hands. “You're not leaving?”
“I have work to do. Fires to rake and make.”
“You'll come back?” He offered her his most charming, most helpless smile. It worked, as it so often did.
“Oh, if you wish.”
“And then we'll work out how to kill them. Together. We'll put a proper end to all of this.”
Mirela opened the door and checked the emptiness of the passageway beyond before she returned to pick up her sack of coal. Her smile did not look as twisted or as harsh on her new face as it would on her old. “It is plain to see you are a foreigner. Or you would not assume so quickly that no one else has ever tried. If it was that easy, do you not think it would already be done?”
She shook her head and, stepping out of the room, closed the door behind her.
Frank tried to wind himself up to heroic action, couldn't seem to find the spring. He wrestled his tall boots on and stood. If his time to act was running down, and he was increasingly convinced he was no hero who could slay the monster and rescue the princess himself, perhaps what he needed was to find himself a champion who could.
The sound of cutlery on china plates, incongruously mundane in this medieval castle, drew Frank to a small dining room. There he found the housekeeper, supervising two of the maids as they cleared the remains of a light lunch from the board.
“Oh,” she smiled. “Master Frank. I didn't know you were up. Please have a seat, and Oana will bring you some breakfast.”
“Feeding me up for them?” Frank joked, and regretted it when the matronly woman flinched. This was no more her fault than it was his.
“I'm doing what I can to make your stay a pleasant one while it lasts,” Anca said with some dignity. She buried her hands in her apron and twisted it as though she were breaking the neck of the Christmas goose. “What else can I do?”
“I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. I just...” He intercepted some of the serving dishes before they made it off the table and ate a swift, patchwork meal of sarmales, brânzoaice and small beer. “I have just become aware of my situation. I didn't mean to take it out on you. I hope you'll accept my apology.”
Her laugh sounded as though he had managed to hurt her again in the same place, but she only patted down her skirts and waited until he was done before clearing his plate away. “Of course, sir. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“I would welcome coffee. And a chance to talk to your lord. Do you know where he is?”
“In the library, sir. Oana will guide you, and I'll bring the coffee up to you both.”
The weather had cleared as he ate. Frank found himself ducking down - the library's door was made for an older time, when people must have been both thinner and shorter - and coming through into a place a little like a church, lit brightly by sunlight. It was wood paneled, like all the rooms he had seen so far, but the paneling was covered in curlicues painted in a thousand medieval devices. Little oddities lurked among the shelves. As he walked through a shaft of rainbow light, from a window depicting some biblical scene in which all the players looked like Cossack horsemen, his fingers trailed over carvings. Here a man curled up tight, laughing fit to burst his belly, next a field mouse, poking an inquiring nose out of the sound-hole of a stringless lute.
The books themselves nestled among the painted and sculpted exuberance as if - as must indeed be the case - it had been made for them. Bindings of gilded leather and fine cloth, embroidered with tiny stitches. Better than that, along one high shelf a dozen yards of ancient folded palimpsests, no backs on them, so the stitched folds of the spine were visible between boards heavy with clumsy j
ewels. Above that, where one needed a stepladder to reach, the shelves had been turned into deep alcoves, and each one was haphazardly stuffed with scrolls.
Frank had not yet remembered, beyond 'scholar', what it was he had been intending to do with his life, but at the sight of the library, of all those books, something in him took flight for joy. He read the nearest titles. Frowned, peering at the nearby shelves. Not alphabetically ordered. Nor by subject. Was there...?
A large volume was set up on a reading stand in the center of this first room. An index of some sort, he thought, trying to work out the scheme by which the collection was organized. Each bookshelf bore a coat of arms on the top, bright with color and rampant with fierce animals. Perhaps...? But no, there was no reference to the blazons in the index, nor did the shelves seem to be numbered. As for the scrolls, he wasn't sure they were recorded in this book at all.
He was evening up a gap on the bookshelf closest to the door, sliding a taller volume out of the center and replacing it next to brothers of its own size, when the housekeeper reappeared in a scent of cinnamon and bitterness, with a coffee pot on a silver tray and a slightly more genuine smile.
At this reminder, Frank's delight faded enough to allow him to remember he had not come here simply to explore the library, but oh, that was a bonus. All these books! "This is wonderful. No wonder he doesn't want to leave."
"Have you got no further than the anteroom?"
"There's more?"
"Follow me."
At the far end of the room a bookshelf had been built out from the right hand wall in such a way as to look like part of the far wall. When she passed it, the optical illusion was broken and he saw there was a space between the two, just wide enough for a short passage and another of those narrow doors. Grinning, Frank followed through a gray oak portal, ancient and studded with nails, set into a doorway that pierced a wall so thick it felt like a passage. On the other side, three deeply worn steps brought him to a floor as crazily humped and warped as a sea-serpent's back.
