“You don’t know much about the Roma, do you?” she mocked. “Didn’t you ever wonder, Grandmother, when you sent a witch to be eaten by the strigoi, which one would win? Maybe she will eat them? Maybe she will be the next one to rule.”
The old woman’s gape of horror followed her away, like a blessing.
The following week, Mirela finished her work by the late afternoon so she could spend the remaining hours of daylight mastering the layout of the castle. She began to cultivate friendships among the servants so she could gossip about the doings of the family without seeming overly suspicious.
They came up, Anca said. Not always—sometimes, when the light outside fell, they were simply there, as if they’d drifted in on the air and coalesced around a dust mote. But sometimes, when they were feeling particularly full of grandeur and pomp, they would walk hand in hand up the old wooden steps that rose from the cellars in the oldest part of the house.
Those particular stairs abutted the kitchen, because the cellars were used for storage of wine and cheeses, hams and sausages. The kitchen maids ran down them and up again squeaking like mice, arriving back in a swelter of fear sweat. It was understood that whoever had to go into the cellars was entitled to half an hour in the sun afterwards, to sit and calm their nerves with tea or ţuică depending on sex and preference.
One took a candle lantern, because it was always dark down there. “And you can feel them,” said Cook when Mirela had unbent her enough to get her to talk. “Like they were inside the dark, if you know what I mean. Like it was full of their eyes.”
“Where do they lie?”
“I don’t know, do I? No one who knows what’s good for them goes beyond the stores. Somewhere down there, that’s all.”
“If you could kill them,” Mirela asked, goaded by Cook’s warning look. “Would you?”
Cook had laughed and thrown the dough she was kneading back into its mixing basin as though she were tossing a severed head. “Maybe I would. But you can’t, girl. You’re welcome to try, but you can’t.”
Given permission, Mirela found a sharpened stake and mallet from the garden, put them in a produce basket covered with a linen cloth, took a candle lantern from the shelf, and lit it with a spill from the kitchen range. A deep breath, Cook scoffing behind her, and she pushed open the cellar stairs and hurried down.
Her candle made a bubble of light around her, but beyond it the dark seemed a solid thing, and she moved as though she had to muscle through it as coiled strings of salami brushed her hair from above like entrails.
Already she could feel the pressure the kitchen maids had spoken about—the constant awareness that something down here knew she had invaded its domain, was watching with malice to see what she would do next. The feeling grew stronger with every step away from the stairs, until she was fighting her own terror for each inch.
She couldn’t do this. She wanted to run away. She couldn’t do this—it wasn’t up to her to do it. This was the job of a hero, not a housemaid. She couldn’t . . .
Her halting steps brought her to the end of the last wine rack. The light showed black dust and cobwebs, a hint of green shine from the final bottle, and a tiny oaken door in the wall ahead.
Narrow and short, made for smaller people, the door had silvered with age. The stone step down to it was worn into a hole by passing feet, and Mirela would rather have cut off her hand than touch the ornate ivy leaf of the latch.
Why did she have to do this anyway? Why couldn’t Văcărescu do it? If he’d seen through her magic, couldn’t he see through this too? Couldn’t he walk down here as though he were walking through a summer meadow? Why was it being left to her?
A dampness between her lips tasted of salt. Oh, she was crying. She wiped the silent seep of misery away with a left hand that shook like a bird’s wing and then bit—bit down on the inside of her cheek. In the distraction of the pain she managed to get her hand on the latch, to turn it, and to stagger through the door.
A larger cellar. This must be directly beneath the kitchens. The sound of footsteps and chatter came down with a steady fall of dust from the wooden ceiling above. Mirela’s small, ineffectual light picked out the curves of the wooden pillars and the bare expanse of stone-flagged floor. The room would have seemed empty if something had not gleamed in the middle of it, but the gleam almost broke her. She jerked back from it in panic and almost ran. Almost ran. Caught herself, with her stomach in her mouth, hammering and aching as if she would only be well again once she’d turned herself inside out.
Her mother was never coming home if she didn’t do this.
She wiped new tears with her sleeve, chewed at the inside of her cheek, and stepped forward again. Once. Twice.
The gleam was a pane of glass set into the floor, several inches thick, smooth and palest green, like ice on a winter pond. A room lay beneath it, brushed clean and painted with a thousand birds, blue and gilt and scarlet. In the centre of the room of painted walls, Constantin and Alaya lay in their coffins, dazzlingly dressed, their hands folded on their breasts, uncovered, and staring upwards through the glass floor. Watching her even as they slept.
She dropped the basket from her arm. The clatter of its falling felt like the falling of empires, catastrophic. But she was already running by then: back through the door, back through the cellars, up the stairs with a speed she didn’t know was in her, out, out into the daylight, to drop her lantern on the ground, grab her knees, and shake and snivel in the first patch of sun as though she had been to the bottom of the sea and back.
“I did tell you,” said Cook, handing her tea as she dragged herself back indoors, the sun having gone below the distant hills. “You’re not the first to try.” She stamped twice sharply on the heavy boards of the floor. “I wonder if they hear us, down there. Maybe they listen to our voices in their dreams, envying us because we’re still alive.”
With strong tea and sugar in her, Mirela had recovered herself enough to take a station at the sink, scouring the dirty bowls from today’s baking. The kitchen door was open to the sunset, letting cool air waft in against the solid heat of the ovens. Golden clouds shone luminous through the high windows, reflecting on the red copper and yellow brass of the hanging pans around the walls.
“They’re right under us now,” she said, with a flutter of horror and a frisson of hope mixed together, shivery as a head rub. “Right under this room.”
Cook rolled her eyes and settled her strong, fat hands on her massive hips. “Oh what, my girl? Leave it at that now. You tried, and you got away with failing. Leave it at that and call yourself lucky.”
The advice was good for the night. Mirela felt too shaken, too watery to try a second time in one day. But as she closed herself into her cupboard for the night, it was with the thought of her uncle Laslo, who used to start fires with nothing more than a little curved piece of glass and the summer sun. The monsters might be made to regret they hadn’t put something safer than glass between themselves and the daylight world.
The following day, after setting the fires, putting out washing water, and slopping out dregs and chamber pots once they had been used, the staff were accustomed to an easy hour before preparations for lunch began. That was when Mirela ran out to the stables and returned with a saw.
“Well, that’s not subtle,” said Cook, leaning back into her place by the inglenook of the fire, with a plate of yesterday’s leftovers at her elbow. She raised her eyebrows at Anca, who stood by the drawing room stairs with her hands over her mouth. “You think we should let her try?”
Anca fidgeted, obviously torn between fleeing and stepping forward to look. It was a mark of how quickly the servants had come together, living under the shared dread, that it no longer occurred to Mirela that any of them would betray her. If this worked, they would all be dancing.
“I have every confidence the gentry will stop her,” said Anca, watching Mirela with a gaze that said, Please. Please just put the bastards down. Let this work, please.
“So there’s no harm in trying.”
With a deep breath, Mirela took the saw in her hand and stepped into the pool of light cast by the middle window, to her estimate, directly over where Alaya lay. She scraped the teeth of the saw in a ragged line across one of the floorboards, and nothing stopped her. Hope rising dizzyingly in her rib cage, she did it again, until she had a groove. Then she leaned on the handle and sawed in earnest. The blade dug in, her hands slipped. It was hard work sawing such seasoned oak planks, but she drove on, her shoulders beginning to ache.
The cut was two inches deep when the blade snagged and refused to go any further. She was through the first board, but between it and the one beneath it was a layer of something dark and springy. She sniffed, and it was pitch—some kind of fabric covered in pitch, sandwiched between the two layers of timber to prevent any light seeping through the cracks of the boards.
But a layer of fabric, pitch or not, should not stop a saw. Furious and frustrated, she jumped up and down, putting her whole weight on the saw handle. She might as well have tried to move the Earth.
“You’ve stopped trying, then?” Cook spoke up when she had worked herself into exhaustion. “Decided it’s not worth it after all?”
“I’ve been trying!” Mirela seethed, hot and puffed out, shaky in the legs yet again.
“You’ve just been standing there for the last quarter of an hour,” Anca told her gently, “staring into space.”
“I haven’t!” Mirela was furious now and sick. Hadn’t they seen her struggling? Why hadn’t they seen her struggling?
“Maybe that’s what you think.” Cook gave a bitter twist of a smile. “But that ain’t what happened. You’ve been standing there doing nothing.” She sighed and turned back to her pastries. “They got in your head and they stopped you.”
Anca brushed her skirts down, obviously trying not to look disappointed. “I knew they would. Now put that down and come help me lay the servants’ table for luncheon.”
Mirela’s fury curdled and blackened inside her, compressing down into something airless and long-lasting.
Fine, she thought. She’d have to rethink. Maybe one day she’d find something incriminating she could use to force Radu Văcărescu into killing his demons for her?
And maybe that would mean Frank would be recovered enough to be prey before she finally succeeded, but that was fine too. She wasn’t his protector. He could look after himself, the way she was having to. She was cunning and patient. She could wait.
Having spent the day awake, Frank tried to snatch a few hours of sleep before nightfall, but he had scarcely lain down before his door eased slowly open. Silk brushed against the floor outside. All of Frank’s thoughts focussed suddenly into fear as he scrabbled up to sitting, his back against the iron rungs of his headboard.
Alaya still smelled of sour earth and too much perfume, and he didn’t know how he had managed to miss the implication of that before. How had he ever mistaken her graceful glide into the room, skirts dragging and rustling around her, for something human? Now he knew . . . Now that he knew, he could see that unless she spoke, her many ropes of pearls did not stir with her breathing, that no kind of youth or beauty could make a woman’s skin so silvery-pale as hers, or her eyes so huge and luminous.
She had brought her sewing basket with her, as always, and her face was bright and innocent as ever. But at the sight of his defensive huddle in the corner, of the fear on his face he hadn’t thought to conceal, she put down both occupation and disguise and licked her lips.
“Dear Frank,” she laughed—still the little girlish giggle of before, while her smile stretched into an eerie sickle of delight, “are you afraid of me?”
“Yes.”
“Who’s been telling you tales?” A sweet voice and a pretty pout, but her eyes full of the same smug and predatory amusement he had seen from the demon on the riverbank. It occurred to him that there had been a chance to keep playing along, to keep her acting the role of dutiful daughter, and he had royally fumbled it.
That didn’t mean he needed to take Mirela with him. “Nobody. I was outside the room when you and Constantin were talking to Radu. I worked it out.”
“I thought I smelled someone out there,” she agreed, and it would have been a beautiful smile if there were not something subtly wrong with it, and it were not on the face of a dead girl dragged from her untimely grave by malice and the powers of Hell. “Oh well, this farce always had to end at some point.”
She drifted closer, carefully, as if not to spook him. His back was already to the wall, and he could go no farther that way, so he scrambled out of bed—he’d done no more than take off coat and shoes before turning in—and tried to edge around her until he could make a dash for the door.
“Would you like to run, Frank? I prefer it when they run. Because you’re wounded, I’ll count to ten, if you like. That would be fair, wouldn’t it? That would make it lots of fun.”
He wished he had quizzed Mirela more thoroughly about exactly what the strigoi could do, wondered if he faced only a girl’s strength or something far greater. Instinct told him to run until his heart burst, but it would mean brushing past her, touching her. Even fleetingly that was not something he wanted to do.
“I’m not interested in making this fun for you.” He soothed his mind enough to reach out for the memory of sunshine. If he could summon that dazzling blaze of light again, maybe he could drive her off, even injure her. Could he kill her with it? Though he was perhaps a murderer, he still revolted from the thought.
His hands tingled with the beginnings of power. He could feel where sunlight still rested, halfway across the world. Searching deeper inside himself, detached from this single moment, his thoughts went inwards to the place where everything welled up, available to the mind out of time. Sunlight—it never truly went out. He closed his hands, began to pull it towards him.
Alaya stepped closer, her angelic face creased with sharp suspicion. “What are you doing?”
He felt something gentle touch the edges of his thoughts, something grey, misty, and slick. It flinched back as Alaya’s mouth opened in shock. Her eyes widened to match. And then her expression slammed shut again, ugly as it had been when they argued about Bucharest. “Frank, that’s cheating.”
He had time to feel smug. Just one flicker of bright, uncomplicated triumph, clear as the light in his head. And then she stopped him. She reached out with her mind and closed it around his as if she had closed iron manacles around his wrists. The grey, greasy feeling of her mind tightened about his as she pried her mental fingers into his defences. His focus wavered. He scrabbled after it, but she got her tendrils into the gaps and tore it into pieces.
For a moment he was so little in control of his own body he couldn’t remember how to breathe. She could have stopped his heart with a thought, could have made him placid, resigned, even willing. But she chose to leave him breathless with panic. It didn’t matter that running was what she wanted from him, running was all he could think of. It didn’t matter that if she was anything like Constantin she would keep pace effortlessly in a cloud of pale smoke.
Nothing mattered. He had to get away. Alaya smiled and leaned forward to kiss his forehead. Blood dripped into his eyes when she pulled back. The muscles of his legs screamed to run, but he couldn’t, pinned through the chest by her will.
“There are some who can resist them,” Mirela’s warning echoed in his head, “but I’ve never met one.” He had ignored it unthinkingly, because obviously a natural born Englishman would do better than any amount of foreigners, that went without saying.
Shame at his own pride and presumption joined his terror. As if that was exactly what she’d been waiting for, Alaya stepped aside, giving him a clear path to the open door. The mental bonds fell from his limbs like rubber shattering under cold, and Frank took in a desperate gasp of air and bolted like prey.
Frank tore out of the door, down the corridor, his new boots thudding against the floo
rboards with a thud as fast as his heart. His mind came back enough to jabber to him that he didn’t know where to go. Out to the entrance hall and then into the forest? He had barely escaped that last time. He caught himself on the corner of the main staircase—not there. Not out into the night.
The girls had come and gone from the sitting room some other way. There must be a back entrance going down into the kitchen or the servants’ quarters. Would Alaya murder him in front of the servants? Surely they wouldn’t stay here if they’d ever seen such a thing?
He almost bolted past the door to the sitting room, but flung out a hand and caught the edge of the lintel, used it to spin him into the room, slammed the door and braced his back against it. His wild eyes fell on a wide bar of iron propped up behind it, and he coughed a laugh, snatched it up, and barred the door with sweat-cold hands.
There was a laugh on the other side of the door, sweetly girlish, and then mist began to curl through the keyhole and seep through the cracks around the hinges and underneath.
“No!” Frank ripped away the curtain that concealed the other door and bolted through. This, too, he tried to secure behind him, but it had no bar or lock, so he only shut it and ran out onto the landing. Narrow stairs, too cramped to go fast, and a larger flight to his right. He turned onto them, bolted down past symmetrical displays of weapons, stars of pistols and pikes. There must be a chapel somewhere, mustn’t there? There would be in an ancient house in England. Somewhere for the family to pray when it was simply too much effort to go out of doors.
There must be a chapel. He could hide under the altar. Mirela said they hunted by smell? He could smoke himself with frankincense and attar of roses and cower beneath the altar and hope . . .
He threw open the next door—a gentleman’s study, brown with smoke, lined with more books. A suit of armour on a stand in the corner. Bizarre helmet and a jacket with wings spreading from the back. Not that way. But there was a smaller door out of this room, and it opened as he hesitated. He had time to see a music room beyond—harpsichord and harp, some odd zither-like instrument flat on a table, a footman holding open the door, his many-coloured uniform inappropriately gay in this moment of terror.
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