“I didn’t mean to tell you,” Val said. “I only came to warn you of Mehmet’s plans to take your brother’s city.”
“He can’t take the city. No one can breach its walls.” Dismissive, certain. “But you…” His eyes widened. “Val, does he know you can do this? That you can visit someone outside of the palace this way?”
“No.”
“You mustn’t tell him. You would be punished.” He looked like he wanted to say more, but cut off, visibly biting back the words. “Val,” he said, helplessly, “I’m sorry.”
“I know, you’ve said.” Val scraped up a smile. “Thank you, but I’ll be alright.”
They stared at one another a long moment, the despot clearly at a loss.
“I should return,” Val said at last. “May – may I still visit you? When I’m able?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you.” Val shut his eyes and slipped away. When he opened them again, it was to the darkness of Mehmet’s bedchamber.
The sultan still snored behind him.
Val lie awake for a long time, silent tears soaking his pillow.
23
THE GUILT AND THE GRIEF
December, 1447
Word had come the summer before that Wallachia had signed a new treaty with the Ottomans, and that the brothers had been officially spared. Murat had been the one to inform Vlad, brought before the old sultan while the new one stood off to the side, lip curled in derision, trying and failing to catch Vlad’s gaze. Vlad paid him no mind; he knew what everyone at court knew: that Mehmet was merely a figurehead at this point in time. He could give commands, and storm his way through the palace, shouting at slaves and commandeering women and boys of his choosing, but Murat was the real power behind the empire now, as he’d been before. The only true influence Mehmet practiced was that acted out in his bedchamber, and that he did, according to gossip, frequently and wildly.
Vlad tried – and often failed – not to think of his little brother. He caught glimpses of him, sometimes, though he tried not to. Val was growing tall, and willowy; waif-like at certain angles, with his sheets of rippling golden hair and delicate features. But some glimpses hinted at the steel edges beneath his porcelain veneer. He shared Vlad’s blood, after all. There was a warrior in there, under his pretty façade. One that would no doubt never be allowed to see the light of day, dripping in fine silks and even finer jewels, his blue eyes smudged with kohl at Mehmet’s pleasure.
The guilt and the grief would cripple Vlad if he allowed himself to feel them keenly. And so he tamped it all down, buried it deep. But he let the hatred fester. He trained, and he studied, and he crafted himself into the perfect knight; into an avenging warrior with his sights set on only one prize. And the hatred kept festering, kept growing. He hated everyone; it was a hatred that lived within him day and night, galvanizing him.
And then.
December arrived.
And with it…word from home.
Vlad was in the training yard, breath pluming like smoke in the chill, his opponent flat in the dirt, when a messenger came for him. “The sultan wants an audience.”
He didn’t bother cleaning himself. He went, sweaty and dusty, to Murat’s audience chamber.
The former sultan was alone, save a single witness. A vizier, of some sort. Vlad didn’t care to know the man’s name. He observed only the barest courtesies, half-bowing, and then waiting, hands clenched into fists at his sides.
Murat made him wait a long moment, though a speculative light came into his eyes, his head tilting to the side. Then he turned to his underling and murmured something behind his hand. The man bowed and then rushed out of the room. He returned a moment later leading…
Leading a Romanian noble. A boyar, dressed in traditional garb, dusty and filthy from the road, mustache more gray than brown, hairline receding. His gaze fell on Vlad with intent, and after a moment’s staring, Vlad realized he recognized him as one of the nobles most loyal to his father. His former chancellor.
“Cazan,” he said on a gasp.
“Your grace.” The boyar came to stand before Vlad and went to one knee. He carried a bundle under his arm: a long, narrow shape that was obviously a sword, wrapped in layers of cloth. With bent head, the man said, “I come – I come with – with terrible news.” His voice was shattered. When he lifted his head again, Vlad saw the lines of strain and exhaustion on it, the dirt caked into the creases. He hadn’t even bothered to wash himself before requesting an audience.
Vlad had lived in a state of numb fury for so long – and now, suddenly, his heart lurched and his palms began to sweat. “What news?”
“Your father. And your brother,” Cazan said haltingly. His eyes shone with checked tears. “They are dead.”
Vlad let the words fall over him. Took them in, processed them. Dead. Father and Mircea. And Father a vampire. Father, who was Remus…purported dead before. Perhaps he…
“How?” he asked, and he could hear the calmness in his voice, could watch Cazan startle in response to it.
Cazan gathered himself a moment, through a series of deep breaths.
“I need to know all of it,” Vlad prompted. “Everything that happened.” So he could make sense of it.
“Perhaps,” Murat suggested, “your friend would like to refresh himself first.”
“No,” Cazan said, “no. I am fine.”
But a slave did bring a folding chair, and he settled into his gratefully. Vlad had to catch his arm and guide him to his seat when his legs wobbled and gave out.
“Your grace,” he said when he could, panting. “It began with John Hunyadi.”
The resentment, and the scheming, had begun, Cazan presumed, during the war council at Dobriya the summer before. The White Knight of Hungary was detained; Mircea had blamed him, personally, for the devastating battlefield losses of the Christian causes. He’d argued for Hunyadi’s arrest, trial, and execution. The rest of the council had disagreed, and let him go, but Hunyadi left that council nursing a massive grudge against House Dracul.
A grudge that sharpened his ambitions of leadership to something barbed and weaponized. He wanted the Hungarian throne for himself, and to get it, he needed an ally in Wallachia – one he wouldn’t find in Dracul, and his son and heir, Mircea. And so he backed Vladislav II of the Dâneşti clan, at the time living in Brasov. And he launched a blistering propaganda campaign against Vlad Dracul.
“They met together last month,” Cazan said, face flushed with high emotion. “Hunyadi crossed the Carpathians. He was headed for Tîrgovişte!”
“Did my father close the gates to him?”
“Yes, of course. But.” He winced. “There was a revolt amongst the boyars.”
“Which boyars?”
“Those aligned with the Dâneşti. It was – it was most of them, your grace. Your father and brother were not in the palace at the time. They had some of their most trusted guards with them, but…”
The wolves. Their faces flashed through Vlad’s mind: Cicero, Caesar, Ioan, Vasile. Fenrir would have been with Mother, in the palace; he was her wolf.
“Your father,” Cazan continued, “told me that he and your brother Mircea were separated in the melee. He lost sight of him, but, one of his guards was able to help him get away…and he ran to me.
“He was scratched and bleeding, his clothes torn. I could tell he’d been running through the forest on foot. And his eyes – they were wild, like a spooked horse. Something terrible had happened, I knew. His grace gave me two tokens, and he told me to get them to you, through whatever means necessary. ‘Should anything happen to Mircea,’ he said, ‘then Wallachia belongs to Vlad.’” Cazan took another series of breaths, blinking against tears. “He told me what had happened in Tîrgovişte, and I begged him to allow me to hide him. I have an old cellar beneath the stables; no one could have found him! But he would not risk my safety, he said. All of the Wallachian nobility had turned against him. And so he fled again, through the for
ests.
“I could not leave him to make his way on his own, though. I gathered some of my men – my best fighters – and we followed. He’d left a path of footprints in the soft earth, and broken branches to mark the way.
“We caught up to him. But…” He shuddered, and closed his eyes.
Vlad wanted to shake him. Just say it!
“Your grace.” The man’s voice cracked. “The enemy was upon him, men in Vladislav’s armor. They had a hunting hound with them, something massive and hairy – it looked like a wolf! And…and…
“What?”
“They had cut his heart from his body. One of the soldiers held it. It steamed, fresh and hot. It…” He choked a moment, coughs that tried to disguise sobs.
Vlad didn’t care. Someone could have swung a sword at his neck, and he wouldn’t have noticed.
His heart. They’d cut out his heart.
Vlad lurched forward and grabbed Cazan by both shoulders. He did shake him this time, hard, and the man gasped.
“Your grace–”
Vlad growled, and the boyar went silent. “You’re sure? The heart? They took the heart out? You saw it with your own eyes?”
Cazan gaped at him a moment – whether in response to his tone or his growl, Vlad didn’t know or care – but finally swallowed. “Y-yes, your grace. I saw. And they – they burned it.”
Six long years had passed since that awful day at Gallipoli; six years of Ottoman captivity. Vlad had long since lost hope that his father would manage to bring him home – or so he’d told himself. The Ottomans might kill him for Dracul’s treaty-breaking, or they might keep him until he was a grown man, numb, a usable puppet.
But he found now, as he was unable to draw breath into his lungs, that hope had lingered. A tiny scrap of it, lodged deep between his ribs. So long as Father was alive, there was a chance for freedom.
He thought of a tiny pyre, just big enough for a heart, and something in him…broke.
He turned around, and vomited on the pristine floor tiles.
He hadn’t had breakfast yet, and so it was only bile. He wiped his mouth with the back of a shaking hand and said, “Where is he?”
“Your grace?”
“My father. Where is he?”
“He is – buried, your grace. After – they left him, and I couldn’t…I left strict instructions with my men to see that his body was properly wrapped and carried to the chapel near my home. He’ll have a proper Christian burial, I assure you. I myself rode straight here. To deliver the news – and these.”
Vlad turned back, and Cazan was unwrapping the sword he’d brought. It was Dracul’s Toledo blade, given to him by emperor Sigismund at Nuremburg in 1431 – the year of Vlad’s birth.
“There is also this,” Cazan said, and from a pocket on his person produced a gold collar engraved with a dragon. “They belong to you now. You are the reigning Prince of Wallachia.”
Vlad couldn’t bring himself to touch either item. “My brother is the heir. Where is he?”
Pale and shivering, Cazan answered carefully. “I do not know, your grace. But I know that his survival is – unlikely.”
~*~
Word of Mircea arrived a few hours later in the form of a Wallachian messenger on a blown horse. The heir was dead. Tortured. Mutilated. And buried alive, face-down in a deep, deep hole.
Vlad was, in fact, the Prince of Wallachia.
Vladislav II of the Dâneşti clan had claimed the title as well.
~*~
A bitter evening, wind sighing through the open sides of the folly that was the palace chapel, candle flames wavering, guttering, but staying, stubborn as the man who knelt in front of them. Vlad held the gold collar, running his thumb over the dragon emblem again and again, tracing its sinuous body with his thumbnail.
The man who’d been Remus, a pagan, the son of a god, had, in the end, been a member of a holy Christian order. Vlad Dracul. Alive for over two thousand years…dead at last. At the hands of a petty Romanian clansman.
He closed his hands around the collar until his knuckles went white; he felt the soft metal start to give; he could break it, if he wished.
A soft step behind him. A whiff of perfumed vampire. “Vlad,” Val said, and his voice was a wreck.
Vlad didn’t turn around; he didn’t trust himself not to reach for his brother. He laid the collar on the altar in front of him, lest he snap it in half.
“Vlad,” Val repeated, and walked up the aisle. He knelt down beside him, an arm’s length away. He was shaking. Under his perfume, and the unwelcome taint of Mehmet, he smelled also of tangible grief. A sharp odor, like fear sweat. “Mehmet said – is it true? Father? And Mircea?”
Vlad nodded toward the collar, candlelight making the dragon seem alive, writhing. His voice was flat when he spoke. “I had it from Cazan. Dâneşti men cut Father down, and then took his heart. Burned it.”
Val whimpered.
“They had a wolf. That must be how they…” Subdued him. Long enough to deliver a fatal blow. Father hadn’t seen any fighting in a long time, grown soft and comfortable at home in the palace. “Vladislav is staking his claim.”
“Mircea…” Val breathed through his mouth, quick, hitched little breaths that rattled in his throat. “He was…buried alive? Maybe he’s…”
“I don’t know. I have no idea how resilient a half-breed is.”
It was silent a moment, save the whistling of the wind in the eaves. Vlad was painfully aware of his brother beside him; distress poured off him in waves and Vlad’s fingers curled against his thighs.
Val started to cry, quietly.
And Vlad turned to him, finally.
Val wasn’t dressed for the weather. In stark contrast to Vlad’s wool breeches and tunic and oilskin, he was wore deep blue silk, a kaftan left open halfway down to his navel, bare skin blue-tinged in the cold. His hair had been left down, wavy over his shoulders, a cold circlet on his head to match the gold rings on his fingers and the fine chain around his neck. White silk şalvar and soft slippers. Indoor clothes. The clothes of an expensive royal plaything…not those of a warrior prince.
Tears ran unchecked down his face, glistening like crystal. A bite mark on his neck peeked out from behind gilt hair.
Vlad could envision it all too distinctly: Mehmet holding him down, sinking his fangs into a tender patch of skin, using him.
He thought he might be sick again.
Instead, he swallowed hard and said, “Valerian.”
His brother’s head snatched up, red-rimmed eyes flying wide.
“There may no longer be love between us.” Val’s mouth opened on a silent, anguished sound of protest, his chin quivering. “But I promise you this, brother. I will reclaim our home. I will find out if Mircea is truly dead, and I will have revenge on everyone who did this.”
Val wiped his eyes with delicate fingertips. “How?”
“I don’t know yet.” He faced the candles again. One stuttered and went out in the next draft. He sighed. “Somehow. I’ll appeal to Murat, I don’t…I don’t know.” He dug his hands into his legs, felt the bite of his own nails through his breeches. If it weren’t for the fabric, he would have drawn blood.
Val shifted closer, silk rustling. “Vlad…”
Vlad didn’t know what he meant to say, only that he could no longer keep his distance. Not now. Not with half their family dead.
He reached out, quick enough that Val tried to duck back – but then he relaxed when he realized Vlad was merely putting an arm around his shoulders, and drawing him in. Val came willingly, then, tucking in close, his head on Vlad’s shoulder. He breathed in shuddering gasps, his slight ribcage pressing against Vlad’s. Delicate as a flower stem.
Vlad held his brother, and tipped his head back, gaze going to the weathered wooden cross that hung above the altar.
God help me, he prayed. Help me kill them all.
~*~
He was called before Murat again the next morning. Clean-faced
from his morning ablutions, surprised, he followed the slave sent to fetch him back to the old sultan’s audience chamber.
The vast space had been heated with coal braziers, and they did a remarkable job of pushing back the chill. Murat sat swaddled in furs, a great mink thrown across his lap, as tidy and imperious as ever. “Good morning,” he greeted.
Vlad didn’t bow. He came to stand in front of the man, hands linked behind his back, waiting. He’d allowed himself to grieve, silent and dry-eyed, in the chapel last night, while Val sobbed quietly into his shoulder, soaking his jacket. He let the fury and sadness sweep through him like a tide…and then forced it away. There was no time for that now. Emotion would serve no purpose.
“You seem very composed,” Murat observed, “for a man who’s been informed that his father and brother were brutally murdered by a pretender to the throne.”
“Shall I weep, Your Majesty?”
The old sultan chuckled. “My, but you are full of hate. No, I don’t think weeping suits you. But I think you should like to take action, no?”
Behind his back, Vlad clenched his hands together, tight, until he felt his nails score his skin.
“I think you want the heads of the men who killed your family.” A pause. The old fox was waiting, dropping little gaps, seeing if Vlad would barrel his way into them, red-faced and shouting. “I think you want blood.” His brows jumped on the last word. Yes, I know what you are. I know what you drink.
Chin tilted upward, as coldly as he could manage, Vlad said, “And yet here I stand, Your Majesty. A prisoner. Unable to do anything.”
“So you do.” A long moment passed, the man’s gaze calculating. “You are still made of steel, I think.” Almost a note of approval in his voice. “Now, your brother is–”
“My brother is a child and a whore.”
Murat was silent a beat, but he said nothing more of Val. Good. It was better if he thought the boy was of no threat or importance. Whores got to live, while warriors were so frequently tested – for honor, for sport, for wickedness.
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