“I’m sorry,” said Sloot. “I don’t know what’s funny.”
“I probably shouldn’t say.” A modicum of restraint was vying for control of Nicoleta’s face, but it wasn’t faring well. Her maniacal glee had the high ground.
“Oh,” said Sloot. “Okay.”
“It’s just probably above my pay grade,” she said with a snicker. “Look, I’m sure Roman has his reasons for keeping you in the dark about … things. Just know that you’re not a prisoner. You’re home.”
Perhaps even more than watching Nan’s bloody execution, the thought of Carpathia as home terrified him. Like all loyal subjects of the Domnitor—which Sloot may or may not still be at this point—Sloot believed in inevitability. The sun rises in the east, swearing causes goblins, and the Old Country is the center of the world. He’d never considered living anywhere other than Salzstadt, and why would he? Everything he’d ever known was there.
Besides, he wasn’t really a Carpathian Intelligencier, he worked for Uncle! He’d gotten so wrapped up in his cover that he’d nearly forgotten about Flavia recruiting him. That was real, wasn’t it? He’d been a bit woozy, what with the stabbing and all. He hadn’t dreamt it, had he?
Of course not! Sloot was the most loyal salt in the Domnitor’s service, of course he’d want Sloot working for him! Wouldn’t he, long may he reign?
Was this some sort of test? His mother had left Carpathia to spy on the Old Country, was he supposed to do the same in reverse? That would be poetic, not that Sloot approved of poetry. Washing away the sins of the father—or, in this case, mother.
The Domnitor, long may he reign, had a plan, after all—who was Sloot to question whether that plan had led him to this point?
He followed Nicoleta to dinner and tried very hard to stop thinking about the Domnitor, long may he reign. He needed to pretend to be as Carpathian as possible, to preserve his secret identity. To that end, he resolved to spit somewhere inappropriate as soon as the opportunity presented itself.
Sometimes it’s difficult to see the grand scheme of things, and sometimes it’s hard to have faith; but sometimes things seem to align the way they’re supposed to, and that was just what seemed to happen when Myrtle appeared beside the chair across from Sloot and smiled at him.
For a moment, Sloot had difficulty in deciding how to react. His heart raced in his chest, and he was overjoyed to see her, but he simply gave her a polite smile and a nod. Emotions are guests within the jurisdiction of etiquette, after all.
She was breathtaking. Even allowing for the fact that he’d been moping about her for weeks, she was stunning by any measure. Not only that, she was beaming at him in that way that women typically reserve for men with a surplus of pectoral muscles; chin models who speak octaves below the range of ordinary men.
Sloot had never been on the receiving end of a look like that and was at a loss for what to do. He made a sort of flustered chortle, grinned from ear to ear, and stared at his feet while his shoulders pivoted wildly. He blushed forcefully enough to start sweating.
Roman walked in next, followed shortly by Greta. They’d both gotten cleaned up as well, in ancient-looking get-ups similar to Sloot’s. Carpathia, like every grandparent the world has ever known, had decided upon its retirement—apparently some thirty years hence—that everything in its closet was as modern as it would ever need to be.
They all remained standing until Vlad came in. She’d eschewed her frightful suit of platemail in favor of a simple yet elegant red robe of raw silk. She wore a smaller sword than the one she’d used to behead Nan. She took the seat at the head of the table.
“Sit,” she said, and they did.
Then Vlad stood back up and drew her sword. Everyone else stood as well.
“I told you to sit!” she yelled. They all sat again, much more quickly this time. Sloot felt the familiar rush of panic and, as was his custom, braced for death. Fortunately, Vlad’s attention was focused at the far end of the dining room. Sloot turned to see one of the shadowy guards standing there, its great sword drawn.
“Who gave you leave to take my seat?” it asked in his hollow, lifeless voice.
“This is my seat,” said Vlad, sounding more bored than threatened. “I am Vlad now. Must we go through this every night?”
“You’ll not live to see the sunrise, infidel!”
Vlad sighed. With her free hand, she used her thumb to twist a ring on her forefinger. In a burst that resembled the cloud that appears when an inkwell is tipped into a bucket of water, a smoking shadow coalesced around Vlad, taking on the shape of the fluted platemail she wore when Sloot saw her for the first time. She kicked her chair backward, jumped atop the table, and started running at the shadow.
“It’s Vlad the Thirteenth,” said Nicoleta. “He took too many hammer blows to the helmet in his day. She’ll only be a moment.”
Their swords clanged together, her real one and his ethereal one. Block, parry, kick—the departed Vlad went flying backward but managed to recover and parry as the living one descended upon him.
“Not fast enough,” he said. He threw a punch with his off hand that sent Vlad sailing through the air. She managed to twist and land in a crouch.
This went on for several minutes, the two gaining and losing the advantage until the living Vlad’s sword severed the dead one’s shadowy helmet from its shoulders. A shower of purple sparks erupted from the ghostly wound, and the corpse disappeared in a puff of smoke.
Vlad sheathed her sword and twisted her ring. Her armor evaporated from her in a puff of smoke, and she retook her seat.
“The Hapsgalt lord tells me that you are his fiancée,” said Vlad to Greta. “Is that true?”
“Er,” Greta blinked several times, “he believes that it is.” She looked at Vlad with that look, the chin model one. Sloot had never seen her look at Willie that way, though he was also sure that Willie had never defeated a spectral warrior in a savage duel.
“Good,” said Vlad. She wasn’t even breathing hard. She reached for her goblet and savored a swallow of wine.
“So it’s true,” said Myrtle. “The shadow warriors are your forefathers.”
“And foremothers, yes,” said Nicoleta. “They are the spirits of the departed Vlads the Invader.”
Nicoleta went on to explain that the former Vlads the Invader, who referred to themselves collectively as the Lebendervlad, still roam the halls of Castle Ulfhaven thanks to several magical totems throughout the castle known as Black Smilers. They’re made from the charred skulls of vanquished enemies, stuffed with demonic larva, mounted on spears and enchanted so that they glow a sickly yellow.
“The glowing isn’t the point of the enchantment,” Nicoleta had felt the need to point out, “just a side effect. It’s an effective deterrent though. People tend to leave them alone.”
“So they just wander around thinking they’re still Vlad, challenging people for chairs?” asked Greta.
“Just Vlad the Thirteenth,” replied Nicoleta.
“Seems more trouble than it’s worth.”
“Not at all! It’s nice having all the Vlads around. Her Dominance trains with them regularly, and they do all of the guarding around the castle now that―” She stopped speaking and stared down at her plate. Vlad was glaring at her.
“Now that what?” asked Greta, causing Sloot to breathe a silent sigh of relief. He didn’t want to ask himself, but the silence had started to grow beyond his standard resting rate of discomfort.
“The curse,” Vlad murmured. She drained her cup of wine, refilled it, and settled into a brooding stare. You had to be flush with gravitas to brood like that. “You may as well tell them,” she said with a wave in Nicoleta’s direction, who treated them all to a history lesson.
***
Sloot had always been told that the first Vlad the Invader was just one of many clan chieftains in the
Badlands, the lawless wastes north of what was becoming the Old Country, in the time just before the Year of Reckoning. That was the proper name given to the first year in modern counting, when the wise men and women of all the world’s nations gathered at Blåsigtopp and reckoned that it was as good a time as any to start up a common counting of the passage of time. Not long after that, according to the official state textbooks issued in Old Country elementary schools, the first Vlad the Invader rose to power over all of the other chieftains by proving that he could eat all of the least desirable parts of a cow while using the wrong fork, having not first washed his hands, and then leaving the table without asking to be excused. He followed this by saying all of the worst swear words, then immediately going for a swim.
It turns out that the truth, in this case, had been judiciously mitigated by the Ministry of Propaganda, though Sloot wouldn’t be so foolish as to point that out. The penalty for finding fault in the logic published by the Ministry of Propaganda was being immediately referred to the Ministry of Conversation.
Before the Year of Reckoning, what is now the sovereign nation of Carpathia was known as the Badlands, a highly disputed territory whose primary export was unadulterated violence. It boasted a one hundred percent employment rate among berserkers, blood riders, and war criminals in exile. Despite the flourishing economy of violence that they enjoyed at the time, Vlad the Bloodthirsty figured that they could do better. He put together a warband of slaves and former slaves, which was rather huge, as nearly everyone who’d spent any time in the Badlands had been a slave at some point, and marched on Ulfhaven.
Before the mighty fortress in which Sloot was presently dining had been built, Ulfhaven had been a small collection of crude stone towers, where the clans gathered to conspire against each other. It was run by a plutocrat who had been given a seat of power for promising all of the clan chieftains that he’d make them rich. Vlad’s warband met little resistance, and before the sun had risen so high in the sky that the daily tradition of asking “I don’t know, what do you want for breakfast?” had begun, Vlad had thrown the plutocrat from the tower. He would thenceforth be known as Vlad Defenestratia, and set himself about the business of invading neighboring holds that had the audacity not to recognize his authority.
Over the course of the next few generations, Vlad and his children and grandchildren who inherited his name subjugated all but one of the clans, one by one. The berserker battle lords advised attacking them all at once and having a really good blood frenzy—one of whom was a distant ancestor of Roman’s, hence the name—but the Vlad at that time knew that sort of thing would make for an economy that was entirely too bullish.
There was one clan that Vlad the Fourth left to its own devices. They were called the Virag, and their chieftain, a gruesome-looking wizard named Ashkar, was rumored to be over a thousand years old. They would not swear fealty to anyone, but offered Vlad a bargain: in exchange for Ashkar’s blood oath that the Virag would never use their magic to the detriment of the kingdom, Vlad would grant them immunity from reality.
The Virag believed that fealty was just another tether to reality, and such tethers limited their ability to peer beyond the veil that separates the realms of the living and the dead. They wanted to explore the mysteries of the ether, not be tied down to constraints of mortality that were, in their words, “Heavy, man.”
Vlad the Fourth saw no glory in cleaving the clan of skinny nomads, having not a single sword among them, so she granted their request. They would be allowed to roam the undesirable lands in the outskirts of the kingdom, occasionally trading with the Carpathian people, but otherwise stay out of their business.
Time went on, and the Virag kept their word. They stayed out of Carpathian affairs, lived in the hinterlands, and occasionally threw music festivals that would last for days at a time.
Nothing changed for centuries until Vlad the Thirty-Fifth, grandfather of the present Vlad, decided it had been too long since Carpathia had invaded anybody. The war with the Old Country had been waging for years and looked as though it might run cold. He couldn’t invade Nordheim due to a peace that Vlad the Twenty-Ninth had sworn with their king on Odin’s spear, Gungnir. The only other place that shared a border with Carpathia was Blåsigtopp, which wasn’t really a nation but rather a monastery where the Blessed Few spent their lives contemplating the mysteries of the universe. It stood at the top of a steep and treacherous pass, and everyone knew that invading it was bad luck, though no one could remember who’d figured that out. Probably the Abbot of the Blessed Few.
That left the Virag. Vlad the Thirty-Fifth donned his most threatening suit of armor and rode out into the hinterlands with two hundred thousand soldiers behind him. He knew he didn’t need that many to subjugate a tiny clan, but he could hardly say “no” to them—it had been a long time since they’d had a good war march, and they agreed to do it pro bono.
Whether the leader of the Virag was the same man or, like the Vlads, it was a hereditary name, the wizard Ashkar refused to swear fealty to Vlad. He demanded that the pact be honored. The Carpathian army slaughtered the rest of the Virag and tied Ashkar to a pyre. As he burned alive, Ashkar laughed in a shrill, blood-curdling sort of way that only the worst of villains are able to manage. He laid a curse upon the Carpathian army, declaring that so long as the line of Defenestratia sat at the front of it, not a single soldier more would join their ranks. Vlad laughed and spat and drank and celebrated his victory, as he was wont to do.
In the years that followed, there was a strange drop in the rate of new enlistments for which the army recruiters could not account. They were under strict orders to disavow any magical interference in the day-to-day operations of the army, so the official forms on the matter, which have been heavily redacted, offer no explanation.
According to Carpathian law, all citizens are compelled to serve in the army from the ages of fifteen to fifty. When the day came in a young person’s life when he or she should have been turning fifteen and putting on their first oversized uniform (they’d grow into it), they instead gave in to the urge to wander off into the hinterlands and beyond, or found themselves missing a leg and were therefore ineligible, or spontaneously turned sixteen and were turned away by orientation specialists who didn’t know what to do with them.
“By the time Vlad’s father passed the throne to her,” said Nicoleta, “all of the soldiers had retired or passed away.”
For a long time, everyone at the table was silent. That was the Old Country thing to do, since voicing an opinion about the culture was frowned upon, to say the least. It could land one in a complicated and uncomfortable steel harness in the belly of the Ministry of Conversation, to say the most. The silence lasted until they’d all finished the simple spread of bread and cold chicken that the kitchen staff had brought out, and then washed it down with a nice Carpathian red. It should come as no surprise to learn that Carpathian vineyards do not produce white wines.
“Have you thought about stepping aside?” asked Greta.
The incredulity with which Vlad answered Greta was orchestrated in three parts. The stage was set in the first part by a horrified grimace. It reached a crescendo with a stream of ill-tempered swearing in the second, followed thirdly by Vlad sending her chair crashing to one side by means of a denouement, and then storming away before the curtain call.
“I didn’t mean to offend,” said Greta, who’d turned bright red.
“Her line has ruled Carpathia for a thousand years!” shouted Nicoleta. She stood in haste. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, “but it’s really expected of me to storm out, too!” And storm she did, with a few fireworks from the point of her hat punctuating the maneuver.
Sloot remained in his chair, for want of a place to which he might storm off. He felt compelled to show deference to his host but thought it would have looked ridiculous to stand up and storm around the table in a circle. Instead, he sat in silence unt
il Roman offered to show Greta back to her rooms, which she accepted. That’s when the tension became the most palpable, as he was now alone with Myrtle for the first time since she’d left Whitewood.
“You’re here,” he said. The impulse to speak had offered Sloot every assurance on its way up that it was going to say something debonaire, or at least witty. Still, he hadn’t vomited. That was something.
“You say so,” said Myrtle in Arthur’ ridiculous Stagrallan drawl, “ergo you’re here as well.”
“Oh,” said Sloot, having forgotten about the interloping philosopher. “I should go.”
“No, wait,” said Myrtle. “Arthur, could you give us a minute? Fine, why would anyone want to have a fully qualified philosopher in their conversation? No matter, I have some eternity to contemplate anyway. Just pretend I’m not here.”
They sat together in silence long enough to feel as though they could reasonably pretend that Arthur had left the room and gone to bed or something.
“I just wanted to say that I’m sorry again,” said Myrtle.
“That’s all right. It hardly seems to matter now. We’ll most likely meet our doom here.”
“What do you mean? I really like it here.”
Sloot gave Myrtle a look of surprise. Had he heard her correctly? That kind of talk was treason! Well, not in Carpathia, he supposed. Still, it triggered his instinct to drag her out into the street by her hair and proclaim her a traitor, the way one supposed to do when heresy is spoken in earshot.
Then again, he was with Uncle now. Was he supposed to be more subtle about it? Or possibly just murder her on the spot with one of the crossed swords above the hearth? He wouldn’t have wanted to do that to anyone, let alone Myrtle.
“You … like it.”
“It’s a lot nicer than you’d think! Plus I’m rich now, which makes just about anything better.”
“Rich? From robbing Whitewood?”
Myrtle blushed. “I’m afraid so. I wanted to give the money back, but Roman told me not to! He told me to take it and run to Ulfhaven, to present myself to Vlad as an Intelligencier.”
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