by Sarah Ash
The feeling of dread overwhelmed him, cold as a fever sweat. He clambered up the sandy cliff path, stumbling over the tangled blackberry briars and tree roots. Breathless and sweating, he reached the old rose garden, his mother’s favorite place. . . .
High above the villa the shadow-cloud hovered, black like choking smoke, leaching all the stars’ brightness from the night.
What in God’s name was it? And why had it pursued him so relentlessly?
He launched himself toward the safety of the villa, tearing across the lawns as though his life depended on it, hurling himself at the side door that his mother had left unlocked for him.
Inside, he leaned against the door, gasping for breath. Then he shot the heavy bolts and locked the door with the key.
Now that he was inside the villa, the whole episode began to seem not only bizarre but absurd. He must have imagined it. His mind, already inflamed with anger and desire, had distorted what was nothing but a rising sea-mist into something far more sinister.
What a fool I’ve been. . . .
He went along the passageway toward the stairs, tiptoeing so as not to disturb Elysia or their housekeeper Palmyre. But the feeling of dread still haunted him, as though the dark shadow-mist had smothered the whole house, extinguishing the light of the stars.
He reached his room and, exhausted, flung himself down on his bed, closing his eyes.
The balmy evening air suddenly breathed cold and chill.
Gavril opened one eye.
The chimney! He had not thought to block the chimney! And now the darkness had entered his room, rolling out of the open fireplace like smoke, gathering itself in great coils like a daemon-serpent, rearing up over his bed to swallow him in its gaping maw.
Gavril gave a cry, tried to roll away—and found himself drowning in swathes of shadow.
He felt his consciousness suddenly wrenched free from the body that lay on the bed, flung far from the warm Smarnan night into a whirling chaos of cloud and stars. . . .
He is in a torchlit hall. The smoky air reeks of burned pitch and worse: the stench of spilled blood, vomit, and something else—a raw, acrid, chymical stink that makes the eyes water and the throat burn.
As the swirling smoke clears, Gavril sees a figure slumped on the tiled floor of the chamber, a figure that strives slowly, painfully, to drag itself over the patterned tiles toward the door. A dark liquid smears the tiles, staining them, steadily leaking from the slow-moving figure. Gavril can do nothing; a helpless observer, he can only watch the dying man’s agonized progress.
“Why? Why have you brought me here?”
“Look.” The hoarse command reverberates in his mind, a brazen funeral bell relentlessly tolling. “Look!”
His gaze is forced up, away from the dying man—and he finds himself staring directly into the eyes of a golden-haired young man, eyes dark with terror and exultation as he stands over his victim, bloodstained saber in one hand, a jeweled goblet in the other.
“This,” cries the young man, emptying the contents of the goblet on the other, “for my mother.” His voice is choked with emotion, a hatred and grief so bitter Gavril can almost taste it in the rank, death-tainted air. “This for my sisters.”
His victim writhes around, hands upraised, fingers clawing. For one moment, in the paroxysmal shudder that twists his body, Gavril sees a column of smoke arising, a spark-filled, cobalt smoke that goes rushing toward the rafters. Flames shoot out from the writhing column and the young man drops, screaming, to his knees. His hand that holds the goblet is burning, bright with blue fire. He hurls the goblet at his adversary.
“This,” he screams, “for my father—”
The column disperses into shreds and tatters of snaking, wisping smoke. In its midst, the older man crumples, crashing back to the floor, the last of his strength exhausted. “Who let you in?” His words rasp out on a dying whisper, but Gavril recognizes the voice. It is an echo, a fast-failing echo of the stern voice in his head. “Who betrayed me?”
But the young man has doubled up, hugging his seared arm to his chest, too choked with pain to reply.
“No more.” Gavril tries to close his mind, to shut out the pain and terror.
A loud hammering shakes the door timbers. Now there are voices shouting, clamoring to be let in.
The young man staggers to his feet. Gavril sees the revulsion—revulsion and raw fear—in his eyes. The exultation has faded. He has never killed before.
“Here! Over here!”
Someone else is in the room. An urgent voice, low and husky, is calling from the smoke. An accomplice. The murderer is not alone.
The thuds at the door grow louder, more insistent; Gavril hears the creak of rending timbers.
“Hurry!”
The young man stumbles away from his victim, slipping on the blood-smeared tiles.
Gavril strains to make out where the third person is hiding—yet all he sees is a wooden panel sliding open in the painted wall.
The locked door bursts inward in an explosion of splinters, and armed men come tumbling into the room.
“Too late . . .” There is a mocking, ironic taint to the whispered words of the dying man.
And, as if glimpsed through his fast-dimming sight, Gavril’s vision begins to break up—streaked, distorted, fading like the last shreds of the dispersing smoke.
“Gavril.” The voice burns through his brain, a last, desperate plea, as if dragged from the fiery depths of the abyss.
“Remember . . .”
Gavril opened his eyes. Watery dawn light spilled down into his room.
Yet he could only lie staring into nothing, rigid, paralyzed with the horror of the vision, wanting to wish it away as only a dream. But how could anything so immediate, so real, have been a mere dream?
“Remember . . .”
The aftertaste of the vision suddenly gripped Gavril’s stomach. He rolled off the bed and staggered queasily toward the dressing room, pitching forward over the sink, heaving and retching.
And then he heard the distant clatter of hoofbeats.
Through the receding surges of nausea, Gavril raised his head, eyes watering. He wondered if Andrei Orlov was up early with his fellow officers for a day’s hunting. And if Astasia was with her brother . . .
He stuck his head under the water tap and let the ice-cold water flow until his skin tingled with the shock of it.
The sound of horses’ hooves grew louder. They were coming this way, along the upper bay road, toward the cliffs.
He could hear shouts now, men’s voices, calling to each other. Puzzled, he staggered to his feet. There came a knocking on the front door. Who was it and what could they want at this early hour?
Head pounding, Gavril made for the hall. The knocking was more insistent now. Ahead of him, Palmyre was slowly crossing the hall, yawning and wiping the sleep from her eyes.
“Palmyre!” He heard his mother’s voice cry out from the upper floor. “Don’t open!”
But Palmyre had already pulled back the bolts. The door was thrown open and a group of men pushed their way past her into the hall. They were tall, tattooed with clanmarks and ritual scars, their long hair braided.
“No!” Elysia screamed from the top of the stairs.
Gavril stopped where he was, staring, openmouthed. Were they thieves come to rob them?
But the foremost among the intruders came forward and flung himself on his knees before Gavril.
“Drakhaon,” he said. His deep voice trembled with emotion. “I bring bad news. Your father—” Tears channeled down the deeply graven lines of his weather-burned face. “Your father is dead.”
“My father?” Gavril stared down at the kneeling man in astonishment. And as he stood staring, the other men dropped to their knees too.
He turned to Elysia, who had frozen pale and silent at the foot of the stairs. “Mother?”
“So,” she said, in a numbed, toneless voice, “Volkh is dead.”
“Moth
er,” Gavril said again, pleadingly. “Who is Volkh? Who are these men?”
“Lord Drakhaon,” the barbarian warrior said, still on his knees. Gavril saw now that, for all his rings and tattoos, he was an old man, and his braided hair was gray as iron. “We have come to take you home.” He used the common tongue, yet so strangely inflected that Gavril wondered if he had understood him correctly.
“Home?” he repeated, utterly confused. “This is my home.”
“Not Smarna, lord. To your rightful inheritance. To Azhkendir.”
“Azhkendir? Surely there’s been some mistake. This is my home, here in Smarna—”
“No mistake.” Tears still ran down the old warrior’s cheeks; he seemed unashamed to weep in front of strangers. “Don’t you remember me, Lord Gavril? Kostya, Bogatyr Kostya Torzianin, your father’s right-hand man?”
Gavril shook his head. This was all happening too fast. Maybe he was still dreaming. . . .
Dreaming.
For a dizzying moment, Gavril found himself plunged back into the bloodstained hall of his nightmare, staring down at the sprawled figure, reliving those last agonizing death throes. . . .
“How did my father die?” he heard himself asking in a cold, distant voice.
Kostya’s expression darkened. Though tears still glistened in his eyes, Gavril saw now a glimmer of implacable hatred and despair.
“I failed your father, Lord Gavril. I fell into a trap. I was not at his side to defend him when he needed me. For that I can never forgive myself: that I still live when my lord and master is dead.”
“But how? How did he die?”
“He . . .” The old man seemed shamed even to say the words aloud. “He was betrayed. Betrayed—and murdered.”
CHAPTER 2
“Why, Mother? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Elysia Andar stood unmoving, her back to Gavril, her hands resting on the windowsill as she gazed out over the blue waters of the bay. She stood so still, she could have been mistaken for one of the pale marble statues that graced her terraced gardens below.
Gavril took a faltering step toward her. Still she did not turn. Tears he could have understood. But this terrible cold, silent anger was new to him. He didn’t know how to approach her. He felt as if it were somehow his fault.
White gulls swooped outside the villa’s open windows, their mewing cries echoing over the bay. The hot, dusty scent of oleanders drifted in on the golden air. A half-finished canvas stood on an easel where the light was strongest; he caught a whiff of the oily smell of the drying paints. This was the essence of his childhood memories: the hot sun of Smarna, the lapping blue waters, his mother painting, humming to herself as she worked.
And yet now it was as if he looked at it all through a dark lens that made everything warped, distorted.
“Mother?” Gavril tried a more coaxing tone. He came closer, hands hovering behind her shoulders, wanting to touch her, to seek reassurance, yet not daring to. “Please, Mother.” To his shame he heard his voice crack; he had not intended to break down in front of her. He had to be strong, if only to keep some semblance of sanity in the chaos that his life had become. “I need to know.”
He heard her sigh as softly as the whisper of the waves on the gilded sands of the bay below.
“This is my home. Smarna. Isn’t it?”
“My home,” she said dully.
“But I grew up here. This,”—and Gavril stretched out his arm, encompassing the villa and the gardens in his gesture—“this is all I remember. Now they—they tell me I am from Azhkendir and I must leave, leave you, leave my work unfinished, to go to Azhkendir. They tell me I have inherited this title, Drakhaon—and I have no idea what they are talking about!”
Elysia slowly turned around to face him. He saw that she had been silently crying, the tears leaving glistening traces on her peach-soft skin. “I was going to tell you,” she said, her voice stifled, “when you come of age next year. Now, it seems, events have overtaken me.”
“But is it true?” Gavril pleaded. “Was he my father?”
“Yes,” she said. She gazed back at him, her eyes dark, shadow-haunted. He had always cherished the image of her as serene, as sunny-natured as Vermeille Bay below. Kostya Torzianin’s sudden, unannounced arrival had destroyed that serenity. The woman who stared at him, distractedly picking at her lace fichu with her nails, was a distortion of the mother he thought he knew. He could not remember ever seeing her look so troubled—or so vulnerable—before.
“Why did you lie to me?” It hurt him to cause her pain. But hadn’t he the right to learn the truth about his birth? “Why did you tell me you didn’t know where he was?”
“You are still so young, Gavril,” she said. “Sometimes a kind of lie is preferable to the truth.”
“And the truth is?”
“That I had to get you away from him.”
Still only these terse, enigmatic fragments.
“But why? Why?”
She seemed to achieve some kind of control over herself, moving suddenly to the table and the cut-glass decanter of karvi, the orange-and-caraway-perfumed liqueur she usually offered to visitors. He saw her pour herself a glass and start to take small, shuddering sips of the liqueur, as though trying to calm herself. Was it going to be so difficult to tell him the truth? Had his father been such a monster? He began to dread what he had to hear.
Elysia sat down on one of the silk couches, the glass of karvi still in her hand.
“What has that old man told you?”
“Kostya?” Gavril grimaced. He had been forced to listen to the stern old man’s repeated insistences that he had given his dying father his oath to lay down his life for his son and bring him back to Azhkendir. Palmyre had come to his rescue: the warriors were now busy eating in the kitchen and drinking their way through a keg of the household’s best ale. “All Kostya says is that I must pack my bags and make ready to leave for Azhkendir.” He wrinkled his nose. “Do the druzhina always smell so ripe?”
“They all need a bath. And some fresh clothes. But that’s the way of the Drakhaon’s druzhina, as you will soon discover if you go back with him, Gavril. They are not like us. They choose to live by ancient clan laws and clan loyalties. Have you seen Kostya’s tattoos?” She made a little moue of disapproval. “Barbaric. Don’t let them put a single clanmark on you.”
“But my father,” Gavril said, sitting down opposite her.
“Your father.” He saw her take another sip of the karvi, turning the glass round and round in her fingers. Then Elysia suddenly leaned toward him, her voice huskily intense.
“I first met your father when he came here to sit for a portrait. And once he had recovered from his astonishment that the painter was a woman, we began to get to know each other. He was very good-looking then. Dashing. Rough and unpolished, by the standards of Smarnan society—but I liked him all the more for that. He had a . . . a kind of raw honesty, an impulsiveness that appealed to me. Beside him, the young men in my circle seemed colorless, dull. But love made me blind, Gavril, blind to any imperfections or flaws. I could not see that your father’s impulsiveness hid a terrible, destructive temper—that the fearless spirit I had fallen in love with concealed a capacity for savage cruelty.”
Gavril heard what she said but still did not understand. “He—he treated you badly? Did he—did he hurt you?”
He saw her try to conceal a shudder as she drained the last of the liqueur in her glass.
“What I’m trying to tell you is that your father changed. Not all at once, but insidiously, almost as though there were some slow-working poison in his veins. Or maybe he was always that way and he tried to change himself as a ploy to win me . . . and failed. Or maybe there is some malign influence at work in Azhkendir, something in the endless winters and the dark, lonely forests that sends them all mad. I don’t know, Gavril, all I know is that it was no place for a little child, for my son to grow up in. . . .”
“So you left him?”
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“I ran away, yes. With you. And he sent Kostya and his men after us and they caught us in the forest and brought us back.” Her gaze had shifted from his. She was staring into emptiness . . . and through her eyes, he saw her, a terrified young woman, clutching her baby, surrounded by a ring of tattooed, fur-cloaked warriors.
“What did he do to you?” Gavril said in a whisper.
“At first he kept me locked in my room. Imprisoned. And then . . . then he came to me one night and I saw in his eyes a distant shadow of the man I had once loved. And he said, ‘Terrible things are going to happen here, things over which I shall have little—or no—control. I want you to take Gavril and get out. Get out now. Before I change. Before it’s too late.’”
“He let you go?”
Elysia nodded; her eyes had clouded with tears.
“‘Before I change’? What did he mean?”
“A few days after I crossed the border, a clan war broke out in Azhkendir. I made my way back here to Smarna with you. I had only the clothes I was wearing and a few coins in my purse. But money, generous gifts of money, began to be paid into a trust fund for you. Instructions arrived in an anonymous letter. . . .”
“So no one knew?”
“Everything was done using false names. Your father had made too many enemies; if anyone found out you were his son. . . .”
“Was he . . .” Gavril hesitated to ask the question that had been tormenting him. “Was he really such a monster?”
She looked him in the eyes then. Her look chilled his heart, like a jagged splinter of ice.
“Yes.”
The sunlit room seemed to grow darker, as if a cloud had drifted across the sun.
“What did he do?”
“If you really want to know, you must find out for yourself; please don’t ask me to tell you. It sickens me just to think of it. Sometimes I wonder . . . if I hadn’t run away, maybe I could have prevented it from happening.” She looked away, her voice hardly audible above the whisper of the sea. “Or maybe no one could have influenced him. But I still wake in the dark before dawn, Gavril, and I wonder—did I help make him into the tyrant he became?”