Now that the immediate threat had withdrawn, his weariness clung and held him like the river ooze. Cold be damned, he didn’t want to move. He hitched his arm more firmly under the root, propped his cane up against it to relieve the other arm, aching from holding it up so long, and closed his eyes.
In the sleep that followed he lost his grasp on everything—didn’t know how long he’d managed to hold on under the reeds before the rushing, tumultuous dreams buffeted him. All he knew was waking up later, too cold to shiver, his limbs locked like driftwood, on a shingle bank beneath a single arched stone bridge. The cane was still in his hand, fingers wrapped immovable around it, and in the sky a half-risen sun was pouring needles of prickly warmth over him, drawing steam from his thin, clammy clothes.
“Nnnhhh!” he said, a long drawn-out exhalation of agony and life, and the complaint stirred his chest into wakefulness. After a little more time he managed to get his arms and legs to respond and, turning over, he crawled up the bank and onto the road.
Scarcely five hundred yards away, the first house of the village was garlanded in edible flowers—roses, marigolds, borage, and others he did not recognise. Its gaily painted pale-blue door stood open, and Frank yearned with all his soul for someone to come out.
There should be drovers on the road, shouldn’t there? Goosegirls and goatherds and cows with tuned bells around their necks making a slow, melodious jangle as they browsed. There should be voices, a clang from the blacksmith’s perhaps, or a trundle as the cooper moved his barrels. There should be women in the gardens, children on the green. At the very least there should be smoke from the smoke holes and chimneys of the neat, well-tended houses.
Frank was crying again—still. Surely he deserved to be spotted by a kindly villager, picked up and put to bed with warmed stones and warmed milk and tincture of opium for the pain? Surely whatever he had done in his past life—whatever had given him this persistent shame—it could not merit this?
As he wept, he pulled himself upright by the railing of the bridge and limped towards that open door nevertheless. He was imagining things. The occupants of a whole village could not just disappear. They were in the town hall, perhaps, discussing what to do about the demon. Yes, and of course they would keep their children close.
They had woken early, had breakfast, driven out the animals and come back already, and now they were all in conference somewhere. When they had finished they would come and help him. This was the only explanation that made sense.
But when he half fell through the door of the first house, he found emptiness—no chairs, no table, a pile of straw where there should have been a mattress and ashes in the hearth as cold as the stones that surrounded them.
Frank spent some time on his knees in the empty room, with his arms curved protectively around his chest and his head bowed. He thought he slept, even, if the gap in his awareness could be called sleep. At any rate, when he raised his head again the sun was high in the sky and the air warmer. His clothes, no longer quite so soaked, were still chill and damp on him, and his bones were cold to the marrow.
Drawn outside by the light, he limped to the village green. Here, since there was no one to scandalise, he took off his wet clothes and lay down in the sunniest spot. The hard bread that had been in his sash was now slimy and vile, but he sucked at the soup-like outside and gnawed the more solid inner part regardless. When he had warmed up a little and been strengthened by the food, he would try the other houses. Wherever the villagers had gone, surely they must have left kindling, bed curtains, an egg overlooked in the chicken coop, scraps thrown out for the pigs? With a curtain or two he could turn the spilled straw into a bed, set a fire in the grate, close the door on the night, and sleep with no fear of wolves.
Whether such things would keep away a man who could turn to mist remained to be seen. Frank didn’t know what the creature was. If he ever had known, the knowledge had been forgotten with everything else. A demon seemed most likely, or a convincingly corporeal ghost of some sort. He rubbed his throat where the man’s fingers had scratched him, and examined his memories, but no new knowledge came.
The sun’s heat was delightful against his bruises. Turning over, he let it spread into his shoulders and his kidneys. The grass felt soft and cosy beneath him, and though he meant to go inside before he slept, the next he knew he was seeing a vision, like a memory brought back to life, unlike the texture of normal dreams.
A fire rustled softly in the grate as he dozed, weary and heartsick, in a dark-panelled library. The front door bell jangled, and he leaped up, his dream-self trembling with hope and terror and guilt. A high-pitched screaming echoed from the hall, and a clatter as though the suit of armour had been pushed off its stand. Then hurried footsteps, and she shoved through the library door, all in daffodil yellow with her hair as dishevelled as a maenad’s and her face unpowdered, red with fury.
“You! You have destroyed us. Do not think you will escape where my husband has been condemned. I will see you hanged beside him!”
“You will do nothing of the kind, madam.” His father followed her, with an expression gnarled and hard as a knob of flint. “Why should both our houses suffer? I will see the boy punished, I assure you, but for the sake of his sister I will not see him publicly disgraced.”
“That’s not good enough.” She whirled to thump her fist into his father’s waistcoat. “He has mired my innocent family in his scandal. I see no reason why yours should escape.”
“Footmen!” his father cried, and the flunkies poured in from the dining room and long gallery. “This woman is no longer welcome in my home. Throw her out and keep her out, next time.”
Frank tried to smile, surprised by this parental support, but as soon as the door shut on the struggling woman’s back, his father turned the same clenched, implacable expression on him. “Frank, there is not time for me to tell you how bitter and deep is the full extent of my disappointment. You are a disgrace to England. You are a disgrace to my name and to all our ancestors! Be gone with you. And Frank? I am not expecting you to return. Do you understand? You are no longer welcome in this house. Get out. Now. And don’t come back.”
The loss felt like falling into an abyss—tumbling, helpless. When he hit the ground, he shocked himself into waking, pain all over his body and dread in his heart. What had he done? He held his hands in front of him, bruised knuckles and long fingers trembling. Uncalloused, indoors skin, white and fine. They didn’t look like the hands of a murderer, but what else would be terrible enough to make a man’s own father repudiate him?
I wouldn’t! I wouldn’t kill someone. I’m not like that.
Though the truth was, he didn’t know what he was like. Perhaps the man he had been before was also some kind of monster? His were not the hands of a strangler, but poison they could have wielded easily enough. Or could his fault be the magic he’d shown in the forest? That ability to channel light? Had he made a pact with the devil for the power? Might the thing that pursued him now be some angel of retribution? A payment for his sins? Something to which he should surrender graciously?
No. If that were the case, the Roma would not have been afraid it would come for them. Nor would Mirela have been left outside for it, tied up like a virgin being sacrificed to a dragon. He didn’t know—couldn’t know what it was, with his brain in such a state. With an effort, he shook the thoughts off and leaned down to pick his now-dry clothes from the grass. The struggle to draw them back on over his injuries put his troubles into perspective. He could worry more about his crime when he was sure he would live.
He had just tied the sash about his waist and turned towards the largest house when a half-heard sound stopped him with a jerk. Unsure what it was, he stood and listened hard, and it came again, still faint at first but growing stronger: hoofbeats, and the high, metallic jangle of harnesses.
Hope choked him. His hands and his legs shook until it was a miracle he did not shake himself apart. Yet still he ran to the other side
of the village almost as fluidly as if he had been hale, and by that time he could see them crest the foothill, come cantering down into the river valley, full of colour and movement and life.
Frank ran towards the riders, ignored the lancing pain long enough to raise both hands and wave. “Help! Help, please!”
The horsemen came thundering up, broke around him and went on, into the village, as though he was so far below their notice they could not even see him. He had a brief, vivid impression of coat skirts and tall boots and horse sweat, and then he was alone again.
“No!” he sobbed, clutching at his hair. But they stopped in the centre of the town, and all but one of them dismounted, scattering to kick in doors. There came the tramp of booted feet on wooden stairs, the crashes of furniture being thrown over.
Frank turned and was skewered through by the steel-coloured gaze of the man still on horseback. This must be their lord—he was better dressed, his long deep-blue coat lined with wolf fur, fastened with ropes of silver frogging across the chest. Atop his black hair, he wore a tall, cylindrical hat, and the shape he made against the bright sky was exactly the shape the demon had cast against the stars.
Even the cold grey gaze felt familiar. It made Frank seize up beneath it, pinned in place like prey, and that was just like last night too. So much for all his efforts and his resourcefulness. He gave a shaky, hopeless laugh. Why had he assumed the creature could not come out under the sun? How ironic that he had run straight to it, calling for help.
The man slid from his saddle, strode towards him, his harsh, handsome face aglitter with fury, and seized Frank by the elbows in a grip that seemed stronger than iron bands. Frank thought of his dream. It comforted him a little to think that perhaps he deserved whatever might happen next.
“You!” the horseman snarled. “Tell me. Where have they gone? Why have they left you? Speak fast and make sense, for I am looking for someone to blame. Do not be that person.”
Frank’s mouth was so dry he could barely force words out. It didn’t help that the man punctuated every sentence by shaking him. His grip was marking Frank’s arms with deep bruises, and Frank’s shattered body burst with pain every time he was jerked about. It was overwhelming, after so long alone, to be so violently, physically close to another man, and his heart raced and shivered under his breastbone as he groped after his fleeing words. “I . . . I don’t know. I—”
The lord backhanded him casually. He was a big man, tall and broad, and his lazy blow took Frank off his feet, threw him five yards, and tumbled him down, fortunately on the wounded shoulder rather than on the broken ribs. The agony was the same.
Frank screamed. It seemed he had no reason to be proud, so why not? Why not force the world to hear the terror and the pain and the loss he had been carrying. They burst out in a howl that raked the inside of his throat, and he doubled over, coughing, after. “You fucking bastard! You whoreson bastard. I don’t know anything.”
He expected those to be his final words. Looked up breathless, waiting for the lord’s fury to leap into white heat, for him to draw that blade at his side and hack Frank’s head off. It was a long startled moment before Frank realised he was seeing curiosity instead.
“What language is that?” The man closed the distance between them again, wrenched Frank to his feet by the collar. Frank took the chance to rest a little, held up by the shirt now digging into his armpits.
“I don’t . . . What?”
“What is the matter with you?”
Under Frank’s weight, the shirt had come untucked from the sash at the back. Now his interrogator pulled it sharply over his head and off, while Frank barely avoided falling.
The horseman breathed in through his teeth at the sight of all Frank’s bruises, the blood crusted on his bandages, and the strapping of his shoulder now come awry, revealing the swollen, angry red of the flesh beneath.
He gazed more intently than Frank thought was appropriate, his face closed, giving none of his thoughts away. Humiliated on top of everything, Frank hauled the shirt back over his head and let it billow out around him like a lady’s petticoat. He was hotly aware that his eyes were streaming. He wiped them defiantly.
“You are very pale for a Roma boy,” said the lord at last. “Though you are clothed like one. Come now. Pull yourself together and tell me what I ask, lest I serve you worse than whatever you have already suffered.”
“I am . . .” Frank sniffed, wiped his face again with his bad hand, while he surrendered to necessity and leaned his weight into the lord’s grip. The man showed no strain in taking it up, but shifted his grasp from restraint to support “I am a . . .” What did he know about himself? “A disgrace to England.” “An Englishman of good family. My name is Frank . . .” The surname still eluded him. “I was attacked by bandits. On the river, I think—I don’t remember . . . things. I was hit in the head hard. When I woke up, some of the Roma helped me. They bandaged me, gave me clothes, told me to come here. I arrived only this morning, found the place deserted. Everyone gone. I don’t know . . .”
“I see.” The noble’s face smoothed further towards civility. It was a wide, strong face, very regular and handsome, except that he had odd eyes. A fold of eyelid at the outer edge made them almost triangular. It gave him a suspicious, sarcastic appearance even when, as now, his expression might otherwise have been called pleasant. “I was told, a fortnight ago, that three English travellers sought permission to enter my lands to view the vril accumulator at Solca. Young scholars, they said, from Cambridge. You are one of these?”
“I don’t . . .” A new and unexpected pain throbbed through Frank’s chest. “I don’t remember. It makes sense to have travelled with friends.” His voice, quite by itself, slipped into a higher register. “I had friends! What happened to them? If I am alive, might they not be too?”
Doors began to reopen in the village behind them, as the man’s troops came out into the sunlight. The oldest of them wore long, walrus moustaches that curved down to either side of their shaven chins and made their scowls larger than their faces. Very foreign they seemed to Frank, proud and brutal and dangerous. He didn’t like what it said about himself that he was afraid.
Frank straightened up, trying not to show any more weakness, and although there was a flatness behind the lord’s eyes that matched his men’s ungentle faces, he gave a small, cold glimmer of a smile. “Well, Frank. I am Radu Văcărescu, boyar of Valcea.”
“You? You are Văcărescu?” He’d known it, of course, the moment he recognised the man’s silhouette. He still didn’t quite believe it. The nightmare hunter that had threatened to tear out his throat and drink—why would it be standing in front of him now pretending to have forgotten him?
The temperature of the conversation, already chilly, dropped into ice. “Someone has been saying unflattering things about me?”
And Frank pulled in his scattered pieces with quick concern. “No! No. Simply that the people who rescued me said they did it for you. Because they wanted to please you.”
The anger was back like a bit in Văcărescu’s mouth. He jibbed at it. “I am glad somebody around here shows the deference I am owed.”
“I owe you my life,” said Frank, intending it to be soothing. It worked a little too well. The boyar studied him again, the long, speculative look of a farmer sizing up a cow at market.
“So you do. I will think on what I can ask of you to repay me.” He lowered Frank to the ground and walked away, speaking in low tones to the leader of his men—an ancient noble with a moustache as silver as a scythe and with blue and green flowers embroidered over every inch of his faded red coat. This gentleman took half of the band and led them, trotting out of the village on the other side, over the bridge beneath which Frank had washed up this morning, and away, raising dust clouds among the wild celandine, down the road he had not travelled.
Two of those left picked Frank up and manhandled him onto the boyar’s horse. Văcărescu swung up fluidly behind him, a
nd reached past him for the reins. The cage of the man’s arms and legs supported Frank like a high-backed chair, making it far less likely that Frank would slide sideways and fall off from exhaustion.
Despite his fears, there was something to be said for having a broad chest behind him, softened by fur coat, into which he could lean, and it was pleasant indeed to be surrounded by warmth, rocked by movement, to not have to walk any longer. Relaxing by degrees, he softened in the older man’s arms, and though he still thought he should be afraid, he was too exhausted and comfortable to quite manage it.
“Do you know anything about my friends?” Half question, half yawn.
Văcărescu leaned forwards and put his mouth against Frank’s ear. The white teeth grazed his skin, made him shudder. “Alive or dead, they will be brought to me. Everyone comes to us in the end.”
Frank had intended to stay alert, to attempt to find a way out of the clutches of someone his suspicions told him was dangerous, even demonic. But the flesh was weak. He found himself jostled awake in the courtyard of a spun-sugar castle, with narrow, tall turrets and graceful buttresses of silvery stone with blue-grey roofs like high witch’s hats, all of it reflecting the sky in a cool gleam.
Frank had slumped entirely against his . . . rescuer? He emerged to full wakefulness warm, surrounded by the smell of horse flesh and wolf fur and a faint whisper of incense. He basked in it for what seemed a long while, something under his skin thrumming in approval to be finally at rest and looked after. Bliss!
Then his mind caught up and told him that if he thought being taken to the lair of the demon who had hunted him in the night was bliss, he should really rearrange his priorities.
Sons of Devils Page 4