In the end, he padded back to his room to think, but he made the mistake of sitting down on his bed to do it. There a week of disturbed nights and injury overcame him and he slept.
A death sentence, Mirela thought as she hurried out of the over-warm room on the heels of the other girls. The hindmost stumbled, her borrowed skirts a little bit too long for her and her eyes streaming. As she sniffed, wiping tears and hair out of her face, Mirela slipped past, going down the main stairs two at a time, her unladylike gait at odds with the pale Vlach mask she wore. One gadji behind her meant time gained to find refuge for herself, and she refused to feel guilty about that. None of them would have stopped for her if they knew what she really was.
On the landing, the oak stairs took a sharp right turn as the wide staircase, lined with red carpet, painted with heraldic emblems and hung with portraits of the family, descended into another level of the noble house. Straight ahead, a narrow panel opened onto servants’ stairs that gnawed through the heavy stone of the keep like the channels of mites in old cheese.
Run down the wide stairs, through the great hall, and out into the dark? Or obey and totter carefully down the steep steps into the kitchen, where she would be surrounded by living servants? Did the strigoi make their thralls watch when they fed? Make them stand there cowed, helpless, and resentful—the way Anca had stood—hating all, opposing nothing?
As she wondered, the second girl pulled out of the housekeeper’s supporting arms. “No!”
Anca murmured something about food and rest, but the peasant girl hauled up her long skirts and tucked them into her decorative belt. Her face was swollen red with tears and her hands fumbled at the task, shaking too much to be of use. “What’s the point of food? Rest? You heard what he said! I’m no safer here than out there. Out there I’ll have a head start on the rest of you.”
She glanced at Mirela, flinched guiltily away, then raced down the main stairs like a deer fleeing for the woods. It made Mirela laugh in a thin, desperate way, to think she was not the only one fighting guilt over being determined to survive.
One behind her, and one visibly and obviously running, appealing to their hunting instincts. Good. One for each of them. That gave her some time before they came for her.
“I am sorry,” said the housekeeper, and gestured for Mirela to go down the servant’s stairs first. They were steep and narrow and crooked, but she was a Badi. She could dance on a rope slung between two trees. An uneven staircase was nothing.
Oh, what a cheerless place the kitchens were tonight. Over the past week of semi-imprisonment, she had rarely seen them so empty. No one was on the spit, no one in the scullery. A tray with soup and bread stood on a table next to the stairs, growing cold. The cook ignored Mirela altogether, concentrating on the housekeeper instead.
“How do they expect me to run a kitchen like this? There’s Dika gone now. She and all her family packed up and running for the border. May the hounds of Hell hunt her down.”
“Cook!” Anca grimaced. “What a thing—” she choked, and Mirela took advantage of her distraction to pocket the bread from the tray. “What a thing to wish on anyone. I hope they get clean away across to Transylvania, she and all her family.”
In other circumstances, Mirela might have told her plainly, Your hope is of as little worth as her curse. It is your actions that count, and they condemn you. But this was hardly the time to start a debate on who to blame, and besides Mirela had had an interesting thought. A thought that just might save her.
“I won’t stay for food,” she said, plucking at Anca’s sleeve to remind her she still existed. “But thank you for dealing well with us this week.” Anca had been motherly with all three of them, as their bruises had healed and the sallow marks of hunger and terror had faded from their faces. As they had been washed and fattened up and made beautiful like prize ewes at a fair. She had no fondness for the woman, but no resentment either. Pity mostly, and contempt. “Show me out to the courtyard?”
Anca’s smile was a timid thing, wary as a wood mouse. She took Mirela by the elbow and led her through pantries and the boot room to the outer door, opened it upon darkness. Distantly Mirela could hear the horses snorting in their stables and someone who cared so little about the girls that even now they were laughing.
“I am sorry.”
Mirela grinned, because she had an idea in her head, and that was all she needed to change the hunt from nightmare to challenge, to change the risk into a game. “I’m not dead yet.”
The door closed behind her with almost indecent speed. Anca probably did not want to risk witnessing what would happen if they caught her here. But she was glad of it. Waiting a moment for her eyes to adapt to the darkness, she picked out a candle lantern burning in the stables. The dim light of it showed her the cell-like stalls, the bulks of hay and saddlery, the harnesses, ploughs, and wagons. And the horses, of course, sidling in their confinement as though they at least knew something dreadful was on the prowl.
A cold night, and she was wearing finest lawn, so white it glimmered even under starlight. She let her skin return to its own native brown, her hair darken to black, changed the colour of the dress to dark blue. Already infinitely harder to see, she hunkered down to seem more dog-like in shape, waited for the poor solitary guard to pass, then loped over the empty courtyard and pressed herself into the closest horse’s stall.
The animals gave her a comfort the gadje never could, solid and honest and understandable as they were. This was a lady’s palfrey, an old and gentle beast whose colour she could not tell in the brown light, but whose legs were socked to the knee with something paler, and whose eyes, framed by colourless lashes, looked blue. You’ll do, Mirela thought fondly, and hopped up on its back, legs astride. Leaning down, she rubbed herself—her scent—all over the horse’s back from shoulders to hindquarters. It angled an ear at her inquiringly, but calmed under the contact, and she whispered thanks to it for what it was about to do.
When she slid down again, she lay in the gutter beneath the back wall of the stall and rolled to spread horse muck and piss all over herself. In the house, all three girls had been dabbed with the same perfume, and Mirela wanted it off her right away. The strigoi were known to be able to sniff out a human by the distinctive meat smell, but Mirela’s grandmother claimed they could not tell one person from another simply by the scent. The chances were, then, that the perfume served to mark out those particular individuals who were to be their prey for the night.
So she rubbed dung on the inside of her wrists until she smelled like a horse, and the only trace of the perfume left was on the palfrey’s broad back. There. Good. Lifting the gate from the stall, she encouraged the beast out into the courtyard with a gentle clucking and a hand in its mane. No one patrolled the walls, nor stood in the archway out from the castle’s great entrance. The portcullis remained up and the bridge down. After all, who would want to invade a place that could so easily bite back?
There were stories of those who had. Whole villages, sometimes, treading up the serenely undefended path with torches and indignation. Fleeing with minds overcome by fear and bodies that sickened over the oncoming months. Villages that had to be burnt to the ground afterwards, their ruins seeded with salt.
The strigoi put no barriers between themselves and those who wish to visit. Normally the thought would fill her with an uneasy horror. Tonight it would work in her favour.
She led the horse, hiding in its shadow, out of the castle’s courtyards to where it could see the long descent to untilled fields ripe with juicy grasses. It sniffed the air, strained forward, and she let it go, out of the walls, out of the doors, out and away where anyone might expect a fleeing girl to head. Then Mirela, keeping to shadows and muddy places, dashed back to the keep itself and up to the main doors.
These were shut against damp and wind, but a guard lounged on either side, in the kind of waking stupor that comes with the attempt to stay alert all night when nothing is happening. Mirela
had seen the one on the left before at a wedding, when her clan had been asked to dance and sing for the bride. Fortune was smiling on her. She’d been quite prepared to go in wearing her own face—a slave seeking employment at the master’s home. But now she rummaged through her memories, found a cousin of his. Name? No, she couldn’t recall it. But she remembered well enough the unruly wiry hair and weak chin, the good cloth of her skirts—patched but a fine solid red. The blue waistcoat, the slightly gormless look.
When she trudged up the steps towards him, into the light of the fire basket that burnt above the door, she still smelled like a horse. She just looked like a completely different person.
“Crina?” he exclaimed, straightening up with shock. Across the way, his partner too shook off apathy and gave her a stare, half-outraged, half-concerned. “What are you doing here? It’s not safe.”
“I didn’t mean to come in the dark,” she said, thinking quickly. “The horse fell—fell on me”—so don’t ask me why I smell like this—“and ran off. I had to walk. Please let me in before . . .”
“It’s no safer in here. You know that. You should be indoors.”
“I’m trying to be!”
“At home I mean. Why are you—”
A sensation as though the air had sucked backwards out of her mouth, as though something was trying to pluck the soul out of her nostrils using frozen wire. The other guard looked up, his eyes white rimmed. “Petre, argue inside. Let her in.”
They cracked the door. Petre pushed her through, making her stumble. She caught a brief glimpse of mist like powdered moonstone writhing out of the distant kitchen doorway. It raised its front end like a serpent testing the air, floated towards the stable. Mirela knew she shouldn’t hold her breath—there was no reason to, it would make no difference—but she felt as though she would die if she ever inhaled again. A shiver of killing cold began beneath her breastbone and threatened to shake her skeleton apart.
The mist reached the stable and disappeared inside. Petre silently shut the door. “What are you doing here?”
“I c-came for a job. Because . . . because they don’t . . . they don’t touch the servants. I thought I’d be safer here than anywhere.”
Mirela didn’t remember how Petre’s cousin spoke, but fear seemed universal, her shaky, high-pitched babble could have been anyone’s. He hesitated for a moment, blank eyed, and she had the sudden intense fear that he was another one like Văcărescu—who had somehow seen her for what she was when the strigoi themselves had been fooled. But then he shook himself and said, “Yes. Yes, quick. Kitchens. Before it comes back.”
So for the second time in as many hours, she found herself down in the servants’ domain. The cook examined her intently, this time, though it may have been partially because she didn’t wish to watch as the gardener and head groom went tramping up the stairs with a stretcher between them, came back down bearing a body.
Mirela felt no triumph at all to turn her head and see the first girl—had she ever learned her name?—as limp and white as her dress, but for a small splash of red just above the heart.
A hand-clap smacked sharply next to her ear. She returned her attention to the cook, and didn’t trouble to pretend she wasn’t on the edge of throwing up. “What? That was . . . Is she . . .?”
By the flaccid look to Cook’s jowls, she must have lost her appetite recently. Living with the monsters seemed hard on one’s health, even if you were among those whom they spared. “She’s nothing to do with you or me,” Cook said firmly. “What the folk upstairs do with themselves is none of our concern. But it so happens I do have a place you might fill. I expect you to work hard, not to complain, to scrub the stink off you, and to be as virtuous as you would in your mother’s house. I don’t think I need to tell you what will happen if you prove unsatisfactory. Do not run that risk.”
This was not going to be a permanent solution, she could already tell. Petre would eventually get leave to visit his family, find out that his cousin had never been near the castle, and come asking questions. That could not be helped. For now, she was happy to scrub the stables and any remnant of perfume off her and savour the feeling of being safely anonymous once more, and more than that, of having won. She had no time to fret over anything else. Tomorrow could worry about itself, and when it came, she would deal with it as she had dealt with this. She was Mirela Badi, and in a contest between herself and the world, the world had better watch out.
Frank’s door slammed open, and a woman’s voice cursed beneath its breath as she tried to catch it with her foot before it struck the wall.
He watched curiously as a new chambermaid bustled through the gap, her arms burdened with three logs and a sack of coal. She stopped with a start as she looked down on him, and her stare pulled him out of the melancholy into which he had been descending over the past weeks. This was the first person not of the family to look him in the eyes since he had come here. Like touching the coldest ice, he didn’t know if it froze or burned, but it certainly woke him up.
“You!” She dropped the fuel with a clatter. “I thought he’d had you a fortnight ago.”
This was not at all appropriate behaviour for a chambermaid. Frank felt quite dizzy with something very like relief.
Seeming to recognise the impropriety herself, the maid stooped and put the logs in the log basket, tipped some coal on the fire, some in the bucket. “He can’t have turned you,” she said as if to herself, “because it’s still light outside. Did you take service with him? You did, didn’t you? Damn. I shouldn’t have—”
“Wait!” Frank interrupted her before she could work herself into hysteria. She jabbed him with a pointy glare for his raised hand, but fell silent. “Who are you? What are you talking about?”
“Of course, you don’t know.” She laughed, with a small twist of condescension about her lips that Frank would have resented if he hadn’t felt he deserved it so much. “It’s probably best if we keep it that way.” Her voice sweetened and softened—an actress taking on a new role. “Forgive me, sir. I—”
“No, you don’t!” Frank lunged as she was heading for the door, caught her wrist. Cold, and wider to the touch than to the eye. Curious. But curiosity couldn’t keep down the wild panic that was the other side of his relief. She couldn’t speak to him as though he was a real person and then just go away and leave him to his doubts. “Please! Please stay and tell me what you mean. I am a stranger here. I don’t know anything, and I’m so . . . so lost. Don’t leave me here alone again. Please.”
She stood a moment, thinking. An utterly unexceptional young woman with curly brown hair beneath a peasant head scarf. The kind of local colour he would have passed by without thought in his old life. Then she smiled and closed the door. Hunting through the fire basket for the smaller pieces at the bottom, she wedged an offcut of ash into the hinges. Only then did she turn around and, shimmering like heat over water, turn into someone else.
Frank didn’t recognise this woman either for a moment, mislead by her colouring. But the once-white shift was the same—somewhat stained now, but still cinched at the waist with a belt stitched with little seed-pearls. Her stature was identical, tall, Amazonian, indomitable. Her features looked different now the skin was darker, with dark eyes, the tumbling hair black rather than flaxen, but they weren’t. It took him a while to see it, but they weren’t. “Mirela?”
He covered his mouth to keep in the cry of joy, but it escaped around the edges in the form of a laugh. “You’re safe? Thank God, I thought . . .” He gestured at her, trying to encompass the change, crown to sole. “How?”
She hesitated again, then sank to the chair as if the explanation was to be a long one. Frank settled on the edge of his bed to listen. “The changing?” She shrugged. “I found out I could do that about ten years ago. That was when many of my clan began to be able to do small things—when the fortune tellers began to speak true. I don’t know more than that. I woke up one day and knew I could. That’s all.”
Frank looked at his hands, remembered grasping light and darkness in them as if they were swatches of silk and velvet, materials he could caress and hold, draw around himself at will. “I can—” He didn’t want to speak of it, sure, suddenly, that it was another of the ways in which he fell short of the standards expected of an Englishman. But fairness demanded he pay her back in her own coin. “I can do something equally unbelievable myself,” he confessed. “Though I only discovered it recently.”
“It hasn’t made you strong.”
Frank laughed again, astonished at her insolence, and oddly pleased. Never had he more appreciated straightforwardness than after this week of uncertainty. “No. I doubt if anything could. But you are, aren’t you? Tell me what happened after I left you. I thought you’d got away.”
“They speak in thought to one another, the strigoi.” She walked envious fingers up the teeth of the comb he had been given, laid out on the desk along with shaving gear, pitcher, and ewer.
“Strigoi?” Frank had heard the word many times, but none of his conversational partners had had the linguistic pedantry to define it to his satisfaction. Evil spirit was his best guess. “The thing that attacked us? Wait, there’s more than one?”
Perhaps because he had not rebuked her for touching the comb, she now picked it up and began unsnarling the tangles of her hair. “You really don’t know anything, do you?” she said, half-pitying and, he thought, half-pleased to be able to talk down to him. He found it an unexpected benefit of having forgotten most of his life, that he had no pride left to wound.
“Nothing. Please tell me what that thing was, and everything you know about it.”
With one side of her hair tended, bouncing into large, loose curls, she started on the other while she thought how to begin again. “A strigoi is the spirit of an evil person. When the person first dies, the spirit is a mist, as all spirits are. But this one is too afraid of judgement to leave this earth. It slips back, instead, into the body it used to have. It cannot stop that body from decaying in the way of all flesh, but by drinking the blood of living men it can slowly build itself a new one—a better one. All day it sleeps in the grave. All night it is like the plague. It hunts by smell, but when it knows a human is near—on the other side of a locked door, perhaps—it can call to his mind and get him to surrender himself. Sometimes, at least. I’ve heard there are people whose minds are strong enough to turn that aside, but I’ve never met one. The worst thing is that those it kills return as strigoi themselves. Just as the bite of a mad dog passes on madness, the bite of a strigoi passes on its evil.”
Sons of Devils Page 7