He waited until Văcărescu was close enough to pick up his own cup, the carved amethyst stone of his signet ring gleaming a purple so dark it was almost black as he curved his fingers around the handle. Then Frank said, “Tell me about the strigoi.”
Văcărescu did not recoil, but he stiffened, and there was a long pause while he stared at the dark froth of his coffee, his head bent. Frank took the chance to steady his own breathing and congratulate himself on a small victory over his own shortcomings.
The smile had gone when Văcărescu looked up, replaced with the hardmouthed surly expression with which Frank was much more familiar. “Either you have just remembered that word, or the servants have been gossiping. Which?”
“Does it matter?” Frank waved the question away before he could succumb to the urge to answer it. “I am glad to know where I stand. Did you know that one of them attacked me on the way here?”
He couldn’t quite interpret the flash of something through those pale eyes. Fury or guilt, it could have been either. Văcărescu said nothing, just watched Frank coolly, waiting for him to come to his point.
So Frank did. “Until recently, I thought it was you. You have the same stature, the same eyes. It was dark, you understand. I only saw glimpses of the creature.”
This reaction was a little easier to parse: startlement and then understanding. “Ah. That explains a great deal. You thought Alaya was protecting you from me, rather than the other way around. What happened to change your mind?”
“I saw Constantin. He looks like you.”
Văcărescu huffed a silent laugh. “I look like him.” He turned to open one of the great glass fronts of the bookshelves, where a series of tall books bound in blue regressed from the jewellike present to tattered, faded pasts. Taking out one of the older volumes, he laid it—to Frank’s distress—flat on the table. No wonder the spine was broken, and loose pages stuck out at angles from segments that had slipped their glue.
When his bibliophile soul had protested long enough, Frank examined the page his host had opened for him, and there was Constantin, stiffly drawn in the centre of a medieval illumination, surrounded by other stiffly drawn horsemen with long hair and aggressive moustaches and fur hats trimmed with pearls. It was not by any means a wonderful likeness, but the little illustrated man was white clad from head to foot, just as he had been when he’d stood before Frank. The artist had coloured his eyes with sheet silver, and they gleamed cold as Russian winters whenever Frank tilted his head.
“He was one of Voivode Tepes’ men.” Văcărescu sat with the air of one repeating a well-worn story. The ancestry of his house—his own story, in a way, for Frank knew enough about being noble-born to understand how one’s ancestors breathed through you with every breath.
“Vlad Tepes? The folk hero?”
“Indeed.” A wry smile. “A great man, who fought back the Turks and stamped out the corruption of his nobles, and enabled the common folk of Wallachia to live in prosperity, under a law that applied to all.”
Radu angled the book so that he could look at it too, brushed an affectionate fingertip along the illustration. Frank held back a protest at the thought of what the touch was doing to the delicate colours and paper.
“I am named after Tepes’ brother,” Radu said, unexpectedly, but the softening in his tone ran out, left it cold again. “The useless one. The collaborator who ruled Wallachia as a puppet of the Turks, for a time. Radu the Beautiful, catamite of Sultan Mehmet II.” He closed the book, ungently. Frank whined with sympathetic pain on its behalf. “It is appropriate enough. Now I rule this domain as a puppet of my ancestor, as every son of the line has done since Tepes’ day.”
Frank understood the shame—powerless, impotent inability to be what one’s ancestry demanded. He smothered a desire to reach across the desk and curl a hand reassuringly around his host’s wrist. Not only would it be in no way appropriate, he wasn’t yet convinced Văcărescu was as trapped as he wanted Frank to think.
“Why would Constantin pass the title down? Wouldn’t it make more sense for him to keep hold of it?”
Văcărescu snorted with scorn. “Constantin died and was buried. This is a known fact. Dead men may not own property. Dead men may not rule. But if they have children, they can come back and carry on telling those children how to live. And those children . . . I do not know how it is in your country, but here, children are brought up to honour their elders. It’s not unknown for a fifty-year-old man still to be ruled by his eighty-year-old father. Our family’s case is only a more extreme version of that.”
“Except that the father is a murderer, and the son knows it.” Oh lord! Frank’s own hypocrisy startled him. Where had that come from? What made him think—when he was dogged by his own unrevealed crime—that he could afford to stand on the moral high ground? When Văcărescu rose from his seat, grabbed Frank by the collar, and dragged him across the desk, scraping his weight over the fragile ancient text as if he didn’t care that the pages would tear under the stress, Frank really could not blame him.
“The book!” Frank gasped, terribly conscious of knuckles against his throat, pressing into the beat of the great vein, slowing the pulse of his blood. His head filled with grey fog as he tried to pry the fingers off. “You’ll damage it!”
He was dropped sharply. Văcărescu moving away like a man recoiling from temptation. “Of course, the book,” he said in disbelief. When Frank caught himself before he could land on it, and carefully replaced the dislodged pages, closing it like a holy thing, he gave again his not-quite laugh. “What strange priorities you have.”
Returning to the window, Văcărescu sighed and bowed to rest his forehead against the glass, a small and weary gesture. “Perhaps you are owed the full story. This is how it is, then. When Constantin died, his young wife sickened and died but a month after, leaving a babe in arms. The child was cared for during the day by the family of one of his retainers. At night he was raised by his dead parents. He felt all the love for them any boy feels for his mother and father. When he was old enough to command he was glad to accept the duty of protecting them in return.
“As is our custom in this land, they found him a wife. Their first child was a girl, on whom the whole family doted. But then they had a son.” He spread both hands on the glass on either side of his head, an oddly cruciform posture that Frank found upsetting. But it did mean there was no way to see his face as he went on. “The family lived until the son was weaned, and then, mysteriously, mother, father, and daughter died, leaving the infant child to be raised by his grandparents with no memory of any other carers.
“This is how it has been now for nearly three hundred years. For a dozen generations Constantin and Alaya have been ‘father’ and ‘mother’ to each singular son.” He turned, his new smile drawn like a dagger. “A tested and satisfactory system indeed, don’t you think?”
Frank did not. “All this time they’ve been terrorising the county? Why do the people stand for it? I see why they’re running away now. I don’t see why they didn’t do so three centuries ago.”
“Have you never wondered how wolves and deer can live in the same forest? Why the deer do not simply go away—why the wolves do not simply eat them all at once?”
“I . . .” Frank knew about books. He had not a clue about the eating habits of wolves. “No?”
Radu Văcărescu had eyes that gleamed with the same chill as those of his ancestor, hard and faintly inhuman. Raised by monsters, Frank thought, and surprised himself by finishing, just like me.
“There is a balance,” said Văcărescu as easily as if he were discussing partridge shooting season and not murder. “A prosperous community can afford to lose a few of its weaker members a year. Those who are dying of cankers or agues, those whose malice sees them cast out from their villages to wander after dark. Criminals, runaways, bandits, and occasionally willing sacrifices, chosen by lot. Our people have ruled here since before the Romans and on the whole we have ruled we
ll. Having seen the chaos of other domains under absentee lords, the occasional cull is something our peasants are willing to endure.”
Frank remembered doors left gaping, cold fires, and silence while the flowers withered in the unwatered gardens. “Yet now you’re losing villages overnight. That’s got nothing to do with the fact that their ruling family is two-thirds demon?”
“Three hundred years after the fact and they suddenly decide to care?” Scorn. “Hardly.”
And like it or not, he had a point. “Then what changed?”
“You may find it hard to believe, but what changed was politics. Do you remember I mentioned that Vlad Tepes disposed of a number of treacherous boyars?”
“Disposed of?”
“Impaled.”
Frank was about to protest from the bottom of his gentle English heart, sick at the cruelty, when a memory of a hanging assailed him with the strength of a nightmare—the smells of sweat and righteousness and ordure, the victim choking, kicking, his bowels opening. Jeers among the crowd.
Văcărescu had been watching him mockingly, as one watches a child that cannot bear the cruelties of adult life, but at the look on Frank’s face his expression eased. “The surviving boyars did not take this lesson to heart,” he said. “We have been under the thumb of the sultan so long we have lost all our pride, learned simply to scrabble for whatever scraps he throws. We have grubbed for wealth and used it to buy our way to the voivode’s throne—promised loyalty, reneged whenever it suited us, spineless and worthless, fit only to be placed in a locked room and set on fire.”
He sneered, with an anger that reminded Frank of another man . . . hawk face, spindly fingers, iron hair cropped close to go under a periwig. Frank’s father, Arthur Carew, Earl of Hungerford. A man who regarded the perfect honour of his family as an extension of his own good name.
Oh, Frank put a hand over his mouth to keep this revelation from flying away. He had a name and a family. How about that.
“With our boyars squabbling, we have been easy pickings for conquerors from every nation under the sun.” Văcărescu seemed not to have noticed the moment of revelation, absorbed in his own concerns. “About twenty years ago, the Ottomans gave us up to the Austrians. Though we might have expected better treatment from fellow Christians, the Austrians regarded us as a convenient source of wealth and squeezed us hard for it, until the peasants had to choose between paying the taxes and feeding themselves. Three years ago, under the Treaty of Belgrade, we were passed back to the sultan. He decided he could not trust any of our own boyars to rule in his name, and put a Greek slave on the throne.”
He sighed again, bitterly. “If this was supposed to make things better, I’m not sure how. The Turks have left us at the mercy of a foreign prince for whom ruling this country is a marvellous opportunity for getting rich on the suffering of strangers. He put the taxes up.”
He rubbed at his frown with a clenched fist, helpless and angry at it. “Since under this punitive tax system peasants cannot work hard enough to feed themselves, there is little else they can do but leave their homes and either turn to banditry or find another country where they can. Hence the exodus of whole villages into Transylvania, where conditions are better.
“My parents are not stupid. They have been restraining themselves for centuries, taking only what can be supported. We had achieved a balance that was workable for everyone. But with fewer peasants the balance is tipped. With the Turks driving our people away, the strigoi must restrain themselves, feed less. They are old and proud and famished. They take to being starved no better than anyone else does. This will not end well.”
Frank folded his arms around his stomach and held on. He was not cold, snuggled into his borrowed, fur-lined coat as he was—and that gave him pause, for it was Văcărescu’s coat. His clothes that Frank wore. His hospitality Frank had been relying on since the rescue. His nights that had been sacrificed to make it harder for the monsters to drain Frank dry.
All of that generosity, and Frank had so far only repaid him with hard words and accusations. He had not yet given Frank an explanation for why he had not rid his people of this blight for good, but perhaps he—
Oh, but he had, hadn’t he? A single solitary son in every generation. In every generation, Constantin and Alaya had been mummy and daddy before they had been anything else. Frank looked around the beautiful room wildly, searching for something that would take the nausea out of his sudden understanding. Because Frank remembered little save unrelenting disappointment from his own father, and still he didn’t believe he could ever bring himself to raise a hand to the man.
Frank thought again of Alaya, with her huge eyes and her practiced, patient sweetness. The charm of her smile. He could see her with a small boy in her arms, both of them poring together over the illuminated histories, while she instilled in him a pride in his own blood. Did Frank really expect Văcărescu to kill his own mother? Whatever she was, otherwise, she was still that.
“I’m sorry.”
Startlement made Văcărescu’s black brows twitch like raven’s wings. All of his expressions were harsh, and perhaps that was why Frank had been so slow to see him as a man who could be hurt like any other. “About what?”
“You saved my life, and although you joked with me about repayment, you haven’t demanded any. My presence in your house has made trouble for you. I may be bringing danger after me—I certainly feel as if I am. All you’ve done has been to treat me with openhanded kindness, and I repay you with accusations.”
The startlement devolved into astonishment, an oddly lumpen look on a face meant for certainty. Had the man never been apologised to in his life that it took him so aback?
“You do not accuse me of anything that I do not already despise myself for.”
And now even this room felt tainted with despair. Frank had no timepiece, but the sun was not yet high in the sky—almost the whole day lay ahead of him, and though there was a night to come after that, he had survived a number of them already. No rush, just yet. There was time to find out more about his situation, to fit the pieces of information together and work out a solution. Time to stop attacking before he turned away the best friend he had left.
Speaking of friends. Frank hugged himself a little harder. It hurt, but that was good—he deserved it. “You said you found my friends? Did you bury them?”
Văcărescu’s expression was appropriately respectful, but the tension of his shoulders eased. “Yes. It was done quickly, as soon as the priest could arrive. What we can do in this country to prevent other strigoi from arising, we do thoroughly.”
“Do I want to know what that entails?”
“They had been violently slain—there was a risk they would not lie easy in the ground. The usual precautions were taken.”
“And I don’t want to know what those are?”
A brief winter-chill smile. “Probably not. Would you like to visit the graves?”
Choking horror filled Frank at the thought. No. He was not ready to write the end and draw a line under his friends’ lives. Not before he was sure he remembered them properly. He wanted to know them before he had to come to terms with their deaths.
“You said we had come to study the ‘vril accumulator’?” So frustrating! Frank could almost recall someone, a grin of delight and a flutter of multicoloured talismans. Deft hands tying pierced stones into a complex knot work of little ribbons. He chased after a name, a face, but only found a picture of copper struts, folding out over water, a moonstone ball that looked like a compass spinning past markings of brass. “I don’t remember what that is.”
Văcărescu unearthed a book from beneath one of the piles on his desk, pulled out a folded letter from among its pages, and handed it to Frank. Just the shape of the handwriting made him gasp as if he’d been struck in a place deeper than flesh.
“I didn’t know it by that name either, before this letter. Here we call it St. George’s Cloak, and it’s a place the peasants go wh
en they are sick or injured, in the hopes of a cure. Your friend explains, in there, that it’s some sort of device of great interest to students of theurgy and ‘a jewel beyond price, of which your country may be justly proud.’” He laughed. “I think he thought me some savage to be placated with fine words. He signs himself ‘James Protheroe’ if that means anything to you.”
Frank closed his eyes to hold in sudden tears, because yes, it did. It meant acceptance where he had feared horror. It meant the heroism of one who would hug a leper with no thought of his own health. A true friend. “I should . . . I should see it for him. If it meant so much to him. Is it a long way away? I should . . .”
“Not far.”
Frank’s eyes were still closed. He should have startled up when a large hand landed on the back of his neck, cool and gentle. He probably shouldn’t have relaxed, and lifted his head so that the slowly rubbing thumb slid up his nape into his hair. But it was comforting, and he had his eyes closed so he could tell himself it wasn’t really happening. He was only wishing it, in the privacy of his own mind.
“An hour on horseback, with a guide. I will take you there now, if you wish.” The voice, too, was behind him, quiet and wry. Then the hand went away, fingers opening and trailing across his skin, leaving individual trails of sensation. The sound of booted feet treading carefully away, long strides. When he opened his eyes, Văcărescu was again on the other side of his desk.
I imagined it, Frank told himself firmly, but he felt much strengthened nevertheless, warmed through and aglow. “I would love to get out of here,” he agreed. “Am I allowed?”
Văcărescu checked his pocket watch. His small smile looked cruel, but Frank was now willing to bet that was just a result of physiognomy rather than of character. “At ten past eleven in the morning, there is no will in this country that overrules mine. And I say you are.”
Only a little over an hour later they were dismounting in the rocky gorge of one of the Olt’s tributaries. The path had become too narrow and too twisted for the horses, winding up as it did into the Carpathian mountains. Grey rock leaned in on them from both sides, and the stream’s chatter echoed off damp walls greened with stubborn grasses. A shallow landing, big enough to take two small boats, marked the end of the navigable part of the stream. Their party stopped at the hythe, where the gap between the cliffsides had been widened by picks to the size of a small room.
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