And then his friends die protecting him.
Frank smacked the empty chamber pot hard against the floor. It was heavy earthenware and took a satisfying beating before the cracks widened enough to shatter. The thuds concealed his sobbing a little, but when at last the dastardly pot gave up the ghost, smashed into pieces, he wailed aloud. It was too much. It was too much to bear.
The door creaked quietly open, and a long lance of butter-yellow light fell over the shards, and made the tears glitter in his eyelashes. He thought—hoped—it was Mirela. Her briskness always made him feel that things couldn’t be that bad. But it was Radu, in his shirtsleeves, the white material stitched all over with red embroidery scarcely more livid in colour than his bruised face. Still, half-dressed and vulnerable, he held himself like a man who was utterly in charge of himself and the world. It wasn’t the truth, but it was a magnificent lie.
Knowing what Frank knew now, his reactions to Radu made an awful lot more sense. That anxiously beating heart, that prickle of hot awareness whenever he was near . . . He didn’t know how he could have missed it for so long.
Radu put the lantern he carried down on top of the writing desk. He stood watching Frank’s red, watery face for a long time, looking stern but uncertain, like he honestly didn’t know what to do with fellow humans and their emotions. Why should he when, to his family, humans were servants or food?
“This weeping will not help,” he offered at last. Frank would have found the sentiment cold comfort if it hadn’t been such a clear struggle for Radu to volunteer even that. “You were resolute enough earlier. What—”
“I remembered the last part.” Frank found a handkerchief. Oddly, that chill gaze was refreshing, like packed snow on a heated wound. “I remembered my crime, why I was sent away. I think my father spoke the truth when he told me I bring nothing but death to those to whom I most owe love. You should stay here and let them have me. I am not worth sacrificing your principles.”
“It is not my principles I sacrifice.”
Frank huffed in exasperation, strangely braced by Radu’s emotional incompetence. Why must the man speak like his thoughts were mice, threading their way over a floor thick with traps? Declaration and nothing—his mouth snapping shut as if the slightest softness might be enough to betray him.
“I’m trying to make it clear that my life is not worth saving for any reason.” He swallowed, had never admitted this out loud. “I am a sodomite, fleeing from just execution. I caused my friends’ deaths, and my life is owed to the noose already. So perhaps you could shoot me, cleanly—I would prefer that to being fed upon—and then, once dead, I cannot be used to coerce you into doing anything against your will.”
Radu’s face smoothed into a masculine version of Alaya’s patient certainty. The expression that had too often made Frank feel foolish for disagreeing with her. Frank shuddered at the resemblance and hitched himself back up onto the bed, drawing his knees to his chest, making a tent of blankets around his huddled form. Radu sat next to him, curling his right hand around the back of Frank’s neck.
“Has it not become clear to you,” Radu asked, “that you being a sodomite is no bad thing in my eyes? I’d wondered from your skittishness if I was misinterpreting what I saw, but I am glad to hear I was not. How many times do I have to tell you that this is my land? My will is law here, and if I do not object, who will dare to condemn you?”
“They always do,” Frank said, remembering the boys who had become blasé about picking up soldiers in the well known cruising grounds surrounding Lincoln’s Inn fields, or the Inns of Court. Hell, the molly house in which he had met Gervaise had been supposed to be a safe refuge, the neighbours tolerant, the magistrate accustomed to looking the other way. None of it had been enough to remove the spectre of the noose. “You let your guard down for a moment and they string you up.”
But the sharp, unbearable pain of the memory was wearing off, letting him feel how he had healed since. Over the past months of journeying he had mourned Gervaise and learned to live again. Those memories came back too, letting his heart and his grief settle inside of him. The shame of exposure, awful though it had been at the time, had not touched his conviction that there was nothing wrong in the love they’d shared. Now, with a reassuring hand warm on his skin and the coverlets tucked comfortably around him, with the light that shone from the lantern making a golden globe of the room, he allowed himself to be consoled.
“Not here. Much though I regret it in other ways, we have at least learned something about human nature from the Turks. Besides, we have other, more important problems.”
The thought of life, the need for life, leaped up like a fire and scorched Frank’s lungs, but he wouldn’t be a coward, wouldn’t think only of himself. “Your more important problems are using me to get to you. You could solve that with a single bullet. Why won’t you?”
The hand on his nape slipped around to clasp the junction of his neck and shoulder, holding on just a little too tight. He was going to have bruises there come morning. But he liked it, liked the way it distracted from his punctured palm, held him together.
Radu’s expression was fierce and grim, his mouth sullen and his eyes doubtful. “Just recently a very impertinent young woman told me that I was not the boyar here, I was simply my parents’ slave. She was right. Perhaps I wanted to insist on having my own will, for once. To just, for once, have something of my own that they did not force on me. Something I chose for myself.”
“You resent them too,” Frank said, surprised. He tucked away “something of my own” to worry about later, when he could pick apart the separate clusters of feeling that came at the thought. A combination of indignant denial—I am no one’s possession. Not to be used by anyone to prove a point—and a mute, doglike joy at the phrase, “My own.”
“Of course I do. I despise them.”
The hand seemed to become heavier to accompany these weighty thoughts, or perhaps it was Frank’s weariness that weighed him down. He pushed himself back to lean against the wall. Radu came with him, shifting his arm behind Frank’s neck and pulling him down to rest against his shoulder. It was an innocent enough thing, both of them dressed, Frank’s cheek touching only embroidered linen that had been laundered into softness, welcomely warm. But he knew full well what the gesture meant, what he was saying by accepting it.
He’d gone out looking for a champion, and he’d found one. It was such a relief not to be facing the future alone that he could quite see how Radu could feel the same. The thought sparked an idea on the edge of dreams. “Could you kill them? In the daytime when they’re not awake, could you do it?” Mirela thinks so.
A laugh, in keeping with the drowsy quiet of the room. “Could I kill my parents, Frank? I don’t know. Could you?”
He remembered being picked up. Five years old and thrown from his pony, with torn knees and elbows and a bloody nose. Carew had picked him up, carried him home, let him bleed all over a five-pound cravat.
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to try.”
“Well, then.”
At length, their position gave Frank a crick in the neck. He shuffled round and lay down, stretching out under the covers as the memories settled further, gained more distance. Radu lay down on top of the bed, twitched the edge of the fur comforter over himself, flush to Frank’s back but for the many layers of blankets between them.
All very medieval, Frank thought, grief and terror loosening under the animal comfort. Like lying with an unsheathed sword between us. But there’s nothing wrong with that. He still felt weak and watery with the shock of Alaya’s attack and the final revelation of who he was. At the moment, the undemanding company of a sleeping friend was welcome indeed.
The next day was full of preparations. Riders went out to the nearest villages to gather supplies for the journey. Grooms attached two plough horses to an enormous, flat-bottomed boat, which had been resting against a wall in the hay barn, and hauled it like a sledge down to the tribut
ary that ran through Bircii village, whose icy depths Frank had cause to remember fondly.
Frank had been given a portmanteau, and filled it with the clothes Alaya had altered for him. He spent much of the day alone while Radu was riding around his holdings, speaking to the headmen he would leave in charge, reassuring them that yes, he was taking the strigoi with him and while he was gone they were as free to walk and work in the night as in the day.
Frank passed the time in the library, and half a dozen of the least rare books were packed in his luggage when he hauled it on board. A second much rougher raft was tied up alongside their boat, and one of the raft men slapped him on the shoulder like an old friend when Frank handed over the bag.
He stopped, disconcerted. “What do you mean by that impertinence?”
The young man tilted up his head and the shadow thinned beneath his bulky sheepskin hood, until Frank was looking at the roguish brown face of Nicu the boatman, the one who had brought him up the Olt, the one who had died, shot neatly through the throat the day Old Frank met with his death. Frank’s heart froze solid. He clutched at his sash as if the crucifix he had once been given—had thrown at Constantin’s face—had mysteriously reappeared too. “Nicu?”
The man’s brass earring wiggled as he smiled, but it was not Nicu’s smile. “Oh, you know Nicu Karela? Perhaps I should have picked a different face.”
“Knew him,” Frank corrected, his mind whirling. “He was shot by the bandits—the same ones who beat and robbed me. You knew him too?”
“He was one of my people, yes.” Nicu’s face went ashen, and the great droop of his moustache seemed to sag further. Most odd, to see him mourn himself.
Frank’s wits recovered, though not soon enough to have done any good in terms of breaking the news more gently. “Is it . . . Is it Mirela under there? You can look like anyone at all? That’s astounding!”
“Good, isn’t it?” she agreed, switching topics like one who is well used to getting over bad news fast. “Sooner or later, if I stay here, that stupid guard will realize I’m not really his relative, and then there’ll be thumbscrews and witch trials and ‘burn the Roma trash.’ In Bucharest I’ll be one among thousands. If I can’t figure out a way to take care of our problem, I can simply leave, become someone else, and who will notice in the middle of a city, where no one knows everyone, and a stranger is an everyday sight?”
Frank couldn’t help but be overcome by admiration of her resourcefulness, even if it was disturbingly like talking to a fleshy ghost. “If you walk away, you will no longer be protected from the strigoi.”
“But that’s the joy of it.” She had not quite replicated all of the old man’s wrinkles, and she had made his long hair blacker—this was a younger, fiercer version, ready to demand respect from the world with the point of a knife. “In a city there will be so many other people for them to feed on, I won’t need it. Besides,” she waved her work-roughened hands at her compact, masculine body, “like this I can get on a ship. I can go anywhere, leave the country, leave everything. No longer be a slave.”
“It doesn’t scare you?” Frank asked, because it scared him. “To draw a line under your old life and start again with nothing?”
“It doesn’t scare me,” she scoffed, reckless and young and full of herself. “It makes me angry to think I might have to go so far, when what I want is my family and my own land. That’s still my goal. But if I can’t achieve that, I’ll take what I can get.”
Frank watched as footmen moved some of the luggage in the better boat, strapped it against the gunwales to make room in the centre for two long, narrow boxes. Just under his skin, he felt the liquid swell of whatever it was the vril accumulator had left in him like a new strength. Mirela, too, was an inspiration. Having lost everything, having “died” in the bandit attack, what indeed did he have to lose by putting that old life down and becoming something new? Radu’s . . . librarian? Lover? Pet?
He looked again at the space for the coffins and frowned. They did not belong in his fresh start. He had not been able to resist Alaya last night—magic or no magic, she had reached in to his head and moved him to her will like a doll. But perhaps tomorrow, when they were on the river at noon and the two strigoi lay sleeping in thin wooden boxes, he would tear off the lids and see how well they took to sunshine.
“What kills them?” he asked, realising he didn’t know.
“Not much.” Mirela leaned on a punt pole, gave Frank a look that he had seen on Nicu’s face a hundred times before, a sort of sideways laughter, as though she found him hilarious, but had decided it was not politic to say so. “Some elders say that a wooden stake through the heart will do it, but that you’d need to cut their heads off first so they slowed down enough to allow it. Some say that you can pin them down with spindles, and that then you should stuff their mouths with garlic and burn them to ashes. Then you should bury the ashes at a crossroads, so that even if they do walk again, they won’t know which way to take.”
“That sounds elaborate.” Frank was dismayed. “But if it works, I suppose—”
“As to that,” she said, “I don’t know. No one who wanted to kill them managed to get within a foot of the graves, so I don’t know if it’s truly been tried. That’s the trick, isn’t it? Finding someone whose mind they can’t get at. Finding someone who can do any of these things, when they try to hold him back.”
Radu did not return until twilight, and then insisted on eating and resting for a while before they set out. So it was dark when the coffins were brought up from beneath the floor. Their occupants walked beside them, bright-eyed.
Having eaten and changed into warmer travelling clothes, Frank stood by the riverbank waiting for the boatmen to load the caskets. He gazed around with something like regret. So much had changed here, he owed the place a little gratitude. The castle was ridiculously pretty from this vantage point—high above them and silvered by an early moon. The forest was acres of sighing movement, so dark a green it seemed black.
Constantin stood as an icy white pillar on the bank, and Frank thought the white thing he saw among the trees on the other shore was an afterimage embedded in his eye at first. Then there was a blaze of smoky orange light and a roar, and something kicked him in the ear. Just behind him a sod of earth seemed to explode of its own accord, spraying his legs with mud. Gasping, he knelt down and felt the ground, and his fingers discovered the smooth, hot roundness of a freshly fired ball. The wind of it passing within an inch of his face must have been what he could still feel phantom-hot against his skin.
“Someone just shot at me!” he exclaimed, and despite the bandits, despite being almost eaten since, he retained enough naivety to be indignant.
Alaya smiled down at him, dressed for travel and wearing only a simple flat hat over her veiled hair. He knew it wasn’t a fond smile, but it looked it, and he was grateful for the pretence. “Well, we can’t have that,” she said, and moved to stand in front of him. The colour faded out of her, leaving her as silver against the night as her husband. The next shot passed halfway through her and did not even billow the mist that she had become. The bullet seemed to lodge in the centre of her chest. Reaching in to the cavity of her lungs, she plucked it out, let it fall at Frank’s feet. Turning her head, bonelessly, like an owl, she grinned at Frank with those serpentlike fangs, and then any semblance of a human form was gone from her, leaving only a ribbon of fog that curled across the swift-flowing brook and streamed away under the boughs.
There was the lap of water, and the cold sough of the mountain wind through the pines. Another shot, deeper in the woods this time, and then a wail he thought at first was a cat in heat. He only realised it was a human scream when his body, wiser than himself, shivered all over. It came again, more desperate and even more animal the second time. Closer too.
Constantin stepped with heavy dignity into the first boat, sat on the coffins, and beckoned for the boatman to tuck a travel blanket around his knees. Watching the man’s attem
pts to achieve this without coming within grabbing distance might have been darkly funny without the distant shrieks of agony and terror. As it was, Frank bit his lip and kept his eyes on the farther shore.
At length a pale blur began to coalesce there. Heedless of cold and wet, Alaya strode into the river at its shallowest point, dragging something behind her by its wrist. Before she was halfway across, the blood on her mouth was visible as a black stain. It tried to trickle from one corner of her lips, down her chin, but she licked it away. With a dismissive toss, as though the body weighed no more than a freshly picked bundle of wild flowers, she threw the corpse down at Frank’s feet.
“I didn’t quite believe you,” she said, wiping her mouth on her hand, “when you said that death followed you. Do you remember me saying that all curses are nothing to the might of the Văcărescu family? Here is your assassin. He’s not so frightening now, is he?”
He lay facedown on the shingle bank, water still draining from him in a black, glittering sheet, from where he had been hauled through the stream. Dressed in a white sheepskin jacket and white peasant leggings, he might have been a local shepherd. Why would such a man try to shoot Frank?
Frank hunkered down beside him and pulled at his shoulder to turn him over—the wet wool gave a sense of ebbing warmth, felt unclean as maggots. He was heavy, or perhaps Frank was reluctant to look. With good reason—for when he finally managed to roll the body over, bring the face into moon and lantern light, he recognised it well enough.
It was Lewis, with a field bandage around his side. Lewis, Arthur Carew’s valet, where valet meant bodyguard. Picked from a foundling school by Frank’s grandfather and given to his father as both pet and protector when his father was no more than ten years old.
Frank released the breath he hadn’t known he was holding, nearly choking on it. So Lewis had been behind the bandit attack. By extension, it was his father’s doing that Protheroe and Stebbins, Nicu, Apostol, and Mihai were dead, and the only reason Frank had got away was that he had shot Lewis. Unconscious, Lewis would not have been able to insist the outlaws finish Frank off after robbing him.
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