“Well I say it’s time to end that,” he said.
A roar. A din of overlapping voices like waves slapping at rocks. Is this what drowning sailors heard? This rushing in their ears?
“We are Wallachia,” he said, shouted. “And we will no longer belong to anyone but ourselves! Join with me. Help me hold our lands, and I shall be the prince you deserve!”
They loved him, Cicero had said, and their love was deafening.
~*~
Vlad couldn’t stop shaking.
“Darling, it will be alright,” Eira said. She hovered a few paces away, a cup of wine mixed with blood ready to offer, should he want it. She hadn’t tried to approach him again since he’d growled at her.
He felt bad for doing so, but it had been a reflex. Night had fallen, and still he reeled.
He’d spoken today of a free Wallachia, and here he was, granted leadership of this land by the very empire he’d sworn today to shake off. He’d said impossible, stupid things today. He supposed all kinds of love had the potential to make fools of men.
“Vlad,” Cicero said, low and soothing. “You should come to bed. Rest. It will seem easier in the morning.”
Vlad stopped in his pacing before the fireplace, and thrust a hand toward the shuttered window. “What will seem easier? The fact that I just scorned the very people guarding this palace? Or the fact that, the moment he’s free, Hunyadi’s going to march down here and kill us all?”
Cicero, stripped down to breeches and a simple shirt, hair unbound, folded his arms and sent him a very unimpressed look with his good eye. “You should talk to your men. Most of them aren’t even Turkish by birth. Who’s to say they won’t support you?”
“And what if they do? Then Mehmet will march to put me down, my whore brother in tow.”
“Vlad,” Eira snapped. “Do notcall him that.”
In the silence that followed, the flames crackled loudly on the hearth. A log shifted with a thump and a flare of sparks.
Cicero and Fenrir looked between mother and son, waiting. She was his mother, but he was a prince.
Vlad turned around and folded his arms across the mantlepiece, rested his forehead on them and peered down into the flames, though their heat was uncomfortable against his face. “Forgive me, Mama.”
She approached then, and set the cup by his elbow. Put her hand against the back of his neck, the vulnerable stretch of it exposed by his pulled-down collar and his tied-up hair.
“If Sultan Murat were here before me now,” she said, “then I would tear his throat out with my fangs and enjoy it. But I’ll grant you the man isn’t a fool. He sent you here to secure Wallachia, and you took an important step toward that today. He knows your people are no fans of his. You said what you had to. Write to him, let him think you’re rabblerousing to defeat Hunyadi, and then later, when you’re stronger, when you can, you can see about throwing off the Ottoman yoke.”
He rolled his head so he could peer at her over his forearm. “You make a terrible amount of sense, Mother.”
She smiled. “Of course I do. You don’t think your father loved me just for my hair, do you?”
“Your captain’s coming,” Fenrir said, tone suddenly hostile, and a moment later a knock sounded at the door.
Vlad sighed and straightened, half-turned, one hand still on the mantle. “Come in, Malik.”
He did so, looking a touch unnerved. He hadn’t announced his presence after all.
Fenrir bristled in a way that Vlad could feel, and he sent the big wolf a quelling glance.
“Your grace,” Malik said, “I have the list of names you requested. The boys in the city old enough and willing to fight.”
“Very good. You may place it on the desk.”
His footfalls echoed in the loaded silence as he moved to comply. And then he lingered. “Your grace.”
“Yes?” Vlad turned to face him, and as he did, he noticed the way the firelight touched the wolves’ eyes. A bright gleam, completely inhuman. He was grateful to have the fire at his back, to have his own face in shadow. A part of him wanted to know what Malik saw when he looked at him, but another, larger part of him already knew.
Malik stood as unruffled as ever, calm as a frozen lake in winter. But he smelled nervy. “Your speech today,” he said, the words slow. “It was…very rousing. Effective, your grace.”
