A chuckle that was like the scrape of metal over stone. “Where has the disobedient Vlad Dracula gone? Replaced instead with a mannerly boy of temperance, eh?”
“Sir.” The real Vlad, the disobedient dragon’s son, was alive and well. But he’d grown patient in his captivity, at the urging of his friend. He’d learn to rake dirt over his furious coals and let them smolder; he trained, and he learned, and he dedicated himself to knowing all that he could about his captors.
And he waited.
Murat studied him, head canted to the side. “It’s a shame,” he drawled, “that you and my son could never be friends. He could have learned from you – you have something which, despite all his wonderful qualities, he lacks.”
“Sir?”
That almost-smile again. “My Mehmet is made of fire. Butyou. You are made of steel.”
Behind his back, Vlad’s hands curled into fists.
“That will be all. Dismissed.”
He did not feel relieved as he walked away; that wasn’t possible for him anymore. But something inside him unclenched a fraction. Father was safe. Without Mehmet around, Val would be safe. And someday, they would get to go home. Maybe even in one piece.
~*~
Val could draw a bow now. He could nock an arrow and draw the string back to his cheek, hold it there, let out half a breath, and take aim. Thethunkof the arrow landing in the bullseye filled him with a rush of rare satisfaction.
“Well done,” the instructor said behind him.
Val felt himself smile, and was surprised by the fact. Training had never before been a call for smiling.
The arrows waited at his feet, heads sunk in the grass. He plucked up the next and fired again.
When the target was bristling, he turned to ask the instructor about his form – and pulled up short. Vlad stood a few paces behind the old janissary, arms folded, gaze unreadable.
Val swallowed his leaping heart back down, handed his bow off, and went to meet his brother.
There had been whispers around the palace. A court couldn’t help but gossip – from dignitaries, to scribes and viziers, to soldiers and servants. Val had even heard the slave boys whispering in the secluded corners of the baths. His hearing was better than that of a human, and so he’d heard the wild speculation: chiefly, that he and Vlad were not full brothers. Vlad, with his pale face, and dark cascading hair, and Slavic bone structure, was believed to be Vlad Dracul’s trueborn son. But Val they called a bastard. They didn’t know that Mother was golden; that she was a secret; that she’d carried both boys in her womb, and kissed their brows, and sung them to sleep.
The other bit of gossip was that the Wallachian brothers – half-brothers, they all swore – hated one another.
In so many ways, that was the tale that hurt the most. Because Val feared that it was true. On Vlad’s side of things, at least.
They’d never argued. Vlad hadn’t even been unkind. But he was cold. No smiles, and no touches, no acknowledgement of any kind. It was if he didn’t regard them as brothers either – even half would have been better than this cold nothing.
Val had never met anyone as perfectly composed as Vlad Dracula.
“Brother,” he greeted quietly, formally, when he stood in front of him.
Vlad kept his voice low, out of human reach. “I just talked with the sultan. He’s abdicated.”
“What?”
“Keep your voice down. Yes, he’s stepped down. Old and tired, he said. Mehmet will be sultan now.”
A hard shiver stole over him. Vlad’s lifted brows told him all he needed to know: yes, Mehmet would be sultan, and that meant he would no longer be a fixture in their lives. A relief to be sure. Mehmet had never behaved aggressively toward Val; quite the opposite. He smiled at him, and sometimes, briefly, would pet his golden hair, grown out now halfway down his back. “Little one,” he called him, and his eyes stayed fastened to him for long moments; Val could feel their weight tracing the delicate wings of his collarbones.
But what did any of thatmean? Being in Mehmet’s presence stoked anxiety deep in his gut. Some of that was thanks, no doubt, to the memory of a practice sword connecting with the side of Vlad’s head. The awful crack of bone breaking.
But some of it was personal. Disquiet moved over his skin like gooseflesh in the heir’s – thesultan’s– presence. Iskander Bey had squeezed his shoulder and told him that he shouldn’t worry on it…but his own eyes had been worried for him.
What sort of sultan would Mehmet be? What would it mean for the treaty? For Father, and for them–
Before he could get lost down that mental trail, Vlad said, “Father’s been released. There’s a new treaty, and he’s going home.”
