Page 1 of Dragon Slayer

Prologue

Tîrgoviste, Wallachia

1439

He woke to the pain of his brother’s elbow in his ribs.

“Val,” Vlad murmured, half-asleep. “Stop kicking me.”

“Oh.” Val blinked up at the ceiling, the faint shadows from the fireplace that flickered over it. “Sorry.”

Vlad sighed and rolled toward him. The furs flapped, letting in a shaft of cold air that made Val gasp. But then his brother wriggled closer until there was no room for anything save soft shirts, body heat, and warm, sleep-sour breath between them.

The lantern Mother had left on the desk had all but burned down, only the last sputtering fraction of the wick. The fire crackled low in the grate, a diffuse glow that washed up over the bed where the two brothers slept together beneath a heap of furs and blankets to keep warm in the winter-chilled palace. There was just enough light for Val to make out his brother’s face, the glimmer of his cracked-open eyes through a screen of tousled dark hair.

“Where did you go this time?” Vlad asked, sounding more awake now.

The dream still clung to him. The dream that wasn’t a dream at all, but avisit. “I don’t know,” he said. “There was gold everywhere. And columns. Tapestries. I think it was a palace. There was a man. A prince, maybe.”

Vlad grunted in obvious disappointment. He liked specifics.

The very first time Val went dream-walking, it was to see his brother. His nurse had tucked him in for a nap, the sun high above, the light of his bedroom pure and without shadows. Val’s mouth still tasted of berries and cream, and his muscles burned pleasantly from playing, and his eyes had closed the moment his head touched the pillow.

But then, suddenly, he’d found himself awake. And out of bed. Standing in the center of the room where Vlad sat perched on a stool at a low, book-loaded table, reading from a tome almost as big as he was. Vlad had jumped, startled, his serious reading-face dissolving into an expression of intense shock. And then he’d frowned and huffed angrily. “You’re supposed to be napping.”

“I…I am. Or…I was.”

Vlad slid off the stool with a sigh, and came around the table, reaching for Val’s hand. “I’ll take you back,” he said.

But his hand passed straight through Val’s. As if it wasn’t even there.

Val stared down at his own small hand, agape, as he watched his fingers blur and swirl, like smoke, before resettling and becoming solid again.

Solid-looking.

Vlad let out a string of curses he’d learned from the wolves, no doubt, and tried again. The same thing happened.

Vlad was in the process of stepping rightthroughhim when Fenrir poked his head into the room and startled both of them with one of his booming laughs.

“Dream-walking is it, my lords?” Fenrir was very old, and very wise, even if father said he was a “great stupid lout of a wolf,” and he’d explained to them that Val was still very much upstairs in their shared bed, that this was his mind projecting itself.

“Not all vampires have the gift,” he’d said, “but some do.Youdo, your grace.” And he’d bowed low, beard swaying, so that Val had a view of the top of his head.

Val had laughed, and tried to clap his hands together, but of course he wasn’t really there, so that hadn’t been possible.

In the months since that first discovery, the dream-walking had happened with greater consistency. Mother had promised he’d someday be able to choose his destination, to drop into his strange not-dreams at will, and go visiting with others of their kind across vast distances. But so far, it happened when it wanted to happen.

He thought Vlad might have been jealous of his skill, but Vlad never said so. He only asked about his travels, pumping him for details, trying to experience it vicariously.

Vlad’s nose wrinkled. “Are you sure it wasn’t Father again?”

“No, it wasn’t him. This prince wasn’t speaking Romanian.”

“Father speaks lots of languages.”

“But itwasn’tFather.”

“Uncle, then?”

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