Page 225 of Dragon Slayer

Val bowed, deep, grave, and mocking. “Very well.” His face twitched, and nearly broke. “Give my love to Mother.” He vanished with a small curl of white smoke.

It was silent a moment.

“What?” Vlad growled. “I can tell you want to say something.”

“No, your grace,” Cicero said. “But come. Feed and rest.”

Tired now in spirit, as well as body, Vlad let himself be led from the room.

~*~

Vlad was twenty-five-years-old, and a great falling light had been seen in the sky, burning orange and trailing tails of fire. A good sign, because he had slain his enemy, and a small council of boyars had come together – grudgingly, he thought – to elect him officially. His official title, adopted in the vein of the princes who’d come before him, was Prince Vlad, son of Vlad the Great, sovereign and ruler of Ungro-Wallachia and of the duchies of Amias and Fagaras.

John Hunyadi died that month, carried away by the plague that swept all of Eastern Europe. His son Matthias took up the mantle of governor of Belgrade, and leader of Transylvania in his stead, and it was to him that Vlad reached out, as well as the mayors of Brasov and Sibiu. It was important to establish correspondence, Eira told him; she stood at his side in the study, his constant advisor in those early days. Politicking was not his strong suit, but it was a necessary part of princedom. He built alliances, and tried to foment a revolt amongst the receptive boyars along the Moldavian border, to aid Stephen’s cause there against the man who’d slain his father. They traded letters as often as they could, the two of them, bound by their youth spent together in the schoolroom and training grounds, and by the bitter loss of sons made princes too early, thanks to murdered fathers.

Val’s warning about Mehmet haunted him. He felt something like guilt every time he remembered that scene in the study, the look on his brother’s face when he’d called him Radu. That had been a cruelty, even for him.

But mostly, he fretted over the Ottomans.

And come they did, though not with spears and swords. Shortly after Stephen was confirmed in Moldavia, a delegation arrived, prim and proper, led into the great hall in front of Vlad by Malik, formerly Bey, who Vlad could see received more than one shocked look.

The head delegate, a thin, reedy man clothed in burgundy and white, his black turban small and tightly wrapped, stepped forward with a bow. “Vlad Dracula,” he said, in flawless Slavic. “Congratulations from my sultan, Mehmet, on retaking your ancestral seat.”

“Please give him my thanks,” Vlad answered in Turkish, and thought the man looked caught between pleased and surprised when he straightened.

“I shall also be happy to convey your agreement to terms of peace,” the man said glibly. “There is a customary treaty already in place between the Empire and Wallachia. The sultan expects that you shall assent to it as graciously as your father did before you.”

Vlad pushed a humorless smile across his face. Whatever it looked like, it caused the delegate to take a half-step back. “Two-thousand gold ducats and free passage through Wallachia?”

“As well as a pilgrimage to the capital to pay homage.”

Vlad snorted. “He can have his gold and access.” He motioned, and two of his men stepped forward, lugging the chest between them. It held newly minted coins, his own face on one side, and the falling star of his summer of ascension on the other, for luck. “But I won’t be making any pilgrimage. Not even if I currently lack sons to be kidnapped and taken as hostage.”

The man regarded him a long, cool moment, then finally nodded. “Yes. Fine. You will need to sign this.” He produced a parchment, and Vlad’s scribe hurried forward with portable writing table, ink, and quill.

It pained him in every sense to sign the treaty, but he was no fool. Right now, he lacked the manpower to halt a true invasion.Patience, he heard Iskander Bey say in the back of his mind, an old mantra from an old friend.You must be patient.

So he signed, and set about the business of ruling his small country.

Vladislav was dead, but Vlad wasn’t content. An eye for an eye. But there were others who had wronged him. Others who’d helped in the murder of his family.

Within days of his installation, the boyars began to come to pay their respects; they brought gifts of wine, and jeweled belts, and ornamental daggers. They bowed, and curtsied, and smiled painfully at him; poured forth effusive praise, and promises of loyalty, and wishes for his good health and long reign. And all of it was a farce. These were the people who’d chased Father through the forest like hounds after a fox.

But he waited, patient.

His most immediate concern was fortifying his lands. He wanted walls, as high, and smooth, and foreboding as those at the palace in Edirne. Tîrgoviste was the beating heart of Wallachia, its center of commerce, and culture, and politics, but the rest of his lands’ keeps and castles were either sad timber lodgings, or crumbling to dust, left too long in disrepair. If he was to stand against Mehmet, he would need multiple fortresses, places where he and his men could overnight safely as he traveled about, defending and inspecting his kingdom.

He started in Bucharest, taking the sleepy necklace of modest pastoral residences and walling it; building it up. He wanted it to rival Tîrgoviste in every sense.

He rode with his builders and architects, Malik and Cicero, and often his mother, alongside him, into the mountains, and drew up plans for towers and keeps, impenetrable holdfasts that he would staff with troops when he wasn’t in residence, places that could serve as stumbling blocks to invaders, and places from which messengers could bear news of attack to wherever Vlad was staying at the moment.

It was at one of these mountain fortresses that an epiphany struck.

It was an old castle, tumbled down to rubble, perched near the Hungarian border. Vlad’s steward, a dour but efficient little man named Florin, speculated that it had been built a century ago, by one of the Basarab princes, and had served as an observation outpost for Castle Bran, just across the way in Transylvania. An ideal location, strategically, in the foothills of theFagarasrange, near Curtea-de-Arges.

Here, he thought, was an opportunity.

For the most part, the boyars still loyal to Vladislav – and, to a lesser degree, their Ottoman vassal lords – had bowed and scraped and pretended loyalty to Vlad. But there had been one, early, right after he was crowned, who’d styled himself Albu the Great, one of Vlad Dracul’s old opponents. He’d attempted to organize a revolt, one that Cicero had brought him word of, while spying on four legs. Vlad had personally led the ambush against the man, his wolves, and Malik, and a few trusted household guards at his side.

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