Page 38 of Dragon Slayer

Finally, they reached the edge of the throng, and the square where the acrobats had already begun their performance.

Vlad breathed a quiet, self-satisfied laugh. “I don’t see anyone naked, Marc.”

“Shut up.”

They settled into a familiar argument, Marcus’s insecurities playing off Vlad’s sureness, but Val wasn’t paying attention. He could only stare, open-mouthed, at the spectacle before him.

If not for his vampiric sense of smell, he wouldn’t have known whether the five lithe, androgynous humans leaping over one another were male or female. But he flagged two women, and three men, all of their faces painted, dramatic lines of kohl giving them cat’s eyes. They wore beaded and belled crimson costumes, gauzy and diaphanous, long sleeves swirling like flags as they lifted one another, and sprung into wild jumps and twists.

They moved like birds, like fairies. Like creatures who weren’t nailed down to the earth.

Free, he thought, unbidden. They looked free.

His hand tightened, a spasm flex of excitement.

And Vlad squeezed back.

~*~

His name.

It probably shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. To him, at least.

Mother had told them the story often, one of their frequent requests at bedtime, when the winter wind howled through the cracks in the shutters and they weren’t quite ready for her to blow out the candle and slip off to her own bed. The story of the tourney at which she’d first laid eyes on their father. When, tall and regal, head held high, shoulders squared, he’d ridden into the arena on a prancing chestnut destrier and captured her heart with a single wink. Vlad II, back from his apprenticeship…maybe not quite like anyone expected, though no one could have said what he was supposed to look like. Mother told them how, up in the stands, flanked by Fenrir and Helga, she’d leaned out over the rail to toss a favor into the sawdust: a heavy golden belt buckle that Father still wore every day.

Mother had been a purebred vampire, and so had Father, and they’d scented it on one another, irrevocably drawn together right away. He’d reined his horse up right in front of her, smiled up at her from beneath his visor.

“What is the fair lady’s name?”

“I see no fair lady.”She’d smiled wide enough to flash her fangs.“But my name is Eira.”

Mother talked fondly and at length about that tourney, Father’s indomitable strength, skill, and horsemanship. He’d unseated every opponent at the joust. Conquered totally in the melee.

Mother told them what none of the cheering spectators had known that day, what Father had told her later, in the candlelit dark of a bedchamber amid warm, tousled sheets: that he wasn’t Vlad II, son of Mircea at all. That he was Remus, twin brother of Romulus, co-founder and one-time-heir of Rome. That he’d hidden from his brother for centuries, that he’d found a purpose and a calling here, in the shadow of the Carpathians, and that he wanted the chance to be the kind of benevolent and thoughtful ruler he’d been too callow to appreciate before.

Mother never talked about what happened after. About her Remus – herVladDracul– having to marry the eldest daughter of Alexandru the Good, Prince of Moldavia. That Princess Cneajna had borne him a son, half-human. A political obligation, Father called it. Though he did love his half-human son, Mircea, named for his own pretend father. And most of all he loved Eira, his Viking shieldmaiden, who had eventually taken him back into her bed.

Eira birthed two purebred sons. The first she named Vladimir.

“It isn’t a Wallachian name,”Vlad chastised her gently.

“It’s not?”

“No, my love, it’s Russian.”

And so her Vladimir was renamed Vlad III by his father.

And everyone save their household wolves thought he was the son of Cneajna, who locked herself most often in her room with a book and a cup of wine, indifferent to the unfaithfulness of her husband.

So when Val was born, Eira brought his small face up to hers, and kissed his forehead, and said,“You will be my Valerian. My precious boy.”

And when father proclaimed him Radu, Mother wouldn’t play along.

To the people of Wallachia, and Moldavia, and Transylvania, and to all the visiting dignitaries who arrived at the palace, Dracul’s youngest son was Radu.

But Val wasValin his head. And in his mother’s smiling mouth. And in the gentle, reassuring squeeze of his brother’s hand.

And his name mattered. It always would. Because the world didn’t care about the truth, but the people who loved him did. And those were the only people whose good opinions he valued.

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