Page 96 of Dragon Slayer

~*~

He was still sitting on the pew an hour later when Val found him. He sensed him coming long before his quiet footfalls struck the flagstones.

Val lingered back by the door, smelling of hesitation…and of hurt. The sadness of a little brother spurned for reasons he couldn’t understand.

Vlad’s hands trembled, and he laced his fingers together where they hung between his knees. His voice was steady, though. “What?”

A beat. “I’ve been to see Father.”

It took every ounce of Vlad’s self-control not to ask for specifics.

“He said–” Val faltered. Took a deep, unsteady breath. “He said that we’ll be held here as part of the treaty. And that he’s taken an oath to not lift so much as a finger against the Ottomans. Not in any way.”

“That’s generally what a treaty means,” Vlad ground out.

“We can’t go home,” Val whispered.Melancholywas too delicate a word for the emotion that colored his voice, small and hushed though it was.

Vlad stood. When he turned, he found Val dashing his sleeve across his cheeks, drying the evidence of a few hasty tears. He was still as soft-hearted as ever, tender as a bruise.

How will you ever survive this world?Vlad wondered.How will you grow into a man?

And internally, his own small, childish fear said,Father, why? How could you?

To Val he said, “Did you expect him to fight for us?”

Val reared back in surprise. “He’s – he’s our father.”

“And we’re his sons. HisRomansons. Were we not raised to understand that it’s us who serve Wallachia, and not the other way around? He won’t risk our whole people just to have us home.”

It was the truth. And it tasted vile on his tongue. He wasn’t sure he’d even really believed it until this moment, watching Val’s lip quiver, hearing the news from him straight-out.

Vlad swallowed a surge of bile and said, “Fathers who sacrifice everything for the sake of their own children belong in fairy stories, Radu.” Val flinched; the name had struck him like a blow. “This is reality. Don’t be such a baby.”

Val’s mouth worked silently a moment. Then he drew in a deep breath and shouted. “I’m not a baby! Stop calling me that!” It was the first time he’d ever said such a thing.

Vlad was glad to hear it.There. There was the beginning of the spark he knew must lay dormant in the boy. They were of the same blood; theremustbe some inner steel in Val, ready to be coaxed out. “Then stop acting like one,” he said.

He moved to brush past him.

A small hand latched onto his wrist and clung hard, blunt nails biting through fabric and into skin.

Vlad could have shaken him off, but he paused instead, turned to him. Was met with a snarl. And tear-bright eyes.

“Why are you so hateful? Doesn’t this bother you?”

Yes. I want to howl. I want to snatch up the nearest sword and slaughter everyone here. And when the blade is dulled, I will tear out their throats with fangs and claws.

He said, “I’ve always been hateful. It runs in the family.”

He twisted his wrist away and left his little brother standing, stunned, beneath the waving ivy and the silently judging cross.

~*~

Vlad saw his first impaled man that summer. A traitor. A vizier who’d intended to betray his sultan to Western forces, passing messages. Mehmet wasn’t at Edirne, so his men carried out the orders: they impaled the man on a long wooden stake, up his rectum and out through his chest, and mounted his moaning, half-dead personage on the palace walls. A warning to others. An attraction for flies and ravens.

As a very young boy in Sighi?oara, he’d watched from the house’s second-floor windows as convicted criminals were led to the bank square and publicly hanged. He remembered the way their necks had sometimes snapped, and sometimes not. The last flailing of feet and hands.

This was more violent, more visceral. This was a spectacle. Like something from the gladiatorial pits; death at the whim of a dictator.

The breeze stirred his hair and he pushed it back off his forehead.I will do this, he decided.One day,I will do this to them.

And so he did.

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