Page 71 of Dragon Slayer

The boy faced forward, and the janissary cuffed Vlad lightly across the back of the head, and it was time for the day’s lessons to begin.

Or, he thought it was.

Mullah Sinan’s gaze lifted to the entryway and Vlad heard shuffling footsteps, and the heavier tread of an adult. Without turning his head, he watched from the corner of his eye as two boys were led forward by a slave. They were both small, and shared the same hair color and bone structure: brothers.

Both wore bandages wound round their heads, covering their eyes. They held hands, clinging tight, knuckles bloodless.

Warm breath brushed across Vlad’s ear. The janissary, leaning down to speak Slavic in his ear. “Stepan and Gregor Brankovic. Serbian princes. They were caught writing letters to their father,” he said, without inflection, “and the sultan had their eyes burned out with a hot iron. You’d do well to learn from their lesson.”

The slave helped the boys to rugs, guided their heads gently so they faced the mullahs. No books or writing tablets awaited them. How could they read without eyes?

Vlad closed his own hands into fists.Let him try to burn my eyes out, he thought, viciousness curdling the breakfast in his stomach.Let him try.

~*~

Vlad was a reluctant student, but he was an intelligent one.

A routine developed. In the mornings, all the hostages – and the heir – were educated on the Quran, history, geography, and politics.

In the afternoons, Vlad and Val had Turkish lessons.

Vlad picked it up the way he picked up all languages, the way Father had described as being like a bucket in a well: “efficiently, thoroughly, brimming over.”

But his understanding didn’t make him cooperative. He couldn’t comprehend the gall of these people; that they thought he would go meekly along with their plans to domesticate and educate him. That he would pray over their holy book, and eat their food, wear their clothes, learn their customs, and willingly agree to this imprisonment. It offended him on a visceral level. Wouldn’t it be more honorable to be thrown in a cell and deprived of food and water? To be chained to a dirty wall and left to wallow in his own filth?

To go along with them felt disloyal not only to his family, but to his homeland. To be a happy hostage was unthinkable.

So.

“Now repeat it back to me,” Mullah Effendi said. He was a former Serbian prisoner of war who’d fully assimilated. A prisoner no longer, but an educator of boy prisoners.

Vlad looked down at the book that lay open on the low writing table in front of him. He could read the majority of it, and what words he didn’t understand could be figured out easily enough with context clues.

He lifted his head, and stared at the man.

“Repeat it back to me,” Effendi said.

In Romanian, Vlad said, “No.”

Slowly, deliberately, Effendi picked up the riding crop that rested beside his own open book. “Repeat it back to me,” he said for the third time.

“Vlad,” Val whispered from his own rug, where he studied with his own tutor; too far to touch, his voice reaching like a hand. “Brother, just say it.Please.”

A darted glance proved that Val had his lip caught between his teeth, gaze wide and imploring.Begging, really.

“Radu,” Mullah Iyas reprimanded quietly, and Val turned his attention back to his tutor. He really was the sweetest, most cooperative child.

Vlad might have obeyed then, just to wipe the worry and fear from his brother’s face. He was thoroughly convinced his little brother could stop a war with that pitiful look.

But to do so would show that Val was his weakness – which it was. And weaknesses could be exploited; could be made to suffer for the sake of manipulation.

That couldn’t happen. Not ever.

So Vlad turned his shoulder to his brother, blanked his face, and said, “No,” yet again.

~*~

The crop left angry red welts that, despite his healing abilities, faded slowly, painful when his clothes shifted over them.

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