He shook his head. “I didn’t have the chance. A war had broken out, the first of a string of rebellions against the senate after the death of the old consul. Some of the fiercest fighting was in my old homeland. I wasn’t allowed to go there until it was resolved, and if I had been, young and powerless as I was, I would almost certainly have been killed.
“Finally, the rebellion was put down. I went home. And discovered that I had a child, one that must have been sired while I was undergoing the Change. I was cursed, as you know, not bitten, and it takes a few days to complete the transformation. It is only in that narrow window that a dhampir can be created, which is why there are so few of them.”
“It must have been . . . a shock,” I said. Sort of like all this. That Mircea had had a mistress wasn’t surprising; he’d been a king’s son, after all. But this didn’t sound like a passing fling. He’d gone back for her, even before he knew about the child.
She must have been special, this girl.
“Yes, but not a happy one for Elena,” he agreed. “The townspeople viewed dhampirs as monsters. Dorina was seen as an abomination, only slightly less so than the one who had sired her. While I was gone, Elena had been pressured by the local people to give the child up, or to face exile herself, and she had nowhere to go. She also didn’t know what kind of life Dorina would have in such a place, among those who openly despised her. She therefore allowed herself to be persuaded to give her to a passing Romany band, who valued dhampirs for their protection on the road.”
I blinked. “She gave away her child?”
“Briefly. She almost immediately regretted it, and tried to find the band again, to retrieve her. But they had already traveled on, and her efforts were fruitless. She needed someone with greater resources for a larger hunt, and as it happened, my brother was on the throne. . . .”
“Which brother?” I asked, getting a sinking feeling.
“Vlad,” Mircea said, his eyes rising from the fire for the first time, full of grief and remembered fury. He didn’t have to tell me what had happened; it was there on his face.”
“He killed her? Just for that? For asking for help?”
“He believed her story to be a lie, that she was trying to fake a family connection to get money out of him. And that she was taking a jab at his own low birth—his mother had been a Gypsy. So yes, he killed her,” Mircea said, his voice rough. “In the most horrific way possible, killed her while I was away, killed her and dumped the body, I didn’t know where. And then tried to kill me after I returned and uncovered the truth.”
“But you didn’t kill him.” It wasn’t a question; I’d met Vlad myself once, many years later. Still as crazy as ever, but very much alive.
Well, in an undead sort of way.
“No. I fled, having found Dorina and needing to get her to safety. I was far too weak to challenge him and his army at the time. But before many years had passed, his fortunes changed, and I returned. And was about to take my revenge when he told me . . .”
“Told you what?” I asked, because he’d trailed off.
Mircea abruptly got up. If he was human, I’d have said he was nervous, and needed to move. But in his case . . . I didn’t know what to think in his case.
“He didn’t even try to run when I caught up with him, in the barn of a friendly noble. He had been waiting for me, he said, sitting there on a mass of hay bales, dressed in the clothes of a peasant, which he’d been forced to adopt to avoid the enemies who were searching for him every bit as hard as I was. But you’d have thought he was dressed in velvets, seated on a throne of gold. His arrogance was as strong as ever, his belief in himself and his destiny unshaken. He laughed when I told him why I’d come.”
“He was always crazy,” I pointed out.
Dark eyes met mine. “But not stupid. People often conflate the two. They shouldn’t.”
He went to the bar to get a drink, and tilted the decanter at me, but I just shook my head. I watched him pour, wondering what he wanted it for. Mircea rarely drank, and usually then only to keep me company. Again, it almost looked like he was nervous, and wanted to give his hands a job.
“I had grown stronger over the years, and wealthier, with powerful friends,” he told me. “Vlad demanded money for a mercenary army, and a contingent of vampires to ensure that they overwhelmed his enemy’s forces. In return for helping him to regain his throne, he offered a trade.”
“A trade?” I said, in disbelief. “After all he’d done, what could he possibly think—”
“You owe me that much.” The hate on Vlad’s face was palpable.
“I owe you? You can say that after—”
*
“Yes, I can say that after. After being thrown away as a boy, given as a guarantee of a treaty Father had no intention of keeping. After being beaten—and worse—once he broke it. After seeing my younger brother whore himself to get out of the Turks’ dungeons, the same ones I lived in for years, until the screams of the damned no longer woke me at night—yes, I can say it after!”
*
I snapped back to the present, stunned and breathless. It had been a long time since I’d had a vision, and I had forgotten how hard they hit. I’d just been reminded.
“A secret,” Mircea was saying, unaware. “Something he’d learned as a young man while serving as a page in Constantinople. Something I . . . did not know.”
He settled back into the chair, his eyes hooded and unreadable. “Did you know the Pythian Court wasn’t always in London?”
I cleared my throat. “Yes. It’s wherever the Pythia wants it to be.”
“When Vlad was a boy, it was in Constantinople. In a run-down house in an overgrown street that reflected the condition of the city. The second Rome had shrunk to almost nothing, its riches gone, its glory days long behind it. There was no reason for the Pythian Court to reside in such a place. But Berenice—the Pythia of the time—was stubborn, and no one could budge her.
“One day, the last emperor, Constantine XI, took his page on a clandestine late-night journey through the back alleys of the city—”
*
Starlight and moonlight and reflections off puddles in the broken street. Nothing else, nothing more, not even a lantern to light the way. At home there would have been torches accompanying such a procession, the common people lining the streets to see a great lord pass. But here, the lord might as well have been one of the beggars slumped in the doorways, reeking of alcohol and piss. This wasn’t how a king traveled, much less—
“Vlad! Keep up!”
“Apologies, Majesty.” He broke into an undignified jog. The emperor’s legs were longer than his, and he was practically running himself. At home, they had servants to run for them. At home, they moved with dignity, and left the running to lesser men. At home—
“Don’t apologize, just keep up! It’s too easy to get lost on these backstreets, young Vladimir.”
“It’s Vlad.”
“What?”
“My name. It is not Vladimir.”
“Isn’t it?” The emperor looked distracted, searching for the right run-down house on the run-down street. “What’s it short for, then?”
“Nothing. It’s just Vlad.”
“Really? I’ve not heard that one before.”
Someday you will, Vlad thought. Someday everyone will.