A Prince to be Feared: The love story of Vlad Dracula (10 page)

“We,” she repeated.

His eyes glinted. “You will, of course, report my wholehearted adoption of Hungary’s cause to your uncle?”

It was a challenge she could answer. “You don’t care whether I do or not,” she observed.

He inclined his head. “Actions speak louder than words.”

No mercy. Kill them all.
She shivered.

“You’re cold,” he said, opening the carriage door to hand her in. He paused, gazing down at her hand, which looked ridiculously small in his gloved one. He said, “Count Hunyadi bids me to Hunedoara next month. If you return then, my escort is at your disposal.”

“Thank you,” she managed. She began to step up, adding, “It’s to be a council of war, I expect.”

She thought his fingers convulsed briefly around hers, an uncontrollable spurt of excitement. And when she glanced at him, she saw his lower lip clamped over the upper before he let it go to smile.

He wanted war. He needed war, to win back Wallachia and to keep it.

***

“We need to be thinking of your marriage,” Mihály Szilágyi said lazily as he watched her sisters and their husbands dance. The main hall of Katalina’s house in Sighisoara was festively decorated with greenery and berries, the table pushed back to make space for games and dancing. They’d even hired a gypsy fiddler, whose music soared to the rafters, pulling everyone’s spirits with it.

Ilona, still seated on the cushioned bench beside Mihály, smiled, because even her mother danced, and because this was a rare moment of quiet companionship with her father, in the midst of rushing children and noisy celebrations.

“We’ve been lax,” Mihály said. “You’re eighteen years old now. Perhaps after this summer, when things are more certain…”

When you’re not in Belgrade, facing the lions.
To distract herself from that line of thought, she teased, “Stephen of Moldavia was flirting with me in Sibiu.”

“Was he indeed?” said her father, straightening with disapproval. “Stephen?” He frowned. “Not Vlad?”

She could feel the warm blood suffusing her face and neck. To cover it, she said hastily, “I don’t believe Vlad does flirt.”

Her father gave a bark of laughter. “That’s not what I’ve heard. If we call it no worse. Stephen, you say?”

“Only very mildly,” Ilona excused. “And respectfully. He must know that if and when he ever wins Moldavia, he’ll look down his nose at the Szilágyis.”

“No one looks down his nose at the Szilágyis.”

Ilona blinked at him. Her father had certainly consumed more wine than normal, but it rarely addled his brains. “Even princes?”

Mihály shrugged. “Your sisters all married well, above their own rank. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t do even better. Especially…” He broke off.

Especially if John Hunyadi defeated the Ottomans at Belgrade and re-exerted all his old influence? Or did he mean more than that? She opened her mouth to ask, but before she could, she was pulled to her feet and swung into the hectic dance. And once again, politics and marriage and war faded into the distance.

***

“What will you do?” Ilona asked.

Vlad said, “I’ll build myself a palace of gold and live there with my treasure and ten thousand exotically dressed servants who will feed me delicacies whenever I snap my fingers. And I’ll hold banquets every night. Until I die of overeating.”

Ilona regarded him. They rode side by side on horseback since the weather was better and the roads clearer. On either side of them, the snowy hills rolled back as far as the eye could see. In front and behind streamed Vlad’s men, and somewhere in among them, her carriage, with the maid and her trunk.

Ilona watched his breath steaming patterns in the cold, dry air and kept silent until he glanced at her to see, perhaps, if she was offended by his mockery.

“So it’s all about food?” she challenged.

“Of course. And palaces and costumes. I promise you, I will be a
gorgeous
prince. You’re laughing at me,” he added with mock indignation.

“No, no, I fully believe in your gorgeousness, Your Gorgeousness. I’m just wondering where you’ll find the time to fight the Ottomans.”

“I won’t. They might tear my clothes.”

Ilona laughed, and reached out to catapult snow from an overhanging branch onto him. Just how she’d got from the discomfort of Sibiu to this easy, bantering companionship, she still wasn’t sure. But she thought it had to do with him and his mood. He liked that Mihály Szilágyi had voluntarily entrusted him with his daughter. He liked going to Hunedoara to receive Hunyadi’s orders for the coming season. If the truth were known, she was pretty sure he liked the Ottomans’ war preparations providing the shake-up that could bring him back to Wallachia. And as his attitude dispelled her unease, she remembered why she’d always liked him.

But she hadn’t forgotten Stephen’s remarks in Sibiu.

While Vlad brushed snow off his shoulder, she said, “Then it’s not really about revenge?”

His hand paused infinitesimally, then gave one final brush. “Food.”

Ilona frowned. “Won’t you be serious?” Why should he be? She was an eighteen-year-old girl who wouldn’t understand men’s concerns of government and policy.

“I am serious,” he insisted. The heavy lids of his eyes lifted fully, allowing the green blaze of his eyes to dazzle her. “Food is vital. I want to clear vast swaths of the forests for arable land, so everyone can grow food, and we all eat and prosper. I’ll endow the churches which use their land properly and guide the people spiritually. I’ll encourage trade and manufacture to develop the towns. And everywhere, the rule of law will be paramount—no exceptions. Without crime and corruption, we’ll prosper some more.”

Ilona felt her eyes widen at the sudden flurry of quiet words, spoken quite without mockery. He waited for that, for her surprised admiration before he spoke again directly into her eyes. “And I will take my revenge on those who murdered my father and my brother, and on all those who oppose me. No mercy, Ilona Szilágyi. I will kill them all.”

He thought, he really thought she would gasp in horror and ride away from him, perhaps scuttle back into her safe carriage. But although the words wrenched at her, she held his gaze without flinching.

“You’re saying that to shock me,” she said calmly.

“Why would I do that?”

“Because I questioned you. For the same reason you forced the sleigh down the hill when the harness broke.”

This time it was his eyes that widened. It gave her some satisfaction. Then he threw back his head and laughed, a clear, ringing sound, rare enough to turn the heads of several of his men.

Chapter Seven

Visegrád, Hungary, 1474

Vlad had seen her that morning when he’d ridden out with Count Szelényi. The back of his neck had prickled as it did when he was under observation, and he’d turned and seen her at the window, watching him.

For an instant, the world stood still. She seemed like part of the pale, grey-and-gold dawn, an insubstantial wraith conjured from the morning air or his own imagination. A wraith in an ugly grey shift with a halo of stunning auburn hair tumbled around her white shoulders and the delicate blades of her clavicles. For an instant she stood perfectly still, framed in the palace window like a painting, and he’d been afraid to breathe in case the vision vanished.

Then her arms jerked upward, perhaps to cover herself, but one hand caught and dragged at her hair in a gesture so achingly familiar that the years of pain and fury rolled away. Her face, her whole person seemed to crumple, and she disappeared. As if the picture had fallen off the wall.

The metaphor had stayed with him throughout the day, reminding him that his mind’s image of her was twelve years old. More uncomfortable to contemplate was her image of him. He could not doubt that her first glimpse of him in twelve years had upset her. He could not doubt that for whatever reasons, she wanted—
expected
—to be excused this marriage. Erzsébet Hunyadi and Count Szelényi had both told him so.

He didn’t understand what was going on in her head. But he knew one thing: all was not well with Ilona Szilágyi. She couldn’t stop the marriage—women never could—but she could destroy a great deal of what he was building.

And so when Szelényi told him of his conversation with her in the garden, he made up his mind. They’d been living in the same building for days, and at this rate they wouldn’t even meet until the betrothal. Patience was a virtue he had cultivated over his years of imprisonment but with indifferent success, and Ilona’s avoidance had gone far enough. It was time to end it.

And so he strode with some purpose through the palace corridors, forcing Szelényi to quicken his pace, ignoring his jailer’s whispered pleas that he think again before acting. Since it was the formal dinner hour, they encountered only a few straggling courtiers rushing along corridors to further their ambitions. Most took the trouble to bow to him on the way past, a respect which he acknowledged briskly. Only as they entered the female quarters did he encounter curious stares from well-dressed women who clearly wondered what the devil he was doing there. Sooner or later they’d put two and two together, and that would pile yet more pressure on Ilona. Well, he’d no objection to that either.

Count Szelényi paused at the foot of two steps on the left, which led up to a closed door, and glanced at him. “Sir, won’t you reconsider?” he asked again.

The corridor was empty. Pity, Vlad thought savagely.

“No,” he said and reached past his jailer to knock on the door.

“At least permit me to announce you,” Szelényi pleaded. “Your position and hers demand that.”

Smart bastard
, Vlad thought with a flicker of amusement, because the man was using Vlad’s own insistence on his rank against him. With exaggerated graciousness, he stood aside once more, just as a woman opened the door. A pretty woman, still young. Her bright blue eyes suggested intelligence, the softness of her mouth, good nature. Lines of anxiety surrounded both pleasing features.

Szelényi said, “Prince Vlad is here to speak with Countess Ilona, if the lady is here…”

The lady was here. Vlad could
feel
her. He moved, forcing Szelényi to step inside. The woman fell back in alarm, and Vlad strode past them both.

He saw her at once, wide-eyed with shock, her pale lips falling open. She stood the length of the room away from him, framed in the doorway of her bedchamber. The grey wraith of the morning had become a grey frump. Ugly clothes, an unbecoming veil askew on her head, revealing a clump of straggling grey hair, and behind it, one strand of dark red-gold.

Vlad drank her in, saw what she’d become, what she was hiding. Her beauty, her
life.
Behind the dull, ugly garb of the penitent.

No, oh no, I will not allow that.

He kept walking, ignoring the moan of fear that escaped her parted lips, the squeak of protest from her attendant. She jerked once, as if trying to back away, but she seemed paralysed, unable to move. Her eyes grew huge, racked with pain and memory like his, surely like his.

He didn’t stop until he was right in front of her, could feel the trembling of her body. In one swift, deliberately startling movement, he raised his right hand and swept the grey veil from her head.

As it fluttered to the floor, she made an instinctive grab for it and missed. Through the tangle of her lovely, burnished hair, streaked now with grey down one side, she returned her gaze to his. Huge and wet, her desperate, dark eyes stared at him—with shame, it was true, but also with an echo of the old defiance.

“Tag,” he said. “What now, Ilona Szilágyi?”

Her eyes widened impossibly. Her trembling lips parted.

“
Now
,” said Countess Hunyadi’s furious voice from behind him, “you leave the room until you can meet in a more appropriate place!”

Damn the woman, she had always had ears like a dog’s, and old age seemed only to have sharpened them further. And of course, the attendant was there too, a protective arm around her lady’s waist.

“My lady is not well,” she said, clearly intending, despite her own fright, to help Ilona back into the bedchamber. Ilona, however, appeared to be still rooted to the spot.

As Countess Hunyadi swept across the room, ordering, “Take her inside!” Ilona’s hands lifted. For an instant, Vlad thought they were reaching for him. And then her eyes closed, as if to hide the tears she couldn’t stop. But her eyelids only squeezed them down her cheeks faster. She swallowed once, like a gulp.

“I want everyone to leave.” Though her voice shook, the words were clear enough.

Vlad, who knew he could clear the room in one short sentence, was forestalled in doing so by Countess Hunyadi, who said fiercely, “I will not go until he does.”

“Oh God.” That was Ilona, halfway between desperation and hysterical laughter. “Then I will go.” And instead of retreating backwards with the force of her woman’s urging, she stepped forward, brushing past him, clearly with every intention of leaving the room.

He could stop her, physically. The thin body which touched his so briefly was pathetically frail. He could eject everyone else and do what he came here to do. Only this was not how he intended it to happen—reinforcing every word of his terrible reputation. And somewhere, somewhere he didn’t even want to acknowledge right now, he couldn’t do it because she didn’t wish it.

“There is no need,” he said, in his most distant, princely voice. “I shall leave until you—feel better.” She paused, her back to him now. “You
will
feel better in the morning?”

Everyone in the room seemed to hold their breath. Then Ilona nodded, once.

“In the gallery,” Countess Hunyadi ordered. “It is a good place to talk.”

In public. Under a thousand eyes.

“I will ensure your privacy,” she added regally.

Privacy of speech, perhaps. A few yards of space. And still the thousand eyes beyond. It was not what he wanted, but at least he could talk enough to calm her, make her allow him the space he needed to do this properly.

“Very well,” Vlad allowed. “Ten o’clock.” It felt more like arranging a duel. He walked past her this time, careful not to touch her. When he turned to bow from the doorway, he half expected her to be safely bolted behind her bedchamber door. There were enough people fluttering behind him in that direction as he walked. But she still stood where he’d last seen her, flanked by the attendant and the countess. She held herself rigid, as if she would shatter if she let anything go for an instant.

Jesus, what have they done to her?

What have I?

The questions stayed with him, nagging unendurably as he strode back to his comfortable prison and let Szelényi lock him in. It was a formality, one that would be over with his betrothal tomorrow. But somehow, this massive step on his road to freedom and restoration had sunk to the realms of trivia.

His plan had got stuck on the vague but desperately troubled face of what should have been its joyful centre.

Don’t do this to me, Ilona Szilágyi… Don’t do this to yourself.

It seemed to be too late. Whatever it was had already been done to her, and he had no idea if he could undo it.

As darkness fell, he threw himself on the bed. He hadn’t allowed the servant to light the lamps as he usually did, so there was little to distract him from his own thoughts. Only a blank darkness in which to conjure up a thousand images and memories of Ilona. What had happened to the triumph of winning her once more? It was lost in the ghosts, and he was haunted by images of the Ilona he’d just seen, tired, frightened, and unworldly. Images of her mother, sick and dying, of Maria, distraught and broken. Ilona, wild with grief and love and guilt. And himself, Vlad Dracula, villain of a thousand stories and legends. Vlad the Impaler, a fierce and terrible tyrant.

He wanted to impale Countess Hunyadi on a very high stake. Second only to bloody Matthias’s.

How in hell did he go about making that right? He couldn’t undo the past; he’d always known that. All he could do was build a new future. And for the first time, he doubted that that would be enough for her…

A knock sounded at the door, breaking into his boiling, unpalatable thoughts. A very faint knock, nothing like Szelényi’s cheery tattoo or the servant’s dull thudding. Frowning, Vlad swung his legs off the bed and stood. He still wore his boots.

“Enter,” he commanded.

The soft knock sounded once more. But there was no way whoever was outside wouldn’t have heard him. Years of such encounters had taught him precisely how to pitch his voice to avoid confusion.

An unlikely idea caught at his breath. His heart beat and beat as he walked toward the door. A light shone underneath it, shadowed by the swishing of a skirt.

The women who assuaged his bodily needs came at his command, not at their own whim. Erzsébet Hunyadi would not knock like a thief in the night. Which left…

The woman? Had she sent her faithful attendant?

No, Ilona Szilágyi possessed too much pride for that. Or, she had once…

Vlad laid his cheek against the cool wood of the door and closed his eyes, trying to sense the presence on the other side, listening in vain for the sound of her breathing. Afraid to be wrong. And yet if he didn’t speak, she would leave, and he would have lost this chance too.

“Ilona?”

Then at last he heard her breath, a gentle shudder as she drew nearer the door.

“Vlad Dracula,” she whispered.

***

How has it come to this?

The words sliced through her pain as she drove them all finally from her apartment, and stayed with her through the darkening of the lonely night.

How had she, the most private of people, who had hugged that privacy ever more tightly around her with the passage of years, come to be seen in this condition by so many? Her aunt, a total stranger, her faithful Margit, and
him.

Above all, him. Why in God’s name had he come?

Because he doesn’t know what’s going on. He has the chance of freedom, of restoration, and you’re pulling against his plan.

And he didn’t know why. He was fulfilling his old promise without understanding that if Matthias wanted him in Wallachia, he’d put him there with or without Ilona. She was an easy gift, and Vlad’s pride would make him take it. Even now, when he’d seen her in all her “glory.”

Ilona closed her eyes, laying her forehead on the cold glass of the darkened window. How long ago was it she had watched from another window as he’d come into view below? With Stephen, once his best friend… And Maria, once hers, had seen him too and fled down to them to make her pathetic attempt at seduction and save her reputation by trickery. Ilona hadn’t been able to watch. Knowing he would reject Maria, riddled with jealousy in case he didn’t.

Tonight there was nothing to see, but she closed her eyes anyway.

It didn’t take away the image of his face, the fierce gleam of mockery in his blazing green eyes.
“Tag. What now, Ilona Szilágyi?”

So like the man she remembered that even now the pain in her chest caught at her breath. He had come to her, to talk. He had tagged her, and she was It. The next move was hers.

“He remembered,” she whispered, wrapping both arms around herself and hugging. “He remembered.” And she wanted to weep again, because it was no longer enough. There was what he remembered, and there was
this
. This Ilona she was now.

But even this Ilona would not spoil his plan, and she had to tell him so. Tomorrow. In the gallery. Under the watchful eye of her aunt, possibly even the king himself. And behind them a thousand others. It was what he had tried to avoid by coming here tonight.

Maybe he was right. Maybe it would have been the best thing. Only Aunt Erzsébet had come in, snarling for a fight, and Count Szelényi, the amiable stranger she could never look in the eye again, was there too. And Margit… What did Margit think of her now?

Do I care?

She opened her eyes, staring out into the night. The sky was clear and black, showering a million stars down on the world. On her.

She was It, and it was her time to act. Not tomorrow. Now.

Her breath caught at the boldness of the idea. It had been a long time since she’d done anything more outrageous than missing mass to care for her garden. But she knew where he was, where they kept him. She’d made it her business to find out, so that she could more easily avoid him. Well, she couldn’t avoid it anymore.

Her stomach twisted, her heart drummed in her breast, but her mind was made up. Pinning the ugly veil back onto her hair at last, she left Margit asleep on her pallet and crept through the dark, empty corridors to go to him.