A Prince to be Feared: The love story of Vlad Dracula (24 page)

Vlad didn’t look remotely surprised. Instead, his lips curved and a glint of quite different excitement entered his green eyes.

“Asking where the tribute is?” he hazarded.

“Precisely.”

“Well, we’ll let them stew for a bit,” said Vlad, striding across to the table to find the wine jug which had already been brought for the weary traveller. Over his shoulder, he called, “Whom have they sent? Someone important, I trust?”

Ilona didn’t really register the strange, Ottoman names. But she saw Vlad’s expressive face turn blank with shock.

Chapter Nineteen

Visegrád, Hungary 1474

“Ilona.” Vlad started across the room to her. “I didn’t know you were there!”

“No…”

“Szelényi’s locked the door.”

“I know.”

He stood in front of her, gazing helplessly down at her anxious face. Though he couldn’t prevent the warm gladness seeping through him because she had come to him to talk at last, he racked his brains for the means to save her the embarrassment of discovery.

“Someone will come if I shout, and let you out, but you know it will be all over court tomorrow that you were locked in here with me. If I call immediately, perhaps it will save you the worst. Szelényi himself…”

“Vlad,” she interrupted, and he saw with amazement that her eyes were full of amusement as well as frustration. “That is the point.”

He heard his own breath falter as understanding flooded him. She tore her gaze free of his, beginning to pace as she spoke. “If you want this marriage, we can force his hand. Make sure everyone knows. He may be so angry, of course, that he keeps Wallachia from you, but I gather there aren’t many options, and he will come back to you, whatever you’ve done. And after all, you’d still be allied with his family as he planned in the first place.”

He said, “You’d do that. You’d really do that…”

She shrugged, still not looking at him. Her pacing became faster, more agitated. “It doesn’t matter. If you call now, they’ll just think I wandered in here in my madness. It might make them a new myth—Dracula’s kidnapping and ravishing gentlewomen—but it will make no real difference. This time, the choice is yours.”

She stopped talking and drew in her breath. Vlad caught her in midpace, gripping her shoulders to still her, and at last she lifted her gaze to his. Anxiety blended with determination and uncertainty in almost equal measure in her soft, dark eyes.

He whispered, “I cannot take your reputation just to force my will on the king.”

“You needn’t touch me,” she said vaguely. “Your private honour is the only one that matters, after all. For the rest…it is, I think, our last chance. For it all. Other bits may be left to us. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. It was the only idea I had, but you needn’t go through with it…”

“Ilona.”

She stopped talking and swallowed. Because he had no words of his own, he bent and kissed her lips for the first time in twelve years. Her mouth opened in a silent gasp, and the salty wetness of her tears trickled from her face onto his lips.

Lifting his head, he touched the taut skin over her cheekbones, traced the line of her tears. “Your beauty still breaks my heart.”

She closed her eyes. “Because I have none left. But I can make myself think again. Perhaps I can still help you.”

He brushed his lips across the fresh tear drop. “Everything about you is as beautiful as it ever was. Together, I think we could shine again.”

A smile trembled into being on her lips. She opened her eyes but remained silent. Understanding, Vlad began to laugh with soft delight. “You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she said happily. “I’m going to make you say it.”

“Then stay with me in secret tonight, and in the morning we’ll shock everyone. I’ll twirl my moustache most villainously, and you, the outraged princess, must hold out for marriage.”

***

Vlad brought her wine in the elegant Venetian glass goblet, then dragged his chair closer and sat almost at right angles to her, his knee close to but not quite touching her silk gown.

He said, “Does your dragon know you’re here?”

“Margit? She isn’t a dragon… For some reason, she’s been protecting me. She seems to love me, though I don’t know why. I‘ve let her serve me all these years and given her nothing. I should find her a husband before she withers like me.”

“You’re not withered,” Vlad objected. “You’ve just been…resting.”

“Resting,” she repeated doubtfully, and since he was afraid she would drift back off into vagueness, he brought her back by returning to the question.

“Does Margit know you’re here?”

“Oh no. She thinks I’m asleep. She won’t wake till morning, when I have hopes that she’ll raise a really loud alarm…”

“If she does, you’ll owe her a very fine husband.”

Ilona brightened. “Is your Count Szelényi married?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“Pity. I like him.”

“Why?” The unexpected twinge of jealousy took him by surprise, but at least he could laugh at himself.

“He seems to care for you… And he troubled to be civil to the king’s dowdy cousin. Beyond lip service.” She frowned. “Although he shouldn’t be intriguing with that woman. She’s beneath him, I think.”

“Have pity on him,” said Vlad, amused. “He’s been apart from his wife for some time.”

She began to say, “Do
you
…?” and broke off. From the clear gaze with which she began, to the rising flush when she realised the impossibility of continuing, it was so reminiscent of the old Ilona, blurting out her curiosity before considering the consequences, that he smiled.

“Do I intrigue?” he finished for her. “No. In recent years, they allow me to assuage my baser instincts with court whores, but you wouldn’t dignify such passages even as intrigues.”

She looked into his eyes. She didn’t appear hurt, and, ruefully, he didn’t know if that was a good thing or not. So he added, “Since our marriage was revived, I’ve returned to celibacy.”

That didn’t get quite the reaction he’d expected either. She smiled as if at an old joke.

“You always did that,” she remembered, and he realised that it was true. A sop, a nod in the direction of honour and fidelity that he had chosen from some only half-understood instinct. The rest, even Maria, had been some almost mundane necessity, like eating.

She said, “I wasn’t faithful either, in body.”

“You were married.” He kept it neutral, no accusation—how could there be when she would have had no choice? And hoped she understood that it was also different from his demeaning couplings. When she said nothing, just absently sipped her wine, he added, “I heard he was a good man.”

“I heard that too.”

Vlad still knew her very well. He ducked his head down to catch her eye again before he pursued, “And was he?”

Her breath came out unevenly. “In his own eyes, in the eyes of the world. I didn’t like him. I was glad when he died. I don’t want to think about him.”

He reached out, covering her suddenly agitated hand with his. He took the wineglass from her and laid it on the table.

“Ilona. We’re fighting together again, and I need to know what we’re up against.”

“Not him. He’s dead.”

Her voice was flat, uncompromising. If it hadn’t been for her fingers clinging almost involuntarily to his, he would have thought she was slipping away from him again.

He said, “What does Matthias fear about us being together? That you’ll deny his Impaler myths?”

Her lips curved slightly. “Oh, I don’t think anyone can deny those now, can they? They have all the authority of the new printing. Which doesn’t mean Matthias doesn’t fear it.”

“Perhaps he fears we’ll be too strong for him together.”

“It doesn’t matter if we’re on his side.”

“Are we?”

“I really think we’ll have to be. The Ottomans are no longer an alternative.”

Vlad sighed. “I made a huge mess of that, didn’t I?”

Ilona lifted their joined hands to her cheek. “No. The mess was Matthias’s fault.”

“I didn’t even see it coming. Not that. And not Stephen.”

“We can’t undo the past,” she said sadly.

“But I think, if we’re to move on, that we’ll have to.”

Chapter Twenty

Tîrgovi
ş
te, Wallachia, 1461-1462

“Who is Zafer Bey?”

She’d waited for him to tell her why the presence of this man in Tîrgovi
ş
te shocked hm. With all the confidence of their new closeness, she knew he would. And yet the princely train had already set out for the capital, and still he hadn’t so much as referred to it.

As if that blank look had never been, he talked about pacifying the ambassadors, playing for time because he wasn’t yet ready to face an Ottoman invasion. The alliance was not yet ready, despite the papal crusade declared in Mantua two years before. Hungary, who’d received forty thousand ducats from the pope for the purpose, was to lead the crusade, just as in the great days of John Hunyadi; and Matthias had to be kept up to the mark. Internally, the massive popular army of Wallachia had to be organised and armed and trained to augment Vlad’s regular troops of nobles, professionals, and mercenaries.

All this he discussed openly with Ilona. And it jolted her, because it forced her to realise the dangers to Wallachia and to Vlad himself that an open breach with the sultan would entail. Somehow, she’d imagined he would never let the war touch his beloved country, but that was naïve, and Vlad was nothing if not a realist. It would not be Matthias but Vlad who drove this crusade forward. Ilona understood that and still she had every faith in him.

But his silence on this one point disquieted her. Until, finally believing she understood that too, she asked the question outright as they rode together along the muddy road south.

“Who is Zafer Bey?”

Almost to her surprise, he didn’t turn the subject. He didn’t even look irritated. He said, “Interesting question. The answer is, I think, that he is the man with whom the sultan means to frighten me.”

Ilona, knowing now she was right, asked steadily, “And does he?”

Vlad dragged his upper lip between his teeth. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “That is one of the many interesting things we’ll discover when I meet him.”

Ilona wanted to weep because of all that was admitted in those words, but more because of the storm of shame that whipped through his eyes before the heavy lids and the long, thick lashes veiled them.

With difficulty, she said, “Some childish fears we never get over, no matter how irrational. There is no shame in that, especially not when your monster is real.”

He turned to her, the hoods lifting from his eyes to reveal them bright and speculative. “Zafer’s monstrosity is not in question—or not by me—but the really interesting thing is how the sultan knows it.”

Ilona frowned. “If this Zafer is a fearsome man…”

“Mehmed doesn’t believe I fear anyone. Or at least he didn’t. It’s one of the reasons he’s backed me for so long. And yet now he sends me Zafer. How does he know now? Zafer himself would not reveal such abuse.”

Gazing at him, Ilona blurted, “
You
know. I can see you know how.”

“Radu,” said Vlad. “My little brother, whom I once protected from Zafer himself, is the only one who knows.”

“He betrayed you,” Ilona whispered in pity. The boy he had risked reimprisonment to go back for. But that didn’t appear to be what was concerning Vlad.

“He means to supplant me,” he said flatly. “When the Ottomans come, it won’t be to swallow Wallachia into their empire. It will be to put Radu on my throne.”

***

Vlad received the sultan’s ambassadors from his princely throne in the great hall of the Tîrgovi
ş
te palace. Leaving out only his dragon collar—which would have been too much an open insult at this stage—he wore his most magnificent garb. Jewels glistened on his velvet mantle and silken hat. Fine ostrich feathers stretched upward from his headgear, adding height and splendour. He was surrounded by his greatest and wealthiest nobles, also very finely dressed, and an array of scribes and clerks sat at a finely polished and intricately carved table below his dais. At a greater distance milled the lesser courtiers, together with the upper rank of court ladies.

The entire hall shone, from painted ceiling to floor, with highly polished wood, with decorative gold and silver plate, with extravagant candlelight to augment the sun streaming in the windows on either side. Vlad clearly meant to impress.

Ilona, accompanied by her mother, sat among the court ladies, aware that Vlad would not have considered it proper to receive foreign dignitaries in any less a manner. Even Mihály, though greeted informally as a friend on first arrival, had always been subjected to a formal reception when he came as the king’s representative.

Trying not to be anxious, she watched surreptitiously for signs of disquiet in Vlad—and found none. Not even when the visitors from the Sublime Porte were announced and walked the full length of the hall to his throne. Was that a trick he’d learned from Countess Hunyadi?

Dividing her attention, she let her gaze focus on the ambassadors. Both were richly robed, their turbans jeweled, and their moustaches and beards luxurious. The taller, stouter of the two walked with a subtle kind of strut, like man aware of his own importance, his dark eyes unwaveringly on the prince. The smaller, thinner man was older, but with fierce intelligence still gleaming in his eyes. Both looked proud, and neither, she suspected, were strangers to cruelty. But she could not guess which was Zafer, which the man who had beaten the boy Vlad so badly.

Approaching the throne, both men bowed low, their noses all but touching their knees.

Vlad Dracula looked haughty and not best pleased. As they rose, he waited in silence, then lifted one interrogative eyebrow. “You do not uncover in the presence of a great ruler?”

“Your Highness is aware of the customs of my people,” said the tall man smoothly in acceptable Romanian.

“Your Excellency is aware of the customs of mine,” Vlad countered. Ilona knew then that Zafer was the taller man. For a moment, she wondered if Vlad would force them to uncover their heads, but he said nothing more, merely held out his hand for the document carried by the smaller man. He stepped forward to the dais, but at once a clerk rose, bowed, took the document from his reluctant fingers, and jumped up to present it to Vlad.

Vlad opened it and read it thoroughly. It took a long time. The courtiers grew bored and began to murmur in low voices or to stroll among the throng to find particular friends. The Ottoman ambassadors stood perfectly still. After a while, the smaller man cast an anxious glance at Zafer, who gave an infinitesimal shrug in response, as if completely unconcerned.

He thought Vlad was taking his time just to rile them. He may have been right. Ilona murmured an excuse to her mother and rose to change positions, moving closer to the throne so that she could see the faces of the ambassadors.

Zafer continued to watch Vlad as he carefully perused the document. She’d been right earlier. There was no anxiety whatsoever in the Turk’s face. In fact, she thought she read a faint, cruel amusement that bordered on contempt. He imagined this excessively careful reading was Vlad’s last attempt at dignity before he gave in. And in that Ilona knew he was wrong.

But why should a man who knew Vlad so well imagine such an unlikely outcome? Because he knew Vlad’s secret fear of him? Because he imagined Vlad would do anything to get him out of his country as fast as possible? With a new spurt of dread, Ilona began to suspect she didn’t after all know all the facts, that she was missing something vitally important here.

Vlad sighed, closed the document, and passed it to Carstian on his right-hand side.

“His Sublime Majesty the sultan does me too much honour, gives me too much credit for the wealth and well-being of my country. I shall write to him to explain that although I acknowledge everything I owe him, I cannot pay the tribute this year because I and my country are both bled dry through constant war with our enemies here and in Transylvania. Nor dare I leave to bring any part of the tribute in person, as His Sublime Majesty wishes. If I did, the Hungarians would seize my throne before I could wink, and that would not be good for His Sublime Majesty.”

“I am sure,” said Zafer, sounding bored, “that His Sublime Majesty would be open to receiving Your Highness and Your Highness’s tribute at some place nearer to home for you than Constantinople.”

“Then when I can gather the money, I shall arrange it,” said Vlad smoothly. “This matter of the children, however. I am duly honoured that His Sublime Majesty so admires the quality of Romanian manhood that he wants our boys for his janissary corp. But Wallachia has never paid a child tribute. It was never part of any agreement between His Sublime Majesty and either myself or any of my predecessors.” Vlad smiled into Zafer’s eyes. It was not a pleasant smile. “I believe I have had frequent cause before to—er—push that point home.”

Since Vlad had ruthlessly captured and impaled several Ottoman recruiting commanders trying to steal Wallachian children, his meaning was abundantly clear. One or two of the Wallachian nobleman grinned openly, as proud of their prince’s wit as of his cruelty in defence of his most vulnerable people.

Although the smaller Turk’s lips tightened, Zafer didn’t bat an eyelid.

“But that is why His Sublime Majesty sent me. As Your Highness knows, I push my own point very effectively.”

Ilona’s gut twisted. For an instant she thought she would vomit and had to swallow down her own bile. The ambiguity of Zafer’s words was more lewd than Vlad’s, but by everyone else they were taken as a feeble boast to try to rival Dracula’s reputation. Only Ilona picked up the sexual allusion, and that because she saw Vlad’s involuntary twitch. And at last she understood the nature and extent of Zafer’s abuse.

The beating he could and did endure. The other assault was the one he had longed to rip out Zafer’s heart for. The one he had saved Radu from. Although rumour said Radu was not immune to manly charms and had given himself willingly to none other than the sultan himself. The protection he had not wanted from Vlad.

And Vlad, face-to-face with the unrepentant, the boastful abuser of his childhood, merely smiled.

“Not as effectively as you imagine. Your courtesy, whether as host or guest, leaves much to be desired. However, since you feel you know best, let me help you keep your own customs in my country.” His eyes flickered, in some lightening signal to the soldiers who guarded the door. They strode forward.

Vlad stood and said disdainfully, “Kneel.”

And for the first time, alarm truly did cross Zafer’s face. The other ambassador gasped out, “You cannot kill the representatives of His Sublime Majesty!”

“Of course not,” said Vlad, stepping down from the dais. Turning to one of the soldiers, he tossed something into his hands. “Make sure these gentlemen’s turbans remain well attached to their heads.”

The soldier looked down involuntarily. Several carpenter’s nails lay in his palm. He grinned.

The Ottomans fell to their knees unaided, crying out for mercy, crying out the sultan’s anger at such an insult and much more in their own language that Ilona couldn’t understand.

Ilona had seen enough. Moving quickly, she returned to her mother and led her silently out of the hall. They didn’t quite make it before the screaming started.

***

As the palace grew quiet and her mother retired for the night, Ilona continued to gaze out into the darkened gardens. Unless he didn’t want to be found, she knew where he would be. Even in the summer storm. With sudden decision, she seized her cloak from the back of the chair and walked quickly to the door. Once there, with her hand on the latch, she paused. For the first time, she felt uncertain of her ability to deal with Vlad Dracula. Those agonies of their relationship that had once eaten her up now seemed completely trivial in the light of today’s revelations. Learning to know the Prince of Wallachia was not unmitigated pleasure.

But her path was chosen and couldn’t be abandoned, even if she wanted to. And she didn’t. There was nothing he could do to make that happen, God help her.

Lifting the latch, she hurried out into the rain, crossing into the palace section of the gardens and hurrying down to the willow tree near the pond.

But no figure leaned there against its branches. There was no Vlad-shaped bulge against the trunk. It seemed he didn’t need the fresh air—or herself—as much as she’d imagined he would. What had she expected? Vlad had learned to live with this long ago. And his acts of cruelty, his “minor atrocities” were not so few that they could be allowed to eat him up. He was a strong ruler, unafraid to take the road he’d chosen.

It was she who needed the fresh air, to remind her of the goodness in the world. Who needed to see him, to assure herself he was still the Vlad she’d always thought him.

And so, gasping, she grasped at the willow branch and let the rain run into her mouth and trickle down her hair into her neck and down the front of her cloak. She looked down slowly, her gaze drawn by invisible strings to the ground behind the tree.

He sat there, in his shirt and doublet, soaked through without any further protection from the rain, his back pressed against the tree trunk, his knees drawn up under his chin. Her heart gave two powerful beats before she realised that his eyes were turned up to her in the darkness.

Without thought, she slumped down beside him. She thought he smiled, but she didn’t look.

She said, “Are they dead? Is Zafer dead?”

“No. He was right. I can’t go around killing the sultan’s representatives. Or at least not yet. But their headaches should keep them from going home too quickly.”

“You always meant to do it. You had the nails with you.”

“The carpenter left them lying in the hall. It struck me they were miniature stakes. It appealed to my sense of humour. And so I picked them up, although I wasn’t certain what I’d do with them.”

She leaned her head back, turned her face up into the rain. “Why didn’t you tell me? About Zafer?”