He swallowed the pain whole, which was the only thing Brother Mungo’s lessons had taught him to do quickly. There were other boys in the room, sons of local families, and he could feel their relief; so long as the monk’s attention was on him it was not on them.
“Nihil agendo, male agere discimus,” Brother Mungo said. “By doing nothing, we learn to do ill.” He let the silence stretch. “Read, boy. Now.”
Edmund pressed his stinging hands flat against the desk and hunted for his place among the swimming letters. When he found it, his voice came out hoarse but clear. “Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt.”
“And do you understand what that means?”
He knew the words one by one. The meaning behind them kept its distance. He risked a glance up. The monk sighed through his nose, and something in his voice eased very slightly. “It means, child, that fate leads the willing, and drags the unwilling.” He tapped the switch once against the desk, lightly. “And which are you?”
Edmund’s knuckles burned. But the phrase had gone into him and settled somewhere deep in his chest, the way a stone settles into a riverbed, and there was no doubt at all in him about the answer. He sat up straighter, one hand closing on the amulet at his neck, the wolf’s head his father had cut for him the morning he rode out. “The willing. My father told me I was the man of the house until he came back. All I want is to be like him.”
“How can you dishonor your own father by wanting to disobey his wishes for you?” The monk’s voice sharpened again. “Your father is soldiering through mud and pain in faraway lands to keep the family afloat so that you can someday be a better man. A learned man, perhaps a clerk or a secretary for the Warden. Or maybe even a clergyman like me if you stop dreaming and keep learning.”
Edmund could imagine nothing worse than becoming like Brother Mungo. He would never have given voice to that thought, but the expression on his face meant he didn’t need to. Brother Mungo’s anger at that expression might have shown itself in a beating; but the lesson was interrupted by the sound of a galloping horse. In the Borders, a single horse ridden hard was never good news for somebody. It wasn’t long before one of Edmund’s brothers had been sent to collect him. When he reached the house, his father’s sword was there. His father was not. There was only one possible reason for that. Edmund stared first at his mother, then at the sword, and then again at his mother. He struggled to get even a single word out. “Father?”
“He is gone.”
❧
You fight when your lord commands you. His father had said it the way other men said grace, without heat, a fact of the world like weather. Henry Tait was English and his wife Bernice was Scottish, and Edmund was a child of the line between where families had married and raided and burned one another’s crops and drunk one another’s ale for as long as anyone could count. Edinburgh says Scottish Borderlands. London says English Borderlands. The people who live there? It’s a border. No man’s land. The Mitfords in their Redesdale stronghold terrorized everyone they regarded as beneath their notice and fawned over those whose power exceeded their own. A marauding Armstrong group, finding the laird of another clan on his own, cut him up and packed the pieces into his saddlebags to be discovered by his kin when his horse found its way home. Everyday borderland social intercourse.
But Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, was Warden of the East March, and joined George Dunbar, Earl of March, to reclaim Dunbar Castle from the Scots. He told Henry Tait to gather as many men as he could and join him. Fifteen hundred Englishmen died at the Battle of Piperdean in the autumn of 1436. Henry Tait was one of them. The Taits had been impoverished before Piperdean. Now they were destitute.
❧
When the Warden gave Bernice one week to pay their debts or lose the holding, Brother Mungo brought his brother Fergus to meet her. The monk said, “My lady, my brother is here with a proposal.” He did not stay to hear it.
Fergus was shorter than his brother and broader, with a face that had taken its share of blows. His coat was good wool, well-cut, though one cuff was torn and there was an old dark stain across the front that had long since set. He stood with his hands at his sides and looked at Bernice. He said, “I will give you the money to pay your debts.”
“And in return?” she said.
“You will continue to live on the holding and you will administer it.”
“And in return?” she said again.
“You will administer the estate, but it will be mine and all of its incomes. And when I need shelter given to men in my band, you will provide it.”
She said, “I accept your offer.”
“I have not finished. One of your children goes with me as my hostage for your good behavior.”
Bernice turned away. Edmund saw her fists close so tightly the nails must be grinding into her palms. He understood that, if no one spoke now, his mother would have to. He stepped forward. Fergus looked at the red hair first, then at the boy under it.
“We accept,” Edmund said.
Bernice’s hands came up and the two younger boys were weeping. Edmund’s hand rose to his chest by instinct, and for a moment he stood there gripping the amulet as though it were nailed to him, breath shallow, before he wrenched it free with a sharp tug that left his neck burning. He paused only to hand his amulet to the elder of the two brothers, whispering, “Take care of this. You’re the man in this house now.”
He was about to walk out of the room when his mother stopped him. “Edmund. You take the sword.”
Edmund had looked at that sword many times. A piece of steel with a worn leather grip, a hand-and-a-half war sword made for a man and not a bairn. A soldier’s tool and a nobleman’s mark, worth two cows, and many a man in the Borders was killed for two cows. His mother said, “You go as a soldier. A soldier must have a sword.” She fixed Fergus with a long, steady gaze as she pressed the sword into her son’s hand. Edmund nodded and took the sword, though he struggled to hold it up. He noticed the smoothness of the leather grip, worn by his father’s sweat. Then, to save himself further grief, he walked out of the room to wherever fate led. Beggars can’t be choosers.
The messenger came to her chamber before the hunting party returned. That was how she knew it was not ordinary news. Aldea-vodă had died in the field. A boar hunt, in the foothills south of the city, in the second month of the year. The healers called it apoplexy. He had been standing, and then he had not been standing. By the time his men reached him he was already gone.
The year was 1436 and she had been in Wallachia for less than two of them.
She sat with the news for a moment, then called for her woman to bring her outer robe. There was no child and she had understood from the beginning that this would matter. The alliance between Moldavia and Wallachia had been bought with her, and the marriage had produced nothing to bind the two courts together beyond the fact of her presence here.
Now Aldea was dead and she was a very young widow of a voivode with no heir and no obvious claim on anything in this court. She thought about it plainly. She could go back to Moldavia. But she knew what return meant: she would become available again, to be placed somewhere useful, and she had already been placed once. The second placement would likely be less favorable than the first. Or there was the nunnery. Women of her rank had gone that way before. It was not disgrace, but it was a door that closed behind you.
Neither answer suited her.
The boyars would be meeting within the day to discuss succession. She was not invited. She was not Wallachian, and she had produced no heir, and her standing in that room was effectively nothing. She understood this. It did not mean she had no choices.
She finished dressing. Then she went to find out who was coming.
❧
He came with a retinue of forty men and a letter from the Emperor. Vlad, called the Dragon, younger brother of the man who had just been buried. He arrived in the second week after the death, before the boyars had concluded anything.
Merchants out of Făgăraș had been coming into Târgoviște for two years and more, and they carried his goods and asked their questions and went back north again. He held Făgăraș and Amlaș. He minted his own coin at Sighișoara. He had kept the passes for the old Emperor, and gone as envoy to Byzantium and to the Sultan both. He had been schooled at Sigismund’s court, and Sigismund had hung the dragon on him. A knight of the highest imperial order.
She placed these facts in order and considered them.
He came through the gate of the palace in the late afternoon and she watched from the gallery. He did not move like his brother. Aldea-vodă had moved through a space as though he already owned it. This one moved as though he was gathering information about the room. He stopped twice crossing the courtyard, both times to speak to someone in his retinue, and both times the conversation was short and the man he spoke to nodded and went. He was in his forties, broad through the shoulders, gray at the temples. He did not look worn. He looked careful. He looked up once before he entered the hall. She did not step back from the gallery rail. She did not know if he had seen her.
The boyars met that evening. She sat in her chamber and waited, which she had become good at in Aldea’s court. Waiting was not passive if you were paying attention while you did it.
Albul, the castellan of Târgoviște, was the one who raised the difficulty. She heard it secondhand through her woman, who had heard it in the corridor outside the hall. Let the Griffin branch make their case before we decide. He was not wrong to say it. The law of voivode-bone meant any man of the right blood could stand for election. The Dragon had the Emperor behind him, but the Emperor was old, and what that backing would be worth in a year was a question no one in that room could answer.
The meeting went late.
She sent word that she wished to speak.
They brought her in near midnight. A single lamp at the end of the table. Ten boyars, Macarie the metropolitan at the head of it, and the Dragon seated to one side. Albul sat across from him, his face giving nothing away, one thumb moving over the white horse worked into the green of his sleeve.
She stood where she was and spoke without preamble. “I was sent here to make firm the alliance between Wallachia and Moldavia. Now the husband I took is dead and the alliance comes into question. If he will have me, I will take the Dragon as my husband, and the alliance with Moldavia will hold.” She looked at Vlad once while she said it. He looked back at her the way a man looks at something he had not expected to find.
Albul turned his cup once on the table. He did not turn it again.
No one had looked at the metropolitan. When he spoke it was to the table and not to her. A man did not take his brother’s wife. The canons were old and they were plain and every man present had stood through enough weddings to have heard them read. He let that sit. She watched it land on faces that had not seen it coming, Albul’s among them. Then the metropolitan said that the canons were given to the Church to be kept, and the keeping of them to the bishops, and that for the peace of a realm a bishop might set them aside. The marriage had made no child. Where there was no child there was nothing to stand in the way. He would make it so. He did not say what it would cost. She noted that he did not need to.
The vote went to the Dragon. He accepted it plainly. He said what needed to be said about the defense of the realm, thanked the boyars, and withdrew. She heard later he had gone straight to the stables to speak with his captain. She thought that might be sensible or it might be telling, and it was possibly both.
They were married before spring.
The Dragon was a widower, but not alone. Behind him came three young boys, his sons born in Transylvania. Mircea, tall and serious; Vlad, dark and quick; and Radu, barely steady on his feet. When Radu looked up at her and said “Mami,” the older two heard it, and within the month they were using it too. She had no children of her own. By spring she had three.
His early days in Fergus’s band were not what Edmund had imagined. Fergus took the sword from him on the first night. “In my band a man earns his iron.” Edmund held it out, but his hand refused to open until he had heard Fergus say he would get it back when he had deserved it. Then Fergus put it in a sack with his own gear and that was the last Edmund saw of it for a long time.
The band did not feed Edmund. If he wanted to eat he stole from the men who stole for a living, and if he wanted warmth he fought for a place at the fire. He was a Sassenach, and the Scots saw no reason to make a Sassenach’s life easier. The first night he edged toward the flames and a boot put him in the mud. By the third he had learned to plant his feet and swing first, and he slept that night with his back to the fire and a split lip and nobody moved him.
Winter closed over the Borders and the band worked through it, for the long nights were the reiver’s season. He was given every task no one else wanted. He held the horses in the sleet while the men went down to the steadings; he broke the ice on the burn each morning for the beasts; he stood the dawn watches, when the cold was at its cruelest and the older men snored by the banked fire. Hunger rode with him the whole season, a companion he learned to walk beside without complaint. He marked the months by the moon, because the moon governed the riding: full for light on the tracks, dark for cover on the way home. Yule passed without a feast, Candlemas without a candle. By the time the thaw browned the drifts and the first lambs were crying on the in-bye land, he had stopped counting the days he had survived.
There was a hut above the moss where Fergus left his broken men. A woman kept it, a healer, and her daughter with her, and twice that winter Edmund was sent up there with a message and a man across a saddle. The daughter was older than him by a few years and looked at him the way the men did, as something that might or might not last. He carried the message and came back.
One night he lay beyond the firelight, where he lay most nights, and heard Boyd say his name. Boyd was the man closest to Fergus and the one the others watched when Fergus was not there. “The Tait lad. I didn’t think he’d last the winter.”
Fergus nodded. “Aye. You’d think a strong wind would blow him away, but you never see him back away from a fight.”
“Somebody should take him in hand.”
“Are you offering?”
“Sure. Why not?”
Boyd threw him a heavy, notched practice blade, the hilt bound in greasy leather, and the lessons began. The older youths gave no quarter. They drove him back until his heels struck stone and lunged at his ribs when he faltered. The skin tore from his palm and blistered and hardened. The iron was too heavy for him and he swung it anyway, every day, until the ache in his right shoulder was something he no longer noticed and the practice blade had stopped feeling like a bar and started feeling like a thing with a point.
❧
Fergus sent him to the healer’s hut alone that summer with a message. He was a mile short of it when he heard her. Morag, the healer’s daughter, was on the ground at the edge of the moss and a man was kneeling between her legs, one hand holding a dirk to her throat, her skirt raised to her waist while the other hand scrabbled at his britches. A broken man, by the look of him, one of the landless ones who came over the moss in the hungry months and belonged to no one. She was still fighting but there was not much of it left.
Edmund did not pause to think about the size of the man. His fingers found a piece of loose granite and closed on it. He came up behind and smashed the rock against the side of the man’s skull and the man fell, sprawling face-first into the dirt. The dirk fell out of his hands and Edmund snatched it up, heart hammering against his ribs.
Then the man got up. He came up roaring with blood down one side of his face. Half blind and swaying, he came at Edmund, shoved him sprawling, then reached for the dirk. Morag leapt forward, hands clasped over the man’s eyes. He staggered, blind, clawing at her and Edmund rolled to his knees and drove the dirk hard beneath the man’s ribs with everything in him. The man’s weight came down on him. He lay under it and held the hilt and did not pull it out for fear that the man might get up again. Morag shoved the body off him, yanked the dirk out in one hard pull. Blood came after it. She wiped the blade on the dead man’s shirt. “You killed him.”
Edmund watched the blood drip. “Aye.”
She looked at him for a moment longer. Then she pulled her skirt down and went back toward the hut without another word, and he followed with the dirk in his belt and the man’s blood going stiff on his front.
When he returned to the camp and told Fergus what had happened, Fergus did not ask who the dead man was. “Some broken man from over the moss. None will come asking.” He looked him over. “So you finally learned to butcher.” He disappeared for a moment, returned with Henry Tait’s sword and tossed it, scabbard and all, into the dirt at the boy’s feet. “You’ve earned the right to carry heavy iron” he said. “Don’t lose it.”
Edmund picked it up. It was the grip he remembered, the leather worn smooth by his father’s rough hand. He had been swinging a bar of iron all winter. Now as he rolled his wrist, testing his father’s steel, he instantly felt the difference. The weapon was heavy, yet balanced. The weight seated exactly above the crossguard. He spent the rest of the day sitting in the damp wind, working the heavy steel. He filled the camp with the harsh, rhythmic scrape of a whetstone, grinding away the neglect, then rubbed the metal down with rancid-smelling lanolin until it shone.
Boyd took him to one side. “It’s a fine blade your father left you. Make it dance.”
The six years that followed after the wedding were not easy, but they were his. He heard complaints and disputes, not always patiently, and he handed down decisions, and the men who went out of the hall went out knowing where they stood with him, which was more than they had known under his brother. In the red mantle of the Order he rode the length of the land, in autumn for the tribute and in spring for the pleas, and in the last years Mircea rode beside him, a boy being shown the country so that the country would know him later. More often than not, Vlad went too. The boy appeared at the mounting block with his horse already saddled and his father lifted him up. Soon enough the people along the road had a name for the imp riding at the Dragon’s stirrup. Dracula, they called him. The Dragon’s son. He answered to it before anyone at court had thought to.
Across the Danube the Turks kept their side of the bargain. Salt, timber, honey and cattle moved south; spices and silk came north. Trade is a kind of peace, even when it isn’t.
Her own body kept no bargain with her. There were months when she counted and months when she made herself not count, and once, in the third year, a thing she did not speak of to her woman or to him. She had three sons who called her Mami. She told herself that was enough, and most days it was, and she had learned not to look long at the days when it was not.
It was the sixth spring, and a late one, winter giving ground a field at a time. She saw them from the gallery as she had seen the Dragon six years before: three riders through the gate, the foremost with a long leather tube at his saddle bound in red cord, which was the Sultan’s safe-conduct and the reason the guards had let them in without a word. They did not dismount until they were told to.
The court gathered in the Hall of Banners, which was not the largest room of the palace but the one that still smelled of linden wood and home. From the blackened rafters, every banner Wallachia had ever captured or inherited hung in stiff, faded splendor: the eagle, the bull, the cross, the crescent. There was a chair for her on the dais and she did not take it. She stood where she had learned to stand in that hall, a pace back from the Dragon’s left shoulder, where she could see the boyars’ faces and they could forget hers.
The envoy stopped three paces inside the hall and bowed, right hand to heart, to lips, then to brow. He waited until the Dragon acknowledged him, and only then came forward and took a leather case from his belt and held it at chest height with both hands. “I bring tidings from Ali Bey, Subași of Giurgiu,” he said evenly. “I bring also a letter from the Padishah.”
Before opening it, he turned the parchment outward so the Sultan’s tughra could be seen, inclining his head briefly toward the imperial cipher. Only then did he break the cord and begin to read.
In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.
From Murad Khan, Padishah of the Horizons, Shadow of God upon Earth, Sultan of Rumelia and Anatolia, to the Voivode of Wallachia: Peace be upon him who follows the straight path.
Let it be known that the Almighty exalts and humbles whom He wills. The Frankish Emperor who once raised his banner against Us has departed this world, and with him the confusion of his realm. Now that the lands beyond the river stand leaderless and uncertain, Our victorious armies advance toward the northern marches to secure the Faith and preserve the tranquility of Our dominions.
From the Exalted Threshold of Our Imperial Court comes this command: that the road through your lands be opened, and that provisions and guides be furnished according to custom.
Those who remain loyal beneath Our shadow shall enjoy Our protection. Those who resist the will of the Padishah shall know the weight of the Sultan’s justice and the force of his arms.
Written at Edirne, beneath Our Imperial Seal, in the year eight hundred and forty-five of the Hijra.
Then the messenger added that the Sultan expected his answer within a day, since his armies were already on the move.
The boyars found their voices all at once. The Dragon let them run, and when he lifted a hand they stopped, and he told the envoy that he would speak with his council and that food and rest would be found for him and his escort.
When the three Turks had gone, the Dragon rose from the dais. He said, simply, “Well?”
Albul answered first, because Albul always answered first. “We bleed at their raids already. Now the pagans want us to join them against our faith. And you ask, well?” He looked around the hall for the men who would nod and found them. “We must stand our ground. We have done it before.”
Neacșu had not moved from the wall. He was a barrel of a man with a gray mustache that hid whatever his mouth was doing, and he spoke to the floor. “Have you seen the Danube in flood?” he rumbled. “Nothing holds it. We can hold them a while in the woods and the marsh, and they will still pass, and our land will burn behind them.”
Albul said, “Better to fight in the swamps and forests until Transylvania answers. Lord Hunyadi will not abandon us.”
“Hunyadi,” said the Dragon, as if weighing it. “Hunyadi cares for Wallachia only while we stand between him and the Turk. He would have us be a shield. But shields are meant to be struck.” He looked down the hall. “The road opens. I ride at the head of it with the host, and the road is mine to choose. Mircea rides with me.”
Albul’s arms came up across his chest. “You swore an oath before God and the Emperor to stand against the pagans. You wear the mantle of it in this hall.”
“The Emperor is dead, and the oath was to him. What I owe God I will settle with God.” The Dragon said it flat. “The envoy has his answer in the morning. Go and see to your men.”
She watched them go out. Albul went last, and slowly, and she marked which of the others walked with him.
❧
After the council dissolved, the Dragon retreated to his own room, and she gave him just enough time to shut the door. He had his answer ready before she had hers out. “You think I want to throw open our gates and kneel before the Turk.”
“You always said the forests are our walls. That a voivode who knows his land can turn a foreign army into bones for the wolves.”
“I believed it. I still believe it. But Neacșu is not wrong. Thirty thousand men make their own road.”
He poured water and set the cup down. The silence between them was not uncomfortable. It was the silence of two people who had learned to think alongside each other.
“He wants a road,” she said. “Now give him more. Warn Hunyadi of every step they take. And when he falls on them, you turn on them with him.”
He looked at her for a while. “Hunyadi will not take that from a letter.”
“And the Turk must never suspect. I must go myself,” she said.
“Hunyadi.” He paused. “You understand the danger. If he decides this is treachery rather than alliance…”
She brushed that aside. “The boys.”
“Mircea rides with me. He is old enough to be seen.” He paused for a moment. “It will be given out that you take Vlad and Radu to safety. The monastery we built at Govora should earn its keep. From there you ride on to Hunedoara with Neacșu. No one else knows.”
That night, Anastasia walked the palace battlements alone. The air smelled of cold mud and the hint of snow, and somewhere in the woods beyond the ramparts, wolves howled. From this height, she could see the three Turks tending to their horses, talking proudly and walking straight, as if the ground beneath them would soon belong to their master.
She rested her hands on the cold stone and stood on the wall until the last torch went out.
❧
In the morning, she watched the envoy being given his answer, a scroll sealed with red wax marked with the insignia of Vlad-vodă the Dragon. The Turks were mounted and through the gates before the bells. By then the first riders were already coming from the villages, and by the time her own party formed in the courtyard the fields outside the walls had begun to fill with the small, tireless horses of the country, ridden by the voivode’s chosen viteji, pride showing in their saddles and their horn bows and the crests that marked their houses.
The Dragon was in the field, in mail and the dark brigandine, with the red mantle over it and the dragon worked in black across his chest. Mircea sat his horse beside him, trying to hold it the way his father held his. He rode across to the gate, put his hand on Radu’s head, and said one word to her. “Govora.” She said it back. Then he turned his horse to the field.
Little Vlad rode his own horse out of the gate, because nobody had told him he could not. Radu went in front of Captain Neacșu with the man’s arm across him. She took thirty men and left the city by the west road with the sound of the muster behind her, and she rode for some time before she let herself look back.
At Govora she left the boys with Father Nicodim, a man whose discretion she had tested over years of oblique requests and kept confidences, and she left the bulk of her escort with him. Govora had no walls worth besieging and no name to draw a hungry boyar’s eye; Târgoviște had Albul, and the mind of this boyar she had not been able to read to her comfort. The boys were safer where Albul could not count them.
From Govora she turned northwest with ten riders in the Dragon’s surcoats and Neacșu, whose left arm had never fully mended since a Turkish blade took it above the wrist. The old Roman road climbed toward the Jiu through a country of broken trees and mist. In early spring the Carpathians hunch their shoulders against the world. The slopes were black and ochre with beech that had not woken, and the wind came down the passes with nothing to break it.
The Jiu was the first true obstacle. The road narrowed to a ribbon between limestone and the river, which ran white and loud and cold enough to be felt from the saddle. Neacșu rode ahead, watching the cliff tops, then dropped back and pointed. “See there. A few men with boulders could hold an army for hours. Or bring it down on our heads.”
The wind battered her cloak and tore at her hair, but she sat straight, the tilt of her chin giving her a height she did not possess. She smiled. “And if you were the Sultan’s man?”
He spat over the edge. “I would fire the woods above and let the smoke bring them out, and shoot them as they came, and send the Janissaries along the water to take them from below.”
The smile vanished as she looked past him, to the twists of the valley ahead. “We ride through before dusk. If we are to be ambushed, let them do it in daylight.”
Beyond the Jiu the road opened and the country breathed again. Frost in the hollows, wood smoke somewhere, nobody on the road. Then the mist thinned and the castle was there, and for a moment neither of them said anything.
It stood on a spur of rock with the river bent around the foot of it, and it was bigger than anything she had seen since Suceava. Squared towers, no ornament, the stone still raw where it was new, and most of it was new. Scaffolding climbed the east face. Below the walls lime kilns were smoking and a line of carts stood waiting with cut stone, and she counted the men on the scaffolds and stopped counting at forty. On the gatehouse, a raven with a gold ring in its beak, on blue. Neacșu let out a low whistle.
As she climbed she set what she knew of this lord in order, as she had once set the Dragon. A cneaz’s son who had fought his way up, and was Sigismund’s man by service as the Dragon had been Sigismund’s man by blood. Married into the Szilágyi, who had their own lands and their own soldiers and were not people one married into by accident. And voivode of Transylvania these two years past, which meant the Hungarians believed him to be the soldier who could keep the Turk off them. She placed these facts in order and considered them, and added the forty masons.
The bridge to the gate was chained timber slung above a chasm, iced and freshly swept, and on the far side men-at-arms stood either side of the path with their boots set and their halberds upright, and nobody moved until the man in fur-trimmed black stepped forward. His helmet was off, showing iron-gray hair cut blunt. He looked up at her and went still for a moment. Then he bowed from the waist, the movement deliberate, and when he straightened his eyes had settled. She had seen men do that. It was worth something and it was worth less than they imagined. “Lady Anastasia,” he said. “Your presence honors us.”
“Lord Szilágyi,” Anastasia said. She let it be seen that she needed no introduction. “I bring word to Lord Iancu and his lady.”
Inside, the castle was all stone and shadow, the windows mere arrow slits, the air scented with damp limestone and boiled meat. At the far end of the long table, beneath a window that admitted more wind than light, sat Iancu Hunyadi and his wife.
He was broad-shouldered and thick through the chest, his hands planted on the wood as though claiming it by force. His nose had been broken more than once. He had the wine poured and did not touch it, and she watched him not touch it. The thick black mustache that dominated his face twitched slightly as he inclined his head, a soldier’s courtesy, and the eyes above the mustache went on with their arithmetic.
Lady Elisabeth was younger, and pale, and her hand went to her belly and came away again.
Anastasia made the prescribed bows but ignored the seat offered her, choosing to remain standing, her eyes locked on Lord Iancu. “My husband sends greetings,” she said. “And a warning. The Turk is on the move toward Transylvania.”
Hunyadi drummed his fingers once, twice. At last he said, “And what does the Dragon propose?”
“He will lead them himself, by the Jiu, as if toward this castle. The road is a ribbon between the cliff and the river. Where horse cannot turn and banner cannot spread, you fall on them. And when you do, we turn on them with you.”
Lady Elisabeth spoke then, and she spoke in Romanian. Someone in this house had thought it worth the trouble. “Deceiving the Turk, he says. And what pledge does the Dragon give that this is not us he is deceiving?”
“I am here.”
Elisabeth’s eyes widened, then she laughed, a sound like water over gravel.
Hunyadi let the silence run for a moment, then took one sip of the wine and set his cup down. “Agreed, but not as you propose. The Jiu leads to me. I do not want them led to me. Let the Dragon take them up the Olt, through the Red Tower, into the Saxon country. Let them sit down before walled towns and burn villages until they strain under the weight of what they have taken. When they grow rash and weary, when they dream only of home, he will tempt them with whispers of Sibiu’s wealth. We will speak of crumbling walls and frightened burghers. And there.” He brought his fist down on the board and the cups jumped.
Anastasia turned to Captain Neacșu. “You know what to do.” He saluted, fist to chest, then withdrew to the corridor, boots echoing down the stone. Hunyadi leaned over the table, close enough that Anastasia could smell the wine on his breath. “Do you trust your Dragon, Lady?”
She met his gaze. “With my life.”
He grinned below his mustache. “And if he does not deserve it?”
Lady Elisabeth shifted in her seat, touching her belly again. “My Lord Iancu is fond of games. But do not mistake him for a man who takes a wager lightly. Even when staked on a pretty head. Heads come off all the same.”
Anastasia bowed her head. “That is all we can ask.”
The next morning, from the battlements, she watched as Captain Neacșu took the first bend of the road south, already a speck against the snow on the Carpathian peaks. Hunedoara’s banners snapped in the wind, sending the ravens wheeling above the courtyard. Somewhere beyond the mountains, the Dragon and his three thousand horsemen waited for news.