Hunt the Moon

Chapter Thirty-eight

I guess I passed out. Because the next thing I knew was waking up in a strange bed, in a strange room, with a strange city view outside a small balcony. But the man standing in front of the window, leaning on the open French door, was familiar. Mircea’s dark hair was blowing in a slight breeze, the same one that was ruffling the thin silk of his dressing gown as he turned his head toward me.

He didn’t say anything, and neither did I. He just walked over and sat on the edge of the bed, leaning to brush my sleep tumbled curls out of my face. “Are you cold?”

I shook my head. I wasn’t wearing anything under the comforter, but it was thick and warm except for my feet, which were sticking out of the covers. They were a little chilly, but also pink and whole and perfect, a gift from Mircea, I assumed. The rest of me felt pretty good, too; tired, but also warm and whole and clean and alive.

I decided I didn’t mind the temperature. It felt good to feel cold. It felt good to be able to feel anything.

Mircea must have thought so, too, because he pulled me in a little more, until he could rest his chin on the top of my head. I usually disliked that; there wasn’t enough hair up there to cushion the bone. But tonight . . . tonight I didn’t mind.

“Your mother was an extraordinary woman,” he murmured, after a moment.

“Hm.”

“Much like her daughter.”

I thought about that for a moment and then twisted my head around, so I could see his face. “I thought I was just . . . lucky.”

Mircea’s lips twisted. “I am not going to be allowed to forget that, am I?”

“Probably not.” At least not anytime soon.

He pulled me back against him and ran a hand through my pathetic hair. “I have never doubted you.”

“Mircea—”

“It’s true.”

“Then what was all that in the tunnel? What has been going on all week?”

He didn’t say anything for a moment, and I thought maybe he wouldn’t. Master vampires weren’t in the habit of having to explain themselves, except possibly to their own masters. And Mircea had never had one of those.

“We talked about my parents,” he said, after a moment. “A few days ago. Do you remember?”

I nodded.

“Did I ever tell you what happened to them?”

“I know what happened to your dad,” I said. “Sort of.”

Mircea’s story about his father’s death and his own near miss changed depending on the circumstances. When I was a child, he’d made it sound almost comical: crazy nobles trying to bury him alive when—surprise—he’d been cursed with vampirism more than a week before. Later, I’d heard a less amusing version, including a late-night flight barely ahead of the torch-wielding mob who had killed his father and blinded him, before leaving him six feet under.

Mircea had crawled out of his own grave and gotten away, still half blind, his newly vampire body struggling to heal itself with no food, his mind reeling from shock and horror. He’d had no master to help him, no one to go to for advice or shelter. And yet, somehow, he’d survived.

“I know all I need to know,” I told him, tilting my head back to look up at him.

His hand tightened on my arm. “No,” he said softly. “I don’t think you do.”

He drew the covers around us, probably on my account. It takes a lot to get a master cold. And then he told me the whole story. The one I doubted he’d told too many people before.

“In 1442, the pope decided to call for a new crusade against the Ottoman Turks, who had conquered much of the Middle East by that time, and were making inroads into Europe. It was felt that someone needed to bring them to heel, and the king of Poland was elected. He had dreams of glory, but at barely twenty, little battlefield experience. He relied on the guidance of a soldier of fortune named John Hunyadi.”

I didn’t have to ask if Hunyadi was the bad guy. Mircea’s tone was the same one a devout Catholic would use to say “Satan.” “I take it you didn’t think much of him.”

Mircea’s hand ran lightly up and down my arm, causing a wave of goose bumps to chase his fingers. “Hunyadi did have military skill,” he admitted grudgingly. “But his ambitions often overruled his judgment. Such was the case when he and Ladislas—the Polish king—met with my father on their way east. Napoleon famously said that God fights on the side with the largest battalions. That was centuries later, but it fairly sums up my father’s opinion. Which is why all his diplomatic skill could not keep the horror off his face when he saw their ‘army.’ ”

“It was that bad?”

“It wasn’t an army at all. The idiots had brought a totality of fifteen thousand men with them. As my father told Hunyadi, the sultan often took that many on hunting expeditions!”

“I’m assuming this Hunyadi guy didn’t listen.”

“He informed my father that a Christian knight was worth a hundred of the sultan’s ‘rabble.’ Rabble!” Mircea’s voice was bitter. “When the Janissaries, Murad’s elite military corps, were among the best-armed, best-trained soldiers in the world. They were trained from the time they were children—Christian children whom the Turks took as devshirme, a sort of tax, on areas they conquered.”

“I wouldn’t think slaves would be all that thrilled about fighting for their masters.”

“These weren’t slaves in the American sense. The Janissaries were among the elite of Ottoman society, respected and feared, even by free men. They had known nothing but military service their whole lives. They ate and drank it. At that time, they didn’t even marry, for fear it would distract them from their work. They threw all of their passion into warfare, and these were the soldiers against whom Hunyadi was taking a paltry force under an untested king!”

“Didn’t he know this?”

“Of course he knew. But he was a pompous, arrogant ass, and worse, a zealot. A cardinal, Cessarini, was traveling with the army, a papal appointment to see to it that God was on the battlefield.” Mircea lips twisted, but not in a smile. “If he was, he was fighting for the other side.”

“They lost?”

“We lost. Or, to be more precise, we were obliterated.” His hand stilled on my arm.

“We? You mean you were there?”

“Yes. Leading four thousand cavalry from Walachia.”

“But if your father knew it was a lost cause—”

Mircea sighed. “That was precisely my argument. But my father was in a difficult position. He owed his position to King Sigismund, his old mentor, who had loaned him the army he had used to seize the throne. Sigismund was dead by this time, but Ladislas had succeeded him, and he reminded my father of his obligation. There was also the fact that my father was a member of the Order of the Dragon, a Catholic military organization started for the express purpose of combating the Turkish threat.”

“So it was a religious thing?”

“It was a political thing. My mother was the devout one in the family; my father put his faith in a strong arm and a good sword, and he had need of one. There were many competitors for his throne who would have liked to do to him what he had done to the cousin he dethroned. If he gave the surrounding Catholic leaders a reason to distrust him, they might lend one of them an army, as Sigismund had done for him.”

“Then why didn’t he lead the forces himself? Why send you to do it?”

“He would have preferred to go himself, if one of us must. But he had signed a treaty with the Turks forbidding it.”

“But . . . I thought they were the enemy.”

“They were. But they also had an army far larger than our tiny force. Had it come to invasion, we would have fought bravely, but we would have lost. As it was, after the Turks made a raid, we would find whole villages nailed to crosses or impaled, or find pyramids made out of the bleached skulls of the dead.”

“Why would they do that? Why not just plunder and leave?”

“Because they wanted to be bought off, and they made sure my father had little choice. In the end, he had to sign a treaty agreeing to pay them ten thousand gold ducats a year and to refuse to lift his hand against them in battle. And to guarantee his good behavior, he had to give two of his sons as hostages.”

“That’s how your brothers ended up in a Turkish dungeon.” I’d known that Vlad, the brother better known to the world as Dracula, had gone insane in a Turkish prison. But I hadn’t known the details of how he got there.

Mircea nodded. “My father went for the treaty discussion under a flag of truce, taking my two younger brothers with him. They were supposed to be safe, but they were seized and put in chains as soon as they arrived. Vlad and Radu were carried away before the treaty was given him to sign. He knew if he failed to do so, their lives would most certainly be forfeit.”

“So he signed.”

“Yes, and was therefore put in an impossible position when Ladislas demanded his loyalty as a member of the Order, to fight alongside him on his damn fool crusade. My father couldn’t refuse without risking his throne, but agreeing would likely mean the death of his sons. He therefore agreed to send the smallest acceptable force with Ladislas, but chose me to command it, thereby keeping the letter of the treaty, if not the spirit.”

“By not lifting a hand against the Turks himself.”

“Yes.”

“I assume it didn’t work?” I really didn’t have to ask. I could read that much from Mircea’s expression.

“Nothing worked. At the battle, we were outnumbered three to one, and then that foolish, foolish king decided to make a dash for glory along with five hundred cavalry—and predictably ended with his head on a pike. The Turks paraded him around like the trophy he was. And as soon as his army saw it, they broke and ran. My forces stayed together and managed an organized retreat, which is probably why most of us survived. Virtually everyone else left their bones bleaching on the battlefield—including the cardinal, who was stripped naked by the victors and left for the carrion birds. Hunyadi, of course, escaped, as such men always do.”

“And your brothers?” I asked softly.

Mircea lay back against the bed, his hair spread out around him. I combed my fingers through it, fanning in out on the pale blanket, because it was beautiful. But also because I couldn’t do anything else to erase the sadness from his face. It had all happened so long ago, but it looked like I had been wrong. At least for one vampire, the past hadn’t faded at all.

“Before the defeat at Varna, they had been hostages, yes,” he told me. “But very well-treated ones. They were kept at Adrianople, the capital, were given food and clothing worthy of their station, were well educated and even received a good bit of freedom within the city itself. After the debacle, they were imprisoned in a filthy dungeon, beaten on a daily basis and half starved. It is a wonder they survived.”

“And your father couldn’t do anything? Pay a ransom or—”

“No. The Turks weren’t interested in money, not after Varna left all of Eastern Europe open to conquest—or so it looked at the time. They groomed Radu, who had proven to be the most malleable, to be a puppet prince for when they annexed Walachia. Vlad, who fought them at any and all opportunities, they mistreated terribly, but kept alive because his hatred for them paled in comparison to his loathing for their mutual enemy, Hunyadi.”

“Because he’d caused him to be imprisoned?”

“No.” Mircea got up abruptly. “Because Hunyadi murdered his entire family.”

I sat there blinking while Mircea disappeared onto the balcony. I wrapped the comforter around me and followed, a little hesitantly, because I wasn’t sure I was wanted. I found him lighting up a cigarette, one of the small, dark, spicy ones he preferred, which wasn’t a great sign. Mircea only smoked when he wanted to settle his nerves, or to give himself something to do with his hands besides wrapping them around someone’s neck.

But I guess that someone wasn’t me, because he pulled me back against him, adding his warmth to the comforter’s, making the otherwise frigid balcony almost cozy. It looked like this hotel was connected to a train station, because there were a ton of people coming and going far below, all looking like extras out of Dickens. Maybe A Christmas Carol, because a bunch were singing on the sidewalk in the middle of the mad rush. The songs drifted up to us in snippets, blown around on the breeze.

For a long time, Mircea smoked and I just enjoyed the feeling of those arms around me. I didn’t get it very often these days, with negotiations and Senate duties and the damned coronation taking up so much of his time. I laid my head back against his shoulder; it was always a surprise how good he felt.

“My father was livid with Hunyadi,” he finally told me, letting out a breath of sweet-scented smoke that drifted up, ghostly pale against the blackness. “He had warned the man, had almost begged him not to go, and now fifteen thousand good men were dead, his sons were imperiled and nothing had been gained. If anything, the crusade had only served to show the Ottomans our weakness, and he knew them well enough to know they wouldn’t hesitate to exploit it.”

“What did he do?”

Mircea shrugged, a liquid movement against my back. “What he should have done. He imprisoned him when the man passed through Walachia, intending that he should answer for his crimes. But Hunyadi had powerful friends, and they immediately began petitioning my father to release him.”

“And did he?”

Mircea was quiet for a moment, but his arms tightened around me almost imperceptibly. “They called me Mircea the Bold then,” he said quietly. “Due to my actions in battle. But I was too bold on that occasion. Furious and grieving, and still in pain from wounds received at that disaster of a crusade, I was rash. I spoke out in open court, told how I had seen Hunyadi’s arrogance firsthand, that I knew his ego and ambition would drive him to find a scapegoat for his failure. He could hardly blame the martyred king or the saintly cardinal, leaving us as the obvious targets. I begged my father to kill him, warned that if it was not his head on the chopping block, it would be ours.”

“And did he listen?’

“No. But someone else did. I don’t know—I never knew—who told Hunyadi. But somehow, my words reached his ears. And after my father bowed to pressure and released him, Hunyadi vowed to do precisely as I had said: to see us all dead. He put together a force and attacked us—his former allies—barely three years later. My family was forced to flee for our lives, but it did little good. Boyars—the local nobility—in his pay hunted us down. It was about this time of year when they caught up with us.”

It was a little incongruous, standing there warm and safe, listening to Christmas carols and smelling the cold, crisp air and Mircea’s funky little cigarette. And imagining the horror he must have felt. “They killed . . . everyone?”

“Everyone they could reach. They slit my mother’s throat, tortured my father and buried me alive. It is ironic, but the only thing that saved my brothers was being in Turkish hands. They were far safer in Adrianople than they would have been at home in their own beds.”

I turned to look at him. “Why did you tell me this?”

Cold hands slid inside the coat, caressed my bare flesh, made me shiver. “So that you would understand. I caused the deaths of my entire family once—”

“You didn’t!”

“Shh.” His hands curved around my waist, then dropped to settle on his favorite spot—my bare ass. “I have had five hundred years to come to terms with what I did. I was young and hotheaded and foolish, and Hunyadi might have done the same even had I said nothing. I will never know. What I do know, what I learned from that one tragic mistake, was never again to risk the ones I love.”

I looked up at him to find the dark hair dusted with snow. It clung to his high, arched brows, trembled on his lashes. “You love me?”

He just looked at me for a moment. And then he reared back his head and laughed, a rich, mellow sound, unreserved and unashamed. “No, not at all. I regularly battle gods for women I dislike!”

I just stood there, snow melting on my cheeks like tears.

“What is it?” he asked, after a moment.

“I—Nothing.” Except that no one had ever said that to me before. Not Eugenie, not even Rafe. They had acted like it, had shown it in a lot of little ways, but no one had ever said it.

No one at all.

Mircea pulled me against him, and I laid my head on his chest.

He was silent for a moment. “I have had . . . difficulty . . . with this season, ever since.”

“Perhaps you need a good memory in place of the bad ones.”

A corner of his lips quirked. “And where would I obtain such a thing?”

I buried my head in his chest. “I think we can figure something out.”