We’d stopped.
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 comicaclass="underline" 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.”