The sound of cutlery on china plates, incongruously mundane in this medieval castle, drew Frank to a small dining room. There he found the housekeeper, supervising two of the maids as they cleared the remains of a light lunch from the board.

“Oh,” she smiled. “Master Frank. I didn’t know you were up. Please have a seat, and Oana will bring you some breakfast.”

“Feeding me up for them?” Frank joked, and regretted it when the matronly woman flinched. This was no more her fault than it was his.

“I’m doing what I can to make your stay a pleasant one while it lasts,” Anca said with some dignity. She buried her hands in her apron and twisted it as though she were breaking the neck of the Christmas goose. “What else can I do?”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I just . . .” He intercepted some of the serving dishes before they made it off the table and collected sarmales, brânzoaice, and a cup of small beer. “I have just become aware of my situation. I didn’t mean to take it out on you. I hope you’ll accept my apology.”

Her laugh sounded as though he had managed to hurt her again in the same place, but she only patted down her skirts and waited until he was done before clearing his plate away. “Of course, sir. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“I would welcome coffee. And a chance to talk to your lord. Do you know where he is?”

“In the library, sir. Oana will guide you, and I’ll bring the coffee up to you both.”

The weather had cleared as he ate. Frank found himself ducking down—the library’s door was made for an older time, when people must have been both thinner and shorter—and coming through into a place a little like a church, lit brightly by sunlight. It was wood panelled, like all the rooms he had seen so far, but the panelling was covered in curlicues painted in a thousand medieval devices. Little oddities lurked among the shelves. As he walked through a shaft of rainbow light, from a window depicting some biblical scene in which all the players looked like Cossack horsemen, his fingers trailed over carvings. Here a man curled up tight, laughing fit to burst his belly, next a field mouse, poking an inquiring nose out of the sound hole of a stringless lute.

The books themselves nestled among the painted and sculpted exuberance as if—as must indeed be the case—it had been made for them. Bindings of gilded leather and fine cloth, embroidered with tiny stitches. Better than that, along one high shelf a dozen yards of ancient folded palimpsests, no backs on them, so the stitched folds of the spine were visible between boards heavy with clumsy jewels. Above that, where one needed a stepladder to reach, the shelves had been turned into deep alcoves, and each one was haphazardly stuffed with scrolls.

Frank had not yet remembered, beyond scholar, what it was he had been intending to do with his life, but at the sight of the library, of all those books, something in him took flight for joy. He read the nearest titles. Frowned, peering at the nearby shelves. Not alphabetically ordered. Nor by subject. Was there . . .?

A large volume was set up on a reading stand in the centre of the room. An index of some sort, he thought, trying to work out the scheme by which the collection was organised. Each bookshelf bore a coat of arms on the top, bright with colour and rampant with fierce animals. Perhaps . . .? But no, there was no reference to the blazons in the index, nor did the shelves seem to be numbered. As for the scrolls, he wasn’t sure they were recorded in this book at all.

He was evening up a gap on the bookshelf closest to the door, sliding a taller volume out of the centre and replacing it next to brothers of its own size, when the housekeeper reappeared in a scent of cinnamon and bitterness, with a coffeepot on a silver tray and a slightly more genuine smile.

At this reminder, Frank’s delight faded enough to allow him to remember he had not come here simply to explore the library, but, oh, that was a bonus. All these books! Wallachian and Russian books, Arabic and German and Slavic. Some of the ugly jewelled ones crackled in his fingers like autumn leaves and smelled of eons of history, hand written in letter forms he could barely decipher, in languages no living man had spoken for centuries.

“This is wonderful. No wonder he doesn’t want to leave.”

“Have you got no farther than the anteroom?” She sounded a little like a fond nanny, wondering why so little progress had been made in the tidying of the nursery.

“There’s more?”

“Follow me.”

At the far end of the room, a bookshelf had been built out from the right-hand wall in such a way as to look like part of the far wall. When she passed it, the optical illusion was broken and he saw there was a space between the two, just wide enough for a short passage and another of those narrow doors. Grinning, Frank followed through a grey oak portal, ancient and studded with nails, set into a doorway that pierced a wall so thick it felt like a passage. On the other side, three deeply worn steps brought him to a floor as crazily humped and warped as a sea serpent’s back.

This room, too, was lined with shelves, though the shelves were less ornate, and the books on them more plainly bound. Workaday things: atlases and treatises on beekeeping, animal breeding, the improvement of the soil. How to win wars.

Above his head the ceiling was dark like the underside of a forest canopy and painted with darker green leaves. Three golden lanterns hung from chains, unlit, but unnecessary in the clear light that sheeted through a thousand panes of pale-green glass.

A section of apparent bookshelf proved to be a last door, cunningly painted and carved, fooling the eye, and even confusing the idle hand a little. Through this, another short flight of steps brought them to the inner sanctum. A round room of chestnut and gold, with a large desk and an indescribable chaos of stacked volumes and scattered papers.

Windows encircled him, and when Frank gazed out he saw he was in a turret built out of the edge of a mountain. Only sky and a deep fall in every direction. A hundred feet beyond the glass, directly at his eye level, a gyrfalcon floated on braced wings, gazing with haughty eyes at the tiny scurrying things down on the distant valley floor.

Radu Văcărescu sat at the desk with a pen in his hand and a large volume of accounts open before him. His head was propped on his fist, and his hair trailed in the ink. He couldn’t quite manage to hide the jerk of coming ungently awake when Anca put the tray of coffee down by his elbow, though he tried.

Frank could see why he dared sleep here. Even with the bookish clutter, stepping into the room was like stepping into a floating bubble of light: clear, clean, all but holy.

Wordlessly, Anca dropped them both a curtsey and left. Văcărescu gave Frank a slow inscrutable look, and waited for him to speak.

At the level grey gaze, so like the clarity of the room—comforting and bleak all in one—Frank discovered he didn’t know what to say. Starting with So, I hear your family are demons, seemed crass. Starting without it seemed false.

He pulled out one of the heavy mahogany chairs and settled into it with a sigh. Văcărescu set his pen down in its holder and seemed to recognise the silent plea for help. “I am glad to see you up and about. Have any memories returned?”

“Some.” Frank smiled. Yes, better to work up to it in the course of conversation. “Mostly it’s preverbal things. Attitudes, things I take for granted. I can feel the rest of it pushing up under the surface like a geyser readying to blow.”

Văcărescu returned the smile, and perhaps it was Frank’s new knowledge that freed the expression from the layers of irony he had read into it before. Perhaps it was only that this was the first time they had spoken unobserved, and the man felt able to shed one or two layers of armour. At any rate, it was a small and pleasant smile, laced with sympathy around the edges. “Perhaps then, it will be easier on you to tell you this now.”

As if recovering a breathing space Frank had destroyed by sitting close, Văcărescu rose and went to look out one of the windows, presenting his dull-blue back to Frank’s gaze. “I’m afraid we’ve found two bodies in the Olt, which we think are the remains of the other two English scholars. The friends you mentioned. One shot, one the victim of some kind of explosion.”

It was better to hear this now, when Frank couldn’t recall why he should grieve. But the news did jog something free of the logjam of his scattered thoughts. “Was there a third Englishman?” He saw a flash of tall boulders and a familiar face on the wrong end of a rifle. Smoke as Frank watched the man fall. “He would have been among the bandits, in the rocks by the side of the river. I think . . . I don’t know. I have the feeling it was not a random attack.”

“We found no other bodies, except for a couple of boatmen washed up farther downstream. If the man fell among his comrades, however, they are likely to have taken him away to bury.” Văcărescu turned and, leaning back against the windows, light limned by the empty sky, gave Frank a look of sharp interest. “Why would there be an assassin on your trail? Who are you, or what have you done to merit that?”

“I would very much like to know that myself.”

An impasse again, as Frank searched for a way of changing the subject gracefully. But there was none. How did you say Are you a lackey or a prisoner of the things that dwell in your house with you? without causing offence? Frank had forgotten many things, but not the casual strength of Văcărescu’s backhand blow. He could still feel it like a fresh graze on his cheek.

He picked up the coffeepot by way of distraction, poured the thick, bitter brew into two small cups. “Shall I be mother?”

The smile again in response, just far enough from being mocking to verge on kind. Văcărescu came slowly back to the desk as if reeled in by a careful fisherman. “What?”

“It’s what we say in England if we’re going to pour the tea.” Frank added sugar to his coffee and sipped. Horrible. But it kicked him in the chest like a mule and set his heart galloping, which was what he wanted from it—a goad to get him moving. Abruptly he was tired of his own cowardice, tired of the invisible restraints of what must have been a suffocatingly polite upbringing. Surely he could allow himself to be rude when his life was at stake?

He waited until Văcărescu was close enough to pick up his own cup, the carved amethyst stone of his signet ring gleaming a purple so dark it was almost black as he curved his fingers around the handle. Then Frank said, “Tell me about the strigoi.”

Văcărescu did not recoil, but he stiffened, and there was a long pause while he stared at the dark froth of his coffee, his head bent. Frank took the chance to steady his own breathing and congratulate himself on a small victory over his own shortcomings.

The smile had gone when Văcărescu looked up, replaced with the hardmouthed surly expression with which Frank was much more familiar. “Either you have just remembered that word, or the servants have been gossiping. Which?”

“Does it matter?” Frank waved the question away before he could succumb to the urge to answer it. “I am glad to know where I stand. Did you know that one of them attacked me on the way here?”

He couldn’t quite interpret the flash of something through those pale eyes. Fury or guilt, it could have been either. Văcărescu said nothing, just watched Frank coolly, waiting for him to come to his point.

So Frank did. “Until recently, I thought it was you. You have the same stature, the same eyes. It was dark, you understand. I only saw glimpses of the creature.”

This reaction was a little easier to parse: startlement and then understanding. “Ah. That explains a great deal. You thought Alaya was protecting you from me, rather than the other way around. What happened to change your mind?”

“I saw Constantin. He looks like you.”

Văcărescu huffed a silent laugh. “I look like him.” He turned to open one of the great glass fronts of the bookshelves, where a series of tall books bound in blue regressed from the jewellike present to tattered, faded pasts. Taking out one of the older volumes, he laid it—to Frank’s distress—flat on the table. No wonder the spine was broken, and loose pages stuck out at angles from segments that had slipped their glue.

When his bibliophile soul had protested long enough, Frank examined the page his host had opened for him, and there was Constantin, stiffly drawn in the centre of a medieval illumination, surrounded by other stiffly drawn horsemen with long hair and aggressive moustaches and fur hats trimmed with pearls. It was not by any means a wonderful likeness, but the little illustrated man was white clad from head to foot, just as he had been when he’d stood before Frank. The artist had coloured his eyes with sheet silver, and they gleamed cold as Russian winters whenever Frank tilted his head.

“He was one of Voivode Tepes’ men.” Văcărescu sat with the air of one repeating a well-worn story. The ancestry of his house—his own story, in a way, for Frank knew enough about being noble-born to understand how one’s ancestors breathed through you with every breath.

“Vlad Tepes? The folk hero?”

“Indeed.” A wry smile. “A great man, who fought back the Turks and stamped out the corruption of his nobles, and enabled the common folk of Wallachia to live in prosperity, under a law that applied to all.”

Radu angled the book so that he could look at it too, brushed an affectionate fingertip along the illustration. Frank held back a protest at the thought of what the touch was doing to the delicate colours and paper.

“I am named after Tepes’ brother,” Radu said, unexpectedly, but the softening in his tone ran out, left it cold again. “The useless one. The collaborator who ruled Wallachia as a puppet of the Turks, for a time. Radu the Beautiful, catamite of Sultan Mehmet II.” He closed the book, ungently. Frank whined with sympathetic pain on its behalf. “It is appropriate enough. Now I rule this domain as a puppet of my ancestor, as every son of the line has done since Tepes’ day.”

Frank understood the shame—powerless, impotent inability to be what one’s ancestry demanded. He smothered a desire to reach across the desk and curl a hand reassuringly around his host’s wrist. Not only would it be in no way appropriate, he wasn’t yet convinced Văcărescu was as trapped as he wanted Frank to think.

“Why would Constantin pass the title down? Wouldn’t it make more sense for him to keep hold of it?”

Văcărescu snorted with scorn. “Constantin died and was buried. This is a known fact. Dead men may not own property. Dead men may not rule. But if they have children, they can come back and carry on telling those children how to live. And those children . . . I do not know how it is in your country, but here, children are brought up to honour their elders. It’s not unknown for a fifty-year-old man still to be ruled by his eighty-year-old father. Our family’s case is only a more extreme version of that.”

“Except that the father is a murderer, and the son knows it.” Oh lord! Frank’s own hypocrisy startled him. Where had that come from? What made him think—when he was dogged by his own unrevealed crime—that he could afford to stand on the moral high ground? When Văcărescu rose from his seat, grabbed Frank by the collar, and dragged him across the desk, scraping his weight over the fragile ancient text as if he didn’t care that the pages would tear under the stress, Frank really could not blame him.

“The book!” Frank gasped, terribly conscious of knuckles against his throat, pressing into the beat of the great vein, slowing the pulse of his blood. His head filled with grey fog as he tried to pry the fingers off. “You’ll damage it!”

He was dropped sharply. Văcărescu moving away like a man recoiling from temptation. “Of course, the book,” he said in disbelief. When Frank caught himself before he could land on it, and carefully replaced the dislodged pages, closing it like a holy thing, he gave again his not-quite laugh. “What strange priorities you have.”

Returning to the window, Văcărescu sighed and bowed to rest his forehead against the glass, a small and weary gesture. “Perhaps you are owed the full story. This is how it is, then. When Constantin died, his young wife sickened and died but a month after, leaving a babe in arms. The child was cared for during the day by the family of one of his retainers. At night he was raised by his dead parents. He felt all the love for them any boy feels for his mother and father. When he was old enough to command he was glad to accept the duty of protecting them in return.

“As is our custom in this land, they found him a wife. Their first child was a girl, on whom the whole family doted. But then they had a son.” He spread both hands on the glass on either side of his head, an oddly cruciform posture that Frank found upsetting. But it did mean there was no way to see his face as he went on. “The family lived until the son was weaned, and then, mysteriously, mother, father, and daughter died, leaving the infant child to be raised by his grandparents with no memory of any other carers.

“This is how it has been now for nearly three hundred years. For a dozen generations Constantin and Alaya have been ‘father’ and ‘mother’ to each singular son.” He turned, his new smile drawn like a dagger. “A tested and satisfactory system indeed, don’t you think?”

Frank did not. “All this time they’ve been terrorising the county? Why do the people stand for it? I see why they’re running away now. I don’t see why they didn’t do so three centuries ago.”

“Have you never wondered how wolves and deer can live in the same forest? Why the deer do not simply go away—why the wolves do not simply eat them all at once?”

“I . . .” Frank knew about books. He had not a clue about the eating habits of wolves. “No?”

Radu Văcărescu had eyes that gleamed with the same chill as those of his ancestor, hard and faintly inhuman. Raised by monsters, Frank thought, and surprised himself by finishing, just like me.

“There is a balance,” said Văcărescu as easily as if he were discussing partridge shooting season and not murder. “A prosperous community can afford to lose a few of its weaker members a year. Those who are dying of cankers or agues, those whose malice sees them cast out from their villages to wander after dark. Criminals, runaways, bandits, and occasionally willing sacrifices, chosen by lot. Our people have ruled here since before the Romans and on the whole we have ruled well. Having seen the chaos of other domains under absentee lords, the occasional cull is something our peasants are willing to endure.”

Frank remembered doors left gaping, cold fires, and silence while the flowers withered in the unwatered gardens. “Yet now you’re losing villages overnight. That’s got nothing to do with the fact that their ruling family is two-thirds demon?”

“Three hundred years after the fact and they suddenly decide to care?” Scorn. “Hardly.”

And like it or not, he had a point. “Then what changed?”

“You may find it hard to believe, but what changed was politics. Do you remember I mentioned that Vlad Tepes disposed of a number of treacherous boyars?”

“Disposed of?”

“Impaled.”

Frank was about to protest from the bottom of his gentle English heart, sick at the cruelty, when a memory of a hanging assailed him with the strength of a nightmare—the smells of sweat and righteousness and ordure, the victim choking, kicking, his bowels opening. Jeers among the crowd.

Văcărescu had been watching him mockingly, as one watches a child that cannot bear the cruelties of adult life, but at the look on Frank’s face his expression eased. “The surviving boyars did not take this lesson to heart,” he said. “We have been under the thumb of the sultan so long we have lost all our pride, learned simply to scrabble for whatever scraps he throws. We have grubbed for wealth and used it to buy our way to the voivode’s throne—promised loyalty, reneged whenever it suited us, spineless and worthless, fit only to be placed in a locked room and set on fire.”

He sneered, with an anger that reminded Frank of another man . . . hawk face, spindly fingers, iron hair cropped close to go under a periwig. Frank’s father, Arthur Carew, Earl of Hungerford. A man who regarded the perfect honour of his family as an extension of his own good name.

Oh, Frank put a hand over his mouth to keep this revelation from flying away. He had a name and a family. How about that.

“With our boyars squabbling, we have been easy pickings for conquerors from every nation under the sun.” Văcărescu seemed not to have noticed the moment of revelation, absorbed in his own concerns. “About twenty years ago, the Ottomans gave us up to the Austrians. Though we might have expected better treatment from fellow Christians, the Austrians regarded us as a convenient source of wealth and squeezed us hard for it, until the peasants had to choose between paying the taxes and feeding themselves. Three years ago, under the Treaty of Belgrade, we were passed back to the sultan. He decided he could not trust any of our own boyars to rule in his name, and put a Greek slave on the throne.”

He sighed again, bitterly. “If this was supposed to make things better, I’m not sure how. The Turks have left us at the mercy of a foreign prince for whom ruling this country is a marvellous opportunity for getting rich on the suffering of strangers. He put the taxes up.”

He rubbed at his frown with a clenched fist, helpless and angry at it. “Since under this punitive tax system peasants cannot work hard enough to feed themselves, there is little else they can do but leave their homes and either turn to banditry or find another country where they can. Hence the exodus of whole villages into Transylvania, where conditions are better.

“My parents are not stupid. They have been restraining themselves for centuries, taking only what can be supported. We had achieved a balance that was workable for everyone. But with fewer peasants the balance is tipped. With the Turks driving our people away, the strigoi must restrain themselves, feed less. They are old and proud and famished. They take to being starved no better than anyone else does. This will not end well.”

Frank folded his arms around his stomach and held on. He was not cold, snuggled into his borrowed, fur-lined coat as he was—and that gave him pause, for it was Văcărescu’s coat. His clothes that Frank wore. His hospitality Frank had been relying on since the rescue. His nights that had been sacrificed to make it harder for the monsters to drain Frank dry.

All of that generosity, and Frank had so far only repaid him with hard words and accusations. He had not yet given Frank an explanation for why he had not rid his people of this blight for good, but perhaps he—

Oh, but he had, hadn’t he? A single solitary son in every generation. In every generation, Constantin and Alaya had been mummy and daddy before they had been anything else. Frank looked around the beautiful room wildly, searching for something that would take the nausea out of his sudden understanding. Because Frank remembered little save unrelenting disappointment from his own father, and still he didn’t believe he could ever bring himself to raise a hand to the man.

Frank thought again of Alaya, with her huge eyes and her practiced, patient sweetness. The charm of her smile. He could see her with a small boy in her arms, both of them poring together over the illuminated histories, while she instilled in him a pride in his own blood. Did Frank really expect Văcărescu to kill his own mother? Whatever she was, otherwise, she was still that.

“I’m sorry.”

Startlement made Văcărescu’s black brows twitch like raven’s wings. All of his expressions were harsh, and perhaps that was why Frank had been so slow to see him as a man who could be hurt like any other. “About what?”

“You saved my life, and although you joked with me about repayment, you haven’t demanded any. My presence in your house has made trouble for you. I may be bringing danger after me—I certainly feel as if I am. All you’ve done has been to treat me with openhanded kindness, and I repay you with accusations.”

The startlement devolved into astonishment, an oddly lumpen look on a face meant for certainty. Had the man never been apologised to in his life that it took him so aback?

“You do not accuse me of anything that I do not already despise myself for.”

And now even this room felt tainted with despair. Frank had no timepiece, but the sun was not yet high in the sky—almost the whole day lay ahead of him, and though there was a night to come after that, he had survived a number of them already. No rush, just yet. There was time to find out more about his situation, to fit the pieces of information together and work out a solution. Time to stop attacking before he turned away the best friend he had left.

Speaking of friends. Frank hugged himself a little harder. It hurt, but that was good—he deserved it. “You said you found my friends? Did you bury them?”

Văcărescu’s expression was appropriately respectful, but the tension of his shoulders eased. “Yes. It was done quickly, as soon as the priest could arrive. What we can do in this country to prevent other strigoi from arising, we do thoroughly.”

“Do I want to know what that entails?”

“They had been violently slain—there was a risk they would not lie easy in the ground. The usual precautions were taken.”

“And I don’t want to know what those are?”

A brief winter-chill smile. “Probably not. Would you like to visit the graves?”

Choking horror filled Frank at the thought. No. He was not ready to write the end and draw a line under his friends’ lives. Not before he was sure he remembered them properly. He wanted to know them before he had to come to terms with their deaths.

“You said we had come to study the ‘vril accumulator’?” So frustrating! Frank could almost recall someone, a grin of delight and a flutter of multicoloured talismans. Deft hands tying pierced stones into a complex knot work of little ribbons. He chased after a name, a face, but only found a picture of copper struts, folding out over water, a moonstone ball that looked like a compass spinning past markings of brass. “I don’t remember what that is.”

Văcărescu unearthed a book from beneath one of the piles on his desk, pulled out a folded letter from among its pages, and handed it to Frank. Just the shape of the handwriting made him gasp as if he’d been struck in a place deeper than flesh.

“I didn’t know it by that name either, before this letter. Here we call it St. George’s Cloak, and it’s a place the peasants go when they are sick or injured, in the hopes of a cure. Your friend explains, in there, that it’s some sort of device of great interest to students of theurgy and ‘a jewel beyond price, of which your country may be justly proud.’” He laughed. “I think he thought me some savage to be placated with fine words. He signs himself ‘James Protheroe’ if that means anything to you.”

Frank closed his eyes to hold in sudden tears, because yes, it did. It meant acceptance where he had feared horror. It meant the heroism of one who would hug a leper with no thought of his own health. A true friend. “I should . . . I should see it for him. If it meant so much to him. Is it a long way away? I should . . .”

“Not far.”

Frank’s eyes were still closed. He should have startled up when a large hand landed on the back of his neck, cool and gentle. He probably shouldn’t have relaxed, and lifted his head so that the slowly rubbing thumb slid up his nape into his hair. But it was comforting, and he had his eyes closed so he could tell himself it wasn’t really happening. He was only wishing it, in the privacy of his own mind.

“An hour on horseback, with a guide. I will take you there now, if you wish.” The voice, too, was behind him, quiet and wry. Then the hand went away, fingers opening and trailing across his skin, leaving individual trails of sensation. The sound of booted feet treading carefully away, long strides. When he opened his eyes, Văcărescu was again on the other side of his desk.

I imagined it, Frank told himself firmly, but he felt much strengthened nevertheless, warmed through and aglow. “I would love to get out of here,” he agreed. “Am I allowed?”

Văcărescu checked his pocket watch. His small smile looked cruel, but Frank was now willing to bet that was just a result of physiognomy rather than of character. “At ten past eleven in the morning, there is no will in this country that overrules mine. And I say you are.”