Mirela had spent her first week at the castle too busy to think about her family. Anca, the housekeeper, had put her through a whirlwind training plan on how to properly scrub floors and tables, build fires, black boots, polish silverware, and remove stains from carpets, upholstery, and linens. She had been given a bed in the girls’ dormitory in the cold attics of a tower turret, five other iron bedsteads radially arranged around the walls, and five other girls trooping up at the same time each night. There were many crucifixes in that room—rosaries looped over the headboards, garlic and salt on the windows and doors. Seeing the defences, Mirela concluded that the girls didn’t believe they were safe at all.

That first night, she sat on her thin mattress as the others undressed, and bounced, testing the creak of the springs beneath. What if her form reverted to its natural state while she was asleep? While she had waited to be chosen, she had been treated as a potential mistress of the house, and locked in a room of her own. The sound of a key in the door had woken her in time to be sure she was presentable. Here she was under constant scrutiny and would get no such warning.

One by one, the other servants had fallen asleep around her. Could she somehow ensure she would wake up first, so she would be in control of her appearance before they opened their eyes?

That made her think of the back of her parents’ wagon—mother and father in the shelf of their bed, Danior, Kem, Kisaiya, and herself in a warm pile of quilts beneath. Always the earliest to get up, Kem had once trodden on her arm without waking her.

Her heart gave a great wrench of longing and fear for her brothers. Had the villagers done as they promised and let them go? Told to sacrifice one of their maidens, knowing Mirela’s talents, the villagers had taken her whole family captive, hostages for her good behaviour. And she had been good, hadn’t she? She had kept to her side of the bargain. It hadn’t been her fault that Radu Văcărescu had seen through her guise, had seen her as she was.

Why hadn’t he given her away?

She shook herself—that was a question for another time. Right now, she needed to concentrate on making it through the night. Careful not to wake her bunkmates, she rolled up her thin mattress and blanket together, picked it up, and padded back downstairs. In the service way behind the dining room was a huge cabinet that held cleaning supplies. She cleared a space in there, set down her mattress bent in half, levered off the top of a can of beeswax and turpentine to conceal her smell, closed the doors, and curled up there.

The swoony smell of furniture polish soon filled the cupboard and seemed to slick the inside of her mouth and lungs, but the closed wooden doors felt familiar and comforting, an echo of home.

She woke early enough to be sure her disguise was still complete, and to sneak back upstairs unobserved with her mattress. But she found Anca standing by the sad springs of her bed, hands on hips.

“Well?” Anca asked, sounding more curious than angry. “Do you have an explanation?”

“I didn’t feel safe,” Mirela confessed, honestly enough. “I wanted to be somewhere I couldn’t be seen. I slept in a cupboard.”

The housekeeper sighed. “They don’t attack the staff,” she said, loud enough so the last couple of departing girls could hear. “But partly that’s because it would be too easy. If they find you in a cupboard, though, they might think it was a challenge. I’m not going to stop you—I have enough on my conscience—but consider what I say.”

Mirela did, as she followed Anca around the house that day, paying careful attention to the layout. Was this how they were among each other then, the Vlachs? Kinder by far than they were to her people.

But that didn’t explain Văcărescu’s silence. He knew what she was. Every so often during the days that followed, she would catch the corner of his eye and watch him startle and then deliberately look away. It was almost as though she could trust him, and the thought made her uneasy. She didn’t want to feel obliged or thankful to anyone. Him least of all.

On the first day she was permitted to do the fires on her own, she met again the foreigner who had freed her from her sacrificial stake. The surprise of him still being alive felt like a good omen, and she had revealed herself to him. She wished she hadn’t, now. It had been a foolish, impulsive decision born of the wish to have a friend, but he might also give her away at any time, and that thought joined the swarm of biting fears that beat against her sanity every time she let up her self-control.

On Sundays, the servants were given a half day off and marked, if they wished to leave the castle, with a spot of pungent jasmine oil beneath the collar.

With her ability to wait all but worn through by then, the moment she’d been scent marked and seen out the door, she was running, back down to Bircii village and then up the stream to the hamlet in the woods where she and her family had stopped to make music for a wedding and had ended up in chains as a result.

The hamlet was almost as silent as the deserted streets of Bircii. Over-ripe plums lay fermenting beneath the fruit trees in a great swarm of hornets. She reached up to the few still on the branches and they dropped into her hands as if grateful. The juice was sweet in her mouth as she knocked doors and had no answer.

May they all be damned! They’d gone—they’d used her to buy time and they’d fled. Furious, she sprinted to the centre of the town, the little green where ducks even now sunned themselves with their heads under their wings. “Hey!” she yelled. “Hey! Come out here. Anyone who’s left, come out!”

There were no corpses, at least. No burnt shell of a wagon. Flowers drooped limply around the tiny chapel door, and the grass had barely bent back upright in the place where she had danced for the bride.

“What do you want?”

She turned abruptly, found a grandmother had limped out of one of the houses she’d thought to be empty. A flash of movement in the chapel said someone was in there too. Probably there were suspicious eyes on her from other windows, where those who couldn’t face a long walk into another country had stayed on to cope or starve.

“I wanted to know what happened to the Roma family you caught,” she asked, too impatient for subtlety. “You said you would let them go free once their daughter had been taken to the castle.”

“How do you know about that?” The woman smoothed out her head scarf while she creaked to a seat on the butter churn that stood by the door. Her hands were steady, but her face had greyed.

“I’m from the castle.”

The woman’s face paled even further, and an ugly satisfaction curled through Mirela’s guts. It was good to see these people afraid because of what they’d done. “Do they know what she is?”

“Tell me what happened to her family,” Mirela insisted, her breath catching under her breastbone as though it was full of fishhooks.

“Nothing happened to them,” the Vlach grandma scoffed. “We let them go, just as we said.”

The hooks retracted, leaving what felt like a smooth bubble of joy in her chest. Thank God!

“And they left. Normally they’d come back around twice a year, but—” the grandma shrugged and looked at the pile of spoiling plums. “There’s not much to come back for, is there? If they knew what was good for them, they would go with the people into Transylvania. But perhaps there is some ill feeling there.”

“After your village killed their daughter?” Mirela spat. There had been joy for a moment, knowing that her family was alive, unharmed, and free to move on, but it rolled away once the wave of grief and anger swept back in. They had been sent off believing Mirela was dead, mourning her. They probably had headed into exile in another land, since this one was emptying. And perhaps they had not sunk house foundations into these hills, but they had groves, camps they remembered dearly, spots on the riverbank, a well-known round of villages who had once welcomed them as friends. They would be mourning that too. She ached for them.

“Does he know about the girl? Văcărescu. Does he know?”

Mirela probably shouldn’t have felt fond of Văcărescu for inspiring this fear, but he was in some unstated way her ally now, and she did.

“He knows.”

“Oh,” the woman wailed, clutching the sides of her head and hunching forward in such distress that even Mirela wavered in her anger. “We are undone! I knew I should have stopped them, but the lottery fell on the major’s daughter and he . . . What could I have done? And now I’m the one left to pay. They wouldn’t impale me, would they? Not an old woman, who never did any wrong?”

She had begun to weep, rocking back and forth, wiping her eyes with dirty fingers. Mirela’s thirst for vengeance took another hit and crumpled. She was, after all, not dead, nor were her family. This situation was therefore recoverable, if she was smart enough.

“The next blacksmiths or singers who come through, you’ll tell them to find Mirela Badi’s family and give them this message: ‘She is not dead. She is finding a way to make it safe for you to come home.’ Yes?”

The words stemmed the rocking at least. A final burst of tears were wiped, and then the mildewed eyes stayed red and dry. “This country will never be safe. There is little a single Roma girl can do about that.”

Mirela’s family was fine. The knowledge restored the heroism of her heart. And she wanted to prove this woman wrong. She would free that poor kitten of a foreigner. She would kill the monsters at the castle and give the land back to the people who loved it. That was what she would do. She had only to work out how.

“You don’t know much about the Roma, do you?” she mocked. “Didn’t you ever wonder, Grandmother, when you sent a witch to be eaten by the strigoi, which one would win? Maybe she will eat them? Maybe she will be the next one to rule.”

The old woman’s gape of horror followed her away, like a blessing.

The following week, Mirela finished her work by the late afternoon so she could spend the remaining hours of daylight mastering the layout of the castle. She began to cultivate friendships among the servants so she could gossip about the doings of the family without seeming overly suspicious.

They came up, Anca said. Not always—sometimes, when the light outside fell, they were simply there, as if they’d drifted in on the air and coalesced around a dust mote. But sometimes, when they were feeling particularly full of grandeur and pomp, they would walk hand in hand up the old wooden steps that rose from the cellars in the oldest part of the house.

Those particular stairs abutted the kitchen, because the cellars were used for storage of wine and cheeses, hams and sausages. The kitchen maids ran down them and up again squeaking like mice, arriving back in a swelter of fear sweat. It was understood that whoever had to go into the cellars was entitled to half an hour in the sun afterwards, to sit and calm their nerves with tea or ţuică depending on sex and preference.

One took a candle lantern, because it was always dark down there. “And you can feel them,” said Cook when Mirela had unbent her enough to get her to talk. “Like they were inside the dark, if you know what I mean. Like it was full of their eyes.”

“Where do they lie?”

“I don’t know, do I? No one who knows what’s good for them goes beyond the stores. Somewhere down there, that’s all.”

“If you could kill them,” Mirela asked, goaded by Cook’s warning look. “Would you?”

Cook had laughed and thrown the dough she was kneading back into its mixing basin as though she were tossing a severed head. “Maybe I would. But you can’t, girl. You’re welcome to try, but you can’t.”

Given permission, Mirela found a sharpened stake and mallet from the garden, put them in a produce basket covered with a linen cloth, took a candle lantern from the shelf, and lit it with a spill from the kitchen range. A deep breath, Cook scoffing behind her, and she pushed open the cellar stairs and hurried down.

Her candle made a bubble of light around her, but beyond it the dark seemed a solid thing, and she moved as though she had to muscle through it as coiled strings of salami brushed her hair from above like entrails.

Already she could feel the pressure the kitchen maids had spoken about—the constant awareness that something down here knew she had invaded its domain, was watching with malice to see what she would do next. The feeling grew stronger with every step away from the stairs, until she was fighting her own terror for each inch.

She couldn’t do this. She wanted to run away. She couldn’t do this—it wasn’t up to her to do it. This was the job of a hero, not a housemaid. She couldn’t . . .

Her halting steps brought her to the end of the last wine rack. The light showed black dust and cobwebs, a hint of green shine from the final bottle, and a tiny oaken door in the wall ahead.

Narrow and short, made for smaller people, the door had silvered with age. The stone step down to it was worn into a hole by passing feet, and Mirela would rather have cut off her hand than touch the ornate ivy leaf of the latch.

Why did she have to do this anyway? Why couldn’t Văcărescu do it? If he’d seen through her magic, couldn’t he see through this too? Couldn’t he walk down here as though he were walking through a summer meadow? Why was it being left to her?

A dampness between her lips tasted of salt. Oh, she was crying. She wiped the silent seep of misery away with a left hand that shook like a bird’s wing and then bit—bit down on the inside of her cheek. In the distraction of the pain she managed to get her hand on the latch, to turn it, and to stagger through the door.

A larger cellar. This must be directly beneath the kitchens. The sound of footsteps and chatter came down with a steady fall of dust from the wooden ceiling above. Mirela’s small, ineffectual light picked out the curves of the wooden pillars and the bare expanse of stone-flagged floor. The room would have seemed empty if something had not gleamed in the middle of it, but the gleam almost broke her. She jerked back from it in panic and almost ran. Almost ran. Caught herself, with her stomach in her mouth, hammering and aching as if she would only be well again once she’d turned herself inside out.

Her mother was never coming home if she didn’t do this.

She wiped new tears with her sleeve, chewed at the inside of her cheek, and stepped forward again. Once. Twice.

The gleam was a pane of glass set into the floor, several inches thick, smooth and palest green, like ice on a winter pond. A room lay beneath it, brushed clean and painted with a thousand birds, blue and gilt and scarlet. In the centre of the room of painted walls, Constantin and Alaya lay in their coffins, dazzlingly dressed, their hands folded on their breasts, uncovered, and staring upwards through the glass floor. Watching her even as they slept.

She dropped the basket from her arm. The clatter of its falling felt like the falling of empires, catastrophic. But she was already running by then: back through the door, back through the cellars, up the stairs with a speed she didn’t know was in her, out, out into the daylight, to drop her lantern on the ground, grab her knees, and shake and snivel in the first patch of sun as though she had been to the bottom of the sea and back.

“I did tell you,” said Cook, handing her tea as she dragged herself back indoors, the sun having gone below the distant hills. “You’re not the first to try.” She stamped twice sharply on the heavy boards of the floor. “I wonder if they hear us, down there. Maybe they listen to our voices in their dreams, envying us because we’re still alive.”

With strong tea and sugar in her, Mirela had recovered herself enough to take a station at the sink, scouring the dirty bowls from today’s baking. The kitchen door was open to the sunset, letting cool air waft in against the solid heat of the ovens. Golden clouds shone luminous through the high windows, reflecting on the red copper and yellow brass of the hanging pans around the walls.

“They’re right under us now,” she said, with a flutter of horror and a frisson of hope mixed together, shivery as a head rub. “Right under this room.”

Cook rolled her eyes and settled her strong, fat hands on her massive hips. “Oh what, my girl? Leave it at that now. You tried, and you got away with failing. Leave it at that and call yourself lucky.”

The advice was good for the night. Mirela felt too shaken, too watery to try a second time in one day. But as she closed herself into her cupboard for the night, it was with the thought of her uncle Laslo, who used to start fires with nothing more than a little curved piece of glass and the summer sun. The monsters might be made to regret they hadn’t put something safer than glass between themselves and the daylight world.

The following day, after setting the fires, putting out washing water, and slopping out dregs and chamber pots once they had been used, the staff were accustomed to an easy hour before preparations for lunch began. That was when Mirela ran out to the stables and returned with a saw.

“Well, that’s not subtle,” said Cook, leaning back into her place by the inglenook of the fire, with a plate of yesterday’s leftovers at her elbow. She raised her eyebrows at Anca, who stood by the drawing room stairs with her hands over her mouth. “You think we should let her try?”

Anca fidgeted, obviously torn between fleeing and stepping forward to look. It was a mark of how quickly the servants had come together, living under the shared dread, that it no longer occurred to Mirela that any of them would betray her. If this worked, they would all be dancing.

“I have every confidence the gentry will stop her,” said Anca, watching Mirela with a gaze that said, Please. Please just put the bastards down. Let this work, please. “So there’s no harm in trying.”

With a deep breath, Mirela took the saw in her hand and stepped into the pool of light cast by the middle window, to her estimate, directly over where Alaya lay. She scraped the teeth of the saw in a ragged line across one of the floorboards, and nothing stopped her. Hope rising dizzyingly in her rib cage, she did it again, until she had a groove. Then she leaned on the handle and sawed in earnest. The blade dug in, her hands slipped. It was hard work sawing such seasoned oak planks, but she drove on, her shoulders beginning to ache.

The cut was two inches deep when the blade snagged and refused to go any further. She was through the first board, but between it and the one beneath it was a layer of something dark and springy. She sniffed, and it was pitch—some kind of fabric covered in pitch, sandwiched between the two layers of timber to prevent any light seeping through the cracks of the boards.

But a layer of fabric, pitch or not, should not stop a saw. Furious and frustrated, she jumped up and down, putting her whole weight on the saw handle. She might as well have tried to move the Earth.

“You’ve stopped trying, then?” Cook spoke up when she had worked herself into exhaustion. “Decided it’s not worth it after all?”

“I’ve been trying!” Mirela seethed, hot and puffed out, shaky in the legs yet again.

“You’ve just been standing there for the last quarter of an hour,” Anca told her gently, “staring into space.”

“I haven’t!” Mirela was furious now and sick. Hadn’t they seen her struggling? Why hadn’t they seen her struggling?

“Maybe that’s what you think.” Cook gave a bitter twist of a smile. “But that ain’t what happened. You’ve been standing there doing nothing.” She sighed and turned back to her pastries. “They got in your head and they stopped you.”

Anca brushed her skirts down, obviously trying not to look disappointed. “I knew they would. Now put that down and come help me lay the servants’ table for luncheon.”

Mirela’s fury curdled and blackened inside her, compressing down into something airless and long-lasting.

Fine, she thought. She’d have to rethink. Maybe one day she’d find something incriminating she could use to force Radu Văcărescu into killing his demons for her?

And maybe that would mean Frank would be recovered enough to be prey before she finally succeeded, but that was fine too. She wasn’t his protector. He could look after himself, the way she was having to. She was cunning and patient. She could wait.