Chapter 1
Outside, beneath Bucharest’s fire-red sky, the earth had long since begun to smell of carrion and vinegar. The old walls of the Rike manor trembled whenever the gravediggers’ carts rolled past, while from the narrow streets of the Scaunelor quarter rose a heavy stench—a mixture of tar, death, and fear. But in our room upstairs, the world had shrunk to the size of a secret.
Between the four carved legs of the oak bed, Ottavia and I had built a tent from two old linen sheets. It was our little white realm, an improvised sanctuary where the air still smelled of dried lavender and starch. In the middle, set upon the lid of a tarnished brass box, a stub of tallow candle slowly consumed its wick with a lazy hiss. Its small orange flame trembled with every breath we took, casting great curved shadows across the cloth, like the wings of bats.
“Tell me about the mirrors again, Maria,” Ottavia whispered.
She spoke so softly I could barely see her lips move. She sat with her knees drawn to her chest, wrapped in a simple nightgown, her slender neck looking unbearably fragile in the yellow light. She had already turned twenty, but tonight, beneath our tent of linen, she looked like a little girl.
“What else is there to tell?” I murmured, smoothing a crease in the sheet with my palm. “You know the story better than I do. Mistress Marioara has told it to you ten times.”
“Tell me once more, please. I want to hear it from you. You make it sound so beautiful!”
A knot tightened in my throat.
I rolled onto my side, propping my temple against my palm, and looked at her. Ottavia was biting one of her nails—an old habit Mother had spent years trying to break with light smacks across her fingers. The skin of her cheeks was pale, her temples dusted with a handful of delicate freckles that summer had failed to erase, and beneath her eyes, the color of burning amber, bluish shadows had gathered, heavy with sleeplessness. She was trying to smile. A crooked, tortured little smile that trembled on her lips like a dry leaf just before it falls.
I could see straight through the silken web of lies she was trying to weave.
She was terrified to the marrow of her bones.
“They say that in the Palace on the Hill, Nistor Cantacuzino’s palace,” I began in a low, gentle voice, trying to give her the illusion she so desperately needed, “the halls are so vast that if you shout, you hear your own voice return to you three heartbeats later. And the mirrors are brought from across the seas, all the way from Venice. They are made of glass backed with quicksilver. When you step before them, you don’t see only your own face, but the glow of every candle burning overhead.”
“And the ceiling?” she asked quickly, clinging to my words like a drowning person to a plank of wood. “What is the ceiling like?”
“Painted in gold and Voroneț blue. With angels who have peacock wings and noble ladies holding crystal goblets in their hands. There is no dust there, Ottavia. No gravediggers hammering at gates with iron crowbars, and none of this endless smell of boiling vinegar.”
“And the music?”
“The music is divine. Nothing like old Lupu’s cobza down in the quarter. They have lutes made of rosewood and violins wrapped in silk. The musicians come from the West, from cities built of white stone, where sickness has never set foot. They say that if you listen to their music for an entire night, you forget your own name, and you forget that you have ever cried.”
Ottavia lowered her head onto her knees. Her long chestnut hair spilled over her shoulders like a wave of dark raw silk. She smelled of harsh lye soap and almond oil—the only luxuries we could still afford in all this poverty.
“It sounds like heaven, Maria,” she whispered, her voice breaking on the final word. “But this heaven is full of dead men who no longer rot.”
Silence fell between us, heavy and warm.
That was the horror gnawing at us both: the vampires.
People called them the Immortals, the Blood Boyars, or simply Those on the Hill. They had lived among us for centuries, untouched by time, watching generations of mortals gutter out like candles in a draft. To them, this country was not a homeland, but an estate; and we were not their people, but their herd.
When the plague had begun sinking its teeth into the flesh of the city, turning the streets into mass graves, they had retreated behind the walls of their vast fortified stone palaces. There they remained, untouched, feeding on the abundance they wrung from our fear and helplessness.
The people hated them with a slow-burning, poisonous hatred. In taverns, they whispered that the vampires themselves had brought the Black Pestilence from the East to cleanse the land of too many useless mouths. And yet, when hunger twisted their bellies and the gravediggers’ carts stopped at their gates, those same people crawled on their knees to the vampires’ bronze doors. They begged for a handful of wheat, relief from their taxes, or a writ of protection.
And the price was always the same: young flesh.
Father, Postelnic Gavril Rike, had lost the last of his lands to cards and moneylenders. Our house was an empty shell. His only escape, the last bullet left in his flintlock, was Ottavia. Taken to the Spring Ball—a masked auction where the immortal boyars chose girls for their Court—the daughters of ruined men could purchase their families’ lives. If a powerful vampire placed his mark upon a girl, her family received gold coins, deeds to land, and untainted food.
The girl, in return, never came home. Some said they lived for a few months in velvet and debauchery until there was not a drop of blood left in them; others whispered that they became playthings, passed from hand to hand until they withered like flowers forgotten between the pages of books.
“I don’t want you to think of them that way,” I told her, taking her small hand in mine. Her skin was cold, even though the air beneath the tent was stifling.
“Then how am I supposed to think of them, Maria?” She lifted her eyes to mine, and in them I saw a terror so pure, so naked, that something inside my chest broke. “Nistor Cantacuzino... Have you heard what they say about him? They say he is older than the church in the Old Court. That his eyes no longer have any color, that they are like two black holes through which you can see Hell. What if he chooses me? What if... what if he demands me for himself tomorrow night? And he will, because I heard Father saying it was with him that he made the bargain...”
That name—Nistor Cantacuzino—hung over the city like a tombstone. He was the oldest among them, the quietest, and the most feared. Even the other vampires lowered their eyes when he entered the Council. They said he almost never spoke, that he never smiled, and that a single look from him could drain a man of his will in the space of a heartbeat.
A deep, scorching hatred rose from the pit of my stomach into my throat. A bitter hatred that tasted of iron and ash. I hated those parasites draped in silk. I hated my father for selling his dignity for an emerald-green gown bought from Greek merchants. I hated every last one of them who sat high in their towers while we died in the mud below.
“No one will touch you if you don’t want them to,” I whispered, squeezing her fingers until her nails turned white. “We’ll run away tonight!”
“I don’t have a choice, Maria. You know that. If I don’t go willingly tomorrow night, they’ll come for me. Father has probably already taken his payment for me. Mother has no power to stop him. And you... you’re too young. I have to do this.”
She paused, dragging in a breath that caught with a small rasp in her throat. Then she moved closer and rested her forehead against my shoulder.
“Do you know what I wish?” she whispered, and suddenly her voice became very clear, filled with a gentle, aching sadness. “I wish we could go to the sea. I read in a book from the attic that the sea is a body of water so deep and so vast you cannot see where it ends. And that at night, the waves make white foam like milk, and the air smells of salt and freedom. No boyars. No fear that someone will come and take our home away. Just the two of us, in a little house made of reed stalks...”
She began to laugh softly, a small, dry laugh that quickly faded into a sigh.
“What a foolish thing, isn’t it? To dream of the sea while the city burns with plague...”
“It isn’t foolish at all, Ottavia,” I said, stroking her soft hair. “We’ll go there. I promise you. We’ll get through this cursed Ball, we’ll find a way, and we’ll leave. I’ll take you to the sea myself, even if we have to walk all the way to the end of the world.”
She said nothing more. She let out a deep sigh, the sigh of a weary child who had finally found temporary shelter. She stretched out on the wool mattress, pulling the edge of the sheet up to her chin.
The tallow candle flame flickered violently one last time, spattering a drop of hot wax onto the brass lid before going out. A thin ribbon of white smoke, smelling of burnt fat, curled toward the linen ceiling before the darkness swallowed it whole.
The room sank into a dense, bluish shadow, broken only by a faint sliver of moonlight slipping through the crack between the shutters.
Ottavia fell asleep quickly. Her breathing grew slow, slightly uneven, accompanied by the faint trembling of her shoulders.
But I remained awake.
I watched her for a long time in the half-light. In that sliver of moonlight, her face seemed carved from mist, so translucent that I feared if I reached out to touch her, my fingers would pass straight through. My heart beat inside my chest like a bird caught in a snare, battering against my ribs with silent fury.
Hatred would not let me sleep. It had nested inside me like a living creature, a serpent of ice coiling its tail around my heart. I thought of Nistor Cantacuzino, of his palace built from black stone, of the way those immortals looked upon our lives as cheap sparks destined to die in the mud. They thought themselves gods. They believed themselves masters of our souls and our flesh.
If you touch her, I sent the words to that monster in my mind, staring through the linen ceiling toward the invisible night sky, if you lay so much as one hand on her, I will find a way to make you bleed. Even if you are made of stone a thousand years old.
I pulled the sheet higher around Ottavia’s shoulders, felt the warmth of her skin, and pressed myself close to her, listening to the beating of her heart. In the heavy darkness of the room, beneath our fragile tent of linen, I closed my eyes and bound myself to a silent oath that no prayer and no god could ever erase.
