Angels of Istanbul, page 9
Four other figures, huddled close to each other, stood next to what had once been the door. All of them turned their heads sharply when she exclaimed, “No!” and darted forward as if to run inside. There had been books in there. There had been her master bibliography—her guide to which grimoires were worth the study, which mere swamps of lies.
She scrambled over the blackened door step, her coal-black shoes crunching over a surface that still exhaled heat. There had been a mirror that the Englishman had had some success in enchanting. It must be in here somewhere, and maybe she could rescue . . .
A hand caught her shoulder and another closed on her skirt, pulling her out of the steaming wreckage. She turned on the person who had dared restrain her. “I have to find—”
“I don’t think so.” The hand at her shoulder belonged to Bogdan. “I think, with the country at war, perhaps we should move on.”
She didn’t like his sneer, as if he’d been served a dish of rotted eel at a state banquet and was trying not to spit it out over the floor. Since he clearly knew it was she, she folded her veil back over her headdress to reveal her blotchy, unhandsome face. If he would scowl, she would give him a reason. “That mirror could be invaluable in battle—for a general to see the whole battlefield at once, where the enemy feints, where his sappers tunnel under? I should present it to the voivode at once as a token of what the mages of Bucharest can achieve—”
“Madam,” Bogdan drew himself up, “do you think the voivode, or anyone else, would trust you again, now it is known how you’ve gulled us all this time? I think not. I suggest, for your father’s sake, you do the right thing and find a nunnery that will take you in, for surely no decent man will ever have you to wife.”
“That’s what you came to say to me?”
“It is.”
“Then good day, sir.” She gave him an achingly correct curtsey and sized up the others of his little band as he walked away. Two Roma women with gifts of prophecy who had attended her soirees a couple of times, both looking sympathetic yet also vaguely amused, and a tall sprightly young man with red hair whom she didn’t recognise at all. “We can take the meeting to my house. I can have someone dig through the wreckage tomorrow, once it’s cooled. This doesn’t have to be—”
“Your pardon, lady,” said the eldest woman, running one of her necklaces of coins through her fingers. “But it seems to me you will not benefit from associating with the likes of us, and we will not benefit from your reputation neither. We get blamed for everything as it is, so we’re not interested in catching this sort of trouble. We’ll be going back to our husbands now and staying well away.”
That left Ecaterina standing outside the wreck of her salon with half her face flushed from the heat, the other half red with anger. The strange young man shrugged at her and opened his mouth to say something, when a bottle hurled from a passing carriage burst on the ground between them and showered them both with glass.
“Evil witch!” a woman’s voice yelled. “I hope you suffer as you have made my son’s poor heart suffer. You are false. A thousand times false.”
Ecaterina kicked at glass shards that smelled of palincă. “Do you know the story of the garden in which everyone looks beautiful?” she asked her remaining companion. “That ended much like this.”
“At least the village girl got some time with her prince,” said the redhead, and grinned in a way that seemed familiar. “Even if she had stayed beautiful and they’d married, who’s to say they’d have liked each other forever anyway?”
“No one ever suggests she was wrong to trick him in the first place,” Ecaterina mused. The thought that she was living in a fairy tale eased her heart somewhat—made the distress seem outside herself, poetic, and therefore easier to live with.
“Oh, well, if you’d done it to gain your true love, that would have been understandable,” said the boy, in an offhand, careless manner that Ecaterina knew well. “But for just having fun and being invited to parties, and laughing at the girls and making the boys jealous of each other . . . maybe they think that’s selfish.”
“But you know how it is, to want to be someone different—someone better than yourself. It is Mirela, isn’t it, under there?”
He (she?) took off his cap and swiped a hand through his carroty hair. By the time the hand had fallen back to her side, she was a girl, with curly ebony hair, dark skin, the clothes of a respectable servant. “So I’m guessing that’s the end for the salon? No more learning things for us and for our—” she took a run up to the word, hurdled it hastily “—posterity?”
Trotting hooves and wooden wheels made the wooden street rattle like the cogs of a water mill. Ecaterina recognised the same matched pair of horses she had heard before, grabbed Mirela by the wrist, and pulled her along to the closest church. They had just ducked inside when the carriage—obviously having made a circuit for the sole purpose of hurling things at her—came past again.
“I’m not going to let them stop me. If we had more mages in this country, there wouldn’t be a war. We’d be able to concentrate on the important matters, like getting these monsters out of our city.”
They had stepped into a richer world of white and gold and pink marble. Painted stars gleamed above out of an indigo sky, where angels were making music among violet clouds. The arched rooms of the church—entrance and nave, sanctuary and aisles—were heavy with the sort of silence left behind by many people thinking and feeling passionately. There was smoke here too, but it smelled of rare spices, heady and warm.
Off the side of the right-hand aisle, a series of carved oak partitions had been set up, marking chapels dedicated to individual saints and martyrs. They ducked into the smallest, where an all but extinguished candle gave out a dim storm light in its amethyst lantern, and a silver-mounted icon of St. Parascheva watched them with solemn eyes.
Ecaterina cast the veil back over her face. Mirela knelt beside her, and in the process of lowering herself she turned from a girl to an old lady, wrapped in black shawls, concealed beneath a heavy head scarf and a shape that proclaimed her of no interest to anybody. “I envy your gift,” Ecaterina said softly. “To pass unseen. I had to choose between peacock and gargoyle, and never truly wanted either.”
“Always the same on the inside, though, isn’t it? Who you are.”
Mirela seemed to exchange a glance with the flat saint. The stuttering light made the painted eyes appear to stir. If Ecaterina looked at the saint long enough, it was as though her face bulged out of the frame, became rounded and real. She was listening, though she didn’t speak.
“About the monsters,” Mirela whispered. “My lord is taking them away. I thought you’d like to know that. We have wagons and everything arriving. I hear the idea is to jam them in, tight as in slave ships, in the bottom of the carts and cover them up with supplies. Then when the army gets down to the coast, they’ll sneak aboard ship, and we’ll take them with us. So you’ll be all right, back here. They’ll all have gone to war, like the boyars.”
Ecaterina was ashamed of herself, because the first thing she thought was that the Roma girl was lying. But lies ought to at least be more plausible than the truth, or how could they ever be believed? “How could he make them do that? How could he get them to cooperate?”
Nightmares flickered into her thoughts like the death throes of the candle. She saw again the moment of understanding that had passed between Văcărescu and the strigoi in the white silk—the old man who had taken Stefan from his family, and walked beside him as a surrogate father.
A priest peeked in through the pierced work carving of the wall.
“Well.” Mirela clucked in mingled disapproval and amusement, just like an old lady sharing scandalous gossip. The priest shook his head, tolerantly, light running like quicksilver over his pectoral cross—the only part of his outfit that wasn’t black. All the colour had been sucked from Bucharest, it seemed. How appropriate.
“Văcărescu brought the strigoi with him from Valcea. The white one and the lady. They listen to him, maybe a little. Though God knows if that will last, now there’s hundreds of them.”
Ecaterina took far too long to understand this news. Her father admired the man, had told her of his awkward reception to the prince’s court. The reason he’d given for not being seen in town before. “I have been containing a plague.”
The White Death had come to Bucharest but days after he arrived in it.
Her teeth were chattering. She had to raise both hands and dig in her thumbs beneath the jaw to keep them silent, though the shudder worked through her wrists and arms and into her shoulders. The emotion was too big to put a name to, too big to be contained, like a wall of fire around her ten paces deep. The altar was inside it, and the green-faced saint, and the sense of something teetering, teetering, about to fall.
Her father liked him. Had welcomed him without reservation, brought him into their house. She had liked him. He was the only one left who still treated her as he had before her glamour slipped—the only one who saw her as she was and was not repelled.
But why should he be repelled by anything human if his household was made up of monsters?
How smoothly he had lied when she asked about the old man, led her to believe he was an unpleasant surprise he’d found waiting for him when he moved in. She should have known the timing was far too coincidental for that. She should have known when he’d hacked her brother’s head off in front of her that he had no human sensibility in him.
But for him, Stefan would still be alive. The strigoi, oh yes, she hoped they would be destroyed, but they could not help their natures. They had little choice but to be what they were. But Văcărescu had chosen to expose her family to its notice—to expose all Bucharest to its curse.
Had Stefan done something to him, to be so targeted? No! Absurd. Stefan had been the kindest child who ever lived. It was worse than that. Văcărescu had killed him and not even meant to. Simply had not cared enough to stop it happening.
The fiery sphere had reached its largest point—almost out to the street. Now it slowed, turned, and rushed back together into a fireball centred in her gut. Every part of her felt incandescent like the sun with rage: powerful, unstoppable. I will kill him for this. I will have vengeance. For my brother and for every other mourner in the city today, I will have justice.
“Catia? Are you . . . well?”
She blinked, aware again and surprised to find Mirela’s borrowed face close to hers, a hand on her arm. “Um. I thought everyone knew that,” Mirela said. “Where I come from, everyone knows. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said. You can forget I said it, can’t you?”
With this new heat inside her, Ecaterina could almost have laughed at that. Forget? Not likely. “You said ‘we’ll take them with us.’ Are you going to war? You are not a man, no matter how you look.”
Mirela shrugged one shoulder, an oddly girlish gesture from the crone she appeared to be. “You don’t want to see what will happen when the Turkish army meets our undead one? I suppose I could stay here and dance for gaujo men who think I’m just a free whore, but I went off that when they gave me up to die. Now . . . there must be a way to kill the strigoi. Perhaps the Turks will know and I can learn from them. I can’t go home until the strigoi are gone. I promised myself.”
Ecaterina had spent every moment since Stefan’s death feeling hollowed out inside. Now that hollow ached less, filled as it was with purpose. She had been turning over a reply to the girl when a sort of snag went up her spine, as though a harp string had caught her sleeve, but within her.
“Wait a moment.” She folded her hands as if in prayer, fixed her eyes on those of the saint, and felt for the catch and thrum along her bones. With her mind turned inwards she could almost see it, a thread of blue-white in the centre of her. It twined up her backbone and curled around her skull in one long spiral. Returned along her breastbone and thence to her belly, where it spilled out into the world from an oval place a finger’s width down from her navel.
Two colours—it was a two-coloured strand, the white and the blue so intertwined as to seem silver. If she took the crackling fire of her anger and applied it to the blue line, the two sprung apart—a magnet rejecting its like. But if she touched it to the white, it brightened, and a burst of fullness, pleasure, and confidence whipped through her bones and soaked slowly into her blood. Soon afterward, it rose to her skin and painted it with warmth.
She threw back her veil. “What do you see? Is it back? The glamour—I think I made it happen.”
Mirela twisted her age-spotted hands in her lap as she studied Ecaterina’s face. She scrunched up her nose, thoughtfully. “I don’t see anything different.”
“Something happened.”
“Yes.” Mirela smiled, a big, easy smile with undertones of relief. “But it’s not the beauty which has come back. Only that I suddenly really like you. It’s probably the best thing you could have done—you’re making people love you without seeing anything different. Now you can force them to like you, and they won’t have any idea that you’re raping their minds again. They’ll forgive you because they have no choice, and they won’t even know it.”
Raping their minds was ridiculous. She was doing no worse than any woman who had trained herself to appear personable and charming. But this was good. It was exactly what she wanted—power without the appearance of it.
“Tell me more about your plans to go to war, then. I think I would like to come.”
In the end, it proved easier than she could possibly have imagined. Her father was distracted organising his troops, and she easily climbed into the attic and hunted through centuries of trunks full of outdated clothes—her father’s, perhaps, or grandfather’s, outgrown, but nowhere near outworn. She assembled an outfit suitable for a young hajduk, stitched herself a singlet that squashed her chest flat, and cut off her hair at shoulder length. Her head felt strange without it. Lighter and less anchored, like it might float off to war without her. Since her hair was never seen—hidden modestly beneath headdresses and pearls, her parents noticed nothing. Or, if they did, her renewed likeability prevented them from mentioning it.
She stole food and a bedroll for her backpack, and wrote her mother a letter apologising for the anguish she had so recently caused and promising to return once Stefan had been avenged. Then, on the day when the armies finally marched, she waved her father off from the front door, a sombre shadow in petticoats, then ran up to her room, flung the skirts off in favour of trousers, slung her pack on her back, and went to the armoury. There she picked up a sword and a rifle, and running out of the back door, caught up with the train of wagons and foot soldiers as it passed out onto the road.
“What the fuck are you doing?” said the last man in the line as she sprinted up so hard she jostled him. He turned to her with a growl and a glare like murder . . . and then his face cleared, his eyes widened, and he broke out into a delighted smile. “Oh, sorry, mate. Didn’t see you there. Go on ahead of me. I bet they’d let you ride in the wagons, if you’re tired.”
She wasn’t, but when she smiled at the faces in the back of the last cart they hoisted her up anyway, and left her there when everyone else took turns about to walk. So she went to war sitting on a warm sack of grain, with young girls along the route showering her with flowers, and it was as though the colour had come back into the world all at once, and she loved it all the more for that.
This half glamour was a great improvement on the old. It retained the advantages that came with being supernaturally likeable, and had none of the disadvantages of great beauty. When she returned home again—and as powerful as she felt at the moment, it did not occur to her to doubt she would—she would have to devote some time to experimenting on what else she could do now she had discovered her gift was more complex than simply having it, like a sluice gate, either open or closed.
But this—riding in a cart with a dozen other soldiers—was no place either for self-examination or for sudden changes of appearance. So she settled herself to sit and learn what she could of the battle plans while the countryside slowly changed from fertile fields to salt marsh, and seagulls began to wheel overhead with sharp metallic cries.
Halfway through the first day, her father’s wagons caught up with those of Văcărescu. Glad to slip the chance of her father riding back along the column and discovering her—for he seemed the one most likely to see through a disguise of short hair and man’s coat—Ecaterina jumped down from her wagon and walked up to see if she could join the other boyar’s men. This was not quite as easy, as Văcărescu’s men were all on horseback, and no one rode in his covered carts.
Knowing what she did, she did not want to risk being in or close to those carts at nightfall, but she could not walk beside them without being spotted, and Văcărescu too seemed likely to see through her disguise. She considered simply borrowing a horse from one of his men, riding up to the head of the column, and shooting him in plain sight, relying on her glamour to gain the sympathy of the witnesses. She would plead her brother’s death, and weep, and she knew she could have them eating out of her hand within minutes.
But it was widely known in Bucharest that she had laid a spell on herself to make men her slaves. She might be able to get away with a murder in the short term, but they would remember it, remember her. Sooner or later someone would find a way of breaking the glamour, or it would slip again by itself, as it had these past weeks. Then, even if she was not burned as a witch, she would be forced to become the outlaw she now pretended to be.
Besides, she didn’t want to think of her father’s reaction if he had to watch. Her rifle felt heavy and reluctant on her back at the thought.
So she pulled her hood more firmly down over her face and went back to her father’s train. There would be time when they arrived at Timișoara. In a crush of different nobles all trying to embark their entourages on different ships, there would be a chance to lurch against Văcărescu in the back room of a harbour inn, and slip a blade between his ribs. Or to find a room upstairs in a cheap hotel, where she could sit in a window and shoot him as he passed below.
