The Crimson Outlaw Read online

  “No!” Vali yelled, his stomach and his throat tearing at his vehemence. Wadim was fully committed to his charge, could not easily pull up, nor change his target, so Vali put all his weight into a charge of his own, got his shoulder into Mihai’s injured shoulder—Forgive me, love—taking him by surprise, and pushed him out of the way.

  Death sped towards him on a silver point. He barely had time to laugh.

  Vali closed his eyes to the look on his father’s face. Gravel, flying from the horse’s pounding hooves, spattered and stung his cheeks. The oncoming wind of the horse blew back his hair as he waited for the hammer blow at the end of all things.

  A thud, and then another. A scream like that of a demon. A hot ember seemed to dash along Vali’s right collarbone and fling itself off his shoulder. He opened his eyes barely in time to see the crumpled form of his father’s horse come sliding on its knees into him. He leapt away and it fell to its side, two long arrows sticking up from its throat. One he recognised as Tavian’s, the other he didn’t know, tawny, barred hawk feathers bound in green cord on a green-painted shaft.

  His father’s lance lay beside the horse. Dazed, Vali pressed a hand to his shoulder, felt the long tear its point had made in his shirt, the welling of blood hot over his hand. The pain was a distant, meaningless thing, because on the ground behind him, where the horse’s fall had catapulted its rider over its head, his father lay twisted and made no attempt to get up.

  Vali scrambled over to him, though the starburst of gore in which he lay left little doubt it was too late. Utterly confident of his own horsemanship, Wadim wore no helmet, though one would have saved his life. Doubtless when he was thrown he would have tried to roll in the air as Vali had, so that he could come up fighting. But the path to the castle was lined with tall stones so that the sledges could tell where the good footing was when all the landscape was under snow. Wadim had smacked up against one of these, and it had broken his skull as a man might break an egg, squashed in half of his face. Only on one side did he resemble a human being at all. That side, when Vali saw it first, had looked considerably annoyed, but the expression smoothed out as he watched into a blankness that was no more like his father than the mess on the other side.

  No time for mourning yet, if there was even mourning in him. Vali stood up, stuck his fingers in his mouth, and whistled shrill. The eyes of all flicked towards him. “Stop!” he shouted. “Wadim is dead. Everyone stop!”

  Mihai and Gavril stood back-to-back in a ring of horsemen, the centre of a wheel of spear and arrow points. Tavian, his horse’s head drooping and his thigh crimson from a gaping cut, sat still and defiant in another. They would have been safer in an iron maiden. One twitch of any one of those hands might set off a hail of steel.

  Wadim’s viteji looked from his corpse to his son, and they were not happy at all.

  “I am Vali Florescu,” Vali insisted. “Even if you did not already know me, you heard your lord call me his heir not a quarter of an hour ago. You were his, but now you are mine, and I tell you: put your weapons down.”

  A standoff for a moment. Even Eugen, who was Vali’s friend, looked from the outlaws to the figures of his fallen comrades, his dead lord, undecided. But then Ionescu clucked his tongue and his horse came ambling, ambling behind Vali, all five of his own men coming after, keeping Vali from running away, yes, but also silently providing him with backup.

  Ionescu beckoned one of his men, who slid from the saddle and offered the reins of his horse into Vali’s hand. Vali looked into his brother-in-law’s face, a face scarcely prettier than that of his father’s corpse, and felt bitterly ashamed at having judged him so quickly and so ill. “Thank you.”

  “You want the bandits spared?” Ionescu had nudged his mount close enough to whisper it, unheard.

  “I do. Their only crime was to aid me.”

  The ridge of Ionescu’s eyebrow writhed like a red worm as he raised it sceptically.

  “My father was a tyrant.”

  “He was.” The expression hardened, suspicious but understanding.

  Vali found himself holding in a sob. “But I never wanted him dead!”

  And Ionescu put a hand to his shoulder and let him lean on it for a moment of reassurance. The pause was long enough for Vali to notice that all of Ionescu’s men bore green arrows with tawny fletching. “Thank you,” he said again, inadequately but sincerely. “They’ve been telling me since the wedding that you were a good man. You saved my life.”

  “Your father was trying to stop,” Ionescu said gently. “You didn’t see it, but he was trying to pull up. He no more wanted to kill you than you wanted to kill him.”

  Vali yearned to put his head in his hands and weep, but although the weapons had now been lowered, Mihai, Gavril, and Tavian looked no less like captives, and he could not let that stand. “These men must live.”

  “Then you’d better give your people a good reason for mercy, lad. Some of their brothers-in-arms died today.”

  Ionescu nodded to his herald, who blew a trumpet blast to ensure all the viteji were looking at him. He stood up in his stirrups. “Men. Wadim is dead. Here is your new lord. Listen to his first command.”

  Vali wiped away the few tears that had escaped and copied the gesture, standing tall on the horse. “There is, in the dungeons, a woman named Doina, with her son Cristian. Eugen, go, let them out at once, and bring them here.”

  He had chosen Eugen for his friendship and his soft heart. The young man’s long face almost drew up into a smile as he smartly wheeled and cantered across the drawbridge. And his acceptance of Vali’s authority, his easy obedience, seemed to reassure the other men. The world had not ended. Life went on much the same.

  “Shall we take these bandits to the prison, too . . .” Grigore had to pause and think before he finished, “my lord,” but he managed to make it sound natural when he did.

  The ache across Vali’s shoulders eased a little as the muscles relaxed. “No. They are my friends.”

  Grigore looked doubtful and the others downright suspicious. But moment by moment, the reality of their situation was sinking in. Wadim was dead. Vali was their lord. What would be the point of doubting or opposing him?

  “They were trying to help me,” Vali insisted, trying to think of an innocent explanation of why Tavian had threatened to cut his throat—an explanation that didn’t include the admission that they had deliberately come to depose his father. His father’s chosen men were unlikely to take that kindly.

  “It’s true.” With a sliding grate and a click, Mihai eased his sword into its scabbard and looked up grimly at the encircling knights. “Young Vali was being held by bandits in the hills. These honourless men intended to cut pieces off him and send them to Wadim until they received two chests of gold and one of silver for his release. At which point they would have killed him and left the body for his father to find.”

  He waved a hand at the white-haired man, who had taken the chance to slide off his wounded horse and tie a bandage tight around his gashed leg. “With the help of my friend Tavian here, and of Gavril, a doughty cooper of the village of Lueta, I infiltrated the bandit camp. I argued that Wadim would not give them anything until he had seen the boy alive, and persuaded them to bring him here, where I knew you could rescue him from them.”

  Mihai licked his lips, forced a laugh. It sounded natural, charming, but Vali had to wonder how much it was hurting Mihai to think of Andrei’s betrayal, Doru’s death. If these things did pain him, it didn’t show. He spoke on earnestly. “We had to keep them convinced we were on their side—hence all the rigmarole with the knife—but it seems we were too successful. You attacked us instead of them. Their greed and cowardice turned them towards an easier target, and they bolted, leaving us to defend ourselves against you. There has been no chance to explain, until this moment, that we are not your enemies at all.”

  A gorgeous lie. Vali could have kissed him for it, had he not known how well that would go down. Still it was
hard not to shout, “Look! Look at this handsome, brave, and clever man, this wily fox, this crimson outlaw. He’s everything a man could aspire to be and he belongs to me.”

  It was terribly tempting indeed. So it was lucky, perhaps, that a movement in the gate house, someone coming out, distracted him, and stopped his mouth before he brought disaster on them both.

  Two horses. Eugen on one with the boy, Cristian, held in the saddle in front of him. The boy looking about as if he had never seen the world before, his fist in his mouth and his eyes dazzled by the light. Beside them, Stela on her palfrey, with Doina before her, looking ragged and skeletal, but sitting upright and proud, her expression caught somewhere between disbelief and ecstasy. Stela’s own face was silver over the cheeks with tears.

  Seeing them, Gavril gave a great cry and shouldered his way through the encircling knights, running to them. They met on the short-cropped meadow that lipped the moat, and Eugen passed Gavril’s son down to him to be scooped up and enfolded and all but crushed with fierce relief. “My little man, my baby. You’re all right. You’re all right now. Daddy’s got you.”

  Gavril turned with the boy clinging to his neck and waist, arms and legs tight, and Stela helped Doina to slide down the horse’s side and into his arms, too weak by now to stand without support. “Oh, my darling. Oh, my sweetheart.” This embrace was gentler, both of them weeping, their faces shining with such joy and such anguish Vali had to look aside. This was too private a moment to watch.

  He looked instead at Stela, whose horse came picking its way daintily over the battlefield with a certain disdain. She wore green, which he took to be a good sign. She had long ago learned to school her expressions into a mask-like serenity, but her wardrobe, when she was unhappy, tended towards grey.

  Then she was beside him, leaning over and crushing their legs between their horses’ flanks so she could hug him. “You idiot! I’ve been so worried.”

  She raised her head from his shoulder—just as well, for the tall headdress she wore was poking him in the eye—to exchange a smile with her husband. A small smile, suitable for an acquaintance with whom one wants to become better friends, but a simple one without shades of regret or fear. It seemed Vali’s advisors had been right, and if not flourishing—yet—in her new marriage, she was not finding it unworkable. “We’ve all been worried. But you look better. Older. It’s done you good?”

  “It has,” Vali agreed. “I ran away to seek my fortune, and I found it. I’m only sad that . . .”

  They both turned to look at the path where their father lay. Someone had covered him with a cloak trimmed in sables, and even now Vali expected him to fling it back and rise to retake command. He didn’t know what he felt specifically, amongst the general ache of the knowledge that his father was dead, but there was sadness there, and love—a chain inescapable no matter how much fear was added to the mix.

  “Well,” Stela said, with unexpected ruthlessness, “I wished him dead a hundred times. It would be dishonest to claim otherwise now. We should take him inside.”

  Other women had ventured out of the gatehouse, and peasants were once more visible in the fields and on the paths of the village. More effectively than anything Vali had said, their presence seemed to signal the end of combat to the viteji. He watched as the killing machines became men once more—a subtle shift in the angles of their shoulders, something in their faces thawing.

  Vali called out for four of them by name. “Bear my father’s body with honour to the chapel, and let him be prepared for burial. Tomorrow I will meet with all my officials and take up my father’s burdens, but tonight we will feast in his name.”

  As he rode through the gatehouse into the castle—his castle—Vali had a sense as of a great clock, into which he slipped like a cog wheel snapping into place. Mihai was supporting Tavian behind him, Tavian limping badly on his cut leg, both of them looking beaten and downcast, sick at heart, as they walked beside Doru’s body.

  He wished for a future, Vali remembered, nauseous himself with a heaviness of guilt he would never have associated with victory. And Andrei wanted freedom. I have what I desired, but I broke Mihai’s family to achieve it.

  No matter how much he wished to walk beside Mihai, to talk of these things and beg some reassurance that Mihai still believed he was worth it, Vali didn’t dare dismount until he reached the stables. He knew what his folk—nervous of so young a lord—would want to see from him. He had to provide it, for everyone’s sake.

  Mihai stroked the dirty-straw-coloured hair back from Doru’s forehead, his cheek wet with tears. Servants were bearing the young man inside, where he would lie in the chapel with Dragomir and the other members of the household who had died today. It was an honour Vali felt he was owed, but it might also be an unpalatable irony for him to rest here, in the very citadel of the man who had ruined him. Certainly Tavian seemed to think so. He trod as if the ground was poisoned underneath him.

  Vali had them lodged in guest rooms, a doctor brought for Tavian’s wounds, and a tailor with his apprentices sent to them both to fit them out for the feast in the splendour their rank deserved—for he intended to make them both his knights, bring them back into civilisation, where he could prove to them that under his care there would be no more need for outlaws in his lands.

  His mood, already subdued, only dimmed further over the day. When he first re-entered his own room, he was repelled by its opulence. What need did he have for so many jewels? From whose hard work had they been wrung? Not his own, certainly. He thought of Rodica, the weeks he had spent helping her to turn labour into wheat, into cheese, into leather and wool and needful things, and he wondered how many men’s work, over how long a time, had paid for these diamonds on his dresser, these gold-encrusted belts?

  He scarcely recognised his face in the mirror, tanned and thin as it had become, with puzzles in his eyes instead of certainty. And he wondered—if he was having so much trouble fitting back into the cage from which he’d flown, what of Mihai? Vali had been on quest little less than a month. Mihai had been fighting for his freedom most of Vali’s life. Could he really slip back so easily into the role of a lord’s retainer? Could he go from champion of the poor to lackey of the oppressor without a backwards look? Could he turn his back on Andrei with as much ease as Andrei had turned away from him?

  And if he couldn’t, what then?

  Mihai was late coming to the hall and, in his absence, even the feast revolted Vali. So much food! Such profligate waste. The cup in his hand alone would have paid for the repairs to Bucin village many times over. He shared his dark mood with Tavian, who was coating the tables around him with a layer of ice from his cold glares, and that just made the doubt worse. Would Tavian ever come to accept Vali as his lord, learn to live with men who had been his enemies for the past ten years? If he did not, if he too left, could Vali be happy knowing he had parted Mihai from every one of his friends?

  Everything had been easier in the forest, when they had been two free spirits together. But Vali eyed the torch bracket to which he had been chained when this all began and remembered his determination, his pride. Just because things had been easier elsewhere didn’t mean he was going to give up now. He had a servant refill his cup with the best wine and passed it down the table to Tavian to mark him out for honour.

  The courtesy gave the man such a shock that the skin over his cheekbones actually pinked. He didn’t smile, but he nodded in return and ate one of the pieces of bread he had been buttering all evening. Vali took that for a triumph.

  When Mihai finally came in, behind a train of servers carrying a roast swan on a river of little fishes in aspic, Vali’s gloom was eager to be lit by the man’s radiance. The tailor had dressed Mihai in golden silk and the shade brought out all the hints of fire in his hair. The sleekness of the material made light run like oil into all the curves and hollows of his wide shoulders and emphasised the muscles of his arms, the trimness, the springy curve of his waist.

  Miha
i caught Vali’s gaze. For a horrified moment Vali thought he would wink, but he only smiled in a great beam of good humour like the sun coming out, and sat down to charm his neighbours at the board as thoroughly as he had enchanted Vali.

  The change was as instant as a magic spell. At once the candlelight was honey gold and all the folk Vali spoke to were witty. He accepted congratulations and consolations with equanimity and tried not to stare too hard at the way Mihai licked his lips, or later at the way he danced, swinging the girls off their feet to their shrieks of delighted laughter and his warm chuckle.

  He was still here. That had to count for something, yes?

  Except that Vali had now seen how perfectly he could lie, with what finesse he could turn himself into what his opponents wanted to see. Could the smile really be genuine, or was Mihai simply disarming Vali’s wariness before he took Tavian with him and went back to join Andrei in the woods?

  Later still, and Vali sat on the edge of his bed alone. Moonlight slanted through his window and lit everything within the chamber in silver as cold as Tavian’s eyes. Vali had stripped to his nightshirt slowly and washed again and waited. Of course Mihai could not follow him to his bedchamber—the court, with many vices of their own, would make no outcry against his, but only if he made a decent effort to allow them to pretend it was not happening at all. To tow an older paramour around openly would be an insult to that code and do them both harm. So he knew he had to wait in patience, to find out whether Mihai would come to him now, or whether their adventure was over—the lord restored, the bandit returning to form, stealing the tableware from the feast and fleeing, never to be seen again.

  He watched the door for what felt like hours, but there were no sounds of feet in the corridors, and no one rattled at the latch. He was just wondering if he could give the whole estate to Stela and run away again to find Mihai wherever he had gone, when the room swooped into darkness. With a scrape and a half-drunken laugh, Mihai climbed in at the window.