The Crimson Outlaw Read online

  “No need to rush.” Mihai neither mocked nor pitied, just worked his hand down from Vali’s throat across his chest, rolling the nipples between his fingers. His touch settled at last on Vali’s prick, which he stroked almost lazily, setting a slower, less angry pace. He pulled Vali closer so that even his injured hand could curve around Vali’s buttocks and knead the tender skin. “Is there more of that slick?”

  Still of a mind to be humiliated—resisting the lazy golden pulse of pleasure every time Mihai completed a stroke—Vali passed the jar. He managed to hold onto his sullenness while Mihai melted some of it in his hand, but all feelings of inadequacy and pride got shoved aside at the toe-curling sizzle of bliss he got when thrusting up into Mihai’s newly greased palm, curled perfectly around his prick and pressing just hard enough.

  He did it again, and again, concentrating on the building delight, the seethe of power and conquest and yes in his belly, and he almost missed the first time Mihai’s other hand slid across his hole, moistening it. He didn’t miss the second as the building ache of pleasure in his prick and balls was echoed by a deep, velvety, intimate throb as Mihai pushed his big, blunt finger in. Vali stilled, breathing in amazement. Why hadn’t he thought to try this with himself? Oh, that was . . . He groaned, panting, and pushed back to try to get more as Mihai circled inside him, painting his insides with slick.

  “Ah! I want . . . I want. Please!”

  He lined himself up again, sank down, and again stopped just with the head of Mihai’s prick touching his hole. That was something in itself, firm and hot there. He tensed his muscles to feel it grasped by him, to feel how smooth, how silky, slippery hot it was. And then he relaxed, and it slid a little way in, coming to lodge against muscle that throbbed with a thin, red, gravelly stretch. And that was almost unbearably good, he couldn’t—

  He twitched his hips again, rising off a little way, coming back down harder, more prepared, as open and greedy as he could be. The stretch was wider this time, more like being torn, and the pain was fantastic. He pushed for more of it, something giving way inside, and the whole length of that almost wrist-thick cock slid home in a slow, long, dragging rush that filled him up past the belly button, he swore he could almost feel it nudge his lungs.

  “Ah, ah . . . oh God,” Mihai panted. The muscles under Vali shook with the need to move. “Mercy.”

  And oh, Vali liked the sound of that. Liked the little, rough noises of desperation Mihai was making in the back of his throat, liked the way the involuntary jerks of his hips speared Vali deeper each time. He might have used his new power over Mihai to torment—another night, perhaps—but he was full of angry, impatient need, and he wanted.

  He pulled himself almost all the way off so that he could feel that fantastic slide again, two, three more times, but on the third time the tip brushed something inside him that hit him like a swig of apple brandy. His head swam and his body seemed to sparkle all over like a log in a hot fire. So he hit it again and again, quicker and harder each time until he burst in an outpouring of tight, shuddering bliss and rubbed his spill hot between his belly and his lover’s.

  Mihai did laugh then, but it was fond and weary, not at all scornful. He slapped Vali’s leg in a friendly sort of way. “And now get off.”

  “But you haven’t—”

  “And I don’t think I will. For a man on the point of death scarce ten days ago, I think I’m doing well to rise at all. We must wait until I’m recovered before I can throw you down and use you as you deserve.”

  There were some advantages to being born of boyar kin. It did occur to Vali to ask if he had been a disappointment, but he dismissed it as the ridiculous thought it was. “Then you will stay with me until you can?”

  Sighing, Mihai wiped them both with a corner of the sheet and gathered Vali to him, where they lay as if they had been together for years, fitting into one another comfortably. “I’m not leaving here. He killed the family I swore on my life to protect. I will make him regret it until one or both of us dies.”

  “I’m glad.” Vali didn’t quite want to speak this thought aloud and make it real. It had a taint of sickness about it—an intolerable, unthinkable thing. But it had also been growing in him ever since the beating. No, ever since Doina and Cristian in the dungeon, when he had first seen what was going on right beneath his feet.

  “Because I am born to be boyar of this country. One day it will be mine to protect. That duty is in my blood.”

  Mihai’s hand flexed on Vali’s hip, possibly in warning. “And you will come back then, when your father dies, and I have no doubt you will do a good job.”

  “If it’s my duty then, why is it not my duty now?”

  “Vali.” The bandit shook him gently, as if to dislodge the outrageous idea. “You can’t go against your own father.”

  “I won’t kill him,” Vali thought aloud. “I’ll send him to Alba Iulia. Give him a town house and a carriage and a fixed allowance to spend money and show off in the capital. And then I’ll rule here and there will be no more deaths. No more burnings.” His mouth ran on without his permission, letting out something raw inside himself he had not quite known was there. “No more burnings! No more children burnt alive in buildings where people were trying to dance!”

  There was an edge of tears to Mihai’s chuckle as he cradled the back of Vali’s head and leaned in to kiss him again, possessive and proud. “If I could promise you that you would never have to fight him in person—that I would do it for you, so that you would not literally have to raise your hand to your own father?”

  “Then I’d be happier. I know I owe him my life and have done for every day of it. But I don’t owe him your life, or Maria’s, or Father Petru’s or Doina’s. I owe those lives to them. I . . .” Harsh and tearful certainty faltered. “But I would be grateful to be able to defend them while also avoiding parricide.”

  His mind returned to the idea of lots of bandits, some of them trained for war. “I think tomorrow you should take me to your outlaws.”

  A long pause, and then, “I will. They may still try to kill you, of course. But they will have to come through me first.”

  Rodica vetoed any expedition for another two weeks, until Mihai could spend a day working in the vegetable garden without fatigue and could perform small tasks with his left arm. These she gave him with increasing frequency, easing it back into work as gently but relentlessly as she did the rest of him.

  For the first two days of this regime, Vali chafed and fretted, wanting to put his idea into practice at once. But gradually he saw the sense of waiting until Mihai stood a better chance of defending himself, and he relaxed with increasing contentment to what seemed a honeymoon. The spring days were growing longer, and though the nights still brought intermittent snow, the sun in the daytime had begun to hold warmth, and all the plants in field and yard were burgeoning. Including the weeds.

  Two weeks of weeding, and feeding Rodica’s chickens, of leaning over the sty on a warm morning to scratch the back of her good-humoured pig. Of walking down to the nearest stream, through woodlands that nodded with bluebells, with the birds a-carolling all around him. Filling up the two buckets on their yoke and trudging back uphill to fill her copper twice, once for washing and once for cooking.

  Work all through the day. Not hard work, particularly—nothing near as exhausting as his weapons training—but endless work, lulling. Enough to occupy the hands and tamp down his nervous energy, but not enough to silence human curiosity. He found himself questioning Rodica about the peasant life, about what he could do to improve it (which appeared to be “lower taxes and leave well enough alone”), and learning from Mihai all about his youth spent in various wars, his journeys to Hungary and Austria and Istanbul.

  And in the evening they would return to their bed and make love, because the days when they could just fuck were over. He had thought, that first time in the hall, that if Mihai did not please him he could leave with no regrets. But if he ever had been ca
pable of that, he was no longer. He had begun to think of himself and the bandit as one unit, tied together as securely as ever a priest could knot.

  These things left Vali feeling strangely at peace. At the end of the two weeks, he stirred himself out of the life reluctantly, no longer excited or vengeful at the thought of deposing Wadim, only more soberly determined.

  “I would have been happier with another month of rest,” said Rodica, handing Mihai a walking stick and Vali a covered pot of soup with a wrapped loaf for their journey. She pocketed one of his sapphires in return without comment, and agreed to look after their borrowed horse until it could be returned to its owner. “But so long as you do not overstrain it, it should be well enough. God give you strength.”

  Obedient to the spirit of convalescence, they did not rush the walk uphill into the mountains, following a trail only Mihai could pick out. They stopped in the middle of the day to make a fire on a bed of small stones, heat the soup, and drink it. Nettle soup today, furry-tasting on the tongue. They drank a shot of tuica or two, and Mihai sang a song under his breath about a prince whose father was a were-dragon who had eaten the father of the woman he loved.

  But when the story was done, he sighed and brushed breadcrumbs from his jacket. By some process of determination, some internal hardening, he put off the mantle of Mihai the simple countryman and became again Mihai the bandit—sharper faced, sterner of eye. Vali felt his own heart sink, then steady in response.

  They doused the fire with water from their water bottles, replaced the cut turfs and leaf litter over it, and went on.

  An hour’s climbing brought them out from beneath the trees into a valley filled with what seemed like gun smoke. The warm air stank of black powder—greasy and sulphurous. The ground beneath Vali’s feet gurgled like an ill-fed stomach.

  He let Mihai go ahead of him and clutched at his coattails so as not to lose him. Solid ground narrowed into treacherous ribbons of soil and rock that threaded between bubbling pools of mud. He could feel the heat of it through his boots.

  When he looked behind him, it was to see that each eruption of a mud pool slopped fresh dirt over the path, wiped out their footprints. They left no trace as they walked.

  Mihai picked his way forward, testing the ground with the end of his stick. After what felt like an hour of this cautious inching over the open bowels of the earth, the farting of the pools subsided. The steam thinned a little, leaving them in a long incline between two spurs of rock. By now, the mud valley had grown bizarre white needles of rock or salt that stuck out of the ground to the height of Vali’s knee, like the columns of an ancient ruined fairy city.

  Above them, steam shrouded the sky. Around them, no landscape he had ever imagined on earth. Vali shivered and caught up with Mihai, but that was little comfort, for Mihai had turned his distinctive crimson jacket inside out and now was half invisible, his sallow shaggy sheepskin the same colour as the steam. “Where are you taking me?”

  “We call it Pestera Dracului,” Mihai whispered back, and gestured to offer Vali the rock face as if it were a gift. There was a cave in it, the mountain’s yellowish rock cracked into a doorway even Mihai could pass through without bending. More steam trickled out of the entrance, and water dripped endlessly from the arch of rock where the mouth of the cave had grown a hundred little teeth, white as the elfin columns of the valley.

  The Cave of the Devil? “I can see why.”

  Mihai gave a snort of laughter, but groped back with his good hand to squeeze Vali’s wrist. “I don’t know who will be at home. Whoever it is, don’t be ashamed to use me as a shield. They won’t strike you if it means harming me first.”

  He angled sideways into the darkness under the mountains, and Vali lunged to follow him, to hold on again. “I don’t need your protection.”

  “Perhaps not. But you have it.”

  Utter darkness surrounded them for a space, the ground rough underfoot. The rock beneath his trailing fingers was smooth and rounded, wet with condensation, and the stink of sulphur was all but choking. They reached a crossroads and turned right. A suggestion of light ahead grew until he could see that he was burrowing through what looked like warm ice. A turn to the left—now they could hear voices—and the passage opened out into a pure white cavern filled with icicles and slender columns of salt. Torches driven into the pillars lit the hollowness with gilding and showed—in the centre of the floor—a green steaming pool whose surface fizzed with heat. And all around it the detritus of men. Sleeping pallets, a cauldron on an iron tripod over the fire. Pieces of someone’s rifle, a stack of bowls.

  The cave’s inhabitants, gathered like wolves around a fresh sheep carcass, had been industriously occupied butchering meat. They looked up one by one as Mihai stepped in, and then they were all rushing him at once, their bloody hands outstretched, their weathered faces beaming.

  Nine of them. The biggest man amongst them made Mihai look a stripling. He must have been seven feet tall, Vali thought, astonished, and almost as broad. A bald Székely man, with five blue lines tattooed over his skull and a black moustache the ends of which brushed his collarbones, got to Mihai first. He wrapped him around in dripping arms and lifted him off the floor.

  “Mihai Roșcat! Mihai the Unkillable. They told us you were dead, but I said it couldn’t be so. And see, boys, wasn’t I right?”

  “Gavril.” Mihai clapped the man on the back and, when he was let down, did the same with the others. It wasn’t until the outpouring of relief and hugging was done that Gavril noticed Vali standing quietly in the shadows behind Mihai. Gavril’s eyes narrowed and his moustache drooped a whole inch.

  “And who is this?”

  Vali could feel the moment the others looked at him like a blow. He was wearing his fine embroidered waistcoat under a borrowed woollen coat, and though he’d pinned his cockade of pearls and diamonds under his shirt, and his hat was still that of a shepherd, he could not disguise his face. Some of these men must have seen Wadim, might even have seen Vali before to recognise. No point in hiding it.

  “I am Vali Florescu, son and heir of Wadim Florescu. And I’m here to ask for your help.”

  Vali had not managed to get the last word fully out before Gavril had launched himself at him. Vali attempted to duck behind Mihai, but the giant was as fast as he was large. He shot out a long, gnarled arm, got Vali by the collar, and lifted him off his feet. Vali was still reaching for Gavril’s wrist when he found himself flung across the cave, the bright glitter of an approaching stone column flying like a spear at his face.

  He managed to hit the thing with hands and feet braced, catlike. Pushing back, he sprang off it, twisting in the air so that he could land on his feet with his hand on his sword hilt. Gavril looked comically surprised that he had not hit his head against the stone and fallen unconscious, but the surprise passed into rage and then all the amusement value was lost. With a snarl, Gavril hurled himself across the cavern once more, enraged and dangerous as a bear.

  “Gavril!” Mihai yelled. “I brought him here as a friend.”

  Vali sized Gavril up. A wrestler, strong and quick, but not terribly agile and still not armed. His breath made a sawing noise as though his chest was packed with wood. Vali let go of his sword hilt—he would not need it—ducked under the swinging arm and dashed for the other side of the cavern, where a formation like a little altar gave him a leg up into the dripping complexities of the roof space. His momentum let him leap to a further ledge and then into the centre of the spider’s web of white that hung like frosted branches above the bandits’ fire.

  Gavril tried to follow him, but the “altar” crumbled under his weight. His foot slipped under him; he put it down ponderously and spent a long moment looking up at where Vali crouched just out of reach. Then he turned round and grabbed for a spear, and Mihai intercepted him, both hands on his chest. “My friend, please listen.”

  With a roar, Gavril tossed Mihai aside, Vali shouting sharply down, “Stop it! He’s injur
ed. Don’t hurt him.” And now the other men, who had been watching with interest, began to react, two of them picking Mihai off the floor, the others forming a loose, watchful circle around Gavril, barring his access to the weapons.

  “I’m not your enemy,” Vali said as reasonably as he could, seeing Mihai unharmed. “I am my father’s enemy. I want to join you and to help the villagers be rid of him. If you put me in the castle, I would give you pardons—”

  The other men were looking at him speculatively now, expressions of interest, even hope on their faces, but Gavril seized the tripod out of the fire and used that to swat at him. Hot iron spikes tore into the salt deposits, made the whole structure beneath Vali sway, grazed the edge of his boots and bruised his feet. “Can a pardon bring them back?” Gavril shouted. “My wife, my little son? Better that I should deprive your father of a child as he did to me.”

  A second swinging blow, and the beam under Vali’s feet gave way. He scrabbled to keep in place, but it was wet, slippery, and cold. He skidded down the incline even as the other end of the bar broke and the whole mass of salt and boy plummeted down together. Vali fell in a heap, and the tripod, coming down to break his head, bruised his ear as he twisted away. “Wait!” he said, raising both hands in surrender, opening himself for the next blow, with a wild, misguided hope. “Is your child’s name Cristian?”

  The strike that would have split his skull whistled past the end of his nose as Gavril pulled it back. “Why?”

  It was! Vali wanted to laugh, to jump up and hug the big man and laugh for joy, but the still smoking feet of the tripod, so close to his face, dissuaded him. “And your wife is Doina?”

  The impromptu weapon came no closer. Gavril’s blue-grey gaze was roiling with hope and fear, distrust and yearning. He waited for Vali to speak on.

  “They are alive.” Vali uncurled slowly, ready to shoot back to his feet. He hoped someone had noticed he had not once tried to draw a weapon on anyone. “Doina and Cristian. They’re in the dungeons, hungry, yes, but alive. I swear to you on my sword—may the blade turn in my hand and gut me, if I do not keep to this—the first thing, the very first thing I’ll do when I am lord, will be to set them free. I told Doina as much already, and now I promise it to you, too.”