He dreams it on the night he reads Mordane’s memo, in the narrow bed in the wine cellar, with the window open on the river.
He wakes knowing it was not a dream.
He does not tell anyone.
Not even Adrian.
The prince is forty-five years old, and he is dying in a wood near Bucharest, and he is not surprised.
He has been expecting it for thirty years.
Since Edirne.
Since the cell with forty-four bricks in the window arch.
He has been a prince three times, and lost his throne three times, and won it back twice.
He has impaled his enemies by the thousand and been called a monster in every court in Christendom, and a hero in every village in Wallachia, and he has never, not once, believed that he would die in bed.
So when the ambush comes, in the winter dusk, in the wood, with his guard cut down around him and an Ottoman spear in his side and his own blood steaming on the snow, he is not surprised.
He is only very tired.
He lies on his back among the black trees and looks up at the sky through the branches and thinks of his little brother, Radu, who went over to the Sultan and became a prince of the enemy, and died of the pox, and whom he never forgave.
He thinks: I should have forgiven him.
He thinks: Too late now.
And then someone kneels beside him in the snow.
She is very beautiful, and very old, and she smells of the marsh.
Black water and reeds and rot.
Her face is pale as the moon, and her eyes are the yellow of a wolf’s, and when she smiles, he sees her teeth.
He knows what she is.
Every child in Wallachia knows the stories.
He has hanged men for being what she is, or for being accused of it.
He has never quite believed.
“The Impaler,” she says.
Her voice is soft and amused.
“The great Prince Vlad.
Dying in a wood, like a deer.
How sad.” He tries to reach his sword.
His hand will not move.
“I have watched you for twenty years,” she says.
“From the marshes.
I have watched you take your throne and lose it, and take it back.
I have watched you make the Sultan afraid.
I have watched you make your own boyars afraid.
I have watched you plant your forests of stakes.” She tilts her head.
“I have never seen a man so good at making others afraid.
I could use a man like that.” She bites her own wrist.
The blood is black in the dusk.
“You will be my sword,” she says.
“My prince.
My hound.
You will make the other courts afraid of me, as you made the Sultan afraid.
You will be mine, forever.” He tries to say no.
He tries to turn his head away.
He is too weak.
She presses her wrist to his mouth, and the blood goes in, cold and foul and sweet, and the dark comes down.
He wakes in the ground.
They have buried him.
The monks of Snagov, on their island in the lake, in the church, before the altar, in his armor, with his sword on his breast.
He wakes in the dark in a box of wood with earth pressing down on the lid, and he is not breathing, and he is not dead, and he is so hungry that he would eat the earth if he could.
He screams.
No one hears.
He claws at the lid.
His nails break.
They grow back.
He claws again.
It takes him three nights.
He counts them.
On the third night the wood gives, and the earth comes in, and he digs up through it like a mole, like a worm, like a thing being born, and comes out into the dark of the empty church with dirt in his mouth and his eyes and his hair, on his hands and knees on the stone floor before the altar.
And she is there.
Waiting.
Sitting on the altar steps with her black hair loose and her yellow eyes shining.
“There you are,” she says.
“My prince.
Come here.” And he feels it.
The hook.
Under his breastbone, in the place where his heart has stopped beating.
A cold, thin wire, running from her chest to his, and pulling.
His body begins to move.
His knees.
His hands.
Across the stone floor, toward her, on all fours, like a dog.
He remembers the cell.
He remembers the forty-four bricks.
The six guards on the wall.
The fat one who drank at midnight and the young one who slept against the gate.
He remembers lying awake in the dark at twelve years old, holding his crying brother, and making a promise.
I will never be anyone’s hostage again.
I will never kneel again unless I choose it.
He stops.
It is the hardest thing he has ever done.
Harder than Edirne.
Harder than the throne.
He stops on his hands and knees on the stone floor of the church at Snagov with her wire in his chest pulling and pulling, and he does not move.
He shakes.
He bleeds from his eyes.
He does not move.
She stops smiling.
“Come here,” she says again, and pulls harder.
He does not come.
He lifts his head and looks at her.
And he lets her see what he learned in the cell.
Not the anger.
Not the fear.
The patience.
The vast, cold, endless patience of a boy who counted bricks for four hundred days and never once forgot what he was counting toward.
“I will serve you,” he says, through his torn and bloody mouth.
“For now.
Because I must.
Because you are strong, and I am new, and I do not yet know what I am.” He smiles.
It is not a nice smile.
“But you should know, my lady, that I have done this before.
I was a hostage once.
I was very good at it.
I learned which guards slept and which drank, and I learned to wait.
And one day,” he says softly, “you will stop watching.
Everyone stops watching, in the end.” She stares at him.
And for the first time in a very long life, something in her yellow eyes flickers.
It will take him forty years.
He will count every one.
And on the night he finally kills her, in her house in the marshes, with her own black blood in his mouth, he will stand over her body and look out at the thousand broken, squabbling, starving courts of his new people, killing each other in the dark, burning, being burned, and he will understand that he has been given a choice.
That if he must be a monster, then he will at least decide what kind.
He will decide to be a king of monsters.
And he will decide, too, standing in the reeds with her blood cooling on his chin, that no one he makes will ever be pulled across a stone floor on their hands and knees.
Not by him.
Not by anyone.
He will write it into his laws.
He will make them all sign it.
He will keep that promise for three hundred years.
He will break almost every other one.
In the narrow bed in the wine cellar, Magnus opens his eyes.
The river is loud outside the window.
His two hearts are beating together, thud and tap, steady and slow.
He lies still in the dark and feels the old patience moving through him, cold and deep and vast, like the black water running past the city.
He understands, now, what the voice in his blood has been asking him for.
Not blood.
Not power.
Not obedience.
Finish it, it has been saying.
Finish what I started.
I made a kingdom where no one is dragged across a floor.
And then I died, and they tore it down, and they are dragging each other across floors again.
Finish it.
Magnus lies awake until morning, listening.
He does not answer.
Not yet.
But for the first time, he does not say no.