Come Freely
External image
The first time she ever saw the man they called Tepes, the young Countess de Szilágyi was only twenty. Pacing figure eights around two great sculptures in her cousin the king’s Hungarian palace as she skimmed over pages of a worn book of verse, Ilona’s attention wandered silently as her father, uncle, and King Methias walked with their imprisoned once-ally, the much talked about, Vlad of Wallachia.
Her relations talked of strategy and politics, the church and land, always land. Those salted voices she knew best were easy to recognize, but in the boom of the wide stone room she found it difficult to distinguish the stranger’s words among them. And she did so want to hear him, to catch a small note or learn some bit of his tenor. Without consciously choosing to do so, she was trying very hard to learn him, to measure the man for herself. Ilona meant only to observe him, to sweep past rumor of the Viviode’s cruelty, his madness in battle and calculating temper and weigh his countenance as a man.
Somehow he was the kind of man whose very presence could command such attention particularly of a young and observant lady.
vladdraco
The dark man kept his tone and words measured when he spoke. He found that revealing little in a deeper timbre served to menace and intimidate those whom he could count as rivals. Once he was free of his chains, Hungary would know that it had found a great rival in Wallachia.
Through the wisps of hair that had fallen free from the tie, he watched the young Countess pace and read. The men did not catch Vlad’s eyes again after he saw her. There was a thought to take her, a very long, lingering thought. To steal the young lady, a jewel in the face of the Hungarian empire, away from her cousin.
Quietly, he strained against his bonds. There will be hell to pay. A hundred thousand impaled men will not repay for this atrocity against me. He thought as he strode along, caught between the men who would protect her until their last.
