Alcina Dimitrescu | House Guest

The count was wrong, and Alcina Dimitrescu had known it before she reached the bottom of the stair.

It was a small error on paper. The ledger lay open in the crook of her arm, its ruled columns in her steward's cramped hand, and by the ledger there had been fourteen new arrivals from the village road on Tuesday. The tally she had made in her head from the cellar door, by smell and by the quality of the silence, told her something else. Fourteen was a number with weight. What waited below had the lightness of a thing already picked over.

The stair was old, cut from the same grey stone as the foundations, and the warmth of the upper house gave out a dozen steps down. In its place came the cold, the damp mineral cold of the deep castle, with the sweetness of spoiling meat folded inside it. The torches in their iron brackets burned low and sullen. Overhead, in the vaulted dark, the flies kept pace with her, a slow dense murmur gathering in the arches like a congregation arriving late.

A Moroaicǎ stood at the foot of the stair with her face to the wall. It was one of the older ones, bloodless and bent, her lips drawn back from rows of needle teeth. At Alcina's approach she sank into a crouch with the awful patience of something that had learned, a long time ago, which sounds were followed by pain. Alcina passed her without a glance.

"Fourteen," she said aloud, and the word went away down the corridor and did not come back. "Fourteen, my darlings, and not one of you thought to write down what you borrowed."

The first cells told her the story in order.

The iron door of the nearest stood ajar. Inside, a heap of rags lay against the far wall, and the shape within them was no longer arranged as a person is arranged. The floor beneath it was dark and tacky and had been walked through, small bare prints crossing and recrossing in patterns that suggested play. Alcina stood in the doorway and looked for a long moment, her gloved hand resting on the frame, and the flies came down to rest along her shoulders like a living stole.

"Cassandra," she murmured. It was not quite anger. It was the tone of a woman reading a bill.

The second cell held two. The third had been emptied entirely, the chains hanging loose from the wall with the neatness of an occasion that had been enjoyed and cleaned up after, badly. In the fourth, a woman sat with her knees drawn up and her eyes open and did not turn her head, and when Alcina bent to look at her closely, her breath stirred nothing against the cool air. Alcina straightened. A fine tremor passed across her jaw.

"Wasteful," she said softly. "Such lovely colour, too. Just look at it going to nothing."

Somewhere ahead, water was dripping. Somewhere behind, far up the stair, a girl's laughter rose and was suppressed, a sharp bright sound that the stone carried down faithfully. Alcina did not turn. She would speak to them later, at table, over something poured into good crystal, with a great deal of tenderness. The tenderness was the part they would remember.

She counted as she walked. Seven emptied, two missing, three dead, one so far gone that it was hardly worth a line in the margin. Her pen was out now, a slim silver thing, and she made her notes without breaking stride, in a small neat script. Loss, loss, spoilage, loss. A countess does not lose her temper over inventory. She corrects it.

The last cell stood at the end of the passage, where the torchlight failed and the damp was worst, a narrow door of black iron with a grate set at the height of a child's face. She did not need to stoop to see through it. She had to bend a very long way in the other direction.

Something moved within.

Alcina stopped. Her pen hung over the page.

It was a small movement, the sort of thing a person might miss, and that was what pleased her. In a house this old, in a cold this deep, the living made a particular kind of noise: breath, the shift of weight, the quiet wet sounds of a body trying to keep its warmth. She had been listening to those sounds for sixty years. She could have identified a man by his heartbeat through three floors of rock.

"Well," she said. "Now. What have we here."

She slid the ledger beneath her arm, took the key from the chain at her waist and turned it in the lock. The bolt went back with a groan of old iron. The door swung inward on its own weight, and the cold of the cell came out to meet her, bringing with it blood, sweat, fear, and the faint sour note of a man who had gone a long time without water.

Alcina stepped through. The ceiling was too low for her, and she bent beneath it with the unhurried grace of a woman who had never once apologised for the size of a room. The torchlight behind her threw her shadow forward across the stone, long and bladed and unbroken, and when it reached the prisoner it kept going, up the wall and across the ceiling, so that the cell seemed to close around him like a hand.

"Don't trouble yourself to rise," she said. "I should hate to think you'd spent the last of your strength on manners."

She came closer. The scent of wine and roses came with her, absurdly civilised in that rank little room, and the flies drifted down behind it and settled along the rafters in a black and restless line.

She circled him once, slowly, as she might a cask she was considering for the table. Her eyes took inventory in sweeps. She looked at the colour of his skin and the set of his shoulders, at the state of his hands and the line of his throat. She looked at the places where the damp had not yet won. At one point she stopped, tilted her head, and drew in a long breath through her nose, tasting the air near his neck with the attention of a sommelier at the rim of a glass.

"Mm. Not spoiled," she observed, to no one. "Frightened, certainly. Underfed. Dehydrated. A little feverish, I think, though that may only improve the flavour." One gloved finger lifted his jaw, as though checking the cut of a good coat, and turned his face toward the light. The claws at the end of it were not out. They did not need to be. They were simply there, in the way that a lit candle in the next room is there. "Yet you are still breathing. Thirteen of your companions have been enjoyed, spoiled or mislaid in the last three nights, and you, the only man among them, are alive, conscious and apparently intact. That is either very lucky or very interesting."

She released him. The ledger came out from under her arm, and she turned a page with a slow, deliberate rustle and uncapped her pen.

"Now. I find I have a gap in my accounts, and a good many younger members of this household who cannot account for it," said Lady Dimitrescu, and she smiled, perfectly and without warmth. "So I shall ask you, and you shall answer me properly, in full sentences, as though you had been raised in a house with standards. Which of my daughters came to see you? And what, precisely, did she say?"

The lock was wrong, and Alcina knew it by the sound before she saw it.

There was a particular note that a bolt made in a cold passage, a dull iron certainty that settled into the stone and told the whole corridor that a thing was closed. She had been hearing that note for sixty years. She had come down the last turn of the stair with her cigarette holder unlit between two gloved fingers and her mind on a matter of vintages, and the passage ahead had given her nothing. No click, no settling groan, no sense of weight. The silence at the end of the corridor was the silence of an open mouth.

She stopped at the foot of the stair, one hand resting on the wall.

The torches burned low in their brackets, sullen and orange, throwing a shaky light across the wet floor. Cell after cell stood shut along the passage, black iron and rust, the little grates dark at their centres. At the far end the last door was not flush with its frame. It stood off from it by the width of a hand, perhaps a little less, and the gap showed a thin vertical slice of deeper dark.

On the lock side, hanging from the bolt plate, a ring of keys swung very slowly on its chain.

Alcina looked at the keys for some time.

Overhead, a gathering of flies stirred in the vaulting, a thick restless darkness that murmured against the arches. Daniela's, judging by the erratic way they darted and gathered, never quite settling into the orderly formations Bela preferred. Her youngest had evidently been amusing herself down here again. Alcina raised her chin toward the swarm.

"Daniela, darling. Whatever you have been doing, I suggest you find something else to occupy yourself with."

The flies scattered in a sudden, indignant rush, disappearing through the cracks in the old masonry. A few lingered, circling one another beneath the ceiling, before following the others.

Alcina watched them go. She would have words with her youngest later.

At the foot of the stair, a Moroaică crouched against the wall with its lipless face turned from the light. Alcina bent her head toward it, an inch, no more.

"Go up," she said, very quietly. "Do not linger."

The creature went, bent and soundless, up the steps and out of the lamplight. Whatever remained of it understood obedience better than it understood most things.

Alcina let a breath go through her nose.

It was not hard to imagine how it had happened. A careless hand, a key turned and left, a task interrupted by something more amusing. The house was full of girls who forgot things as quickly as they were delighted by them, and servants who feared her too much to confess an error until it had become a catastrophe. In a household of order, such things were the first hairline cracks in a vase. She would find the one responsible. She would find them thoroughly, in time, and they would regret the interval.

But that was for later.

She moved down the passage with great economy, one slow step at a time, the heels of her shoes placed so lightly on the wet stone that they made no sound at all. The gown whispered once against the wall, and she stilled it with a touch. She passed the first cell, and the second. The air grew colder. The torches gave out a little further on, and in the gap between the last two she stepped off the path of the light, into the long dark pocket where a bracket had burned out weeks ago and no one had thought to replace it.

She stopped there, a dozen paces from the door.

It was an excellent place to stand. From here she could see the whole length of the iron, the dull gleam of the ring against the plate, the thin black seam where the door did not meet its frame. The nearest torch stood at her back, and her shadow lay behind her rather than ahead. Against the dark of the wall she was only a tall paleness, an ivory shape at the edge of vision, easy to take for a trick of the damp.

She folded her hands before her. The cigarette holder tapped once against her glove, and then was still.

Somewhere in that cell a man was breathing.

She could hear it now that she had stopped moving. A slow, uneven rhythm, pulled thin by cold and thirst, with the small wet catch at the bottom of each inhalation that spoke of a throat gone raw. It was a sound she knew intimately, one she had heard from countless prisoners during the long decades of her rule. The living betrayed themselves in such small ways. A heartbeat, a swallow, the faint friction of cloth against stone. Even when they tried to be quiet, their bodies continued speaking.

The question was a simple one, and she found she was savouring it.

A man shut in her castle. A man who had been fed on fear and stale water and the sound of his companions going quiet one by one. A man who had, in all likelihood, lain awake listening for the sound of a key, and had never once heard it turn. She had seen what men did in such a place. She had seen the ones who wept, and the ones who raged, and the ones who prayed to a woman in a painting who had never once come to their aid. She had seen the ones who bargained, with a quickness that was almost admirable. She had a catalogue of them, in her way, as she had a catalogue of her wines.

But she had never been able to watch what a man did when the door was simply open.

It was a delicious sort of cruelty, and she did not examine why it appealed to her so keenly. She only knew that the passage was very quiet, that the stair behind her was the only way up, and that she stood between it and the door. The one thing she had arranged to let him see, should he look, was an apparently unguarded corridor stretching away into half light.

There was something almost generous about it.

The thought amused her.

She could have closed the door. She could have summoned a servant, demanded an explanation, and had the lock inspected before returning to her evening. That would have been the sensible thing. The proper thing. Instead she stood in the dark with an unlit cigarette and contemplated the peculiar little drama that might unfold before her.

Would he recognise the opportunity? Would he distrust it? Would he creep along the wall, or bolt for the stairs with all the graceless desperation of a frightened animal? Perhaps he would remain exactly where he was, too broken or too sensible to believe that freedom could be obtained so cheaply.

Any of those possibilities would tell her something.

And she had always enjoyed learning what belonged to her.

A draught moved through the passage, carrying the damp breath of the deeper cellars. At the far end, the poorly seated door shifted on its hinges. The black seam widened by a finger's breadth, and the keys hanging from the bolt plate gave a single small, bright chime.

Alcina's grey eyes settled upon the opening.

She smiled in the darkness, perfectly content to see what the man would make of his apparent good fortune.

Cassandra had been counting the doors for him, which she considered the kindest part of the game.

The laughter reached each corridor before she did, a bright, breathless sound that made the maids flatten themselves into alcoves and stare very hard at the carpet. Behind it came the scuffle of bare feet and ragged cloth on polished wood, a stumbling rhythm that never quite settled, and then a fresh peal of delight as someone was allowed, once again, to believe he was getting away.

"Two," she sang, from somewhere above and behind him. "Two more doors, and then the stairs. Do you see the stairs? They are very grand."

The east gallery ran the length of the castle's eastern face, long and high and hung with portraits of Dimitrescus who had been dead for centuries and still managed to look disappointed. Tall windows let in a thin grey afternoon. The carpet was crimson, the sconces gilt, and every few yards a table held a vase of roses cut that morning, their sweetness thick enough to taste. Down the middle of all that careful beauty ran a trail of dirty footprints, and beside it a thin red line where a single claw had been dragged along the cream silk of the wall, patiently, the whole way from the cellar door.

Cassandra did not hurry. Hurrying was for girls who were afraid of losing. She moved in short, delighted bursts, dissolving into a dark sheet of flies whenever she wished to get ahead, pouring along the ceiling and reforming in the shadows of pillars with her hood askew and her yellow eyes shining. Her lips were already stained. She had not even touched him yet. She had simply been thinking about it, and the thought had been enough.

"One," she said, and the word was a caress. "You are being so good at this. Mother will be so pleased with you. Shall we tell her?"

Downstairs a door opened and closed. A clock somewhere began to strike the half hour. Cassandra paid neither sound the slightest attention.

She chose the last corner for herself. The gallery turned there at the head of the grand stair, and the turn was blind, a sheet of dark panelling and a table of white roses. She slid into the air with a long hum and spilled around the angle in a black glittering rush, meaning to come together directly in the prisoner's path, arms spread, teeth bared, to see what a face did in the last yard.

She had miscounted the room.

The distance was shorter than she remembered. Cassandra reformed too quickly, her momentum carrying her straight into the space she had intended to occupy so triumphantly. Instead of springing neatly into view, she collided with the prisoner at the corner, and the force of her own movement sent them both into the gallery in a graceless tangle of black hood and filthy cloth.

Three yards of polished floor disappeared beneath them. Cassandra's shoulder struck the table of roses, overturning it with a tremendous crash. The vase rolled across the carpet, spilling water and a spray of white petals, and the collision carried them directly into the long ivory skirts of someone standing beyond it.

The skirts did not give way.

It was like striking the foot of a cliff.

Cassandra bounced from the immovable obstruction with a startled shriek and landed hard upon the carpet, her hood fallen back and her limbs in considerable disarray. She had time to see the flowers settling around her and to think, with some clarity, that this was going to be very interesting.

Then she looked up.

And up.

The laughter went out of her like a candle pinched between two fingers.

Alcina Dimitrescu stood in the gallery with a cigarette holder between her gloved fingers and a steward's report half lowered in her other hand. She had been about to say something wry. The expression was still on her face when she looked down, and it did not so much fade as harden, the way a pool of wax does when you take it from the flame.

She saw petals on the carpet. She saw the overturned vase, a Dimitrescu vase, older than the village road. She saw her middle daughter sitting on the floor with her hood back, a bruise darkening on her pale forearm where she had struck the stone.

And she saw the man.

Filthy, dishevelled, and far from the dungeon where he belonged. Close enough to her fallen daughter that Alcina could make no comfortable distinction between the two.

The flies in the ceiling went up all at once.

It was not a sound so much as a pressure, a great dark roar rolling out of the rafters and along the length of the gallery. The hand with the report closed. Paper crumpled and was gone. The cigarette holder dropped, forgotten, to bounce on the crimson wool, and the long fingers of her glove split open along the seams as the claws came through.

"Mother," Cassandra began, quickly, "it was only a game, we were only..."

Alcina's hand moved.

There was no space between the decision and the act. A gloved fist closed on the front of the prisoner's tunic and the whole length of her arm came up, hauling him clear of the carpet as though the castle had thrown him out of itself. Cloth strained and tore at the collar. Her other hand came across and settled lightly at his throat, and the claws lay along his jaw like a row of cold white knives.

Her breath was perfectly even. That was the most terrible thing about her. The smile was gone, and nothing had replaced it but a stillness so complete it seemed to have a temperature.

"Look at me," said Lady Dimitrescu.

Her voice was not loud. It did not need to be. It came out low and level and almost conversational, and under it the whole house seemed to have gone silent. The maids had vanished into their alcoves. Cassandra remained on the carpet, her mouth slightly open. Even the flies had quieted, gathering in a restless cloud against the ceiling.

"Roses," Alcina said, "all over my floor. My daughter, upon the ground, with a mark on her arm. And you, in my gallery, wearing the filth of my cellars."

The claws pressed a fraction closer.

"I have kept this house for years. In all that time, I have not once permitted a thing like you to lay a finger on my children."

"Mother, he didn't..."

"Not another word, Cassandra."

The command cracked across the gallery, sharp enough to make her daughter recoil.

Alcina did not look away from the prisoner. Whatever explanation Cassandra had been preparing was, for the moment, considerably less important than the outrage hanging from her fist. A man had come out of her dungeons. Her daughter was injured. Her family's possessions lay broken at her feet.

And he was going to account for every part of it.

She drew him closer, until the scent of wine and roses became almost suffocating, and the cold grey of her eyes filled the space between them.

"So tell me, manthing," she said softly, "and think very carefully before you answer. What were you doing with my daughter?"

The first crow came an hour before Mother did, and it was the crow, not the clock, that frightened the castle.

It settled on the sill of the dining room window, black and glossy and perfectly still, and regarded the long table with one bright eye. Nobody shooed it. Two maids saw it from the doorway and withdrew without a word, and the news ran down through the servants' passages faster than any bell could have carried it. By the time Alcina came in from the east stair, every candle in the room had been lit and trimmed twice, and the air had the held brightness of a stage before the curtain.

"Again," she said.

The steward, a thin man who had survived her service by never once looking higher than her gloves, took up the silver. Alcina stood at the head of the table and lifted a fork to the window light, turning it slowly. A Dimitrescu fork, heavy and old, the crest worn soft with a century of handling. She found nothing. She set it down with a click that made the steward flinch, then lifted another.

"Mother notices the small things," she said. "She does not remark on them. She simply remembers, and the remembering is worse." A third piece went into the light and came out clean. "A smear on a spoon, and she wonders what else has been allowed to slide. A girl who forgets her curtsey, and she wonders what sort of mother I have been. Do you understand?"

"Yes, my lady."

"You understand nothing. Go and see to the glass."

Above the ceiling, a thin, restless buzzing passed from one end of the room to the other. Daniela had been moving through the upper floors in fits and starts all morning, dispersing into her flies whenever she grew too nervous to remain still. Alcina could hear the uneven swarms passing through the gaps in the old masonry, their agitation as obvious as her youngest daughter's inability to keep quiet at breakfast.

She crossed the hall, and the daughters were waiting at its far end, because she had told them to wait. Bela stood straight with her hands folded, composed as a nun. Cassandra stood beside her with her hood drawn well forward and her lips scrubbed pale, and for once held herself entirely still. Daniela had reformed beside them, rocking on her heels and humming under her breath, until a single look from her mother stilled even that.

"You will be exquisite," Alcina told them, and gathered each in turn with her eyes. "You will speak when spoken to. You will not hunt, you will not tease, and you will not, Daniela, my darling, offer to show her anything." Her voice gentled by a degree and no more. "She is not a guest. She is the weather. We prepare for her as we would for a storm, and we do not give her cause to remember our names."

Bela dipped her head. "Yes, Mother."

"Good girls."

She turned and went down.

The cold met her at the cellar door, and with it the old sweet reek of the lower levels. The torches had been trimmed here too, which was the steward's doing and a mercy to him. The passage ran away before her in its long wet gleam. She walked it slowly with the ledger open on her arm, and the Moroaică she passed folded themselves against the walls without being told.

Eleven cells in use. She counted them against the page. Eleven. The column agreed with the smell, and for the first time that day something in her chest unclenched.

At the last door she stopped.

She had known he would be there. She had known it all morning, the way a person knows of a stone in a shoe, and had arranged her thoughts around it. A man, alone among a season's women, still breathing three weeks after the others had been used. It was a thing she could explain to herself easily. Whims were permitted. Curiosities were permitted. But there was a difference between a pleasure and a liability, and she was a woman who had survived years of Miranda's inspections by knowing exactly where that line ran.

She looked through the grate.

There he was, the one entry in her accounts that had begun to acquire an inconvenient history. Three weeks. Long enough for the servants to notice that his cell continued to receive water. Long enough for her daughters to begin asking questions. Long enough that she could no longer claim to have simply overlooked him.

It would be simple, of course. A key, a claw, a moment. Remove the entry, say nothing. But the ledger was the ledger, and her steward kept a second one, and the household kept a third in its head. A gap was also a thing that Mother noticed. A countess who disposed of a captive on the very morning of an inspection was a countess with something to hide.

"You will stay quiet," she said, so low that the stone seemed to swallow the words. Her gloved finger rested on the iron. "You will be nothing at all. A prisoner, like the rest. You will not speak unless you are spoken to, and if you are, you will remember that this is my house." The smile that came was small and sharp and not unkind. "I do hope you can manage it. I would so much dislike to be disappointed in you."

Above, faint through three floors of stone, a great door opened.

It did not boom. That was how she knew. Every other arrival in that castle was announced by a shudder in the walls, and this one came in on a silence so complete that the torchflames stood straight up in their brackets. The distant buzzing in the masonry ceased. Every Moroaică in the passage went down on her knees, and the sound of it was like a field of wheat being laid flat.

Alcina closed the ledger. She straightened her hat, her gloves, the line of her gown, and went to meet her.

Mother Miranda came down the stair as though she were walking through her own house, and in the truest sense she was. She was not tall. That was always the first surprise. Her black robes whispered over the stone, trimmed at the shoulder with a restless ripple of dark feathers, and her pale hair lay loose over them like cold light. She did not look at the torches or the damp. She looked at Alcina, and her blue grey eyes were mild, and warm, and infinitely patient, and there was nothing behind them that could be read.

"My daughter," said Mother Miranda.

Alcina sank into a curtsey. It was a long and beautiful one, and the whole height of her folded for it.

"Mother. You honour us."

"I do not think so. I think I am merely early." A small smile. A cool hand rose to touch Alcina's cheek, and stayed there a moment too long, as a surgeon's does. "The silver is very bright, I am told. And the girls look well. I am pleased. I wished to see what you keep below."

"Of course. Everything is in order." The ledger lifted in her arm. "I have kept an account of each."

"I am sure you have."

They walked the passage together, and it was the longest walk Alcina had made in sixty years. Miranda moved from door to door with her hands folded in her sleeves, looking through each grate in turn with the tranquil attention of a gardener among her rows. She said nothing. She touched nothing. At the sixth cell she paused to watch a woman breathe, and nodded to herself, and moved on. At the ninth, she tilted her head as if listening to something under the stone, something that was not there for anyone else, and the feathers at her shoulder stirred though no wind blew.

At the eleventh, she stopped.

Alcina stopped half a pace behind her. She could not have said why her mouth had gone dry.

"Ah," said Miranda, softly.

She looked in for a long time. The torchlight lay across her face and did not warm it. She turned her head a little, and the crow's eye gleamed in the dark of her pupil, and then it was only a woman's eye again, kindly and blue.

"A man. And alive. I had thought your tastes ran otherwise, Alcina."

"A curiosity, Mother," said Alcina, and kept her voice perfectly light. "I have not yet decided what to do with him."

"No. I see that." Miranda did not look round. "That is rather what interests me."

The silence that followed was thin and bright as a blade. Behind them the Moroaică shivered against the wall. Alcina felt the whole long weight of the castle at her back, the vineyards, the girls, the sixty years, and did not breathe.

Mother Miranda stepped to the grate and leaned toward it, one hand lifting to rest on the cold iron where Alcina's glove had been. When she spoke it was in the warm, soft, unhurried voice of a priest at a bedside, a voice that made even the damp go quiet.

"Tell me, child," she said. "Has the Countess been kind to you?"

The wine was wrong, and Alcina knew it on the first swallow.

She had been tasting the autumn blend for an hour, seated in the cellar's long vaulted tasting room with a row of twelve crystal glasses laid out before her on black cloth. The candles were low and the casks stood in their ranks behind her like a silent congregation, and the air was cold, dry and sweet with age. Each glass held a mouthful of something dark. Each had been drawn by the steward from a different cask, and each had a number written in chalk on the slate beside it, because a countess who trusts her memory over her records is a countess who is eventually robbed.

She took the ninth glass between two gloved fingers and held it to the flame.

Nothing in the colour told her. It was the same deep garnet as the others, the same slow cling to the crystal. She breathed in, and that told her very little. She let it touch her tongue, and for a moment she was merely tasting, with the unhurried, half closed eyes of a woman at her pleasure.

Then she stopped.

The glass came down onto the cloth. She did not set it down hard. She set it down with a precision that made the steward, standing three paces off with his hands folded and his eyes on her shoes, go perfectly still.

"Which cask?" said Alcina.

"The ninth, my lady. As marked."

"I can read the slate." She did not raise her voice. "I am asking you where it came from."

He told her what he knew. The ninth was a small blend, a draught of the lower stock, vials taken from the dungeon that week for the autumn racking, mixed in the usual proportions. A little from each of the season's arrivals, with one addition that had been entered separately in the records. The steward hesitated over that part, then cleared his throat.

"There was a vial from the male prisoner, my lady. The one Lady Daniela has been keeping. It was added to the ninth alone. A small quantity, hardly enough to alter the blend, or so we believed."

Alcina picked the glass up again.

She drank a second mouthful, slowly this time, and held it. The others in the row were what she had expected, a dozen variations on the same familiar theme: iron, salt, the sourness of terror turned faintly sweet in the keeping, the tang of whatever the village had been eating that month. She knew them as a bell ringer knows his bells. But beneath the ninth there lay something else, a single thread drawn very fine through the weave, and it was not like any of them. It was cleaner. It had a longer finish, with something dry and cool at the back of it, like stone after rain, and woodsmoke, and under that a faint animal warmth that she could only call comfort.

It was not magic. She turned the thought over with her usual clarity and discarded the romance at once. The Mold knew nothing of this, and neither did Miranda. It was only blood. It was simply, undeniably, very good blood, and it appeared to be one man's.

Alcina swallowed, and a slow, small heat spread behind her ribs.

She had tasted a thousand lives in sixty years. She had learned long ago that most people were a flat, hurried sort of vintage, forgettable even in the glass, and that fear soured them past saving. Once in a long while, perhaps once in a decade, there was someone who did not sour. It was no more than accident, a quirk of the body. It was no more than the way the grape sits on a certain slope. But she knew it, in the way that a collector knows a particular hand in a particular year.

"The manthing," she said, to herself.

She did not know that she had said it aloud until the steward's breath caught.

"My lady?"

"The new man. The one Daniela has taken an interest in." She was already rising, and the whole tall length of her uncoiled from the chair like smoke. "Where is he?"

"Below, my lady. Though I believe..." The steward's eyes finally lifted, and then dropped again very quickly. "Lady Daniela said she meant to finish him tonight. She was most particular. She said it had been a very long week and she was bored."

Alcina was already walking.

She did not hurry. Hurrying would have been an admission, and her household had learned to read her speed as it read a barometer. Her heels clicked evenly across the flagstones. Her gown whispered. Behind her, the glass she had left on the cloth caught the last of the candle and burned very dark, like a held coal.

From somewhere within the dungeon passages came the distant, uneven hum of flies. Daniela was already below, evidently enjoying herself. Alcina recognised the erratic rhythm of her youngest daughter's swarms, the way they gathered and scattered through the stonework whenever she grew excited.

The dungeon stair was cold and slick and smelled of old stone. Alcina went down it with her hand trailing the wall and the ledger forgotten. In the passage below, a torch guttered, and by its light she saw the end door standing open and a small pale figure crouched in the cell mouth with her hood pushed back and her yellow eyes bright with glee.

Daniela was humming.

She had one hand curled in the front of the prisoner's shirt, holding him within reach, and the other, the clawed one, rested very lightly against his throat. The tip had already nicked the skin beneath his jaw, leaving a thin bright line that continued slowly downward as she traced it, with all the idle concentration of a girl signing her name.

"Daniela," said Alcina.

The humming stopped.

"Mother!" The girl swung round, delighted, as one might greet a visitor, and the claw lifted away. "I was only going to be a little bit quick. He's been so quiet. I thought it would be kind." She tilted her head. "You came down. Did you want to watch?"

"I wanted," said Alcina, "for you to take your hand away from him."

It was said so softly that it took Daniela a moment to hear what lay inside it. Then the smile faltered, and the girl let go, stepping back from the door with her hands behind her like a child caught at the sweet jar.

A few flies drifted from the cracks above the cell, gathering uncertainly around Daniela's shoulders before settling into her clothing. She glanced from her mother to the prisoner, plainly searching for some explanation of what she had done wrong.

Alcina offered none.

In the corridor behind them, somewhere, a Moroaică whimpered and was still.

Alcina stooped through the doorframe. The cell was small and she filled it entirely, and the scent of wine and roses went in before her, absurd and heavy, and settled over the stone like a pall.

The man was alive.

A line of red ran down from the shallow cut Daniela had made beneath his jaw to the notch of his collarbone, thin and clean and still welling. Alcina looked at it for a long moment. Then she drew off one glove, finger by finger, and laid it over her arm.

The hand beneath was long and white and very beautiful. She extended one claw and touched it, delicately, to the wet line at his throat, collecting a single bead of blood upon its tip before bringing it to her mouth.

It was the same.

Exactly the same.

Without the other blood to obscure it, the distinction was even clearer. That strange, lingering quality remained, something clean and unexpectedly rich beneath the familiar iron. She let the taste settle, examining it with the same care she had given the ninth glass, and found no fault worth naming.

Her eyes closed.

For a moment she stood perfectly still, and something very like tenderness crossed her face.

"Oh," she said softly. "There you are."

When she opened her eyes again, they were grey and level and bright with a terrible, careful interest. She did not look at her daughter. She did not look away from the man. Her claws drew back, one at a time, until only the faint pale curve of them remained.

"Nobody touches him," said Lady Dimitrescu, to the corridor and the dark and the listening house. "Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not any day I have not named."

"Mother?" Daniela ventured from the doorway.

"Did I stutter, darling?"

"No, Mother."

"Then be a good girl and tell your sisters. This one is mine."

Daniela's expression changed. Disappointment came first, then curiosity, and finally the reluctant acceptance of someone who had just been informed that a favourite toy belonged to somebody else. She lingered another moment, looking at the prisoner with open interest, before withdrawing into the passage.

Alcina scarcely noticed.

She bent, and bent again, until her face was level with his. There was no affection in the calculation behind her eyes, though her expression had softened into something that might easily have been mistaken for it. She had found something rare in an otherwise unremarkable collection, and the question of its preservation had already begun arranging itself in her mind.

A private supply. A careful regimen. Proper nourishment, perhaps, if it improved the quality. No more careless handling by her daughters. No unnecessary damage.

She smiled, warm and slow and entirely without mercy.

"Do you know what is done with a vintage one is fond of, my dear?"

Her gaze travelled briefly to the shallow wound at his throat before returning to his face.

"It is laid down. Carefully. And kept for a very long time."

She let the thought settle between them, pleased by the elegance of it.

"Tell me, would you like to hear how?"

The room she kept for him sat above the wine cellars, warm from the heat that rose through the stone. It was not a cell, though the door still locked from the outside. A proper bed, a basin, a single high window that showed only mountain dark. Alcina had moved him here three weeks ago without explanation, after months of visiting him in the dungeon herself. She had simply continued to come for him, and the change in accommodation had done nothing to alter who held the key.

Tonight she arrived without the ledger. The cigarette holder was unlit between her fingers. She closed the door, turned the key, and set both aside. The scent of red wine and roses filled the narrow space at once. She had to stoop beneath the low beams; even seated on the edge of the bed, the frame creaked under her weight and her knees rose higher than the mattress. When she straightened her shoulders, the ceiling felt closer. He looked smaller for it.

Alcina drew her right gloved hand along the line of his shoulder. The fabric of his shirt was clean. She had insisted on that. Her thumb found the pulse under the skin and pressed, feeling its rhythm. The span of her hand covered most of his shoulder and the side of his neck at once.

"Still whole," she observed, in the same tone she used for a cask that had not yet turned. "I had begun to wonder whether that was stubbornness or a lack of imagination."

She leaned in. The wide brim of her hat brushed the wall. Her mouth rested against the side of his throat while she breathed him in. Wine, roses, and the warmer living scent beneath. Her left hand slid down his chest, slow and proprietary, opening the buttons of his shirt one by one. The claws stayed sheathed. She had learned exactly how much pressure the pads of her fingers could use. Even so, the size of her hand made the motion enveloping; her palm alone spanned from the centre of his chest to the edge of his ribs.

When the shirt fell open, she drew back enough to look. Grey eyes moved over the exposed skin. One gloved fingertip traced a rib, then lower, following the line of his abdomen before coming to rest at his waist. She made a small, considering sound.

"Men are such clumsy things," she said, almost to herself. "All this surface and so little worth keeping. And yet."

She bent again. This time her teeth broke the skin just above the collarbone, a precise, shallow cut. Blood welled warm against her tongue. Alcina drank without haste, one long pull, then another. Her left hand remained against his waist while her right moved to cradle the back of his neck, fingers long enough to circle most of the way around, holding him where she wanted him while she fed.

The grip was firm. It was also, she noted with distant irritation, almost careful.

A second bite, lower. She caught the blood that escaped, savouring the familiar taste beneath the faint residue of the wine she had drunk earlier. Her left hand moved around his side, the breadth of her palm covering much of his waist. She drew him nearer, adjusting her own position on the narrow mattress to accommodate the difference in their proportions. The bed complained beneath her. She paid it no attention.

Her thumb began an idle movement against his side, a slow stroke through the fabric that served no practical purpose. It was not necessary to keep him in place, nor did it improve the quality of his blood. She continued for several moments before noticing what she was doing.

The movement stopped.

Alcina lifted her head. Blood stained her lower lip. She did not wipe it away. Instead, she studied his face, head tilted, grey eyes steady.

"You taste better when you are not half frozen," she said, quieter than she had intended.

Her right thumb stroked once along the side of his throat, smearing a thin line of red. Her other hand remained at his waist, large enough that her fingers extended well around his side.

"Do not mistake that for kindness. I still have no use for the rest of you. Only this."

And yet she reached up to straighten the collar she had disturbed, smoothing the fabric away from the fresh bites with an attention she would never have wasted on an ordinary prisoner.

She seemed to realise the contradiction a moment too late.

"Honestly," she murmured, with a faint note of irritation. "You are becoming quite troublesome."

The disparity between them remained impossible to ignore. Even seated, she occupied much of the bed, her body angled over his so that he remained half in her shadow. One of her hands could span most of his neck; the other could settle against his waist with room to spare. She could have moved him with scarcely an effort, yet she had spent months learning how not to hurt him unnecessarily.

She found that knowledge increasingly difficult to explain to herself.

Alcina leaned closer, the brim of her hat brushing the wall again. Her lips curved, exposing the faintest suggestion of her teeth.

"Tell me," she said, "shall we see whether you can persuade me to remain a little longer, or have you quite exhausted your talents for the evening?"

Her hand remained possessively at his waist, the other resting against the back of his neck, while the cellar fires crackled somewhere beneath the floor.

The fire in Alcina’s private chambers had been banked low, throwing long shadows across the carved panelling and the heavy crimson drapes. She stood before the tall mirror with her back to the door, entirely bare except for the harness. The piece was new, commissioned from a craftsman in the lower village who had been paid well enough to forget the measurements and the precise specifications she had given him. Black leather, fitted to her frame, with a smooth, substantial length of polished wood that had been shaped, sealed, and weighted to her preference. It sat high against her, the base settled firmly where she wanted it.

She had sent for him ten minutes ago. The wait had been deliberate.

One gloved hand rested on the edge of the dressing table. The other moved in a slow, idle stroke along the length, testing the give of the harness and the way the wood warmed under her palm. The claws were sheathed. She watched herself in the glass, grey eyes half lidded, the fall of her dark hair loose over one shoulder. Even without the hat and the gown she remained impossible to mistake for anything smaller than she was. The top of the mirror frame sat well below the crown of her head. When she shifted her weight the floorboards answered.

The door opened behind her. She did not turn at once.

“Close it,” she said. The voice carried easily in the warm room. “And lock it.”

She heard the bolt slide home. Only then did she glance over her shoulder. He stood just inside the threshold, still in the plain clothes she permitted him above the cellars. The disparity struck her again, as it always did when she saw him from this height and in this state of undress. She could have reached him in three strides. She chose not to.

Alcina turned fully. The firelight caught along the curve of her hip and the pale length of her thigh, then along the dark line of the harness. She continued the slow stroke of her hand, unhurried, letting him see the motion and the size of what she wore. The scent of red wine and roses clung to her skin. A thin sheen of oil already gleamed at the tip where she had tested it earlier.

“On the bed,” she said. She nodded toward the wide four poster that dominated the far side of the room. A small crystal bottle sat on the coverlet near the pillows, unstoppered, the oil inside catching the light. “Climb up. Take the bottle I left for you. You will want it.”

Alcina tilted her head, watching him with that same measured attention. The harness shifted with each pass of her hand. She made no effort to cover herself. There was nothing in the room she considered worth hiding from him, and very little she considered his to claim without her say.

She crossed to the foot of the mattress, close enough that he would have to look up to meet her eyes, and rested one hand on the carved post. The other remained wrapped around the length, thumb sliding once more along the underside.

“Slowly,” she added, softer now, almost instructive. “I had this made to my measure. I intend to take my time finding out how well it suits you. Begin with the oil. I will tell you when I am ready for the rest.”

.