“It’s called perseverance.”
“Aye. That’s what Fox calls it when he does it too. Like father, like daughter.”
“I wouldn’t know. You spend more time with him than I do these days.”
“I spend more time getting cursed out by him. Besides, I would have much rather been in Istanbul.”
“Is that so?” I said, frustrated to realize that my pencil was still in our compartment.
“You don’t think I wouldn’t rather be lounging on plush beds, having room service deliver jugs of wine, and scantily clad serving girls to feed me grapes?”
“It’s a hotel, for the love of Pete, not Caligula’s Palace.”
“Shh. Don’t spoil my daydream.”
No worries there. I was too busy with my own daydream, which featured me as a black-hooded assassin, sneaking through hotels, eliminating ample-bosomed serving girls and poisoning all the grapes. “Do you have a pencil?” I asked in frustration.
“Afraid not.” He squinted at me over the table. “Trying to ignore me for that crossword puzzle? You forget—I know you too well, Theodora Fox.”
I forgot nothing. That was precisely the problem.
Luckily, I was saved by our steward, who soon rolled out a trolley laden with food, which he deposited on our table. Bottles of mineral water. Perfectly cut sandwich triangles. Blinis topped with caviar and crème fraîche. Some sort of potato terrine and tiny bowls of olives and shelled pistachios, to which I’d become addicted while staying in Turkey. And after lighting a flame beneath a silver spirit kettle, which steamed with freshly brewed tea, the steward wheeled the emptied cart away, leaving Huck and me on our own again.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I’m famished,” Huck murmured, tucking into the finger sandwiches. He inhaled three before I could blink.
“I would have ordered more if I’d known you were practicing for a competitive eating contest.”
He smiled. “You know what they say. Empty stomach, empty mind.”
“No one says that.”
“An uneaten sandwich never spoils.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“Hang on. I’ve got it now,” he said brightly. “Six sandwiches a day keep the doctor away.”
“You are still absolutely terrible at proverbs.”
“Pfft.I’m a proverbial champion. A modern-day Confucius,” he said, eyes twinkling as he dipped the end of his sandwich triangle into a cup of tea, pausing for effect before shoving it into his mouth. He loved to dunk. Bread in soup, cookies in milk, sandwiches in perfectly good tea. Sometimes I thought he did it just to annoy me; soggy food made me want to retch.
I flagged down the steward and ordered more sandwiches for Huck to ruin. We both ate heartily—some of us more than others—and after the plates began to empty, our forced conversation turned from our impending stop in Romania to my father and shared bits of what we both knew about Vlad the Impaler, me from books and my mother’s stories and him from what little he’d gleaned on the trip to Tokat.
“Fox said Prince Vlad of many names... Vlad the third or Dracula or Tepid—”
“?epe?,” I corrected. “Vlad ?epe?. It means ‘impaler’ in Romanian.”
“Huh. Did not know that. Anyway, Fox said he was either a national hero or a mass murderer, depending on who was telling the stories.” He casually leaned back in his chair, long arms languid, a lazy king lounging on a throne. “I mean, sure, he skewered a few people on spikes to scare off invaders, but was it wrong if it was for the protection of his country?”
“Forty thousand people,” I corrected. “He impaled forty thousand. He invaded Bulgaria”—I tapped the glass, pointing to the moving landscape—“somewhere out there and impaled twenty-three thousand Turkish forces stationed here when the Turkish sultan demanded taxes from him. Then, when the sultan marched north to Wallachia, he was greeted by the gruesome sight of another twenty thousand impaled Turks greeting him along a road for sixty miles.”
Huck whistled. “That’s a lot of skewered bodies. Imagine the stench.”
“And the work. Impaling someone can’t be easy. And supposedly Vlad preferred to do so while they were still alive. They’d die slowly for a day or two in utter agony.”
“You’d have to really hate someone to go to all that trouble.”
“Oh, he hated, all right. He hated the Turks. And his own half brother, Radu. Really, anyone who challenged his power. His own people, even.”
