The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.
Robert Frost.
There is a woman who walks the lands, hooded and cloaked. She is an old woman; bent, frail. Across the grass, over the hills, she walks. She is in all of the forests, all of the lakes, all of the lands. She has many names, yet there is only one of her. And she is searching; always, she is searching. Her name is Baba Yaga, and she is searching for me.
1505, Bavaria
I feel cold. The grass is shining beneath me, with the golden light of the sun. But I am cold.
I do not understand it. My eyes are closed, the sun should warm my eyelids, should heat my hands that are outstretched beside me. It doesn't.
I open my eyes, and I blink. Once, twice. The air is too light, too strange. My heart is pounding, racing in my chest. My chest. My chest heaves, and my body follows. Now I am sitting, palms on the ground behind me. The breaths come in quickly now; my memory is returning.
My boy. My boy. I am running through the forest, pushing through the trees, my black hair catching on the branches. I want to scream but I am terrified and the words catch in my throat.
I run and run and run – the forest is moving around me, I hear the leaves whispering to me, telling me their secrets, asking for my boy. But I cannot answer – I cannot answer.
I find my boy, lying face down, the leaves around him stained with blood. Horse's hooves have trampled his body– someone has killed him and they have not even moved his tiny form.
Now, my voice comes. I moan and thrash my fists on the ground, I wail and scream. I do not form words, I cannot think them.
My boy.
Like a mad woman, like Baba Yaga, I feel around on the ground, looking for anything. My eyes are trained on the body of my boy, but my hands flit around, looking for anything.
When they find something, I turn. I see boots; black leather boots. I curl my fingers around their ankles, still wailing, still screaming.
Strong hands hook under my arms and pull me up. They hold me at arms length as I drop my weight onto them, but the man does not budge. His arms stay straight.
My head lolls back and he takes one step closer, his arms finally bending and then he bends me, too, folding my body up like an infant in his arms. I do not want to leave my son and I feel my strength return for one fleeting moment as I scream that I will not leave my boy, my little boy.
The man pauses, as if deliberating. He shifts the weight of me and now I am cradled against his chest and his other arm is holding my son.
I want to ask him how he can bear the weight – drop me instead and drag me behind him on a rope. Give my boy the dignity of both of his arms. But I cannot speak. The arm that is holding my boy has a gash on the wrist – a clean cut, blood still dripping from it. There is a dampness on my tongue. It tastes of iron, of something bitter that I cannot place.
In my daze, I see the man bend his head of dark hair down towards me. Brown eyes connect with mine.
"I am sorry," I hear a gruff voice say and when his mouth moves I see that it is his.
His mouth moves again and my fingers grip onto his vest.
"I tried," he says.
I turn my face away from him, and stare at the lifeless body of my boy, held in his other arm. My boy has blood on his mouth, too.
"I tried."
The man sets me down beside a tree. The trunk is thin, the branches are too wispy.
"The other one," I say. I have found my voice.
He turns in confusion and I point at the tree beside it. "That one."
Without a word, he begins to dig at the base of the oak, quickly making a deep grave close to the roots. I nod in approval. The roots are huge – they snake around the trunk. They will protect my boy.
I notice that he digs with his bare hands – yet not once does he falter.
My boy's face is so beautiful that I do not want to cover it. But I do. I place coins over his closed eyes and wrap his face with my own scarf. I pray; to God, to Baba Yaga, asking them to take care of my boy. Protect him, return him to the earth.
I try to lift my son's body but I cannot. My arms sag under the weight. The man is at my side in an instant and, somehow, he knows. He places his arms under mine, so that my skin is still against that of my boy's, and lifts for me. Together we place him into the grave.
When nature has taken his body, swallowed him up with dirt and debris, I stand back and look at the freshly covered ground.
"Where are the other bodies?" I ask the man. For how else have we managed to get here, and not come across the other bodies of those who died in their efforts to kill us.
"In the lake."
"The lake?" I turn to him, incredulous. His head of black hair moves up and down in a nod.
"It won't like it," I admonish. "It'll spit them back out."
His dark brows fold over in a frown. "How do you know?"
I turn away from him, from his confusion, his bewilderment. I turn back to my boy and kneel beside where his head is, only a few feet below my hands.
The man crouches down beside me and trails his fingers over the disturbed earth.
"I am sorry," he says again. "I did try."
It is a poor apology for a woman who has lost her son. It is not an apology at all, but rather an admission of guilt. Not for my boy's death, for never did I believe that my boy could be saved once I saw their swords drawn. It is an apology for this man's failing, because somehow he should have been able to breathe life into my boy, but he hasn't.
"I know," I say. And I do know.
Why?
Because he managed to breathe life into me.
1509, Seville
I stretch out on the bed, basking like a cat in the sunshine that my skin cannot even feel.
"My lady?" I hear the foreign voice outside of the door and rise to open it, revealing the man's servant Shkelgim, a gypsy man, like me.
"The Prince would like to see you," he says, and hands me a goblet of rich, dark red liquid. I feel my strange, sharp fangs descending at the scent of it and nod, shutting the door to his kind, old face as my own rapidly transforms into that of a monster.
When the man, or Vlad, as I now know him to be, told me of what I had become, I heaved onto the grass. Or I would have heaved, in another life. In my new, dead life, I dry wretched like a milksop who'd had too much Bavarian beer.
He'd given me three days, to decide. But I had shook my head with a newfound resolve – I did not want to live. My son was not alive; why should I be? I wanted to die. I held my wrist under his chin and said: "kill me, so I do not live."
But Vlad only bent his nose to my skin and breathed in the scent, a strange mixture of blood and ice, he told me later, and dropped my wrist. It was then that he had introduced me to Shkelgim, whose blood, more often than not, flows through my veins instead of my own. I do not know how this gypsy is still alive, yet somehow he is. But perhaps we will need to find a new one, soon.
I finish the goblet and stand at the window, looking out at the forest that begins from the back of this beautiful house. I whistle softly, calling to Baba Yaga – has she seen my son? I hear a faint sound carry through the wind and I smile.
"My lady?"
"Yes," I turn and walk out of the room, down the corridor, up heavy wooden stairs and onto the man's floor. Everything is darker here, richer. I do not like it, truth be told. The carpets are too red for my taste, the wood too brown, the tapestries too dark. But I walk down the corridor anyway, trailing my fingers along the wall until I come to the door at the end that I open myself, not waiting for Shkelgim.
Vlad is standing at his window, an identical goblet in his hand. He is exactly as he was when I first saw him – the same hair, the same body, the same skin. No new wrinkles, no new slivers of grey. He is wearing black. He always wears black.
"Alvina," he says quietly and tips the goblet in my direction. Perhaps in another life I would have curtsied to this Prince. Now I nod and go to stand at his side, looking out at the trees.
How beautiful this land is! How warm! Perfect for Baba Yaga, and perfect for me, her descendent. The trees are endless, the land rolling here and flat there, and the sun! The sun shines decadently, like a beer that is cool instead of warm.
I stretch out my hand to the pocket of sun near the window ledge and sigh in delight when my skin glows. Beside me, Vlad does the same but his sizzles like he has laid it on coals and not the wooden ledge. He hisses and removes it. I wonder, as I have done so many times, why Baba Yaga is still protecting me, daughter of nature, even though I am dead. But, as I have done so many times, I smile and silently thank her. She does not need to explain herself.
"Have you found anything?" Vlad asks grimly. He is always grim.
"Still looking," I say absentmindedly, then look up at him. "And the silk? Are you still pulling the line, a hand length each day?" He nods. "And you retie it?" He nods again.
"We shall see what comes out of the lake when you reach the end," I say and cross my fingers, pinching the skin between my thumb and index finger twice.
"That is why I called for you," he admits. "We need to leave."
"Oh," I say flatly, though I am not surprised. This land is too nice for us. "Why?"
"The same reasons…" he shrugs. "And perhaps I was too obvious when I raided that last ship. Their monopoly on the trade routes is becoming rather vexing."
I laugh – I can't help it. I throw my head back and laugh, feeling my long hair brushing my waist. Vlad laughs too, but only for the smallest of seconds.
He is looking at me – not fondly, not tenderly, only kindly. I see myself in the reflection of his eyes; still pale, still slim, brown eyes that only have the slightest of wrinkles at the sides, pink lips and black hair. I still look one and thirty, though by my count I am now five and thirty.
"We will leave before the silk line finishes," I predict, thinking of how I had tied foot after foot of thin silk, cast it into the lake and fastened it to a nearby tree. We have been waiting until Vlad pulls out enough that we are able to see what the lake gives him in return, on the end of the hook. There is always something. The spell always gives something.
"And you will be right," he smiles softly.
"Where?" I ask next.
"I thought…" he looks down at his feet, then back at me. "Where do you want to go?"
Me? Vlad has never asked me.
"To my son, to your son," I answer immediately, then shrug. I know we cannot – not yet. "To the sea," I say next. "Do you know, I have never seen it?"
"Yes you have," he replies blandly, undoubtedly thinking of our journeys over the last four years.
"No." A man wouldn't understand, even an undead one. "I haven't. Haven't ever put my feet in it, haven't ever cast a spell with the salt water."
Then I think. I feel a telltale chill. "To the sea, but where it rains. We haven't tried sea water and rain water before." I am thinking of new spells, different mixes I can try.
I am trying to find a way for Vlad to walk in the sun. I can, yet my maker cannot. It is the most amusing conundrum for me, as the loss of my son and the strangeness of being a monster has made me a cynic. But Vlad feels the loss of the sun keenly. He wants to walk in it again. And what he wants, I want.
He nods. "To England, then."
.
.
.
A/N
Welcome to the story. I am aiming for a short, AU explanation of Vlad's years between the ending of the film and perhaps modern day but more than likely it'll leave off somewhere before that. I've taken inspiration from the Baba Yaga figure (baba: old woman, yaga: witch) in European folklore. My character is greatly influenced by Philippa Gregory's wonderful depicture of Elizabeth Woodville, a woman who is a descendent of the water goddess Melusina. A good read, if you have the time.
