Magia Posthuma ✓

Fifteen

A couple of days before Christmas, Ferenc came to visit his sister. It was a Saturday afternoon, the last market day before Christmastide, and – although it was one of the only days of the week where he wasn't expected to serve his master and was therefore able to go out and earn his own money – he'd chosen to spend the time with his very small family of one. His sister.

Irina was more than happy to allow them a little time together, and while they sat down beside the fireplace and talked – she curled up in the window smoking tobacco with Folie sleeping at her feet as she pored over the notes in her ledger and caught up with her letters.

There weren't as many letters as there usually were; a few so called friends back in Vienna had stopped writing to her as soon as the rumours had reached them, and those who hadn't stopped writing, wrote far less frequently than before. Amalia still wrote, of course; she'd heard the rumours but refused to let them cloud her love for her best friend. She was just as lonely, it seemed, and had written close to ten pages complaining about the court in Parma, her mother (who she wasn't speaking to) along with a detailed description of some infuriating French minister who was pulling her husband's strings. Irina sympathised (although it had all honestly seemed a bit trivial to her) and had scribbled just as many pages in response about the equally infuriating Hungarian Prince who was attempting to pull on her father's strings. She signed off with a little well-meaning nudge for her best friend to make amends with the Empress – "what I wouldn't give for a meddlesome mother, Mal."

In between the letters, she perplexed over her notes (including the phrases she'd plucked out of Magia Posthuma and added in the margin), brushed her fingers over the rough, ink sketches of blood cells and translucent, white cells – as well as the strange, metamorphosing – mutating – hidden cells that she'd discovered in Vlad's blood. Both sets were differentiated and labelled clearly in her swooping handwriting. HUMAN BLOOD, and "V" BLOOD. V for Vlad. V for very strange. V for very everything, really.

"Tell me the truth, Ferenc," Fiebe suddenly insisted in Romanian.

Irina tuned her ears as she looked up; she blew a stream of smoke into the air and gazed off towards the misty mountains on the horizon. She didn't mean to eavesdrop in on Fiebe and Ferenc's conversation; it wasn't so much that she was trying to listen to what they were saying, more that she was testing herself – seeing how much of the language she could understand. They spoke as quickly and as fluently as native speakers tend to do, and sometimes just picking up a familiar word was as difficult as distinguishing a single raindrop on a rooftop during a downpour – but Irina surprised herself when she found she was able piece together a few fragments of their conversation, just like a puzzle.

"Is he still cruel to you?" Fiebe asked her brother as she continued stitching an intricate pattern of silver vines and leaves all along the satin sleeves and pleats of the gown Irina had chosen to wear to Prince Lupesci's Christmastide ball.

Ferenc scoffed. "...Nothing I can't handle," he replied, brushing a rough, beaten hand through a crop of hair the same soft strawberry blonde shade as Fiebe's.

Irina imagined that he might be handsome if he scrubbed up. He was boyish and tall with long limbs, sullen brows and a set of slightly sunken, heavy amber eyes. He had long fingers that she imagined might have made themselves useful playing a harpsichord or violin in another life, but instead they were mottled with scratches and scrapes from the snares he used to serve his master. They'd annoyed Irina the last time he'd visited, and so she'd made a healing balm for Fiebe to give him for Christmastide.

"I'm lucky, sis. I don't have it as bad as the others; I hardly see the bastard. I'm always outside checking the fences and the traps. And with the bounty on wolves caught, I can earn a little extra and have a bit of fun - you know," he added with a wink.