Nicolas shook his head. “Rózsa said nothing, just leant over and spat on the polished floor, then walked away without looking back.
“I took her with me to Prague and she became my daughter. But the time she had spent in the prison with her parents had taken its toll, and in the convent she had not been allowed to rest and regain her health, but rather made to do work too heavy for a child of her brittle strength. The winter following her fifteenth birthday I watched the signs of the consumption growing in her. I had seen it before in another dear one, and I could not bear it. The physicians said that mountain air would be good for her, so in the spring we traveled to Bavaria, and there we met Prince Geoffrey, who had taken a house there and asked us to stay with him.
“The hectic badge of her fatal illness continued to glow in her cheeks and I grieved, for I knew she would be taken from me, and I had come to love her dearly. But then I saw other signs, and these I put together with my observations of the prince, and one night I confronted him with my suspicions.’ My lord,’ I said ‘I think that you are a vampire, and that you are feeding upon my child.’ He did not deny it, but said that she would not live to be a woman without him, and that he had offered his gift to her, and that she had accepted him. ‘So now, Nicolas,’ he said to me ‘what would you?’ I told him I would stay with her, and become as he was, if he would extend his gift to me.
“He agreed, and a few weeks later, on Rózsa’s sixteenth birthday, we dosed her heavily with poppy syrup, and Geoffrey smothered her as she slept. She had no wound, no horror to fight through, you see. She slept, and then awakened. A few days later, when we were certain that Rózsa would live, I followed her.”
Nicolas fell silent, staring at the fire. I turned my attention to Geoffrey, who said nothing, for a time, then abruptly spoke.
“About my living days there is little to be said. Much was done, or so I’ve read, of which I am less than proud now, but given the circumstances I would most likely not do any differently, saving only accepting horse and armor from my brother John!” His smile was brief and bitter. “Richard was always hell-bent,” he continued, “desiring only the glory of battle—no, not even the battle, but rather the conquest, the forcing of others to do his will against theirs. It was meat and drink to him. It’s whispered about that he loved only boys,” Geoffrey’s cool gaze lit on me, and I shifted a little in my chair. “That’s not true, of course. Richard loved only Richard. He took boys, and men, because women were not, in his eyes, powerful enough to make the taking worthwhile. He married a woman who could but intensify his belief in the worthlessness of her sex. Had he married Constance of Brittany in my stead, she would have taught him his folly, and they would probably have ruled the world! She was a strong woman, and hated us all equally, but always held an eye for the main chance. Mother, on the other hand, Richard never believed was human at all. But there, I am wandering; you must bring me up short, or you will learn more about my family than you ever imagined in your worst nightmare.”
I realized with a start that Geoffrey was talking of the Lionheart, that this man had been alive then, four hundred years ago, had lived the stories I had been raised upon. I shook my head and compelled my attention back to the discourse.
“ . . . a tournament in Paris. John had made me a gift of a beautiful destrier. I had looked the beast over, as would anyone who’d had so long an acquaintance with my younger brother, and I could find no fault with him, nor yet with the harness. But, in the mounted mêlée, I heard a strange and piercing whistle, and the stallion reared suddenly, twisting in a peculiar fashion; the cleverly contrived harness sundered and I was thrown. I knew as I touched the ground that it was a plot, for the beast whirled and trampled me. I felt the grinding of my