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Elizabeta braided her hair without looking in the mirror.
"A little more..." Vlad had murmured. "To that side, yes..."
She sat on the edge of their bed, he laid near her.
Her servants had been relinquished of the duties of undressing her in the evening long ago. It had been Vlad's desire, and her settlement with her maids and ladies in waiting.
All that time ago.
Elizabeta knotted the ribbon at the bottom of the second braid, and laid back to rest her head on Vlad's stomach.
"When I was walking today I went to the cemetery no one visits anymore." She told him. "There was a graffitied gravestone hidden amongst the plaques for unburied dead at memorial from the last conflict. It looked as though a metal rod had been used, the size of my finger, perhaps. My love, I think of you as love tears us apart. What a series of words to leave for someone."
"That gravestone must belong to the Ionaescu family." Vlad said. "Their daughter was the only one who could read and write. She would have written those words before she left."
"Where did she go?" Elizabeta asked.
"She married a merchant and they went to Greece." Vlad replied.
She smiled a little. She moved up so she sat on the side of the bed again.
"Is it too hot for us there now?" She asked.
"In the middle of the day, we would need to be in the shade." Vlad told her. He sat up, and drew her into his arms.
"We cannot be scorched." Elizabeta said as his mouth pressed to her temple, and the top of her cheekbone.
"This is true." Vlad agreed.
"Halved figs with feta and honey. Pelagoniums in terracotta pots. Hellenistic palace ruins in the moonlight." Elizabeta thought aloud. "Does that not sound like a dream?"
"It sounds like Greece." Vlad said.
She smiled.
"Ocean bathing in the dawn or the dusk?" She proposed.
"I would like us to experience both." Vlad said.
"I do not mean just now." Elizabeta reminded him. "Not even in a few months. Perhaps next year. The year after. I enjoy our snow. Our forests. Our frozen lakes."
"Of course." Vlad agreed.
Elizabeta's face leaned into his. She was tired, her body ready to sleep. The press of Vlad's nose against her head did not discomfort him.
She hummed softly, and leaned back in Vlad's arms. She opened her eyes by half as the back of her head rested on his shoulder.
"I dream about you, even though you are here." She said. "I saw this vision last night. It was raining, yet the raindrops were pearls. They hit the earth just like waterdrops, but the light on them from the dark clouds as they fell...we watched them from the windows here. What a strange dream. A lovely dream."
"It becomes you." Vlad told her.
Elizabeta's eyes glowed.
"I should hope so." She replied.
/ / /
Vlad was made curious by what Elizabeta did remember, and what she did not remember.
She became lost so frequently in the castle that the goblins would mutter and shake their heads before she went through a doorway. They would point to the library, the dining hall, the ballroom, the dungeons, the weapons room, the kitchens, the stables. It was where Elizabeta intended to go customarily.
"I never thought my memory would fade before my face." Elizabeta said. She moved a brush through her hair, made damp by snow that had begun to fall on it as she had walked from the stables. "I thought I would become a gaunt, looming presence that never forgot a detail like my mother."
"It has been many years since you were here, my love. You cannot punish yourself." Vlad told her. "Do you remember what your Mother looked like?"
"When I left her to marry you her lips had started to become thin, her cheeks sinking in." Elizabeta described. "Her forehead was nearly smooth, but there were lines around her eyes, nose and mouth. Her eyebrows stayed thick and dark. The caterpillars suited her. The other ladies plucked their hairlines back and made their brows into those faint arches. I thought it would be so tedious, the first act and the maintenance." She smiled a little. "I hoped you would think I was beautiful, and not take a mistress that everyone knew was more beautiful than me when I was travelling here. I was young. Forgive me for doubting you."
"I hoped that you would not insult me and despise me. I expected you to." Vlad said.
"You speak as though you would have tolerated it, when I know you would not have." Elizabeta said.
Vlad's mouth quirked.
"My Mother told me to be good to you, and to not expect goodness in turn." Elizabeta said. "Security, luxury, children. If I was fortunate." The chuckle that went to pass her lips died in her mouth as she saw the look on her husband's face.
"When she discovered how you died..." Vlad said. "She cursed my name. She invoked pagan priests and shaman songs to end my life. Those close to her were terrified for her welfare. They pleaded her to reconsider her behaviour. To sink to her knees and apologise to me. They thought I would have her murdered."
The hairbrush was laid with a trembling hand on the table.
Elizabeta had never heard Vlad speak those words.
"How long after I died did she die?" Elizabeta asked, her tone pitching higher with emotion.
"She lived to sixty three years." Vlad told her. "Her death was caused by brain fever, and wet lungs."
Elizabeta looked to her curled hands in her lap. The soft swells of flesh in her palms and fingers, made into shapes by the natural lines.
Vlad came to her from his armchair near the fireplace. His hands moved over the shape of her shoulders, and he kissed the top of her head.
"I know where she is buried, draga mea." Vlad said. "We will take her a wreathe tomorrow."
"There won't be anything left of her body." Elizabeta said, before her head tipped forward and she burst into tears.
Vlad stroked the hair of the grief delayed by three hundred and eighty years with one hand, and held his other against her cheek.
/ / /
Pianos had not been in existence in their first marriage.
Elizabeta had learned to play from a child in her new life.
"Have you ever heard the adiagetto of Gustav Mahler's fifth symphony?" She asked Vlad. A fire in the large hearth of the drawing room made Elizabeta and the piano look aflame.
"No, my love." Vlad said. He gazed at the sight in solemn appreciation. It reminded him of some of the Rubens paintings he had seen during his time at the Hague a hundred years before. "I have never known of music."
"It is a piece for harp and strings in origin, yet I can play it well on piano." Elizabeta said. "It transcribes so well for someone who plays with their left hand, such as I." She smiled. "I did learn the violin, as well. Now we know what you shall give me for my name-day. I will play it for you on piano tonight, and in later time, violin."
Vlad's eyes moved down as Elizabeta adjusted her skirts under the piano. The tip of her foot in a white slipper found the pedal, and waited against it.
Vlad listened as one by one, Elizabeta pressed down keys in sounds that he did not know were a C-minor.
"What am I doing?" She smiled at him with one shoulder raised to her chin. "Come here. Come sit with me."
Vlad moved an armchair around her waist, and kissed her temple, as he came to be beside her.
He watched her fingertips move in that strange way that was necessary for the instrument to be played, yet unfamiliar to him.
"I can play twelve on piano." Elizabeta murmured. "More on violin."
"When did you learn this one?" Vlad asked.
"When I found I was going to be married off to that naive, foolish solicitor." Elizabeta chuckled. "It thought it would be romantic."
"You thought you would perform for him in the evenings after a long day of his naivety and foolishness?" Vlad remarked.
"Indeed so." Elizabeta's eyes twinkled. Her right hand which she did not need to play covered Vlad's other hand. She entwined her fingers with his and squeezed them.
"It was lovely to see Paris." She said. "But I care more to be here with you. What strange ways we have experienced when we were separated, my Prince."
"Meu iubit." Vlad murmured.
In Wallachia, there had been an Îndrăgostit for too long.
A lover made unhappy by his unrequited love, yet he continued to love all the same.
Lover love-lorn.
Love rebirthed.
/ / /
A kiss to her hip, then more laid across the small of her back.
There were no scars from the sword and the tooth trap on her back, chest, and leg.
Gratitude to not be haunted by his past actions in that way made Vlad's vision turn white for moments at a time.
A sharp nail on Elizabeta's foot had cut a long line down the back of Vlad's left calve. There was a bruise around her wrist from where Vlad had held her too tightly when she had nearly fallen off the bed and he had caught her in time.
"For a moment I looked to that frission in the stonework for my soul to slip through." Elizabeta chuckled.
"Not without my permission." Vlad moved her hair back behind her ears with his fingertips.
"Not without my permission, either, do you go." Elizabeta traced the line of his nose with her fingertip.
She had always had her own words to describe her side of their relationship.
My man. My husband. My Prince. My property. Father of my child.
Vlad blinked as he felt his heart crack.
"I will not leave you." Elizabeta closed his eyes with her thumbs, and her full lips pressed to each one in turn.
There were some things they did not talk about.
The loss of their unborn baby was one of them.
Whether it was a desperate union, hasty with base desire, or a long isolation from the world, primeval with bone marrow dripping with red blood cells smouldering and figures pressing into each other, the end was the same.
She would laugh, gleeful and strong and sated.
She then would cry, and it was something that she could not help. Her body needed to do it. It needed what came after.
Her tears were thick, heavy with salt. She cried concentrated saline that clung to her eyelashes and the skin above her cheekbones. It brought a sheen to her skin, and showed up the violet blue veins.
"We were apart for so long." Vlad would say. "You will need time to become used to me again."
"I love you." She would painfully protest, her mouth twisting in agitation and bitterness. "I want to be with you. There is nothing wrong. I do not know what is wrong."
Vlad would hold her in his arms, her back against his chest, and he would cover her eyes with one hand, whilst his other hand held both of hers.
He would speak to her of the past, of the first time, until her heartbeat became slow, instead of a terrifying current without pauses of patterns.
"It was my effortless ambition to remember you without predicting you." Vlad would tell her lowly. "With you, it was always a hunt. I was your prey, and you loved me. Yet, I bought you to my memory whenever I could. A labour of which I was do grateful, and so in need off, in later time. I would mutter it all to myself before I went to the darkness at night. Sleep changed for me. It did and did not exist when you were taken from me. Visions of you, as though you were not gone, would pull me into a meditation that could last for months. The cruelty outside the castle walls of invasions and civil wars, and I was there in the dark with you. I was safe with you. Happy, with you."