If you're reading this from the main blog page, and you haven't finished Dragon Slayer, and don't want spoilers, then don't click on the "Read More" under the photo.
But I want to talk about my boys!!
This will doubtless turn into several posts, because there's lots of break down. Let the debriefing commence...
I want to start with Vlad.
Before I wrote the first word of White Wolf, I knew two things: that Vlad was going to play a major part in this series. And that writing him as a sympathetic figure was going to be a tall order.
But after putting in the research, that order turned out to be not so tall. I've never written a character quite like him, but I'm enjoying it immensely!
I've joked about him being the Inigo Montoya of this series, but it's not that much of a joke. Vlad's driving force is revenge. And he's a cold, patient man.
“It’s funny,” he said, breathless now as the pain
tugged at him, “all these humans think I’m the liar, and you’re the
straightforward one. They’ve got it all wrong.”
“I’m not a liar,” Vlad countered, turning back to
him. “I’m only patient.”
“That’s one word for it. And you never met a
grudge you couldn’t hold forever. Atlas carried the world on his shoulders, but
you carry all the world’s grudges, brother.”
“I’m patient,” Vlad repeated. “I waited
five-hundred years to pay you back for this.” He reached to pull the collar of
his shirt aside and reveal the faint white scar across his shoulder, a near mirror-image
of the wound he’d given Val.
“That’s not patient, that’s vengeful!” Val
countered with a disbelieving laugh.
“Revenge requires patience,” Vlad said seriously,
and Val lost it.
One of my historical sources referred multiple times to the authors' "surprise" that Vlad would "turn against the Ottomans." That he "went back on his word after being installed in Wallachia." Vladislav and Hunyadi were directly responsible for this father's death, after all; so why did he align himself with Hunyadi and seek war with Mehmet? They wondered...after having described in detail what Mehmet was still doing to Radu.
Were the authors being coy? I like to think so. Because to me, Vlad's reasoning is quite clear: he took his pound of flesh over his father and brother. But his baby brother was still in enemy hands, and he'd make a deal with whatever devil he had to in order to stop what was happening. This is the idea that drove my characterization of him.
Perhaps, in real life, he really did hate his brother when they were both hostages. But that would be a one-dimensional, boring way to spin the story. The great irony, then, is that for all his outward coldness, Vlad actually feels deeply. He loved his family, very much so, and that was what sustained him as his revenge was delayed for years. He doesn't hate Val, but intentionally drives a wedge between them; draws his captors' ire on himself in the hopes of sparing Val the hurt.
Vlad might have obeyed then, just to wipe the
worry and fear from his brother’s face. He was thoroughly convinced his little
brother could stop a war with that pitiful look.
But to do so would show that Val was his weakness
– which it was. And weaknesses could be exploited; could be made to suffer for
the sake of manipulation.
That couldn’t happen. Not ever.
So Vlad turned his shoulder to his brother,
blanked his face, and said, “No,” yet again.
But of course, from Val's perspective, who's always been a bit in awe of his grouchy older brother, this burst of coldness - the intentional use of the name he dislikes - can only be seen as hate.
At the beginning of the book, after the ugly events at the end of Red Rooster, Val has no reason to think being asleep for six-hundred years has altered that hate. When Vlad has Val electrocuted in RR, he tells him he's being punished. Val believes he is; why wouldn't he? And so in DS, when a still-recovering Val hears his brother come into his cell, he's braced for more torture.
Get up, get
up, he
thought, desperate, but his body wouldn’t cooperate. He managed to crack his
eyes open a slit, just in time to get a blurry glimpse of Vlad’s boots as he
came to stand over him. He opened his mouth to croak out some pitiful insult,
but his throat was too dry, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.
Vlad’s clothes rustled softly as he crouched
down. And then…
Then.
And then Vlad's taking care of him. And we get the reveal about the spell. And Val starts to understand that, maybe, he got it wrong all along. Because his furious, fuming, unreadable big brother is so ruthless that, oftentimes, violent efficiency colors even his well-meant deeds.
I loved that bathtub scene. Er, the second one. The first was fun, too, but for different reasons.
He lifted one shaking hand and held it up before
him, fingers spread so the sunlight slipped between them, limned them in
silver.
“Why?” he asked, and looked to his brother. His
voice shook, his body shook.
Vlad’s cruel features were as implacable as
always. But his eyes hinted at warmth and softness. “When was the last time
they bathed you?”
He wet his lips. “I…I don’t know.”
“Can you stand?”
“No.”
Vlad nodded and went to turn the taps off. The
rushing of water left behind a bristling silence, filled only with the
occasional plunk of a stray droplet, and Val’s unsteady, open-mouthed
breathing.
Vlad returned. “Here,” he said, and reached for
the tattered hem of Val’s shirt. He undressed him efficiently, but carefully,
his sword-callused hands gentle. And when Val was naked, lifted him into his
arms again and lowered him slowly into the full bath.
We explore a variety of relationships in this book: familial, friend, romantic. But I think it's the relationship between Vlad and Val that drives the narrative, to a certain extent. They have so much more in common than they know. They're brothers, after all; and, in my universe, the grandsons of the Roman God of War. There's a martial spirit in both of them. They look different, though; the sallow, unhandsome Vlad, and the fine-featured, beautiful Val. Val is soft-spoken, respectful, and charming. Vlad is sullen, ill-tempered, and completely without charm. Val could not have kept picking himself back up and fighting on as the "prince without a palace." Likewise, Vlad couldn't have survived at court, not least because Mehmet would have executed him out of personal dislike.
So in so many ways, they seem total opposites. But they're both patient in their own ways. Vlad fleeing when necessary, biding his time in Moldavia, and then Transylvania. And Val decided to play along with Mehmet, in order to stay alive.
He thought of Vlad, of the riding crop slapping
his head, his shoulders, the backs of his knees. His willfulness and sullenness
in the face of all his teachers. That
was resolve. The kind of thing that got men through captivity. It was only his
body that had been hurt – and it was a strong body at that. An immortal one.
What was a little pain and a little time to a
vampire if it would, in the long run, get him what he wanted?
In the next week or so, I want to visit specific passages and scenes, and walk through some of the DVD commentary of it all. So stay tuned for more!
That bathtub scene was so good!
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