#DragonSlayer Debriefing: Hostages

This book could have been much shorter. I could have kept discussion of the past to a bare minimum; a few quick flashbacks. But I knew early on that I didn't want to do that. Vlad and Val are such important characters moving forward that I wanted to really show them to the audience; more than that, I wanted to show how two innocent little boys could grow into the men they are now. And that, in this instance, is neither a quick, nor lighthearted story. In my other books, I often reference a character's childhood, but here, I needed to show you most of it. 

During their meeting in the garden, Sultan Murat tells Vlad the following:

Murat studied him, head canted to the side. “It’s a shame,” he drawled, “that you and my son could never be friends. He could have learned from you – you have something which, despite all his wonderful qualities, he lacks.”

“Sir?”

That almost-smile again. “My Mehmet is made of fire. But you. You are made of steel.”

It struck me as a very fitting way to describe these two adversaries. 

Vlad Dracula was, in real life, a cold, cold man. He bottled all his rage and hate up, and conducted himself in a mostly emotionless way; a small, cruel smile every so often. 

By contrast, Mehmet was most definitely made of fire. He raged, he screamed, he had extraordinary fits of temper. If he suffered a military defeat, he impaled the generals who'd led the charge. He terrorized his viziers; they knew death was a distinct possibility should they displease him. During the building of the Throat-Cutter, his building crews were threatened with torture and impalement. He was brilliant, but he was emotionally troubled, and, as the absolute authority in his empire, had no one to temper or check him. 

Vlad began his captivity as uncooperatively as possible. Accounts show that the riding crop was used liberally on him. Eventually, though, he settled. Grew "patient," as George Castrioti urges him in the book. And, intelligent as he was, it wasn't long before he'd picked up the Turkish language, and tackled his education in earnest. There's no official reporting that this was at George's urging, but given George's future as Skanderbeg, Ottoman enemy, and his known friendship with Vlad at this time, I think it's a reasonable conclusion that he helped Vlad to understand the long game here. 

But poor Val. His father's third son: neither heir nor spare. He caught Mehmet's eye. 

The Val we first meet at the beginnign of White Wolf, the one who visits Sasha, and, a few moments later, Monsieur Philippe's seance, is silky, charming, and calculated down to every inch. A showman; one who is cocky, smug, and in complete control of his own reponses. 

But baby Val, holding his brother's hand on the way to see the acrobats, is all sweetness and innocence. What happened between then and now? Mehmet happened. 

It was important to me that we get to watch the gradual evolution of Val from sweet child to cunning royal pet. He crafted his own invisible suit of armor, piece by piece. 

He realizes, after that first night, that resistance is completely futile. But it isn't until this scene -  

In the beat before the sultan spoke, Val felt an odd stirring. Somewhere deep, up under his ribs, where it was warm and well-protected. It was…it was resolve. Only a small kernel of it, but hard and bright as burnished steel. It rearranged his insides to make room for itself, pushed out some of his awful, desperate prey drive. He was chained to the wall with silver, a slave in all the ways that counted, but he had a fight brewing inside him, the long-range, patient kind. He couldn’t let it out now, no. But someday. It could wait. He could wait. And maybe Mehmet would beat him, would doubtless ravish him, but Val found that he wasn’t afraid the way he’d been up to this point.

He lifted his chin.

Mehmet took another swallow of wine and then set the cup aside, eyes never straying from Val’s face. “I expected cowering.”

Val didn’t respond.

 - that he decides he's going to lean into the awful turn his life has taken. It's simple self-preservation. As long as he's cowering, he's a victim. Victims hope for better, and he knows that, in the long run, hoping is going to kill him more surely than any of the violence exercised against him. He won't hope, he decides; but he won't fight, either. He's going to bargain. So he waits, instead. Learning, always, but waiting patiently. Like Vlad, in that way. 

What he doesn't count on, I don't think, is the way he's actually going to enjoy aspects of it. He likes making the viziers and nobles squirm. He likes feeling untouchable, since he is, after all, the sultan's favorite. And there are moments, even, when he enjoys himself in bed. And all of this fuels his self-loathing. Not because he's ashamed of physical pleasure with another man - Val is most definitely bisexual in this series and not even a little ashamed of that - but because he found something pleasurable about his abuser. That's a long-term trauma that will continue to haunt him as the story moves along. He did what he had to in order to survive, but it carries a cost in his heart, and he hasn't even begun to examine any of that trauma in his long years of captivity. 

So Val is still sweet. He always has been. But his smug, cocky persona is something he created to protect himself. When he finally starts to look at the damage that lies beneath it, things will be messy, let me tell you. But thankfully he has people who love him now, who can help.

And Vlad. Though he spent all that time acting like he hated his brother, calling him a "whore" and a "puppet," Vlad is eaten up by the guilt. He killed Vladislav, he terrorized Mehmet; he impaled and killed thousands...but none of that saved his little brother, and he'll never forgive himself for that. Not that he could have done anything about it; he probably knows that, intellectually, but emotionally is another story. 

I'm happy with the way things left off between the brothers at the end of Dragon Slayer, but they will definitely meet again, and both of them have boatloads of PTSD to work through. That means lots of good, meaty, emotional content in the books to come.