Blood of the Dragon: A Novel Vlad Dracul, Father Dracula

Constantinople, 1422. A Wallachian hostage swims out of the Ottoman camp with no coat, no weapon and nothing in writing, and talks his way onto the walls of a city that cannot feed its own garrison.He is twenty-four years old, he is the son of a dead voivode, and he has just discovered that he is worth nothing to either side. He spends the next nine years learning the only trade nobody else wants: how a document is made, how it is read, and why a man who fights a piece of writing has already lost.Targoviste, 1436. He takes the throne of Wallachia with fifty-eight men after a ride of two days, and finds that the country comes with a price already agreed. He is sworn to the Society of the Dragon before the King of the Romans. He is also required, in Greek, on parchment, to deliver his sons to the Sublime Porte.He signs both.And somewhere between a warm room at Targoviste and a market stall in Brasov, three sides of Italian rag paper - a working draft of everything he refused before he agreed - walk out of his chancery and do not come back.In a world without printing, a document exists in a countable number of copies. Which means it can be hunted. Which means it can be bought.Blood of the Dragon is the story of the man history remembers only as the father of Vlad the Impaler: eleven years of tribute paid before term, a country governed out of a letter-book, and one clause in a charter of 1439 in which a prince forbids himself something for ever. The clause is real. It is still there.