“No, he’s not,” August said, recognizing the face in the illumination, with its flowing brown hair and penetrating eyes. “Take away the beard, leave the mustache, and I think you’ll know who this is: the father of Dracula. This is most definitely Vlad II Dracul.”

“But the cape is wrong,” Xandria said. “It should be black and red, right?”

“You watch too many movies,” August said. “Vlad III really confused the history of his father. Dracula literally means ‘son of Dracul,’ which has been wrongly translated as ‘son of the devil.’ Dracul, the title Vlad II was given, means ‘dragon’ in the Romanian language, not ‘devil.’ The name was given to him when he joined Emperor Sigismund’s nobility.”

“And the cape?”

“The color of the draconist’s cloak was in fact green, as is depicted in the illumination, not black as most people have come to believe,” August said. “But black looks much more sinister on the movie screen, I must admit.”

“Let me guess why you know so much about this,” Xandria said.

“I sold an Archibald Constable and Company mustard-yellow-with-red-lettering 1897 first edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula for twenty-five thousand dollars. My dad bought it back in the fifties for less than five hundred. What a bargain! He couldn’t have known that only a few decades later a Dracula-boom would occur. But lucky for me, it did,” August said. “The fascinating thing was the history behind the story, which in many ways is far more horrific than the fairy-tale version.”

Xandria smiled almost imperceptibly. “How so?”

“For one, though the real Dracula is best known for the torture and amputations he inflicted on others, he was a tortured person himself. When he was only eleven years old, he was taken hostage by a sultan and held captive in Turkey. His gruesome stay ended only after his father was killed. By the time he returned to his homeland, he had become—to put it lightly—a world-class sadist.”

“That’s when the impaling started?”

“Correct. His first act after taking back his father’s throne was to gain some revenge against his captors. On Easter Sunday, he invited his father’s assailants to a great feast. They thought he was trying to mend fences. They were wrong.”

“What happened?”

“He had the older ones impaled immediately.”

“Naturally.”

“But they were lucky. The rest were forced on a fifty-mile hike to the capital city of Poenari. Many didn’t survive. Those who did were ordered to build Dracula an incredible fortress, known today as Castle Dracula.”

“Sounds evil.”

“Spooky, evil, all of the above,” August said. “This illumination might indicate that we’re dealing with something equally wicked.”

Xandria’s attention shifted back to the image of the green-caped knight. “So we’ve got Dracula’s father in his ceremonious Order of the Dragon attire. And is he saluting?”