Coronets and Steel (32 page)

I woke when the engine kicked in. As it putt-putted us across the floor of the valley, I fell back asleep.

When I woke, darkness had barely lifted. There were the familiar mounds of the rock quarry: we were on the outskirts of the city.

The engine stopped when we reached the open market, where people were busy setting up stalls and chatting. I scrambled off the truck bed. Pavel wasn’t in view, but I figured he’d prefer not to find me at all than to hear thanks from someone he didn’t even know, so I slipped between the flimsy barriers of two booths. The city proper began on the other side of the row of wagons and ancient, decrepit vehicles, with a long horse picket beyond; farmers still drove wagons.

Now that I knew where I was, I had to figure out how to get to Aunt Sisi’s safely—all the way at the other end of the city.

I chose the narrowest streets and alleys I could find, avoiding the main streets, which were full of people heading down to the market. I had no idea whether a search was going on in Riev as well as on Devil’s Mountain, and if so, what the searchers looked like. I also did not know if the Vigilzhi were on Alec’s side or Tony’s. Or which side might mean trouble for Yours T.

As I slunk across a main street, I remembered those guys watching me at the wedding reception. If there was a search, that would be the first place they’d check. So I wasn’t going anywhere near the inn.

At least I had something to eat.

I ducked into a narrow, inset doorway with a laughing gargoyle carved over the archway. I stared up at the weatherworn face, half-bird, half-human, the ropy, muscular arms clutched around bony knees, the long toes like bird talons curled over the arch. The gargoyle’s wings arched up above the skinny shoulders, creating a heart shape.

I wondered what it would be like to live in a house guarded by a gargoyle—growing up reading Fyadar comics in secret, and watching for ghosts on windy nights.

Was it true that I saw ghosts? This was an entirely different paradigm—a way of understanding the world. All the rules had changed, at least in this country. Maybe here it made sense to expect Alec, as the distant crown prince, to protect the kingdom by marrying on a specific day.

Time to get moving. I had three things to do: get to Aunt Sisi and tell her the news, then ask her to send a servant over to the inn to collect my clothes and other things. Third, hire a ride to Father Teodras and the Cistercian monastery.

I did not want to toil all the way up hill to discover Tony’s red car waiting outside his mother’s house. Even if Aunt Sisi would tell her son to act civilized, I didn’t know if he’d listen. Not if he had his own sister as prisoner up on that Devil’s Mountain.

The cathedral bells rang, echoing from stone walls and streets. Voices penetrated as well. Children’s voices. I remembered Theresa’s uniform. Her school was next to the cathedral—

—three or four blocks from me now.

I slouched up the street, lurked behind a potted juniper, and peered up in the direction I thought she’d come. The school kids walked in groups, some wearing the thick navy and white uniforms, others in equally old-fashioned brown uniforms.

I spotted Theresa with two friends, one in navy and the other in brown. That was a setback. I had assumed she would be alone. I pressed back in the shadows as the girls got closer, faces earnest as they talked in low voices. The girl in brown was tall and thin, with thick glasses and dark red hair worn in braids to her hips. The other girl had a round face and dark braids like Theresa’s.

Theresa looked up—our eyes met. I jerked away, but then oozed back as her sharp face lengthened in surprise. She whispered something to her friends and all three homed straight for me.

“I hoped you would think to look for me if you returned, Mam’zelle,” Theresa greeted me without preamble.

The other two girls nodded, one firmly and the other with a furtive glance back at the street.

I recovered from my astonishment. “Tony’s people came and got my stuff, did they?”

“Yes. And then yesterday—”

“Hst!” the dark-haired girl whispered, motioning violently toward some distant kids.

The four of us hustled around the side of a steep-roofed house to a brick alley. A cat sat like a meatloaf on a high stone wall, tail hanging; otherwise no one was in view.

“Look, I don’t want to get you into trouble,” I began.

The dark-haired girl said in heavily accented French, “It was only Xani, a girl with nose trouble. She went down Prinz Karl-Rafael Street without seeing us.”

The redhead and Theresa then exchanged glances. Theresa said, “Let us go to the cloister garden. That is a quiet place, and we can talk. We have time before our schools begin.”

The other two agreed, and the dark-haired girl, with a grin of excitement, led the way back along an alley and then unlatched an unmarked door in the featureless wall that bordered the back of the cathedral’s grounds.

Inside was an enclosed courtyard, visible from two stories of windows on one side. Theresa led us to some grass beneath a drooping willow, adjacent to a statue of a saint. “The sisters are at the school now, and we can talk here. Oh! Katrin and Miriam are my friends. They know what has happened, but they have already promised not to say anything.”

I sank down as the girls gathered around me. “What happened?”

“The evening of the day you went on the tour with the count, at dinnertime, two men came. They said they had been sent by Count Karl-Anton. He had called them on a telephone from somewhere. They said Lady Ruli had decided to go home to Riev Dhiavilyi, and they were to pay what you owed Mama and to bring away all your belongings.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“So Mama packed up your clothes and they took them away, and afterward I cleaned the room, which is my chore. Part of the work is to wash and polish the floor, if the guest has stayed longer than one night. And so when I moved the armoire out, a thing fell and hit my head. It was blue jeans, and a blouse, and papers! I discovered an
American
passport, but in it was your picture. And I thought, there must be a reason. I thought also, Mama would feel she must send a message at once to the count. That is her way. So I showed the things to Anna and Tania. Anna said, a thing is hidden for a reason. Tania felt we should continue to hide your blue jeans, and your papers, until you came for them. She took them to her shop, where she said she put them in the barrel where they store the old and broken spectacles. No one would ever look there.” She grinned. “And Josip added, that to tell everyone about the passport is to make everyone laugh at us, for much envy has come to Anna that you were at her wedding! Everyone thinks—as we did, at first—that you are the Lady Aurelia von Mecklundburg, you see.”

“Be sure to thank Tania for me,” I said feelingly.

“That is not the end. Yesterday, again at the dinner hour, the count came to us himself. Mama was excited. He said your papers were missing from your suitcase, and had you given her anything to hold for you?”

“Argh. Was he a bully about it?”

“Oh no, he was polite and pleasant. Mama was upset that we might have had a thief, but nothing else was gone, and she told him that when she packed your case with her own hands she had found all your things exactly as you always left them. So he asked to see the room, and he looked around, and even felt on top of the wardrobe, but no one asked me anything. If they had,” she added seriously, “I would have said, no one
gave
me anything to keep, for that is not a lie.”

I said, “I don’t want to get you into any trouble, political or moral.”

She smiled. “Anna said, if the reason is good, a small lie can be confessed and is forgiven. Tania agreed. So Mama said you must have taken the papers in a handbag on your outing, and had forgotten it somewhere, and the count should ask you to mentally retrace your steps and he said he would. He left. Josip told Anna and me at night that a man seemed to be watching the inn. And another was there this morning when I left.”

“You are totally made of win,” I exclaimed. When they looked puzzled, I hastily translated.

Anna blushed in pleasure, and Miriam’s eyes were crescents of magnified delight behind her glasses as she whispered over and over, “Madeuffween, madeuffween.”

“What’s going on, is this. I am not Aurelia von Mecklundburg, who has been missing for some weeks.”

“Ah, there was a rumor,” Miriam spoke up for the first time. “Now gone, since you came.”

“Well, I said nothing to anyone because I wanted to achieve my purpose anonymously, but I am the granddaughter of Princess Aurelia Dsaret.”

Katrin gave a sigh of pure felicity. Miriam grinned, hugging her thin arms to herself. Theresa said, “Better, oh, so much better.”

“My name is Aurelia as well, but you can call me Kim. When the count tried to make me go up to his castle, I found out that he’s already got his sister up there. Anyway, I escaped.”

Miriam’s glasses flashed as she sat up straighter. Interpreting her expression correctly, I said, “I jumped out of the car when it was stopped on a bridge by sheep, and then I dove off the bridge. I climbed up the mountain, following flute music. But instead I found a road sign, and that led me to a—a friend. I hid in a wagon this morning in order to get back into the city.”

Katrin’s hand covered her mouth. Theresa bit her lip.

Miriam breathed, “Vrajhus.”

I said, “What was Vrajhus? I really did get help from a friend.”

Theresa exchanged glances with the others, then Katrin’s long face turned my way. She said seriously, “It is Vrajhus that brought you there. The music on the mountain.”

“Not . . . ghosts?” I asked, old habit making me embarrassed to be speaking the word like I was serious.

All three shook their heads. Not a grin among them.

“You must have heard one of Them from the Nasdrafus,” Miriam said with a firm nod. “Guiding you.”

Okay, it was possible. Anything was possible. If I had to accept ghosts, what was one more step? Except it was clear that no beings ectoplasmic or otherwise nonhuman were stepping out to guide me now.

So I said, “I don’t want you to get into any trouble.
I
don’t want any trouble. My intention right now is to get to the duchess to tell her about her daughter. And the Stadthalter should be told as well,” I added. Whatever Alec thought of me—and whatever lay behind his neglect to tell me about the Dsaret treasure (assuming Tony hadn’t made that up)—he had the right to know. “He and Ruli’s mother can decide what to do. It’s their affair. As for my stuff, if Tania won’t mind hanging onto it for a while longer, until I know my next step—”

Theresa nodded vigorously. “I will wait for you, or for a message.”

“Great. So, the duchess. First, I don’t know if the count is there. He was driving a red car. Second, if any of them ordered someone to search for me, well, they would have described this dress and my hair.” I indicated my long braids.

As great bells began to ring, Miriam jumped to her feet. “Fifteen minutes.”

“Do you think you could sneak me one of those uniforms?” I asked. “That would get me across town anonymously enough.”

“No, it will not do,” Miriam said decidedly. “Every busybody shop-keeper will call out, ‘Girl! Why are you not at school?’ I know a better thing . . .”

“You can’t make it to your school in time,” Katrin said in Dobreni.

“No, I will say I have the asthma again. I will, too, by the time I run home and back here and then to temple.”

“Please! Wait here,” Theresa said to me, and I barely had a chance to call “thanks!” after them before they were all gone.

I couldn’t have sat on the grass longer than about twenty minutes before Miriam reappeared, crimson-faced, carrying a bulging plastic shopping bag.

She plumped down and gasped, “It is ugly, a dress my aunt meant to be cut up and made into cushion covers. No one will miss it.”

“Great!” I said. “Good thinking.”

She colored even more. “And this is my own scarf. If Mama notices, I will say I lost it.”

“I’ll get it back to you, even if I have to wait until things settle down.” I stood up and shucked my dress. “Another thing, though you’ve done enough—”

“Please!” She gazed at me, wide-eyed with anticipation.

“It’s the Stadthalter,” I said. “He should know as soon as possible, I guess, and a verbal message sent now might be faster than my finding ink and pen to write to him, or trying to track him down.”

“I know where Ysvorod House is. If he is not there, they will know where he is to be found,” she said briskly, in spite of the heaving of her thin chest and the dark flush of overexertion in her cheeks. “What is the message?”

“The count admitted to me that he has his sister, and I’ve gone to tell the duchess. But please, Miriam, there’s no need to run anymore. Take it easy, okay?”

As I spoke I wrestled into the horrible widow’s dress, which was made out of some scratchy material, dyed a rusty black and laundered until the seams were a different shade than the rest. The aunt, I thought as I scowled down at myself, must have had even worse eyesight than Miriam to be able to wear that thing.

I frowned at her, uncertain. “Are you sure you will be all right?”

“I would go if I died, like the Angel Xanpia,” Miriam declared passionately, then scrambled to her feet and hefted her schoolbag. “I will go now.”

“Miriam—thanks.”

She flashed a grin and slipped through the heavy gate.

Miriam’s kerchief was a subdued gray-blue. I tucked my braids up into it, making a lopsided bulge, and stuffed my russet sundress into the bag. The sandals couldn’t be helped.

Affecting a hunched walk, with my face down, I slipped out of the cloister garden and started into the street.

I felt like I was outlined in Day-Glo paint, and my shoulders twitched against the tap I expected at any second, followed by Tony’s grinning face, but I kept my pace slow as I crossed town.