Coronets and Steel (40 page)

I turned to face him, feeling this sense of doom. More like DOOM. It was that visit to Father Teodras hanging over my head.

“I guess we’ll see,” I said, knowing I sounded like a weasel.

He opened the door. “Shall we go?”

We drove up the mountain road behind Riev. He pointed out various old ruins, giving me quick histories. We stopped at a village Gasthaus to eat, and over a tasty meal we discussed his father’s journal, going from there to the other major projects, like the newly finished hydroelectric dam and the new plan for building of wind turbines in mountain valleys where the winds howled down fiercely all winter long. Let the wind howl and make electricity.

It was a pleasant afternoon, and I was disappointed when we had to return. I must have shown my reaction because he said, “Bored with the social whirl?”

“Is any of this social whirl goosing Count Tony the Obnox a bit?”

Alec’s grin flashed. “Tony was chased up a tree by your appearance,” he said with satisfaction, “and now his branch is breaking.”

“Because of me?”

“You’re the catalyst.”

“That means more trouble with that Reithermann bozo?”

“That’s a good part of it.”

“What’s the other part?”

“There will be an end soon.”

“Good.”
Father Teodras, here I come.

He was back by 6:30, in order to dine with Aunt Sisi and Madam A. and me. French food and French conversation, about classical music this time. Again he was a perfect host, and Madam A. was seated in the hostess spot, so Aunt Sisi and I faced one another. Two guests of honor. Afterward the four of us set out in amity for the cathedral.

The city was gearing up for Dobrenica’s big two-week festival starting on August 15 and winding up on September 2. This year, the festival was to culminate in the wedding.

The cathedral was packed with Riev citizenry of every degree. We joined the rest of the von M. clan, who flanked us on either side, and a few of them behind us, as we were front row center. I felt cramped and itchy, but as soon as the music started my surroundings faded.

The three accompanying musicians were excellent, but the old Russian violin master was superlative playing adaptations from Rim-sky-Korsakov’s
Invisible City of Kitezh,
some Glinka, after an evocative melody from Mussorgski’s
Khovantschina.
Possibly the arrangements were sublimely skillful but I think the artist—like Gran with her piano—could carry any piece.

Even in the shorter, lighter pieces he told stories without words, mixing poignancy with laughter, weaving a bright thread of—no, I was about to say magic, but I don’t want to use that as a metaphor. The music made me think of the way emotion was absent in Milo’s journal, making it omnipresent, which led to thinking about emotion in historical works . . . and somehow I was sitting among men with top hats and women with extravagant hats atop elaborately piled hair, the still summer air thick with musky perfume and candle wax as people listened to Mily Barakirev—

“No, but I believe Milo sent the girl on the cello to Moscow to study,” Aunt Sisi’s bored whisper arrowed into my images of an icy river in the Russian steppe gleaming in the low winter sun and splintered it.

I jumped. On my right was Aunt Sisi’s profile, calm and enduring. On the other side of her, bulky Robert von Mecklundburg whispered to his wife behind his hand.

I became aware of my own hands clenched in my lap, and I relaxed them. Then I felt Alec’s brief but considering regard.

I could not recapture the mood after that. Aunt Sisi’s boredom sat like a weight in the air beside me. I became aware in an ever-widening circle of the restlessness of people packed on uncomfortable wooden benches; I heard coughs, sniffs, shoes scraping, whispers. A lighthearted piece from Borodin and it ended, and I was glad.

Alec said nothing to me until Aunt Sisi had been unloaded at her home and we pulled up in front of Ysvorod House. Then: “You all right?”

“I’m fine.”

Madam A. preceded us in, bade us a grave good night, and disappeared. Alec hesitated at the bottom of the stairs, then followed me up the stairs to the library, as he said, “I didn’t think you were white-knuckled from pain, or from ennui, particularly when I recalled a similar reaction to
Les Sylphides
in Vienna. But something pulled you out of whatever head space you were in.”

“Aunt Sisi was bored.” Images from the music danced in the flames. “No, it’s not her fault. Some people aren’t into music.”

“Ruli doesn’t like it, either,” Alec said, his smile ironic. “When they said she left for her clothes shopping trip so she wouldn’t have to attend the spring music festival in the valley, I didn’t question it. Wasn’t until she’d been gone for six weeks that I got suspicious.”

“So Tony must have grabbed her as soon as she agreed to the marriage, huh?”

“I wonder.”

My stomach muscles tensed as I tried to sound casual. “Do you happen to know if there is a musician named Mily Balakirev?”

“Ah . . . wasn’t he a composer of one of the pieces we heard?”

I didn’t know that.
Or did I? “Of course. I must have overhead that without being aware.” I was rubbing my hands up my arms, though the room was warm and even summery. I turned my back to the fire. “I always thought I had an overactive imagination.”

“What did you see?”

The impulse was to scoff, to fall back into old patterns. But I wanted so badly to tell him the truth because I knew he would listen. Though he’d never seen ghosts, magic, Nasdrafus, or the tooth fairy, he was exerting all his effort to bring about a marriage on a specific day, just in case.

“This isn’t like seeing ghosts. I don’t think. I sat in the cathedral audience, hearing that music when it debuted. The people around me wore late Victorian dress. It—it even smelled different. Like a billion candles burning, so there was wax in the air. How could that be possible? I don’t think it has anything to do with ghosts or blessings.”

“No, it doesn’t,” he agreed. “What you are talking about—deuteroscopy—is rare, what is sometimes called the sight, or Second Sight.”

“Gran told me, very firmly, that such things are merely imagination. No truth in them.”

“Whether it exists or not I can’t tell you. This isn’t the first time.” His tone was observation, but I felt the question.

“Not even. I’ve always had too much imagination. I never went to scary movies—why pay for it, when it was so easy to scare myself? That was part of the reason I picked the sport I did, so I could fight back, if any of those shady monsters ever . . . I know, me, me, me. Sorry about that.”

“Kim.” He flicked me a look, brows raised. “I don’t think twenty seconds of answering my question meets the modern standard for ‘me me me.’ If you don’t want to talk about it, then we’ll drop it.”

I sighed again, trying not to squirm. Fighting the instinct to get up and move away. “Yeah, I’m wussing out. It’s . . . all these years. I thought . . .” I didn’t want to say anything about Gran. “Okay, you know why I went out to Schönbrunn that day? Because I was following . . . a ghost. And not just any ghost. It was Maria Sofia. I recognized her the second I saw her face in the gallery. It’s even the same gown. And down in the Kaisergruft, for a second, I saw . . . something beyond one of the crypts. Then the wall was there. And that day when I jumped off the train, I wandered onto this farm, and they gave me water. I drank it and everything. But then I could see through the woman, and when you drove me by there the next day, the buildings were modern. A tractor. The field patterns different.”

He frowned down at his hands, then looked up. “There are some people I know who might be able to give you better information about that than I can. What I’m told is that Dobrenica possibly exists in a kind of liminal space. It would explain some of those anomalies, like the fact that the entire country seems to function as a natural jammer to electromagnetic radio frequencies. Most reliable are either shortwave or COFDM, but neither are reliable enough to depend on. Another unexplained anomaly is the increased instability of nitrocellulose in weapons—”

“Which is?”

“—smokeless gunpowder. Old-fashioned black powder is actually less unstable up here, though not by much. That’s why you’ll find old style rifles in gun closets.”

“Got it.”

“The Salfmattas and Salfpatras insist there is another form of energy that is present in places around the world, but it conflicts with EM. You might be one of those who can see, or sense, those mystery borders.”

“But neither Gran nor my mom ever saw a ghost, or anything else.”

He lifted a hand, then dropped it. “I’m out of my depth here. I’ve no experience of any of it. I can put you with people who seem to know more. Though maybe we should save this subject until we get the current problem sorted.”

“Okay. I’m good with that.”

“Want a nightcap?”

“Sure.”

“We’ll sit on the terrace. Take advantage of one of our rare balmy nights.”

The terrace was a balcony with iron furniture. Alec left me there while he went to talk to Emilio. I stared up at the diamond-bright stars in the black sky. Music drifted on the summer air from a house on the hillside below, a series of plaintive folk melodies with a Russian feel. It was live music, not a stereo. I’d heard more live music in the past few days than I had in the past ten years.

Alec returned and handed me a mug of coffee with a big dollop of
zhoumnyar
in it.

“Why did he stop the journal when he did?” I asked.

“He left it behind after some trouble that kept him on the move until after the miners’ strike in Romania. It was some years before he found where he’d left it, and he’d lost the habit by then. Then—this was the late eighties—he suffered a slight stroke, was ordered to take it easy for half a year. That’s when I first assumed some of his duties. And when I didn’t fail too spectacularly, the six months stretched into a longer time.”

“You must have been super young! ‘Fail too spectacularly.’ Is that modesty, or did you make mistakes?”

“I made plenty of mistakes. I was an insufferably callow know-it-all in those days,” he said calmly. “Impatient with what I considered the lumbering and superstitious trappings of the past, I was going to appear like a comet and brilliantly gift my backward country with modernity.”

“Like Joseph II.”

“Exactly like him. Except that I didn’t have an entire empire to piss off. One small country was tough enough to handle. I learned fast. Had to.”

“But . . . wait a sec. I hope this won’t sound like he-said she-said, but Tony said you were, ah, conservative. Like your dad.”

Alec’s laugh was so soft it was more like a snort. “Tony wasn’t around when I made those errors. Heh. I thought he would have heard about them.” He leaned his head back and smiled skyward, obviously deep in thought.

From the hillside below came the sound of a wind instrument, and then another joined in, the melodies braiding in a dancy folk beat. We listened in silence; gradually I began to sense the question that lay between us.

My nerves began to send warning sparks through me. I was hyperaware of sitting in the chair with soft, blossom-scented air caressing my face, Ruli’s silky crepe dress cool against my skin. Alec gazed across the starlit valley, feet stretched out before him. He had rolled his sleeves back to his elbows; the white of his shirt glowed in the starlight but his forearms, throat at the open collar, and face were in darkness, his profile a silhouette against the stone wall.

I stared down at my hands. What was it he had said, when I demanded to know if Armandros was my grandfather?
“I did not want to be the one to tell you . . . multiply the personal consequences . . .”

His hand came up with the drink, and his ring flashed a cool blue wink. “That ring,” I spoke up randomly. “It’s a signet, isn’t it?”

He dropped his hand to the chair arm. “Yes. My great-grandfather had it made.”

“Then it’s comparatively new? So it wasn’t used to seal secret letters in the good old days?”

“No. Disappointed?” I heard rather than saw him smile.

I turned my attention to the rooftops, and beyond them the palace crowning the hill, silvery in the summer moonlight. The air was charged with promise, but it was not for me, not for me. I’d made a pass at him once, and been turned down: he was marrying someone else. I looked like her, but I was not her.

Time for a joke. “First time I saw it,” I said with a fair assumption of carelessness, “I had you pegged as a Regency rake.”

“Regency? Oh, the Beau Brummell fellows—Hell! The ones who wore patches and rouge and ponced about on heels higher than yours?” he asked with mock affront.

“Think of Byron, then.”

“Even worse,” Alec stated, and I choked on my drink. “Though he wasn’t the ass he appears in what they call Byronic fiction. I read his journals and letters the last year before I left school.”

“I know, I’ve read ’em, too. He was good to a lot of people. Had a sense of humor about himself. Sad, at the end—reminds me of Oscar Wilde in ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’ and not like the ranting Baron Wildenhaim at all.”

He frowned, then turned my way. “Wilden—ah.
Lover’s Vows
by way of
Mansfield Park.
” His tone was difficult to define. Almost meditative.

“Right.” I pictured a lounging figure with curly blond hair and wicked black eyes. “Maybe Tony should be Byron, then. But he’s a far better Henry Crawford.”

“He’s Byronic enough galloping around with rifles and swords up in his hills,” Alec said, getting to his feet. “I had better get back to work.”

Leaving me wondering what I’d said wrong. Or rather, what my words had done inside his head. Because I hadn’t said anything wrong. But something had sure changed the atmosphere.