Coronets and Steel (58 page)

I grimaced in sympathy.

“Are you really from the States?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Your French. It’s good.” I knew she meant it as a compliment, but her voice carried shades of her mother’s gracious condescension.

“Thanks to my grandmother. As for the latest idiom, I picked up a little of it in Paris a few weeks ago.”

Her eyelids lifted in pleasure. “You were in Paris? It seems a hundred years since I was home. How were—but then, you wouldn’t know—” she began in disappointment.

“Not likely,” I said ironically, and she flushed as if rebuked. I added hastily, “I don’t know anyone there. Too bad, too! It’s a wonderful city. I would have liked to spend more time there.” Inside, I was thinking,
She called it home.

She hunched her shoulders and cast a furtive look about the busy street, but I had a feeling she didn’t see any of the shops or people. Her hand fumbled in the elegant handbag and she half pulled out a cigarette case, then dropped it back. She said in a low voice to the tops of her shoes, “I wondered if you’d like to go on—” and stopped.

“Pardon?” I prompted cautiously.

“Trade places,” she said in a desperate whisper. “Marry Alec and stay here.”

Her words hit me with such force I felt dizzy—but I didn’t see ghosts or goblins or anything that would have been relatively simple to define, compared to the new mess facing me. Instead I saw Alec’s sleeping face as dawn began to paint his silhouette with color, and how badly I wanted to waken every day to that.

I don’t know how long we walked like this, side-by-side and in silence, before I got control.
It’s not all about me. And she isn’t swooping down to give me what I want because I deserve it. So what does she want?
“But what about the Blessing?”

“I don’t know,” she—well, she whined, twisting the rings round and round on her fingers.

“You don’t believe it’ll work?” I asked.

She gave me a slanted glance, through eyes that were unsettlingly like my own. “I’m afraid it will,” she said in a low voice. “Don’t you see? If it does not, as Maman insists, then a marriage would not matter. I could live in Paris—Dubrovnik—do what I want and never have to be here except on state occasions. But to be married and imprisoned in the Nasdrafus forever . . .”

“What’s wrong with the Nasdrafus?”

She shrugged listlessly. “It’s a nightmare, from everything they say. Ugly creatures from stories walk freely, and there are no machines. Paris wouldn’t be the real Paris—it wouldn’t have elevators, or cars, or electric lights. Beka told me once that the Salfmattas say it looks more like the Paris of two centuries ago.” She shivered.

“Your family doesn’t believe in it?”

Ruli gave me a brief smile. “Maman doesn’t want it to work, unless she can guarantee she would have the influence she has now.” She gave a very French shrug. “My brother talks to the undead, and some say he knows the wild folk. But he says to anyone who will listen that magic is gone. Yet even so, they are all here for the Festival.”

We were at the inn. I was trying to think of three things at once and doing none of them well when we walked in. Forcing my attention front and center, I introduced Ruli, who barely responded to their gratified nods and bows.

As soon as I named her, they retreated behind polite deference, which seemed to make it easier for her; she obviously had no idea how to deal with people outside of her circle. I could see that the artifice of social privilege was a refuge for her—she knew what to say and what to do.

By the time we’d refused offers of refreshment from each member of the Waleska family, Anna had disappeared and reappeared again with a scrupulously sealed paper package; Tania’s lens-crafting shop had to be nearby.

As I brought out my wallet, with its slim pack of euros that hadn’t been touched since my arrival, Anna backed away, hands behind her. “No, no, we will not take money, Josip told you yesterday! You will come to us again, soon?”

Nods, smiles, repeated thanks—they begged me to visit again—Theresa’s intense dark eyes and her proud smile—I found a moment to whisper, “Thanks again for the rescue. Tell Miriam!” and Madam’s obvious pleasure at the stir our appearance was bound to make. She would have liked to have kept us in the restaurant, seated by a window. Whatever else was going on, we’d be great for business.

As we walked away into the street, Ruli said curiously, “Who are those people? How do you know them?”

“That’s the inn I first stayed at when I came to Riev.”

“So you came alone?” she went on, and at my nod, “I wish I had a quarter of your courage.” Her wry tone ended on a laugh breathy with desperation.

“It’s not courage.” I grimaced, groping for the truth, though I felt more awkward by the second. “I’m stubborn, not to mention pigheaded, and I really,
really
hate people trying to order my life.”

“I’d like. Once. Not to have my life ordered. I want to be left alone. With my friends. In Paris, where I love living . . .”

I squashed down the urge to say,
Don’t we all want to be left alone to live our lives?
“Why don’t you want to stay? Is it the country? Or the trouble? Or—or Alec?”

She shrugged sharply. “I don’t know. Since I was small I’ve been hearing about the idea of marrying him. I was willing enough when I knew he wouldn’t interfere with my life. My child would inherit, and I’d have plenty of my own money at last.”

“The Innocents’ March, is that the young girls who walk down from the Roman church with candles on the Day of Assumption?”

“Young girls and brides-to-be,” she said listlessly. “Four o’clock in the morning, and everyone flings roses in your face. Then a hideous long Mass, or service at the temple for the Jewish girls, and inevitably it will rain. The old women say that if the angels walk out with us, we will be in the Nasdrafus world.” She made a gesture of repudiation, the crystal bracelet on her wrist rattling. “I think they pretend to see ghosts—Anton always used to tease me about the Bloody Duke in the weapons room, so I wouldn’t pass it by, when we were little. But I never saw him.”

“I see,” I said, resisting the urge to touch the flower in my ear. “Uh oh,” I added under my breath.

“I cannot tell you how much I hate the Eyrie. And this country,” she went on, fierce and low. “And now, with Anton’s trouble, and Maman acting so horrid. To be closed here forever—” She shuddered.

I nerved myself to ask the question central to my own interest. “What do you feel about Alec?”

Again, a shrug. “I’ve always known him. I could sleep with him, he’s not repulsive, but I can’t get what Cerisette is on about. She and Phaedra. “

Annoyance flashed through me, but I let it pass out again. I’d asked her and she had a right to her opinion. Things would be easier if she was totally into him—yet I was relieved that she wasn’t.

She went on, obviously unaware of my reaction. “Alec was a horrid boy, a tongue like cut glass, but that was because Maman set Anton to rag him. He was nice enough to me, nicer than Anton was, anyway, though he made it clear he thought me boring. Boring!
He
always had his nose in a book. When he wasn’t fighting with my brother, or running off with him into the hills to blow up Russian mining gear, when Maman wasn’t around.”

“Look, Ruli,” I said. “Ah. How about if we sit down?”

We had reached the flower park before the temple. Ducks quacked and splashed in a pond, and on the other side, near a border of violets, two young mothers sat gossiping quietly while four children ran around yelling in a circle, their feet twinkling in the deep green grass. Ruli followed me, her gaze on the ground.

We sat on a stone bench, and as she eagerly pulled out and lit a cigarette, I said, “So you don’t want to stay here?”

“That’s why I thought of trading places.” She gave her bracelet a couple of yanks so the dangling stones twinkled. “If you wouldn’t mind stupid things, like wearing these ugly crystals.” Her gaze was now back on her shoes. “You are a descendant, same as I. Tony even said something about a legal marriage—”

“It wasn’t,” I said.

She shrugged, a sharp movement. “I can’t believe it would matter.”

“If miracle there is,” I said slowly, “I can’t believe one can fool it.”

“I don’t know what to believe. I want people to be civilized, and pleasant.” Her voice softened to a quivering whisper, eyes despairing. “Decent. Is that too much to ask?”

She rattled the bracelet, the crystals catching light and throwing it about in frantic rainbow shards. I wondered if the crystals I saw everywhere were not only for decoration.

“Why do you wear the crystals?”

“Beka Ridotski gave it to me. It’s supposed to be magical protection. She went to school with me. How could she believe in magic? They all pretend to be civilized, but they chant ancient spells. Or under cover of darkness they grab swords or guns and run off into the brush to shoot one another. Anton more than any of them! Sometimes, even Maman seems—” She shook her head, and lifted a hand as if to push something away.

“Violence, cruelty, and greed are everywhere,” I said, feeling my way toward the truth, desperate because events were fast outrunning my brain, leaving me to wade through emotional fallout. “Up close with swords, or at an anonymous distance, duels by e-mail and lawyers.” And when she didn’t react, “Ruli, even if there wasn’t any Blessing, we can’t switch places. You’d never be happy in a tiny Los Angeles house, though I know my parents would welcome you. I’m not rich, cousin. And if the kingdom was closed off by magic, would you have enough to live the way you want, if you went to Paris, and all your family was gone?”

She threw away her cigarette and pressed her hand over her eyes.

The train of reasoning moved inexorably, and the scenery got more bleak. But I had to ride it out: I owed it to us both—to us all—to find the truth. “Whether or not the Blessing is real, the idea, the
ideal,
is to bring about peace. Right now, that includes healing the breach between you von Mecklundburgs and the rest of the country. And so I—”

Nat’s voice echoed in my head,
“You have some heavy-duty decisions to make—”

Now I knew why Alec’s mood had changed as we left the peace of the mountainside and drove back down into civilization. Into his responsibilities, which never end. As always, he was right ahead of me on that train of reason, because he could never truly relax—he always had to be thinking ahead. Not for himself, but for an entire country.

I’d come here and found two guys who’d thoroughly disrupted my life. I was attracted to both, but there was only one I’d choose to live with, to share my life with.

But the hard choice had never been mine.

What was it he said?
“Easy to condemn, isn’t it, when one doesn’t understand all the facts?”

Ruli said, “What’s wrong?”

“The clue bat’s finally hit me. I’m not facing Gran’s choice, I never was. It’s Alec who is.”

“I don’t follow, I’m afraid.”

I pressed my hands over my forehead, where a volcano was threatening eruption. “‘You were gone, and the diamonds were there.’ Oh, God,” I said, a cold and terrible numbness closing on my neck, my skull. “I wonder exactly when it was he found himself where Gran was, all those years ago, having to choose between love and responsibility?”

Ruli shook her head as she lit another cigarette. “Alec would never run away.”

“No. Which makes this choice even rougher.”

I looked at her. Alec and Tony had said she didn’t have a sense of humor, but I’d seen evidence of it. No one could watch seven seasons of
Buffy
without knowing how to laugh, even if she had no one to share it with. Her own mother had seen her as a tool, not as a person.

Had no one ever seen her potential? Though tears blurred my eyes, I had to convince her of it now. I gripped her thin shoulder with my right hand. “Look,” I said, finding her eyes and holding her light brown gaze so much like mine. “I can’t be you, you can only be you. Only
you.
” My throat closed with grief, and I struggled for control. “Only you can run away and leave the country divided, and open to the growing troubles outside, or you can use your heart and your hands and work to bring light and grace into it—” I stopped, a sob constricting my chest.

“Me?” she said wildly, her cigarette dropping ash onto her silk as she stared back, eyes wide and shocked.

I fought for control and went on desperately, “—and every decision, every problem, every triumph, you are asked to be a part of! I’d help Nat learn how to get medical knowledge match with magic—if it exists—and redefined so the superstitious can understand it, if not. I’d go up to the border and talk to the half-Russian Devil’s Mountain people to get them to put down the knives, and I’d dance . . .” I fought for control. “And dance . . . at the weddings of people like Miriam, and Theresa, and love them as they’d grow to love you.” My voice cracked. Fighting for balance, for humor, I added, “I’d be too busy to be bored!”

Her brow furrowed. “So you don’t want to stay, is that it?”

“God! Beyond life I’d like to stay, Ruli, but I
can’t.
Don’t you see? There can’t be two of us here. Only part of me is Dsaret. The other half is Murray. Your relatives hate me, and yeah, I asked for it, except they hated me before I walked in that door that night. To them I’m nothing but trouble. Tony and Dieter, with their guns and their knives, proved that much. Oh God, emotions, the glass knives that shatter . . .”

I hiccoughed, and let go of her shoulder.

“I don’t understand,” she whispered.

Would she have understood if I’d said
It’s a matter of honor?
But that sounded so pompous, so self-righteous to my ears. And so I gasped, as always trying for humor though there wasn’t any, and felt like there would never be any ever again, “Sisterhood is beautiful, Ruli,” as I stared down at the package in my lap. The jeans, the cotton top. My passport, wallet, the airline ticket for a departure from London—