The Lady Rogue

by Jenn Bennett

  “If we die in Bulgaria, I hope someone ships our bodies home,” I said, smiling a little. “I’ll be most annoyed if I’m forced to spend eternity roaming the barren countryside like we did today.”

  “Aye. That makes two of us. But hopefully that won’t be an issue. Tomorrow is Thursday, and Bucharest isn’t all that far, right? We still have plenty of time to make it to the hotel by Fox’s deadline.” Huck rested his arms on bent knees. “And today was tough. Perhaps we both said some things we regret . . .”

  “Did we?” I mumbled, sneaking a glance at his face.

  He cleared his throat. “The important thing, though, is that we got away from that devil and his big white wolf.”

  “Yes. No more Carpathian wolf dog is a very good thing,” I agreed, tipping my cup to swallow the dregs of my brandy. And, as if by magic, Valentin appeared with more.

  “Hello, friends,” he said cheerfully, sitting in front of us on the ground cross-legged and insisting on refilling our cups. “Did I hear you talking about a white wolf?”

  “A wolf dog,” Huck said. “But yes.”

  “White wolves are very good luck,” he told us, gesturing for us to drink up. “They are said to be the spirits of the ancient people of the Carpathians and the Black Sea—the Dacians. Do you know about them?”

  “Oh, yes! The Kingdom of Dacia,” I said, excited. “They ruled Transylvania before they were conquered by the Romans.”

  Valentin nodded. “Do you know the stories about their wolves?”

  I knew a few things. “When I was a girl my mother told me that the Carpathians were once called ‘the land of the wolves.’ ”

  “And the Dacians were the wolf people,” he said, animated. “There is an old story of a mountain priest who could talk to animals and gave sermons to the Carpathian wolves, who began to think of him as their master. A Dacian god named Zamolxis saw this, and he turned the priest into a white wolf. Do you know this story?”

  “Is this the origin of werewolves?”

  “Now you’ve done it, brother,” Huck murmured to Valentin while smirking at me with slanted eyes.

  “No werewolf,” Valentin said, shaking his head. “Not a cheap story about the full moon. Imagine a man’s soul inhabiting the body of a great beast—one who could lead the mountain wolves to help the people of Transylvania in battle. If anyone was in danger, they could trust a Carpathian wolf to appear and save them. They were not beasts to be feared. They were friends. Helpful friends.”

  “Lucky wolves,” I said. “They shared a bond.”

  He nodded. “For years the Dacians trusted the great white wolf and his pack. Until the Romans came to conquer them. And because the Romans were tricky, they put doubt in the Dacians’ hearts, and they said the white wolf was evil, a monster to be feared. They promised the Dacians a land deal if they would get rid of the white wolf’s pack—kill the wolves, keep their land.”

  “Did they take the deal?” I asked, unfamiliar with this part of the story.

  Valentin lifted his cup, nodding. “Unfortunately so. The Dacians turned on the Carpathian wolves, slaughtering them with their swords, until they were no longer a threat to the Romans. The giant white wolf priest was forced to flee. He took shelter inside a holy mountain, where he stood with the god Zamolxis and watched with sadness as the Dacians were defeated by the tricky Romans, who never honored the deal.”

  “That’s a sad story,” I said.

  “Sadder that the wolves no longer listen to us. Back in those times, there were many stories of people of the old ways . . . people who could perform miracles and talk to animals. Now? Only a few,” Valentin said quite seriously.

  Huck lifted an eyebrow. “People who talk to animals?”

  “You don’t believe me. That is fine. I have no proof to give you, only faith,” Valentin said before finishing his drink and pouring another. “But I do know one who follows the old ways. She knows the tongue of the beasts, a wisewoman in a village near București. Her name is Mama Lovena. The Romanian locals call her ‘mother of the forest.’ They also call her a vrăjitoare—a witch.”

  “Muma Pădurii,” I murmured.

  “You know her?” Valentin asked, brows raised.

  “I know the legend,” I said, feeling light-headed from both the drink and the conversation. “In stories she’s said to be an ugly old hag who kidnaps children and eats them. To the Germans, she is the witch in Hansel and Gretel. In Russia she is Baba Yaga.”

  “And in the Balkans she is Gorska Maĭka,” he said. “But Mama Lovena isn’t a legend. She is a real person.”

  “Who speaks to animals?” Huck said, incredulous.

  “Many say she does,” Valentin assured him. “She is descended from old blood. Old money. Her sister is titled—a baroness—and Lovena herself is well educated. But she left her inheritance to live alone in a small house in the woods outside a village north of Bucharest. A famous church is there too, one that tourists like to see. But to the locals Mama Lovena is more famous,” he said with a smile.

  A witch in a cottage in the woods. How captivating!

  I wanted to hear more, but before long Ana had joined our little group, and Valentin was leaving wolves and witches behind and telling us other stories—about how he and Ana met and how this trading group came to be, farmers and craftsmen who crossed the Danube to sell their wares. He also asked us a million and one questions about where we lived in New York and all the places we’d traveled. And maybe because the brandy was bringing out Huck’s gregarious nature, he was eager to trade tales of life on the road.

  The life I lived with Father wasn’t all that different from what these traders did, crossing the country to take their goods to market. Father and I spent half the year traveling from place to place. He said the beauty of travel was that if you never came home for long, you never had to face your problems. There was always another town, another country, another treasure to distract. I used to think that Father was trying to outrun his grief and forget about Mother. But now that I’d read pieces of his journal, I wondered if being on the road so much made him feel closer to her. She’d left home when she was my age, went to university, then never stopped traveling. By the time she’d met my father, she’d already camped with Bedouin desert nomads outside of Morocco and spent several months at a Tibetan monastery, studying temple ruins in the Himalayas.

  If she were here now, she’d love Valentin’s stories. I rubbed the Byzantine coin around my neck and smiled to myself, glad I’d trusted my intuition to take up Valentin’s offer of hospitality.

  The night wore on. Father’s last journal entry slid into my thoughts, and I wanted to ask Valentin if he knew any stories about Romanian dragons, but he was caught up in other stories. After a brief trek outside the camp to relieve my bladder from the strain of plum brandy, I returned to find most of the camp was retreating to their tents. A few wide-awake campers migrated to our side of the dying bonfire, and Valentin translated pieces of the conversation in both directions—stories from the road. Stories of the dead. And of the mullo and strigoi, who purportedly could shape-shift into animal forms, not unlike the fictional Count Dracula. Enraptured, I listened and found myself sitting closer to Huck. Close enough that, occasionally, our legs and arms would touch, and my heart would pitter-patter beneath my coat as if the last year were just a bad dream and our afternoon argument never happened. It wasn’t forgotten, but it shifted into the background as we listened to the campfire stories.

  And drank.

  And laughed.

  And drank . . .

  In fact, it wasn’t until the fourth or possibly fifth cup of plum brandy that my mind stopped listening to all the campfire stories and wandered back to all the things Huck had said during our walk from the train. A stupid, drunken mistake. Empress Theodora.

  His words stewed and bubbled and hissed inside me . . . until I boiled over.

  “I am not a mistake!” I said. Or shouted. Same difference.

  In my hazy anger
I was vaguely aware that I’d interrupted Valentin and that several pairs of dark eyes were blinking at me as if I had just insulted their mothers. Everyone except Huck, whose neck and ears were turning a dark shade of red.

  “Theo—” he said, but I cut him off.

  “I’m not a mistake,” I repeated, trying to keep my voice down. “Or some spoiled brat born with a silver fork in my mouth.”

  “Spoon,” Huck corrected.

  “Whatever! I can do things. I’m smart. I know five languages and can swear in two more. I know history and archaeology and how to do cryto . . . cr-crypt-o-grams,” I said, unsure why that was so hard to pronounce. “You don’t know how, but I do! And you . . .” I pointed a finger at Huck’s face. “You, buddy-boy, should be so lucky to even call yourself my friend, jerkface.”

  “Um . . . ,” Huck said, eyes darting around the camp.

  “I’m not spoiled, and I’m not a coward. I’m not.” I shrugged to underscore my point. “Did I fall apart when I was falsely accused of shoplifting a stupid puzzle ring in the Grand Bazaar? Or when Miss Frenchy Tutor robbed me and left me for dead?”

  “No one left you for dead,” Huck mumbled, glancing around nervously.

  “How would you know? Were you there? No, you weren’t. I was alone, just like I always am. And I don’t sit around crying over you and your stupid face. I don’t even think about you at all.” I tried to make a rude gesture while still holding my tin cup of booze, and it didn’t work so well. Huck rushed to grab the cup out of my hand.

  “Don’t touch me! Am I embarrassing you? Well, I’m soooooo sorry.” I pushed myself up from the ground with no small amount of effort. Gravity was not my friend, and it took the oomph out of my argument. And that’s when I realized that for the first time in my life, maybe, just possibly, I was a little bit drunk. Maybe even a lot drunk.

  “Uh, I think we need to call it a night,” Huck said to Valentin, giving him a look that I interpreted to mean that the two of them were judging me.

  “She is a lively one,” Valentin said. “Wildcat.”

  “Cat? I’ll have you know, I’m not an animal,” I said, insulted, and then sloppily took out my coin pendant from where it was tucked inside my coat. “See this? I was named after a great empress. I’m royalty—nay, I’m an independent young lady! You may call me Lady Rogue.”

  Woo! Was I ever so proud of that speech! I held my hands up in victory while Huck mouthed something to Valentin and Ana. I had the distinct feeling he was apologizing for my outburst, which only made me want to give another angry speech. But when I started to do just that, Huck interrupted by handing me my satchel, and surprisingly, it was difficult to be mad and hold luggage at the same time. I wasn’t sure, but I thought some of the campers were laughing at me, and like the sun dawning, regret crept over me. Then anger. Then more anger. Then I stopped caring about everything, and that felt much better.

  Next thing I knew, Valentin had found a lantern and was leading us away from the dying bonfire, past several tents, to the steps of the vardo wagon.

  “You can sleep here,” he said, gesturing up the wooden fold-down steps.

  “But this is a wedding gift,” I argued. “And so small. Look at the tiny pixie door, Huck.”

  “I see it,” he said before speaking to Valentin. “She’s right, brother. We can’t kick you out of the wagon.”

  Valentin insisted. “Ana and I have been sleeping it in for two nights. We brought a tent along for the ride back after we deliver it. We will sleep in that tonight.” Then he said in a lower voice, “Honestly, there is more room in the tent. I am not doing you any favors.”

  Ana squinted into my eyes like a doctor giving an examination, and then she climbed a step to open the door, came back down, and gestured for us to go inside the wagon, “Up, up,” she said in Romanian before informing her husband something in Bulgarian.

  “She says do not be sick inside or you will have to purchase the wagon. You break it, you take it,” he translated with a small smile.

  “I’m not going to be sick,” I assured him. I tried to toss my satchel up the stairs and inside the wagon’s small door, then kicked it when it fell back down and landed on my feet. And while Huck took it from me, I slowly climbed the stairs and ducked to enter the pixie door.

  Miles away from the luxury of the Orient Express, the tiny space was half filled with supplies packed in crates and several pieces of wooden furniture—a table and chairs stacked and bound with rope. In front of this in the remaining space was a pallet of ragged, colorful blankets. Everything smelled of freshly sawed pine.

  Valentin hung the lantern with its sputtering nub on a hook near the door. “It is humble, but it serves its purpose. There is a local expression—to make a whip out of shit. It means to do much with very little.”

  “It’s perfectly fine,” Huck told him.

  I roughly fell back onto the pile of blankets, which was farther away than my backside expected. “Hey, Valentin? I’m sorry I snapped at you with my wildcat teeth.”

  He chuckled. “It is nothing. I admire the wildcat. They attack when you least expect.”

  “Hear that, Huxley Gallagher?” I said, grinning up at him. “Better watch your back.”

  “Good night, my friends. Tomorrow we will travel over the river.” And with that, Valentin closed the wagon door, his merry whistling fading into the camp.

  When he was gone, Huck looked down at me and asked, “You okay, banshee?”

  “I’m peachy. Or maybe I should say plummy.”

  “I think you mean drunky.”

  “Don’t judge me.”

  Huck chuckled and pinched out the lantern’s candle, sending the small space into darkness. “Don’t you worry, banshee. I won’t tell Fox.”

  “And I won’t tell him that you slept with me in a wedding wagon.”

  A string of mumbled obscenities filled the small space.

  “It was just a joke. J-o-k-e,” I spelled out. “Lighten up, Huxley Gallagher. Not going to tear your clothes off again. I’m not that desperate.”

  He was quiet for a moment and then said, “Fox mentioned you were seeing a few people, but he wouldn’t tell me who.”

  “That’s none of his business. Or yours.”

  “Oh . . .”

  “Do you have a girl back in Belfast?” I asked.

  “Too busy working.”

  “Well, I’m too busy studying,” I said. The truth was, I tried dating once, earlier this year, but there was no magic. Huck poisoned my head for other people. And I hated him for that. “But I get lots of offers,” I lied.

  “You always know how to make a guy feel good about himself, banshee.”

  “I told you not to call me that.”

  “Did you, now? I’ll try to remember it next time.”

  I gazed up at the small windows on either side of the wagon, but everything was spinning. I shut my eyes for a moment and said, “I forgive you for what you said out in the fields. Do you forgive me?”

  The wagon creaked and shifted. Huck’s silhouette passed over me and lay down somewhere near me. “Tell me tomorrow,” he said. “After you’re sober.”

  How was I supposed to take that? I opened my mouth to ask but couldn’t figure out how to say it. So I didn’t. I just flipped up my fur collar, rolled to my side, and curled shrimplike inside my coat. I was done. I’d said my piece and received nothing remotely satisfying in return. Time to figure out a way to stop caring. I was tough. I could do it. I didn’t need Huck’s stupidly pretty face in my life.

  The traders’ blankets smelled of dust and earth, and I wondered how far they’d traveled and what they’d seen. And I wondered where my father was sleeping that night. I guessed I’d find out tomorrow, when we’d meet up with him in Bucharest. Then this brief adventure would end. And no one would care that I’d drank too much and slept inside a wagon in a forest with a boy who’d broken my heart. Maybe not even me. So I pretended to casually, accidently, fortuitously flop over until we
were facing each other. Until I felt his breath on my forehead. Until my knee jabbed into his leg.

  “Ow,” he complained a few inches from my face.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled. But I wasn’t. And I didn’t move away. Yet while a hazy, plum-brandy sleep pulled me under, I realized something interesting: neither did he. . . .

  Unfortunately, that small, stolen joy didn’t last, because at some point during the night I dreamed of meeting Valentin’s legendary white wolf. Or was it Mr. Sarkany’s Carpathian wolf dog? The creature was outside our wagon, circling and sniffing, and Dream Me crawled over the wagon floor and opened one of the tiny shuttered windows to reach out and offer my hand for him to sniff . . . until I became afraid that he might bite it off.

  I awoke in a cold sweat, head aching from the brandy but painfully sober. I hated vivid dreams. My mother used to say that vivid dreams were your brain’s way of sending you messages that you tried to ignore or had forgotten while you were awake. Was my dreaming brain trying to send me a warning? Perhaps so, because I had a terrible thought:

  Mr. Sarkany and his wolf dog trailed us across Europe from Istanbul.

  Were we fools to think that he wouldn’t try to follow us into Romania?

  JOURNAL OF RICHARD FOX

  June 25, 1937

  București, Kingdom of România

  Jean-Bernard has become addicted to the roasted eggplant (“aubergine,” he insists on calling it) that is served on toast at the café across the street from our hotel. We spent half the afternoon there, drinking too much coffee and reading several books for information on the bone ring. I had the distinct feeling that someone was listening to our conversation—I couldn’t say why really. Just a feeling. But we switched to French to be safe.

  If Theodora were here, she’d team up with Jean-Bernard and poke fun at my poorly conjugated French verbs. I can hear her now in my head, an eight-year-old slip of a girl, practicing French alone in her room, pretending to have cosmopolitan conversations with teddy bears.