Of the row of shop fronts, only one was lit. The rest of the buildings were plain-fronted boarding houses.
The lens maker displayed various types of wire rimmed glasses in the shop window, as well as photographic lenses for the old-fashioned analog types of cameras. But those weren’t all. In the corner was a pretty little lamp with crystal prisms hanging down.
Crystals. I remembered what Ruli had told me on my last day in Dobrenica: crystals were protections. She’d thought the idea of protections mere superstition.
I opened the door, and chimes tinkled above.
Tania Waleska came out, a thin figure in a plain dark brown dress. She looked like a college-age Wednesday Addams. She stopped in surprise when she saw me, then her long, sober face smoothed into politeness. “Mademoiselle?”
Polite caution. She’d been far more friendly in summer. “I have a couple of questions that I think you might be the one to answer,” I said,
“TAAAAAn-ya,” came a high voice from the back room. “TAAN-ya! Did I not tell you to sweep up these—oh.” A short, solid woman appeared, her pale hair pulled up into an aggressive knob squarely on the top of her head. “A customer. The polishing is waiting. I’ll tend to her.” She shooed Tania with her apron and showed me a lot of teeth.
“I have a question for Tania,” I said.
The pale eyes swept over me from knit hat to the hem of my charcoal coat, then the smile vanished like a light put out. “Very well, very well. Tania, you’ll tend to the polishing after you help this person.” Snap! Went the inner door.
“May I help you?” Tania’s manner was polite, not inviting.
Ghosts. Ruli. Crystals. Ruli had told me that her crystal bracelet was a gift from Beka Ridotski. “I was told on my last visit that these crystal prisms are more than decorations.”
“They are traditional protections. It is a custom to take them out in sunlight and say novenas over each before we affix the prisms to a lamp or window decoration.”
“Protections? Against what?”
“It is a custom in our land. Visitors find it charming, so we sell many.”
Visitors find it charming. Was I being fobbed off, or shut out?
Time to try my original question. “When I arrived at the inn yesterday, did you think I was the ghost of Madam Statthalter?”
Her face tightened as soon as I said ghost and then flooded with color. I hadn’t merely trespassed some boundary, I’d trampled it like a centipede wearing jackboots.
“Sorry, Tania. I know you’re busy. I’ll, um, go now.” I yanked open the door and left.
The cold wind was a relief. Wondering if that disaster of a conversation was a harbinger of the evening, I toiled uphill to the inn.
I found the shared bathroom empty, but when I turned the hot water spigot, there was only a tiny dribble. So I shivered through a barely lukewarm sponge bath. On my way out, I nearly ran down Anna, carrying bedding to an empty room. “Is there a reason this bathroom is always empty?” I asked. “I know you’ve got a ton of guests.”
Anna looked surprised then puzzled. “Is it not understood, you pay extra for it to be yours?”
“Oh.”
“Mama says that is what rich people like,” Anna explained. “You may bathe as many times in the day as you wish. Though our boiler is not always so good late in the day,” she added apologetically.
I was about to explain that I wasn’t rich, then thought: by whose standards? Instead I asked, “But where do the other guests go?”
“Oh, they come downstairs to ours,” Anna said. “Or go up to the new bathroom in the attic. It is all family. They do not mind.”
Rich people. Did I act like a privileged snot without knowing it? The problem is, I thought aggrievedly, we are all the hero of our own story, and behavior we think reasonable can look arrogant to someone else.
Finally I stepped back and stared at myself in my forest green dress. Was it properly “subdued?” My hair was in smooth coils, pinned with a beautiful silver leaf clasp my mom had spotted on our shopping foray and gave me as an early Christmas present. Besides my travel boots I’d brought one other pair of shoes, a wickedly expensive pair of black ballerina pumps. Those should be subdued, I thought. Ready or not, here I come.
I said to the air, “Ruli, it would be great if you could appear and give me a hint about the help you needed. Need. Even a ghostly hand pointing in the right direction would be awesome.”
After about thirty seconds, I walked downstairs to get my coat.
NINE
AS SOON AS I appeared downstairs, Madam was scandalized, waving her arms. “You cannot wear those in the ice!” She pointed at my shoes.
Already I was off to a great start. I grumped upstairs and exchanged the good shoes for the boots. I put the good shoes in a carrier bag and tried a second time to leave, hoping I wouldn’t be criminally early—or late. I didn’t know how long the inkris took to cross the city.
I bent into the flensing wind and thought about Tania as I tromped along the street, glad of the boots. Even in those, my toes were fast going numb.
There were small covered kiosks like bus stops at certain corners. When I reached one, I was not the only person waiting. A couple muttered softly, and a little boy stamped his feet, either to warm them or to hear the crack and snap of the ice film over the snow. An inkri came along and scooped them up.
The next inkri came along almost immediately, and I climbed aboard. It was only then that I realized I hadn’t asked Beka for directions. The cowardly part of me hailed hope for non-comprehension when I said, “Ridotski House?”
The driver gave a short nod, and that was that.
The upper, or southwest, slope of the mountain below the palace was the Beverly Hills of Riev. I knew that Ysvorod House, Alec’s home, was a few blocks from Mecklundburg House, which was about ten blocks from the palace. The streets were broad with only a few houses on each, as they had extensive private gardens, by city standards. Ridotski House turned out to be a couple blocks north of Alec’s street, along the cliff above the river that bisected the city.
Little of Ridotski House was visible from the street. It lay uphill behind a screen of tall hawthorn interspersed with rowan. Long golden windows spilled light in bars on the snowy driveway, which had been cleared off. Three or four cars were parked to one side, and I glimpsed what seemed to be a stable down a hedge-walled driveway, from which arose the sound of convivial voices.
I paid the inkri driver, who looked at me curiously as he tipped his hat. Then he shook the reins, and the reindeer tripped daintily through the crunchy snow, and away.
Leaving me alone before the carved front door, I had that stomach-sinking sensation I used to get before a ballet performance when I wasn’t sure of my steps, or I hadn’t had time to warm up properly. But I was here. Ruli had asked for my help, and I was going to try to find out how and why.
As I reached up to rap the door knocker, I felt exactly the way I did the night in the Eyrie when I pulled the rapier off the wall: There was no turning back.
The door immediately opened, and a young man in white jacket and serving gloves smiled a welcome. He led me to a side room where I could take off my coat, and sure enough, there was a bench and a couple of stools for people to sit on and change their shoes.
After that, an older woman led me through an oval entryway that featured two circular ascending staircases at either side, the supports for the banisters carved in patterns of hawthorn branches and leaves. I thought them pretty. I had no idea of their significance.
Beyond the entry lay a long salon that evoked the Renaissance with its restrained Classical Greek and Roman lines. The furnishings had that classical feel, the silk cushions in shades of buff and camel. The rest of the room was decorated with Byzantine high-relief ornaments, tapestries and silk runners in burgundy, gold, and hints of green.
So far, there were maybe eight or ten guests gathered in a cluster at the far end near the fireplace. My eyes zeroed in
on Alec, seated on a couch covered with sand-colored raw silk. His head turned, and our gazes met. His lips parted—he seemed on the verge of a smile, but then his expression smoothed into politeness.
Sitting close on one side was Beka, and on the other Cerisette von Mecklundburg, Tony’s cousin, who was even thinner and more elegant than I’d remembered.
“Welcome, Kim,” Beka said.
“Kim. Glad you could make it,” Alec spoke at the same moment, their voices blending.
Cerisette had apparently seen that almost smile, for she gave me a polite nod with all the warmth and welcome of the Antarctic in a deep freeze.
“Thanks for inviting me,” I said to Beka, and to Alec—painfully aware of Cerisette’s laser-glare—“Hi.”
Then I stuck to my resolve and faced the laser. “Hi, Cerisette.”
“Bon soir, Aurelia.” She wore an elegant dress in a properly subdued pearl gray, which flattered her new hair color, a warm auburn. She had made it plain how much she despised me during summer.
Aurelia. I was now going to give her the benefit of the doubt, and assume that she was using my first name because she didn’t remember that I went by my middle name. Time to start over. “Call me Kim. Sorry about my part in all the misunderstandings last summer.”
“I understand,” she said, with a heavy air of You should be.
Thud went the old conversational ball, as I struggled against an angry reaction. I wanted to add, And if you hadn’t been such a total snob, things might have been different. But that wouldn’t help anybody.
She reached for her drink, the movement enabling her to turn her shoulder, effectively shutting me out as she murmured, “Remember when Ruli gave that party in Paris just after . . .” Her voice sank, too low to hear. Leaving me standing there feeling very stupid.
For one second.
Then I found at my side a short, elderly gent in a suit who I belatedly recognized as the Napoleon from summer’s masquerade ball.
“Mademoiselle . . . Murray? Have I that correct?” He pronounced my name with a French accent.
“You’re Prime Minster Ridotski?” I asked. I’d had no idea who the Napoleon was that night, except that he’d been kind to me just when Aunt Sisi had tried to prevent me from meeting anyone except von Mecklundburg connections.
“This is a private affair, not one of state.” Beka had gotten up and joined her grandfather, leaving Alec to Cerisette. “He’s Grandfather to all of us.”
The old man chuckled. “Even in my family, they do not call me Shimon. That is the cost of passing down the same name. Nowadays, ‘Shimon’ is my great-grandson. What can we offer you to drink? We have seasonal mulled wine.”
“Or if you prefer the modern, there’s everything from cocktails to limonade,” Beka put in, using that tone that I was beginning to understand as her way of asking a question. In other words, on the surface was the fact of drinks, but underneath: Do you want to stay away from liquor?
Gratefully I said, “I’ll go for the limonade.” I was tense enough without worrying about the effect of alcohol while trying to negotiate social pitfalls.
It wasn’t until Cerisette made a little movement—no more than recrossing her long legs—that I noticed the subtle twist to her mouth. The tinkle of ice in Alec’s hand drew my eye. He was also drinking limonade.
Beka said, “Come with me, Kim. I will introduce you.”
She led me to the bar at the far side of the room where another servant in white jacket tended the drinks. As I watched, he stuck a mulling rod into some wine, sending up an aromatic waft of cloves, cinnamon, and red wine.
Two guests took silver-framed mulled wine glasses as Beka reeled off names. First was Beka’s mother, who I’d learned had been widowed during the bad old Soviet days, right after Beka was born. Behind her, talking to Beka’s forty-something older brother and sister, was Honoré de Vauban—another of Tony’s cousins. I’d thought that my Aunt Sisi’s preference (if not affectation) for speaking in French was one of her little quirks, but now I was hearing French all around me.
Honoré lifted his glass slightly in salute, his heavy eyelids narrowing with cynical humor that reminded me instantly of Tony. This guy was somewhere between my age and Alec’s, tall, slender, graceful, his suit tailored by an artist. Last summer I’d mentally tagged him as a cross between Bertie Wooster (for the wardrobe) and Christopher Lee (for the cool, slightly sinister face and dark, slicked-back hair).
Noise from the entrance caused a shift. With a quick “Pardon me,” Beka left to greet the new guests.
When I turned back, Honoré was watching me. Time for try two. “I’m sorry about last summer.”
Instead of winning the male version of the Cerisette blow-off with my apology, I got an intent gaze. “Sorry in what sense?”
“That we got off to a bad start,” and when he didn’t make an immediate reply, I tried a new topic. “Why does everyone speak French instead of Dobreni?”
“Habit, I expect.”
“Most of us were raised outside the country.” Cerisette had joined us. “I’m told one thinks in the tongue one used most as a child.” She reached past Honoré, a fine diamond bracelet on one skinny wrist catching the light. She claimed a glass of mulled wine, then gave me a look like my eyelashes were crawling with bugs. “What language did you grow up speaking . . . Kim?”
That hesitation was like a needle-jab. “I grew up speaking English and French. They mix in my mind.”
Honoré asked, “Were you taught Dobreni?”
“I am pretty sure my grandmother talked to me in Dobreni when I was little, before I knew how to read and write. But then she stopped, and I forgot. It came back to me last summer, all at once. But I’ve still a child’s vocabulary.”
I discovered why Cerisette had joined us when Alec spoke from behind me. “Your grandmother wasn’t much older than a child herself when she left.”
“It’s true,” I said. For the first time with these cousins (for they were my cousins, if twice removed, as well as Tony’s) I was in an actual conversation, not a fake one with me pretending to be Ruli. “Most of Gran’s education had been in French and German, and Latin as well.”
Cerisette asked: “Is your grandmother planning on a journey?”
Journey? A socially neutral term, neither return nor visit. Her expression was polite, but the way her smile did not reach her eyes, the angles of her stance, betrayed her hostility.
“I don’t know her plans.”
Cerisette’s bony shoulder lifted as she cast a quick look behind me.
I knew it was Alec before he stepped up beside me. Desperate for some topic of conversation that wouldn’t stick like old gum on the social shoe, I hefted my glass, looked at his, and said (inanely), “I didn’t know you like this stuff.”
Alec looked down into the half-empty glass, his lashes shuttering his eyes, his expression withdrawn into his Mr. Darcy look. I hadn’t managed to step into the gum, I’d stuck to it.
In other words, I’d said something wrong, and I had no idea what.
Beka touched his arm. “They’re asking for you.”
Alec followed her back to the couch. I took a step, meaning to join them, but Cerisette expertly cut me off, leaving me following her elegantly knobby back. I slowed as she calmly took her place beside Alec, sitting slightly sideways, legs crossed, preventing anyone else from sitting on that couch besides the two of them.
How could it get any worse?
That was the moment the door opened on the noise of fresh arrivals, and in came the principal von Mecklundburgs—minus red-haired Percy, the only one I’d kind of liked.
Tony’s uncle Robert, Cerisette’s dad, strode ahead of the others, looking more than ever like a Russian emperor, though in an expensive double-breasted Italian suit. Now that Tony was the duke, this guy was technically Tony’s heir, which would make him the new count. His wife, the countess, drifted at his side, as thin as a wraith.
The last set of cousins, Mor
vil and Phaedra Danilov, were right behind, walking on either side of Tony, who was dressed up for the first time I had ever seen. He wore a black suit with a black mandarin collared dress shirt, no tie. It was startling to see him in formal wear. He’d even pulled his wild hair back into a ponytail, revealing the fact that he wore a diamond in one ear.
They were clustered around the duchess, who had once asked me to call her Aunt Sisi—before she tried to get me killed. She looked like a Parisian version of Mom in her a mourning suit of silk, the glitter of diamonds on one hand and at her throat.
Aunt Sisi air-kissed Beka’s mother and grandfather, bestowed a fond pat on Beka, greeted everyone else. By then the entire party had reformed with her at the center.
That’s when she saw me.
Her stare was like glass, then her brows lifted in perfect polite surprise. Then she came smack up with a smile and a cordial, “Aurelia Kim, chérie. Someone said you had returned. What a charming surprise.”
The last time we’d seen one another, she’d sent me up a tunnel in her castle to rescue her daughter. After which she slammed the door in my face.
Could she possibly not know that I knew?
“Here I am,” I said brilliantly, and choked off a How are you? remembering in the nick of time why she was here. “I’m very sorry about Ruli,” I said, flashing prickly heat with embarrassment and awkwardness. “I just found out—” I choked off or I wouldn’t have come.
“Thank you, chérie.” She took my hand. Hers was warm and soft, the skin fragile over her delicate bones, as she nodded toward Alec over on the couch. “Alexander must have invited you for the holidays, then?”
“No,” I said, and when she lifted her brows in question, I said, “Nobody knew I was coming.”
“A surprise? You wished to visit him as a holiday surprise?”
Blood Spirits Page 9
