by Anna Bright
And if we were careful, the tsarytsya and the hertsoh would never be the wiser.
I rounded on Cobie. “Let’s follow them. Let’s find out where they’re going and who they’re meeting out there.”
She got up, grinning, and sheathed a knife at her hip. “I thought you’d never ask.”
This time, when we reached the dock, I didn’t pause before I dove into the water.
We hadn’t swum far before we spotted the freinnen in their boats. There were five of them, two girls to each vessel. Even at a distance, I could make out their beautiful gowns, their glimmering jewels.
The sisters were quiet, for once, as the boats bobbed downstream in a little parade. We kept well back from them, letting the current carry us, taking care not to splash. My heart stampeded in my chest, nerves running high.
But I was breathing clear air and staring up at a night sky full of stars, alive, alive, even as my lungs began to ache and my shoulders burned.
They rowed down the little canal that led from the castle straight to the Reyn. Cobie watched the current uncertainly, then reached for my hand.
“You said I didn’t need help.”
Cobie seized my fingers and began to tow me across the broad river. “Everybody needs help sometimes,” she said over her shoulder. “We stick together.”
“We stick together,” I agreed.
I clung to Cobie’s hand as we crossed the Reyn, as its waters beat against my side. When we reached the far bank, we clambered up among the mud and the rocks and the weeds, panting and waiting.
Before long, the freinnen were tying up their boats at another little dock, and we followed them up the hill, into the forest. I wrapped my arms around myself against the night air and kept close to Cobie, trying to be as quiet as the owls and bats swooping overhead. Moonlight silvered a stand of birches alongside the path.
“Selah,” Cobie whispered. “Do you see that?”
Candles clung to the branches of a massive alder, gleaming golden in the dark ahead, so like Arbor Hall I couldn’t help but think it was an omen. The sounds of laughter and music were coming from just beyond the candle tree, from a ruined castle hidden in the wood.
Many of its walls were crumbling, half its roof was collapsed, and green lichen spotted its old gray stone; but its every window glimmered with candle flame, and the stars were diamond-bright overhead. And more than all that—the music.
Tears built in my throat. Cobie’s brow furrowed. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” My voice cracked.
I was overreacting. But the music pouring out of the ruins was the first I’d heard in days.
I’d taken it for granted, before—had hardly noticed Andersen humming as he folded his paper figurines or Will singing to himself in the galley. The music at the balls I’d attended in Asgard and England had been background noise to other pursuits.
But after days and nights of decay and silence, the music and the sparkling hidden castle in the woods had undone me. I swallowed hard and smiled at Cobie.
A path led clearly from the candle tree to the castle door, but we clambered up through the woods to a window instead. Cobie blew out the candle on its ledge, as if to show what she thought of our not being properly invited.
Then we leaned over the window ledge and peered inside.
15
Beauty, beauty, sparkling and bright, lay before us.
I had never longed for an invitation so badly in my life.
The ruined palace was a fairy glen, a cave of wonders. Candles everywhere glimmered on bright jewels and polished leather, on a table piled with food and wine—but above all, on the crowd.
They were girls with elegant hands and boys with broad shoulders, boys with soft eyes and girls with sharp smiles. Glittering skirts and loose sleeves and slim trousers swirled through the room, some fine, some rough-spun. Many guests were masked; others were not; and their hair and skin were of every shade.
Musicians played in one corner as the crowd danced. I counted eight of the freinnen among them, wearing a fairy ring into the earth in their high-heeled shoes. Other guests lined the stone walls—some along the very wall beside our window.
Cobie saw them the same moment I did. A girl with black hair, a goblet in her hand, talking to a boy and to a second girl, who was tall and thin and wearing a dress the color of lilacs.
Even in the half-light, I recognized them at once.
I lurched down, pulling Cobie with me. “Leirauh,” I gasped.
“And Margarethe.” Her eyes were wide.
We’d found them.
“Did they see us?” I panted.
“I—don’t think so,” Cobie said, uncertain.
I had seen something shift in Leirauh’s blue eyes, but it might have been only the flicker of a candle. We crouched beneath the window, backs flat against the castle wall. I grasped at the forest floor, my heart pounding.
A shadow stretched past the window ledge above us, and then the candle was lit again.
Cobie’s eyes met mine. We ran into the woods, not daring to look behind us.
“We’ll go back tomorrow,” Cobie said. Her eyes were intent. “We’ll dress up, and go inside, and find out what they’re doing out here.”
“What if they are just going to a party?” I asked, sliding into the river. The water was cold. “What if that’s all that’s going on?”
Cobie’s smile was feral. “Then we’ll go to a party.”
My heart beat hard all the way back to our room, my mind sharp with fear and starlight and freezing water, the images of the night still vivid in my mind. The freinnen dancing, happy and beautiful beneath the candlelight, so like the ball I’d had to flee in Arbor Hall. They had looked as free as I had felt dancing with Torden in his father’s house, surrounded by the Asgard boys. Aleksei and Hermódr and Bragi and Fredrik, all as close as blood.
Turning over, I shut my eyes. Then a thought struck me.
“Have you noticed how similar all the freinnen look?” I asked Cobie.
She bit back a yawn. “Siblings tend to.”
“Yes,” I said slowly. “Margarethe and Ursula and Hannelore and Ingrid. And most of the others. Light brown hair and eyes and thin features. Fritz, too.”
Cobie’s eyes were drifting closed. I poked at her across the gap between our beds, and she pulled away, yawning. “What’s your point?” she grumbled.
“I don’t have one.” I shook my head. “It’s just odd, to me. Leirauh. She doesn’t look anything like the rest of them.”
16
Our midnight adventure left me weary. I was nearly swaying as Cobie and I followed the freinnen to their studio the next day, dreading the long, terrible hours of stitching ahead.
Fritz’s mention of the freinnen spending a little time in their sewing room each day had been a massive understatement. Remaking their clothes was all they seemed to do—though, now, I understood why.
As we passed his workshop, the door swung abruptly open.
“Seneschal-elect.” Fritz’s voice was relieved.
I curtsied slightly, avoiding his eyes. “Your Highness.”
I’d probably gotten the honorific wrong; perhaps I should’ve addressed him as Your Grace or Your Majesty or Your Serene Beneficence. Neither Torden nor Bear had made much of titles, we never used them aboard the Beholder, and Perrault wasn’t here to correct me. More important, I wouldn’t be standing in front of Fritz long enough for him to comment. I carried on after the quickly disappearing queue, but the fürst stopped me. “Your Grace—”
I turned. My smile felt tight. “I’m not due to return to irritate you for another two days.”
“Selah, please come in,” Fritz said, and the apology in his tone took me aback.
I paused. “Cobie,” I called after her retreating form. She turned, and I pointed to Fritz’s open workshop door.
Cobie looked surprised, but nodded significantly. “I’ll let the others know.”
They wouldn’t notice
my absence, and Cobie wouldn’t say a word to them. But she would be watching and listening.
Fritz ushered me inside and closed the door behind us.
The workshop looked a bit tidier than it had the previous day. I wove through the maze of tables and sheets before turning to face him.
“Why did you invite me back?” I asked. “You don’t want me here. You said so.”
Fritz put his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched. “I felt bad.”
My face burned. “Flattering.” I started toward the door. “I’ll go join your sisters.”
“No—stay. Please,” Fritz managed. “Why don’t you sit down?” He gestured to a single chair along the wall, sitting by itself. Despite myself, I laughed.
“What?” Fritz sounded affronted.
He had made an effort in the awkwardest manner possible.
“Now I really feel like a child,” I said, thinking of our last conversation and beginning to laugh in earnest. “You might as well have me stand in the corner.”
“That wasn’t my intention.” His brow furrowed. “What would make it a more inviting space?”
Books. Fire. Rain. A kiss.
The thought of an attic study above a library suddenly sprang, unbidden, into my mind, followed immediately by a fjord at sunrise.
I swallowed and pushed the memories from my mind. Fritz wasn’t trying to romance me, and I didn’t want him to. Both realizations eased me a bit.
“A table?” I twisted Torden’s ring on my index finger. “Something to eat or drink?”
I regretted my last suggestion as soon as I’d made it, in light of the fare I’d been served at meals, but Fritz immediately straightened. “Yes! Of course.” He bustled over to a copper contraption in the corner and poured coffee into a mug, pausing first to set what looked like a piece of paper over its mouth.
He passed me the cup. I peered inside, curious. “What was the paper for?”
Fritz’s face brightened. “It’s a filter. A woman named Melitta Bentz developed them, to keep the grounds out of the coffee.”
“Any sugar?” I asked hopefully.
Fritz repaired to the coffee maker and returned with a small bowl. “Don’t ask where I got it.” He smiled slightly.
I took the sugar bowl with shaking fingers.
It was nothing. A throwaway comment. A joke.
But it meant Fritz had secrets. Sources. Ways of getting things from beyond the court. And that was a start.
I would have bet it was a bigger lead than Lang had; reticent though he’d been, I doubted he could have resisted boasting about it.
I sat in my lone chair and sipped my coffee, reveling in the sweetness and my own little victory. Fritz settled down next to one of his machines, slid on a pair of spectacles, and began to tinker with a fitting at the end of a hose.
“So what are you doing in here?” I asked, curious. “Building the perfect woman?”
“I told you, I don’t have time for romance.”
“So what, then?” I pressed.
Fritz took off his glasses again and looked at me. “Important things.”
I laughed. “Goodness, Fritz.” Could he really not hear himself?
He passed a hand over his eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m being rude again. I’m hardly the charming host you expected.”
What would Fritz make of Bear’s initial biting sarcasm and his eventual efforts to win me over? Of Torden, and his brothers ribbing him and upending half his attempts at romance? Fritz was certainly nothing like either of them.
In fact, Fritz reminded me a bit of me.
I tipped my head to one side, startled by a sudden sense of kinship with him. In Fritz’s frustrated expression, I recognized every time Alessandra had interfered with my work, every budget of mine that she’d flouted in her extravagance.
“Back home, I’m responsible for about three thousand acres, not to mention the cattle, the gardens, and other sundries.” I swallowed, missing my father even as I spoke the words. “My stepmother arranged to send me here without consulting me. I understand having your pursuits interrupted by someone with no regard for what they mean to you.”
Fritz blinked at me, stymied. “I don’t know how large an acre is, to be quite honest with you.”
I gave him half a smile. “Use your imagination.”
After a long moment, he spoke. “A stylist in Rouen invented a way to dry women’s hair quickly.” He nodded at the hose before him, then gestured to a row of gas lamps on a table nearby, each smashed, each connected to an identical hose.
I stood and shifted closer. “So you want to . . . dry your hair?”
“No, I want to dry out the castle.” Fritz pinched the bridge of his nose. “The rot and mildew are everywhere. The carpets, the wood, the tapestries and upholstery. And . . .” He gestured at the machine. “I hoped the stylist’s machine might work for my purposes.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to repair the roof?” I mused. “Or patch the leaking walls?”
“Only my father can authorize improvements on such a scale.” He sighed, looking dissatisfied. “Only he can stop things from growing worse.”
I thought of my father. Of his body’s slow slide toward ruin, of the sadness that had seemed to weigh on him since my mother had passed, of Alessandra’s relentless emptying of our coffers. Of my own powerlessness to deal with the source of my problems, rather than address their symptoms.
Fritz did not speak of the tsarytsya, of her thoughts on his castle and his court, and I wondered if he believed what I only hoped was true: that, if not beyond her reach, we were beyond Baba Yaga’s notice in a moldering house at the edge of her world.
“You’re just trying to make the best of the situation he created,” I finished for him. Fritz nodded glumly. With a rush of sympathy, I raised my mug in his direction and drained it.
“I should go,” I said after a long moment, heading for the door. “Your sisters will be wondering where I am.”
They would not. But I wanted to leave Fritz thinking fondly of me, and to do that, I needed to actually leave him.
“It was nice talking to you,” Fritz said. He seemed to mean it.
“We’re not so different, you and I.” I gave him a wan smile. “You should let yourself trust, sometimes, that someone might understand.”
17
I left my watery expression and my platitudes to do their work with Fritz and hurried to the studio.
“What have I missed?” I asked Cobie as I sat beside her. She was holding a needle in her hand like a dart. “Are they talking about the ball?” I assumed they would be, as I assumed the gowns in their laps were the ones they would wear that night.
“No, they’re talking about a wedding— Ow.” Cobie popped a bleeding finger into her mouth, glaring at the tear she was trying to patch. “Will’s so much better at this than I am.”
I glanced around at the freinnen, all of them immersed in their work. They reminded me of Imani, the brilliant designer and seamstress I’d commissioned my Arbor Day dress from in Potomac. As Imani had, the girls worked with an artist’s intention, their fingers moving as delicately as any sculptor’s, their eyes roving as keenly over color and texture as any painter’s would do. Old garments became new gowns in their hands.
Art was strictly regulated within the Imperiya. It seemed incalculable foolishness to count clothing out of that reckoning.
Suddenly, I straightened. “A wedding?” Certainly, it was a normal enough subject of gossip; but the freinnen didn’t seem excited. Their voices were quiet—almost grim. “What about it?”
Cobie frowned, concentrating on the torn black trousers in her lap. “Something, something, months to prepare, something, a year and a day . . .” She tugged a stitch through, needle high, wrapping the thread around her fingers so tightly it nearly snapped. “Oh. Their father’s wedding.” Something cold and slimy squirmed in my stomach.
Hertsoh Maximilian had warned us he was busy with marriage preparations, and ind
eed, I’d engaged little with him directly. He was a gray presence in my periphery at meals, the incarnation of the unseen tsarytsya, the living image of the castle decaying around me. I had furiously avoided his gaze; the few times I’d looked his way, he’d been laughing at a rat scampering, terrified, across the table, or cajoling Leirauh into letting him feed her off his plate. He was merely a shade of the tsarytsya, possessed only of a shadow of her power, but his presence sent me eagerly scrabbling back to the freinnen’s dungeon room. Even Fritz’s prickly company was far superior by comparison.
I wanted most of all to flee entirely. I had to remind myself constantly that we were here to help the Waldleute so they could be free of the tsarytsya and the duke and all his ilk.
“Do we know who his bride is?” I asked quietly, wincing as I stabbed my own finger, whipping my hand away so as not to bleed on the gown I was hemming. “I haven’t even heard whether she’s at court.”
“Maybe Perrault knows something,” Cobie said. I made a note to ask him after dinner. “Do you think—” But before Cobie could finish her thought, the door to the studio burst open.
As if we had summoned him, Hertsoh Maximilian himself stood in the doorway, clad in gray and flanked by two guards.
Hands in his pockets, he moved across the circle of his daughters, now risen from their threadbare brocaded chairs and faded velvet settees. Each of them curtsied, murmuring their greetings to him in Yotne.
Batyushka. Batyushka.
Ingrid and Hannelore. Johanna and Greta. Ursula and Margarethe and all the rest of them. Their light brown heads bobbed, their hands clasped. Leirauh shook her black hair in front of her face and stared at the floor.
Maximilian ignored Cobie and me. I could not say I took offense at the slight.
The duke turned instead to the dress forms scattered about the room, like dancers frozen in place. The sisters clustered a little closer together when their father’s back was turned.
