by Paul Park
He looked again when he was on the train to Germany. He saw the boy and his dog and the soldier. They had built a fire on the bank above the boat, and they huddled around it in the dark. They had found Miranda Popescu’s quilted coat, but the girl herself was not with them.
At the moment of collapse, she’d been in the cottage itself, just another object out of hundreds there. Perhaps with the other objects she’d been transported back. It was only later that he thought to turn his gaze eastward, after it was too late to find her. Too late and too early.
* * *
FRIGHTENED NOW, MIRANDA ran down through the trees. She must have gone the wrong way. She must have gotten turned around; how was it possible she couldn’t find the river? Even the trees were wrong—the tall pines had disappeared, and she found herself in a forest of oak saplings. And the dirt was sandy and smelled of salt.
“Peter!” she called out. “Andromeda!”—where were they? Almost she felt angry that they couldn’t find her. She wanted to share what had happened with the ugly man. And though she couldn’t understand it, she knew it was significant. She knew something had changed. The victory had left her flushed and burning—it took her several minutes to realize she was hot. The light that spilled in through the trees was hot and yellow. She could smell dirt and green grass. She could hear the chattering of birds.
She paused to catch her breath. “Peter!” she called. Where could he be? She’d climbed up through here from the boat, but now the path had disappeared. And she must have come around in a circle, because in front of her she saw the roof of Umar’s house again.
She saw it again, and yet as if for the first time, because everything was different. The dark eaves and shining roof were different now, more solid and more real, and in their proper place among these little trees. And how hot she was! She was conscious of the smells of her own body and her clotted, tangled hair, which itched.
After a moment she stepped forward. She broke through a clump of juniper bushes, and then stopped again. In front of her was Umar’s formal garden, much overgrown. Paths of soft grass made their way among the brambles that had covered Umar’s roses and poppies. A thicket had grown up around the statue of Athena, and the stone bench was invisible. Briars grew over the Magdalena fountain. Irises were in bloom.
Time had gone by since she’d last been here, ruinous time. Maybe the false house along the Hoosick River had been closer to her memory—insubstantial, insufficient, changeable. But this was the real thing. And even if some small details were unfamiliar, still it all stank of home, every rock and tree and bush.
Home, and it was she who had brought them there—Peter and Andromeda, wherever they were now. She’d find them soon enough. Right now she preferred to be alone, at least for a few minutes more. She wanted to savor these small feelings, as well as something else that maybe she’d find awkward or impossible to explain: Again, it was because of her own strength that she was here. Her aunt had not helped her, nor Raevsky, nor Peter.
She took off her sweatshirt, then bent to unlace her heavy boots. She stripped off her wool socks, and rubbed the dirt out of her toes. She pulled up the sleeve of Blind Rodica’s shirt—there was the golden bracelet on her forearm. And for the first time since she’d put it on, she didn’t feel entirely like a fraud, like someone half pretending to be herself. And maybe this white tyger thing was going to work out after all.
Through the long-needled trees she could just see the corner of her father’s house. Barefoot, she followed the path toward it over the big slate slabs, almost hidden in the soft grass. She was conscious now of the sea air, the murmuring of the water. Near her a brandywine bird perched on a strand of briar. It cocked its head and sang its cheap little song, then fluttered off down the path.
She followed it until she came to the high bank. There were the steps that led up to the terrace, guarded by the stone lion. Beyond, there would be octagonal red tiles, French windows, and the stone tower above her head—part of her wanted to climb up that way at once. But part of her resisted—there’d be time to explore the castle room by room. There’d be time to find her own turret window. Maybe it would be more fun with Peter anyway.
In the meantime, Miranda followed the path away from the stone building. The wind was off the water, which she could glimpse now through the hillocks of tough grass—the rocky shore, the flat, murmuring water of the Black Sea.
THE TOURMALINE
Available in hardcover from Tor Books
Read on for a preview
1
Catching up
1
The Hoosick River
ALL AFTERNOON THEY SEARCHED the riverbank. Peter went a mile in both directions, tramping though the high reeds next to the water. At intervals he called Miranda’s name.
It was a bright, clear day. The reeds were golden in the winter sunlight, which dazzled him and blinded him when he stopped to catch his breath. But the light had no warmth in it. Past three, the shallow water in the hummocks and the roots were covered with a veiny skin of ice. Peter’s feet were numb inside his running shoes. Hoarse and discouraged, he went back to the boat to search for woolen gloves.
Andromeda was no help. Since her transformation, she’d never been a barking kind of dog. She’d scarcely made a sound except for a breathless wheezing almost like speech. But now she ran in circles on the higher ground, yelping and howling. Sometimes she had her nose down, but there was nothing methodical in the way she sniffed and searched. She might just as well have chased her tail.
How much was left of her? Peter asked himself. Packed in her dog’s narrow skull, how much was left of the girl he’d known? Raevsky—the old man—was better, more effective. He kept to the place in the high pines where they’d last seen Miranda, before she’d faded and vanished into the air. He went outward from the clearing in a spiral, his pistol in his hand.
In the morning he’d been stiff and lame, and in the afternoon he still moved slowly. He limped down the steep bank to meet Peter at the boat.
Six hours ago they’d pulled out of the current and stopped at this curved, sandy shore. Lured by—what? Peter had seen someone he thought he recognized, a woman in a long skirt. She’d called to them from the high ground. Then she’d come to greet them as they brought the boat to shore.
At that moment all of them had been waylaid by something separate, some illusion from the past. Miranda didn’t even glance at the woman, the Condesa de Rougemont in her embroidered vest. She didn’t wait for the boat to come to land. She’d thrown down her paddle and stepped out into the shallow water. She’d scrambled up the slope and disappeared into the woods and that was that.
What was she looking for in this empty forest, on this empty river? Now she was gone, and Peter stood with his hands in his pockets where Raevsky had drawn the boat onto the pebbles. Above him somewhere, Andromeda yipped and wailed.
“No reason to seek more,” said Captain Raevsky with his sibilant Roumanian accent. His gun was in his pocket and he blew on his hands. He moved his weight from one boot to the other, because of the cold or because his feet were sore. “Now we make camping.”
Peter was relieved to hear him say so. Stamping though the frozen reeds, Peter had already half-convinced himself it made more sense to leave. They must be close to where the Hoosick River joined the Hudson near Mechanicville. He remembered the distances from home. He and his parents had driven up to Saratoga more than once. But in this world there was no town before Albany, and even Albany was a tiny place with just a few thousand souls, as Raevsky called them. But there’d be food in Albany. Food was what they didn’t have, except for some stale biscuits.
They could put in a couple more hours on the river. Miranda had left them. There was no reason to stay. Yet when he saw Raevsky reach into the flat-bottomed boat and pull out one of the big canvas bags, Peter felt a shudder in his body that was like hope. With another part of his mind he told himself he never wanted to leave this godforsaken shore. So he dragged the
tent from the pirogue and then carried it up the slope to a flat place in the golden grass, while Raevsky pulled dead branches from the trees. Andromeda was nowhere to be seen.
In the morning on this trampled rise above the river, he had seen a woman or woman’s ghost, dressed in a long skirt and embroidered vest. Even a name had come to him—Inez de Rougemont. Now all that seemed dreamlike and unreal, except for the scratches on his forearms, the bites on his shoulders where the woman had attacked him, diverted him, prevented him from following Miranda. Then she’d dissolved and disappeared just as Miranda had—Peter laid out the stiff canvas and slid the stakes into the sandy ground. Because the wind was stronger now, he found some rocks for the corners. It was a military pup-tent. When it was up, he brought the blankets and sleeping bags from the boat. Of them, at least, there was no lack.
These were all supplies from Raevsky’s journey up the river. He’d come from Roumania to kidnap Miranda for some woman named Ceausescu—Peter was unsure of the details. But in a series of catastrophes his men had all been lost, leaving blankets enough for six or seven, but food for none.
Raevsky made a fire-ring of river stones and dragged some logs to sit on. He built up a big fire and was heating water in a tin pot. Now he sat pulling off his boots, crooning over his damaged feet, which Peter could see were mottled and discolored in some places. With his clasp knife, Raevsky scraped away some skin.
He ripped a shirt to make clean bandages, which he smeared with ointment from a jar. Grimacing, he slid his feet into his woolen socks again. Squatting among the rocks, he pounded up some biscuits in a pot, then softened them with boiling water.
He was in his fifties. Under his knit cap his hair was gray. And his beard was rough and grizzled over his blotched, uneven cheeks. When he smiled, as now, holding out a bowl of sludge and a tin cup of ouzo, Peter could see his upper teeth were missing on one side.
“So. Eat. In the morning, then we see.”
“I’ll stay here,” Peter said impulsively, idiotically.
Raevsky shrugged. “Is nothing. Why? She is not here.”
Peter sat with his warm biscuits in his wooden bowl. Off in the woods, Andromeda yowled and was silent.
Raevsky stared at him. His eyebrows were coarse, his eyes sunken and bright. “What you saw?” he asked, finally.
Peter shrugged. It sounded stupid to say. “There was a woman. She called out to me. Rougemont or something—she was dressed, I don’t know, like a Gypsy. Now I can’t even remember. Look,” he said. He put down his cup and bowl, then held up his hands. They were scabbed and torn.
“And so? I did not see this Gypsy.”
Now it was getting dark. The sun was down behind the trees on the far bank.
“So?” Peter said.
Raevsky blew his nose on his fingers. Then he wiped them on his trousers. “When you saw Miss Popescu…”
He spat into the fire. In a moment he went on. “You smell burning smell? Fire burning and black powder? Then something, some ordure, and so? Murdarie—garbage?”
He sniffed to clear his nose again. “Is telling you, this murdarie of conjuring. Is like a conjure trick—no woman there. Me, I saw blackness, blindness, then you and the dog, fighting with nothing only a spirit or shadow. Then Miss Popescu, all alone. Then nothing. She is gone.”
“Yes,” Peter muttered.
All afternoon he’d tried not to think about it. So he’d occupied his mind with searching and shouting and stumbling through the grass. All the time, though, he had known what Raevsky knew. She was gone.
ALSO BY PAUL PARK
Soldiers of Paradise
Sugar Rain
The Cult of Loving Kindness
Celestis
The Gospel of Corax
Three Marys
If Lions Could Speak and Other Stories
No Traveller Returns
The Tourmaline
The White Tyger
PRAISE FOR PAUL PARK AND A PRINCESS OF ROUMANIA
“Paul Park knows fairy tales, contemporary and classic fantasy, and literary science fiction, and he borrows tropes from all these genres. So readers will find, as they enjoy this long novel (the first volume of two or more), that it provides the pleasures of the familiar—indeed, the archetypal—without neglecting some twists and enigmatic variations all its own. At times, though, it’s bound to remind you of the Harry Potter books, Phillip Pullman’s novels about Lyra Belacqua and even Gene Wolfe’s recent The Knight and The Wizard, as well as such older classic as The Wizard of Oz, Joan Aiken’s Dido Twite chronicles and even Philip K. Dick’s classics as The Man in the High Castle. But then all these works draw from the same well of fantasy, the same pool of dreams and nightmares.”
—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World
“Superb … A Princess of Roumania may well be the year’s best book in any … category … Beautifully written, touching, and enchanting, it is the best fantasy novel I’ve seen in several years … Marvelously conceived and majestically written … the manner in which Park revises almost beyond recognition the staple tropes of adolescent and adult fantasy … suggests that the succeeding volumes in the White Tyger sequence will complete a striking masterpiece, the equal of the finest works of Crowley, Pullman, and Le Guin … We may be looking at one of the major fantasy works of the decade.”
—Locus
“No one writes like Paul Park, and when he turns to magic, the results are magical. A Princess of Roumania is weirder and wilder than any fantasy you’ve read before and even those elements that might have been familiar—a princess, a werewolf, a jewel, a gypsy, magic, and murder—are transformed into strangeness. Park’s characters, incidents, and images will stay with you long after you’ve finished this book and are already dying to know what happens next.”
—Karen Joy Fowler
“Many of those who enjoyed the works of Philip Pullman or Madeleine L’Engle will be thrilled to discover A Princess of Roumania. Beautifully mysterious, it casts a spell that its readers will never forget.”
—Kim Stanley Robinson
“Paul Park is one of the most gifted and subtle story writers I know.”
—Jonathan Lethem
“All the world in a book! A Princess of Roumania is wildly original and simply wonderful, a phantasmagoria of wicked women, dangerous men, and seductive magic. Paul Park is one of the most original and delightful writers in fantasy today.”
—Michael Swanwick
“I love it! I think it’s wonderful.”
—Elizabeth Hand, author of Mortal Love
A Princess of Roumania puts Park into the top ranks of modern fantasy writers.”
—The Denver Post
“A Princess of Roumania is at once a vastly ambitious and passionately realized work of art, and immediately appealing in all the ways that the heart-tugging matter of high fantasy ought to be. Park’s Miranda is as brave and questing as a heroine of fantasy should be, and his Baroness Ceaucescu is a fascinating portrait of unstoppable evil that is never more or less than appallingly—even appealingly—human. Every page of this book holds something you couldn’t have imagined and yet that strikes you as supremely right and satisfying. A huge achievement.”
—John Crowley
“A smart political drama—one laced with paranoia-inducing saboteurs and riddling apparitions … It’s a journey almost as gratifying as the magic trick pulled off by Park, who should be knighted for breathing life into an oft-tired genre.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Paul Park’s A Princess of Roumania will delight fantasy readers with its mix of intrigue, death, and the possibility of rebirth. Park, author of half a dozen science fiction novels and a wonderful short story collection, has turned in an interesting first volume in what promises to be an exciting and thought-provoking series … Readers will be kept guessing until the end, when they will begin the wait for the next book.”
—Bookpage
This is a work of fiction.
All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A PRINCESS OF ROUMANIA
Copyright © 2005 by Paul Park
Teaser copyright © 2006 by Paul Park
All rights reserved.
“Comment,” copyright © 1926, copyright renewed 1954 by Dorothy Parker, from The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker, edited by Brendan Gill. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Edited by David G. Hartwell
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
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New York, NY 10010
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Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN 0-765-34950-7
EAN 978-0-765-34950-7
First edition: August 2005
First mass market edition: July 2006
eISBN 9781466839366
First eBook edition: January 2013
