Once

by Elisabeth Grace Foley et al.

  Ioan sliced a hand through the air. “Folk will see what they most desire to see. You are but a clever impostor at best. My king and queen lost a child—their only child—and it is only the basest of people who would intrude on that sorrow and exploit it for profit.”

  Maria watched the rage and suspicion war within him. He really believed her a pretender, did he? Well, she was sorry to disappoint but she’d never have attempted such a coup d’etat on her own volition.

  “I am the princess,” she said quite simply.

  “Impossible.”

  “And yet, here I am,” Maria answered. She held his gaze for an uncomfortable moment, then tipped her chin and breathed in the beauty of the glass ceiling. “If you’d be so good as to tell the king, I would like to see what that roof can do.”

  “It must have been magic.”

  After Heath confessed the non-plausible plausible solution to Flavian, the man had quieted.

  He rolled the rim of his beer glass with a fingertip. “I will take you to Carlotta. She will not be so happy to see you, but this is how it can be.”

  “Really?”

  “Dah.” He brought a pair of dark eyes to Heath’s face and flashed a smile. “Follow me.”

  “Where will you take me?” Every cell in Heath’s composed, civilized brain told him this was what travel guidebooks called “a compromising situation” and suggested the American traveler at all costs avoid. Still, he’d asked to meet with Carlotta and did he really have another way? Brandon’s film connection might turn up a different lead—eventually. Meanwhile, Maria was very likely in danger.

  “Coming?” Flavian inquired.

  “Yeah, give me just a second.”

  The man nodded and casually steered little Daniel outside. A commercial screamed on the television behind the bar.

  Heath zipped his jacket and switched his passport and wallet to the inside of his shirt, making sure it was tucked and his belt tightened. Then, as cautious as he could reasonably be in this moment, he followed Flavian and Daniel through the purple evening. They skimmed several bricked, patch-worked side streets and several alleys, climbed a fence or two, and exited the white sector of town.

  Here, the peoples’ skin blended with the dusk while the fabric of their clothing screamed of exotic places. Sultry-eyed girls in tiered floral skirts hawked bright gold watches—all the colors at which conservative Romanians balked. Skinny boys and gangly men, shapely women with braids swinging to their hips, fat women with hair combed into thick knots at their necks. Everyone out in the mild, drawing night. No one seemed in a particular hurry to close themselves into their homes for the evening. All doors were open to the street. Half the children ran naked, chasing a ball down the center of the avenue. Dogs skulked between legs and cats hid in potted petunias, their eyes catching odd shards of light leftover from the setting sun.

  The reek of unwashed bodies and odd housekeeping persisted until Flavian led Heath and the boy into a clean, white lane set with opulent mansions. The contrast between the sector through which they’d just trekked and this celestial glory hurt Heath’s eyes almost physically. He blinked and caught his breath while Flavian spoke to a slender gypsy man smoking against a gold-painted fence. Daniel clambered up to the top spikes, making faces at the grand house in its beautiful cage. He took a rock and banged on the metal gate. An old, old woman with a bruised left eye jerked open a window.

  Daniel hailed her with a grin.

  She tossed her hands and swore at him.

  “Daniel,” Flavian called, and jerked his head. The boy came off the fence.

  Flavian gave instructions which Heath could not understand. An urgent, constant stream of foreign tongue.

  They waited and watched the boy trot away into the darkness. Flavian then turned to Heath and slung his arm across his shoulders.

  “Carlotta is a very influential woman in our community,” he explained. “You did a good thing to not go to the police.”

  Suspicion rankled. “Why?” He winced at his tone.

  “Oh, because you know the police. They will not be believing stories of magic and sorcery.” Flavian chewed his bottom lip. “Those things are too upsetting for the people. Better to keep to things easily to explain. Your boss stole the book and ran away from you with it. That is what they would be saying right now. And you would be staying the night in a prison, I am thinking.”

  “Yeah.” Heath shoved his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “Guess it is a good thing I didn’t set off the hue and cry.”

  “I am supposing the spirits brought me to you.”

  Heath looked at him curiously. “You believe that?”

  Flavian’s dark eyes gleamed. “Of course. What do you believe? Are you Orthodox?”

  “I’m not saying I don’t sometimes forget it, but I’m a Christian.” He laughed.

  Flavian eyed him slyly. “Ah… Pentecostal.”

  Heath grinned. “Baptist or something.”

  “Okay.”

  They had reached the largest house on the street: a mansion standing in a gravel-filled courtyard, gleaming white as if carved of pure hope. A few lights glowed from the upper windows and hit upon the bronze cupola on the roof, sparking fire off it.

  The two men crunched across the drive and climbed to the porch. Flavian knocked with the backs of his knuckles on the ornamental paneling of the front door. A brief moment, and the door was wrenched open from within.

  “The American?” she of the golden eyes hissed. Drenched angora cats seldom look quite as bemused as she. Arms crossed, Carlotta leaned against the lintel of the door and dared him silently to cross her.

  Heath stiffened and made a bow. Afterward it seemed to him quite stupid, but her manner required he genuflect. She watched him. A smirk played on her lips, failing, as usual, to reach her eyes. And the eyes themselves—the ex-girlfriend eyes—began their entrancement.

  “So you’ve found me,” she murmured. “You want help, I presume?”

  Funny, how the more they interacted, the better her English. If he’d been any less frustrated, he would have found it mesmerizing.

  Heath set his jaw. “I want answers. If I can get them by way of your help, I can deal with my distaste for it.”

  She laughed and sulkily shoved off the door-frame with another musing smile. “This way.”

  Through a house half-sunk in gold, mosaic tiles, and upholstery, Carlotta led him. In one foyer hung a chandelier so large, so ceramic, it seemed an immense teapot upended. Nine feet tall. How heavy must it be? Pure goldenness numbed Heath’s senses; the rooms flowed with a muffled sing-song of their own. Every lamp seemed the rim of a wine-glass stroked by a dulcet finger-tip.

  The windows sang. The room, filled with amber liquors in huge decanters, seemed an orchestra itself and no sooner had they passed through one space, then the sound followed them to another.

  Last came a heavy room looking vaguely pagan, vaguely pleasant, gorged on silk drapery. Tantalizing. A place demanding leisurely exploration. Carlotta sank to the satin pillows on the floor and seemed to grow into them, rooting herself poisonously deep. Her billowing yellow robes mixed with the red pillows, turning blush and orange on the edges. Indefinite. Nothing but pure color, like oil paints on a canvas stretched taut.

  Enough. Keep your mind. Heath looked to Flavian. The man smiled and he too seemed cast in gold. He pushed Heath’s shoulder gently.

  Look to Carlotta, the gesture said. Focus.

  Yes, focus.

  Carlotta was speaking. He saw her lips move but could make out none of it. Her words were not Romanian, nor English, nor any written language from any portion of this world. But as she spoke, pictures filled Heath’s mind. Carlotta glistened at him and softly, the pictures became a dream.

  A king, a queen, a viciously gorgeous caravan and stepping out from it: a wild, storm-ridden woman. Jealously sat upon her like a crown and no jeweler could have fashioned for her a more fitting adornment. In her arms she held a yellow book. The
same yellow book taken by Maria when she vanished into the case.

  “You forgot,” the woman cried. Her tone laughed at the king and queen, pitied them. “I was to be invited. It should have been my wedding.”

  “Guards, remove her.”

  The gypsy clicked her tongue. “Oh, hush. We had an agreement. I was to marry him.”

  The king halted in his protests. His queen, wedding garments fitted to her gentle figure, trembled beside him. He put his arm around her and she quietened. At this, the stranger flashed dusky laughter.

  “Look at you! A spring flower, fit for nothing but to wilt at a blow! Look at the queen you chose, Carol. Does she suit you? Does she know how to bear your humors?”

  The king flinched and Heath watched the intensity flow from the king’s jaw to his hands, which clenched. Men’s common instinct to strike out at words.

  “No more,” His Majesty commanded.

  The wild one swept to his side and stroked his face with the back of her hand. “Oh, Carol, how noble it is to please your family. Elisabeth will make you a very… blancmange queen.”

  “Who are you?” the queen protested.

  Carlotta, for she it was, tossed her head. “Queen of my people. Your husband favors my warmth, you know. As I said, he pledged his first troth to me.”

  “He did no such thing. I am his mate. We are one.”

  “Mmmm, it seems so now, doesn’t it?” Carlotta’s gaze seethed with insane humor. “But when he is rigid in manner, will you melt him? When worry overtakes him, will you be able to share his load? Have you will? Have you passion? You have words. And words will not take you far with him, I believe.” She had kept her hand to the king’s cheek this whole time. Now she drew it back and whipped him with the back of her palm. A heavy green ring bit into his flesh, but the King did not cry out.

  “A curse upon you, Carol, faithless man.”

  “Witch!” Something sang out of nowhere, accompanying the words, and struck Carlotta’s mouth. It was the queen’s hand and Carlotta, properly aghast, stared back at the queen who looked no less white with anger than herself.

  “You will not speak of my husband like this. Not now; never.”

  Deep in his mind, Heath felt that the pulsing warmth of Carlotta’s fury had grown into his own breath and he heard her words as if they proceeded from his own mouth:

  “Then I curse you. I curse your family and your lineage.” He felt her arm, as if were his own, raise the yellow Spindle-book into the air. “I curse the ground upon which you stand and I curse the promise you have pledged. Enjoy your reign, O, Carol of Romania. I am certain it will be suited to a man like yourself. All honor and dignity.”

  What that meant, she did not say, but a prickling sensation in Heath’s stomach distracted him a moment. The scene whisked away and a new one took its place. Heath found himself in a church. He looked over the rim of a coffin into the face of a dead child. Soulless. An unmoored body drifting, no ties to this world.

  “My darling,” a voice breathed.

  Startled, Heath’s gaze lurched to the figure beside him. There stood the poor queen, and her blue eyes bored wildly into his own. He balked at the intensity and backed away.

  “Karl,” she wailed, and flung herself on his chest, beating her fists against him. “Kiss her. Say you will see her again. You will! You will!”

  With calm, terrified hands, Heath put her away from himself. He looked at the hands which were not his, felt the beard which he had not grown. He realized he embodied the king’s form. Heath looked to the dead daughter, lying motionless. A far, far, dismal cry from the laughing aspect of childhood was this waxen form, lips parted as if straining for a breath, hands folded with crass calm in her lap. When were a child’s hands ever still? When were limbs so straight and tidy? What Heath saw knotted his guts into ropes of helplessness. Unable to act as Heath swore he would have acted, he watched himself—in the king’s body—push away his queen with rough hands. He stalked away from the coffin. Not a farewell, not a kiss, not a kind word. Nothing. Because reality tugged him from the dream and reality was Carlotta’s hand in his, stroking his fingers, pulling him into the future.

  He thrashed, panting into focus, and they were once again in the temple room, now seated on red pillows. Heath felt a great thirst. His shirt clung to his chest and shoulders, soaked with sweat.

  “My God. Mercy,” he panted.

  “So,” Carlotta purled, smoothing his hair away from his forehead, “you know about me.”

  “That was you.” He blinked, trying to bring himself into the real world. This could not be the real world.

  “My finest work.”

  “You killed their child!”

  Carlotta caught her rich bottom lip between her teeth and looked at him fondly. “Oh, you are sweet. I didn’t kill their child. I stole her, which is infinitely worse for the parents. One must,” here, she dropped her lids and smiled modestly, “make concessions for stereotypes. Gypsies steal children, do they not? The King lived in denial to the end of his life. Worthless man. But Elisabeth—she had more spirit than I supposed. She understood what I had done.”

  “Taken her child.”

  “Delayed her child’s life for a hundred and twenty years.” Her lids lifted and the serpentine gold glinting out from under them struck Heath like barbed venom. “The queen had a verse from her sweet little Scriptures engraved on the child’s tomb. Tattle-tale that she was: “‘Weep not; she is not dead, but sleepeth.’“ Carlotta smirked. “ I had not thought it possible to hate her more.”

  “And the princess?” The words ground willfully from Heath’s mouth. He did not want to know the answer. He did not want to be here in this treacle-like golden stupor.

  “Why, I brought her here… to this world. An age apart from that in which she might have lived, had I not dabbled in more effective sorcery than most.”

  “What did you do? Say it plainly before I throttle you.”

  Carlotta’s skirts rustled as she rose to claim a cup from Flavian, who had absented himself. This she put to Heath’s lips and bade him drink. When he had finished, she wiped his lips with the hem of her skirt and grew thoughtful.

  “You are not as swift as I might have hoped,” she mentioned. “I caused the princess to sleep for more than a hundred years. My race was to have mingled with theirs,” she breathed. “I was to have made a way for the Romani. This…” she spread her fingers toward the outer world, “…would no longer exist if I had married Carol. Our lines would have crossed, our blood mixed with theirs. We would have had our pride.”

  “You knew that would never happen,” Heath said, coldly. “So you acted in jealousy.”

  “Of course.” Carlotta stood, clasped her hands behind her back, and paced before him. “Many a crime has been committed for lesser reasons.” She sprang to him fiercely, gracelessly. “He crushed my happiness. I stole his.”

  A great weariness came over Heath and as he stood, his legs shook. “What do you intend to do with me?”

  “As you have wished from the start: help you find your… boss.” She winced at the term and ran a hand through her perfumed hair.

  Heath breathed deeply, squared his shoulders. “At risk of sounding like a 1930’s film noir heroine, why would you tell me all of this if you intended in the first place to help me find Maria?”

  “Because, Childe Harold, you have the heart of an artichoke. You will pity me. You pity her. I can do with you what I will.”

  “Why would Maria need my pity? What have you done with her?”

  “I did nothing. She was the one who fumbled backward a century. It was none of my doing, I can assure you!”

  “She time-traveled.”

  “Yes, you asinine creature, she went backward to her birthright.”

  Many worlds collided in Heath’s headache. He groped about for words. “Maria is…”

  “Of all the slack-jawed, brainless beetles I’ve seen in my reign,” Carlotta snapped. “Here it is plainly: your M
aria is the princess. She has gone back in time and will try to change it all. History will be rewritten and Doamne knows where we will end up. So you, dear hero, are going to get her for me by exactly the method I choose.”

  Heath laughed. “How do you think I’ll agree to that?”

  Carlotta’s eyes narrowed into flame-filled half-moons. “Because, sweet, you’ve drunk of my cup. Maria might have taken The Spindle but I can effect simple magic without a spell book. Sending one person backward is not difficult. You’ll go and you’ll get her and you’ll bring her back.”

  “Why do you want Maria in this age?”

  Carlotta knotted the edge of her robe. “If she returns to her parents, her throne, her life… what good would all my sacrifice have been? I am sending you back. You will effect the time-travel spell in The Spindle as I lead you.”

  “You need your spell book, don’t you?”

  Rage emanated from the gypsy as she burned into her luxurious bed of satin pillows. At last, she raised her eyes to him and spread red lips in a smile. “I do need my spells.”

  Then for the first time, Heath noticed dark circles underscoring Carlotta’s eyes and her chest rising and falling rapidly. As he noticed this, the desperation of her consumptive beauty shocked him.

  “You’re sick,” he marveled.

  “Silence! You will bring Maria back and you will bring with you The Spindle. And if anything goes wrong… you will kill her.”

  “I won’t kill Maria,” Heath snarled. “You’re insane.”

  She moved to him and her fingers were silken-fine to his skin. He twitched under her touch like a mustang bridled for the first time.

  “But you will, darling. You cannot help but do what I bid, having drunk the cup of obedience. You are my slave, American.” Carlotta laughed. “Oh, do not be alarmed. Flavian finds it most agreeable to be my manservant. Don’t you, Flavian?”

  Heath jerked from her touch but she followed him and twined a terrifyingly muscular arm around his neck.

  “I will never kill Maria,” he growled. “I will never give you the spell book.”