The Wolf Princess

by Cathryn Constable

  Ivan staggered slightly. “No use?”

  The woman laughed. “Don’t imagine for one second you were ever going to be anything more!”

  Ivan shook his head, his eyes pleading, but when the princess said no more, he stumbled to the door.

  “Pull me up!” Sophie cried out. “Dmitri! Do as I say!” He was taking too long.

  She saw the princess look up into the chandelier, her hand to her mouth. Sophie knew the general, too, had flicked his gaze upward, but she was too excited to take anything in other than her desire to climb up into the cloud of crystal. Soon she could rescue the princess, get rid of the general. The princess would be so grateful to her, and … yes, they would be friends, wouldn’t they? She would talk to her about the wolves, explain why they must not be locked up …

  Dmitri pulled her up.

  She scrambled up onto the metal branches. The chandelier tilted and rocked. Swaying, Sophie clutched on to the gilt bars to steady herself. Dmitri sat opposite her. He didn’t look up.

  “Help me!” she said. “I need to reach across …”

  Dmitri followed her gaze to the rope of gray crystals with the rusty wire. His eyes filled with tears.

  As she put her hand out, he grabbed her wrist. A tear splashed from his eye and onto his scar. “Think what you are doing!” he said.

  “I know exactly what I’m doing!” she said. “Let go of my hand. You’re hurting me!”

  As Sophie wrenched her arm free, the chandelier shook again. The particles of light flew around them. It was all so beautifully clear to her. She unhooked the rusty wire and wrapped the rope of crystals around her wrist, her arm, her neck. Then, putting her foot in the loop, she smiled at Dmitri to let her down. His face was frozen now.

  She heard the voices of the general and Anna. They were discussing something. The princess sounded anxious, as if the general might leave at any second.

  “If you don’t help, I’ll just jump!” she cried. And she put her leg into the air. This seemed to send a charge through Dmitri’s body.

  “Nyet!” he cried. He let out the rope, feeding it through his hands, and Sophie was lowered to the ground, jumping off at the last minute.

  “See?” Sophie called up to him. “They were here all along! Right where we first met. The wolf princess was so smart.” She unwound the rope of stones from her arm. They were too large to be diamonds, surely? The necklace was too long. There couldn’t be many stones in the world as beautiful as these.

  The princess and the general were standing quite still. The princess’s eyes glittered and she said one word in Russian: “Brillianty!” The word sparkled and threw light around the room.

  In a smooth, quick gesture, she plucked the rope out of Sophie’s hands.

  There was the sort of silence you hear after you have dropped a beautiful antique glass. You know that something precious is about to be broken, something that, once it is smashed, can never be replaced … and you wonder, in that instant, if somehow, against all odds, you could catch it before it shatters.

  The princess stared at Sophie, her eyes cold, almost black. The chandelier shivered and Sophie looked up at Dmitri. He had his head in his hands. The diamonds spilled over the princess’s arm like a rope.

  “Long enough to hang a man,” she said.

  And then, sweeping Sophie with an expression of icy disdain, she dropped her head back. Closing her extraordinary eyes, she laughed. Everything in the room changed.

  “You are very generous. Are you sure you want me to have them?” she said teasingly.

  What’s she talking about? Sophie thought. They’re hers.

  The princess continued, “Are you quite sure?”

  The general, who had been observing everything without speaking, strolled across. The princess swung the diamonds in front of his face, laughing.

  He hooked them off her finger and ran them through his hands. “They’re just what you said they would be!” His voice was full of wonder. He held the rope up and looked closely at each stone. “Candlelight-cut, exquisite, no flaws, each one at least fifty carats!”

  “They’re not for you!” Sophie screamed. “Give them back! They belong to the princess! Those are the Volkonsky diamonds!”

  The man looked surprised. “Anna,” he said calmly. “The little wolf girl says these diamonds belong to the Volkonsky princess!”

  The woman smiled up into his eyes. “They do!” she whispered.

  They looked at each other and something like a current of electricity seemed to pass between them. The princess smiled as the general reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a sheaf of papers.

  “Perhaps these will be useful after all,” he said. He waved them in front of Sophie’s face.

  She saw the watermark on the thick white paper, the heavy black Russian letters … and, at the bottom, looking ridiculous in her own handwriting, her name: Sophie Smith.

  “There’s no need to tease her, Grigor,” the princess laughed, and took the papers from him.

  The general threw the diamonds around his shoulders. They winked in the candlelight, seeming to hold the entire room in hundreds of facets. “Hurry, Anna!” he barked. “We are leaving!”

  “I can come?” the princess gasped.

  The man shrugged, pulling on leather gloves. He balled his fist. “Just make sure you dispose of the evidence first.” He took a couple of steps, then turned around. “Don’t make any mistakes this time, Anna,” he whispered. “The only wolf you can trust is a dead wolf. That goes for wolf princesses, too.”

  “I won’t come with you!”

  “I don’t think you have a choice!”

  As Sophie was pulled toward the door, the chandelier shivered. She looked up. Dmitri parted heavy ropes of crystal and stared down at her. The expression on his face made her feel ashamed. She had disappointed him. But what could she do? The diamonds were Anna Feodorovna’s, and although Sophie hadn’t wanted them to be given to the general, they were not Sophie’s to keep. Dmitri turned his face away. Anna Feodorovna held Sophie firmly by the elbow and they walked down the corridor. In her other hand, she held the papers tightly.

  “I don’t understand.” Sophie had a sour taste in her mouth. She swallowed.

  “You are a silly, stupid little darling,” the princess told her in that musical peal of bells that was her voice. “I had hoped that I would bring you here and then … oh, then … the magic would start!” She sighed.

  They were moving down a narrower corridor with a much lower ceiling. It was more desolate than anywhere Sophie had seen in the palace.

  “I should have got rid of you when I had the chance,” the princess continued.

  Why couldn’t Sophie understand? The princess was speaking English. They weren’t difficult words. But what did she mean by them?

  “Got rid of me?” Sophie said slowly.

  The princess sounded exasperated. “But Ivan interfered. I would have said it was an accident, of course, that I was aiming for the wolf and you got in the way, but I suppose there would have been too much fuss anyway. Even though we are so far away, stories get out. Your idiotic friends would have told tales. How annoying that your stupid headmistress insisted they come, too. And then who knows? Someone might have remembered something about you. They might have claimed to be related to you and the whole situation would have been unmanageable.”

  “Princess,” Sophie whispered. “You’re hurting my arm.”

  The woman took no notice. Her face was set straight in front of her. Sophie tripped and almost stumbled, but the woman’s grip held her up. A draft soughed up the blighted corridor. Shadows flung themselves over the two figures like cloaks.

  “Please let me go.” Sophie thought she might cry.

  Perhaps the wolves had heard them, for they sent up a lupine chorus that became louder as the princess dragged Sophie on, laughing as the wolves cried out.

  “I should have had them shot when I arrived,” she said. “I’ve had a constant headache f
rom their stupid noise!”

  There was a sour, dank smell in the corridor.

  “What have I done?” Sophie felt her arm burning from the princess’s tight grip. At Sophie’s words, the princess looked as if she had been slapped on the cheek. She pulled Sophie closer to her and stared into her face. Sophie saw a blue vein throb in the woman’s temple.

  “Don’t you understand?” she whispered. Sophie watched the woman’s pale tongue. “All these stories about the wolf princess. You are the wolf princess, you little fool!”

  “But …”

  “Do you think I would give a damn about you if you weren’t? Why do you think I brought you here?”

  Sophie tried to twist her elbow out of the woman’s grasp. But she was unable to move. Was this what Dmitri had meant when he had asked her to think what she was about to do? Had he been trying to warn her? But if he thought she was in some way related to the Volkonskys, why hadn’t he said anything? Had he, too, realized only at that moment what he had done?

  “How can I be … how can I be the wolf princess?” She didn’t want to cry in front of the woman.

  “The lost Volkonsky child!” Anna Feodorovna spat at her. “All the other Volkonskys dead! Killed, murdered, gone! But there was one, just one child that escaped!”

  “But how can that have anything to do with me? I am English!”

  She snorted. “You might be English now … but like so many people in your stupid, tiny, ridiculous little country, your ancestors came from somewhere else!”

  “That can’t be true!”

  Anna Feodorovna didn’t answer immediately, but looked at Sophie as though deciding what to say. She bit her lip. “That is what was so thrilling about you when you first arrived here. I thought you would know something of who you were. Would even guess why you had been brought here.” She laughed. “But it was the most amazing thing! You knew nothing. Nothing!”

  “But there isn’t anything to know.” Sophie wished that her throat didn’t hurt so much. And that her head would stop throbbing.

  “Of course not.” She leaned in closer. “But haven’t you ever been curious about your family? And what a family! Such a sad story, too …”

  She frowned as if she felt genuine sorrow. “It made me so unhappy when I first found out. How Princess Sofya Kyrilich Volkonskaya, our dear, sweet wolf princess, had to leave her home in the middle of winter nearly a century ago. Such ugly, blood-soaked times, worse if you had a title or land or money … or a set of priceless diamonds hacked out of your own mine.” She shook her head. “And that should have been the end of the Volkonskys!”

  She took a step backward from Sophie, although she still held her tight. With her other hand she grasped the handle of a door. “She got nearly as far as the White Sea and then the snow claimed her. She was a fool to travel alone like that. Only a desperate woman would have considered making such a journey.” She shook her head. “Perhaps if she had left the child behind, she would have escaped. But she was a devoted mother.” The woman sighed. “They never found the child, you see. And that’s what interested me. It would have been the first thing that a wolf or a bear would have eaten. But nothing was ever found. Not a boot or a hat or a cloth to wrap the child in. Where had he gone?”

  She ground her foot into the loose stones on the floor. It made a rasping, grating sound.

  “I found myself thinking … what if someone had found the child, in the woods, and taken it to safety? There might be some Volkonsky prince living up near the White Sea!” She raised an eyebrow. “But I couldn’t find any child, and I did look … and so then I thought, what if someone took the child and put it on a ship … I didn’t know where he might have gone, but I started to look around, see what I could dig up.” She laughed. “And I found an old woman, very old. Living alone. She would die soon, but did she have any relatives?”

  The woman looked at Sophie, her eyebrows raised. “Did you ever meet Xenia? She was still alive when you were born.”

  As the princess said the name Xenia, an image did fall, quite perfectly formed, into Sophie’s mind. Stairs to a flat. Spider plants on a windowsill. A Pekingese that yapped and yapped. A woman so old that Sophie had been frightened; laughter because Sophie refused to sit on her lap. Sparkles at the old lady’s throat. Diamonds? A present pressed into her hand as she left, a piece of glass …

  The princess sighed. “But Xenia had never known that she had escaped from being murdered in Russia, had barely remembered being plucked from the frozen arms of her mother in a silver birch forest. How could she tell her son? Or her granddaughter? How could she tell them what she didn’t know herself? But somehow, between the forgetting and the loss, there was a song and a child named Sophie. And I thought that, in time, Sophie and I might meet …”

  “But that means” — Sophie shook her head — “that we are related. If I am a Volkonsky and you are a Volkonsky …”

  “Who said I was a Volkonsky?” The woman looked at Sophie as if she had said something completely stupid.

  “But that’s your name,” Sophie whispered.

  “It’s the name I use.” Anna Feodorovna raised one eyebrow. “After all, I found the palace, I uncovered the history. I set myself the task of finding the Volkonsky diamonds …” She put her finger to her lips. “Oh!” She smiled. “Have I said too much?”

  Her eyes glinted. She leaned forward and grabbed Sophie’s hand.

  “Don’t shrink back into the shadows like that,” she purred. “Once I brought you here, it occurred to me that you were so pretty, so amiable, that perhaps we should become related.” She grabbed Sophie’s chin and tilted her face up. “I could just get you to give everything to me!” She held up Sophie’s piece of glass. “And now an extra diamond! This alone is worth a fortune.”

  “But that’s my father’s.” Sophie tried again to twist away from her grasp. “It’s glass.”

  “It’s a Volkonsky diamond, you fool,” she hissed. She put it around her own neck, knotting the string where it had been snapped. “And now it’s mine. You … and the Volkonskys … really have lost everything now.”

  “Give it back!” Sophie tried to snatch back the glass drop that the princess shook in her face, taunting her. “My father gave me that!”

  “You are so stupid!” the woman crowed, dropping the diamond into her pocket. “Everything about you is just like a Volkonsky! Of course I soon realized who you were, even though you swapped sarafans with your silly friend. That’s when I took the knife to that stupid, smiling portrait; I had plenty of time to look at her face. You are so like her …”

  “You ruined the portrait? But why would you do that?”

  “I saw the way Dmitri looked at you. I knew what they were thinking, down there, in their stinking kitchen. It wouldn’t be long, despite my threats to throw them out or shoot them, before they’d realize, before they’d say something.”

  She turned her face and spat onto the floor. Sophie gasped.

  “Don’t like my rough ways?” she laughed. “Well, that suits me. Because I don’t much like you!”

  She reached into her pocket and got out a key. The wolves kept up their chorus, louder now, as she unlocked the door.

  Sophie took a step back, but Anna Feodorovna, without turning around, reached out and grabbed a handful of Sophie’s hair.

  “Not so fast,” she muttered. Snowflakes hurled themselves over the two of them as she opened the door an inch. “If only you had done as I asked, and not spoken to Dmitri,” she whispered into Sophie’s ear, “I might have kept you here for a couple of years. I might have let you play princess for a while before I got bored of you … and did … THIS!”

  She pushed Sophie through the door and out into the snow.

  Sophie hammered on the closed door as the snowflakes whisked crazily around her. “Princess!” she cried. “Please. Don’t leave me!” She rattled the large iron door handle, but heard bolts being thrown and realized it was hopeless.

  She turned. She was s
tanding at the top of steps in an enclosed courtyard in what seemed like an even older and more neglected part of the palace, filled with enormous stone animals. She looked up at the high walls. Every window was shuttered. Even if anyone was looking, no one could see her.

  For a moment it was silent. The howling she had heard in the corridor had stopped.

  And then she heard the sound of crying. Behind a rusting metal grille that looked like a claw gripping the courtyard wall, Marianne and Delphine crouched, wrapped in furs …

  She tried to call out their names, but all that came out was a broken croak.

  “Sophie!” Marianne clung to the metal bars.

  Sophie put her foot down on the next step and sent a mini avalanche of snow to the bottom.

  “Watch out!” Delphine screamed. “Sophie! The wolves!”

  It was as if they were speaking to her through a dream. She understood the words, but not what they meant. She saw Marianne bury her head in Delphine’s shoulder and she knew this meant something bad.

  “Princess!” Sophie scrabbled back up the step and hammered again at the door. “Please … let me in! I’ll do whatever you want … I promise … the wolves …” She was crying. “The wolves …”

  It was quiet. She had closed her eyes, tried to squeeze as flat as she could to the flaking paint of the enormous door, but she knew it was no good. They were coming toward her.

  She half turned, and the white shapes moving through the cemetery of stone animals stopped, as if they were playing statues. And even though they were still some distance away, she saw things she didn’t want to see. Eyes that glinted red in the pale rose pink of their eyelids. Lips pulled back from teeth that looked too long. Blood on white fur, as if there had been a recent kill. She took a breath and thought, How many more breaths will the wolves allow me to take?

  There was a peculiar noise. She could hear it above Marianne’s panicked sobs. There was the sound of her own breathing, of course, and the pounding of her heart, but also a thin, inconsequential humming. Her humming. She wanted to laugh. Who would hum as wolves crept closer? Because they were creeping closer now, in their loose-shouldered way. She crouched down and made herself very small, putting her head in her hands.