Coronets and Steel

by Sherwood Smith

  “Let’s go,” he replied, smiling.

  “Aunt Sisi sent the gown for the masquerade ball tomorrow night.” I sighed happily as we walked out into the hazy sunlight. The lawns and flowerbeds were all deep with color, and huge sky-reflecting puddles pooled in the streets. “I was trying it on.”

  “And? Does her gown meet with your approval?”

  “It’s gorgeous. I can hardly wait for tomorrow.” I looked at the red Fiat waiting. “What happened to the green machine?”

  “This car is easier to drive on the old back streets. And the mountain roads.”

  “Bright colors on purpose? So animals and people and the occasional other car can see ’em?”

  “And hear them.” He started the car.

  “Thought so. Tony’s ride is red, too. Do you know if Aunt Sisi ever wears costume jewelry?”

  “Costume jewelry?”

  “You know, fakes. Like, to wear with costumes. That Queen Maria Sofia dress is beautiful, but the broad expanse right here,” I smacked my collarbone, “looks bare without any sparklies. Would she be insulted if I asked?”

  He turned the car up a back lane into the palace complex, then shot me a humorous look. “She would,” he said with conviction. “She’d be offended if a guest to her dinner table wore false jewelry in her presence. I’ve a collection of family jewelry, and no female relatives to use it. Would you like a necklace? I’ve got half a dozen of them. Two old. The rest newer. All very sparkly.”

  “The real McCoy?”

  “Yes.”

  “No thanks.” I shook my head. “Much as I’d enjoy putting something like that on, the thought of having to replace an irreplaceable heirloom would haunt me all evening, and nothing is allowed to spoil my night at a masquerade ball in a real, licensed and patented royal palace.”

  He pulled up behind a wing of the palace and parked. “So you took the palace tour?” He opened a discreet side door, which led into a plain white-plastered hallway.

  We were in the servants’ quarters—which we didn’t get to see on the tour. It took a crown prince to gain access to them, a thought I found funny. “Sure. How else was I going to see this place?”

  “You expected to move about inconspicuously, and to leave unremarked after your purpose was accomplished?”

  He didn’t say visit, he said purpose. Cravenly I overlooked it as we trod up a flight of stairs. “Yep. You’d said Ruli was rarely in the country, and when she was she only hung out with the blue bloods, and I thought it impossible anyone would associate me with Gran. I had doubts about the whole thing being connected with me in the first place. But that sure changed when I saw the portrait. And then the nursery. And five minutes after that, Aunt Sisi found me.”

  “Nursery? This way.” He opened the door down another plain hall.

  “The mural. Gran used to tell me Fyadar stories, and that was the scene of a lot of ’em. Did you ever read any of the Fyadar comics and stories made by schoolkids under the Germans and the Soviets?”

  “Yes.” He glanced at me with that expression of mild inquiry. “Milo brought me back a few children’s stories in Dobreni when I was small, to encourage my learning of the language. And my first friends here showed me some of the smuggled books when I was around thirteen.”

  “Did you like the comic books?”

  He shrugged. “They were part of home. I read a few. But after a dozen or so I was disgusted to discover that you could tell where the story was going by the mountain it was set on.”

  “The mountains,” I breathed. “I wondered about that.”

  He opened an unmarked door and we stepped onto the parquet floor that stretched gracefully between two grand stairways. I remembered following the tour along the marble floor below, peeking in through the doors at the grand ballroom.

  “Leaving aside the question of otherworld inhabitants, no matter how cynical and sophisticated he or she becomes, you will never completely convince a Dobreni that the mountains don’t have distinct personalities. Certain valleys are believed to be better for herbs, others for the breeding of sheep. Makes for obscure jokes.”

  “Speaking of jokes, you once told me that Devil’s Mountain got its name from bad weather. After what I’ve been through what I want to know is, what’s it really known for? Devils?” I laughed.

  “I already told you. Vampires.”

  I gave a snort of disbelief. “I don’t believe it.”

  “All I can say is that I have never seen any. However.” We had walked along the parquet past two high paneled doors. Alec opened the third door as he said, “My father thinks he might have. Here we are.”

  “What?” I squawked, staring around the high-ceilinged rococo gallery. “He never said anything about that in the journal.”

  “Only evidence of what he could see—what he could prove—went into the journal. He’s deeply devout, but you never saw a reference to attending Mass, either. Faith is not proof, it is . . . faith.” He opened a door to a familiar long gallery. “Here we are.”

  Down one side was a row of tall windows that overlooked the garden. Every available foot of wall space between and on the long wall across from them had been covered with various sizes of portraits.

  Alec waited patiently, surrounded by the silent eyes of our ancestors as I took it all in.

  Dsarets predominated, though twice in the nineteenth century the rulers were Ysvorods—and there, in a late-Renaissance frame was another Ysvorod king. Grigorian was his name. “Your family have a title when not throne-warming?” I asked over my shoulder.

  Alec had opened a window and was sitting in it. “Domitrian. Dukes of.”

  “Ah.” More Ysvorods; it appeared they’d had control for most of the Middle Ages. These portraits were so stylized, after the fashion of the time, that all one got a faithful impression of was the clothes.

  The last of the early Ysvorod kings caught the eye partly because he was (despite the artist’s valiant attempts to draw attention away from the fact) enormous, emphasized by a fondness for pink satin slashed with crimson puffs.

  “That guy.” I pointed. “Don’t tell me he was a pious monk-type.”

  Alec laughed. “Good old Thaddeus was exactly what he looks like, a dedicated gourmand. He was the only ruling Ysvorod to marry a von Mecklundburg—you notice they are the only family who Germanized their names, back in the 1600s—but no children resulted, so the throne went to the Dsarets. It was after that marriage that the Swedes invaded us.”

  “So how—” I stopped.

  Maria Sofia Alexandria Elisabeth Vasa Dsaret smiled benignly down at me.

  “Where are her kids?”

  “She had several daughters, and finally one son. Here—” He tipped his chin toward the opposite corner, where a ringletted lady reclined in a filmy white gown on a sylvan background. Curly black hair, slanty black eyes, Mediterranean coloring, arms plump and rounded after the Directoire fashion; she had the crooked smile, charming and insouciant. I’d seen her before, along the staircase at Aunt Sisi’s.

  “Daughter?”

  “Daughter-in-law, Aurélie de Mascarenhas. She’s the one who brought your name here, though it reverted to the Latin form, Aurelia. Many family stories about her. Beautiful, ambitious, opinionated. The crown prince wouldn’t marry anyone else. Championed by the queen, despite some questions about her background. Sofia must have seen herself in young Aurélie, who came here straight from Napoleon’s court, where some hinted the upstart went to meet another upstart.”

  “So her pedigree wasn’t pure?” I asked, doing air quotes on the word ‘pure.’

  Alec opened a hand. “The queen vouched for her, so that was that. Family legend has it Napoleon made a pass at her. Perhaps he did. She was much sought after in Paris and Vienna. Some say England, too. That was painted when she married the crown prince. Her daughter married into the von Mecklundburgs, which is where they get the black eyes and that crooked smile.”

  “Wow,” I said, staring slowly around t
he room. “My relatives. No wonder people pay a fortune to have their genealogies traced—it’s amazing to look at them and see resemblances to one’s self and one’s relatives. Like this fellow. He’s definitely got The Face.”

  I pointed up at a stiffly posed slender young man wearing a nineteenth-century military tunic with sashes and braid and epaulettes. He looked like a somber Tony, with the same pale hair, but with light brown eyes. No hint of the crooked smile.

  “That’s your great-great-grandfather. Painted a year after his twin was killed in a duel up in the eastern mountains. He married another of Old Sofia’s descendents. It’s their child who was your grandmother’s mother.”

  I sighed. “I wish I’d been a good tourist and brought a camera. I’d love to show these to Mom.”

  “Why don’t you let her come see for herself?”

  I turned to face him, feeling this sense of doom. More like DOOM. It was that visit to Father Teodras hanging over my head.

  “I guess we’ll see,” I said, knowing I sounded like a weasel.

  He opened the door. “Shall we go?”

  We drove up the mountain road behind Riev. He pointed out various old ruins, giving me quick histories. We stopped at a village Gasthaus to eat, and over a tasty meal we discussed his father’s journal, going from there to the other major projects, like the newly finished hydroelectric dam and the new plan for building of wind turbines in mountain valleys where the winds howled down fiercely all winter long. Let the wind howl and make electricity.

  It was a pleasant afternoon, and I was disappointed when we had to return. I must have shown my reaction because he said, “Bored with the social whirl?”

  “Is any of this social whirl goosing Count Tony the Obnox a bit?”

  Alec’s grin flashed. “Tony was chased up a tree by your appearance,” he said with satisfaction, “and now his branch is breaking.”

  “Because of me?”

  “You’re the catalyst.”

  “That means more trouble with that Reithermann bozo?”

  “That’s a good part of it.”

  “What’s the other part?”

  “There will be an end soon.”

  “Good.” Father Teodras, here I come.

  He was back by 6:30, in order to dine with Aunt Sisi and Madam A. and me. French food and French conversation, about classical music this time. Again he was a perfect host, and Madam A. was seated in the hostess spot, so Aunt Sisi and I faced one another. Two guests of honor. Afterward the four of us set out in amity for the cathedral.

  The city was gearing up for Dobrenica’s big two-week festival starting on August 15 and winding up on September 2. This year, the festival was to culminate in the wedding.

  The cathedral was packed with Riev citizenry of every degree. We joined the rest of the von M. clan, who flanked us on either side, and a few of them behind us, as we were front row center. I felt cramped and itchy, but as soon as the music started my surroundings faded.

  The three accompanying musicians were excellent, but the old Russian violin master was superlative playing adaptations from Rim-sky-Korsakov’s Invisible City of Kitezh, some Glinka, after an evocative melody from Mussorgski’s Khovantschina. Possibly the arrangements were sublimely skillful but I think the artist—like Gran with her piano—could carry any piece.

  Even in the shorter, lighter pieces he told stories without words, mixing poignancy with laughter, weaving a bright thread of—no, I was about to say magic, but I don’t want to use that as a metaphor. The music made me think of the way emotion was absent in Milo’s journal, making it omnipresent, which led to thinking about emotion in historical works . . . and somehow I was sitting among men with top hats and women with extravagant hats atop elaborately piled hair, the still summer air thick with musky perfume and candle wax as people listened to Mily Barakirev—

  “No, but I believe Milo sent the girl on the cello to Moscow to study,” Aunt Sisi’s bored whisper arrowed into my images of an icy river in the Russian steppe gleaming in the low winter sun and splintered it.

  I jumped. On my right was Aunt Sisi’s profile, calm and enduring. On the other side of her, bulky Robert von Mecklundburg whispered to his wife behind his hand.

  I became aware of my own hands clenched in my lap, and I relaxed them. Then I felt Alec’s brief but considering regard.

  I could not recapture the mood after that. Aunt Sisi’s boredom sat like a weight in the air beside me. I became aware in an ever-widening circle of the restlessness of people packed on uncomfortable wooden benches; I heard coughs, sniffs, shoes scraping, whispers. A lighthearted piece from Borodin and it ended, and I was glad.

  Alec said nothing to me until Aunt Sisi had been unloaded at her home and we pulled up in front of Ysvorod House. Then: “You all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Madam A. preceded us in, bade us a grave good night, and disappeared. Alec hesitated at the bottom of the stairs, then followed me up the stairs to the library, as he said, “I didn’t think you were white-knuckled from pain, or from ennui, particularly when I recalled a similar reaction to Les Sylphides in Vienna. But something pulled you out of whatever head space you were in.”

  “Aunt Sisi was bored.” Images from the music danced in the flames. “No, it’s not her fault. Some people aren’t into music.”

  “Ruli doesn’t like it, either,” Alec said, his smile ironic. “When they said she left for her clothes shopping trip so she wouldn’t have to attend the spring music festival in the valley, I didn’t question it. Wasn’t until she’d been gone for six weeks that I got suspicious.”

  “So Tony must have grabbed her as soon as she agreed to the marriage, huh?”

  “I wonder.”

  My stomach muscles tensed as I tried to sound casual. “Do you happen to know if there is a musician named Mily Balakirev?”

  “Ah . . . wasn’t he a composer of one of the pieces we heard?”

  I didn’t know that. Or did I? “Of course. I must have overhead that without being aware.” I was rubbing my hands up my arms, though the room was warm and even summery. I turned my back to the fire. “I always thought I had an overactive imagination.”

  “What did you see?”

  The impulse was to scoff, to fall back into old patterns. But I wanted so badly to tell him the truth because I knew he would listen. Though he’d never seen ghosts, magic, Nasdrafus, or the tooth fairy, he was exerting all his effort to bring about a marriage on a specific day, just in case.

  “This isn’t like seeing ghosts. I don’t think. I sat in the cathedral audience, hearing that music when it debuted. The people around me wore late Victorian dress. It—it even smelled different. Like a billion candles burning, so there was wax in the air. How could that be possible? I don’t think it has anything to do with ghosts or blessings.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” he agreed. “What you are talking about—deuteroscopy—is rare, what is sometimes called the sight, or Second Sight.”

  “Gran told me, very firmly, that such things are merely imagination. No truth in them.”

  “Whether it exists or not I can’t tell you. This isn’t the first time.” His tone was observation, but I felt the question.

  “Not even. I’ve always had too much imagination. I never went to scary movies—why pay for it, when it was so easy to scare myself? That was part of the reason I picked the sport I did, so I could fight back, if any of those shady monsters ever . . . I know, me, me, me. Sorry about that.”

  “Kim.” He flicked me a look, brows raised. “I don’t think twenty seconds of answering my question meets the modern standard for ‘me me me.’ If you don’t want to talk about it, then we’ll drop it.”

  I sighed again, trying not to squirm. Fighting the instinct to get up and move away. “Yeah, I’m wussing out. It’s . . . all these years. I thought . . .” I didn’t want to say anything about Gran. “Okay, you know why I went out to Schönbrunn that day? Because I was following . . . a ghost. And not ju
st any ghost. It was Maria Sofia. I recognized her the second I saw her face in the gallery. It’s even the same gown. And down in the Kaisergruft, for a second, I saw . . . something beyond one of the crypts. Then the wall was there. And that day when I jumped off the train, I wandered onto this farm, and they gave me water. I drank it and everything. But then I could see through the woman, and when you drove me by there the next day, the buildings were modern. A tractor. The field patterns different.”

  He frowned down at his hands, then looked up. “There are some people I know who might be able to give you better information about that than I can. What I’m told is that Dobrenica possibly exists in a kind of liminal space. It would explain some of those anomalies, like the fact that the entire country seems to function as a natural jammer to electromagnetic radio frequencies. Most reliable are either shortwave or COFDM, but neither are reliable enough to depend on. Another unexplained anomaly is the increased instability of nitrocellulose in weapons—”

  “Which is?”

  “—smokeless gunpowder. Old-fashioned black powder is actually less unstable up here, though not by much. That’s why you’ll find old style rifles in gun closets.”

  “Got it.”

  “The Salfmattas and Salfpatras insist there is another form of energy that is present in places around the world, but it conflicts with EM. You might be one of those who can see, or sense, those mystery borders.”

  “But neither Gran nor my mom ever saw a ghost, or anything else.”

  He lifted a hand, then dropped it. “I’m out of my depth here. I’ve no experience of any of it. I can put you with people who seem to know more. Though maybe we should save this subject until we get the current problem sorted.”

  “Okay. I’m good with that.”

  “Want a nightcap?”

  “Sure.”

  “We’ll sit on the terrace. Take advantage of one of our rare balmy nights.”

  The terrace was a balcony with iron furniture. Alec left me there while he went to talk to Emilio. I stared up at the diamond-bright stars in the black sky. Music drifted on the summer air from a house on the hillside below, a series of plaintive folk melodies with a Russian feel. It was live music, not a stereo. I’d heard more live music in the past few days than I had in the past ten years.