Coronets and Steel

by Sherwood Smith

  A second later he was on me. A second or two after that he had me pinned down by a knee across my thighs, a hand over my mouth, and his other pressing my wrists over my head against the mattress.

  He grinned down through his drifting blond hair into my (no doubt) richly purple face and said, “My, this is tempting—”

  I gave an almighty heave with my middle that bounced the entire bed. He laughed, like a grammar school kid playing a game. “—but maybe we’d better postpone the fun.” He got that out with some difficulty because of my enthusiastic efforts to fling him off, then he paused, studying my face to see if I understood.

  I did: truce. So I lay still.

  He continued, “I think I’d better catch you up.”

  I tried to nod, which was difficult with that palm holding my head firmly against the mattress.

  “No screeching? The wicked count is supposed to be asleep, and I’d as soon not shatter that illusion. The crashing of furniture might not raise any interest, but shrieking would.”

  I nodded again, and he lifted his hands.

  “Jerk,” I snarled. “Let me up.”

  “No more kung fu?”

  “Unless you try to harass me again.”

  “I promise. With extreme reluctance.” He laughed and freed me.

  I promptly rolled away and landed on my feet on the other side of the bed, straightening my clothes as I did so. Tony remained sitting on the bed. Next to him, where I had been lying, was a big smear of gray grime.

  Pointing at it in triumph, I said, “Hah. I hope you have to sleep in it.”

  “Dieter will never believe you are Ruli,” Tony responded reflectively. “Never.”

  “She’s gone, and I’d prefer not to meet any of your minions. So, if you’ll tell me whatever it is you have on your furry little mind, I’ll be about my business.”

  Instead Tony leaned back against the pillows, crossing his hands behind his head, the ridiculous lacy sleeves of his pirate shirt draping over his hands. He was chuckling as he repeated minions, then he stretched his legs out comfortably on the bed, ankles crossed. “Where did you wake up?”

  “At your mother’s.”

  “Ah. And she told you . . . ?”

  “You were in trouble, and this Reithermann scumbag—was that the guy waving the gun?—wanted to kill Ruli, and she had only me to help her get Ruli out. So we drove up, and I got her out.”

  The light from the wall sconce reflected in his black eyes as he gazed upward. “You had better understand first that my mother was right, I am in trouble. In fact, I’m a prisoner in my own house.” His light tone and lopsided smile made light of the words: if it was true, he wasn’t any too worried about it. “Which is why I retired. To figure out my next step.”

  “You mean, that Reithermann fellow everyone says is such a creep has pulled a palace coup on you? So tonight you did, in fact, try to pull a palace coup on Alec while the masquerade was going on. Right? And that bombed, and so Reithermann has pulled a coup on you?”

  “Well, he has the gun, as you say, while mine ended up in a fishpond. More important right now, he has the keys.”

  “If that doesn’t serve you right,” I chortled.

  “Perhaps,” he said with no diminishment of his usual good humor. “But it makes your position rather precarious. Neither of us has a key to the stair door, so you have the option of remaining here and continuing to impersonate my sister, or continuing on in your efforts to get out of the castle. The first would be the safer course, I suspect. Ruli is too effective a block to any retaliatory moves on Alec’s part for Dieter to want to harm her, ah, permanently.”

  “Ugh.” I frowned, contemplating this last.

  He nodded slowly, his smile mordant. “That’s why I had her moved up here.”

  “So, that would mean I sit in that locked room until someone bothers to let me out.”

  “I expect that would be the safest course,” he agreed.

  “No thanks.” I shuddered. “Any other passages? They all lock? And this jerk Reithermann has the keys?”

  “The important passages are at present inaccessible, though Dieter does not yet know it. He thinks some of those keys are for the flat in Paris, the house in England, and so forth.”

  “Does he know about the passages?” I asked, intrigued despite myself.

  “Only about one or two,” he returned conspiratorially.

  “You’ve got no one to help you? Or—”

  He lifted a shoulder. “Our return was in disorder, and in glum spirits, and Dieter—being a professional—was ready. There’s a lesson in all this.”

  I knew he would not say the obvious or the moral. “What, not to mix mercenaries with masquerades?”

  He shut his eyes and gave himself up to laughter. “Ah, Kim! What can I give you to throw in with me?”

  It’s not a what, it’s a who, I thought and grimaced.

  Meanwhile Tony was silent, his eyes open again, and intent. “Shades of our fathers,” he said in slow, appreciative Dobreni. Then back to English. “Don’t tell me—”

  I cut in rather rudely, “So this Dieter clown has all your people under lock and key, is that it?”

  “I’d say merely under guard. No one is locked up except my sister. Supposedly. You have a key to these rooms?”

  “Yes. I did.” I hunted over the floor, bent down, and picked it up from where it had fallen beside the bed. “Does it work anywhere else?”

  “No. If you decide to risk the house, your best last resort is to pretend you are Ruli and that you nicked my key while I was asleep. I’ll back you up, and you’ll be safe enough here.”

  “What will you get out of it if I ‘risk the house’ as you say? Since you aren’t threatening to lock me up now.”

  He lifted his hands and lounged to his feet. “But I wish you all the best in the world, Kim! Despite my plans being knackered ever since you turned up. I sympathize with your wish to take what you can get out of this cock-up. I certainly will.”

  “I’m not taking anything,” I stated. “There’s nothing here that belongs to me. I don’t count your stupid treasure, wherever that is. I’d rather live under a freeway overpass than fight over it or steal it.”

  Tony sighed, and stopped right in front of me. “Can I change your mind, I wonder? We’ll see. For now, if you run through the house it’ll rouse ’em, which should allow my people—if they aren’t asleep, or drunk—to make a try at altering the balance of power. That’s to your advantage. If you’re quick, and use your wits, you might even reach the gate. But I think you’d best go for the garden wall,” he added, giving me a considering look. “I suspect you’ve no objections to scaling an eight-foot fence made of granite?”

  “What’s on the other side?”

  “Filled-in moat all along the old walls.” He laughed. “Heh. The idea of Ruli even thinking of jumping a wall—”

  “She did pretty well in that lovely strollway,” I interrupted, jerking my thumb over my shoulder at the paneling behind me. The way he kept comparing me to Ruli was beginning to irritate me. “Let’s hear the layout of the house.”

  “So you’re going to try a run?” he asked, studying me intently. “I ought to remind you that you’re safe only as long as they think you’re my sister. You’ve no value at all against my mother, and your value against Alec would be doubtful, though I’m beginning to suspect—”

  “We’ve been through that,” I said with acid exasperation.

  “We haven’t been through it,” he countered. “What I’m trying to tell you is if Dieter’s men do retain the whip hold—”

  “They might not be civilized,” I said fiercely. “Look. Spare me the good news, all right? My insides are a pit of boiling snakes right now, and you aren’t helping. I’m not going to sit in your sister’s room and wait for you idiots to decide my fate. The house, please.”

  My voice went a trifle uneven at the end, but he refrained from comment about it. Without any further attempts to dissuad
e me, Tony gave me a precise description of the castle, which was laid out in a step pattern, the highest point being right where I was standing now, ending in gardens on a gradual slope that was bordered by thick forest. It was this forest I was to aim for.

  And then—

  Well. I had a lot to do before I needed to worry about and then.

  Tony finished, giving me a whimsical smile. “Want a kiss for luck?” he offered, reaching lazily for me.

  “If I wanted bad luck I’d break a mirror,” I said, ducking around him and jamming my key in the lock.

  “Kisses,” he said reflectively. “You know we’ve unfinished business, you and I. Whatever you claim about hating me.”

  Gritting my teeth, I yanked open the door, then I whirled around. “I said I enjoyed it. But next time, I choose the time—and the place. Now can I get on with my escape?”

  “I’m going to remind you of that one day.”

  “Fine. Whatever. Good-bye, have a nice life.”

  He laughed softly and shook his head, moving toward a bureau.

  “What are you going to be doing?” I asked unwillingly.

  “Since it seems the night’s entertainment is not yet over . . .” He brandished the riding boots I’d seen him wear the day of our picnic. “I thought I’d get dressed again.”

  I shut the door and ventured onto the landing beyond, scanning the area warily.

  The sky suite was a square tower at the highest end of the gigandor castle called the Eyrie. Solid granite walls, heavy staircases, and huge marble slabs on the floors would have made the place seem like a dungeon but for the high arched ceilings, the pillars with Corinthian fluting round the tops, and the airy multistory square around which each main stairway formed.

  As Tony had explained, the castle was built on the mountaintop in a series of four huge steps. The sky suite was highest, on Devil Mountain’s crown. Each “step” was a building formed around a central square stairwell. The ground floor of the highest “step” connected to the upper level of the next by a long hallway, and so on down.

  He had given me a precise explanation, but I had no idea what it meant until I got outside his bedroom door and took in the landing like a picture frame around the stairwell, with a circle of arched clerestory windows up under the domed roof. On three sides of the stairwell, opening off the landings, were a series of heavy carved doors to match Tony’s.

  This was the smallest of the four buildings.

  Ooooo-kay.

  My eyes soon adjusted, aided by the silvery-blue moon- and starlight glowing on the marble from the high windows.

  Across from Tony’s door, the first stair started down.

  My heart thundered as I slunk along the cool marble, my sandals hissing. When I reached the top of the stairway and paused to look down into the square, I saw four or five stories below me—a sizable journey for someone trying to escape. And this sky suite was only the first “step.”

  For a second or two my nerve failed. I turned my attention back to Tony’s door, beyond which lay relative safety. I didn’t trust him much—but I didn’t trust Reithermann at all, from the brief glimpses I’d gotten.

  The thought of being parked somewhere for my own good while these guys played out their games infuriated me. Better to make my run for freedom.

  I was about to put my foot on the first step when movement caught my eye on the other side of the balcony.

  Someone was there.

  Fear make me snap up my head—

  And I stared straight into the honey-brown eyes of my ancestor Maria Sofia Vasa.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  IT WAS LIKE all the moon and starlight coalesced into the figure of a young woman with high-piled silvery hair wearing a 1760s robe à la française of blue the color of dawn. I can’t tell you how I saw the color of her eyes across fifty feet of airy, moonlit space, but I did. Yet I could see through her, too: the latch to Tony’s still-closed door was visible through her graceful bodice.

  “I’m seeing you, right?” I whispered. “Can you talk to me?”

  She gazed past me into some other dimension, slowly fading out until all I saw was the wall and door.

  Okay, that was weird. But I had a castle to escape from.

  I slipped down the shallow steps. At intervals I edged close to the marble balustrade and peered quickly at the lower levels, moving when I saw no one.

  First landing.

  I tiptoed along the perpendicular hall, nearing an open door. Bright light beyond. Stiffening my toes against my sandals to keep them quiet, I moved to the edge of the balustrade and swiftly glided by—one step, two—three! No noise, no alarms. I skipped on down to the next landing.

  So far so good. But now the danger would increase—I could see electric light sending dramatic slants between columns into the stairwell.

  Two more floors down, then the staircase broadened to a spacious, brightly lit landing off which two sets of carved wood doors opened, just as Tony described. Now I was at the second step, the old medieval keep, which had been modernized in the 1700s, with electricity added by the Russian occupiers. An ancient tapestry hung between the doors. Strange Byzantine eyes stared out of stylized figures, the tapestry greenish-dark with age. The eyes seemed to move with me as I passed—a chill gripped the back of my neck, and I almost ran into another ghost.

  I scrambled back, nearly tripping over a dark blue rug as a young man walked through the shut door. He wore a tunic not unlike Alec’s costume, down to the high boots and the sword. He was tall and thin, with a somber face that tweaked at me—I knew I recognized it, even if I couldn’t remember where or how. He passed within about six feet of me, glowing silvery, though I could see through him. But his details were extraordinarily clear, from the spurs at the heels of his boots to a lock of curly blond hair falling on his forehead.

  When I saw the dueling pistol he carried in one hand, I remembered him. One of the Dsaret twins, the one who died in a duel? Prickles tingled across my shoulder blades as he drifted through the balcony into the air above the stairwell—and faded.

  I listened at the door he’d come through, sure it must have some significance. No sound. Hoping I wasn’t making the mistake of my far too short life, I eased the door open.

  The room was empty of people and ghosts. A lamp burned on a massive oak table before an equally massive fireplace. Under my feet lay a thirty-foot Persian carpet with riotous patterns and color. On a wall hung two Renaissance paintings of hunting scenes. Between those was a battered tournament shield with two heavy swords crossed behind it.

  Swords.

  Maybe this was the von M dueling chamber or weapons room, which might explain the ghost—if ghosts can ever be explained. Duels, I had no interest in.

  But what about self defense?

  I looked down at my empty hands, then up at the wall. Those heavy late-medieval weapons would be tough for me to lift, much less swing, if I had to defend myself.

  I whirled around. A crossed pair of nineteenth-century curved cavalry sabers had been set on a far wall, mounted behind an ornamented horn, and ahhh! On the short wall next to the fireplace? A pair of dueling rapiers.

  Set directly below was a small case containing several gold-inlay and chased main gauche blades.

  I hopped up onto the case and freed a rapier from its mounting. It rang softly with a metallic shear, and I shivered.

  I did a few lunges to stretch my legs, and swung the sword to warm up my arms.

  The rapier was heavier than our fencing sabers back at UCLA, and there was no button on the end. I brought the point up and tested it with my thumb. Sharp.

  The door I had come through opened, and a man walked in. We stared at one another, equally startled. He was big, and heavy, wore half-boots and a Dobreni tunic and loose trousers. I wondered whose flunky he was—and whether it would make any difference to my position at all.

  He demanded in Russian-accented Dobreni, “What are you doing here?”

  “Practice,”
I said, trying to lower my voice.

  He advanced on me and I lifted the sword point to halt him. He checked for a second, looking at it impatiently. “The Captain will want to know why you are walking around down here.”

  “The Captain,” eh? Not Tony’s minion, then.

  “Tell him I’m getting some fresh air.” I smiled—it felt like a grimace. “I’ll move right along now.” My voice shook a little.

  I might as well not have even tried. He ignored the excuse and stomped toward me, hands out to make the grab.

  Moment of truth.

  I fought the urge to plead, back away, reason, be civilized, because there was no civilization in his expression, only fury-driven intent. So I whipped a tight bind round his arm and smacked the blade sharply across the back of his hand. He jumped back, cursing harshly.

  “Why don’t you go on your way?” My voice came out high and sharp, but clear. I’m good at this. I can do this.

  Two angry red spots marked his fleshy cheeks. He snatched at the rapier. I twitched the point away, zipped it back, and dealt him a stinging blow to the upper arm.

  Baring his teeth, he lunged straight at me, and I wove the point between his extended arms and crooked fingers, and—clamping my teeth to brace myself—I let his own momentum run him into the sword. I shuddered as the point sank deep into his upper arm, then ripped the blade free. He recoiled, his breath gasping in shock.

  My mouth dried, a reaction to the horrible feeling of steel entering real, living flesh. The man staggered backward, blood flowering brightly and terribly around the wound and down his tunic. He clapped his other hand to his arm as his boots got tangled in the rug-fringe.

  He fell heavily, his head thumping against a carved leg of the display case—which toppled slowly toward him. I spun on my toes and fled.

  For a heartbeat I wished I was safe in Ruli’s room watching the television, then I heard the case crash, glass splintering.