Coronets and Steel

  “I begged her to tell me where she was going, I would go, too, to take care of her, but all she said was, ‘I do not yet know. If Count Armandros comes with a priest, let him in. And if he comes alone, I will not see him.’”

  Mina rubbed her hands across her eyes. “How it all comes back! The weather was so chill that night. How I shivered—I thought I would never be warm again. The count did not come, but he sent a message, to say that he had arranged for the priest and for the necessary dispensations, and she was to meet them at St. Paul’s chapel at the old school. She wanted me to come and stand up with her, which I did happily, and even though the count had brought two friends to serve as witnesses, she insisted I was to sign as bride’s witness.”

  Mina sat back, gazing down into the fire, the light softening the lines in her face. Her expression was tender, a little sad. I curbed my impatience: she was getting to what I’d come all this way to hear.

  Presently she continued. “The priest was from the Cistercian monks high in the northern mountains. I was surprised to see him, for they do not normally mix in the world, but I thought there must be a family connection. The priest, he was young, and stiff and performed the marriage awkwardly, but as I said they are monks up there, and I expect he had never presided at a wedding, only baptisms and funerals. But it was done, and the count put the ring on her finger. Oh, I was crying and could hardly sign my name to the paper! After I signed, the count took me aside and made me promise never to tell anyone what I had seen that night. I was to say that when I left the princess to go to bed, she was in her room writing letters. This surprised me but I had no time to ask any questions, for then Lily turned to me and took my hands, and ordered me to go back. I pleaded and begged, but she said she was going to make a new life, and she had no right to ask anyone to give up the old.”

  Mina sighed, and pressed the handkerchief to her eyes.

  I leaned forward, my heartbeat loud in my ears. “What about the marriage papers you signed? What happened to them?”

  She frowned at the glowing remains of the fire. “My mind was bound up with Lily’s leaving me behind. All I recall is the priest rolling them up and sliding them into a pocket in his white cassock.”

  “Ahhh!” I sat back. “Do you remember his name?”

  “It was Father Teodras.” She lifted her hand toward the north. “From the Cistercians, as I said.”

  “So then what happened?”

  “She left with her husband, and I never saw her again. The rumor got around that Lily had left Dobrenica. Ah, that broke her father’s heart, I can tell you. May I grind you more coffee, my dear? That hearth is so hard.”

  “I’m fine,” I said quickly. “So then what happened?”

  “There is little else to tell.” She lifted her hands. “The count returned. The king had dismissed me, but his heart was so sore I forgave him, especially as I knew I kept the truth from him. The count sent for me in secret, and told me Lily was living abroad and happily. He arranged for me to assume new duties up at the Eyrie, until I married and settled here.” She leaned over and touched her rosary, which hung on a special hook below a holy picture. “I offered novenas for her every night—and asked forgiveness for not speaking about the count’s bigamy, a terrible sin. But who would it help if I spoke, and without proof? The times were so bad.” She shook her head. “In truth, I was a coward.”

  “So Armandros went and married Princess Rose?”

  “On September 2 that year. But there was no Blessing. The Germans came the very next winter. When it was clear we could not force them out the king abdicated, and then died, many said of a broken heart. The troubles had begun. The baby came two winters later, and poor Rose died almost immediately. She had risen straight from child-bed and went to parties every night. So nervous and strange she had become! Always flirting and laughing. I have always thought she was unhappy. So the count was no longer married to two women. I prayed for his soul, too, and for the baby. We cared for Sisi as we did the other children, but none of them were like my Lily. Afterward my Vasilo died fighting the Soviets at the mines, but I then had the comfort of my sons.”

  “So . . . what does it mean, to be called Salfmatta?”

  “I protect Dorike,” she said. Her brow wrinkled in perplexity. “You could say in German Schutzmutter, but Schutz has a different meaning, I think, and the French is also different. But I protect us through my novenas.” She indicated the rosary again. “And through my roses, which keep the vampires away.”

  “Vampires!”

  She raised a small hand. “Do not worry. The boundary is strong.”

  “Oh. Uh, good.” I never expected to hear that word from an old lady—but after all, the whole vampire legend came from this part of the world.

  So . . . did that make it true?

  What is truth anymore?

  I shoved that aside as she sighed tiredly and folded her hands across her lap. “I am happy that Lily lives. And a daughter! Happy in America, with a good home, and a good man, and contentment. God is good, God is good,” she repeated, nodding, then she said something surprising. “It would be proper for you to tell King Marius. For now the wrongs can be righted again.”

  “I’m sure Alec will have told his father about us already,” I said, stretching out my cramped legs. “And if Alec wants to do this marriage thing on the second—” I put Dobrenica above everything therefore I get trapped in politics, he’d once said. Even to pretending to believe in magic? “—he’ll soon know where Ruli is.”

  She nodded slowly. “Yes, that is true.”

  “One last question. Why do you think Gran would tell my mother that her father’s name was Daniel Atelier?”

  “Perhaps she did it because to depart from France with a German name, von Mecklundburg, would be to earn opprobrium. You must know how much all Germans, even those who had not wanted Hitler’s government, were hated in those days.”

  “Gran certainly hated them,” I said. “Or she wouldn’t have left him. So I was told.”

  “I can believe it happened,” Mina said soberly, looking old and careworn as she stared back into the bloody history of her youth. “Such angry partings also happened here. You must understand the strife in Dobrenica in the last days of the war, when it was clear that Hitler would fall at last. Each report brought news of further advances by the western Allies deeper into Germany, and that Hitler was fighting against his own military leaders. They were trying to assassinate him. Yet Stalin, who was just as evil, was poised to take us from the other direction. When the duke his brother died, and Armandros became duke, he called all the men to him. Vasilo came down from the castle and told me Armandros promised them that the madman Hitler was finished. But Germany still had planes. It . . .” She looked away, into the fire, then straightened as if she had come to a decision. “He wanted to protect his home, finally.” She rose. “You must sleep again. Pavel starts for the city soon after three, to be at market in time to set up. You must be ready to slip into the lorry. I will wake you.”

  “Mina, I can’t thank you enough—”

  She reached up and laid a finger against my lips. “If your grandmother decides to come home, you must bring her to me so I can see her face. It is soon enough that I will see my good Vasilo again in heaven,” she added cheerfully.

  She got up and went about finishing her day’s labors. I sat where I was, staring into the fire. I knew my first duty was to tell Aunt Sisi where her daughter was. And then I’d better tell Alec. I remembered his face at Aunt Sisi’s. Would he even listen to me?

  Maybe if I found Father Teodras and recovered the marriage documents. Then I could give him all the truth at once.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  IT SEEMED A minute later Mina was shaking my shoulder. The cottage was dimly lit by a candle on the floor. Mina had prepared hot porridge sweetened with honey, and as we eased out into the chill night air she pressed a warm cloth-wrapped package into my hand.

  “Bread and good cheese,” she whi
spered as she walked down the stone steps to where a dilapidated World War I era truck waited. “Eat this at dawn. God bless you, child.”

  “And you,” I said awkwardly, bending down to kiss her forehead. “Thanks a thousand times.”

  “Wrap up warm now, and stay under the blankets.”

  Pavel was nothing more than a silent, bulky shadow. Mina waited as I climbed onto the truck bed and wedged myself between baskets of produce and bales of sheep’s wool, and other goods difficult to make out in the darkness. Pavel’s job, besides blacksmith and mechanic, was trader for the whole village once a week in the open air market in lower Riev.

  I settled on folded quilts, and someone laid a heavy rug over me. With a lumbering lurch, the truck began to move. Pavel killed the engine. Lulled by the slow bumping of the old tires as Pavel expertly coasted the vehicle down the winding mountain, I drifted into a drowsing sleep.

  I woke when the engine kicked in. As it putt-putted us across the floor of the valley, I fell back asleep.

  When I woke, darkness had barely lifted. There were the familiar mounds of the rock quarry: we were on the outskirts of the city.

  The engine stopped when we reached the open market, where people were busy setting up stalls and chatting. I scrambled off the truck bed. Pavel wasn’t in view, but I figured he’d prefer not to find me at all than to hear thanks from someone he didn’t even know, so I slipped between the flimsy barriers of two booths. The city proper began on the other side of the row of wagons and ancient, decrepit vehicles, with a long horse picket beyond; farmers still drove wagons.

  Now that I knew where I was, I had to figure out how to get to Aunt Sisi’s safely—all the way at the other end of the city.

  I chose the narrowest streets and alleys I could find, avoiding the main streets, which were full of people heading down to the market. I had no idea whether a search was going on in Riev as well as on Devil’s Mountain, and if so, what the searchers looked like. I also did not know if the Vigilzhi were on Alec’s side or Tony’s. Or which side might mean trouble for Yours T.

  As I slunk across a main street, I remembered those guys watching me at the wedding reception. If there was a search, that would be the first place they’d check. So I wasn’t going anywhere near the inn.

  At least I had something to eat.

  I ducked into a narrow, inset doorway with a laughing gargoyle carved over the archway. I stared up at the weatherworn face, half-bird, half-human, the ropy, muscular arms clutched around bony knees, the long toes like bird talons curled over the arch. The gargoyle’s wings arched up above the skinny shoulders, creating a heart shape.

  I wondered what it would be like to live in a house guarded by a gargoyle—growing up reading Fyadar comics in secret, and watching for ghosts on windy nights.

  Was it true that I saw ghosts? This was an entirely different paradigm—a way of understanding the world. All the rules had changed, at least in this country. Maybe here it made sense to expect Alec, as the distant crown prince, to protect the kingdom by marrying on a specific day.

  Time to get moving. I had three things to do: get to Aunt Sisi and tell her the news, then ask her to send a servant over to the inn to collect my clothes and other things. Third, hire a ride to Father Teodras and the Cistercian monastery.

  I did not want to toil all the way up hill to discover Tony’s red car waiting outside his mother’s house. Even if Aunt Sisi would tell her son to act civilized, I didn’t know if he’d listen. Not if he had his own sister as prisoner up on that Devil’s Mountain.

  The cathedral bells rang, echoing from stone walls and streets. Voices penetrated as well. Children’s voices. I remembered Theresa’s uniform. Her school was next to the cathedral—

  —three or four blocks from me now.

  I slouched up the street, lurked behind a potted juniper, and peered up in the direction I thought she’d come. The school kids walked in groups, some wearing the thick navy and white uniforms, others in equally old-fashioned brown uniforms.

  I spotted Theresa with two friends, one in navy and the other in brown. That was a setback. I had assumed she would be alone. I pressed back in the shadows as the girls got closer, faces earnest as they talked in low voices. The girl in brown was tall and thin, with thick glasses and dark red hair worn in braids to her hips. The other girl had a round face and dark braids like Theresa’s.

  Theresa looked up—our eyes met. I jerked away, but then oozed back as her sharp face lengthened in surprise. She whispered something to her friends and all three homed straight for me.

  “I hoped you would think to look for me if you returned, Mam’zelle,” Theresa greeted me without preamble.

  The other two girls nodded, one firmly and the other with a furtive glance back at the street.

  I recovered from my astonishment. “Tony’s people came and got my stuff, did they?”

  “Yes. And then yesterday—”

  “Hst!” the dark-haired girl whispered, motioning violently toward some distant kids.

  The four of us hustled around the side of a steep-roofed house to a brick alley. A cat sat like a meatloaf on a high stone wall, tail hanging; otherwise no one was in view.

  “Look, I don’t want to get you into trouble,” I began.

  The dark-haired girl said in heavily accented French, “It was only Xani, a girl with nose trouble. She went down Prinz Karl-Rafael Street without seeing us.”

  The redhead and Theresa then exchanged glances. Theresa said, “Let us go to the cloister garden. That is a quiet place, and we can talk. We have time before our schools begin.”

  The other two agreed, and the dark-haired girl, with a grin of excitement, led the way back along an alley and then unlatched an unmarked door in the featureless wall that bordered the back of the cathedral’s grounds.

  Inside was an enclosed courtyard, visible from two stories of windows on one side. Theresa led us to some grass beneath a drooping willow, adjacent to a statue of a saint. “The sisters are at the school now, and we can talk here. Oh! Katrin and Miriam are my friends. They know what has happened, but they have already promised not to say anything.”

  I sank down as the girls gathered around me. “What happened?”

  “The evening of the day you went on the tour with the count, at dinnertime, two men came. They said they had been sent by Count Karl-Anton. He had called them on a telephone from somewhere. They said Lady Ruli had decided to go home to Riev Dhiavilyi, and they were to pay what you owed Mama and to bring away all your belongings.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “So Mama packed up your clothes and they took them away, and afterward I cleaned the room, which is my chore. Part of the work is to wash and polish the floor, if the guest has stayed longer than one night. And so when I moved the armoire out, a thing fell and hit my head. It was blue jeans, and a blouse, and papers! I discovered an American passport, but in it was your picture. And I thought, there must be a reason. I thought also, Mama would feel she must send a message at once to the count. That is her way. So I showed the things to Anna and Tania. Anna said, a thing is hidden for a reason. Tania felt we should continue to hide your blue jeans, and your papers, until you came for them. She took them to her shop, where she said she put them in the barrel where they store the old and broken spectacles. No one would ever look there.” She grinned. “And Josip added, that to tell everyone about the passport is to make everyone laugh at us, for much envy has come to Anna that you were at her wedding! Everyone thinks—as we did, at first—that you are the Lady Aurelia von Mecklundburg, you see.”

  “Be sure to thank Tania for me,” I said feelingly.

  “That is not the end. Yesterday, again at the dinner hour, the count came to us himself. Mama was excited. He said your papers were missing from your suitcase, and had you given her anything to hold for you?”

  “Argh. Was he a bully about it?”

  “Oh no, he was polite and pleasant. Mama was upset that we might have had a thie
f, but nothing else was gone, and she told him that when she packed your case with her own hands she had found all your things exactly as you always left them. So he asked to see the room, and he looked around, and even felt on top of the wardrobe, but no one asked me anything. If they had,” she added seriously, “I would have said, no one gave me anything to keep, for that is not a lie.”

  I said, “I don’t want to get you into any trouble, political or moral.”

  She smiled. “Anna said, if the reason is good, a small lie can be confessed and is forgiven. Tania agreed. So Mama said you must have taken the papers in a handbag on your outing, and had forgotten it somewhere, and the count should ask you to mentally retrace your steps and he said he would. He left. Josip told Anna and me at night that a man seemed to be watching the inn. And another was there this morning when I left.”

  “You are totally made of win,” I exclaimed. When they looked puzzled, I hastily translated.

  Anna blushed in pleasure, and Miriam’s eyes were crescents of magnified delight behind her glasses as she whispered over and over, “Madeuffween, madeuffween.”

  “What’s going on, is this. I am not Aurelia von Mecklundburg, who has been missing for some weeks.”

  “Ah, there was a rumor,” Miriam spoke up for the first time. “Now gone, since you came.”

  “Well, I said nothing to anyone because I wanted to achieve my purpose anonymously, but I am the granddaughter of Princess Aurelia Dsaret.”

  Katrin gave a sigh of pure felicity. Miriam grinned, hugging her thin arms to herself. Theresa said, “Better, oh, so much better.”