Roza pressed her face against the wavy, uneven glass. This was, indeed, a place where queens were doomed to die. A castle. Complete with a moat and drawbridge. Guards on horseback patrolled grassy fields outside the moat and the woods beyond.
“What’s in the moat?” said Roza.
The maid smiled. “Monsters.”
Just as she had at the suburban house, Roza had the run of the castle. There was a throne room, a vast hall with a banquet table so long it could seat thirty, a library, a portrait gallery. Unlike the suburban house, however, the castle bustled with people. Maids, cooks, groundskeepers, guards. Cats prowled the kitchens, catching rats. Hooded birds darted and dived outside the windows at the behest of falconers perched on the ground. Here, at least, there were people to talk to, people who said, “Good morning,” and asked what would please her for dinner. And though she never ate what they served, except for a few slices of bread and a goblet of water, she always thanked them; she was always grateful for the questions.
Except for this one: “Are you in love with me yet?”
She did not meet his eyes, instead watching a mouse scurry along the floor. It was a little scrap of a thing, this mouse, perhaps still a baby, on its first foray into the world. The mouse found a shred of cheese and turned it in its tiny paws as if attempting to discern its edibility.
“You’ll love me one day,” said the man. He was sitting on one of the thrones, the one decked out in black velvet, the one with the elaborate carvings of people screaming—in fear or in pain, Roza did not know.
“You like the castle,” he said. This was not a question.
She slouched at the foot of the throne meant for her. “I could do without the crown,” she said, touching the golden circlet on her head, weighty as the anvil on which the blacksmith hammered the horseshoes.
“You don’t have to wear it. You don’t have to wear anything you don’t want to wear.”
“Hmmm,” said Roza. She had to be drugged. She had to be unconscious or dreaming. She was in a hospital right now, eyeballs darting beneath papery lids. She wondered if she would ever wake up, and if Sean would be waiting for her when she did.
The tiny mouse ate the shred of cheese, sniffed for more. Roza kept an eye out for the castle cats. She adored the cats, but . . .
He said, “I could crush that mouse by just thinking about it.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“I know. Which is why I won’t.”
So stoic was his expression, so even his tone, so bland his smile that his moods were difficult to discern, but Roza was learning them. Today, he was happy. The servants were abuzz about a wager with some stranger who had come to the kingdom and bet he could defeat one of the most fearsome dogs with his bare hands. He did, and claimed the dog for his prize, only to return it later. “This dog is too much trouble! He tried to eat my mother. And he stinks,” said the stranger. The icy-eyed man smiled and said he’d known all along the dog would best the stranger eventually. He had never lost a wager, he said, and he never would. How could he, when he could read people as easily as reading a story?
The mouse rose up on its hind legs, sniffing, then ran to the wall, disappearing into a nearly invisible hole in the mortar between the stones.
She said, “Why do you want me?”
“Why? Because you are beautiful.”
“There are a lot of beautiful women.”
“You are the most beautiful.”
If she hadn’t been drugged or dreaming or in a coma, she would have cried. She would have cried if any of this was real, or if she hadn’t already cried herself out.
She didn’t cry. She said, “That’s not who I am.”
He continued to stare and stare and stare, waiting for her to say more, perhaps, or perhaps nothing that came out of her mouth was as interesting to him as the mouth itself. She pretended he wasn’t staring. She pretended his eyes weren’t scouring her up and down, steel wool scraping her skin raw. Her vision blurred, time stretched and knotted, memories looping, bringing her back to where she had begun.
Roza grew up in Poland in a town so small it had no name. The inhabitants called it “here.” They called everywhere else “there,” as in “Why would anyone want to leave here and go there?”
Here, cows and horses roamed freely down streets indifferently paved with cobblestones. Along the main thoroughfare, the houses were built right at the edge of the road, as if huddling for warmth during the cold Polish winters, and hoping for company in summer. Neighbors would call to one another through their windows, exchanging news or insults or both.
Roza loved it. Roza’s grandmother, on the other hand, said it was like living in a beehive, but with a lot less privacy. The grandmother—Babcia Halina—always encouraged Roza to travel when she got old enough.
“Don’t you want to see the world?” she’d say, rolling out the dough for pierogi and then spanking it with her palm.
“I see enough of the world,” said Roza.
“You take after your father,” said Babcia. “He never wanted to go anywhere either. Always sitting under that elm on the hill, playing that concertina and dreaming the days away. And what happened?”
Roza plucked a knuckle of raw dough and popped it into her mouth. “Lightning struck the elm.”
“And it fell on him,” Babcia said “If your father had left this place like I told him to, he’d still be here.”
“Except my father wouldn’t be here,” said Roza. “He’d be there.”
“He’d be somewhere.”
“And where would I be?” said Roza.
“Right where you are now, stealing my food,” Babcia said, slapping Roza’s hands away. Babcia spooned some potato filling onto a circle of dough and pinched the edges into a neat purse. Later, she would fry the pierogi with onions right from the garden, and the very air would taste good enough to eat.
Roza said, “Why would I ever want to leave you?”
“I’m old. I’m cranky. You need young people.”
Roza smiled. “There are young people right here.”
“I hope you’re not talking about that Otto Drazek again.”
“Why shouldn’t I talk about him? He’s handsome, he’s strong, he’s—”
“A meathead,” finished Babcia. “A golobki.”
“He’s not a golobki!” said Roza. “When there’s a puddle in my way, he picks me up and carries me over it.”
“So, he’s not such a golobki,” said Babcia. “You, I think, are the golobki.”
“Babcia!”
“What?” said Babcia. “This pierogi has more to say than Otto Drazek.” She held the pierogi to her ear and nodded knowingly. “In comparison to Otto Drazek,” she announced, “this pierogi is a philosopher.”
Roza looked down at her bare feet. “Otto carries me—”
“Over the puddles, yes, I heard you the first nine hundred times you told me. Don’t you know that he hauls you around like a sack of cabbages to prove to his meathead friends how strong he is?”
“I like that he’s strong,” Roza said.
Babcia spooned more filling, pinched the edges of the dough. “Lots of boys are strong. You are strong.”
“Are you going to make cookies today?”
“There will be boys who will tell you you’re beautiful, but only a few will see you.”
“You’re not making sense, Babcia.”
“How about finding yourself a smart boy? Or better yet, a kind boy, a boy who listens to what you have to say?”
Roza shrugged. She didn’t know any boys like that.
“You need to have an adventure. Do something different. And maybe then you will meet a boy who listens. Who sees.”
“I’m already doing different things,” Roza said. And she was. She commuted two hours a day, three days a week, to her first year of university classes. She moldered in humid rooms with droning biology and composition professors. At night, she fell asleep on top of her books and woke up with
the pages sticking to her cheeks. She loved it.
Babcia grunted. “You need to do different different things.”
Roza smiled and hugged her grandmother, believing that university was enough of an adventure. And so was Otto Drazek. Until the day he was carrying her over a puddle and asked her to quit school and marry him.
She laughed. “Otto, we’re too young.”
“We’re eighteen. Not too young,” he said.
“I like school,” she said.
“What can you learn in school that you don’t already know?”
“A million things.”
“Why do you need school when you already have me?”
“One has nothing to do with the other,” she said.
“Who do you think you are?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is there someone else?”
“No!”
“What then?”
“You’re squeezing me too tight.”
“Sorry,” he said, and dropped her in the puddle. When she would not quit school, he dropped her completely.
She didn’t have time to be sad about it. After Otto, there was Aleksy, Gerek, Ludo. “Beautiful,” they said. “So beautiful.”
“Don’t be too proud,” said Babcia.
“But it’s nice!” Roza said.
“It is nice. But a pretty face is just a lucky accident. Pretty can’t feed you. And you’ll never be pretty enough for some people.”
But Roza was pretty. And lucky. Everyone told her so. She liked Ludo best because, though he told her she was pretty, he didn’t try to carry her over puddles, because he was delicate and smart and beautiful, and he gazed at her with soft gray eyes like twin pools in which she could lose herself. It took months before she noticed that they only talked about the books he’d read and the movies he liked, that he never asked her a question, that he chided her for everything from her love of raucous polkas to how loud she laughed and how much she liked to eat. Don’t you worry you’ll look silly? Don’t you worry you’ll get fat? He poked her in the sides to show her where she was soft.
And when she found herself getting a little too quiet, a little too worried about how much she liked to eat, she told Ludo that they should take a break. Because he was so delicate, he sobbed like a baby. Because he was so delicate, he shook her hard enough to rattle her teeth. Who do you think you are?
She didn’t tell her babcia. She didn’t talk about how she’d cried, how she’d kissed him just so he would stop shaking her. How he’d touched her after. How she didn’t want to kiss anyone else ever again, how the thought of kissing made her skin itch, made her bite the insides of her cheeks till they were bloody.
What she did tell her babcia: that she had applied and been accepted to an exchange program with an American university. Three months over the summer, living in a dorm in Chicago, far away from Otto, Aleksy, Gerek, Ludo, far away from everything and everyone she knew.
Babcia said, “America is like El Dorado! Mrs. Gorski’s son told her that women go to the market wearing dresses made of fifty-dollar bills.”
“Mrs. Gorski’s son is a golobki,” said Roza.
“True,” said Babcia. “But I still like imagining dresses made of money.”
Roza already regretted the decision. “I don’t know why I signed up. I can’t afford the airfare.” And what would it change?
Babcia had held up a finger, disappeared into her bedroom. She returned with a cigar box. When Roza opened it, it was stuffed with zlotys.
“Babcia, where—”
“I save,” she said simply. “I saved it all for you.”
“But—”
“You will see the world. You will have love affairs with boys who see past a pretty face. You will be strong. You will call and tell me all about it. And then I will crow to the neighbors and make them all jealous.”
Even as Roza packed her bag, she missed the smell of frying pierogi. She missed the rolling hills and the woolly sheep and the feel of brook water running cold over her feet. She missed the familiar drafty classrooms, the textbook pages sticking to her cheeks. And, as far as love affairs went, she would be happy if no boy ever looked at her again. She snarled her hair in a bird’s nest and zipped her sweatshirts all the way up.
But Babcia sounded so sure, the way Babcia always did. Maybe it would be good for her to do a different different thing.
“Okay,” said Roza. “But I’ll be back soon. I promise, I’ll be back.”
The man gazed at her. “You don’t need to go back. You have everything here.”
Roza blinked, remembered where she was. Could the man hear her thoughts? No, he’d never given any hint of that. She must have spoken aloud.
She hadn’t intended to tell him this story, or any story, but maybe she had. Maybe the loneliness was getting to her. Maybe he was getting to her somehow, wearing her out, wearing her down, gazing upon her with that indulgent smile, ice-chip eyes twinkling—twinkling! Was she so pathetic that she would ramble on, offering bits of her own story, bits of herself, like some second-rate Scheherazade?
Who do you think you are?
She turned away, training her eyes on a stained-glass window. But his stony fingers found her chin, brought her gaze back to his. She hated to look at him, hated him looking at her, the way his eyes mentally unbuttoned her clothes, mentally unzipped her skin. Her throat constricted as those fingers, cold, so cold, traced the length of her jaw, the curve of her ear, the hollows of her neck, where a pulse fluttered like a dying moth.
He’d said he wouldn’t touch her, and she had believed him. Now his fingers dragged across her flesh, and his icy eyes burned with a strange fire. Soon, she would be sitting on the throne next to him, that stupid crown on her head, stuffing her face with turkey legs, in the sad hope he wouldn’t hurt her, as if he hadn’t already.
The gown lay against her skin like a dress made of lead, pinning her to her seat. Her voice was barely a whisper when she said, “You told me you wouldn’t touch me.”
The fingers curved around her neck, strumming the delicate cords there. “Until you want it.”
“I don’t want it.”
He released her neck, slid his hand down to spread his palm over her heart, pressing into the soft flesh. “You do.”
She fought the bile that begged to choke her, begged to end this before it went any further. “Where is the beast?”
His hand stopped its downward slide. “Excuse me?”
“The beast. The one in the yard. The one at the other house. The hideous one that almost ripped out my throat.”
“He was just doing his job. But I’m sure you don’t want to see him again.”
“Bring him to me. If you want to please me, that would please me.”
“And why would that please you?”
“Because,” she said. She leaned back in the chair as far as she could go, leaving his hand frozen in the empty space. Because he’s just as pretty as I feel.
Finn
SEES THE FIRE
SEAN STOOD IN FRONT OF THE OPEN BARN DOOR, HIS large form casting a long shadow. “Since when do we have a horse?”
“Since four nights ago. Which you would know if you’d been home.”
“Uh-huh,” said Sean. “And how do you expect to feed her?”
“There are ten bales against the wall.”
“And how do you expect to feed her after those are gone?”
“I’ll figure something out.”
“Right,” said Sean. “And what’s that?”
“This? This is a goat.”
“A goat.”
“Yes, for the horse. The Hasses gave him to me for twenty bucks because he won’t stop eating the pants off the line.”
“Great,” said Sean. “I’ll start saving up for new pants. Dinner in fifteen.” He turned on his heel, stalked toward the kitchen door, then disappeared into the house.
Finn led the goat into the barn. “Goat, this is Horse. Horse, this is Goat. I??
?m still working on your names, but that’s all I got for now.”
“Meh!” said the goat, peering up at the horse. Suddenly, the goat leaped straight up till he was eye level with the horse. He did this three times. The horse’s whinny sounded like a laugh.
“I can see you guys are going to be friends.” Finn took a carrot out of his pocket, giving half to the horse and half to the goat. Then he searched for the cat. Calamity Jane wasn’t in the yard. She wasn’t in the hayloft, or under the bushes, or perched in the crook of her favorite tree. Her food, sitting in a bowl by the kitchen door, was untouched. It wasn’t like her, and a nail of anxiety pierced his gut.
The nail turned into a screw when Charlie Valentine charged across the street toward Finn’s yard. Charlie’s long gray hair was rattier than usual, and he had forgotten to put in his teeth. He marched right by Finn and pounded on the back door till Sean came out again.
“Runaround Sue got out,” Charlie said.
Sean said, “Maybe it’s time for a coop, Charlie.”
“The chickens don’t like the coop.”
“They don’t seem to like the living room either.”
“Are you going to help me find her or not?” said Charlie.
“Get your great-grandchildren to help you,” said Sean. “There’s a lot more of them. You’ll cover more ground.”
“Is that your idea of a joke?” Charlie said.
“I don’t joke,” said Sean.
“You used to,” Charlie said. “When Roza was around. You used to joke and smile and play games. Now you’re just a boring old pain in the ass. You need a new—”
Sean gestured to his uniform. “Let me get out of this first.”
“I’ll be in my yard,” said Charlie. “Sometimes she likes to roost in the marigolds.”
“Charlie!” Finn called after him.
“What?”
“How long do you need me to keep the horse?”
Charlie sucked his lips into his face. “What horse?”
“You gave us a horse.”
“Now why would I do a stupid thing like that?” said Charlie, stomping across the grass toward his house.