The zing and clash of steel echoed. My gaze arrowed straight for Tony, who looked up expectantly as Phaedra and I walked in, shedding coats and gloves and hats as fast as we could.
It could have been summer again. He sauntered toward us, wearing his usual loose white shirt over a black tee shirt, jeans, and boots.
Danilov lifted his saber in casual salute, then resumed lunge stretches. Honoré was a few paces away, dressed entirely in black and looking more like Bertie Wooster’s evil twin than ever as he warmed up by practicing footwork. He was tall, slim, and impossibly elegant in those tailored fencing duds.
Phaedra led me to one side, where racks of equipment had been lined up next to a long table. We set down our armloads of winter gear, and I hesitated, wanting to strip to my leotard, but not sure if I should.
A few paces away a good-looking guy in old jeans shrugged into a white fencing coat—not the rumpled general issue ones I was used to at my university fencing class, but fitted, coming down mid-thigh like a military tunic. He had curly dark hair. I recognized him as Niklos, Tony’s main aide-de-camp.
The guy who’d shot me.
His gaze lifted, our eyes met, then he advanced. “You are Mademoiselle Murray, yes?” he asked in French-accented English. “I must tender apologies, me, for my actions at the castle. I trust that your bones, they were not involved? No damage, one could say, serious?”
“Nope,” I said, trying for ultra-cool. When I caught Tony grinning at me I added, “Except now I’m way out of shape.”
Niklos made a large gesture, smiling. “We must make the amends for that.”
“Tea?” Danilov drawled. “Or coffee?”
I wanted to say Iced tea, and heavy on the ice, but I didn’t want to be rude as he gestured with his sword toward the side table set with a splendid tea service, and Russian-style glass cups in silver holders.
Phaedra was dressed in ski clothes that showed off her thin, taut body. She was in splendid shape, her clothes so snug they were the next thing to a leotard. In relief, I shrugged out of my long-sleeved shirt, then sat on the floor to take off my boots and socks. I felt their gazes, quick, then away. Something was going on, and it had nothing to do with my togs.
Whatever. I kept my jeans on over my tights, and began some ballet stretches to warm up.
Phaedra said to me, “You will find extra jackets here. There are also gauntlets, but mostly men’s sizes. I have an extra pair.”
“Women don’t fence here?”
She lifted a shoulder, her mouth tight. “Some do. But this is our private salle.”
She stood next to her brother, who wiped his damp brow. Phaedra whispered something to him. Tony backed up, taking up a lazy stance next to the fireplace, in spite of the blast of Hades roaring out.
Danilov gave Phaedra one of those sharp shrugs with covert facial expressions, like, This was your idea.
The welcome I’d hoped for—a truce, maybe even the hand of friendship—had vanished like smoke going up the chimney. Instead, I felt that uneasy, crawly sense along the back of my neck; something that happens when I think people are talking about me, and not in a good way.
Phaedra whirled around and advanced on me.
“I don’t suppose you’ll tell us the truth,” Phaedra drawled, “but I will ask. What are you doing here in Dobrenica?”
I got up from the floor and took first position in ballet, as if beginning a set of warm-up plies would somehow force the incipient interrogation into becoming the fencing practice that I’d been invited to.
They were all watching me, except for Honoré, who practiced fully extended lunges into a target on a wooden post some five yards away, his profile completely absorbed, as if he existed in a different space.
I made myself do right foot through all five positions. They waited for me to speak. So I said, “First tell me why I owe you any answer, seeing as how you’ve offered me nothing but hostility ever since you laid eyes on me?” When she didn’t shoot back a hot retort, I tried to get the better of my temper. “I apologize for my lies at the duchess’s party last summer, but you know, I wouldn’t have done that if you people hadn’t acted like I was going to rob you right down to your underwear the second I walked through those doors.”
“What we heard, before you walked through those doors, was someone chatting up Alec and doing her best to take Ruli’s place.” Phaedra leaned against the table laden with breakfast.
“What?”
She crossed her arms and gave me a level stare from her assured place on the moral high ground. “You were using her name while shagging Alec up and down the Adriatic coast, last summer. Then you came here, and we thought—Tante Sisi thought—she said she thought—you were doing your best to take Ruli’s place and marry Alec. You certainly had him by the—” She stopped herself.
Honoré muttered something and lunged at his target. He skewered the center of the one-inch circle inside the painted heart.
I couldn’t quite hear him, but it sounded like he’d spoke the German word for fuss again, Dienstbeflissenheit, and the others turned his way with complete attention. Odd.
When Honoré went on practicing, Danilov poured coffee, then shot me a speculative glance across the table. “It appeared to us that you’d done something to Ruli,” he said, his tone light, as if it didn’t much matter. “You used her name. Shopped at her favorite places. Flirted with di Peretti and those connards on the coast.”
“Yes I did. To flush her out of hiding—we thought, we hoped. And then I came here. Without Alec knowing. I didn’t pretend to be Ruli here, in this city, until Alec and the duchess, your Aunt Sisi, asked me to. So why didn’t you bring these questions to either of them?”
The Danilovs cut fast glances at Honoré.
He was busy lunging at the target.
Phaedra said, “We did. Alec said it was to flush Ruli out of hiding, and Tante Sisi agreed.”
I jerked my chin at Tony as I began the grandes plies. “You tried to kidnap me the next day and haul me off to that castle of yours, where you had Ruli locked up as a prisoner, so do not try to scam me about my conspiring against Ruli.”
Tony raised his hands, palms out. “I’m not saying anything here.”
I shot a glare at Phaedra as I jerked my thumb Tony’s way. “He knew I was here to find out about my grandmother’s background. As for the shagging, there wasn’t any. Alec was a perfect gentleman on the Adriatic coast.” Worse luck. “And during the entire time I stayed at Ysvorod House, he camped out somewhere else.”
Danilov leaned his hands on the breakfast table. “Tante Sisi said that you and Alec were observing the surface proprieties to stop gossip. She convinced us that going along with your pretense would lead to exposure.”
Of me and my supposed plot. At least he didn’t say it.
“Yes, about that,” I returned cordially, as I used one of the target posts as a barre and began warming up my legs with low kicks, then high. “What exactly did she say to you? Considering the fact that she knew that Tony had Ruli up at the Eyrie all along?” I did a battement fondu développé with full extension, toes pointed Tony’s way as I said to Danilov, “So you didn’t know that Tony was planning to hijack the government?”
The fire crackled. Porcelain clinked as Danilov set down his glass cup. I worked through both legs, and began a set of grandes battements as Smack! Honoré’s rapier point dug into the target’s heart.
Tony leaned against the stone fireplace, damp strands of hair across his brow, and smiled.
Then Phaedra took me by surprise. “I didn’t know,” she said flatly. As though still angry. “I knew there was some conspiracy, and it seemed that Alec was either a party to it, or pretending not to see it. Everyone was aware that he didn’t want to marry Ruli.”
I looked at her, amazed that even after knowing what Tony had done, she still blamed me through this “Alec conspiracy” theory.
As I snapped my feet out in hard, fast frappés, Honoré muttered again—t
his time in Ancient Greek. Then he set aside his rapier with a precise movement and smoothed a black lock of hair off his brow with his other hand. When his hair wasn’t slicked back, it reminded me a lot of Alec’s—thick and fine, with a natural wave.
I said, “By the way, who’s di Peretti again? Seems to me I’ve heard that name before.” Oh yeah, the boyfriend Ruli was going to install at the palace.
“Marzio di Peretti?” Phaedra said, eyes wide in disbelief. “You met him, in Split. You danced with him.”
“I told you why I did that—to flush Ruli out of hiding.” I paused and took in the Danilovs’ skeptical faces. “But I don’t think you want to believe anything I say.”
Whoosh! A welcome draft of cold air swirled in. Honoré had opened the far door and a window beyond that. Within seconds the temperature inside became more bearable, the fresh, chilly air welcome.
Phaedra crossed her arms. “No. Yes. There is the matter of Tante Sisi’s actions. But the only person you talked to besides Alec was Ruli, and then you left the country. Tante Sisi said you left because you discovered there is no Dsaret treasure. Not that any of us believed there’s still such a thing, but we could see how you would.”
A fast glance back at Tony. I remembered what I’d said just after he’d killed Reithermann. In spite of the fact that I’d been shot, I’d figured out where the Dsaret Treasure was hidden. Then I had to go and retort like a six-year-old: I know where the treasure is, and I won’t tell you. How dorktastic can anyone possibly get? Granted I had a bullet in my shoulder and a raging fever.
Tony smiled gently at me, like we were the only two people in the room. I bet myself all the treasure in the bank—in the world—that he was thinking of it, too, and that he was going to pick up this unfinished business when he could pick the place. And the time.
I’d have to make sure that there would be no place and time.
I forced my gaze away from him. The others were watching Honoré again. Last summer I’d thought of them as a kind of monolith of elegant snobbery, indistinguishable except in looks, equally uninteresting. Now that I was seeing them up close, and the only similarity between them was this undercurrent of tension. This much I was sure of: Whatever Tony’s motivation had been at that horrid wreath party at the Ridotskis’, the Danilovs had brought me here for their own reasons; not as a friendly gesture but for this interrogation in an overheated room.
I was not going to tell them about Ruli’s ghost. But I could tell them what she had caused me to decide. I said, “I came to try to reason with Ruli, because I heard she wasn’t happy. I didn’t know she was dead.”
The Danilovs turned Honoré’s way.
He raised his weapon. I braced myself for another odd mutter, but all he said was, “En avant.”
Let’s go.
As if released from invisible ties, the others pulled on fencing tunics. Within a few more minutes my expectations took another hit. This wasn’t merely a setup to grill me. At least, it had been partly that. But not wholly. It was clear from the ways they fell into familiar patterns of warm-up, then paired off, that this gathering was habitual.
I finished a few combinations, then hunted through the available clothing in search of a tunic that more or less fit. It felt different from the fencing jackets I was used to, but it was sturdy and quilted. As I sat on the floor to put my socks and boots back on, Tony spoke up from behind me.
“If there was anyone wanting evidence you were raised in California, those bare feet would convince them.”
I shrugged as I pulled on the gauntlets. They fit in length, though they were tight in width, which wasn’t surprising. Phaedra was a tad taller than me.
Tony tipped his head toward the rack. “Pick a weapon.”
“Are you too cool for warm-ups?”
He snorted. “No. If I do have to defend myself, no one is going to stand aside while I stretch.”
“I’m half warmed. I usually do some lunges.”
“We’ll take it slow,” he said.
“Bad guys won’t do that, either.”
He shrugged.
I said, “Where are the helmets?”
“We could dig one up for you, if that makes you feel more comfortable.”
“I take it no one worries about lawsuits any more than they worry about poked eyes?”
“What can I say? We’re backward here. Danilov says his family used this room as a salle in days of yore, until his great-great-grandmother put a stop to it when she noticed the boys’ spurs cutting up the floor.” He pointed to the parquet a few yards away.
“Where did you practice before?” I asked, as I sorted through the blades. I found a fine rapier, what we called a saber in competition fencing. I tested the length. Perfect.
“My place,” he said as we squared up. “When I was in town.”
“And you can’t anymore because?”
“The way the estate is tied up. Robert has that wing of the house now. Goes to the heir. He chucked us out. My mother still has hold of the duke’s wing.”
“What’s Robert turning it into, a torture chamber?”
Tony laughed and struck, easy and slow. I parried, and we worked through some exchanges, neither of us moving fast, as he said, “Restoring the grand gallery. His big project is the opera house.”
“Opera house? Robert? That has to be a front for something sinister.”
“No more sinister than having to listen to opera.” Tony flashed a grin. “Robert got infected by it while studying in Italy.” He increased the pace. “So you came to talk to my sister?”
“Another third degree?”
“No, it’s fencing practice.”
“It was the third degree—and a slaughter—back in London.”
He grinned and attacked in the high line. “So?”
“Why didn’t you tell me Ruli was dead? Nevermind, you obviously thought Alec and I were up to some evil plot, just as you were last summer. Do you really see the rest of the world as conniving liars?”
He didn’t answer the question—or the implication that he was a conniving liar. Instead, he pressed an attack on my right, which I warded with a snap. “So answer this instead,” I said. “Phaedra stopped near a fountain. I think she was going to begin her third degree then, but she changed her mind when I told her the fountain figures were moving. Why?”
“I think you spooked her.”
“Why?”
“Family secret.”
“I thought I was a member of the family.”
“I’m wondering about that.” Tony whipped the blade around, attacking in the low line. “When we were at Sedania. Did you see something through that old portal?”
“Yes,” I said, recalling golden light and strange faces. I whistled my blade up in a fast block, then lunged high. “For about a second.”
“And you’ve seen that sort of thing before?”
“Yes.” Mentally I vowed to redouble my pushups as I leaped back. “Your turn to answer. Did you know that Grandfather Armandros has been following me around?”
He checked, his eyes widening. “No. You’ve seen him?”
“Briefly. Reflected in the wardrobe mirror. But someone else has seen him around me.”
“Heh.”
“You told me after Niklos shot me that you have seen ghosts.”
“Yes. Up at the Eyrie. Ever since I was small. But not here in the city. And I’ve never seen our respected grandfather.”
Clashes and clangs resounded to my right. Danilov was fighting against his sister. Clearly they’d been working with one another for a long time. They were superlative fencers.
Tony whacked me on the shoulder. “Warmed up?”
Warmed up? My arm felt like string! “As good as it gets.”
And mayhem is what I got. Though my strength was sorely lacking, at least I wasn’t pole-axed by jet lag after a thousand mile drive, as I’d been when he attacked me in London. I had enough of my old speed to land a couple of good hits, causing Tony to
laugh out loud. Other than that, he demonstrated with pitiless detail not only how out of shape I’d let myself get, but how much of an advantage height and strength had. I would have to recover my flexibility as well as my speed, which had been more than a match for the tall and strong when I was doing serious competition.
Finally I lifted my blade, wringing with sweat. “Break.”
He sauntered over to Honoré, who leaned against the opposite wall, sipping coffee as he watched Niklos and Danilov finish. Phaedra gestured to Tony, who walked her way. To discuss me? No, to fight: they squared up. I reached the breakfast table, wiped my damp forehead—and there was Honoré’s considering gaze zapping me from the other side of the room, from beneath an enormous portrait of some guy on the back of a rearing horse. The guy was tall and thin and blond, wearing a variation on the Vigilzhi uniform.
Most of the other noble figures in the portraits were dark-haired. As I recovered my breath, I wandered along the walls looking up at the various styles of clothing and painting. I could guess when this family had first married with the von Mecklundburgs, judging from the variations of my own genetic markers that began appearing in the portraits. It looked like they’d been closely allied since the Vasas brought in pale hair. One of Queen Sofia’s daughters, maybe?
When I returned from my perusal of the gallery, the others had changed partners. They were all extremely good, but Niklos and Honoré were world class fencers, playing ten-moves-ahead chess with their blades.
When the matches broke up, Tony sauntered back in my direction. “Up to your speed?”
“Those two are amazing.” I jerked a thumb at Honoré, who was demonstrating something with his point as Niklos observed.
“Honoré used to do competitions in Germany a few years ago.”
“Before what?” I asked. “Do Honoré and Danilov have jobs? What do they do? Or if that’s a state secret, tell me this: Have you ever included Alec in these private meets?”
Tony’s brows rose. “He used to practice with us, when we were young. Over at our house. This was while Ysvorod House was still occupied by the Soviet captain, and he was still stopping with his father at the Dominican Friars, who had been sheltering Milo for years. That all changed when Alec became Statthalter and got his house back.”