So I looked into that expectant, slightly wary face and said, “Ever seen a vampire?”
Niklos’s brows shot up. Then his face smoothed into bland wariness. “Yes.”
I could tell he was going to be as easy to question as a rock, so I gave him the Mick Jagger point-and-shoot with my forefingers, and walked away.
I think I heard him laugh.
On the other side of the room, Alec was dancing with Beka. Her gown was white on top, with a black floaty skirt. It moved like a dream, or rather, she moved well in it.
“Care to waltz?” asked a guy.
He was around thirty, maybe older, a thickset fellow whose broad chest looked splendid in his wide-lapel box tux and black bow tie. He and three of the others in their group wore extravagant Punchinello masks—jaguar, lion, bird. My partner was the jaguar.
I thanked him, and he swung me so energetically out onto the floor that my skirt flagged behind me. “I’m Carol Madaksos. You are Mademoiselle . . . Dsaret?”
“For tonight that will do,” I said. “It’s actually my grandmother’s name.”
“Your grandmother really lives?”
“Yes, she does.”
“Is she coming home?”
“That I don’t know.” And when his eyes widened behind the jaguar mask, I said, “I’ve been traveling for several months, so I haven’t spoken with her.”
“Ah,” he said. “You have such a look of her. A Dsaret, alive! We thought they were all gone.”
I wanted to point out that there were plenty of descendants of Princess Rose around, who would technically be as much “Dsaret” as I was, but decided it was better not to get into it. What was it Danilov had said? “Too fatiguing to explain”? I just wanted to have a good time.
So did he. When I asked what he did, I got a stream of information, not only about his family’s business in floor restoration, but about how his tux had been his father’s, remade by his cousin the tailor, about how the food for the party was divided between the Vigilzhi kitchen and the pastry shop across the alley from Cuzco’s Pies (“Everyone knows their pies, the best in the city”) and how those who had donated skills and or materials to the opera house got bumped up the list of businesses used by the palace, arranged by Mam’zelle Cerisette herself.
He was a nice guy, and apparently he was popular, because as soon as our dance finished, a swarm of his friends descended.
And so I spent the next several hours dancing. I noticed that the crowd had, in typical fashion, separated into two groups. The VIPs migrated to the area near the orchestra and the refreshments around the high table, at the center of which, the duchess sat in a fancy, thronelike chair (the only one in the room, as far as I could tell). She didn’t even seem to talk to anyone. A couple of times I danced near her, and I couldn’t tell if she was watching me or staring through me in an old-fashioned cut direct. The other group was everywhere else.
Twice I spotted Robert heading in my direction, but there was always another partner for me to turn to and make my escape. Once, when I was between partners and I saw him trying to zero in, I tried my summer move—a beeline for the rest room. I was saved by teenaged Sergei Trasyemova, who had scraped up the courage to ask me to dance. We fumbled stiffly through a cha-cha.
Then there was a new partner, one whose red hair and huge chin I recognized. In slacks and pullovers, or in that stupid pirate costume last summer, Percy von Mecklundburg had looked dorky, but in a Brioni tuxedo, he came on with an old-style movie hero vibe.
“Will you dance with me?” he asked shyly.
Thirsty, my feet protesting after avoiding being smashed by nervous young Sergei, I even so, said yes. He was so shy, and his eyes were so unhappy I felt like turning him down would be puppy-kicking, even though he was at least my age.
Percy’s dancing was more absentminded than enthusiastic. It was clear within a few steps he mainly wanted to talk. “I don’t care what they say,” he began. “I believe it, that you came to see Ruli.”
Unlike the rest of your family? I thought, wincing inside.
“She liked you,” he went on.
Help me, I remembered. “She didn’t know me,” I protested, feeling the weight of guilt.
Percy’s lips shaped words, and one hand twitched in my grip, a gesture subdued, as if he struggled to give voice to images. “Beka says you were for Ruli a symbol of freedom. I think that is right. Like my pirates were for me.” He smiled, and I remembered his pirate costume at the masquerade.
Tony’d had the exact same costume, which he’d worn with a piratical air, so he could kidnap me right off the ballroom floor. But that was never Percy’s fault.
He went on, “Only my pirate drawings were more, oh, more freedom of—of choice, of imagination. Pirates were free of family, of obligation. I love Dobrenica,” he said quickly, earnestly. “I could never be happy anywhere else.”
“Not even Paris?”
“I could have loved the old Paris of candles and artists. The Paris of today, with neon and diesel fumes, no.” He lifted his gaze up at the martial figures of the baroque era. “Ruli, she wanted Paris, she wanted freedom. You were free. She had Magda always watching and reporting to Tante Sisi.”
“Why didn’t she just leave?”
“Her mother would cut her off.” He lifted his shoulders. “Unless she went to the north of England to be mired up with her father, and that would make her just as unhappy. How should she survive?”
I was going to retort, “She gets a job, like anyone else,” but I clamped down on that. What seems so easy to one person can be impossible to another. While I don’t have much (well, any) sympathy for the rich who suddenly find themselves having to struggle like everyone else in the world, I could understand how Ruli, raised all her life to the job of princess, would feel lost if she ran from that to the unknown. And face it, who would hire her? She wasn’t trained to do anything except wear expensive clothes and act like a princess.
Percy went on. “Ruli helped me here, did you know that?”
He flashed a glance up at Jupiter gazing sternly down at us from beyond the wheel chandeliers. “See over there? Ruli got Honoré to help her find the portrait of Alexander II for me. All that was left was the outline of his battle tunic and his feet. He built the first riding school here, on the site of the old medieval castle. Took six of us to shore up the fresco, which was crumbling at the touch. Moss had grown where the walls weren’t filled with bullet holes from the Soviets. Or maybe it was the Germans. Did you know that the Soviets used this hall as a car park for their trucks and transports?”
Image flash: the mossy, bullet-pocked walls, a smell of mildew and gasoline, the hulking shapes of mud-splattered old vehicles. I blinked it away, amazed. In all the times I’d seen Percy the summer before, I had never heard so much talk from him. He was like a dam released at last as he told me the history of the riding school and what he and his team of painters had to do to restore the old frescos—with mostly volunteer labor, from the sound of it. Huh, I thought as the dance came to a close. Robert might be short on cash, but he’d sure scored by getting Percy to do the restoration as a freebie.
When the dance music wound down, Percy smiled. “Thank you. Oh, there’s Phaedra. She seems to want me, or maybe it’s you?”
We slipped through the crowd forming up for the next number, and made our way toward Phaedra, who leaned against a chair midway along the wall, well away from her family, cool and elegant as a knife.
When we joined her, she greeted Percy, asked him if he was having a good time, and listened to him go on about the last-minute rush to get the south wall done—“Nobody knows it but the paint under the gallery is still wet,” he said, pointing to the martial scene directly below Gilles and his film crew.
Phaedra made social noises, but I sensed she was waiting. When a couple of twenty-year-old girls pounced on Percy, drawing him into the crowd, she leaned toward me. “Tony is back.” Her smile was angry. “And he’s here.”
“He flew in about four hours ago,” came a familiar voice.
We whirled around: there was Alec.
TWENTY-EIGHT
ALEC SAID TO ME, “Dance with a dead man?”
“As long as he’s not a zombie,” I said, holding out my hand.
“Bra-i-i-i-ns,” Alec murmured in my ear as his arms closed around me and every nerve shimmered like a carillon of bells. This was where I belonged, in his arms.
His grip tightened as I looked into his face.
“No,” he whispered. “I am not drunk.” His body shook. He was laughing silently. “If they put me against the wall, will you bring me a last shot of whiskey? Make it a fifth.”
“Don’t.” I shivered as we twirled into the middle of the floor. “Don’t say that. Even as a joke.” And though I’d meant to keep the secret—I knew how horrible it would be to raise his hopes only to smash them if I was wrong, and it was so very, very easy for me to be wrong, but: “You didn’t do it, Alec.”
His smile was almost manic. His blue eyes were wide, the marks of tiredness revealing how little rest he’d had since I last saw him. “Didn’t do what?”
“You were not driving that car.”
His grip tightened almost painfully as the blue gaze intensified. No, it was that his pupils had snapped to pinpoints. “What?”
An older man looked our way, his expression intent, as if he wanted to speak to Alec.
But Alec twirled me under his arm, and with an expert sidestep and another, he guided me between two couples to relative safety. As we whirled, I caught sight of Tony and Beka framed between two amaranth-crowned pilasters, she with arms crossed, he with that smiling, proprietary air I so distrusted. They were quite a contrast, he so tall, she petite, his long hair pale against his shoulders in the black coat, and her dark curls against the white bodice of her gown.
I finished the spin, facing Alec once again. He gazed down at me, not even breathing for a long moment.
Beka and Phaedra had been convinced that it would be cruel to give Alec hope without proof, and I’d agreed. But that was before I saw him, and got hit with that overwhelming sense that keeping secrets from him was like shutting off access to half my brain and senses. He needed hope, and it was maybe crueler to keep it from him.
So I said in English, “We weren’t going to tell you until we proved it.”
We barely moved in a taut little circle, our bodies fit together hip to hip, as I gave a fast description of the accident site journey. It not only felt good to tell him, it felt right.
Alec’s grip was as intense as his breathing. Then, “How do you know it was that day?” He whispered the words into my hair.
“I don’t. There’s no helpful LED date thingie running at the bottom of Prismview. So tell me this. Has Magda Stos ever driven your green Daimler with you in the back seat?”
“Not to my knowledge. And I haven’t been in the back seat since I was a boy.” On the last word his hand tightened on mine, but when I wriggled my fingers he instantly loosened his. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I just remembered something.”
“From that day?” I looked up in hope—and a bit of trepidation.
“I don’t know. I thought it was some kind of nightmare, because it didn’t make sense, but I recollect a hand pushing my head down. Then cold leather under my cheek. Dizziness. Thirst, even.”
The cluebat whapped me. “Alec, is it possible that blackout was caused by your being roofied? Drugged?”
His mouth thinned into a pale line. “I never thought of that. But who? There was no one in the palace that day but staff. Far more likely I lost track of how much I was drinking, than some mysterious person was lurking around with potions.”
“What you described, those unconnected physical impressions? Well, that’s what it was like when you put Kilber’s sleepy-powder in my wine in Vienna.”
We were moving in a such tight, tiny circle that we were clinging to one another, barely dancing. His eyelids came down for a brief, painful second, then his expression changed, rueful and mildly ironic. “If it’s true, would you call that payback?”
“Don’t joke about that,” I whispered fiercely. “Yes, you did a stupid thing that day, but you didn’t mean me, or Ruli, any harm. If it’s true you got roofied, it sure as hell wasn’t for any good reason.”
“No, but I’m beginning to see that no reason is good. How can anyone trust me if they cannot trust a drink from my hands, or food from my house?”
I looked up into his face. His gaze had shifted to that distant look he got when his mind was running, and he said quickly, “Is that not the essence of civilization, that we can trust something so fundamental from each other as food and drink?”
“Kilber used it during the war. He said so he wouldn’t have to kill anyone.”
“Yes, but he used it against those he didn’t trust, who didn’t trust us. Don’t you see? When we do such things to those we want trust from . . .” He looked away.
“You did it exactly once. You haven’t again,” I said. “And you won’t.” He had that slightly pained, inward expression that I knew meant that, once again, he’d been judge and jury, and he’d found himself guilty. “Speaking of evil and rotten, do you know what Tony’s up to?”
“Dmitros has von Mecklundburg House under constant surveillance,” Alec murmured. “I sent someone to Paris to find out what Tony did there.”
“And? Did he come back with that Magda person?”
“No. Dmitros went himself to the airstrip to intercept Tony, who told him that Magda had already left Paris by the time he arrived.”
There we were, back in the rhythm of our former exchanges. Alec’s hand drifted up my back and down again, causing me to shiver with pleasure, as he said, “She’s returning to Dobrenica by train, which would be her usual habit unless she was accompanying a family member. She left her mobile in Paris—which is typical, since, as you know, they don’t work up here.”
“What about Tony’s excuse for going to Paris to hire a cook?”
“Apparently Tony has actually returned with a cordon bleu chef.” He chuckled. “Dmitros accompanied them to Mecklundburg House himself. He said Madame Tullée hit that household like a bomb. Redhead, designer glasses tinted green, wearing clothes straight off the Champs-Élysées. I’ve never believed that about redheads and temper, but apparently she arrived with her own food—bales of it. Threw a fit when the Vigilzhi insisted on inspecting her crates, but there were no racks of guns, just fresh vegetables and the like. When she got to Mecklundburg House she chucked the family out of the kitchen and proceeded to sort them all to her liking, while Tony stood by, laughing. When Dmitros left, the duchess was standing in the middle of the kitchen in silk and diamonds, surrendering to force majeure.”
I loved the idea of a cook menacing the Evil Family of Doom. “Why don’t you arrest Tony? It would make my day to see him dragged off the ballroom floor in chains.”
“Because there is no evidence that he’s done anything to warrant the chains.”
“All right, though personally I think there should be more off with his head! to your job. Okay. Instead of what-iffing each other to death, tell me this: Do you by any chance know what the word ‘Esplumoir’ means?”
“No. Yes.” He frowned. “Dmitros and Honoré are both signaling,” he said quickly, as the orchestra began bringing that dance to an end. “Strange how memory sometimes gives you the context before you remember the actual words. When I was around twelve, and we first came to visit Dobrenica, and we were staying with the Dominicans, my father read me medieval French grail stories when we holed up during bad weather. You haven’t read those?”
“My early Arthurian familiarity is pretty much limited to Chrétien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach.”
Alec’s eyes narrowed pensively as he navigated us between two pairs of young dancers who were trying to speed-waltz. “Esplumoir. All I recall was that Esplumoir was Merlin’s prison, or his secret retreat. At twelve, the i
dea of a secret retreat has instant appeal, though the rest of the romance is pretty much rot. Ah. Another stray fact: it was the magical place where falcons went to molt. Why?”
“Because Armandros’s ghost said it to me.”
“What did Armandros say to you?” Tony asked.
The jolt was physical, like a shock of cold water. The music had stopped—and Tony was right behind me.
Alec gave me one of those looks—his hidden laughter revealed only in the slight lift to his lower eyelids. He left the question to me to answer. Some old legend about Merlin didn’t sound important, but why would a ghost say it?
At any rate, I didn’t trust Tony enough to say so out loud.
“Pistols at twenty paces?” Tony said to Alec in English.
Alec cocked his head, brows raised interrogatively as he asked me, “How are you with a pistol?”
Our eyes met, and there was that flash that obliterates everything but the other. Of course he knew that I would hate someone fighting over me, that I would fight my own duels. He knew it, and I rejoiced in the knowing. But the intimacy of that moment demanded privacy, and we did not have that. So I turned away.
“I can learn.” I glanced at Tony then back to Alec. “If the target will stand still.”
Tony laughed. The next dance hadn’t begun yet. I could hear some shuffling up on stage. Tony held out his hands, and said, coaxing, “If I promise to stay strictly in the room?”
Alec flicked his fingers up in a wave, squeezed my left hand, and then left me alone with The Enemy.
I longed to zap him with a snide, So where is Ruli this time? but what if I was wrong, and he really didn’t know that his sister had not been burned up in the Daimler? His chin lifted and there was a musical thrump! followed by the reedy wail of a concertina in a fretful minor key note, which was punctuated with another drumming, guitar-strumming thrump, in the nervy syncopation of the tango.
Tango is a seduction without words.
“No way,” I said.
He flashed a grin. “Chicken?”