Revenant Eve Read online

  You’d think that after they found out who she was, Tony’s snob of a mother would despise my mom, especially as it turned out they shared the same father, though Mom’s birth was not sanctioned by marriage.

  Alec’s doctor friend Natalie Miller had made one of her typical comments on the situation. “The Duchess von Mecklundburg can’t play the snob, because Mom Murray doesn’t care any more about being a bastard than she does about duchesses. You can only be snubbed if you’re into snobbery, and your mom doesn’t give a flying frick. Imperviousness is the best defense.”

  The amazing thing was that Mom and the Duchess actually got along, in a sort of armed-but-neutral way. The Duchess appreciated five-star French cuisine, and Mom had ruled their kitchen like a red-haired Napoleon. Mom and Tony had become good buddies, being a lot alike.

  I laughed. “A Bugatti! It has to be gorgeous.”

  Tania said, “Their guess is that the commander put it up on blocks then boarded it up before they fled from the Russian advance. He must have hoped he could get back and recover it.”

  “The surprise is that the Russians never found it. They were pretty good at looting, from everything I’ve read.”

  “It was well hidden. The wall had been lightly plastered over, then lumber moved in front of it,” Tania said as we walked into the central square facing the palace. “They’d been searching for the other end of one of the old secret passages.”

  “There are a million of those, I remember. Tania, it sounds like you haven’t had any time for your crystal experiments. I know you said you’d help with the wedding stuff, but you don’t have to run every errand. We can hire more people.”

  Tania’s smile was brief but real. Tall and long-faced, Tania looked as studious and earnest as she was. I’d hired her to try to run some experiments with the crystals that seem to focus Vrajhus—that is, magic. I could sort of deal with the idea of Vrajhus as a mysterious (and dangerous) power source, but the word magic threw me.

  Tania said, “I needed a break to think. No matter how careful I am, I still can’t reliably reproduce effects. I’m beginning to understand the warnings of the old folks about how unreliable magic can be. As for the wedding, I like the preparations. Your mother makes me laugh—and then she always makes me lunch. Ah, such lunches,” she said with a sigh of deep appreciation.

  By then we’d crossed half the central square, with its gigantic, mostly obliterated hammer and sickle painted on the patterned brick. From long habit, Tania scuffed her foot as he walked over part of the hammer. The Dobreni had been silently rubbing it out with their feet for three generations.

  On the left and right sides of the square stood the imposing buildings of government and finance, including the Council building, now nearly rebuilt after the fire that had gutted it during the vampire fight just after New Year’s.

  We headed for the main gate to the royal palace, where a cute Vigilzhi guy stood on duty. He saluted, crisp in his blue uniform with the red stripe down his trousers, the gold buttons on his tunic, and the twin falcons on the brass plate at the front of his helmet. The Vigilzhi are the police and army combined. And if Alec gets his way (which he will), women will soon be able to join. The first will be his distant cousin, Baroness Phaedra Danilov, a sharpshooter, a first-rate fencer, and an expert rider.

  I gave the guard a grin and a wave, and as soon as we were out of earshot, I said, “You happen to know him? I’m trying to learn the names of the staff.”

  “Him? That is Chaim Avramesçu, cousin to my friend Sara.”

  “Sara Avramesçu—the rabbi’s daughter?”

  “Yes. Sara and I studied lens making together, but she went on to work with gems. She has a gift for restoration and faceting. I don’t know the two guards at the sentry station.”

  “I’ll find out,” I promised, as we entered the main building.

  The heavy, wet smell of plaster was evidence that the refurbishing of the royal suite—which hadn’t been done for nearly a century—was proceeding as planned.

  Tania lifted her hand in a friendly wave and peeled off on an errand of her own as I walked into Alec’s outer office.

  Alec was alone, as I pretty much showed up at the same time every day. When I walked in, there was that transformative smile that somehow made his eyes seem bluer. I still don’t get how that works. He tossed down his fountain pen and came to meet me in the middle of the room for a good-morning kiss.

  “How’d the interview go?” he finally asked.

  “Not as bad as I dreaded. I didn’t have to lie, except about Ruli. For the rest, I just sort of skimmed over the nastier stuff.” We sat side by side on the edge of his desk, and I leaned into his warmth as I gave him a fast recap.

  I was living in state with my mom at Ysvorod House until the wedding. Just us and the huge staff. It seemed pompous to have this large staff for two people, but (I told myself) that big staff was really there to maintain Alec’s family house, not look after me or Mom. Especially as Mom was hardly ever there, spending most of her time with the von Mecklundburgs, who had become her cause. “I’m going to tame them,” she said to me.

  If anyone could, that would be my mom.

  Anyway, my dad had gone back to Los Angeles to shut up our rattletrap house in Santa Monica, store our cars, and all the other red tape of modern life. My parents had made no decision about moving to Dobrenica, but they did plan to stay for a while. Dad was expected to return by mid-August, so he would be in Dobrenica in plenty of time for the wedding, held on the traditional date for royal weddings: September second, St. Xanpia’s Day.

  “Heard anything from Paris?” I asked, my mind going from my parents to my grandmother. Gran was sixteen when she gave up being a royal princess in order to run off with the bad boy Count Armandros von Mecklundburg, months before World War II crashed over Europe. She’d ended up a single mom in Los Angeles for the rest of the century, until I went to Europe to search for her roots, and saw Queen Sofia’s ghost.

  Just after Easter, Gran quietly married Alec’s dad Milo, who had been her official intended all those years ago. He’d carried a torch for her ever since.

  Gran wasn’t much for talking. I don’t know if she fell in love with Milo—I can’t tell you if “falling in love” means the same when you’re nearly ninety and your spouse is even older—but there was no question she respected him, cared for him, and trusted him.

  She regretted her past enough to have insisted on a private wedding, with just Alec, me, my folks, and her old governess as her matron of honor. Mina Hajyos was even older than Milo, though still sharp as a tack.

  After that, Milo took Gran to Paris.

  “Got a call early this morning,” Alec answered, as he pulled me up against his side. “They’re in Vienna now. Will start back in a few days.”

  “How is it going? Can you tell?” If anyone was more tight-lipped than my gran, it was Alec’s dad Milo.

  Alec flashed his smile. “If I am correctly decoding the little I’ve pried out of Milo, it seems to be going well. He mentioned something about laying ghosts.” He played absently with my fingers, turning round and round the Ysvorod family diamond, which he’d had resized for me. I’d insisted he keep the Napoleonic era setting, which I loved for its having been made during a period of history I knew fairly well; he said the ring had been made for one of Queen Sofia’s daughters, who married into the Ysvorods.

  “That’s got to be metaphorical ghosts,” I said. “Gran has never seen any real ones.”

  “Neither has Milo. Metaphorical it is. I think they’ve investigated all the places your grandmother and Armandros went to. Not what I would have suggested for a wedding trip, but it seems to be the right thing for them.”

  “Good,” I said, eyeing him. I was getting better at decoding his subtle signs. As you’d expect of someone who’d begun taking on governmental duties at age fifteen, Alec was as good as his father at keeping his emotions buttoned up. But I was working on that. “Anything wrong?”
r />   “Nothing is wrong,” he said with a quick, rueful smile. “Apologies for seeming distracted. You know how it is.”

  “Yep. You’ve got plates spinning, or fires to put out, or whatever you want to call a pack of ongoing hassles. So what now?”

  “Kim, how serious was your offer to work?”

  “I like work. What do you want me to do?”

  “Be a princess and tour.”

  “That’s not work, that’s…”

  “Play-acting?” He took my hands. “Are we going to have The Princess Conversation again? If it’s needed, we’ll take the time.”

  “Is there a hint of sarcasm there?” I asked, making a face. “Have I been whining too much?”

  “One hundred percent sarcasm-free observation.” He kissed me. “You are the only woman I know who was interested in me in spite of the baggage, and not because of it.” On the word baggage he waved a hand, taking in the palace.

  I thought of Cerisette von Mecklundburg, who’d been Ruli’s secret rival and my overt one, and not because she loved Alec. She’d been so in love with the idea of herself as a princess that she’d been willing to endure Alec’s sense of responsibility if she couldn’t get a crown any other way.

  I kissed him back. “I appreciate your accepting my ambivalence about the princess issue. But I can’t help feeling that it’s another Thing for you to deal with, and your life is an endless juggling of Things. So let’s skip that discussion and move on. I get it that royal figures are a fiction agreed on by everybody, not just the guys at the top. That we’re giving up a certain amount of privacy in living public lives, etcetera. But tours? How’s that work?”

  “How about I put it another way, then?” he said. “I want you to spy.” He gave me a bland smile.

  “Spy? On who? When, and where? I don’t want to appear ungrateful for my first official offer of work, but you know I’m not very good at lurking.”

  “Don’t want you to lurk. I am hoping you will smile, and look around, encourage people to talk, and listen to them. Especially if you—as a newly minted princess—request a tour of the mines.”

  “Okay, still trying not to sound like I’m arguing, but aren’t you better qualified for mining inspection than I am?”

  Alec said, “If I go up there, I will get the official tour. That means everyone will buzz around cleaning things up and decorating, and they will line the streets and salute. I’ll get careful speeches. But if you go up there as the new, friendly princess—look around admiringly, get to know people—you will hear all the anecdotes that they keep from me and my father. And among those, you will probably catch references to the mines that I am not supposed to know about.”

  “So you aren’t joking. You really do want me to spy?” I got up from the desk and turned so we stood face to face. He was my perfect guy, from his gorgeous dark hair to his fine-boned face and the body he kept in shape by fencing with the Vigilzhi guards several times a week. But: “Spying?”

  “Yes.” He grinned. “The only reason why those mines are secret is to avoid paying taxes. Understandable, while we were under the control of the Soviets, but now my father thinks it is time for everyone to be contributing equally, just as they have equal shares in the benefits that the taxes bring. However, if you feel uncomfortable—”

  “When you put it that way, I don’t have a problem,” I said. “It becomes a kind of game.”

  “It is a game,” Alec said. “Centuries old.”

  “So if I discover these secret mines, what’s going to happen? It won’t be a game if people end up in prison.”

  “Even if we had a large enough labor pool to be sending miners off to prison,” Alec said, “which we don’t, they don’t see themselves as criminals. To indict them as such wouldn’t be playing the game as we Dobreni understand it.”

  “Is it more like the smugglers versus the excise men of the seventeen hundreds?”

  “Exactly. So what will happen is, you’ll come back and tell me about anything suspicious. And in a month or two, Dmitros Trasyemova, in his capacity as Jazd Komandant of the Vigilzhi—or one of his captains—will be up there on a training mission, or an inspection, and will happen upon the mine, and Tony—because you know Tony will be behind it—will express surprise and consternation. The miners will express surprise and consternation. There will be an elaborate charade, ending with a conversation between me and Tony—or Tony and the Council—resulting in the safety measures being brought up to date, as there tends to be a somewhat medieval attitude about such things. Until it’s too late.”

  “And half a village’s inhabitants are wiped out in an accident. Ugh. I get it.”

  “So the mine will be officially inspected and registered, the necessary improvements made, the taxes will be collected, and life will go back to normal.”

  “Or what passes for normal in a country where you have to plant roses to keep the vampires away,” I said. “Okay, I’ll do it, if only to see Tony squirm. Except that he won’t squirm, he’ll be all touché,” I gave Alec a fencer’s salute for a hit, “and go right back to his own brand of ethics. I know your families are ancient. Our families,” I corrected, remembering that Gran was the last of the Dsarets, the royal family. “Were the von Mecklundburgs all like him?”

  Alec laughed. “I suspect that many of our ancestors would surprise you.” He glanced at the elaborate ormolu clock on the other side of the room.

  “I know, it’s time for the Council meeting,” I said. “And talking about von Mecklundburg ethics, I have a meeting with Cerisette to discuss wedding strategy. I figured, get two potentially rough things over with on the same day. But my reward will be lunch with Nat and Beka.”

  Beka Ridotski was another of Alec’s old friends. Daughter of the Prime Minister, she was a teacher at the temple school, and secretly a Salfmatta in training. The Salfmattas and Salfpatras were the ones who studied Vrajhus—magic. Tania was also a trainee.

  “I wish I could join you,” Alec said. “But this meeting is going to run late.”

  “Then I’d better scram so you can get to it.” I took a step away, then a step back. “Except why do I have this feeling there’s something I forgot?”

  “Wedding thing? Tania’s experiments with crystals? Your family?” Pressed as he always was for time, he did not glance at his clock again. He’d be late if I needed him—what were they going to do, fire the Crown Prince? But he didn’t like holding them up unless he had to; it was disrespectful.

  “I don’t know,” I said, grimacing. “Maybe it’s just that one-more-thing feeling, like I’ll always have one more thing I meant to talk to you about every time we part, even if it’s just for a couple of hours.”

  “Is that because marriage is a lifelong conversation?” he asked, and there he was, taking my hands and kissing me again.

  “So what’s courtship?” I asked, holding him tight before I let him go.

  “The questions,” he said.

  “That we will spend our lives answering,” I said. “I like that. And so, on that note, I’m out the door.”

  And I was.

  I set out into the perfect day, striding back over the hammer and sickle palimpsest, fading symbol of half a century’s oppression.

  My mood was good in spite of the fact that I was about to face Cerisette von Mecklundburg, Tony’s cousin. She’d hated my guts the moment she’d seen me. I’d asked her to organize my wedding anyway, partly in hopes it might somehow lessen her enmity, and partly because I respected her organizational skills. I didn’t know the first thing about organizing royal weddings. Growing up an only child, with Mom, Dad, and Gran as my only known relatives, I’d never even done birthday parties, and I didn’t want my wedding to be a string of disasters like Queen Victoria’s.

  When I’d told my mother I was going to ask Cerisette, she whistled and said, “Are you sure? I’m afraid when she’s done with you, Queen Victoria’s wedding will seem perfect by comparison.”

  Beka Ridotski had nodded a
t the same time I did. “Matter of honor,” Beka had stated, which put my instinctive reaction into words.

  And so far, Cerisette had been an amazing commander in chief, even if she had a tendency to talk to me as if I were the dog’s breakfast.

  My mood was high as I walked under the triumphal arch again and ducked through a lichen-dotted medieval archway abutting a Renaissance building. Adjacent to that was a half-timbered building with odd walls and juttings, in a secluded corner off the regular path. Somewhere someone was playing a radio or recording of a catchy melody, full of hand drums and cymbals, voices rising and falling in a Caribbean rhythm.

  I turned toward the music, trailing my fingers along the wall of the Renaissance building. Only in Dobrenica, I thought: an old-fashioned record playing music from half a world away, in a building constructed five hundred years ago.

  I recognized the building, for I’d walked past it several times. Yes, there was the door that had intrigued me ever since I first discovered it, painted so realistically that on first glance it seemed three dimensional, with exquisitely rendered hinges that looked like stylized acanthus blossoms.

  The music put me in a good mood, far too good to spoil with Cerisette’s antipathy. She could wait two minutes.

  I paused to look at the door more closely. Its paint was fresh in spite of the weather-worn corbels and wood all around, the brush work so masterly that the latch looked three-dimensional. It was painted to look like entwined hawthorn, rose, and acanthus, in silver.

  So imagine my surprise when my fingers closed on cold metal, the door opened, and I found myself face to face with a strangely familiar teenage girl with honey-colored braids. She wore a bulky homespun sweater and a skirt embroidered with flowers and birds.

  Though the door was on the side of a house, the girl stood in bright sunlight, vague colorful shapes shifting about behind her. “Well met, Aurelia Kim,” she said, her voice barely audible above the rise in the rhythmic song. Someone had cranked the speakers to the max. “I am Xanpia.”