by E. P. Clark
“Where are the guards for this door?” demanded Vyacheslav Irinovich, sounding displeased. We looked up and down the corridor, but saw nothing but the retreating backs of the embarrassed couple. I went out onto the balcony, Vyacheslav Irinovich right behind me, but in the twilight of midnight it looked empty.
“Where are the guards?” he repeated, sounding even less pleased. “This door is always guarded!”
A movement in the corner of the balcony caught my eye, and I went over to the shadows there and found what turned out to be one of the guards, in a state of insensibility.
“He’s dead drunk,” said Vyacheslav Irinovich, prodding him in disgust. “Where’s his partner?”
There was groan from below, and I looked over the balcony railing. The other guard was lying on the ground.
“He’s gone over somehow,” I said, and climbed over the railing myself and jumped down to join him. It was only a single story drop, but the knee I had wrenched jumping over a fence the summer I had been running around after Nika, and that, unlike all my other injuries, had never healed properly, twinged from it anyway.
“Old age is not a pleasure,” I muttered to myself, and bent over to examine the guard. It flashed through my mind that this could be a trap and he could be feigning drunkenness, but when I prodded him, he only groaned in response.
“Valeriya Dariyevna?” called Vyacheslav Irinovich, who was leaning anxiously over the railing. “Is all in order?”
“It is for me,” I told him. “But this poor fellow looks to have hit his head and sprained his wrist, as well as drinking himself into a stupor.”
“He’s lucky it’s not worse,” said Vyacheslav Irinovich, sounding not at all compassionate. “He’s lucky he didn’t break his head entirely, going over the railing and landing on the flagged ground. You’re lucky you didn’t break your head either, Valeriya Dariyevna.”
“Jumping down from this height? I should hope not! Wait, I think he’s coming round. Can you hear me?” I asked the guard, who was groaning and moving more and more vigorously.
He muttered some nonsense syllables, which after a few tries resolved themselves into the question, “Where is she?”
“Where’s who?”
“The woman…mead…”
“She brought you mead?” I guessed.
“Strange…”
“What was strange?” I asked.
“Taste…”
“She brought you strange-tasting mead?”
“Hmm-mmm.”
“How much did you drink?”
“Sip…she said…beer.”
“She told you it was beer?”
The guard made a sound that was probably affirmative.
“Was it the beer you were expecting the servants to bring you at the end of your shift?”
The guard made another affirmative sound.
“I’ll send for a healer,” I told him, and, calling the information up to Vyacheslav Irinovich that I suspected the guards had been slipped a potion, and that I was going for a healer, I ran off in the direction of the kitchens.
The former frenzy had deserted the kitchens when I arrived, and now there were only a few of the older cooks and servants sitting there and eating the remains of the feast in the Hall of Celebration.
“A healer!” I cried as soon as I burst through the doors.
A sensible-looking woman rose from the far side of the table, and I explained the matter to her. Within moments she had sent one of the serving women to find another healer, and was setting off herself to tend to the fallen guards.
“Be sure to take down everything they tell you,” I commanded her, and then rushed off in the other direction before anyone could detain me with further questions or offers of hospitality. I wanted to see if I could find out the identity of the woman who had come in from the balcony just as Vyacheslav Irinovich and I had been about to go out onto it. Although I was certain I’d never seen her before in my life, I had a good chance of finding her companion, since the man with her had been Nika.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
As I ran along the corridors I also ran over the possible places I might find him. It all depended on whether or not he was currently involved in an intimate tryst with the unknown woman. I would have liked to think better of him than that he would dally with a strange woman while his wife and his mother were in the same building, but I was fairly certain that we had conceived Mirochka in this very building, just two rooms down from where his mother and his wife-to-be had been celebrating his upcoming nuptials, so I had the most positive proof that he could be unfaithful under such unpromising circumstances. What I really wanted to think was that I had been special and he had only done it with me, but that was looking less and likely…I darted into a small private chamber a little ways down the corridor from the servants’ entrance into the Hall of Celebration. We had made use of this room more than once. It was unlit except for a single guttering candle, and for a moment I thought it was empty, but then I caught sight of a masculine figure slumped against the wall.
“Nika!” I cried, rushing over to him. “Where is she? What has she done to you?”
“Valya?” asked Nika thickly. “What are you doing here?”
I knelt down in front of him and gave his shoulder a good shake. “Where is she?” I demanded again. “Who is she?”
“That hurt!” protested Nika, trying to escape my grip.
“Did she give you something? Mead, perhaps?”
Nika tried to focus on me in the flickering darkness. “How’d you know?” He squinted at me. “You’ve still got that trick, I see.”
“I saw the guards, that’s how! There’s no trick to it at all!”
“What guards?”
“The guards on the balcony who were drugged!”
“Drugged…” he repeated in bewilderment. “They weren’t drugged…”
“Then what happened to them? What happened to you?”
“Mead…”
“You never had much of a head for drink, Nika, but I refuse to believe that a little mead could bring you to this state,” I said in exasperation. “Who is she?!?”
Instead of answering, he threw up onto my shirt.
“Do you feel better now?” I asked.
“A little, yes,” he said, sounding surprised and wretched but also clearer than he had before.
“Good. Get up.”
With one hand on the wall and one hand on my shoulder, he managed to drag himself upright. He wavered for a moment, but then let go of me and stood there solidly enough.
“You’re covered with vomit,” he pointed out.
“I’ll hardly be the only one by the time the night is over,” I said, stripping off my shirt. I had an undershirt on beneath it, but Nika still averted his eyes, which annoyed me more than anything else he had done this evening.
“You were running around with a strange woman who has been drugging people,” I told him sharply. “I hardly think the sight of me in my undershirt is going to sully your virtue any more than it’s already been sullied.”
He gave me such a woebegone, boyish look that I had to turn away in order to keep myself from kicking him in the shins. When I turned back around, he was still looking pathetic, but I had reminded myself very severely that I only cared about the mystery woman, and that he could stand there looking like a hungry baby and a kitten in a rainstorm as much as he liked, because it was nothing to me. His lack of backbone and all the other qualities one would want in a man had already been abundantly proven, and it was no longer my problem.
“Who is she?” I repeated, wadding my sick-soaked shirt up into a ball in order to busy my hands and stop them from giving him a good slap.
He looked down and muttered a number of unintelligible things, but after some pressing I gathered that the mystery woman was the daughter of his mother’s head steward.
“And what were you doing with her?” I demanded, unable to stop myself. Shame-faced silence was the only answer I got,
and was no more than I deserved.
“What was she doing?” I went on.
He came out of his sullen shame-filled silence long enough to give me a puzzled glance and say, “What do you mean?”
“I can’t believe she went to all this trouble just to…” I gestured at him. “What else was she doing?”
“I don’t know,” he said stubbornly. I resisted the urge to give him another good shaking: although his posture and his voice told me that he wouldn’t tell me even if he did know, it seemed that he did not, in fact, know.
“Well, where is she now?” I demanded.
He shrugged.
“Does your mother know about her? Does your wife know?”
He gave me a hurt look.
“They do know,” I stated.
His shoulders slumped in admission that yes, they knew.
Screams of rage started to build up somewhere in my chest. I bit them back and asked, “Do you need to be escorted somewhere? Do you need a healer?”
He shook his head, looking even more woebegone than before, and before I could launch myself at him and throttle him within an inch of his life, I strode out of the room and slammed the door behind me.
***
My rage carried me all the way into the Hall of Celebration and over to the table where Princess Velikokrasnova and Princess Vostochnokrasnova had been sitting. They were no longer there, so I marched off to the chamber where older princesses often liked to retire to conduct some quiet business while the younger folk entertained themselves in the Hall of Celebration. Sure enough, Princess Velikokrasnova, Princess Vostochnokrasnova, Princess Yuzhnokrasnova, Princess Malokrasnova, Princess Severnokrasnova, and some more minor black earth nobility were all gathered there.
“Where is your steward’s daughter!” I shouted in Princess Vostochnokrasnova’s face.
She remained almost impassive, but a twitch of her eyes gave her away, and several of the other princesses gasped.
“What is it to you?” she asked, raising her chin.
“I admire your spirit. I hope my sister admires it as much when she comes to question you. Now, where is your steward’s daughter? Because the last I saw of her, she had just been slipping something to a couple of Imperial guards—and your own son. They were barely sensible of their surroundings.”
“Men drink a lot at these celebrations,” observed Princess Vostochnokrasnova coolly. “No doubt it was just too much vodka.”
“That was the wrong answer!” I shouted. “You should have said: ‘Oh, by all the gods, where is he? I hope he has taken no harm! Marina, my daughter, go summon a healer directly and attend to your beloved husband.’”
“Ah, Valeriya Dariyevna, child,” said Princess Vostochnokrasnova. Something like a smile quirked her wrinkled mouth. Everyone else appeared completely unmoved. And I was the one who was supposed to mistreat men. “Sometimes I really do regret not making you my daughter. No offense to you, Marina,” she added to Princess Velikokrasnova.
“None taken,” said Princess Velikokrasnova, although judging by the set of her own mouth, not entirely truthfully.
“So you did know!” I cried. “I didn’t want to believe it, but…how…how many…how many…” Tears, I realized with extreme horror, were building up behind my eyes, threatening to burst free and choke me.
“Come, my child,” said Princess Vostochnokrasnova, patting the space beside her on the soft bench she was sitting on. “Have a seat.” When I didn’t obey, she reached over and tugged on my undershirt with a surprisingly strong hand. I allowed my knees to buckle, and plopped gracelessly onto the bench, still swallowing back the tears clogging my throat, and, I discovered with even more horror, sniffling like a child.
“Here.” She handed me a kerchief. “This is a little nicer than that stinking shirt you’ve got in your hand. And don’t take it so hard, my child,” she added, with something almost like compassion in her voice. “Did you only realize…just today?”
I nodded.
She sighed and gave Princess Velikokrasnova a meaningful glance.
“Valeriya Dariyevna,” said Princess Velikokrasnova stiffly. “I…I know you have no cause to love me. I know you think I did you a great injury, and him as well. But…I always knew. What he was. I knew about you all along, you know, and about…the one before you, and the one after. I knew about all that, and I…took him anyway.”
“So are you claiming that you loved him more?” I said angrily. The lump in my throat was gone, melted away by old hurt and new rage.
She gave me a contemptuous look and pursed her mouth, and it was Princess Vostochnokrasnova who said, still speaking more gently than she had ever spoken to me before, “You really did him love him very much, then, my dear. As much as it is possible to love a man one has only known for two months, that is.”
“Three months. And I can’t exactly claim it was a pure and elevating passion, but I never thought of any other man even for a moment the whole time, and my intention was certainly an honorable marriage.”
Princess Vostochnokrasnova sighed heavily again. “And if you had found out about…the others?”
I made a face, and she gave a short laugh. “As I thought. He’d be lucky if all you did was turn him out on the steppe in the middle of a howling blizzard, with nothing but the shirt on his back.”
“I wouldn’t!”
“No, my dear, you’d cut off his head, snick-snick, just like you did with the last people who made you really angry.”
I opened my mouth to protest that, but then shut it, since that would certainly be what I would want to do.
“And what mother could wish that for her son? No, my dear, he’s much better off where he is, and you’ll be much better off with Marina’s little boy, who’s grown up into such a fine young man, and against all the odds, too. Because that’s what’s being planned, is it not? I must confess, when I first heard of this mad scheme of your sister’s—well, and your own, I assume—to take him off with you to the East, I thought, ‘oh, there go those Zerkalitsy again,’ but”—she looked over at her sister princesses—“I am beginning to see the wisdom of it, at least if marriage between you and Marina’s Vanya is the goal.”
Everyone looked at me, and after a moment, I nodded.
“There, you see,” said Princess Vostochnokrasnova, sounding pleased. “The Tsarina is planning to honor us with a special show of esteem. Whose idea was it, by the way, my dear—yours or hers?”
After another moment of deliberation, I said, “Hers.”
“All of it, my child?”
“All of it.”
“Including the choice of husband?”
“Yes. The plan was hers. Well, the execution has been mostly mine, so if I’ve ruffled any feathers, don’t blame her for it. I’m happy to face any woman who thinks she’s been offended myself.” The boldness of my declaration was somewhat undercut by my voice cracking as more tears suddenly threatened to break loose. I would have been very angry and embarrassed about them, except that everyone in the room, who had to a woman always disliked me my entire life, had visibly softened towards me upon seeing them, so I had to admit that they had been a brilliant tactical stroke, even if an unintentional one. Crying might have gained me more with my sister’s ill-wishers than ten years of careful plans and cunning strategy.
“Of course you’d be happy to fight any of us, my dear, but that won’t be necessary,” said Princess Vostochnokrasnova, patting my hand. “No one is offended, and an alliance, a proper marriage alliance, between Krasnograd and the black earth district would be a very welcome thing, would it not, my sisters?”
The other princesses didn’t look as convinced of that, but no one dared say anything in dissent.
“It would only be cementing in name what we already know to be true in fact,” she continued.
Princess Velikokrasnova made a very sour face at that, but Princess Vostochnokrasnova only laughed and said that she’d have a word with her steward and see what her daughter
had been up to, but ten to one it was the high spirits of a woman who was chasing after a man she shouldn’t have, and since she didn’t have all the resources of money, servants, the strength of a warrior, and a sister on the Wooden Throne that I had had, she was resorting to tricks and potions instead.
I looked her and the other princesses over narrowly as she was speaking, but while I could see that they were concealing something from me, and that there was division between them over what to do, I could also see that further questioning at the moment was going to be useless, so I said I would disturb them no more for the evening, and rose to leave. Princess Vostochnokrasnova rose with me and walked me out the door.
“Your plan is a good one, my dear,” she said once we were alone in the corridor.
“Is that so,” I said. I started walking, and she walked with me.
“It is, my dear. A marriage alliance with the black earth district was always a good idea; the only problem was in your original choice of husband, although I suppose you could be forgiven there: he was handsome, clever, and of age, and you were very young. You still are very young, my dear, if you’ll forgive me for saying so. The fact that you care so much about…him, and all of this, proves it. Not that I hold it against you. Or anything else, for that matter. You said your intentions were never anything but an honorable marriage, and I believe you. I believed you then, too; I just knew that such an establishment was not in my son’s best interests, much as I regretted that fact. I tried to convince myself that it would be, and that I should allow him to break off the betrothal I had arranged for him and accept your proposals, but sober judgment told me I could never allow it.”
“So he did want to, then,” I exclaimed, rather bitterly. “At least a little.”
“Even a lot, my dear, but not enough.”
“How can you be so sure! He might have changed!”
Princess Vostochnokrasnova laughed. “And once again, my dear, you show yourself to be a very young woman, and one who has never had a husband or a son.”