by H J Peterson
Friedrich looked up at his mother for a second, then looked back down at all the fabric samples, rubbing the back of his neck. “I think you guys are going to have to narrow it down a little more: I can’t even tell the difference between half of these colors.”
Terézia laughed at that. “My Tamas said something very similar to that while we were planning our wedding. We didn’t have much choices: it was between red, blue, yellow, and violet. I thought that he was just being cynical, until he went to doctor one day and found out that he’s colorblind.”
Viktoria and Terézia both had a laugh at that, while Katalin just gave Friedrich a look. Kill me now, it said. That’s exactly what Friedrich was thinking, too. He needed to get away from all these color samples, and from the looks of things, Katalin wanted to, too.
“Mother, would you mind terribly if I stepped out to get some air?” Friedrich asked. “All of these colors are giving me a bit of a headache.”
Viktoria smiled. “Of course, honey. Get that mind of yours cleared so we can figure this out.”
Katalin stood up and gently patted down her dress’ skirts. “I’ll come with you.” They took each other by the hand, and the two of them began to walk out of the drawing room.
Katalin’s mother said something in Magyaran that Friedrich didn’t understand. He had a feeling that it wasn’t very appropriate, though: Katalin’s cheeks turned as red as cherries, and her grip on Friedrich’s hand tightened, all while Terézia laughed to herself.
“Friedrich, please tell me that you didn’t understand that,” Katalin said once they were out of the room, putting a hand to her forehead in embarrassment.
“I didn’t,” he assured her.
She sighed. “Thank heaven for that!”
The two of them walked out onto a balcony overlooking the vast gardens behind Eltz manor. Friedrich sighed, finally able to relax a little. It was raining, but he didn’t really mind: the balcony was covered, the tapping of the rain was calming, and he rather liked the smell the earth gave off in the rain.
“Who knew that planning a wedding was so stressful?” Katalin asked as they let go of each other’s hands. She took a deep breath and sighed, rubbing the wedding ring Friedrich had given her earlier that day. It seemed like she was a fan of the smell of rain, too.
“Who knew there were so many shades of… well, everything,” Friedrich asked.
“I take it that this is the first time you’ve ever had to pick colors for anything?” Katalin asked. She looked down at her wedding ring, a silver band with one large emerald and small diamonds along the band. “Well, other than maybe for this.”
“You do like the ring, right?” Friedrich asked. “My father told me that you would leave me if I gave you an emerald ring.”
“The fact that your father’s the one who told you that should’ve tipped you off,” Katalin said. “You know what I heard about your father my first day at court? One of the noblewomen told me that your father has horns hidden beneath his hair. Horns!”
Friedrich gave her a look. He had to admit: he could see why people would believe that one. After all, Lord Eltz did seem more like a demon than a man, sometimes. “What did they say about me?”
“They said that you’re one of those orthodox Gerechtists that thinks that colors are sinful,” Katalin said.
“No: my mother just didn’t trust me to put colors together,” Friedrich said. “And, frankly, she was right.”
He looked over the gardens as a hush fell over their conversation. He found himself twiddling with his own wedding ring. It felt so strange: after years and years of resisting his father’s pleas to get married to a noblewoman, it was finally happening. Granted, that noblewoman was Magyaran (which, according to his father, meant that she wasn’t noble, at all), but it was still happening.
And after that mess with Hiro… well, after all that, he hadn’t been all that sure that he’d ever truly fall for someone, again. After all that, the last thing he wanted was to do was put himself or any other woman in that position.
“How are we going to pull off this wedding?” Katalin’s voice broke the silence. “I mean, I know that we’ll have plenty of money for all this between our houses, but… how are we going to make everyone happy?”
Friedrich sighed. And, there was another reason why weddings were so hard to plan. A wedding wasn’t just a romantic occasion, not when you were a noble: it was a social event, and it was an official joining of two houses. If you wanted things to get off on the right foot, you had to make both heads of the houses happy.
And how they were going to do that when the heads were so… different?
Friedrich didn’t really have a chance to answer that question for his intended. The bell from Eltz Manor’s tallest turret began to toll, the loud clanging interrupting the serene quiet of the night.
He frowned as he began to look around, looking for some sort of an explanation. What was going on? The only reason that bell ever rang was to announce the death of someone in the house or to alert the guards to something.
“Friedrich, what’s going on?” Katalin asked, looking up at him with a look of concern on her face.
Her question was answered just seconds later. One of the guards bolted onto the balcony, his rifle still slung over his shoulder. He was panting, as if he’d just run from one end of the estate to the other.
Friedrich recognized him: it was Carlin Maddox, a young Gelynian Dodger from the Königstadt Guard the king had assigned to House Eltz a few days before.
“Lord Eltz, Lady von Thurzó,” he said, standing at attention. “I’m to escort you two to the safe room immediately.”
“What for?” Friedrich asked. “What’s going on?”
“Armed protestors, sir,” Maddox said as calmly as he could. It wasn’t hard to see how worried he was about all this, though: he was around Friedrich’s age, young enough that he wouldn’t have fought in the War of the Powers. This was probably the most exciting thing he’d seen since he got out of training. “They’re being held off on the road, but I’ve been ordered to get you all to safety, just in case things get out of hand-“
A loud, earth-shattering boom erupted a ways away, seemingly coming from the road where Maddox said the protestors were. Friedrich did his best to keep from wondering whether or not the accompanying screams were from the men trying to get into Eltz Manor or the men trying to defend it, but it still made him absolutely sick to his stomach: good men were possibly dying for him, and what was he going to do? Hide in some hidden room like a damned coward?
“Where’re my mother and Lady Jankovics?” Friedrich asked as he and Katalin followed Maddox inside. “Are they already in the safe room?”
“Yes, sir,” Maddox said. “You don’t have to worry about them, Lord Eltz: they’re in good hands.”
Friedrich knew that Maddox wouldn’t lie to him about this, but… he couldn’t help but wonder just how safe they could be if the house was getting attacked by a bunch of blood-thirsty protestors-turned-rioters.
The three of them rushed back into the drawing room. It was completely empty, void of any people: even their fabric samples, which were still spread out chaotically on the table, seemed undisturbed.
Maddox grabbed one of the paintings–a portrait of Lord Tederich Eltz, Friedrich’s grandfather–and slid it to the side on a railing invisible to all except for those who knew it was there. The motion revealed a panel, one that looked just like the rest of the wall except for the faint seams that marked the door for the trained eye, and what looked to be a small hole, likely caused from somebody’s carelessness. To any robber that might steal the portrait of the late Tederich Eltz, it would see as though the painting had been put in place to cover up that hole, and the seams, if they could see them, were there simply because the painting had been there for a long time.
Maddox pulled something out of his pocket–an ornate, metal rod about the length of his hand from the tip of his fingers to his wrist–and shoved it into the ho
le.
That started the reaction. There was a clanking noise as the panel popped out of the wall, allowing Maddox to slide the panel in the opposite direction of the portrait. It revealed a small, simple room with a plush couch, a few chairs, and a table. Just as Maddox promised, Viktoria and Terézia were already there. Both of them were sitting in separate chairs, waiting for all this to blow over so they could get back to the business of planning the wedding.
They both looked horribly worried, until they looked over at their children and saw that they were alright. Viktoria’s shoulders sagged and she stood up as she began to relax, while Terézia simply sighed, looked up at the ceiling, and muttered something under her breath.
Viktoria came over and gave Friedrich a hug as he and Katalin walked into the room. “Oh, thank heaven, you’re both alright! I was so worried about you two!”
If Friedrich weren’t wrapped in the tightest hug his mother had ever given him, he would’ve given her a look. “Mom, we were on the balcony, and the trouble’s all down the road-“
Another boom, one that was big enough to shake the house. He thought that he heard Terézia curse, but he wasn’t positive.
“That doesn’t sound good,” Maddox said to himself. He looked back at Friedrich, Katalin, and Viktoria. “Stay in here, and don’t come out until I get back.”
He didn’t have to tell them twice. Friedrich moved the panel back over, shutting himself, Katalin, Viktoria, and Terézia in, while leaving Maddox outside to defend the house.
Friedrich plopped down on the couch, running a hand through his hair and sighing. Well, that was an adventure. His mind was reeling, trying to figure out what the hell was going on outside that safe room. Why was this happening? Why did they pick Eltz Manor–with all of its well-trained guards–to raid? Was this just some random act of violence, or was it, heaven forbid, an orchestrated event? All those questions and more swam through his head, and it gave him a headache.
“What are we supposed to do, now?” Katalin asked as she took a seat next to Friedrich while Viktoria sat next to Terézia.
“Well, we can talk about the wedding some more,” Viktoria said. “I think there’s a deck of cards somewhere around here, too, and I’m sure that Friedrich still has some of his books hidden in here.”
“So, we’re just going to sit around and do nothing while the guards fight for us?” She asked. It sounded like she didn’t like the idea of sitting around.
“This isn’t like Magyar, Katalin,” Terézia said in Magyaran. It was the first thing the woman had said in her native language that Friedrich understood. “Nobles here don’t need to defend themselves like back home.”
“So, doing nothing is okay?” Katalin was getting antsy: she was playing with her wedding band, furiously rubbing it and twisting it on her finger. She sighed, frustrated, and looked down at her feet. “Sometimes, I wonder if I’ll ever understand Vorbereichers.”
Viktoria looked over at Friedrich, a confused look on her face. Friedrich found himself blushing, sheepish. It was only then that Friedrich realized that his mother was the only one in that room who didn’t speak Magyaran-
There was a loud, thundering crash, one that sounded like it came from inside the drawing room. Screams erupted, ones that made Friedrich’s blood run cold.
Katalin cursed in Magyaran, standing up. Everyone looked up at her, surprised: nobody had thought that she would lose her patience that fast.
“Where’s the peephole?” she asked quickly and quietly as more cries sounded from the drawing room. “There’s got to be a way of telling what the hell is going on out there.”
Friedrich stood up and walked over to the wall and to one side of the panel. There was, in fact, a peephole. What kind of a safe room would it be without one? It was hidden behind a false painting of a battle from Vorbereicher history, which was really just a very thin screen to cover the small hole in the wall they could use to see what was going on in the room.
He slid the small panel over and he and Katalin peeked through the slat.
What they saw was pure and utter chaos. It looked like there’d been some sort of explosion in the room: the table was knocked over and on the other side of the room, the fabric samples scattered on the floor; the once cream-colored walls were blackened in some parts like firewood; priceless paintings had fallen off the walls, were singed, and were ripped apart by shrapnel; however, those signs of destruction weren’t the things Friedrich noticed the most. What he noticed the most were the men scattered around on the ground like rag dolls. There were only a few of them, and it seemed like most of them were dead: four out of the five people in there–all dressed in the red uniforms of the Königstadt Guard–weren’t moving. The only one who didn’t seem to be dead looked to be Maddox. Even from where Friedrich was, he could tell that his left arm was burned, and from the looks of it, it was burned pretty badly. His face was blackened by what kind of looked like soot, but even so, Friedrich could see that he was in a lot of pain: he was rolling around a little grabbing onto his burned arm in pain.
Someone he didn’t recognize was standing in the doorway of the drawing room, unscathed. It was a woman, one with red hair pulled up in a tight bun and two mechanical arms, ones that didn’t look all that nice. She seemed unfazed by the carnage surrounding her: in fact, it seemed like it was all part of the plan.
Friedrich could feel himself starting to get sick as the woman walked into the room. She had a gun in her hand: a pistol, from the looks of it. She was looking around, apparently trying to decide whether or not there was anything worthy of stealing.
Maddox saw her, and apparently decided to try and stop her. He scrambled to his feet, swaying slightly, grabbing his rifle on the way up.
“Just stay down, mate,” the woman said as Maddox raised his rifle to shoot. Friedrich couldn’t imagine that it felt very good: the poor man had to press the butt of his gun into his burned shoulder, something that just sounded awful to him. “Ain’t a need for ya t’ get hurt, tonight.”
Maddox responded to the woman by taking the shot, hitting the woman square in the shoulder: a non-fatal shot, but plenty to stop any normal human being.
However, it was very apparent that this woman was no ordinary person.
She stumbled back a little and her shoulder was pushed back as the bullet hit, but otherwise, she seemed fine. Really, really pissed, but unhurt.
The woman soon revealed why. She shrugged off her coat and tossed it to the side. Well that was why: unlike her left bionic arm, which only went as far up as her elbow, her right bionic arm reached all the way up her arm, stopping almost at her neck. Maddox’s bullet had hit in the middle of her mechanical shoulder, hitting the metal plate that protected the delicate gears beneath it. Friedrich could see the bullet: it was crushed up against the plate, apparently stuck.
She cursed when she saw the damage to her arm and looked back at Maddox, murder in her eyes.
“Now, that was a mistake!”
The woman lunged at him.
Katalin cursed in Magyaran as she turned towards Viktoria and Terézia. Friedrich looked over at her as he tried to calm his very queasy stomach and tried to keep himself from passing out. He found himself leaning against the wall, he was so light-headed.
“Do you keep guns in here?” she demanded. “You have to have some way of defending yourselves in here.”
That phrase made Friedrich even more queasy. She wasn’t really going to do what he thought she was going to do, was she?
Viktoria frowned, a little confused, but she pointed over to the gun cabinet, anyway. “They’re in there. Why do you ask?”
Katalin walked resolutely over to the gun cabinet and threw it open, revealing the many weapons Friedrich’s father kept in there just in case something like this happened. “Because that poor man out there is going to die unless someone in here does something about it.”
And there it was: the thing Friedrich was really hoping she wouldn’t say.
Becau
se now that she’d said it, it meant that he had to get involved in this, too.
He walked over to Katalin and the gun cabinet as his fiancée pulled one of the rifles out, trying to keep himself from looking as scared as he felt.
“Toss me one,” Friedrich managed to say as Katalin pulled an ammunition bag out from the cabinet and slung it over her shoulder. It was amazing how at home she looked with that big rifle and that ammo: she didn’t look at all uncomfortable, which is exactly how Friedrich felt whenever he handled guns.
Katalin looked at him like he had something crawling out of his ear, as did Viktoria and Terézia.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Katalin asked. “I mean, you pass out at the sight of blood.”
Friedrich forced himself to stand up a little taller, hopefully letting her think that he was a whole lot less scared than he actually was. “Katalin, you’re going to be my wife pretty soon: I’m not about to let you face some mad woman by yourself.”
Katalin smiled at that. She took another rifle and bag of ammunition out of the cabinet and tossed them to him. Somehow, he managed to catch them with minimal fumbling.
“So help me, Katalin, if you ruin that dress, that psychopath out there will be the least of your worries!” Apparently that was the only thing Terézia had to say on the matter.
There was a really loud shout of pain, one that sounded like it came from the drawing room and didn’t sound like the woman. Friedrich ran over to the peephole and looked through it, unsure if he really wanted to know what was going on.
His blood ran cold.
Maddox had lost the fight. The woman had him pinned against the wall, one arm holding him up, while the other hand pressed a pistol into his chin. It was close enough that Friedrich knew that it would kill Maddox, even though he was a Dodger. Maddox looked even worse off than he was, before: his shoulder–the same one that was horribly burned in the explosion–now hung loosely and unnaturally. Friedrich got the horrible feeling that it was dislocated. One of his eyes was black and so swollen, Friedrich doubted that he could see out of it; a massive gash from heaven knew what was bleeding into his swollen eye; yes, the woman also looked worse for wear, but what Maddox went through looked absolutely excruciating.