Coronets and Steel

by Sherwood Smith

  As soon as I named her, they retreated behind polite deference, which seemed to make it easier for her; she obviously had no idea how to deal with people outside of her circle. I could see that the artifice of social privilege was a refuge for her—she knew what to say and what to do.

  By the time we’d refused offers of refreshment from each member of the Waleska family, Anna had disappeared and reappeared again with a scrupulously sealed paper package; Tania’s lens-crafting shop had to be nearby.

  As I brought out my wallet, with its slim pack of euros that hadn’t been touched since my arrival, Anna backed away, hands behind her. “No, no, we will not take money, Josip told you yesterday! You will come to us again, soon?”

  Nods, smiles, repeated thanks—they begged me to visit again—Theresa’s intense dark eyes and her proud smile—I found a moment to whisper, “Thanks again for the rescue. Tell Miriam!” and Madam’s obvious pleasure at the stir our appearance was bound to make. She would have liked to have kept us in the restaurant, seated by a window. Whatever else was going on, we’d be great for business.

  As we walked away into the street, Ruli said curiously, “Who are those people? How do you know them?”

  “That’s the inn I first stayed at when I came to Riev.”

  “So you came alone?” she went on, and at my nod, “I wish I had a quarter of your courage.” Her wry tone ended on a laugh breathy with desperation.

  “It’s not courage.” I grimaced, groping for the truth, though I felt more awkward by the second. “I’m stubborn, not to mention pigheaded, and I really, really hate people trying to order my life.”

  “I’d like. Once. Not to have my life ordered. I want to be left alone. With my friends. In Paris, where I love living . . .”

  I squashed down the urge to say, Don’t we all want to be left alone to live our lives? “Why don’t you want to stay? Is it the country? Or the trouble? Or—or Alec?”

  She shrugged sharply. “I don’t know. Since I was small I’ve been hearing about the idea of marrying him. I was willing enough when I knew he wouldn’t interfere with my life. My child would inherit, and I’d have plenty of my own money at last.”

  “The Innocents’ March, is that the young girls who walk down from the Roman church with candles on the Day of Assumption?”

  “Young girls and brides-to-be,” she said listlessly. “Four o’clock in the morning, and everyone flings roses in your face. Then a hideous long Mass, or service at the temple for the Jewish girls, and inevitably it will rain. The old women say that if the angels walk out with us, we will be in the Nasdrafus world.” She made a gesture of repudiation, the crystal bracelet on her wrist rattling. “I think they pretend to see ghosts—Anton always used to tease me about the Bloody Duke in the weapons room, so I wouldn’t pass it by, when we were little. But I never saw him.”

  “I see,” I said, resisting the urge to touch the flower in my ear. “Uh oh,” I added under my breath.

  “I cannot tell you how much I hate the Eyrie. And this country,” she went on, fierce and low. “And now, with Anton’s trouble, and Maman acting so horrid. To be closed here forever—” She shuddered.

  I nerved myself to ask the question central to my own interest. “What do you feel about Alec?”

  Again, a shrug. “I’ve always known him. I could sleep with him, he’s not repulsive, but I can’t get what Cerisette is on about. She and Phaedra. “

  Annoyance flashed through me, but I let it pass out again. I’d asked her and she had a right to her opinion. Things would be easier if she was totally into him—yet I was relieved that she wasn’t.

  She went on, obviously unaware of my reaction. “Alec was a horrid boy, a tongue like cut glass, but that was because Maman set Anton to rag him. He was nice enough to me, nicer than Anton was, anyway, though he made it clear he thought me boring. Boring! He always had his nose in a book. When he wasn’t fighting with my brother, or running off with him into the hills to blow up Russian mining gear, when Maman wasn’t around.”

  “Look, Ruli,” I said. “Ah. How about if we sit down?”

  We had reached the flower park before the temple. Ducks quacked and splashed in a pond, and on the other side, near a border of violets, two young mothers sat gossiping quietly while four children ran around yelling in a circle, their feet twinkling in the deep green grass. Ruli followed me, her gaze on the ground.

  We sat on a stone bench, and as she eagerly pulled out and lit a cigarette, I said, “So you don’t want to stay here?”

  “That’s why I thought of trading places.” She gave her bracelet a couple of yanks so the dangling stones twinkled. “If you wouldn’t mind stupid things, like wearing these ugly crystals.” Her gaze was now back on her shoes. “You are a descendant, same as I. Tony even said something about a legal marriage—”

  “It wasn’t,” I said.

  She shrugged, a sharp movement. “I can’t believe it would matter.”

  “If miracle there is,” I said slowly, “I can’t believe one can fool it.”

  “I don’t know what to believe. I want people to be civilized, and pleasant.” Her voice softened to a quivering whisper, eyes despairing. “Decent. Is that too much to ask?”

  She rattled the bracelet, the crystals catching light and throwing it about in frantic rainbow shards. I wondered if the crystals I saw everywhere were not only for decoration.

  “Why do you wear the crystals?”

  “Beka Ridotski gave it to me. It’s supposed to be magical protection. She went to school with me. How could she believe in magic? They all pretend to be civilized, but they chant ancient spells. Or under cover of darkness they grab swords or guns and run off into the brush to shoot one another. Anton more than any of them! Sometimes, even Maman seems—” She shook her head, and lifted a hand as if to push something away.

  “Violence, cruelty, and greed are everywhere,” I said, feeling my way toward the truth, desperate because events were fast outrunning my brain, leaving me to wade through emotional fallout. “Up close with swords, or at an anonymous distance, duels by e-mail and lawyers.” And when she didn’t react, “Ruli, even if there wasn’t any Blessing, we can’t switch places. You’d never be happy in a tiny Los Angeles house, though I know my parents would welcome you. I’m not rich, cousin. And if the kingdom was closed off by magic, would you have enough to live the way you want, if you went to Paris, and all your family was gone?”

  She threw away her cigarette and pressed her hand over her eyes.

  The train of reasoning moved inexorably, and the scenery got more bleak. But I had to ride it out: I owed it to us both—to us all—to find the truth. “Whether or not the Blessing is real, the idea, the ideal, is to bring about peace. Right now, that includes healing the breach between you von Mecklundburgs and the rest of the country. And so I—”

  I make things worse.

  Nat’s voice echoed in my head, “You have some heavy-duty decisions to make—”

  Now I knew why Alec’s mood had changed as we left the peace of the mountainside and drove back down into civilization. Into his responsibilities, which never end. As always, he was right ahead of me on that train of reason, because he could never truly relax—he always had to be thinking ahead. Not for himself, but for an entire country.

  I’d come here and found two guys who’d thoroughly disrupted my life. I was attracted to both, but there was only one I’d choose to live with, to share my life with.

  But the hard choice had never been mine.

  What was it he said? “Easy to condemn, isn’t it, when one doesn’t understand all the facts?”

  Ruli said, “What’s wrong?”

  “The clue bat’s finally hit me. I’m not facing Gran’s choice, I never was. It’s Alec who is.”

  “I don’t follow, I’m afraid.”

  I pressed my hands over my forehead, where a volcano was threatening eruption. “‘You were gone, and the diamonds were there.’ Oh, God,” I said, a cold and ter
rible numbness closing on my neck, my skull. “I wonder exactly when it was he found himself where Gran was, all those years ago, having to choose between love and responsibility?”

  Ruli shook her head as she lit another cigarette. “Alec would never run away.”

  “No. Which makes this choice even rougher.”

  And my sitting here, waiting for his decision, makes it that much more painful.

  I looked at her. Alec and Tony had said she didn’t have a sense of humor, but I’d seen evidence of it. No one could watch seven seasons of Buffy without knowing how to laugh, even if she had no one to share it with. Her own mother had seen her as a tool, not as a person.

  Had no one ever seen her potential? Though tears blurred my eyes, I had to convince her of it now. I gripped her thin shoulder with my right hand. “Look,” I said, finding her eyes and holding her light brown gaze so much like mine. “I can’t be you, you can only be you. Only you.” My throat closed with grief, and I struggled for control. “Only you can run away and leave the country divided, and open to the growing troubles outside, or you can use your heart and your hands and work to bring light and grace into it—” I stopped, a sob constricting my chest.

  “Me?” she said wildly, her cigarette dropping ash onto her silk as she stared back, eyes wide and shocked.

  I fought for control and went on desperately, “—and every decision, every problem, every triumph, you are asked to be a part of! I’d help Nat learn how to get medical knowledge match with magic—if it exists—and redefined so the superstitious can understand it, if not. I’d go up to the border and talk to the half-Russian Devil’s Mountain people to get them to put down the knives, and I’d dance . . .” I fought for control. “And dance . . . at the weddings of people like Miriam, and Theresa, and love them as they’d grow to love you.” My voice cracked. Fighting for balance, for humor, I added, “I’d be too busy to be bored!”

  Her brow furrowed. “So you don’t want to stay, is that it?”

  “God! Beyond life I’d like to stay, Ruli, but I can’t. Don’t you see? There can’t be two of us here. Only part of me is Dsaret. The other half is Murray. Your relatives hate me, and yeah, I asked for it, except they hated me before I walked in that door that night. To them I’m nothing but trouble. Tony and Dieter, with their guns and their knives, proved that much. Oh God, emotions, the glass knives that shatter . . .”

  I hiccoughed, and let go of her shoulder.

  “I don’t understand,” she whispered.

  Would she have understood if I’d said It’s a matter of honor? But that sounded so pompous, so self-righteous to my ears. And so I gasped, as always trying for humor though there wasn’t any, and felt like there would never be any ever again, “Sisterhood is beautiful, Ruli,” as I stared down at the package in my lap. The jeans, the cotton top. My passport, wallet, the airline ticket for a departure from London—

  September 4.

  “D’you think you can get me to the border, Ruli? Now, fast, without anyone knowing? Fast, Ruli?”

  Tony had taught her to drive.

  She got Alec’s Fiat, which had been left at Ysvorod House. There was little more of any purpose said between us; she was terrified driving on mountain roads, and I—well, forget it.

  From the western border of Dobrenica I must have used one of every type of wheeled conveyance known to modern life, splurging at last on a commuter flight from Frankfurt to London.

  In a restroom in Frankfurt I changed into my jeans and top, and after trying unsuccessfully to figure how to carry the grubby dress I left it in the stall. I tore up the letters I’d started so disinterestedly on the train to Vienna, and then, carrying only my wallet and passport, with a white rose and a slim green dictionary tucked into my sling, I got onto the commuter plane.

  In London I picked up some cheapo duds in an Oxfam then holed up in a Chelsea bed-and-breakfast for a day or two, sleeping and trying not to think as the last days of August burned toward September.

  Finally I couldn’t bear the four walls and I took a train north and visited all the Murray sites. Abandoning my sling, I tramped Culloden and Flodden fields, feeling as dead inside as those long-ago Jacobites who’d longed for a return to a lost world that had changed forever. The day was dark, pressed in with fog; ghostly figures seemed to drift in the slow vapors, but I was too dispirited to care.

  A day or so before my flight I returned to London and wandered the streets of London aimlessly, looking, thinking. Remembering.

  Finding myself in Charing Cross I was soon at Foyles’ Bookstore. There I went into action with feverish intensity, and spent almost everything I had left of my money on purchasing copies of Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter, and a host of other favorites about magic, and had them boxed up by the store to be sent by the quickest available method to Theresa and Miriam via the inn. They gave me a card to fill out as an enclosure, and my first impulse was to write “Rudolf Rassendyll.”

  I laughed unsteadily, and said, “Just get it there before the first. Or it might travel around and around the mountains forever . . .” Laughter is so dangerous, so close to tears; I threw down the money and ran.

  The second dawned, and passed, and I endured the hours sitting in the garden at Hampton Court.

  I nerved myself to look at the news on the third—but of course there was nothing. There had never been anything about Dobrenica, so quiet and removed it may as well be Brigadoon.

  On the fourth I left for Los Angeles.

  There were two bad moments on the flight. After food was served I could not keep still so I wandered about the plane. Anguish seized my heart at the glitter of a blue stone in a square ring on a male hand holding up a French newspaper; the paper lowered, and an elderly Middle Eastern man calmly turned the page before raising the paper again.

  The second time was when I saw my mother’s face.

  My parents were at LAX, having known my arrival time when I bought my ticket months ago. I was the first through customs because I had no baggage—I left the Oxfam stuff in the airport restroom.

  Mom’s face was round and smiling, her short hair frizzing like a cream-colored halo around her face, the rest of her comfortable in her favorite flowered kaftan and sandals. Next to her Dad shifted from foot to foot, tall and rangy, his beard more straggly than I’d remembered, his eyes crinkled with good humor. He clapped his hands around me in an enthusiastic hug, until I groaned and backed away, wincing and rubbing my left shoulder.

  Mama said nothing, her smile wavering, and after looking at her Dad spoke. “Welcome home, Oh Footsore Traveler! Or arm-sore . . . what happened?”

  I shrugged. “Little accident.” My voice came out too flat. Mom’s brow puckered with quick worry.

  He tried again. “Well, Rapunzel, I suppose I should do the fatherly and claim your burdens?”

  “Aren’t any,” I said, trying for offhand, for a smile, but not quite able to yet. I held out the carryall I’d purchased in Frankfurt. “This is it.”

  “What? The airline lost your—”

  “I lost it, Dad. Let’s go.”

  “Kimli.” Mom’s voice was soft and tentative. “You look bummed. What’s wrong?”

  That’s when I forced myself to meet her eyes. Her brow was serene, as I remembered, but instead of being smooth I finally saw the lines. But different lines from Aunt Sisi’s. Instead of well-bred tension these were laugh lines—and instead of the military precision of Aunt Sisi’s plucked brows Mom’s were arched as nature made them.

  I turned away, my eyes burning with tears I refused to shed. Instead I stared through the shaded windows into the blaring sunlight beyond as we began to walk down the long corridors. “It’s okay, Mom,” I said, when I knew I had a grip. “I found your relatives. And . . . and I think they are safe.” My chest heaved; I closed my eyes, held my breath. Got control. Forced my eyes open, and my voice to sound normal. “But first, how is Gran?”

  “The same,” Mom said, se
arching my face with an anxious gaze. “Why don’t we wait until we’re home?”

  “Okay.” I looked away, groped for an easy topic and managed a normal LA question, “How’s the traffic?”

  “The usual!” Dad said in an attempt at cheer. “Cell-phone gabblers to the right of us, tailgaters to the left of us, folly and blunder. Your mom was so sure you’d be suffering withdrawal symptoms by now, from not having had any Mexican food, she suggested we have tacos for dinner tonight.”

  The door slid open, and the heat enveloped me uncompromisingly. Dust, smog, hot dry air, so alien, propelled me back into the old life. Home life? Not home. Not home.

  As we drove up Sepulveda, I turned my aching eyes to the hazy horizon. A plane had taken off, engines screaming as they lifted the silver-winged shape into the air. I watched it soar into the glittering brown smog-haze as the fierce sun glared off its wings, and heat waves hazed the underside. It headed out over the ocean, and then began its wide turn up in the sky, vanishing into the glare.

  I thought of the two continents that lay between myself and my heart, and of the hours, days, years that stretched ahead of me into this merciless sunlight, then somehow we were home, and getting out of the car, and there was my house, small and shabby and familiar yet strange. I knew I was seeing it through Alec’s eyes.

  There was our tiny kitchen, last painted before I was born. Mom thanked the neighbor who’d sat with Gran while they drove to the airport, and then we were alone.

  Food had been half prepared, but Mom did not go to the stove to finish up the taco shells. Instead, she sat down at the table next to Dad, and touched an envelope lying next to one of Dad’s clocks.

  Mom said, “Kimli, maybe you’ve got a clue about what’s happening here.”

  “Surprise came—express delivery for your grandmother, right before we left for the airport.” Dad grinned, scratching his beard again, which bristled out, more demented than Rasputin’s. “Go ahead. Take a gander.”