Blood Spirits (30 page)

Back up the hill. By the time we reached the posh streets again, my hands were sweating inside my gloves, making those scabs itch.

The inkri eased down St. Ladislas Street. There was a row of fancy-fronted shops across from an enormous baroque building that I later found out was the museum and library, that had once been the royal riding school.

Above a marble-fronted shop selling imported rugs was the Hanging Gardens, and stepping inside was a male figure. I saw no more than a shoulder in a long coat and curling locks of pale hair escaping from under a black Russian-style hat, but I recognized Tony instantly.

I paid the driver and walked inside the restaurant, where a wash of herbal-scented air greeted me, followed by sensory overload.

Somebody had gone to an enormous amount of trouble to create an indoor garden filled with secluded dining nooks that overlooked a waterfall fountain surrounded by terraced bonsai gardens and lit by tiny lanterns. Discernable above the plash of fountains was Jewish folk music from North Africa, the acoustics carrying as subtly as the warm, scented breeze. As I looked around in amazement, I felt that sense of being watched, and so I did a slower scan, but the complication of hanging plants and tiny lanterns effectively screened me from seeing into the nooks.

No Tony in sight. And no Alec.

A somberly dressed older woman approached me, wearing an elaborate sashed robe that was embroidered with peacocks and parrots. I said, “I'm trying to find a friend.”

Like the inkri driver, she glanced at me, then did a furtive double-take, her gaze shifting from feature to feature. “At the top of this stair,” she murmured with an air of shared privacy, though I couldn't see anyone listening.

She indicated one of two narrow tiled stairs curving off to either side. Each vanished beyond a wall of hanging orchids in graded shades of gold, yellow, and white.

The lighting was dim, so I stepped slowly. The tiled stairway worked its way up along the wall, with the dining nooks discreetly curtained off at intervals by fantastic embroidered silk hangings.

I'd just reached the third nook when I heard Tony's soft laugh from the other side of the hanging. I froze, one foot on the next step as he said in that warm, intimate drawl, “
Draska mea
. I hoped you would change your mind.”

“I have not!” Beka whispered fiercely. “Why are you here?”

“I couldn't resist. And neither can you, I see.”

“I am before you,” she whispered, “because I am so angry. I promised him a quiet dinner. And you are supposed to be with Honoré!”

“I had to escape from Gilles and his pack of French wankers.”

“Gilles is in Riev? He brought people with him?”

“Seems to think he can turn this farce into a film.”

“No!”

Tony laughed. “And speaking of alone, it looks like you are as well. Shall we be alone together? A holiday truce. For tonight. . . .”

I had absolutely no excuse to be eavesdropping, and I didn't know which would be worse, to be caught at it by him or by her. Or both.

So I propelled myself up the stairs. When I reached the top landing—the stairs started their descent beyond it—I stepped into the alcove, which looked out over the fountain. The only person was a young guy busy bussing dirty dishes.

When I stepped out, there was the woman again, who said in that low, confidential voice that she was sorry, but I'd missed the Statthalter by mere moments. She indicated the stairway going down the other way.

Tears stung my eyes as I stared down at the half-eaten supper, the full glasses of mulled wine. The inescapable truth was before me: Yes, Alec could socialize the day of his wife's funeral, and yes, he was in the mood to go out for dinner.

With Beka. Not with me.

If he'd really wanted to see me, he could have.

In fact he had, he'd seen me come in.

And then he left.

NINETEEN

As I climbed wearily into another inkri, aching all over from the adventures at Honoré's, I tried to be a grownup. Yeah, Alec had said,
I don't want you dragged into this
, and it sounded noble. Put less nobly, it could be rephrased,
Don't make things any worse than they already are
.

Because he obviously didn't want my help. Okay. So we were pretty good together during summer, but people change their minds. Happens every day.

If so, why did he invite me to Zorfal, and why did we connect that evening? Surely that was real, not just me wanting it to be real.

Wasn't it?

There was no time to crawl into a hole for a good self-pity wallow, because the moment I walked into the inn, Theresa darted toward me from where she'd been lurking between the counter and the stairs, obviously waiting for me.

There were customers gathered in the dining area. From the sound of their tuneless singing, they'd downed a few gallons of the mulled wine, and they paid us no attention. Nevertheless, Theresa fingered her long braids as she looked around carefully, then whispered, “Grandmother Ziglieri postponed her journey home. For you! To test.” She held her fingers before one eye, and blinked.

Huh? Oh—the Sight. More fooling around with prisms. “Great.” I tried to summon up some enthusiasm. “Does she come here or do I go there?”

“Oh, you must go to her, it would be much better.” Theresa's eyes widened. “Tania will take you, as soon you have breakfasted. Madam Petrov thinks she will be making the deliveries of spectacles and lenses,” Theresa added with somber satisfaction. “I will make them.”

I trudged upstairs, fully expecting another dismal night of little sleep . . . and I woke up with clear wintry light streaming in the window.

An hour later, Tania and I toiled up the steep street north of the inn, where I'd never been before, Tania clutching a large covered basket against her side. At least I could find out more about how to contact Ruli's ghost, I thought. But when I expressed that to Tania, she gave her head a shake.

“No. This test is for the Sight—that is, catching glimpses of events in a specific location. None of them see ghosts, so far as I am aware. The Salfmattas asked me many questions when Sister Franciska first brought me before them. Most people do not see ghosts.”

I sighed. “Why did I suddenly start seeing ghosts when I came to Europe?”

“You probably always saw them but mistook them for other people.” Tania hugged her basket tighter against her side, one hand reaching protectively under the red-and-white checked cloth covering it.

“About that,” I said. “I have the vaguest memory. Maybe it's not even memory, but anyway. When I was real little. I do remember being scolded for pretending someone was there. My grandmother was adamant about pretense. That's all I remember, her being mad at me for the first time.”

Tania said soberly, “She had denied everything, had she not?”

We both knew the answer to that and fell into silence.

I brooded as we climbed, first inventing excuses for Alec's avoiding me at the Hanging Gardens and when none of those were convincing, totting up reasons for leaving Dobrenica. Meantime, Tania and I zigzagged up streets that switch-backed up the steep mountainside. Here and there I glimpsed older houses and an occasional round, tile-roofed cottage set among ancient trees. Toward the end we had to bend forward, feeling for purchase on the slippery ground. I wished we'd taken a sleigh, though that icy steepness might have been challenging even for reindeer.

Finally Tania led the way up a stone footpath past a fiercely tangled hedge of holly and hawthorn. We ducked through an arbor and emerged onto a small plateau that overlooked Riev.

The city was a beautiful sight, sloping gently below the peak of Mt. Adeliad, and divided by the shallow valley made by the River Ejya. On the cliff above the river, I could make out Beka's house, which was much larger than I'd thought. It, too, was mostly hidden among very old trees, but I was able to make out the dome of a glass cupola, below which Prime Minister Ridotski had to be keeping his famous orchid collection, which he'd described at the masquerade during summer.

To the far right, at the highest point, the palace was like a crown, its snow-topped complication of roofs gleaming in the sun.

Below the palace, were more modest, modified mansards along the finer business streets, and everywhere else, slanted gables and a forest of chimneys. “Someone told me you used to sit on ridgepoles,” I said to Tania. “I think that's awesome. Was that for cats?”

Tania looked down at the path. “It was to watch the dance of the mist ghosts, when the moon was full and the sky clear. Also, during the sun's eclipse, though that only happened once, when I was eight or nine.”

“What are mist ghosts?”

She lifted her shoulders. “I do not know what else to call them. Not like the ghosts we see when we are close. These are silvery, as if made of vapor, coming and going like this.” She wiggled the fingers of her free hand. “It is as if they are almost visible and yet not.”

Chill ran through me. “I saw those. During the funeral mass.”

Tania gave me a startled look, then a slow nod. “You are the first to ever tell me you have seen them! We must go inside. They are waiting.”

I followed her up a swept stone pathway, bordered by the stumps of severely trimmed rose bushes poking out. Behind the house, on a smaller, higher cliff dotted with linden trees, inside a holly and hawthorn border, I made out rows of beehives that were blocked from view as we stepped onto a broad porch.

The house was small, no more than two or three rooms under an attic loft, the furnishings so old they brought Tante Mina's cottage to mind—where my grandmother's governess had lived since World War II. Inside, enthroned on a very old chair, sat little Grandmother Ziglieri, who I'd met at Anna's wedding, wearing widow's black. She had to be near her century mark. Her eyes were narrow, framed by countless lines, but her gaze was alert.

A young wife—recognizable as a married woman because she wore her hair tied up in a kerchief, and an apron over her skirt and tunic blouse—came forward to greet Tania, who set her basket down and lifted the checkered cloth. The two seemed about the same age. The wife had slanted eyes and red-glinting dark hair curling out from under the embroidered kerchief. She watched as Tania lifted out a kitten with a bandaged paw.

She and Tania vanished with the kitten into an adjacent room, followed by a junior-high-aged girl with honey gold braids. Then Grandmother Ziglieri said, “Come forward, please.”

Small as she was, she dominated the room. “Welcome, child.”

Seated across from her were three older women. One looked like she might be a nun. She wore a pince-nez, and her mouth looked like it smiled a lot, though she was serious now. Another, a tiny old woman with curly salt-and-pepper hair, was familiar. She wore expensive clothes with that distinctive French air.

“Have we met?” I asked.

She smiled. “At a party during summer. We spoke briefly about ballet, which was my passion when I was young. And more recently a day or two ago, you visited my brother's home after you rescued the Baron de Vauban.”

Honoré. I remembered the smell of smoke, and my scratched up hands more than I remembered her. “You are Beka's Great-Aunt Sarolta?”

“Yes.”

Next to her sat an old man, and in the background, near the tiny kitchen, hovered the kid with the braids; she wore a long knitted sweater, dyed a kind of streaky blue, over a skirt embroidered with flowers and leaves and birds.

Grandmother Ziglieri addressed me in Dobreni, “Do you yet speak our tongue?”

“I'm still learning, Grandmother.”

“Come forward. It is well enough for a test.”

She motioned me to the table, on which sat an honest-to-circus cliché crystal ball.

“Look. Tell me what you see.”

I sat on a hassock embroidered with entwined whitethorn leaves and red berries, and stared down into the crystal ball. Wham! Images flitted like crazed bats through my head, too quick and too splintered to catch. They spun away, leaving the twinkle of distant stars, drawing me down and down. . . .

Do not fall
. I don't know where the voice came from, or even if I imagined it instead of hearing it. I shut my eyes, and caught myself as I was about to tip off the hassock to the floor. I straightened, wrenching all those bruises down my side.

Someone exclaimed softly behind me. Grandmother Ziglieri said, “Not the sphere, Margit.”

The young wife, Margit, picked up the ball with both hands, and carried it away. Then she returned with a pyramid prism similar to the one Tania had showed me, but smaller.

The images in it were like splinters of mirror: half a baby's face; rushes; smoke billowing from the fireplace; a woman's watchful eye. Mine?

Another muffled exclamation, and Grandmother Ziglieri said, “It is not in balance.”

Margit looked up. “Tania?”

“I brought several,” Tania said.

A five-sided pyramid was set before me. When I bent over it, red lightning flashed in its depths, corresponding with sharp pangs in my head.

“You are angry,” the Grandmother said imperturbably. “Take a moment. Breathe out your anger. It will not serve you. It distorts what you see.”

I sighed sharply, then did some tai chi breathing as everyone waited. Another peek made me squinch my eyes shut—it was like a steadicam on speed, jittering through a smear of images too blurred and too quick to decipher. I turned away, dizzy and nauseated, restraining the urge to fling that prism through the nearest window.