“How long ago do you mean?” I ask.
“Oh, before all the bad things,” she says.
I know that she means before 1919, when tiny Sveloria was swallowed up by the U.S.S.R., but I can’t help thinking there was never a time before bad things.
I also can’t help being taken aback at the last hundred strife-filled years being reduced to the bad things.
“No,” I say. “I’ve never wished that.”
She smells a rose, then blinks at me.
“Why?” she asks. “You would still be king someday.”
I look up at the windows of the palace and imagine beautiful women swirling around, dancing with men dressed to the nines. The warm orange glow of a thousand candles.
“No, I wouldn’t,” I say.
“Of course you would,” she says. “Your family has ruled for hundreds of years.”
“It’s not that simple,” I say.
I think of Maksim the second, glaring out from his portrait. I want to say this castle has murder holes for a reason. I want to say the barbarians were always at the gates.
I want to say right now the barbarians are attacking villages in the north, only now they call themselves the United Svelorian Front, and my father insists on pretending that everything is okay.
“You’re of royal blood,” she says. “It isn’t complicated, Kostya.”
Everything is complicated, I think.
“When I was seven, I wandered into a part of the castle that was under construction,” I say. “And I stepped on a nail that the workers had accidentally left on the floor, sticking up through a discarded board.”
Yelena’s turned her mouth down at the corners, and she puts one delicate hand over it.
“I was so humiliated that I hadn’t been watching where I was going that I didn’t tell anyone. My foot turned bright red and swelled up, and I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t want them to know I’d done something wrong, that I was anything but smart and capable, even at age seven. It wasn’t until my governess saw red streaks going up my leg that anyone realized I’d gotten blood poisoning,” I go on.
I pause a moment, wondering if Yelena will connect the dots on her own, but she just looks at me.
“If that had happened in the olden days, I’d be dead,” I finish. “But we have antibiotics, so I’m still here.”
“What a stubborn child you were,” Yelena says, shaking her head. “I would never allow my child to be so stubborn.”
I think she’s forgotten what we were talking about. She takes my arm again and we continue walking.
“My dress for the ball is deep red,” she says. She’s already forgotten that I nearly died twenty years ago, or that everything was never perfect.
Dear God, there’s a masquerade ball next week. It’s on my calendar, but I’d completely forgotten about it.
Probably because I have thousands of better things to do than attend the ball Yelena talked my mother into hosting, I think.
“Oh?” I say, because I don’t care and don’t know why she’s telling me.
“Deep red with rhinestones on the bodice,” she says in her soft, sweet voice. “Your mother helped me choose it. It will look lovely with your uniform.”
Finally, we go back inside. As sweet and kind as Yelena is, I’ve had more than enough. I tell her goodbye very formally, and she leaves the palace with her parents.
Hazel disappeared long ago. She’s probably asleep by now, and I don’t blame her.
Everyone else leaves slowly, and then it’s only my mother, my father and I in the formal drawing room, standing stiffly. My father looks at my mother and nods once, severely. She nods back.
“I’m going to retire for the evening,” she says, kissing my father on one cheek.
“Good night,” he says.
“Good night, my dear,” she says, and then kisses me on one cheeks. “Sweet dreams, Kostya.”
“Sweet dreams, mother,” I say, and she leaves the room.
As soon as the doors close behind her, my father turns to me. I’m a half-inch taller than him, but we have the same eyes and similar faces, though I got my mother’s hair.
“I will not have you chasing after that unmannered American girl again,” he says, his voice deadly quiet.
Something clenches inside me at unmannered, even though he’s technically correct.
“I was being hospitable,” I say.
“You chased her down, leaving Yelena Pavlovna alone at the dinner table,” my father says, his voice coming close to a growl.
That’s what this is about.
“I thought you wanted us to have close relations with the Americans,” I say, even though I know full well that arguing with my father has never gotten me anywhere.
“Don’t you disrespect me,” he says.
Anger flares inside me, sudden and hot. That’s what he says when he doesn’t want me questioning him. When he’s being stubborn for the sake of being stubborn.
But he’s the king. He can be as stubborn as he wants.
I step forward and lower my own voice. I want to shout, but I can’t shout what I’m about to say.
“The USF burned a dozen houses to the ground yesterday,” I say. “And today, you forced me to accompany you to the train station to meet that unmannered American girl instead of doing something about the threat.”
“Meeting her at the train station was a formality,” he says. “Ignoring a good, well-born Svelorian woman to chase after a strumpet who can’t hold her liquor is pure folly, Kostya.”
“You can’t ignore the USF forever,” I say.
He looks me hard in the eyes, not backing down. I’m probably making this worse by pushing him on the matter, but I can’t help it.
I spent years of my life fighting against them. I crawled through dirt and slept in mud to defend my country. I watched men who were like my brothers die at their hands.
And now, when I could really be doing something about it, my own father is more concerned with my love life than the fate of his country.
“I’m not ignoring them,” he says. “They’re a small threat, and small threats burn themselves out. But you need a wife and an heir, Kostya. A Svelorian wife and a Svelorian heir. And don’t think I’ll give permission for anything else while I’m still drawing breath.”
Then he turns on his heel and walks out, leaving me alone and furious in the drawing room. Maksim the second glares down at me from the wall, and I glare back at his portrait, my hands clenched in fists.
A few days pass. My father doesn’t budge, even though the reports keep coming, and they keep getting worse. Houses and farms burned. People killed. Good, hardworking people whose only crime was living in the wrong place.
It’s small-scale, yes. But this is like a few drops of rain before a storm. I was on the ground there for a long time. I can feel it.
He refuses to let the news channel or the newspapers report on the deaths and destruction, saying it’s only a few people, or we’ll take care of it. I meet endlessly with generals and people who’ve come from the north. I try to send a battalion, organize some kind of protection for the people under threat.