The life I lived with Father wasn’t all that different from what these traders did, crossing the country to take their goods to market. Father and I spent half the year traveling from place to place. He said the beauty of travel was that if you never came home for long, you never had to face your problems. There was always another town, another country, another treasure to distract. I used to think that Father was trying to outrun his grief and forget about Mother. But now that I’d read pieces of his journal, I wondered if being on the road so much made him feel closer to her. She’d left home when she was my age, went to university, then never stopped traveling. By the time she’d met my father, she’d already camped with Bedouin desert nomads outside of Morocco and spent several months at a Tibetan monastery, studying temple ruins in the Himalayas.
If she were here now, she’d love Valentin’s stories. I rubbed the Byzantine coin around my neck and smiled to myself, glad I’d trusted my intuition to take up Valentin’s offer of hospitality.
The night wore on. Father’s last journal entry slid into my thoughts, and I wanted to ask Valentin if he knew any stories about Romanian dragons, but he was caught up in other stories. After a brief trek outside the camp to relieve my bladder from the strain of plum brandy, I returned to find most of the camp was retreating to their tents. A few wide-awake campers migrated to our side of the dying bonfire, and Valentin translated pieces of the conversation in both directions—stories from the road. Stories of the dead. And of themulloandstrigoi, who purportedly could shape-shift into animal forms, not unlike the fictional Count Dracula. Enraptured, I listened and found myself sitting closer to Huck. Close enough that, occasionally, our legs and arms would touch, and my heart would pitter-patter beneath my coat as if the last year were just a bad dream and our afternoon argument never happened. It wasn’t forgotten, but it shifted into the background as we listened to the campfire stories.
And drank.
And laughed.
And drank...
In fact, it wasn’t until the fourth or possibly fifth cup of plum brandy that my mind stopped listening to all the campfire stories and wandered back to all the things Huck had said during our walk from the train.A stupid, drunken mistake. Empress Theodora.
His words stewed and bubbled and hissed inside me... until I boiled over.
“I am not a mistake!” I said. Or shouted. Same difference.
In my hazy anger I was vaguely aware that I’d interrupted Valentin and that several pairs of dark eyes were blinking at me as if I had just insulted their mothers. Everyone except Huck, whose neck and ears were turning a dark shade of red.
“Theo—” he said, but I cut him off.
“I’m not a mistake,” I repeated, trying to keep my voice down. “Or some spoiled brat born with a silver fork in my mouth.”
“Spoon,” Huck corrected.
“Whatever! I can do things. I’m smart. I know five languages and can swear in two more. I know history and archaeology and how to do cryto... cr-crypt-o-grams,” I said, unsure why that was so hard to pronounce. “You don’t know how, but I do! And you...” I pointed a finger at Huck’s face. “You, buddy-boy, should be so lucky to even call yourself myfriend, jerkface.”
“Um...,” Huck said, eyes darting around the camp.
“I’m not spoiled, and I’m not a coward. I’m not.” I shrugged to underscore my point. “Did I fall apart when I was falsely accused of shoplifting a stupid puzzle ring in the Grand Bazaar? Or when Miss Frenchy Tutor robbed me and left me for dead?”
“No one left you for dead,” Huck mumbled, glancing around nervously.
“How would you know? Were you there? No, you weren’t. I was alone, just like I always am. And I don’t sit around crying over you and your stupid face. I don’t even think about you at all.” I tried to make a rude gesture while still holding my tin cup of booze, and it didn’t work so well. Huck rushed to grab the cup out of my hand.
“Don’t touch me! Am I embarrassing you? Well, I’msoooooosorry.” I pushed myself up from the ground with no small amount of effort. Gravity was not my friend, and it took the oomph out of my argument. And that’s when I realized that for the first time in my life, maybe, just possibly, I was a little bit drunk. Maybe even a lot drunk.
“Uh, I think we need to call it a night,” Huck said to Valentin, giving him a look that I interpreted to mean that the two of them were judging me.
“She is a lively one,” Valentin said. “Wildcat.”
“Cat?I’ll have you know, I’m not an animal,” I said, insulted, and then sloppily took out my coin pendant from where it was tucked inside my coat. “See this? I was named after a great empress. I’m royalty—nay, I’m an independent young lady! You may call me Lady Rogue.”
Woo! Was I ever so proud of that speech! I held my hands up in victory while Huck mouthed something to Valentin and Ana. I had the distinct feeling he was apologizing for my outburst, which only made me want to give another angry speech. But when I started to do just that, Huck interrupted by handing me my satchel, and surprisingly, it was difficult to be mad and hold luggage at the same time. I wasn’t sure, but I thought some of the campers were laughing at me, and like the sun dawning, regret crept over me. Then anger. Then more anger. Then I stopped caring about everything, and that felt much better.
Next thing I knew, Valentin had found a lantern and was leading us away from the dying bonfire, past several tents, to the steps of the vardo wagon.
“You can sleep here,” he said, gesturing up the wooden fold-down steps.
“But this is a wedding gift,” I argued. “And so small. Look at the tiny pixie door, Huck.”
“I see it,” he said before speaking to Valentin. “She’s right, brother. We can’t kick you out of the wagon.”
Valentin insisted. “Ana and I have been sleeping it in for two nights. We brought a tent along for the ride back after we deliver it. We will sleep in that tonight.” Then he said in a lower voice, “Honestly, there is more room in the tent. I am not doing you any favors.”
Ana squinted into my eyes like a doctor giving an examination, and then she climbed a step to open the door, came back down, and gestured for us to go inside the wagon, “Up, up,” she said in Romanian before informing her husband something in Bulgarian.
“She says do not be sick inside or you will have to purchase the wagon. You break it, you take it,” he translated with a small smile.
