Little empress. That was what my parents called me. Hearing it now threw me off-balance and made my throat constrict.
“Yes, sorry...,” I said, a little rattled. “I think you spoke to my father a few months ago, in the summer? He was with another man, and they came here looking for a ring.”
A smile grew. “You are the American treasure hunter’s daughter.”
“We were wondering if perhaps my father had come here again?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Yesterday.”
My heart went wild. “Yesterday? Are you sure?”
“Do you forget a bear growling at you? No, you do not. Richard Fox was here, but he left.”
“Did he say where he was going? Was he with anyone? Was he okay?”
“So many questions,tsk,” she said, more weary than irritated, before lifting her head to the taxi driver and telling him in rapid Romanian to wait. When he lifted a hand and nodded, she beckoned to me with her cigarillo again. “Come inside, little empress, and we can talk. I will tell you what I know.”
Huck was still hesitant, so I elbowed him firmly in the ribs in an attempt to pluck up both his courage and mine. He muffled a groan. Then we followed the strange woman into the stranger house.
A narrow, dim hallway passed several doors—a kitchen, with drying bundles of herbs and roots that perfumed the air, and a bathroom with modern facilities. Photographs of well-dressed ladies lined the walls, and I remembered Valentin saying that Mama Lovena was rumored to have come from nobility. Seemed she was also educated: a framed degree blurred in my sight as I walked past, from a well-known Romanian medical university in Transylvania. She had medical training as a nurse.
An educated noblewoman, living here in a humble cottage.
The hall stretched the length of her home, and we ended up in the main living space, where natural daylight filtered in through a long pair of windows. It shone upon low bookshelves that ringed the four walls, overflowing with dusty books, and it illuminated a cluster of elaborate birdcages that hung from dark wooden rafters in the center of the room. The cages were old, a variety of shapes and sizes, but it wasn’t until we walked beneath them that I noticed what was inside.
Crows.
A dozen or more—each black as the night, from beady eye, to beak, to claw. One shook its cage, and a dark feather fell out, gliding until it settled upon the woman’s outstretched palm.
Mother of the forest, Valentin had said.
She knows the tongue of the beasts.
One of the caged crows squawked, and I jumped. A chill raced down my arms.
“Never mind their chatter, dear,” the woman said. “My birds are only curious, as all creatures of intelligence should be. Are you curious, little empress?”
“I’m curious about where my father is,” I said, trying to sound tougher than I felt.
“Yes, let me tell you what I know about Mr. Fox.” She settled on a large velvet-upholstered armchair, its stuffing poking out in several places, and invited us to sit on a couch across from her, which we did. “He came to see me last summer with his pretty traveling partner, the French man.”
“Jean-Bernard,” I said, feeling hopeful.
She nodded. “And I didn’t mind that your father was a rude American who demanded my time instead of asking. Nor did I mind that he insisted on looking at a ring that he was certain had been in my family for several decades. The problem was that he was sent here by my enemy, a Hungarian man by the name of Mr. Rothwild.”
“He’s the collector who hired my father to find the bone ring,” I said.
“Collector?” She shook her head. “He is a wicked man.”
“How so?” Huck asked carefully.
She looked at both of us, thoughtful, and then leaned back in her seat. “Don’t suppose it hurts anyone to tell you. Do you know of the legend of the Solomonari?”
“They’re wizards, aren’t they?” I said, trying to recall whether I’d seen something about them in myBatterman’s Field Guideor whether my mother had told me a folk story about them.
She nodded. “Travelers in the clouds, they were called by the Dacians. Said to be able to control the weather. They rode dragons in the sky. Well, our Mr. Rothwild fancies himself one of the Solomonari—at least, in an aspirational sense. You see, he’s a devotee of a medieval Romanian organization with a checkered history. A secret society. The ring your father was hired to find is the centerpiece of some grand plan to revive the society, and Mr. Rothwild is a fanatic psychopath. He conspired with a woman to kill her husband in order to obtain what he thought was the genuine ring of Vlad ?epe?, and when he found himself holding a dud, he was furious.”
Conspired to kill a man? She had to be talking about the widow Natasha Anca. Rothwild helped kill the widow’s husband... and Sarkany killed the widow. That was an awful lot of murder for a “dud” of a ring—murders of which my father was smack in the middle. Of whichwewere in the middle...
