ARCANE AND RELIGIOUS ICONOGRAPHY
BRA?OV, ROMÂNIA
“Huck!” I said, shooting to my feet. “Look—look!”
“I’m looking. I’m looking.” He took the card from me.
“It was here the whole time. They’re in Bra?ov now. Or they were this summer, anyway, when Father was touring Romania.”
“Does appear that way, doesn’t it?” he murmured, inspecting the card as if he didn’t trust it. “You never noticed this card before?”
“Have you seen the junk that’s shoved in there?”
“Bra?ov... Why do I know that?”
“It’s my mother’s hometown. Remember? I showed you on the tourist map. With the vampire bat?” I flapped my arms and bared my teeth.
“That’s right,” he murmured. “Her parents aren’t alive anymore, right? Do you think you still have any family there?”
“Cousins, probably. Not sure if they still live there, though. They don’t know me.” My Romanian grandmother died before I was born, and my Romanian grandfather died when I was a baby. I never knew them, and my mother was, like me, an only child.
“It was the same for me when I returned to Belfast,” he said, almost as if speaking to himself. “Cousins I remembered were gone and other family I didn’t know I had were there. Funny how a family can be solid one moment and then blow away with the wind.”
Yes. Funny.
I nodded at the business card. “So what do you think?”
“About Bra?ov? Not much to go on. Lovena did say they traveled. What if they were in Bra?ov this summer when your father was traveling here, but...”
But they aren’t now. He didn’t have to say it. I was already thinking it myself. But the one thing I was hoping, the most important thing, was that at least my father thought they were in Bra?ov—it didn’t matter if they were. It didn’t even matter if the ring was there. After what had happened tonight, maybe I’d had enough of magic rings.
“What’s this?” Huck said, leaning over the workbench to inspect a large piece of paper that I’d knocked sideways on the hangar’s bulletin board during my moment of rage. “Regional map. Look—these stars are the other rural post offices around Transylvania. And these here?” he said, pointing to sets of numbers written neatly on the map’s wide bottom border. “Flight coordinates. Ten post offices, ten coordinates.”
“So this plane normally flies to these other towns to deliver mail,” I said.
“Indeed it does. And see this? Right here,” he said, pointing to a star on the map. “That’s right outside Bra?ov. This symbol means they keep lights burning on their runway. This airfield we’re on is too small to bother with twenty-four-seven lights. Just a waste of electricity. But the Bra?ov airfield is bigger.”
“So you could land there without problems?”
“No, not without problems. Look at the weather, banshee.”
“The snow isn’t sticking. The runway is clear. The plane isn’t covered in ice.”
“Not worried about icing so much, but visibility might be reduced if the storm picks up, or snow could block the intake. And who knows what it’s like in Bra?ov. Maybe the storm hasn’t made it there yet. Maybe it won’t. Seems to be heading west, not east. But even if we’re able to land, we’ll have to deal with another postal employee who might be working there, and I don’t speak Romanian, which makes lying rather difficult—”
“Or easy. I’ll do the talking. Or we just make a run for it.”
“We’ll still need to hike from the airfield into town.” He paused, scratching the back of his neck, and mumbled, “Maybe we could hitch a ride.”
“Surely so,” I said brightly, having no idea.
He wasn’t listening to me anyway. He was too busy mumbling to himself, talking about the weather. Looking around the hangar. Making another pass around the plane again.
But after all his grousing, I knew he was seeing things my way when he took the map off the wall and handed it to me. “You’re in charge of the coordinates. We may need to find an alternate place to land if Bra?ov isn’t viable. Cluj, maybe. That’s northwest from here, and it takes in planes at night, too.”
“Aye, aye, Captain Huck.”
“Sure you want to do this?” he asked seriously.
