Coronets and Steel (47 page)

And—
click-click-click
—locked.

“
A
UNT SISI!” I SCREAMED. “Please, Aunt Sisi, please open the door!”

I stumbled the rest of the way down, tripped, and caught myself against the door. It did not budge. I dug my nails in, trying to find a way to open it, and I have to admit I panicked there for a while, screaming and begging.

Finally it occurred to me to shut up and listen—she might be out there trying to tell me something, or worse, some enemy must have appeared.
Some
thing had to have happened. It made no sense for her to lock me in after asking for my help. And getting it.

So I pressed my ear against the wood, laboring to quiet my shaky breathing, but heard nothing.

“If they were caught, it’s up to me to rescue them,” I whispered, my cheek grinding against the granite-hard wood of the door. “Right. It’s up to me.”

I pushed away from the door with both hands, and swung wearily about, doing my best to ignore my own trembling until two things with a lot of wiggly legs dropped on me. I batted at myself crazily, knocking them off. One crunched as it hit the step. The result? A five minutes’ climb was done in about two minutes flat.

When I reached the platform, panting like a marathon runner, I felt at the two adjacent doors and found cold metal keyholes on both. I tried my key as quietly as I could, but it fit neither. So I turned up the right-hand passage again, and this time listened at each door.

The kitchen sounded like a hub of activity, so I passed on.

The library had at least three men talking in it. I pressed my ear hard against the door, heard Dobreni words . . . and finally deciphered enough to realize what was going on in there was not a secret war conference but a card game peppered with reminiscences that made it clear it had been a looooong time since some of those guys had had a date.

So I toiled on to the third door and listened. Like before, no sound. So I opened the door, and for a second I was so glad to see light that I forgot about danger.

Not that it mattered. Tony saw the passage door open the second I lifted the latch, and even if I’d caught on quickly, where would I have gone? Still, it was a shock to have the door pulled out of my fingers and to find myself face-to-shirtfront with Tony.

I recoiled back into the darkness of the passage but his hand snapped out and closed around my upper arm. He pulled me into the room. I flung his hand off violently as he shut the passage door beside my head. The edges disappeared seamlessly among the jointures of the wood panels. I stared at the now invisible door for a few seconds, rubbed my stinging eyes, then turned around.

Tony was on the other side of the room, pouring water from a pitcher onto a white cloth.

“Here,” he said conversationally as he came back toward me. “That passage is vilely filthy.” He held out a dampened hand towel.

I rubbed the cool wetness over my face. When I pulled it down the hand towel was grayish black with grime, but my face felt better. I started cleaning my fingers as he smiled at me and leaned against his bureau.

“Charming,” he went on, his indolent, slack-lidded glance moving slowly down my body. “Strange, you have my sister’s features but you don’t look at all like her. Not at all,” he added, his gaze drifting back to my jeans, and when I scowled, he smiled. “What can I do for you?” And with an ironic echo of the point-and-shoot, “I’m at your service, my dear Kim.”

Despite the cold of the room he was wearing only the frilly white pirate shirt, half-unbuttoned, and the black trousers of his costume. Bare feet, even. I had interrupted him in the homely and everyday task of getting ready for bed. Which might be expected at . . . what was it, two? three? in the morning. But common sense did not prevent me from flushing neon-red right up to my itching scalp.

Tony had been watching comprehension work its way into my brain, and now his amusement intensified in proportion to the crimson in my face. “A couple minutes more and I would have been very much at your service.” He laughed at my embarrassment.

“If you want to help me,” I said sourly, “you’ll show me the quickest way out of this dump.”

“I noticed Ruli’s taken off,” he commented. “As yet I’m the only one who knows. What happened? She’s not in the passage, is she? Did you lose the base-door key on the stair?”

“No, she’s safe. With your mother. The door shut in my face,” I said reluctantly. “I thought maybe they were caught by some of your goons lurking out on the road.”

“The door shut?” he repeated with mild interest.

I finished wiping my hands, and put the filthy towel down on an exquisite side table. “Yes. When I had only a few steps to go.”

“Ruli went first?”

“Yes. Which suggests to me there might have been trouble . . .” I began. He seemed disposed to stand around and chat. Fine. I would respond, but my mind was on the door on the other side of the room.

“At—my mother’s request, perhaps?”

“Yup,” I said agreeably, hooking my thumbs in my belt loops and sauntering a step. Another step. “Sure wish I knew what happened. Everything had gone so well until that point, too.” I shrugged as carelessly as I could while gripping the key against my palm. “So, if you want to help me, you might point me toward the front door in this pile so I can be on my way.”

“No, because that won’t—”

As soon as I heard
no
I snapped out a side kick, sending the marquetry table crashing toward his knees, and vaulted over a hassock.

Tony laughed.

I grabbed a bedpost, propelled myself around the corner, and lunged toward the door. One step, two, key outstretched—

And as usual the difference between 5 foot 8 and 6 foot 3 worked out to 5 foot 8’s disadvantage. When he grabbed me, I whirled around and began to fight.

The struggle was short. I thrashed wildly, which almost worked only because Tony was trying to gain control without hurting me. I nearly wrenched free once, then he increased his efforts, catching hold of my wrist. I yipped in anger and kicked him. His grip shifted, and I flew through the air to land with a splat on the bed.

A second later he was on me. A second or two after that he had me pinned down by a knee across my thighs, a hand over my mouth, and his other pressing my wrists over my head against the mattress.

He grinned down through his drifting blond hair into my (no doubt) richly purple face and said, “My, this is tempting—”

I gave an almighty heave with my middle that bounced the entire bed. He laughed, like a grammar school kid playing a game. “—but maybe we’d better postpone the fun.” He got that out with some difficulty because of my enthusiastic efforts to fling him off, then he paused, studying my face to see if I understood.

I did: truce. So I lay still.

He continued, “I think I’d better catch you up.”

I tried to nod, which was difficult with that palm holding my head firmly against the mattress.

“No screeching? The wicked count is supposed to be asleep, and I’d as soon not shatter that illusion. The crashing of furniture might not raise any interest, but shrieking would.”

I nodded again, and he lifted his hands.

“Jerk,” I snarled. “Let me up.”

“No more kung fu?”

“Unless you try to harass me again.”

“I promise. With extreme reluctance.” He laughed and freed me.

I promptly rolled away and landed on my feet on the other side of the bed, straightening my clothes as I did so. Tony remained sitting on the bed. Next to him, where I had been lying, was a big smear of gray grime.

Pointing at it in triumph, I said, “Hah. I hope you have to sleep in it.”

“Dieter will never believe you are Ruli,” Tony responded reflectively. “Never.”

“She’s gone, and I’d prefer not to meet any of your minions. So, if you’ll tell me whatever it is you have on your furry little mind, I’ll be about my business.”

Instead Tony leaned back against the pillows, crossing his hands behind his head, the ridiculous lacy sleeves of his pirate shirt draping over his hands. He was chuckling as he repeated
minions,
then he stretched his legs out comfortably on the bed, ankles crossed. “Where did you wake up?”

“At your mother’s.”

“Ah. And she told you . . . ?”

“You were in trouble, and this Reithermann scumbag—was that the guy waving the gun?—wanted to kill Ruli, and she had only me to help her get Ruli out. So we drove up, and I got her out.”

The light from the wall sconce reflected in his black eyes as he gazed upward. “You had better understand first that my mother was right, I
am
in trouble. In fact, I’m a prisoner in my own house.” His light tone and lopsided smile made light of the words: if it was true, he wasn’t any too worried about it. “Which is why I retired. To figure out my next step.”

“You mean, that Reithermann fellow everyone says is such a creep has pulled a palace coup on you? So tonight you did, in fact, try to pull a palace coup on Alec while the masquerade was going on. Right? And that bombed, and so Reithermann has pulled a coup on
you?
”

“Well, he has the gun, as you say, while mine ended up in a fishpond. More important right now, he has the keys.”

“If that doesn’t serve you right,” I chortled.

“Perhaps,” he said with no diminishment of his usual good humor. “But it makes your position rather precarious. Neither of us has a key to the stair door, so you have the option of remaining here and continuing to impersonate my sister, or continuing on in your efforts to get out of the castle. The first would be the safer course, I suspect. Ruli is too effective a block to any retaliatory moves on Alec’s part for Dieter to want to harm her, ah, permanently.”

“Ugh.” I frowned, contemplating this last.

He nodded slowly, his smile mordant. “That’s why I had her moved up here.”

“So, that would mean I sit in that locked room until someone bothers to let me out.”

“I expect that would be the safest course,” he agreed.

“No thanks.” I shuddered. “Any other passages? They all lock? And this jerk Reithermann has the keys?”

“The important passages are at present inaccessible, though Dieter does not yet know it. He thinks some of those keys are for the flat in Paris, the house in England, and so forth.”

“Does he know about the passages?” I asked, intrigued despite myself.

“Only about one or two,” he returned conspiratorially.

“You’ve got no one to help you? Or—”

He lifted a shoulder. “Our return was in disorder, and in glum spirits, and Dieter—being a professional—was ready. There’s a lesson in all this.”

I knew he would not say the obvious or the moral. “What, not to mix mercenaries with masquerades?”

He shut his eyes and gave himself up to laughter. “Ah, Kim! What can I give you to throw in with me?”

It’s not a what, it’s a who,
I thought and grimaced.

Meanwhile Tony was silent, his eyes open again, and intent. “Shades of our fathers,” he said in slow, appreciative Dobreni. Then back to English. “Don’t tell me—”

I cut in rather rudely, “So this Dieter clown has all your people under lock and key, is that it?”

“I’d say merely under guard. No one is locked up except my sister. Supposedly. You have a key to these rooms?”

“Yes. I did.” I hunted over the floor, bent down, and picked it up from where it had fallen beside the bed. “Does it work anywhere else?”

“No. If you decide to risk the house, your best last resort is to pretend you are Ruli and that you nicked my key while I was asleep. I’ll back you up, and you’ll be safe enough here.”

“What will you get out of it if I ‘risk the house’ as you say? Since you aren’t threatening to lock me up now.”

He lifted his hands and lounged to his feet. “But I wish you all the best in the world, Kim! Despite my plans being knackered ever since you turned up. I sympathize with your wish to take what you can get out of this cock-up. I certainly will.”

“I’m not taking anything,” I stated. “There’s nothing here that belongs to me. I don’t count your stupid treasure, wherever that is. I’d rather live under a freeway overpass than fight over it or steal it.”

Tony sighed, and stopped right in front of me. “Can I change your mind, I wonder? We’ll see. For now, if you run through the house it’ll rouse ’em, which should allow my people—if they aren’t asleep, or drunk—to make a try at altering the balance of power. That’s to your advantage. If you’re quick, and use your wits, you might even reach the gate. But I think you’d best go for the garden wall,” he added, giving me a considering look. “I suspect you’ve no objections to scaling an eight-foot fence made of granite?”

“What’s on the other side?”

“Filled-in moat all along the old walls.” He laughed. “Heh. The idea of Ruli even thinking of jumping a wall—”