The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (25 page)

“No news about our boys?” he asked.

“A Greek village somewhere was captured, I think,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.

The newspapers were so full of shit that it was impossible to know what mattered and what did not. Sometimes, it just felt like people made things up, like when the same village was captured by their soldiers several times over. Did that mean that the enemy took back the village? Or did the Bulgarian soldiers withdraw, then attack again, and then withdraw, and so on? She knew that the newspapers didn’t report everything, but it was natural to think that everything they said about what was going on was perhaps not outright false, but not completely true. After all, hadn’t they said that the war was just about won for the past year? And here they were, still waiting for this damned war to bury itself in history. She quietly scolded herself for being so mean-spirited, but she hated the filthy newspapermen who printed so much garbage.

The landscape was so beautiful
even this close to the ordinary seasons in the normal world, and it was really like something from a fairytale, a peaceful winter land. The white blanket covered the rock and trees, and the sight almost made her forget just how cold it was, as if her skin might have thickened from the climate. Nadia usually didn’t like the cold and hated winter, but she had been getting used to this long winter up on the mountain. The balcony had a good view of the grounds outside the mansion, and she tried to ignore the boys throwing snowballs at the guardsmen down in the yard—they were disrupting the peacefulness of the untamed winter landscape she could see from outside her room. She wasn’t sure why her two brothers were so childish, but they apparently were. Boris was supposed to be seventeen and Alexander fifteen, yet ever since they came to stay at the lodge yesterday, they had been like a couple of little boys having snowball fights with the guardsmen and the young officer who accompanied Boris. Nadia was happy to see her brothers, but they were being rather rude to her, and she didn’t like that at all. Well, maybe not rude, but they were not nice to their big sister.

The sound of the door opening behind her prompted Nadia to throw a quick look over her shoulder
and see the familiar, friendly face wincing when their eyes met.

“You might catch pneumonia if you stay out here,” Elena muttered, shuddering when she felt just how cold it was out here.

Elena Davidova Neikova was a year older than Nadia, but for all intents and purposes they were the same age. Elena had been at her side like a surrogate sister for almost six years, and Nadia enjoyed her company immensely. She had become an even better friend during the stay at the lodge with no other people for Nadia to socialize with at all save for her. However, Elena had a real weakness for cold weather like a thin-skinned South European.

Elena
pulled the shawl tighter over her shoulders when she stepped out on the cold wooden floor of the balcony to get her friend to stop standing so skimpily dressed out in the freezing weather. Nadia wasn’t wearing more than her, but she was standing around in the sort of weather that made sensible people dress up in fur and still feel cold. She might catch pneumonia if she kept going out on the balcony without any fur.

“I don’t think so,” Nadia said with a warm smile, a little happy that Elena was being so annoyed.

“Why don’t you come inside?” Elena said, already shivering from the cold.

Nadia shrugged her shoulders, enjoying the way the cold was biting her skin
and hurting her a little. Her exposed cheeks were no longer cold, but felt almost warm in the freezing air. However, she couldn’t deny that it was probably bad to spend much time outside.

The winter lodge overlook
ed a popular winter resort, and before the war it had been a place where rich people went to ski in the wintertime—it still was, but it was too far from the lodge for her to really see anything—there were just the loud voices echoing over the landscape and disturbing the peace. The lodge had originally been built as a hunting lodge by Nadia’s grandfather, but he didn’t use it much, and before they had gone to stay here it had been almost completely ignored for some years. And now her mother had gone to live here along with Nadia and her little sister Evgenia for almost an entire year. It was isolated from the outside world, and it was not a bad place since Elena was here for company, but Nadia missed the city. Before the war she had lived much more luxuriously in Sofia, rather than living like some kind of royal hermit up on the old holy mountain. It felt like she was the royal equivalent of a nun out here, but she could still appreciate the beautiful scenery from the balcony outside her room. She could imagine spending winters here, but not the whole year. That was just too much.

After they went inside
Elena sent the servant girl to get some hot tea, and they settled down in the room they shared like they would so often. Boris and Alexander were only here to visit their mother for a couple of days before they would leave again, but Nadia was staying here for the long haul—since she had no say in the matter. It wasn’t fair that the boys were allowed to be among people while Nadia was in exile, but after spending over a year more or less in isolation, she had gotten a lot closer to Elena even as she became more distant to most other things in the world. Elena was really the best kind of friend Nadia had ever had, and she looked back with embarrassment on the mean-spirited thoughts she had harbored about her when she had been picked out to be Nadia’s friend when they had been teenaged girls who didn’t know each other at all. Now, Elena was like a sister. No, her little sister Evgenia had never been anything like Elena—she was more than just a friend or a sister.

“I heard from
Zlatan Davidov that your father is doing well,” Elena said, hoping to cheer up her gloomy friend.

Prince Petar was w
ith the army, which was probably why Princess Mariya had decided to go away so far from the city and the constant focus on what was going on at the frontlines where Prince Petar was in charge of a whole army fighting the Russians. She didn’t want to betray her superiors’ confidence, but Elena thought Princess Mariya was a bit of an oddball—a royal kook really. The prince was the younger brother of Crown Prince Boris, the oldest son of King Petar V, and his wife was obviously strange, if not a bit batty.

It was an honor to anyone to be a companion to someone like Nadia, and Elena enjoyed being there for her
, especially for the past year. Even if she didn’t like the cold up on the mountain. If Princess Mariya had to isolate herself and her daughters from the world, then why hadn’t she picked someplace by the sea? It wasn’t like this sort of horrible climate was the national norm, and Elena had spent time previously with her royal friend at a mansion by the Black Sea coast that was just amazing.

“That’s nice,” Nadia said
dutifully. “I’m sure Father does very well.”

Nadia
wasn’t supposed to think about the war—she had told Elena everything her mother was telling her—but Elena knew that she was curious, and since her mother was being so obsessed with her and Evgenia remaining oblivious, she couldn’t learn much about what was going on even over in the capital, let alone out in the country and the world. Elena could, however, and she made sure to talk to people who came to deliver food, kerosene, and other things, and she learned a lot from them about what was going on in the country and in the war.

“Maybe the war will be over soon,” Elena said
, quite pleased about the news that the Chinese hordes were attacking all over Asia.

“Maybe,” Nadia mumbled, not really sure
about that.

Nadia
was too young to know of any other wars from experience, but she knew enough history to know that wars could last a very long time. She was turning twenty this summer, and she had just been a few years old at the time of the Turkish War. She couldn’t remember her great-grandfather, even though she knew that she had met him as a toddler before he had died and left her grandfather to reign over the kingdom and see that it remained strong and healthy.

Growing up, it had dawned on Nadia that she was unusual
in more ways than just being a princess—she couldn’t even remember when she was first told that she was particularly special on account of being the king’s granddaughter. Most people in the country spoke the same language as Elena, but Nadia’s family was littered with people who spoke a very different language. Mother always spoke her own language, and Nadia had learned both languages concurrently from her tutors and her governesses. As much as she was a Princess of Bulgaria, her family’s lineage was not exactly wholly Bulgarian. Her grandfather was properly referred to as Petar
V
by written references like coins, but Petar IV had died in the 12th century before the nation had been conquered by the Ottoman Turks. Indeed, as far as Nadia knew, she wasn’t even remotely related to Petar IV or any of the ancient Bulgarian kings—she presumably had not even a single drop of any kind of Bulgarian blood of any kind, royal or otherwise. Her great-grandfather had been a German from the House of Hanover, and both her great-grandfather and her grandfather had married German princesses. Her family tree was littered with them!

“So
, did you finish that book I gave you?” Elena asked, thinking that it might be best to talk about innocuous things when Nadia didn’t seem interested to listen to her.

They spoke about books, which was a harmless but interesting topic. Nadia liked reading, and she especially liked to talk
with Elena about what she had read. It was a far more relatable subject for discussion rather than the alien world of geopolitics and war, and it was Elena’s intelligence and interest in literature, philosophy, and history that had made her Nadia’s companion since Nadia’s father Prince Petar wanted her to have someone like herself to talk to.

She had no idea how long she had been in the dank little room, but it couldn’t have been more than three or four days, could it? It wasn’t easy to keep track of the hours, and the small window didn’t make it easy to tell what time of day it was, let alone tell days apart. The hard bed, a blanket, and a dirty bucket was all she had with her, and she was shivering from the cold. She wasn’t in any mood to try to go to sleep, no matter how tired she was from hardly sleeping at all. She hadn’t seen Daryn since the Russians came, and she had been put in this little stone cubicle under a big building all alone. Ever since she had got there, she had tried to stay calm, but the bad feeling in her stomach wouldn’t go away. This was bad, wasn’t it? Daryn had warned her that if they were caught the Russians might kill her, but her imagination had worked up far grislier things than just the kind of execution she knew from newsreels of the condemned having his head swiftly cut clean off his shoulders by a sword-wielding constable. Would they slice her like a really evil criminal? Carve her slowly up with a sharp knife dozens, hundreds of times all over her body. As bad as that was, her imagination was focusing on one very troubling kind of fate. After all, she was a girl… That was why she had to have the gun so she could protect herself, protect her dignity. But she hadn’t even drawn the gun, let alone shot even one of the nasty
white ghosts
.

The cell had a door in the barred wall section facing the corridor, and she felt like an animal in a cage, just waiting for its captors to do as they pleased with her. The bed was just a wooden frame with no mattress, and the cold made her wonder if she would freeze into an ice cube. Maybe that would be a gift from God. Freezing to death would be better than whatever the enemy might do to her, but it was too painful for her to actively try to freeze to death.

It wasn’t technically freezing in the cell at all, but the temperature was far lower than comfortable, and with only her underwear and the dirty blanket for warmth things felt really cold. The man in the cell across from hers made it embarrassing to no end to pee in the bucket, and she vainly tried to cover herself when he ogled her, and she was too shy and afraid to try to make him not watch. At the boardinghouse it had been embarrassing to go on a chamber pot, but then it was just Daryn, not a complete stranger. Oh, God, she wanted so badly to be home, soaking her cold body in the cleansing hot waters in the bathhouse down the street from her house rather than to sit on the hard wooden bed.

As much as Meryem had known that it was dangerous to be an active patriot, she had hardly ever felt like she was personally afraid of the Russians before. Nobody should fear them, because they were really just a bunch of little devils who dominated weak peoples and lands. That was why the Imperial Army would beat them. It was fate and justice. But every time she heard footsteps she imagined that they were coming for her dignity, and it made for a horrible sensation inside her.

She looked over at the metal bars that kept her inside the small cell. Would the enemy king have a cell this big once his feeble little armies had been wiped out? She tried to picture how the Emperor would punish the enemy, and it was a lot more fun to do that than to worry about herself. Or Daryn. She was sure he would be fine, but she knew that he would be worried about her and she wanted to tell him that she was still safe and in good health, left alone and clean. She knew that he had to be so worried. That was something she liked about him; even when he seemed to be cross with her, he cared about her more than anyone in the whole wide world. Not even God liked her more. Well, He did, but that was different. God wasn’t having sons with her.