TW04 The Zenda Vendetta NEW (17 page)

“I can see that, I suppose,” said Hentzau, “but it all seems needlessly elaborate to me. My patience is wearing thin.”

“Your impatience may yet be the death of you, my love,” she said. “You must learn to wait.”

“Well, I shall wait until tonight, at least,” he said. “What about tonight?” said Michael.

He stood in the doorway, holding the door open. Falcon glanced at him sharply, wondering if he had heard. He gave no sign of it. Hentzau could not appear to care less.

“We were discussing the dinner tonight,” she said, moving toward him. She came up to him and gave him a soft kiss on the lips. “Rupert is impatient to get back to Zenda to check upon the prisoner. I told him that he should wait until tonight. I would feel better knowing he was here to guard me while you were at the dinner. They might try anything to work against you. They could try to kidnap me and use me to make you release the king.”

“But what makes you think that you will be remaining here?” said Michael.

“You’re sending me away?”

“I will do no such thing. You shall attend the dinner with me.” He glanced down at her fencing apparel. “In fact, you had best be getting yourself ready.” He frowned. “I don’t know why you bother practicing your fencing. It is one thing for a girl whose father had desired a son to play at it, but it is useless for a woman. It is unseemly.”

“She plays at it rather well,” said Hentzau, with a smirk. “You should try her, Michael.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Now run along, dear, and prepare yourself.”

“Is it wise to take her to the dinner?” Hentzau said. “I mean, it would hardly ingratiate you to Flavia.

You might do well to cultivate the favor of your future queen.” His eyes mocked them both. “A man in your position may find two women burdensome.”

“Take care of your insolence, Rupert,” Michael said. “When the time comes, I shall take Flavia as is my due. As to what she thinks or doesn’t think, I could not be less concerned.”

“What about yourself, Countess?” Hentzau said, addressing her, but baiting Michael. “Have you no thoughts upon the matter?”

“Flavia can warm his throne,” she said, smiling. “I shall be the one to warm his bed.”

“You see, Rupert?” Michael said. “Sophia and I understand one another.” Hentzau gave an insouciant chuckle. “I would caution the man who believes he understands his woman.”

Michael narrowed his eyes. “That will be enough! I shall tolerate no veiled insults to Sophia in my presence.”

“Why,” said Hentzau, innocently, “was I insulting the countess? May Heaven forbid! I meant no such thing.”

“Stop it, both of you,” she said. “Dissension in our ranks serves only Sapt and von Tarlenheim. We must be patient. Time is on our side. We can afford to wait, while each day makes the imposter’s position more precarious. They are doubtless growing desperate by now and desperate men are vulnerable men.”

“You see, Rupert, how she always thinks of my interests above all else?” said Michael.

“
Our
interests,” she said. “It is in all our interests for you to become king. Isn’t that right, Rupert?” Hentzau smirked and inclined his head slightly.

“I shall go get ready, then,” she said. “Rupert, thank you for indulging me. I know I could never give you a good match, but it was kind of you to humor me. It helped alleviate some of my worries.”

“Anytime, Countess,” Hentzau said.

They left him in the training room. “I have a few matters to attend to,” Michael said. “I will see you when you have dressed. I wish you to look particularly ravishing tonight, my dear.”

“Your wish is my command.
Sire,”
she added, significantly.

When she was alone in the bedroom, she shut the door and bolted it, then sprawled down on the bed with a bottle of whiskey. She took a long drink. It helped to wash the bad taste out of her mouth.

Hentzau was a pleasant diversion as a lover, but he was growing more tiresome by the day. It was wearying to play constantly to his juvenile sensibilities, to his swaggering braggadocio, to his arrogance and conceit. He was an excellent swordsman, but he had condescended to her during their match. She had to use all her concentration to fence even more poorly. It would have been interesting to see how it would have gone had he given his all. It might have been an excellent match, indeed. She was reasonably certain that she could take him if he were in earnest. She had originally thought to use him further, but she had long since dismissed any such notion. He was too self-centered, too unpredictable, too much of a boy with a cocksure sense of his own uniqueness. If Michael had walked in on them one moment earlier, she had no doubt that Hentzau would have welcomed it as an opportunity to kill him. He simply didn’t care. He did, indeed, live only in the here and now, with no thought to any consequences.

Michael, on the other hand, was the complete opposite: a planner and a brooder, a born intriguer.

However, his moodiness and his possessive attitude were stultifying. Keeping the two of them in line and away from each other was a full-time job. Fortunately, the same tactics worked well on both of them.

They were men and being men, were easy to manipulate. All it took was an appeal to their hormones. It was easy, but it was both annoying and time-consuming. Now this demand that she attend the dinner at the palace as Michael’s showpiece. She grimaced as she realized the
double entendre
nature of the thought. Her first instinct had been to beg off. Michael might not have liked that, but she could easily have managed it. Then, it occurred to her,
why not?

Why not attend the dinner? It would make Delaney squirm. There she would be, face to face with him, and he would be unable to do anything. It would serve to demoralize the bastard. Perhaps he would give himself away somehow. It was certain that they were planning to make their move soon, perhaps even tonight. Maybe something in his manner or in his face would give it all away.

To Rupert and to Michael and to Nikolai, she counseled patience, yet she herself was beginning to chafe at the bit. She was concerned about the others, Priest and Cross. She had no idea where they were or what they were doing. Surely, they would not be idle. And Moses would be with them now.

That would only serve to spur them on, give them more confidence. The leader had come to join his troops in battle. She wondered what was going through his mind.

He would be thinking of his son. His son, the Timekeeper. His son, who hated him with an all-consuming passion. His son, whom he would have to kill. Would he be thinking at all of her, of how she had used Nikolai to lure him here? Would he be recalling the nights that they had spent together, both in Plus Time and in the field, of the love that they had shared, of her proposal to him?

She drank more whiskey. It had been another life. A part of her, a very essential part, had been suppressed so that she might avoid detection. During that life, she had been unaware of her true self, but afterwards she had remembered. She remembered both her real self and everything that had happened while she had been Elaine Cantrell. The whiskey always helped to dull the memories, but it could not obliterate them.

There had been a desperation in Elaine Cantrell, some sense of imminence perhaps motivated by subconscious knowledge of the hidden part of her. She had sought escape. There had been strong impulses driving her, impulses she had not understood then but knew now as programmed imperatives she had vainly attempted to resist. In order for Elaine Cantrell to be able to function in her role, it had been necessary for her to be the sort of person who would abhor what her real self did. She had found solace in the arms of Moses Forrester and for a time she believed that she might find escape as well.

Escape from an imminent
something
that would not resolve into a clear picture. She had proposed marriage to him one night—a new life, a new beginning. They could leave the service and find stability.

As civilians, they could enjoy a peaceful existence. No more uncertainty. No more traveling through time.

No more pressure, no feelings of impending disaster. They could have a permanent home that would be their own. They could have children.
A son, Moses. We could have a son.

He turned her down.

She offered him what other men would have accepted upon any terms and he turned her down. To add insult to injury, what she offered him he had accepted from some ignorant peasant girl. The child that Vanna Drakova had borne should have been hers. She flung the bottle away, cursing Lachman Singh. He had done his job too well. Elaine Cantrell should have been dead, but a large part of her still lived. Well, soon it would be put to rest. Relief would come at last with the death of Nikolai Drakov.

She lured Forrester here to destroy him, but not in the manner that he thought. She would not try killing him herself. She would leave that job to Nikolai. If Drakov killed his father, she would, in turn, kill him, and then the slate would be wiped clean. And if Forrester prevailed, it would be a much more exquisite revenge. She would let him live with the knowledge that he had killed his own son. Either way, he would die. The Timekeepers would also be avenged and a massive timestream split would occur. As with the ancient Japanese, who would not surrender until they had experienced firsthand the awesome power of atomic energy unleashed, so would the war machine be forced to face the final consequences of their folly. She would go down in history as the woman who had single-handedly brought the Time Wars to a halt. And this time, history would not be changed.

They were admitted to Flavia’s chambers by Countess Helga von Strofzin, a pretty girl scarcely out of her teens. She was delighted to see Fritz von Tarlenheim. Finn left them alone in the sitting room as he went in to see the princess. Flavia had dressed for the occasion, already prepared to attend the dinner so that her king would not be kept waiting while she changed. She curtsied deeply with a rustling of organdy.

“Come, come, no need of that,” said Finn, taking her hand and bringing her up straight. “Surely we can dispense with formalities in private.”

“As you wish, Rudolf,” she said. “May I offer you some wine?”

“No, I don’t think so, thank you.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Not even your favorite port?”

“I have favored port too much of late, I think,” said Finn. “It is one thing for a prince to be somewhat overfond of wine, but a king should be more abstemious.”

She looked surprised. “What brought this on?”

Protocol demanded that he sit first before she could be seated. Despite the fact that he was not standing on formalities, Finn knew that she would not sit down until he did. He settled on the large divan.

“To be honest, I’m not really certain,” he said, putting a note of puzzlement into his voice. “Things suddenly began to feel somehow strange.”

“How strange?” she said, sitting down beside him and turning so that she could face him. They sat close together, yet there was still a distance separating them. He knew he would not close it in a single day, but he could make a start, for Elphberg’s sake.

“I wish I could explain,” he said. “I am not quite sure when it all began. Perhaps it began when we rode together from the cathedral to the palace. Perhaps it started afterward, when I was alone in my bedchambers. Nothing had changed outwardly, but everything seemed somehow different suddenly. I experienced a vague unease. I stood before the mirror, still dressed in the uniform in which I was crowned, and I said to myself, ‘Well, there you are, Your Majesty. King Rudolf the Fifth.’ Only somehow, I did not feel like a king. I felt like a little boy who had dressed up in his father’s clothing. The clothing looked impressive, but it did not quite make me feel grown-up. It didn’t seem to fit. It was too large for me, somehow, despite its having been excellently tailored to my form.” Even as he spoke, he was starting to feel cheap.

“I began to feel foolish,” he continued, noting that Flavia was listening with growing interest. “It felt like, well, you know— Oh, well, I suppose
you
would not know, but it felt like the morning after one becomes paralyzed with drink. You wake up and absolutely everything is wrong. .You can’t see straight, your head is splitting, your stomach feels as though someone had lit a fire in it. You feel terrible and the first thought that enters your head is ‘Why on earth did I
do
that last night? What possessed me? I must have been insane. I’ll never,
never
drink again, not so much as one sip.’ Only of course, it doesn’t last long. The feeling goes away and one does drink, even to excess and the entire process repeats itself. It’s a never-ending circle, like a puppy chasing its own tail. The only difference is that eventually, the puppy grows tired of the game and has enough sense to lie down.”

He glanced at her and saw that the beginning of a smile was tugging at the corner of her mouth.

“Does any of that make any sense at all?”

She licked her lips and nodded. “I think so. But I’m not certain that I completely understand your meaning.”

“Well, for that matter, neither am I,” said Finn, grinning ruefully. Delaney, you miserable bastard, he told himself, you’re working a fast-talking con on a naive young girl who has already resigned herself to a loveless marriage. Now you’re trying to turn her head in another man’s name to suit the purpose of the moment.

“It was a most peculiar feeling and I thought that it would go away. I said to myself, ‘You’re tired, Rudolf, worn out from all the nonsense of that ridiculous parade through town and kneeling for what seemed like forever while that mitered idiot—” she frowned, but Finn continued in character—”sprinkled holy water over you and chanted nasally in Latin. You drank too much at the banquet and did not eat enough. You simply do not feel yourself.’ And that was the answer, you see. I did not feel myself. And the feeling did not go away. It only grew and grew and it began to give me headaches. I was not ill; there was no fever, but I felt like an old woman with the vapors. I knew that I needed to talk to someone, to attempt to describe how I was feeling, only who was there to talk to? Sapt? He had no patience for such nonsense. I was not up to hearing yet another lecture from that old bear. Von Tarlenheim? What would Fritz know? He’s just a boy. I’d only confuse him. The chancellor? He’d merely sit there pressing his lips together and then run off to search his documents for some precedent.” Flavia chuckled. “And so you came to
me?”