Lucy had had her hair bobbed, but Alice still wore hers down her back. They were both taller than me, and their hair was a darker brown than their mom’s. Lucy had a heavy jaw and wide cheek-bones, but she had a steady, sensible way about her. Alice looked kind of skittish.
“How do you know Eli?” Veronika was trying to act like this was a regular social visit. She was pouring me tea and sitting in a social way, her knees together and angled toward the side, her back straight.
I knew Eli every way a woman could know a man, but I said, “We’ve worked together. I’ve been his protection on a couple of jobs.”
“Protection?” Veronika looked puzzled.
“I’m a gunnie.”
The three women glanced at one another in a puzzled way.
“I’m a hired gun,” I explained. “I usually work with a crew. We guard cargo of all kinds until it gets where it’s going.”
Lucy’s face lit up, Alice looked scared, and Mrs. Savarov looked shocked. But then she smiled. “Eli’s spoken of you,” she said. “You went with him to Dixie. And Mexico?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Please, call me Veronika.”
“Lizbeth.”
“As you already know, Eli was arrested two weeks ago,” Veronika said.
“What charges?”
“The arresting officers, grigoris, didn’t tell us.”
“Isn’t that against the law?” Even in Texoma, you had to tell someone why they were being hauled off.
Veronika shrugged. “Not here.”
Well. Russians. “What led up to the arrest?”
“When my son returned from Dixie, he reported to the palace. Then he came here. He’d been wounded. I suppose you knew that?”
“I killed the man who done it. Did it.”
The Savarov women didn’t seem to know what to do with that information. But Lucy smiled a little, looking down at her hands.
Veronika pulled herself together enough to say, “Eli told us another wizard, Felix, had helped to heal him, and you and Felix had gotten him out of the hospital so you could leave Dixie fast.”
I nodded. “Did Eli recover fully from the wound?”
“Mostly. He slept and ate a lot. But he seemed very unhappy.”
I had been, too.
“Eli told me he had been … double-crossed.” Veronika looked a little proud of knowing that phrase. “He didn’t want us to worry, so he didn’t tell us all of it.”
And see how well that worked out?
“Other grigoris tried to kill us in Dixie. And before that in Mexico,” I told Eli’s family.
Alice and Lucy looked stricken. They said something to their mother, words overlapping, in Russian.
“English, please,” Veronika said. She told me, pride in her voice, “We speak English when we are out, but I wanted all my children to learn their mother tongue.”
I didn’t care.
“Why would other grigoris try to kill you?” Lucy asked, speaking to me directly.
“I figure it had something to do with the movement to replace the tsar with his uncle,” I said. “If there was another reason, I don’t know what it would be. Do you?”
There was a long silence.
“My husband has done harm to this family, and he is still doing it, even now that he is buried,” Veronika said, anger clear and strong. “He made us outcasts, and he’s made Eli’s and Peter’s lives hell. I wish he had died sooner.”
The girls did not look surprised at hearing this. Maybe they all said this before every meal, like a prayer.
Veronika broke the silence. “Were you there? He died in Texoma in a bar. You live there. I’m just now adding it up. Did you see Peter there? My younger son’s story of that day is … changeable.”
“I was there,” I said. I thought about my next words. This felt pretty strange, talking to the family of a man I’d blown up. “Prince Savarov was killed by a spell.” I stopped there. Hoped they wouldn’t ask more.
“Peter’s? Eli’s?”
But they did. At least, Lucy did.
“Ah … Eli’s. He had given me a rock with a spell cast on it.”
“He wasn’t there. You threw the rock.” Not a question, exactly.
“Yeah. I did it. Peter was there and intended to kill him, but that’s not what happened.”
“Good.” Veronika was relieved. I could tell that Peter, in the irritating way of very young men, had been mysterious about the whole episode.
“Eli,” I prompted.
“Yes.” Veronika left the happy subject of her husband’s death and got back to the grim present. “After Eli had been home from Dixie for a few weeks, and he was healthy again, and working again, the grigoris arrived, six of them. The leader of them, a woman, told Eli they had come to arrest him. She said she hoped that out of courtesy to his family and their health, he would not put up a fight.”
“He should have,” Lucy muttered. Alice nodded so hard I thought her head would fall off. That was surprising.
“He went quietly with them,” Veronika said. I saw a big tear land on her lap. “And we three have not seen him since.”
“But Peter has.” I was feeling restless. I had already talked more today than I did in a week at home. I had to finish this conversation. I needed the information.
“Peter was the only one given permission to visit. You will want to talk to him,” Veronika said. She was right. “Peter is living at the Rasputin School. It’s his next-to-last year.”
“Did he say Eli looked as if he’d been beaten?”
Veronika flinched, but she said, “Peter says Eli didn’t look mistreated. But he hadn’t heard anything about a trial or a hearing, and no grigori lawyer had visited him.”
So as far as Eli knew, he was there forever. And I didn’t know what “grigori lawyer” meant. But I needed to get out of this quiet house where I could practically hear the dust settle. I didn’t like the way the maid was lingering around the doorway, though the Savarov women did not seem to notice.
“What is your best guess about why all this happened?” If Veronika knew anything more, I needed to find out now.
“My best guess … is that the tsar’s uncle, Alexander, who should have been executed, has bribed or persuaded Gilbert, head of the grigoris, to back him in his struggle for the throne. Since my son has always been loyal to Alexei, getting Eli out of the way will deprive Alexei of a good ally, one who has kept him alive.”
“But surely the tsar knows where Eli is?” He’d told Felicia he had to report to the palace.
Veronika shook her head. “Sometimes he is as blind as his father. Alexei believes since he’s had a son, his throne is secure. But the baby could have the bleeding disease like Alexei. What will happen when he is a bigger child and wants to run and play? Will we be dictated to by another Rasputin?”
She’d gotten angrier and angrier as she spoke. Wasn’t the time to let her know that Rasputin was my grandfather.
“If Alexei knew what had happened to Eli, do you think the tsar could do something about it?” What was the point of being tsar if you couldn’t get a friend out of jail?