I’d only had time pass by in such a slip-sliding way when I’d been badly injured. I came down the stairs slowly and carefully, with the clingy slithery dress holding on to my legs as though it wanted to trip me.
Felix was waiting for me, his hair smooth and combed. That was what dressing up meant to Felix, that he brushed his hair. He looked real odd.
Without looking at me directly, Felix took my hand and wrapped it around his arm.
“What are you doing?” I whispered.
“I’m giving you away,” he said, with no meaning in his voice.
I had never been Felix’s to give, but like everything else about this day, I seemed to be going along with it. This morning, picking up bits of bone and teeth in the yard. This afternoon, getting married.
The priest was in the parlor, and there was a reading stand in front of him with a book on it. The priest looked less angry than before. When he saw me, he looked almost friendly—or maybe he felt sorry for me. It was a lot of dress.
I’d seen everyone else prettied up. But they were nothing compared to Eli. I stopped dead when I saw him.
His hair was all slicked back somehow and braided very neatly into a long plait. He had shaved. He wore a real suit. It was dark blue. That was all I could remember, later.
I couldn’t read Eli’s face or posture; he seemed frozen after he saw me coming into the room with Felix. Felix led me up to Eli; we were both looking up at Eli as though we’d never seen him before. Then Felix let go, assumed a position by Lucy, and took her hand as though that were his regular habit.
Eli’s eyes were wide and green and bright, and they were all I saw during the priest’s reading.
Which took forever, let me say. In fact, the service took so long that I had time for my mind to wander, to realize there were people there I didn’t know, and a few I did. There were a couple of grigoris standing as far away as they could and be in the same room. They listened to the priest with polite interest. There was the blond woman from next door and her husband. (I later learned they were longtime friends of Veronika’s.) There were a couple of men in uniform, who’d come to take Captain McMurtry back to the base hospital, under the mistaken impression he was a burden on the Savarov household.
I thought, suddenly and sharply, My own mother should be at my wedding. And Jackson. And… I came up with a few other people I would’ve liked to have seen in the little knot of witnesses. I regretted letting them know by a phone call. Not having them here. But there was no way around it: if we had to leave town to satisfy the tsar, and we had to be married Russian Orthodox, then we had to do it now. I couldn’t imagine trying to find a Russian priest anywhere in Texoma.
Though the priest’s voice hadn’t changed, Eli’s hand tightened on my arm, and I looked up. “Your mother,” he mouthed, and all of a sudden I felt fine. He had thought of her, too. We would be okay. This wedding wasn’t the seal of doom. It was something we had to do to make Veronika happy. And making my husband’s mother happy was a good thing.
Eli looked surprised when I smiled at him, but when he saw I meant it, he smiled back.
After that, everything was okay.
Normally, there would be a wedding lunch or dinner, Veronika explained later. But under the circumstances—blood and craters on the lawn, no cook, and no food—that couldn’t happen. However, we’d been married, it had been witnessed, and it was done. And now we ought to leave.
Veronika didn’t exactly say that, but I understood: The tsar had asked that we leave, and then Eli’s name would be cleared. Therefore, the Savarov family would be back in favor. And Eli and I would be correctly hitched.
Eli had to hurry back to his rooms in the grigori dormitory to get all the things he’d left when he’d been arrested. Felix took him.
I had a talk with my sister, up in the room Eli and I had shared. Veronika insisted I take some of her clothes, though I had no idea where I’d wear them. I had the pants outfit and the jacket I’d bought, too. But as soon as I’d taken off the wedding dress and hung it up, I put on my jeans and my boots and my heavy shirt. I would put on my guns as soon as we were out of the Holy Russian Empire. And I was wearing my wedding ring on my finger, for the first time in months.
I didn’t need to talk to Felicia about sex, because her father and her uncle had brought women back to the hovel in Ciudad Juárez, and Felicia was well aware of what happened, she had given me to understand.
“What’s your goal?” I asked her, when I couldn’t see anything else that should go in my leather bag.
“It’s enough to be safe, fed, and dressed,” Felicia said. “All I have to do is learn and be ready to give blood, otherwise.”
She was sitting on the bed, so I took the chair. “I don’t believe you,” I said. “You got a plan, I know it.”
Felicia grinned at me. “Maybe I do. Maybe I wanted to look younger for a while so I could get the lay of the land here. Maybe I know a lot of magic my teachers don’t. It’s the kind they despise, low-level stuff, but I’m really good at it. Our father’s gift came to me strong.”
“So you want to learn more and more?”
“I want to be a great grigori. I don’t want to be a blood donor forever. I want to think of a way the tsar can maintain his health and strength without having to rely on descendants of Rasputin.”
“I knew the ‘safe, fed, and dressed’ was only smoke,” I said. “You got eyes for Peter or Felix? Or anyone else?”
“Felix would never care for any woman the way he cares for Eli. Besides, he’s got his eyes fixed on Lucy. And Peter?” She looked thoughtful. “He’s too impulsive. I don’t really see Peter having a very long life unless he learns to think before he acts… and speaks.”
“Have you been reading my mind?”
“Nope, we both have common sense,” Felicia said. The smile flashed again.
“I meant it about you coming to stay. I warn you, the way I live is closer to Ciudad Juárez than to this.” I waved a hand around me at the big house.
“I’m not worried about it.”
But I thought she was, a little bit.
Eli returned an hour later with two crammed bags. Veronika had consulted a train schedule. We had just enough time to catch the last train out for the night. We’d have to piece our route back to Sweetwater, the nearest train station to Segundo Mexia. She had made a reservation for us for the night train.
The Savarov women and my sister cried a little when the cab came, and even Peter’s eyes looked red, so we left pretty quick. (Felix had already said a really brief, hard “Good travels,” and taken himself away, to my relief.)
And then we were in the cab alone.
It felt strange to be going somewhere with Eli without a mission, without anyone trying to kill us or steal from us. I had nothing to guard, other than him and our luggage. We did not speak on the drive.
At the train station, the one from which I’d walked into San Diego exhausted and terrified days before, Eli and I went to the ticket counter.
“We have a reservation for a sleeping compartment,” Eli said. This was news to me.
“Yes, sir!” The old man cackled and started to say something, but after a look at Eli’s face, he canceled that and simply took Eli’s money and gave us our tickets.
I must have made some kind of noise—it was a lot of money. But Eli said, “We didn’t have a big wedding. We can at least have this,” which was the right thing to say, not boastful or wasteful. And he took my hand.
We boarded immediately. Got shown to our compartment, which was really nice, two double seats facing each other. “How do we sleep?” I whispered to Eli, after we stowed our luggage and took one of the seats.
“The porter will turn these seats into a bed at night,” he said. “There’ll be another one over our head.”
The people across from us, I assumed, were a mother and her girl, who seemed to me to be about ten.
The mom nodded at us. “We’ll try not to snore, won’t we, Pamela?” she said.
Pamela looked anxious. Maybe her first train trip. “I don’t even know what that is,” the girl said.
We all laughed politely, and then the mother fell to telling Pamela about what they would see out the window tomorrow, and I leaned against Eli, unable to count the things that had happened that day. It was a big runny blur in my head. The train got under way. As soon as we could, we made our way to the dining car. I didn’t think I’d gotten anything to eat since the ham sandwich, and that felt awful long ago. Maybe it wasn’t newlywed-like to be hungry, but Eli and I plowed through our food like horses after a long day’s work.
Some time later we were at the border. As they had when I’d come into the Holy Russian Empire, the police had us all get out and checked our identification.
The man who took our passports, a naturalized American with a Russian accent, looked down at Eli’s identification and said, “Prince Savarov!”
Everyone within hearing froze and gave us a big stare. I could have smacked the guard.
“Eli Savarov is fine,” my husband said calmly.
But the damage had been done.
“And you are?” the guard said, turning to me.
“This is the new Princess Savarov,” Eli said.
“Ah, that explained the name,” the guard said, beaming at me. “Well, young sir and madam, I knew the prince’s father, and he was a fine man.”
Could not have been worse. I felt Eli freeze beside me as the man got all talky about Eli’s father and how wonderful he’d been.
“But I am chatting too much,” the guard said, way too late. “You must be tired. Have a good evening, you two!” He beamed at us, which made it even worse.
We got back on the train to find the beds had been made up. I would have liked to watch the process out of curiosity, but any interest I had was quenched now by the way the other passengers were looking at us. I had to ask Eli how we got into the bed, and he gave me my bag and told me to go down the car to the bathroom and change in there.
“I don’t have a robe or nightgown,” I whispered.
“I’ll bet you money my mother put those in your bag,” he said, smiling.
And he was right. I had a pink nightgown and robe folded neatly on top of my clothes. I cleaned my teeth and face and took care of the bathroom situation before I went back to him. It felt real strange to get into our bed, especially since I had to take one of my guns in with me. I wasn’t about to sleep without a weapon when we were so accessible. The curtain across the bed kept anyone from seeing us, but that was the limit of our privacy.
The mother and Pamela had already climbed up into their bed above us, and I didn’t even get to see how they did it. I wondered how they’d get down in the night if they had to go to the bathroom. I was grateful that wasn’t my problem. Though it might be, if their feet landed in our faces.
Eli parted the curtains and slid in beside me. The fit was snug. I was glad we were both slim. There were plenty of people still moving around, and the perpetual sound of the train, but Eli still whispered when he said, “Our first night as newlyweds, Lizbeth.”
“Our first night as Russian Orthodox newlyweds,” I said, and even my whisper sounded tart. “To me, we been married since Dixie, at least mostly.”
He chuckled right in my ear, slow and low, and then we were both asleep.