Free A Prince Without a Kingdom by Timothee de Fombelle

envelope, smaller but thicker, addressed to Vango.

    There wasn’t much else in the letter to the doctor, but already, for the first time in eighteen years, she had referred to the island as
their
home.
    “I want to go home,
Tioten’ka
.”
    The little girl was looking at her.
    “Yes, my sweetheart, we’ll go home.”
    At last, they were in front of the mailbox with its brass mouth.
    She reached over to Zoya’s school smock.
    “I popped something in there; stand still a moment.”
    Sliding two fingers inside the little girl’s pocket, Mademoiselle grabbed hold of the envelope.
    She felt a hand lock on to her arm.
    “Don’t do it, Mademoiselle.”
    She turned around.
    “They’re watching you. They’re behind the glass in the booths, or else in the gallery, up there. Don’t do it. Or they’ll send you to Siberia.”
    Time stopped for a moment. A man was standing in front of her: the father of Zoya, Kostia, and Andrei.
    “Please, Mademoiselle. If I’d allowed you to go through with it, I would have been condemning both of us.”
    She let go of the letter in Zoya’s pocket. The children threw themselves at the man’s legs.
    “Daddy!”
    The man hugged them tightly, while still talking to Mademoiselle.
    “As long as they’re sure I’m watching over you, they’ll let you live with us. Don’t try anything else in this vein. My older son, Andrei, is abroad. They’re playing us off against each other. I was asked to keep you in my home. I’ve got no idea what you’ve done, but our lives, and the life of my son, have been linked for nearly two years now.”
    Mademoiselle knew that she slept in Andrei’s bedroom, beneath his childhood drawings. She had seen a photo of him, tucked inside the accounts book. She knew that his family was worried about him. But she had never made any connection between her own fate and that of the serious-looking boy in the white-framed photo, his cheek against his violin.
    “Come on.”
    The children held their father’s hands.
    Mademoiselle followed them.
    They emerged into the bright May sunshine, at the top of the steps, and clung to one another as they made their way down, slowly, like mountain climbers linked by a rope on the ridge of a glacier.

New York, summer 1936
    History books don’t account for what happened during the summer of 1936 on one of the most important construction sites in Manhattan. But building work on a tower was interrupted for several months. It all started in the spring, when one of the workers fell from the top. There was nothing unusual about this — dozens of similar accidents occurred every year — but it turned out that the victim was a Mohawk, forced to work on the construction site against his will. Out of solidarity, the other men laid down their tools for several days.
    The morning they were due to return to work, the men had discovered mysterious inscriptions on the walls as well as up the service stairs. Incomprehensible graffiti had been painted in red letters, as tall as a fully grown man. It was a sinister sight.
    ERAT AUTEM TERRA . . .
    University linguists were summoned to the premises by the police. An elderly Latin specialist set to work.
    He was able to decipher passages from the Bible. First of all, there were nine verses about the Tower of Babel, taken from Genesis. They spoke of mankind’s desire to build a tower that would reach to the heavens. And of how God had managed to stop them. There was also a line in Greek taken from Revelation, in which an angel sounded his trumpet, “And there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast down upon the earth.”
    In the wake of the Mohawk’s death, the workers were frightened by all these signs. On the top floor, in the middle of one of the rooms, they had found the name RAFAELLO spelled out using eight of the nine letters intended for the illuminated sign above the tower.
    Some of the men had recognized the name of the archangel Raphael, one of the soldiers of