Free Coronets and Steel by Sherwood Smith

brought fresh coffee, steaming tea, and a small golden bottle of cognac. He set these down on the low table, carted away the dishes, then he left.
    Alec passed me a cup of tea then poured himself some coffee and laced it liberally with the cognac.
    I settled back, curling up my feet, and cradled my cup in my hands. “Well, that was a great meal,” I said. “But. I’m not ready to be grateful. Good as it was I’d rather not have to whet my appetite with a hundred-mile hike.”
    “A hundred-mile hike,” he repeated. “I thought it was typically perverse of you—being, as I thought, Aurelia—to have learned courage at this late date. Imagine poor Emilio’s shock on entering that train compartment with a peace offering of tea to find you gone and the window open—”
    “Hah!” I gloated. “So what is this Aurelia von Whatever’s terrible crime?”
    “She disappeared without word or trace about a month ago. A couple of months before she and I were to be married.”
    “Married? You?” I snorted, almost slopping my tea, and as he signified assent I could not resist adding, “Well of course she’d take off! Who wouldn’t?”
    Humor creased the corners of his eyes. My cracks had no power to provoke, now that I wasn’t his Aurelia.
    I sighed. “So the next question is, why are you chasing after somebody who has obviously changed her mind?”
    “Because it’s not so obvious.”
    “What? If your courting manners are much like what I saw today . . .”
    He made a quick, impatient gesture. “You do not understand the situation. She may not have changed her mind. I think it’s been changed for her. If it has been changed. When we spoke in March she was willing enough to get on with it—” He set his coffee down, got up, and moved to the window. He glanced over his shoulder and added, “—though no more enthusiastic than I was.” He flashed that sudden smile again. “The motivation for this event, I feel constrained to add, is mostly political.”
    “Political?” I squawked. “Politics? Political marriages these days? That’s stupid.”
    “But politics are always stupid,” he retorted promptly.
    “He shoots, he scores!” I gave him a double-finger point-and-shoot. “Okay. So we know I’m not involved in whatever mess you’ve got going. I guess you could say it’s none of my business. But I’m curious, and—” I patted his dressing gown significantly “—not going anywhere, and since you’re the reason why I’m not going anywhere, I think you owe me an explanation.”
    “I do owe you an explanation,” he agreed, as outside rain began tapping gently at the window again, and far away lightning flickered. “You said you know little about Dobrenica.”
    “An isolated country like the Falklands and Granada and Kuwait that you never hear about until the superpowers steamroller them in their own pursuits, except this one doesn’t always show up on old maps. I’ve always assumed that that was because of the way kingdoms swapped borders and allegiances back in the bad old empire days.”
    “Yes,” he said—somewhat ambiguously.
    At the time, I didn’t notice, but plowed right on, eager to show off my two cents’ worth of knowledge. “Apparently they speak a weird combination of ancient Latin and Slavic that drives the purists nuts when they try to isolate origins. The USSR controlled it, right?”
    “Yes. Until relatively recently, too. To sketch in the background, Russia is the ancient enemy, persistent enough through medieval times that Dobrenica became part of the Hapsburg Empire somewhere in the fifteenth century. For one reason or another—” He hesitated, then went on. “The empire’s control was nominal. As a kingdom protected by the Hapsburgs we existed in relative peace until the empire and its world crumbled after World War One. There succeeded a number of desperate years—”
    “Like the rest of Europe.”
    “Yes. Germany overran Dobrenica early in the war. The Dobreni