Blood Spirits by Sherwood Smith

tried to hide my face. Sure enough, his eyes widened. Then his expression went all official and blank as he saluted me and opened the ornate carved door.
    â€œI wish to speak with the Statthalter,” I said in Dobreni. I could see my breath.
    He gave me a short bow. “Please. Go to the double door there, in the south wing.”
    The palace is shaped kind of like an E with a bent spine. The south wing lay to the left. Inside that door waited a young guy with a shock of curly black hair resolutely tamed. He, too, wore a Vigilzhi uniform, but with no insignia and no cap. Maybe a cadet. His eyes widened when he saw me. They were startlingly green. “Good day, Mam’zelle,” he said in careful French that sounded rehearsed. “Please to come this way.”
    I followed him into the business wing of the palace, where the parquet floors were covered with rugs to protect the old wood, and where ceilings were smooth plaster above rococo molding instead of fabulous wood-carvings and paintings. As we walked, I considered and reconsidered what to say to Alec.
    Then the cadet opened a set of double doors that had to date back to the seventeenth century.
    By that time, I felt as if my nerves had poked through my skin, and though warmth emanated from the enormous china stove in the corner, I shivered. In the middle of the room was a splendid baroque era rosewood desk. A woman was seated there, and standing behind her, his arms reaching around her to rest on the tops of her hands, was Alec.
    My brain shut down, and I stumbled to a stop.
    They looked up as one. For about a hundred years I took in those shocked honey-brown eyes the same shade as my own, and Alec’s enigmatic blue-gray gaze above.
    Then Alec straightened up. I was peripherally aware of the woman putting something in her purse as he said, “Kim. Welcome back.” It was almost a question.
    The woman’s expression smoothed to blandness.
    â€œUh.” My voice came out sounding like someone else’s. “I’m intruding. I can . . .” I waved my hand in a circle.
    The woman got to her feet—not that she had far to go. She was short, built in the petite version of the pear shape, with a pointed face, a broad forehead, and a cloud of curly dark hair twisted up simply but in a way that framed her face with wispy tendrils. She wore a plain pearl-gray shirtwaist dress, but it was so stylish it had to have come from Paris.
    Alec pinched his fingers to his forehead as though his head hurt. “Kim, this is Rebekah Ridotski. Beka, Kim Murray.”
    Beka smiled at me. “Hello.” She flicked a glance at Alec. Her English was French-accented. “I’ll see you tonight, then?”
    He assented with a gesture. She stepped around the desk and whisked herself out, leaving a whiff of expensive scent as the door shut behind her with a decisive click.
    I approached the desk but stayed on my side of it.
    Alec looked exactly the same—wearing slacks, a good shirt, a hint of a tie at the V neck of a dark woolen sweater-vest. His eyes, the color of clouds on a rainy day, were steady. But he wasn’t exactly the same; there were healing bruises on one side of his forehead and along his jaw. The cobalt Ysvorod signet ring was on the little finger of his left hand, and on the ring finger of his right he wore a plain gold band.
    And he stayed there, on the other side of that huge desk.
    I stood poised to close the distance between us, though I knew it would be wrong, that whatever his relationship had been with Ruli, he’d just lost her in a horrible way. “Alec, I’m sorry about what happened. I really, truly did not know. Until I got here. And Nat told me just now.”
    â€œYou just got here?” Alec repeated, sounding distracted the way you do when way too much is going on at once.
    â€œWell, yesterday. On the train. You knew I was here? I told the Waleskas not to blab about—”
    He was catching