Aleksey's Kingdom (A Royal Affair #2)(5)

But I was distracted now and not particularly wanting to continue a brewing argument—as much as we both enjoyed bickering. His story had indeed stirred a remembrance of the past: a memory of a place entirely abandoned, as if people could leave this earth whilst still eating or sleeping.

I plucked another fish off the grill and pulled pieces of the succulent meat from the tiny bones. Aleksey was watching me closely. Eventually, unable to contain himself, he threw a pebble at me. “And? What? Are you going to sit there all night, brooding?”

“I am not brooding. I am remembering.” In truth, I was trying to decide just how much of the story to tell him. Some, I could not. I could not think about some of it myself, let alone tell someone else, even him. Had I known what was to come for us in the following weeks, I would have done, if only to have the comfort of knowing that now two of us knew of this horror. I had shared my past like this with Aleksey before and had felt distinct relief, as if laying down a physical burden.

It was tempting to do so again, but my impatient boy threw a pebble at me—again. “And?” and thus the decision was made to tell him a version only of the story.

“The Powponi—do you want to hear this or not?” He stopped the eye roll he’d been making and produced a face like an eager schoolboy listening to a wise master. Aleksey had missed a vocation upon the stage. “We used to winter in the south by a huge lake. It was so big it had waves and a tide, and you could not see the far shore even from the—”

“I don’t believe you. How could a lake be so big?”

“Well, it was fresh water so could not have been the sea. Although I suppose there might be freshwater oceans…. I had not thought of that.”

“Whatever. You wintered there and…?”

“Another tribe, the people of the Black Crow—I do not know how to translate that better—lived permanently at the water’s edge, and we used the winter months to trade with them, but when we came to the lake one winter, they were gone. The tepees were there; the fires were still warm; the dogs and horses tethered and not yet starving or dead. But no people.”

“Oh goodness, just like the colony! Why did you not say so at first? I wish they could hear this back at the colonel’s house. They laughed at my—anyway. Go on. You do have fun stories. So, where were they? I know, they went swimming, and it was very cold, and they all drowned…?”

“I do not remember, exactly, but there were over a hundred in the Black Crow nation—women, old people, and babies too—so a jolly swimming excursion is not all that likely, is it? And we would have then found their bodies.” I pursed my lips, frowning, staring at the flames. I thought this coincidence of his story of the colony and my memory very odd, but wanted Aleksey to be the one to wonder and speculate about it, as I knew he would.

“So, where were they? What had happened to them? They must have told you where they had been.”

I think he missed the point. “They never were discovered. That is the point. The village was empty, as if they had been plucked from the earth, and no trace of them was ever found again.”

“What?” He was aghast. He had seemed to like speculating about his little mystery at the outpost, but clearly he expected to find a perfectly rational explanation. This did not please him as much. “What did everyone say—the Powponi? When they found this place? Did you release the dogs and take them with you?”

I smiled. “Yes, Aleksey, we saved the dogs and took the horses, although we did not touch the blankets and tools or anything else.” I stared morosely into the fire for a while. I was on tricky ground now and didn’t want to stray into the territory of things I did not want to speak of. “No one talked about it. It was accepted as a part of the world—real—but I think they assigned it more to the unreal world with which we communed only in dreams.” Then I conceded, “But I did not understand this way of thinking at all and wanted to know why the place was deserted, where everyone had gone. I had particularly wanted to meet up with some of the boys I had known the previous—”

“Seriously. You are going to sit there and tell me another story of how you could lie down in plain sight with boys and men and—”

“I was nine, Aleksey, or thereabouts. I wanted to go fishing with them.”

“Oh. Well, all right, then. I will allow you to have a previous life fishing. So what did you do?”

“I started to look for them.” I rubbed my nose, remembering more than I wanted to. “Anyway, I was retrieved, beaten, and then we moved on.”

“Oh. That is a bit disappointing.” He stared into the fire, poking it with a stick and then watching its tip flare to life. “But in another way it is excellent, is it not? Now you can do it properly and find the missing—”

“What are you talking about?”

“Niko! You are so dumb sometimes! I’ve told you—the outpost is deserted, so we are raising a party to go there and find everyone. We are mounting a rescue! I told you this!”

I didn’t argue with him; I began to walk back to the cabin.

There was only one thing I was planning to raise, and it wasn’t for anyone else’s relief.

I could feel the waves of his fury washing over me. I suppose, being a king, he just could not tolerate the idea that someone would blithely walk away from him when he was speaking.