A/N: Having begun in the middle of all the excitement, this story will now go back to the beginning. As I said, all will EVENTUALLY be explained. But first…

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The afternoon after our return unfolded in a fairly ordinary way.

I took one last look around the space that might in the future (exactly when had not yet been discussed) be the nursery suite, and then went back down to see exactly what wedding preparations needed my assistance if they were to keep moving. I finalized the order for flowers with the horticulture department, approved the wording, paper and format for the thank-you notes, and went to have a look at the presents that were arriving almost hourly. Castle security had cleared them as safe, which meant they were already unwrapped.

That was another thing I had not thought about: wedding presents. Of course I knew people usually did give gifts to the bride and groom, but I hadn't connected the fact that meant people were going to be giving gifts to Victor and me. It was clear that there were going to be a lot of them, and given that Victor was a head of state, and many of the guests were representatives of other heads of state, some of the gifts were lavish.

To wit: a full dinnerware set of Sevres porcelain, an antique silver—not silver plated, solid silver—hostess service, complete with coffee pot, tea pot, chocolate pot, and about a dozen accessories like sugar bowls, creamers, milk pitchers, lemon slice dishes, bowls to put the used tea leaves in, dishes for bonbons, plus various spoons, tongs, and unidentifiable silver doodads. There were punch bowls, tapestries, rugs, and a matched pair of epergnes, elaborate serving stands which were meant to sit decoratively on a table and hold small pieces of fruit and candy for later consumption. These two were Murano glass, and looked like trees with little baskets among the branches.

Conspicuous consumption didn't cover it. This was ridiculous. Then I remembered Mary, Queen of Scots, and what she did with the solid silver christening font that Elizabeth the First sent her: melted it down and turned it into coinage. These were not so much personal gifts as they were assets, and if need be, they could be turned into money—a quiet little auction at Sotheby's would do it.

The personal gifts were humbler, and heartfelt. Gifts from the people of Latveria—the Werner Academy's third form class had banded together to buy a vase from the cameo glass factory. The inn's brewmaster had made and sent an extra-large keg of spiced wedding ale. Those meant a lot more to me than the set of flatware that came on behalf of the Queen of England. After all, I didn't live in England.

However, the castle's major-domo had all the gifts displayed on tables in the white-and-gold morning room, according to who had sent them, and the relative monetary value of the gifts was a little too apparent. Since the Latverian people were going to be allowed in to see them, I told the major-domo to rearrange the gifts according to their use, so every gift had a place of equal honor.

He asked why. I drew a deep breath, and was about to tell him, when a voice behind me said, "What can that matter to you? Whose is the authority here, hers or yours? She's the Master's wife, and can send you packing if she pleases!" It was Boris, Victor's foster father. It must not have been one of his good days, because he was relying on his cane. He thumped it on the carpet for emphasis.

The major-domo blanched. "As you wish, my lady." He hurried off.

"I'm glad you're back safe." Boris told me. "Can you spare a couple of hours or so to talk with an old man?"

"Of course." I replied. Whatever Boris had to say, it was more important than whether the wedding favors should be handed out as guests took their places for the ceremony or put on the charger plates so they got them when they sat down to eat. "Where should we go so we can be comfortable?"

"I have a fancy to show you something that's a ways off." he said. "Up the river. There's a lad from the garage who drives me when I want to go there, he'll take us both and wait."

"Let me get—let me send for a hat." I corrected myself.

Boris was quiet during our ride—evidently whatever he had to say was not for other ears. I just sat back and enjoyed the scenery. The lilacs were blooming, in melting shades of white, lavender, and pink. Here and there people were cutting branches to use as wedding decorations around the castle. Our native Latverian lilacs were tough, robust, and disease-free, but you could never use them on a dinner table. Nobody would be able to taste the food; their fragrance so strong it was almost visible in the air. So the flowers for the tables would be flown in from Holland, as would the blossoms for my bouquet.

Which reminded me: 'The Master has given instructions that your bouquet should be entirely jasmine.' The chief horticulturist had looked apologetic. Why should Victor have done that? I wondered idly. I liked jasmine, but no more than I liked roses, lavender or any other flower. I loved jasmine tea, that was true, but I loved most teas Nor could I ever recall mentioning that flower to him. Maybe it had a significance for him…

Boris coughed. I looked at him; an old Rom in his every day clothes.

Before I lived in Latveria, I hadthe usualvague misconceptions about the Gypsies, or the Roma, as they preferred to be called: Esmerelda from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, dancing with her goat and her tambourine—Maria Ouspenskaya and Bela Lugosi as mother and son gypsies in The Wolfman—a lot of fashion magazine layouts showing sulky models in haute couture that was some designer's idea of what a gypsy wore.

There were plenty of negative connotations attached to gypsies, too. All gypsies were thieves, liars, beggars and con artists. They kidnapped children. The men were layabouts, the young women were sluts and the old ones fortune tellers. They were filthy and lazy. The very word 'gypped' was a racial slur.

The reality was quite different. I learned that an 'Orthodox' Rom—one who lived strictly according to the old ways—lived according to laws as strict and complex as that of an Orthodox Jew. They were suspicious of outsiders, but I met them as one who Victor had sent, and that was different. Everywhere else in Eastern Europe—and indeed in much of the rest of the world—the Roma were discriminated against, persecuted, reviled. Not in Latveria. Victor's outreach program, which provided food, medical care, education, various other assistance to his mother's people, which I had worked on, had been an education for me.

"Here we are." said the driver. He stopped at the beginning of a driveway; a road led away over a slight hill. "Shall I wait here, as usual?" he asked Boris.

"Yes, that's fine." Boris nodded. The driver helped him out of the car. "This way." Boris pointed at the drive, and he and I walked over the grassy swelling of earth.

"I went and sat with him," he said suddenly, as crickets jumped about in the tall grass. There was no need for Boris to say who 'he' was. He meant Victor, and we both knew it. Boris went on.

"After we got you out of the well, once when they'd done all they could and then put you to bed to get better. He went and stood by your bed for the longest time, you lying there so silent and still…Like he was trying to will you back among the living.

"He said 'If she lives, she is my wife.' I knew it would be all right then. I knew he would be all right—that is, if you lived. He wouldn't have said it if he didn't mean it, and never since he understood what giving his word meant have I known him to break it.

"I'd seen you around the castle, of course, and I noticed something about you. When he started getting too full of himself, you could tell him so, without his getting mad. That's more than I ever learned."

We were picking our way down the far slope of the hill. "Um," I temporized. "I just try to, uh, to…I didn't think anyone was noticing." I confessed.

"I've known him since before he had ever had a stitch of clothing on. I was there when they placed him, new-born, all red and squashed and yelling, at Werner's feet."

A Rom custom; a fiercely patriarchal society, the father has the power of life and death over his child. If he picks the child up, it is accepted, and can live. If not…It was an old custom, outdated.

"This is what I wanted to show you." Boris said, with pride, and gestured around. It was a horse farm; there were stables, pastures, a riding ring. Several dozen horses were in view; in the nearest enclosure, a mare with a delicate little foal beside her pranced over to the fence, attracted by Boris' voice. "This is mine.

"It was over twenty years ago—getting on toward thirty, now—that I must have said I wanted to have some blood-stock of my own, some day, to breed, to train, to buy and sell as I pleased. He heard me say that, and he remembered. As soon as he could afford it, he bought this place, told me to look about for the breeding stock I wanted. He even brought in some mares he thought would be good. I swear, if I'd looked up at the sky and said I wanted to own the moon one day, he wouldn't have rested until he came up with some way of getting it for me…Of course, when the Fantastic Four came in a few years back and set that Rudolph Haasen up as ruler of Latveria, Haasen took it all away. He shot three of my horses, one right after another, to get me to betray my—my old friend's son, to make me say Haasen was king. When I wouldn't yield, he sent me to the dungeon. They were too valuable to go killing all of them. The dungeons didn't break me, either."

I was too rapt to make a sound. "Haasen sold them all. When he came back," Again, 'he' was Victor. "the first thing he did, when his was the power again, was go down to the dungeon and carry me out of there, and tend to me. Later, he bought back the horses that he could, and replaced the ones he couldn't. There's some of the finest blood in the world, right here…"

Boris dug a bag out of his pocket, and shook some pieces of dried fruit into his hand. The mare whickered, and he fed her a bit. "Do you want to give her some?" he offered.

Horses make me a little nervous. There's no major trauma behind that; I'm wary of animals that not only weigh a ton, but have steel nailed to their feet. My step-sister was the horse-crazy one, not me. Boris was looking at me expectantly, though, so I took some of the apple bits and held them out to her. Her muzzle was velvety and bristly both.

"What with the new ways of doing things, my stallion has sons and daughters all over the world. They freeze his seed and send it to all the corners of the earth." Boris said. "Never did I dream such a thing could be. I didn't know it, but the whole world changed the day Werner Von Doom first came among us."

TBC….soon.