Chapter 2: Accident
Bucharest's wizarding quarter is a sprawling testament to grandeur past. Marina lives half-way between Piata Centaura and the Ministry, in Strada Bufnita, a resolutely respectable small street that runs behind the Hotel Nai. When she gets home on Friday afternoon Cezar is in a tizzy. Usually he is a calm Kneazle, stocky, placid, deeply preoccupied with personal hygiene and hunting dust bunnies. But today he is on the rampage, storming into the hall, down the stairs, onto the stoop, from which he looks anxiously up and down the street. Marina picks him up and he digs his claws possessively into her flesh, peering over her shoulder at figures Marina does not see.
Marina carries Cezar upstairs and looks carefully around her two-room flat. There is a footprint, a large, man-sized footprint in the thin dusting of flour she always leaves on the floor just inside the door. The newspapers lying on the breakfast table have been disturbed. Without further ado, she grabs her purse in one hand, Cezar in the other, and scuttles back downstairs to her landlady's flat.
"Mrs. Bogasieru," she says breathlessly, when a comfortably plump elderly witch opens the door. "Mrs. Bogasieru, someone's been in my flat. Do you know who it was?"
"Your English friend was here with the young lady—what's her name?"
"Katie," supplies Marina.
"Yes, yes, Ekaterina. Yes. Here," says Mrs. Bogasieru, shuffling towards her overflowing desk. "They left you a wedding invitation."
Marina takes the unsealed envelope and pulls out the elegant, hot-pressed card. In ornate prose, the elder Bells request the honor of her presence at the marriage of their daughter Katherine Irene to Mr. Charles Weasley. The invitation is embossed with two small animated drawings of dragons, linking their spiked tails. Marina looks at it and she looks at Mrs. Bogasieru and she says, "But why were they in my flat?"
"Ah," says Mrs. Bogasieru. "Ah. The Dragon Keeper with the very strange accent—the good-looking one who's too old for you?"
"Fergal," suggests Marina.
"Yes," Mrs. Bogasieru. "He baked a pastry made of baking soda, which sounds very odd to me, but your English friends say it is a great delicacy. They brought you one and left it in your kitchen. They left the wedding invitation there too, but when they saw me and I asked to see it, the young lady fetched it downstairs for me. A very nice young lady, I think. It is nice to be married young."
This story is reasonably coherent. Marina has powerful anti-intruder charms on her flat door, but Slovadan knows the counter-charm and he would have told Charlie and Katie. She climbs the stairs, tailed by Mrs. Bogasieru, and they duly find Fergal's Irish soda bread, neatly wrapped, on her kitchen counter. But there is no note.
Marina hates it when people don't leave notes.
"You should get married too," says Mrs. Bogasieru affably, munching on a slice of soda bread. "Maybe you will meet a nice Romanian boy at your English friend's wedding. Your English friend, he has been a good friend to you, all these years you are living here, he must have nice friends, yes?"
Marina resists the temptation to tell Mrs. Bogasieru that her English friend Charlie, many valuable qualities notwithstanding, doesn't know any nice Romanian boys. Well, he knows one. He knows her brother.
At twenty-four, Marina is starting to wonder whether there are, in fact, any nice single young wizards left in Romania. The Romanian wizarding community is troubled, fragmented, and small. The poor purebloods—who are numerous—are all trying to marry up. The rich purebloods—who are few—are trying not to marry down. The Muggle-borns are a bunch of unlettered toughs who don't know one end of a wand from the other, which is not surprising, really, given that most purebloods won't give them the time of day, and there's no proper school for them to attend. (The Durmstrang Institute, which serves Romania, doesn't admit such riff-raff.) Half-bloods are rare indeed, because Romanian purebloods don't marry out. Marina feels like a freak in this community.
Marina isn't really a half-blood, of course, any more than her mother was. Julijana Oblak's ancestry was only one-eighth Muggle; Marina's is one-sixteenth. But one-sixteenth is enough to make one a half-blood, here in Romania.
Marina is Romanian enough to know that she won't be marrying a Romanian pureblood, fifteen pureblooded great-great-grandparents notwithstanding. She is too proud to pass herself off as a pureblood, as some witches would do in these circumstances. As Stefan would say, human transfiguration is a powerful tool, but a poor way to live one's life.
It isn't just her blood status. There were always whispers about her mother. It wasn't just that Julijana Oblak had one great-grandfather who was a minor Magyar nobleman instead of a Slovenian alchemist. Julijana was raised in a fairytale village in the gorges near Lake Bled, and she called herself Slovenian, but there was much confusion in her ancestry, too much, too much of an aura of having been buffeted from one end of the Austro-Hungarian empire to the other. It wasn't just the Magyar stain but also, nearer the surface, the Macedonian mother from whom she got her dark good looks and, farther back, a trace of Russian. It wasn't just her rootlessness, but also the mysterious Oblak custom, inherited from a long-forgotten Russian forebear, of educating children in St. Petersburg instead of at the familiar and prestigious Durmstrang Institute. Off in St. Petersburg, the Oblak children imbibed a cosmopolitan outlook quite foreign to their Balkan roots. Off in St. Petersburg, the Oblak daughters imbibed a strain of revolutionary feminism that thoroughly unfitted them to become Balkan—much less Romanian—wives.
Even when her mother was alive, there were whispers about her mother.
So Marina, caressing Cezar as she tosses Mrs. Bogasieru a politely evasive reply, has already all but given up on the notion of a nice Romanian boy. She thinks she could settle for a nice Bulgarian one. She thinks it's a bloody miracle, less than she once wanted perhaps, but far more than she expected from life.
But she tells herself, as she shuts the door behind the loquaciously affable Mrs. Bogasieru, that going on first dates thinking like this is the reason why first dates don't turn into second ones. With a flick of her wand she lights the torches in the W.C. and she says five times, firmly, to the mirror, "It probably won't work out. But I'm going to have a nice time anyway. I'm not going to expect much tonight. I'm just going to have a nice time anyway."
And she goes to meet him in Budapest, at the Harried Horntail.
Dining in Budapest is an adventure for Marina. She gazes around the room at the well-dressed patrons, the children prattling in four or five languages, the glitzy animated oil painting of a Hungarian Horntail on a wall opposite the entrance. She picks her way carefully through the lengthy menu, on which dishes are listed in three languages—Hungarian, German, and English—but not, of course, Romanian. Viktor offers to help, but Marina orders for herself in very, very careful Hungarian, and the waitwizard appears to understand.
"How many languages do you speak?" she asks as the waitwizard walks away.
Viktor thinks for a minute. He says, "Seven. Bulgarian, Romanian, Hungarian, German, English, a little Russian, a little French. Oh, and a little Greek, but that's just for vacation purposes."
Marina looks at him.
"We have a cottage in the Peloponnese," says Viktor.
Marina looks at him.
"Well," says Viktor, belatedly realizing that the Vasiks probably do not have a cottage in the Peloponnese, "well, it's my grandparents', really."
Marina purses her lips. She says, "Is Durmstrang a good place to learn languages?"
Viktor shrugs. "I learned to read at four," he says apologetically. "I couldn't go to Durmstrang until I was eleven, almost twelve. My parents taught me some magic, but they couldn't flout the law too wildly. So they hired a tutor and we mostly did languages . . . I don't really speak them all that well."
"The classes at Durmstrang are in German, aren't they?" she asks.
"Mostly, yes. The textbooks are in all different languages, German, Russian, English. There was even one in Romanian—an advanced transfiguration textbook by a fellow named Stefan Dobrega." He glances at her, hopefully, to see if she recognizes the name. "But we used Quick Transla-quills for those," he says after a minute. "I speak German a lot better than I read it."
Marina reads German after a fashion, but she doesn't speak it at all. She never went to Durmstrang, nor to any school. She sat at home like the modest, obedient Romanian girl she was, and she did lessons with her mother until her mother was overcome by darkness. Then she did lessons with Slovadan until Slovadan moved to the Transylvanian Dragon Research and Breeding Facility. From the age of thirteen, she taught herself. By the age of fifteen, she had read every book on magic ever published in Romanian. Then she started on the French books, because Romanian is an Italic language and French comes more easily to her than English or German.
She has heard of Quick Transla-quills, of course, but she has never owned one. They're not easy to come by, not if you're poor, not if you're a Vasik, not if you live in Romania.
He asks about her family, which is a standard wizarding dating gambit, especially here in the east, where traditions matter almost as much as bloodlines. He asks if Slovadan is her only sibling, and she says yes. He asks if she has cousins, and she says, a few. He says, is that lonely, and Marina shrugs and smiles.
In truth, Marina's mother was the fifth of six children, and Marina has kin aplenty on her mother's side. But they never did her much good. Lavra, who was a herbologist though not a very good one, clumsily exposed herself to the cry of a full-grown Mandrake and died at the unfortunate age of thirty-seven. Marko sits in a Croatian prison, convicted of passing information to the Romanian Death Eaters, though it remains unclear—even to his nearest relatives—whether he was guilty or framed. Pavel, who is gay (a state of being not much accepted in the Balkan wizarding community), lives a strange half-life in Paris, among companions who are mostly unaware he is a wizard. Andrej, the middle son, was overcome by darkness, like his sister Julijana. That leaves only Aunt Cecilija, fratchetty, needy, slightly unbalanced, tending the echoing empty house in the gorges near Lake Bled.
If she knew him better, if she were certain she could trust him, she would tell him this, but not, she thinks, on the first date. So she smiles and says nothing, and he asks about her parents.
Both of them are dead.
"Was it long ago?" says Viktor.
This is not something Marina particularly wants to discuss on a first date. She tries to think of a way to change the subject. She fails. "My father," she says, "my father died when I was eleven years old."
They're the same age, almost to the month, and she can see him doing the math in his head. Thirteen years ago, the world was ostensibly at peace, but it was an uneasy peace at best, especially in Carpathia.
"Was he killed by Death Eaters?" murmurs Viktor.
"No," says Marina, "no, it was an accident." And because she likes him, because she thinks she is starting to trust him, she feeds him the line she always feeds to those she likes and trusts. "He was abroad, working with Peruvian Vipertooths."
Anyone in the dragon community would know in an instant what she meant. Anyone. She was the one who told Charlie, and Charlie nearly fainted. She was present when Slovadan told the Director, and the Director nearly burst into tears. Old women hug her when she feeds them this line.
Viktor doesn't get it. He says, "I'm sorry." He pats her hand across the table, which is nice though it's insufficient, and he says, "I didn't know." He says, "Was he buried there or here?"
Marina looks at the floor. She thinks, buried? There wasn't much left to bury. Anyone in the dragon community would have known that the minute I said, "Peruvian—." But it's quite clear that Viktor knows nothing about Peruvian Vipertooths.
She looks at the man sitting across from her, hook-nosed, lantern-jawed, still young, and for the first time, she feels herself to be his equal, even, in some slight ways, his superior. Marina knows, as any witch raised in eastern Europe would know, the bare outlines of Viktor's story. She knows that his parents' marriage was the much heralded alliance of the last two great wizarding houses in Bulgaria; yet it was also a love match, one that was slathered all over the pages of the Drum Liber and other sentimentally sensationalist periodicals in the year Slovadan was born. Viktor was the middle son and the only one who survived; by the time he was five, they knew there would be no more. It surprised no one that this wealthy pureblood Wunderkind grew up an athlete and a scholar, that he made Bulgarian National Seeker at seventeen, that he became Igor Karkaroff's star pupil in Karkaroff's last years as headmaster, that he was chosen as the Durmstrang Triwizard Champion by the Goblet of Fire. His manners aren't gregarious, but they're impeccable; his visage may not be conventionally handsome, but it's attractive enough to Marina. There isn't much that isn't attractive in Viktor.
But he doesn't know much about dragons. She needs someone strong, someone resilient, and it gives her pause, that he doesn't know much about dragons.