To his left, playing piano, violin, and horn, were three beautiful women. They wore gowns of lace and satin, simple but appropriate for the season opening of the Opéra-Comique. They had swanlike necks, and skin as white as Alseid marble. The oldest girl, perhaps twenty, played the piano with a smiling, relaxed ease that reminded Hugo of a yachtsman at the tiller. She had red hair in a tight chignon définitif, capped with a tall comb that bobbed in a 6/8 signature as she gazed at her sisters serenely, willing them to stay in time with her.

The horn player, slightly younger, hair as black as a raven’s, played with obedience, her hand hidden in the bell, shoulders hunched as if in anticipation of an explosion. Which could perhaps be provided by the third member of the orchestra. The violinist, who was at most fourteen years old, had excitable hazel eyes that flickered back and forth from her oldest sister, where they were supposed to be, to Hugo, of whom she obviously expected a great deal further.

A smile was stitched to Hugo’s face. He was quite literally unable to proceed. His most explicit thought was that the women were not wearing potato sacks. “Where—where are the old peasant women?”

“Mmm. I lied about that, too,” Aarne said.

They were not old. They were not peasants. That they were Russian was undeniable, but this meant that, for Hugo, Russian meant far more than he’d ever known.

The music reached its final merry chord. The red-haired woman at the keyboard turned and stood.

“Private Hugo Black of Detroit, Michigan,” Aarne intoned. “May it please you to find yourself in the exalted presence of the Ladies of Pokrovskoe and Petrovskoe; Heirs to Lotoshino; Princesses of the Vesholi-Podol palace in Poltava; entitled noble heirs to ruling the estate of Petrovskoye-Alabino; humble penitents at the monastery of Solnechny Strana. May I present the Princesses Anna, Maria, and Vasilisa.”

Princesses. Hugo felt as if he had been handed a heavy chalice brimming with fine wine. The word itself, the confirmation of princesses, iced his blood with diamonds three feet thick. He saw, now reaching back over a decade, the powdered and corseted form of his cotillion instructor, Dame Gladys du Lac. Her pince-nez.

Each princess in turn inclined her head with the subtle significance of a dealer at the faro table. Hugo’s smile trembled. “If called upon to court,” he could hear his instructor saying, “you must bahh bahhhh lllahhhhhh,” her voice fading and indistinct, taunting him with its absence, along with the fourth Latin declension and Ceylonese trade routes.

He bowed. His cat-fur hat dropped off of his head and onto the floor. He straightened.

Popping and crackling from the fire. Hugo once again felt mysterious eyes watching him from the shadows.