Young and moody Vasilisa felt the room begin to swim. A curious, dizzy pleasure began at her knee and ignited upward until her whole body tingled, as it had only once before, when as a child she had determined she would run away to the land of fairies said to live underwater and she had dived deep into a pond on a summer day with the intention of never returning to land. Her lungs seemed empty, her vision began to dissolve. There was Hugo awaiting her. The last flower—he offered it solemnly in both hands and, as the Apache demanded, when she reached for it, he tore it from her fingers and rent it in half.

Vasilisa collapsed dead away in a faint.

Her sisters and Aarne leapt to her side. Her head lolled backward, a broken puppet’s, and she let out a moan, the sound of a small animal helpless on the forest floor.

Hugo moved to attend, too, but Aarne, impossibly swift, was in his path. “You have done enough, monsieur.”

It hardly mattered that Aarne was so small. In fact, it made Hugo feel even more like a brute as he watched the scene before him, the distressed princess laid out and supported by her sisters.

“I’m sorry,” he said. And then, “I’m sorry. No, truly. We were having fun.”

Such a thing was hard to assert when one of the party had collapsed. He knew it wasn’t his fault. She had been the one to suggest Maurice Mouvet.

Vasilisa waved away her sisters, gesturing weakly at the dance floor. “Monsieur Hugo, thank you,” she whispered, eyes closing. “Thank you very much.” And she seemed to slip into a light slumber.

“You know,” Anna sighed, “she does like her scenes.”

Maria chuckled. “Vasilisa? Are you making a scene?”

Vasilisa declared, eyes closed, “I am not making a scene,” which caused her sisters to laugh anew. Aarne joined in, and then, carefully, Hugo, too.

Anna called out, “Ah, Monsieur Hugo, Monsieur Hugo,” as if he were a dear and frequent guest.

Vasilisa, with her sisters’ help, reluctantly stood. The wood in the fireplace made a mighty crack, a gasp and hiss following as the logs burned a little more brightly.

What followed was subtle, a small shift in position: the three women stood together, Vasilisa supported in the middle, in almost a semicircle, with Aarne facing, in case they had needs. Hugo thought that you could connect all four of them as though they were stars in a constellation, three in a row, one before them like a stem, and they would make a kind of anchor. Or you could connect the five of them, if that was a legitimate pattern, and this thought made tears stand in his eyes.