While Oskar continued handing out medals beneath the chandeliers of the Royal Palace at Potsdam, the celebration rolled on with all the warmth and confidence of a nation convinced it had witnessed something historic. Sailors drank beside their families, officers laughed with men who only weeks earlier had been fighting for their lives upon the Atlantic, and music spilled from the palace into gardens crowded with uniforms, dresses and raised glasses. For one night, at least, victory seemed almost complete. Yet the celebration belonged overwhelmingly to the Navy, and many of the Army's most important men were conspicuously absent. Their absence was no accident.
While Potsdam glowed with light and triumph, the headquarters of the western armies remained awake in Luxembourg City. There were no chandeliers there, no music, no wives or children waiting with embraces. There were only maps, casualty ledgers, telephones, wireless transcripts and the war. Beneath the hard electric light of his headquarters, Helmuth von Moltke stood with both hands braced against a table buried beneath reports. Great maps covered the walls around him, crossed by coloured lines and arrows showing the enormous German advance through Belgium and into France. In the south and centre the French still held stubbornly along their fortified frontier, but farther north the German right wing had broken through Belgium and spilled into France with terrifying speed.
The Battle of the Marne was now fully underway. German reconnaissance elements had already reached the outer approaches to Paris, and in several sectors advance patrols were scarcely ten kilometres from the city itself, fighting French companies entrenched among villages, farms and narrow belts of woodland. To anyone looking only at the map, it might have seemed that victory was finally at hand. Liège was gone. Brussels had fallen. Namur had finally been crushed, and German columns had poured southward until Paris itself appeared almost close enough to touch.
Yet the nearer Moltke came to what should have been the decisive moment of the campaign, the less decisive anything seemed.
The French had lost ground, men and entire formations, but they had not collapsed. Again and again they withdrew before they could be properly surrounded, falling back battered and bloodied yet sufficiently intact to form another line farther south. The British Expeditionary Force did much the same. Small beside the continental masses, it nevertheless remained disciplined, stubborn and maddeningly difficult to destroy. The enemy bent, retreated and bled, but no great annihilating victory had yet occurred. There had been no western Soldau, no enemy army erased in a matter of days, no capital seized beneath the shock of one overwhelming operation. France still fought, and every kilometre gained seemed to create two new problems behind it.
Antwerp remained in Belgian hands. It was encircled, battered and increasingly isolated, but still dangerous enough to threaten the German rear. Nor had the rest of Belgium become quiet simply because German flags now flew over its cities. Railways were cut, bridges damaged, telegraph lines severed and supply columns ambushed. Isolated soldiers disappeared. Guides sent German patrols down the wrong roads. Routes declared secure one afternoon required armed escorts again by morning. Every act of resistance demanded men—men to guard bridges, patrol railways, escort ammunition and fuel, protect depots and occupy towns supposedly conquered weeks earlier—and the farther the armies drove into France, the longer and more vulnerable those arteries became.
That was the curse Moltke could no longer ignore. Before the war, he and too many others within the old Army establishment had resisted Oskar's demands for vastly greater investment in motorised transport. Horses had carried armies for generations, railways had moved millions of men across Europe, and great fleets of trucks, tractors and specialised vehicles had seemed like yet another expensive excess produced by the Crown Prince's endless fascination with machines. Now the railway network through Belgium was damaged, overloaded and under constant attack, while the western armies consumed shells, fuel, food and spare parts faster than the trains could bring them forward. Muscle Motors trucks rumbled south in endless columns to fill the gap, but there were never enough of them.
At least the east had demanded nothing from him. Oskar's victories against Russia had been so complete that Moltke had not been forced to strip even a single additional corps from France. Had East Prussia remained in danger, the western campaign might already have begun tearing itself apart. Instead Oskar had given Moltke what generations of German planners had dreamed of possessing: freedom to concentrate Germany's strength against France.
And still France would not die.
The thought returned to him more often than he cared to admit.
The original conception of the northern advance had called for von Kluck's First Army to swing much farther west, wheeling around the outer flank before curling down behind Paris. Reality had forced Moltke to approve something narrower. First Army remained closer to Second rather than extending the German right wing across still greater distances, and Moltke had considered the reasoning sound. A wider sweep would have exposed neighbouring formations at precisely the moment when German strength was already being diluted by distance, occupation duties and rear-area security.
The Belgian Army remained active, the British manoeuvred somewhere beyond the flank, and supply columns were already struggling merely to keep pace. Every additional kilometre created another road to protect, another bridge to repair and another opportunity for one German army to become separated from the next.
That possibility haunted him now. His armies remained immensely powerful in direct battle, but the Western Front had grown so vast that strength itself seemed to thin across it. A corps pushed too far might suddenly discover itself alone. An advance that appeared magnificent upon a headquarters map might, on the ground, amount to nothing more than exhausted infantry marching beyond the protection of its artillery while ammunition crawled behind them on overcrowded roads.
Ahead of all of them waited Paris.
The capital was no open prize waiting to be seized by momentum alone. Its forts still stood, its approaches were being strengthened and a newly assembled French Sixth Army under General Michel-Joseph Maunoury had appeared before it. Even after everything France had lost, another army had seemingly materialised from railways, depots and reservist camps, as though the Republic possessed an inexhaustible ability to replace blood with more blood.
The countryside around the Marne had become a maze of resistance. Bridges were fought over repeatedly, villages changed hands and changed back, woods concealed machine guns and farmhouses became improvised fortresses. Roads declared secure at dawn were being shelled again before nightfall. Even the meaning of victory had become difficult to define. A telegram might announce that a town such as Meaux had been taken, that German troops had entered, flags had been raised and the bridges secured. Twelve hours later another report would arrive saying French infantry still held several streets, reinforcements had crossed the river and artillery continued falling throughout the town. One battalion might be asking permission to withdraw while another claimed to have advanced beyond the railway station.
Was Meaux German, then? Was it French? Did the answer depend upon the street, the hour, the building from which one happened to be reporting?
More and more often, Moltke found that he simply did not know.
Oskar's radios had improved German communications beyond anything previous generations could have imagined. Army headquarters could exchange information in minutes rather than waiting upon couriers and telegraph offices. Moltke had once believed that such speed would bring clarity. Instead it often brought contradictions more quickly. A wireless report could already be obsolete by the time it was copied onto his desk. An exhausted officer might exaggerate a breakthrough; a frightened one might transform a local reverse into catastrophe. A corps headquarters could believe its neighbour remained upon the flank when that neighbour had already received orders to move elsewhere.
Moltke possessed more information than any commander of the previous century could have dreamed of possessing, and somehow he felt increasingly blind.
Even Germany's greatest mechanical advantages were beginning to reveal their limits. The tanks had terrified the Entente during the opening weeks of war, but Oskar had never intended them to grind across hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres beneath their own power. Wherever possible they were meant to travel by rail and be committed only where armour and concentrated firepower were required to rupture a defensive line. The western campaign had demanded otherwise. Tracks wore thin, engines overheated, transmissions failed and road wheels cracked beneath distances their designers had never expected them to travel. Mud, rubble and broken roads consumed machinery almost as efficiently as enemy fire, while workshops laboured without rest and recovery vehicles dragged crippled Panzers back from fields and roadsides. They remained terrifying weapons, but they were not immortal.
Neither was the air arm. German aircraft dominated the skies wherever they could be concentrated, bombing railway junctions, watching enemy movements and tearing apart exposed formations, yet the Western Front stretched across several countries. There were never enough aircraft, never enough trained crews and never enough hours in the day. Every corps demanded reconnaissance, every artillery commander wanted aerial observers, and every army headquarters possessed some railway junction, reserve concentration or ammunition depot that absolutely had to be bombed immediately. The sky could assist Moltke. It could not solve the war for him.
So the reports continued to arrive, hour after hour, until they seemed less like information than a form of punishment. Ammunition required. Another bridge destroyed. Another convoy delayed. Another regiment missing hundreds of men. Another battery nearly dry. Another village secured and then attacked from behind. Another truck column immobilised by a road collapsing beneath the weight of traffic. Another request for reinforcements. Another casualty return.
Those were the reports Moltke hated most.
He had visited the hospitals in Luxembourg himself, and afterward he sometimes wished he had not. Paper made death orderly. Five hundred killed. Twelve hundred wounded. Three hundred missing. Numbers sat obediently in columns and allowed a man to pretend, for a little while, that war could be understood through arithmetic.
A hospital gave the numbers faces.
He had walked between beds occupied by men who no longer possessed arms or legs, men whose faces had been torn into shapes he struggled to look at directly, men whispering for mothers and wives beneath morphine, and others too far gone even for speech. He had smelled blood, antiseptic, infection and human waste beneath clean white sheets already stained red. Surgeons and orderlies moved between the beds like exhausted ghosts, surrounded by the physical result of decisions that men such as Moltke made from offices hundreds of kilometres away.
The memory followed him back to headquarters.
Sometimes he would stand before a map and look at one of the neat coloured blocks representing a corps, and suddenly remember that it was not a block at all. It was tens of thousands of living men.
And he was sending them forward.
Again and again.
The thought had begun eating at him until, on his worst nights, he felt less like the Chief of the General Staff than some enormously efficient butcher. Whole lakes of blood seemed to gather behind every decision, and what frightened him most was not merely the scale of the killing but the growing uncertainty that his decisions still possessed enough clarity to justify it.
Reports came of German soldiers cut off in ambushes and executed after surrendering. Hidden machine guns opened from woods or farm buildings and disappeared before retaliation could reach them. Artillery fired from concealed positions, moved and fired again from somewhere else. Men died because a map was wrong, because a road was blocked, because one division arrived two hours later than another. The battlefield seemed to possess an intelligence of its own, changing faster than the men attempting to command it.
Moltke tried desperately to understand. He read everything placed before him. He demanded maps, strength returns, ammunition expenditure, fuel reports, reconnaissance photographs and wireless transcripts. He wanted to know where every division stood, where the French were weakest, where the British were moving and where the Belgian Army might next emerge from Antwerp. Yet the answers never formed the clean picture he wanted. They merely produced new questions.
At night he paced his office long after his staff had begun speaking in whispers beyond the door. Sometimes he muttered while moving from one map to another. Sometimes he stopped before the same sector and stared at it for several minutes without moving at all. Sometimes he wrote to Eliza, softening what he truly felt because committing the whole truth to paper would have made it too much like confession. He wrote of blood, responsibility and the terrible burden of sending men into battles from which thousands would never return.
More than a month of war had worn down the armies beneath him, but it had worn something down inside Moltke as well. Increasingly, he felt command itself slipping through his fingers.
The German system had worked until now. Army commanders had enjoyed broad freedom to react to circumstances without waiting for Luxembourg to approve every movement, and that flexibility had helped carry German forces through Belgium and deep into France. Now Moltke was beginning to see its darker side. One army could turn without another fully understanding why. One corps could advance while its neighbour paused. A gap could appear between formations almost before headquarters recognised that the gap existed.
What had once looked like flexibility increasingly resembled fragmentation.
Moltke could feel the campaign approaching some invisible edge. One mistake, one army moving too far, one flank left uncovered, one French counterattack arriving at precisely the wrong place and hour might be enough. He found himself staring at the great sweep of arrows upon the map and wondering whether the whole magnificent advance had become a structure stretched so tightly that the breaking of a single thread might unravel everything.
Then, inevitably, his thoughts drifted east.
Oskar.
The victories that had spared Moltke from diverting troops had become another weight upon him. In Russia there had been clarity: Soldau, the destruction of Second Army, Warsaw, Rennenkampf broken, territory falling with astonishing speed. They were victories with names, victories ordinary Germans could understand, victories that filled streets with cheering crowds.
In the west Moltke had conquered enormous stretches of territory and killed frightening numbers of enemy soldiers, yet he possessed no equivalent moment. France remained alive. Britain remained in the field. Paris remained beyond his grasp.
Not yet, he reminded himself, not yet. But the words no longer brought much comfort.
While Helmuth von Moltke paced beneath the lamps of Luxembourg City, staring at maps whose arrows seemed less obedient with every passing hour, the celebration at Potsdam continued without him. There, after what felt like an eternity of names, medals and handshakes, Oskar finally reached the bottom of the enormous parchment held in his hand. He glanced down at the final entry, cleared his throat, and raised his voice once more.
"Fritzi Wolf. Assistant cook of the battlecruiser SMS Moltke. Please come forward."
For several seconds, nothing happened. Then, from among the sailors and families gathered below, a very small figure emerged hesitantly from the gardens. The sailor looked terribly out of place amid the polished uniforms and ceremonial dress, clad in kitchen-stained naval clothing that appeared to have survived the battle, the voyage home, and several hours of work without ever encountering a proper laundry. Fritzi climbed the steps with such visible nervousness that Oskar half expected those little knees to give way before their owner reached him.
Karl, however, seemed scarcely to notice anything unusual. By that hour the little man had shaken thousands of hands, spoken thousands of names, and helped distribute so many decorations that the ceremony had become almost mechanical: take the medal, confirm the name, congratulate the sailor, pose for the photograph, move on. After hours of repetition, even Karl's formidable attention to detail had begun surrendering to exhaustion.
Oskar accepted the final medal and bent down—considerably farther than usual—to fasten it to the tiny sailor's uniform. His fingers moved with the same practised care they had shown hundreds of times that evening, but as he secured the clasp they brushed against considerably more softness beneath the tunic than he had expected. A distinctly girlish squeak escaped Fritzi, and Oskar stopped.
For the first time, he actually looked at Fritzi Wolf.
Dirty-blonde hair escaped from beneath the naval cap, framing a small, unexpectedly delicate face. Long lashes surrounded enormous deep-blue eyes that stared up at him with something approaching terror, while the sailor's cheeks had turned such a furious shade of red that Oskar half expected steam to begin rising beneath the palace lights. Soft, full lips parted as though their owner desperately wished to say something, yet no sound emerged.
Now that he was actually paying attention, the truth was not particularly difficult to discover. The upper buttons of Fritzi's shirt had come slightly loose, exposing enough pale skin and feminine cleavage to make the matter rather obvious, while beneath the deliberately ill-fitting naval clothing was the suggestion of a slight hourglass figure that concealment could disguise only so far. Even the hand she nervously offered him seemed so tiny that his own might have swallowed it whole.
Oskar blinked. Fritzi Wolf was not, apparently, quite the young man described in the Imperial Navy's records. Fritzi Wolf was a very small, very frightened young woman.
At three in the morning, well into the 4th of September, Oskar discovered that he possessed absolutely no energy with which to care.
If this tiny creature had somehow disguised herself, passed through Imperial naval recruitment, and subsequently spent the war aboard one of Germany's battlecruisers hauling potatoes, stirring enormous cooking pots, and feeding several hundred hungry sailors while pretending to be a man, then that was a matter between Fritzi, God, and whichever recruiting officer had failed spectacularly to inspect his newest sailor with sufficient attention. More importantly, the remarks beside her name described her as an exceptionally capable cook: diligent under difficult conditions, reliable under pressure, and highly regarded by the crew. As far as Oskar was concerned, that settled the matter.
Something about her face nevertheless tugged faintly at his memory. Those eyes in particular seemed strangely familiar, as though he had seen them years before staring up at him from very close quarters and under entirely different circumstances. Yet the name Fritzi Wolf meant nothing to him, and despite the unmistakable way she was looking at him—the sort of look he had learned to recognise from women—he was reasonably certain he had never slept with her. Not even by accident. Oskar might forget names, dates, and half the details of an evening, but a pretty face tended to remain with him. Whatever faint familiarity lingered here, however, refused to resolve itself, and after another moment he let the thought go. Instead, he reached down and gently closed one enormous hand around hers.
"Well done, little sailor."
Fritzi's lips parted again, but still nothing came out. Her entire face seemed to catch fire as she stared upward at him, trembling so badly that the newly pinned medal quivered visibly against her chest. Oskar merely smiled. After everything he had become in the public imagination, that sort of reaction was hardly unfamiliar anymore.
"Good work," he repeated warmly.
He released her hand, gave her a friendly pat on the back, and guided her into position for the final official photograph of the ceremony. Karl joined them on Fritzi's other side, displaying no more concern over the discovery of her sex than Oskar had. If he had noticed—and knowing Karl, he almost certainly had—he apparently regarded correcting Imperial naval recruitment records at three in the morning as somebody else's problem.
Fritzi stood between them looking perilously close to fainting. Beside Oskar's immense frame she appeared almost miniature, barely reaching the lower part of his chest, and when he rested a steadying hand behind her, it seemed nearly large enough to span her entire back. To his relief, however, she managed to remain upright.
The photographers called for them to hold still, and magnesium flashes erupted beneath the balcony. For several dazzling seconds, the last sailor to receive a decoration that night was immortalised between the gigantic Crown Prince and his diminutive companion, looking as though she had stumbled into some impossible dream from which she desperately feared waking.
Then it was over.
Oskar stepped away while two servants approached to collect the enormous parchment. Karl immediately took it from them again before they could carry it off, running his eyes down the final section with the grave concentration of an accountant who distrusted the very existence of an empty column. He checked the last line, turned the parchment slightly, and even examined the reverse as though another forgotten sailor might somehow be hiding there. Only when he had finally satisfied himself that no names remained did he release a long breath and surrender the parchment to the waiting servants, who carefully rolled it and carried it away.
"That," Karl announced with profound satisfaction, "is everyone."
Oskar looked down at him and grinned.
"Well done, my little man. Now let's go celebrate."
Below them, the formal ceremony had finally ended, though the party itself showed little intention of dying. The palace had settled into the peculiar, pleasant exhaustion that came when a celebration had continued long past the hour at which sensible people should have gone to bed. The orchestra still played beneath the chandeliers, although more softly now, and only a handful of stubborn couples remained on the dance floor. Out in the gardens, families lingered beneath lamps and covered pavilions while children who had once run laughing between the tables now slept wherever exhaustion had finally defeated them: against their mothers, across sofas, curled beneath blankets or sprawled over their fathers' uniforms without the slightest concern for dignity.
Still, remarkably few people seemed willing to leave.
Sailors lingered beside wives, mothers and children they had wondered whether they would ever see again. Officers sat over half-finished glasses, retelling battles that had already grown slightly larger in the telling. Men who had survived burning ships, torpedoes, storms and British shells laughed together beneath the warm palace lights, reluctant to surrender the night that had welcomed them home as heroes.
Every so often Oskar noticed someone looking toward him.
There was no demand in those glances and no expectation that he say anything more. Most simply watched him for a moment before returning to their families or conversations, as though his presence had somehow become part of the evening itself. Perhaps they merely wanted reassurance that the Iron Prince was really there among them rather than existing somewhere distant in photographs and newspapers. Perhaps, after weeks at war, they simply wanted to remain a little longer inside the strange warmth and safety of that palace night.
Oskar smiled quietly at the thought, but Beside him Karl suddenly went still.
From the Royal Gallery, Oskar followed his gaze down the broad staircase toward the ballroom and narrowed his eyes as Karl started walking away. For several seconds he wondered what his little friend was doing, but the moment Karl turned toward the musicians gathered around the small stage, suspicion became understanding. Oskar knew that walk. Karl was about to perform.
What surprised him was seeing Tanya rise almost immediately and catch Heddy by the hand. She hurried after Karl, dragging the other woman along before Heddy had much chance to protest. Clearly this had been arranged beforehand. Karl reached the stage first and helped them up one after another. Even Tanya's usual confidence faltered slightly as she found herself standing before the Imperial ballroom, while Heddy looked considerably more nervous. Karl, by contrast, seemed perfectly comfortable. Music had become one of his stranger little pastimes over the years, and although he had never pursued it professionally, he had sung before enough audiences to know how to handle one.
Taking the centre between the two women, Karl adjusted his coat and introduced himself with exaggerated formality despite the fact that everyone present already knew perfectly well who he was. Tanya smiled at the absurdity of it, Heddy managed a smaller smile of her own, and then the musicians struck the opening beat.
Oskar immediately sighed and covered his face with one hand.
"Oh, God."
It was Karl's Prison Block Rock again. He had heard this performance before.
Karl began to sway with the rhythm almost at once, shoulders and hips moving with a confidence that looked thoroughly improper upon Germany's famously severe little administrator. Then came the singing, his rich baritone carrying easily across the ballroom while Tanya and Heddy joined him from either side. They were actually rather good together, and within moments the room had brightened around them. Conversations stopped, people turned toward the stage, and laughter and applause began spreading through the crowd as Karl strutted between the two women like he had been born there.
Oskar watched them for a moment with an amused smile before becoming aware that the little sailor was still standing beside him. Fritzi remained rooted to the spot, staring up at him with enormous blue eyes and looking as though she were engaged in a desperate struggle to summon enough courage to speak. Yet the instant Oskar caught her gaze, she dropped her eyes, clasped her hands tightly before herself, and froze all over again.
The sight was so endearing that Oskar nearly laughed, though he spared Fritzi the embarrassment. Whatever the little sailor was desperately trying to work herself up to saying could wait. His attention had already wandered across the ballroom, over the scattered tables and lingering guests, until it settled upon a small gathering that brought an immediate warmth to his chest.
His writers.
There were only a handful of them around that table, and beside the admirals, ministers, industrialists, and princes filling the palace they might have appeared almost insignificant. To Oskar, however, they were anything but. These were the people entrusted with giving shape to the worlds, legends, and stories that crowded his imagination; the little company that took fragments of vision and turned them into words others could actually read.
More than that, they had become part of something larger. Under his patronage they were gathering old German tales, restoring forgotten legends, breathing life into history, folklore, and cultural memory that Oskar believed generations of neglect had allowed to fade. Armies could defend a nation and factories could strengthen it, but these people were helping it remember what it was. He was immensely proud of them.
Then he saw Edith, and for a moment Oskar simply stopped.
She looked nothing like the quiet writer he was accustomed to finding surrounded by papers and half-finished manuscripts. Her raven-black hair had been left long and loose, falling in thick, glossy waves over her shoulders and down her back, the chandelier light drawing only the faintest warm sheen from its darkness. Her magnificent emerald-and-ivory gown hugged her graceful figure before spilling into sweeping skirts, making her seem less a woman seated in a royal ballroom than some lady of an ancient woodland court drawn from one of the very story ideas he had once entrusted to her imagination.
Fine leaves and delicate silver embroidery traced the fabric, while at her throat hung a magnificent silver pendant shaped almost like a star, its intricate design impossibly familiar. It rested just above the hollow of her breasts, catching the light with every small movement—and Oskar's eye at once.
A chill ran pleasantly down Oskar's spine.
It was ridiculous. He knew perfectly well that Edith was an Englishwoman sitting in a German palace, not some immortal lady stepped from the pages of a fantasy. Yet some deeply buried, thoroughly childish part of him was suddenly delighted beyond reason.
A broad smile spread across his face.
Without another thought he started down the stairs and across the ballroom toward her. Fritzi hurried after him on tiny legs, still apparently determined not to lose sight of the prince who had just decorated her, though Oskar had already forgotten she was there.
Edith noticed his approach almost immediately. Surprise flashed through her bright grey eyes and brightened her face as she rose from her chair just as he reached the table.
"Your Highness—"
Oskar stopped her with an uplifted hand. He stepped directly before her, towering over her far smaller figure, and, to Edith's astonishment, gave her a small bow instead.
"Please, my lady, none of that. Sit. Be comfortable."
His eyes travelled appreciatively over the extraordinary emerald-and-ivory gown, lingering for a moment upon the silver pendant glittering at her throat before returning to her face. His expression had become almost boyishly pleased. Then, with effortless courtesy, he reached for the back of her chair and drew it out for her.
"Tonight, if anyone ought to be bowing, I think it should be me. It is not every day one finds such a lady of legend."
Edith stared up at his immense figure, warmth rising into her usually cheerful face. For perhaps the first time that evening, even her ready wit seemed momentarily to desert her. She could not quite decide whether the Crown Prince was teasing her or simply indulging in some extravagantly gallant joke at her expense.
Then she caught the unmistakable gleam of delight in his eyes. One dark eyebrow lifted almost imperceptibly as understanding dawned upon her.
Ah, so that was it.
The corner of her mouth curled into that familiar, knowing Edith smile, though the faint colour in her cheeks stubbornly remained as she allowed him to guide her back into her seat. Oskar casually pushed the chair into place behind her, apparently oblivious to how absurdly easy the gesture looked for a man of his size.
Only then did he notice the two conspicuously empty places nearby.
His smile faded.
"Where are Ronald and Hilary?"
Edith hesitated.
Oskar glanced down at her, his brow furrowing. "Where are my favourite writing brothers?"
For a moment Edith simply looked at him, faint confusion replacing her amusement, as though she had assumed he already knew the answer.
"They're at the front, Your Highness."
Oskar stared at her.
"The front?"
Edith nodded, and to Oskar's growing horror there was unmistakable pride in her expression. "They wanted to do more than write about courage. Your speeches affected them deeply, and with everything happening—the war, the feeling that everyone ought to contribute—they decided they should do their part as well." Her smile warmed. "They were very brave about it. Both of them."
Several of the other writers around the table nodded approvingly.
Oskar's stomach sank.
He had gathered these people precisely because he understood how valuable they were. He had given the brothers security, patronage, books, time, and every possible opportunity to write, hoping that one day they might help create something extraordinary.
Apparently he had also inspired them to go and get themselves shot.
"My God," he murmured, colour draining from his face. "They did what?"
At his side, Fritzi finally spotted an opportunity to be useful. She intercepted a passing servant, seized a glass of wine from the tray, and presented it to Oskar with both hands.
He scarcely looked at it.
"No alcohol. Go get me my milk."
He pointed absently toward the Royal Gallery.
Fritzi followed his finger up the grand staircase, past the Imperial guards and toward the private tables occupied by the Kaiser and his family. Her mouth slowly fell open.
Oskar had already forgotten her again.
He pulled out the chair beside Edith and sat down, all thoughts of Elven ladies and magnificent gowns temporarily driven from his mind.
"Start from the beginning. When did they leave? Where were they sent? And what, exactly, did those two idiots volunteer to do?"
Edith turned toward him, already beginning her explanation.
Behind them, Fritzi Wolf swallowed, squared her tiny shoulders, and began the terrifying journey toward the Royal Gallery.
Her prince had asked for milk, and she was absolutely going to get him some.