Page 38 of My Queendom for a Horse

“The internet?” Aleks frowns.

“Oh, boy.”

“You need to teach me,” he says. “Where can we study this internet?”

I suppress my laugh. “You can do it anywhere you have service, but listen.” I glance around my room. “You can’t stay here, and there’s no internet in the old barn. I still need to concoct some kind of lie to tell my dad and John, and Mirdza. She’s my best friend, and she’s here a lot. She teaches horseback lessons on our older and retired horses to kids who live in Daugavpils.”

“But Kristiana, I need to study this internet immediately,” he says, for all the world sounding like a melodramatic teenager. “How else will I discover my enemies?”

“Okay, but the internet, as with most records kept by people, always has an angle. You can’t really trust anything you read.”

“I can’t trust it?” He looks absolutely shocked. “If the internet is an unreliable source, then I demand we find a reliable one.”

“I hate to tell you this, but history is always written by the victors, and it seems like that wasn’t you.” I pull out my laptop, and open it up. A few quick taps and it’s booted up, and a few moments later, I’ve pulled up a webpage. “Okay, it seems that the Romanov family wasn’t killed until 1918. Whoops. Off by a year.”

Aleks still looks as if someone struck him between the eyes.

“Are you alright?”

“I will be.” He motions for me to slide over. “I have a lot of things to search up.”

“No, you don’t search them up,” I say. “You search for things like this—” Over the next hour, I try to show him as much as I can about how the internet works, and how to construct a decently successful search.

He spends the time asking me more questions than any preschooler could ever come up with, and practicing making the roundest eyes I’ve ever seen.

A rap at my door distracts me from the rabbit hole I’ve fallen into. “Yes?” I call. “Who is it?”

“It’s me,” my dad says. “We need to talk.”

I may still suspect that Aleksandr may not be a very good person, especially by today’s standards, but hunched over my laptop, typing in words with his index fingers, he doesn’t look like much of a threat. “I’ll be right out.” I drop a hand on Aleks’ shoulder.

He startles.

I drop my voice to a whisper. “I need to talk to my dad. I’m going to tell him I met you in Ireland, and that you begged me to let you come work for us. You found a ride out here. If anyone presses, speak quickly in Russian. Dad knows basics but is easily flustered if you use large words or speak rapidly. Got it?”

He shrugs. “Whatever.”

“No, not whatever.” I glare. “This is my life, and I need my dad and trainer and best friend to believe me when I tell them things. I never lie, but this is a weird situation. You didn’t cause it, I guess, but I had less to do with it than you did.”

“You’re doing it for my good as well,” he says. “I understand.”

“Kris?” Dad’s sounding less understanding.

“Coming.”

“Keep searching,” I say. “Maybe something will stand out to you that means nothing to me.”

“Right.” He turns back to the computer.

And I square my shoulders and exit, bracing myself to face the father I’m going to try to placate with even more lies. “Hey there.”

“I know you’re upset, and I know this mess is my fault,” he says. “But why did you tell me that Mirdza sent that man to us?”

We aren’t really much on small talk, the Liepas.

I sigh. “It felt easier, okay? I knew if I could just say that someone we knew vouched for him, you’d be fine. But—”

“But no one knows him at all. He’s some kind of bizarre stranger who’s sitting in your bedroom right now, wearing Gustav’s clothing.”

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