The Ember Trail

The bell above the shop door has been broken since Tuesday. I know this because I fixed it myself on Monday, and by Tuesday it was dangling from its bracket like a hanged man, and now it's Thursday and I'm standing on a stepladder with a screwdriver between my teeth while a man in a very expensive coat pretends not to stare at my ass.

He's not subtle. The coat is cashmere, charcoal, the kind of thing that costs more than my monthly rent. His shoes are Italian. His watch is Swiss. Everything about him screams money and nothing about him says antiquities dealer, which is what he claimed when he called this morning and asked if I had any pre-war Slavic iconography.

I don't. Not for him, anyway.

"Are you going to stand there all day," I say around the screwdriver, "or are you going to tell me what you actually want?"

He shifts his weight. The floorboards under him creak, old wood complaining about new money. "I was told you specialize in certain... esoteric items."

I take the screwdriver out of my mouth and point it at him. "I specialize in not being lied to. Try again."

The shop smells like dust and beeswax and the faint chemical tang of the restoration solvent I've been using on a nineteenth-century samovar that turned out to be a twentieth-century fake. Through the front window, Kraków's gray afternoon light filters in, catching the edges of brass candlesticks and tarnished silver frames. A tram rattles past on the street outside. The whole building shivers.

"My name is Aleksei Volkov," he says. "I represent a private collector who is interested in the Drakos medallion."

The screwdriver slips. I catch it before it hits the floor, but barely. My heart does something complicated in my chest, a kind of stutter-step that I haven't felt in years. The medallion. The one my mentor died for. The one I've been chasing through auction records and museum archives and the kind of back-alley dealers who don't advertise in any directory.

"I don't know what that is," I say.

"Of course you don't." He smiles. It's a good smile, practiced, the kind that's meant to disarm. It doesn't work on me. "But you have a reputation, Dr. Kowalczyk. Your work on Balkan pre-Christian iconography was quite influential. Before you left the field."

Before you left the field. Like it was a choice. Like I woke up one morning and decided to abandon a decade of research because I felt like selling vintage postcards to tourists instead. I climb down from the stepladder and set the screwdriver on the counter. My hands are steady. That surprises me.

"You've done your homework," I say. "So you know I don't have it."

"I know you don't have it yet."

The words land like a slap. I keep my face still. I've had a lot of practice at that. "Get out of my shop."

"Dr. Kowalczyk—"

"Get out of my shop before I call the police and tell them there's a Russian oligarch's errand boy harassing a legitimate business owner."

Something flickers behind his eyes. Not anger. Amusement. That's worse. He reaches into his coat and pulls out a card, cream-colored, heavy stock, embossed with nothing but a phone number. No name. No logo. He sets it on the counter next to the screwdriver.

"When you find it," he says, "and you will find it, because you've been looking for it for six years, call that number. The collector is prepared to pay generously. And Dr. Kowalczyk?"

I don't answer.

"He's not the only one looking."

He leaves. The door closes behind him with a soft click, and the broken bell doesn't ring, and I stand there in the silence of my shop surrounded by other people's history, and I feel the familiar weight of paranoia settling onto my shoulders like a coat I can't take off.

I pick up the card. The paper is thick, textured. I turn it over. Blank on the back. I should throw it away. I should burn it. Instead I slide it into the pocket of my leather jacket, next to the medallion I wear around my neck, the one that belonged to my mother, the one that has nothing to do with any of this.

Or so I've always told myself.

The samovar is still waiting on the workbench in the back room, its fake patina mocking me. I've been restoring it for a client who thinks he's found a piece of the Romanov treasury. He hasn't. It's a decent forgery from the 1970s, probably Czech, but he paid a deposit and I need the money, so I'll finish the work and send it back with a polite note explaining that his great-grandmother was either mistaken or a liar.

That's my life now. Polite notes. Fake samovars. A shop that barely breaks even. And a dead man's voice in my head, telling me that the medallion is real, that it exists, that it can change everything.

I met Professor Nowak when I was twenty-three, a doctoral student with too much confidence and not enough sense. He was sixty-one, chain-smoked unfiltered cigarettes, and had spent forty years chasing a legend that his colleagues laughed at behind his back. The Drakos medallion. A Byzantine artifact from the twelfth century, supposedly commissioned by a emperor who wanted to control the tides of fortune. It disappeared during the Fourth Crusade. It resurfaced in Hungary in the 1600s. Then in Venice. Then in the hands of a Romanian boyar who was murdered by his own servants. Then nowhere.

Nowak believed it was real. He believed it had power. Not magic, he'd say, waving his cigarette, just a kind of concentrated luck. A focal point for probability. He believed that whoever held it would find their path smoothed, their enemies confounded, their desires fulfilled. And he believed that a secret society called the Order of the Dragon had been hunting it for centuries, killing anyone who got too close.

He died in a car accident outside Sibiu. The brakes failed. The police report said mechanical error. I knew better.

I still know better.

The shop phone rings. I let it ring three times before I answer, because that's what I do now. Let things wait. Let them prove they're worth my attention.

"Monika?" The voice is warm, familiar, tinged with a Ukrainian accent that makes my chest ache. "It's Yuri. I found something. You need to come to Lviv."

Yuri. My old colleague, the only person from my academic life who still speaks to me. He runs a small museum in western Ukraine, specializing in medieval Slavic artifacts. We've been trading information for years, scraps of rumors, auction house whispers, anything that might lead to the medallion.

"What did you find?" I ask.

"A document. A letter from a Venetian merchant, dated 1621. It mentions the medallion by name. And Monika, it says where it was taken."

My hand tightens on the phone. Outside, the tram rattles past again. The gray light shifts. "Where?"

"Kyiv. But that's not the important part. The letter says it was given to a man named Bohdan Khmelnytsky. As a gift. From a Cossack leader who didn't know what he had."

Khmelnytsky. The hetman who led the uprising against Polish rule in the seventeenth century. A man who changed the course of history. A man who, if the legends were true, had a run of impossible luck that defied all explanation.

"When can you meet?" I ask.

"Tomorrow. Take the night train. I'll send you the details."

He hangs up. I stand in my shop, surrounded by fakes and forgeries and the debris of other people's lives, and I feel something I haven't felt in a long time.

Hope. And behind it, like a shadow, the cold certainty that Aleksei Volkov wasn't bluffing. Someone else is looking. Someone who knows my name. Someone who knows what I've been doing.

I lock the shop early. I pack a small bag. I don't call the number on the card.

But I take it with me.