“You walked right into my hands.” Yurovsky twirled his pistol around his finger.
Zash’s eyes closed slowly. “The spell inside me . . . that was from you. At the Revda train station.”
“A tether spell. The last spell your dear babushka ever made, I’m afraid.”
Zash paled and he clung to a tree for support. I fumbled at my throat for the Matryoshka doll, but Yurovsky darted his pistol toward me. “Ah, ah, ah. You’ll hand those spells over to me or I’ll send a bullet into the body of that boy.”
That boy. Alexei. The tsarevich of Russia. I planted myself between Alexei and Yurovsky, but Yurovsky only laughed. “I can tell by your face that you know I’m not the only one here.”
The click, click, click of other pistols behind us, around us, thrust my hopes deeper into darkness. Iisus, what do we do?
“Give me the doll.”
I shook my head before he even finished demanding it. I would give up any spell he wanted, if only to keep Alexei safe. But this final spell was the only way to heal Alexei. If I gave it up, Yurovsky would kill us anyway.
“I don’t ask twice.” Yurovsky stepped left and fired. Alexei jerked and flumped onto his back. I screamed. Yurovsky fired again into Alexei’s stomach.
I threw myself over Alexei. “No! No, no no!”
“Give me the doll!” Yurovsky shrieked, brandishing his pistol. I was too busy trying to plug the two holes in Alexei’s abdomen to care if he shot me in the back.
“Alexei! Alexei!” My body yearned to collapse. My mind ached to shut down. But beneath the panic flowing over me came the calm logic that had guided so much of my life. It sped through my brain so quickly it was as though time stopped.
The only way out of this was to get us to Dochkin. And the only way to do that was with a tiny glowing bean of a carved doll I’d dropped in my sleep last night. It sat half buried by leaves beside Alexei’s ear, calling to me. Romanov. Romanov. Romanov.
There was still no seam. No word. But finally, there was clarity.
I inched my bloody hand toward the piece and wrapped my fingers around it as if physically grasping a final hope.
“Give him the doll, Nastya.” Zash’s voice crawled into the forest, bringing with it a cold silence.
“N . . . No . . . ,” Alexei whimpered beside me, beneath a blanket of blood.
I gripped the little doll even tighter. So this was it. Yurovsky was back—the main contender for Zash’s loyalty. And Zash was choosing him. Again.
We were always meant to be on opposite sides of a pistol.
“Give it to him!” Zash yelled.
“No!” I curled in on myself, hunched over Alexei’s body. In the darkness of my own shadow, I slipped the small doll into my mouth. It tasted of metal and was salty from the blood. But there was also the bright burn of magic. I fought a gag and forced a swallow. Down it went, leaving the spell in its wake on my tongue.
Yurovsky cocked his pistol, but Zash strode to me and yanked my arms away. “Give it to him or you’ll be shot!”
Didn’t he realize Yurovsky would shoot us anyway?
But then Zash snatched the bigger Matryoshka doll—the empty husk from the last spell—out of my sleeve and threw it toward Yurovsky. In the noise of Yurovsky scrambling for the doll, Zash whispered, “Now.”
He hadn’t been betraying me. He’d been using it as an excuse to get near me. To hold my hand so when I used the new spell, whatever it did would happen to all of us.
He took my left hand and I gripped Alexei with my right. But Joy still stood guard over Alexei’s head and I didn’t have a free hand. “Zash,” I gasped. “Joy.”
By this point Yurovsky had opened the doll husk and found it empty. “Not so fast,” he growled.
Zash grabbed Joy by the ear just as Yurovsky lunged forward. Pistols fired and pain exploded in my neck.
Drenched in my brother’s blood, I screamed out the final spell. A name. “Dochkin!”
35
The world dissolved around us.
We were falling. Flying. Spinning through darkness and it was all I could do to keep my grip on Alexei and Zash. My body grew thin and weightless, then heavy and sluggish, then finally balanced back out. The spinning stopped. And I blinked color back into the world.
Bright greens, flickering blue, startling sunlight.
We were still in the woods, but no longer in the wild.
We’d been moved to a flourishing garden of trimmed grass, twisted rosebushes, and a stone-laid brook winding through it all. Gravel dug into my knees. Alexei lay in a heap on the ground before me, Joy swaying drunkenly at his swollen head. My hands pressed on Alexei’s chest as his blood seeped into the rocks beneath us.
Behind me, Zash grappled with another body—an angry, disheveled Bolshevik body.
Yurovsky had come with us.
Zash needed help. But one name chanted from the blood around my knees louder than the rest. Romanov. Romanov. Romanov.
Alexei lay paler than a snowfall. The world turned to silence around me. Through the haze of my panic, I saw the gravel path led to a carved house of wood and I knew where we were—not through recognition, but because the spoken spell had woven the answer with the threads of my veins.
Dochkin’s home. He was here. We were here.
“Nastya!” Zash croaked from behind. I spun, halfway to my feet before I caught his next strained words. “Get him . . . to . . . Dochkin.”
Just like that, the conflict in my soul between staying and helping Zash and saving my brother was loosed like a snapped rope. I gathered Alexei into my shaking arms, his blood sliding across my skin. His breath undetectable.
Though he weighed hardly more than the shoulder pack I’d carried the past few days, my knees threatened to buckle as I rose. My ribs screamed. I stumbled through the gravel, small stones jamming between the worn cloth of my shoes and my tender skin.
I reached the door, hefted Alexei over my shoulder, and lifted the latch. Before I entered, I looked back over my shoulder. Zash was on the ground, a hunting knife clenched in his fist, pinned beneath Yurovsky.
Iisus, help him.
I entered the house. “Help!” I blinked against the sudden dimness, willing my eyes to adjust. “Help! Help! Please, Vasily Dochkin!” The first thing that came into view was a quilted bed across the room. I managed two steps toward it before my legs gave out. I slammed into the wood floor, clutching Alexei close so he wouldn’t bruise.
But then he was weightless. Lifted from my arms and transported to the bed by two weathered arms of an old man. He had a long mustache and a bald head.
A sob rose in my throat. “Save him . . . please.” I pressed a fist against my chest and stared at the blood—the life—flowing out of my brother. Already dripping from the quilt onto the wood floor.
Dochkin bent over Alexei, tearing open Alexei’s uniform—buttons flying everywhere. “Come press on this wound.”
I was on my feet mere seconds after the word come. I pressed the palms of my hands over a bubbling red wound in Alexei’s abdomen. The moment I plugged the hole, Dochkin rushed to the kitchen.
His home was a wide one-space cottage. To my right rested a kitchen of sorts, covered in scraps of food but also bottles of ink and pieces of parchment. A double window lay propped open and birds pecked at seed on the sill, some hopping into the house and others flying around in the rafters.
Dochkin sifted through the bottles and jars. Alexei gave a shuddering gasp. I swung my attention back to him. His gasp turned to a gurgle. A wet cough. “Dochkin!” I screamed, pressing harder. But Alexei had more than one wound. I couldn’t stop them all. His body was a cracked dam, leaking and growing weaker. About to crumble entirely.
My scream echoed in the still house, mixing with the noise of clattering bottles and the scuffle outside. I twisted toward the kitchen. “Doch—” I choked.
Yurovsky had entered, silent as a cougar. He leaped at Dochkin from behind and pressed his knife to the spell maste
r’s throat. Dochkin clutched a black jar in one hand, its stopper stained with silver-rainbow smears. Spell ink.
Where was Zash?
“Release the jar and surrender,” Yurovsky growled. “You are a traitor to your country.”
With a shaking hand Dochkin passed the jar to Yurovsky. The moment it passed from old weathered fingers to bloodstained ones, Zash stumbled into the cottage. Half his face was bashed in and a nasty gash across his hairline poured blood down his face. He held a river rock and rubbed a fist against his eyes as he took in the scene.
Alexei’s body stilled beneath my hands. “Alexei.” I freed one hand only to plug another wound. “Don’t give up! Alexei!”
Zash swayed but lifted the river rock, setting his gaze on Yurovsky. But Yurovsky threw first. The ink jar sailed across the room and smashed against Zash’s temple, glistening spell ink splashing everywhere. Zash collapsed to the floor, blood like a halo rippling around him. No. No!
The ink from the smashed jar rolled in a thick stream toward my boots.
“It knows your blood.” Dochkin pinned me in place with the intensity of his stare.
“Silence, old man!” Yurovsky gripped him tighter.
Dochkin’s throat bobbed against the knife blade and he spoke again. To me. “The ink is loyal to the Romanov—”
Slice. Splash. Fall.
Dochkin sank in a shredded heap, his throat split open like a seam. Time slowed. Even my scream of dismay seemed to take thrice as long to escape my mouth.
Our one hope. Our spell master. Our life. Gone.
My body processed the hopelessness before my mind did. My hand slipped from Alexei’s wound. My eyes blinked against the flash of sun on Yurovsky’s raised knife. My knees slammed into the silver of the spell ink.
The ink mixed with blood—mine, Zash’s, Alexei’s, Dochkin’s.
Yurovsky turned a murderous gaze to me. My heart barely beat enough to process my end, let alone my smothered hope. There was peace in an end. Death would come as a relief . . .
. . . but not at Yurovsky’s hand. I couldn’t let him take that from me—not after he’d taken everything else.
Yurovsky stepped over Dochkin’s body—using it as though it were a mat for him to wipe his shoes. Dochkin let out a gurgle under the pressure of Yurovsky’s step.
Yurovsky’s boots splashed into the shimmering spell ink that still held its rainbow color despite the blood everywhere. The blood that chanted my name. Romanov. Romanov. Romanov.
The reminder startled me awake. The emotions and heartbreak flowed back into my body and I let them—I let them fuel me.
I was Romanov.
I would not kneel while this man cut me down. I had never surrendered to failure, and I wouldn’t start today. Yurovsky’s shadow fell over me, he was so close. I closed my eyes and hummed the hymn that Mamma and my sisters would sing each night. It wasn’t a spell song, but it was the only song I had.
I plunged my hand into the spell ink that had gathered in small pools in the cracks of the floor. Light awoke in my mind, like a flickering star falling closer and closer to earth, growing brighter and more stunning even though it fell to its death. The spell ink warmed between my fingers, like gloves on a winter day.
“The Romanov line is ended.” Yurovsky’s voice came as though through a pool of water. Muffled and distant, even though I felt the energy from his body hovering over mine.
A streak of white and red burst through the open door and launched itself at Yurovsky. Joy, sporting her own battle wounds, clamped down on Yurovsky’s meaty thigh. He roared, but I barely heard it over the song that now seemed to be singing itself in my mind.
I dove for Zash’s hand and yanked him closer. His body slid easily across all the blood. Joy yelped. I tangled my other fingers with Alexei’s limp ones. In a last thought, I pulled Dochkin’s arm out from where it was lodged under his body and clamped his and Zash’s together in mine.
Joy went silent.
Yurovsky dug his nails into the skin of my fuzzy scalp and a wet blade hit my throat. I let the spell ink turn to fire on my skin. I didn’t know what I was doing, just that I was doing it with all the hope and faith left in my body.
I yanked free of Yurovsky’s touch. And as his blade cut into my neck, I whispered a final word. The only word I had.
“Ajnin.”
36
I saw my body fall.
I watched my own blood join the mixture of three dying souls.
But it had not been silenced. I could still hear it. Romanov. Romanov. Romanov.
Yurovsky stood over me, his arm still raised, his knife still slick, his face still manic. As though he had not yet realized it was over. He’d cut the life out of me. I was at his feet—the way he’d always wanted me.
But I was also standing at his side. Tall. Ethereal. Alive.
It had worked. The spell worked—on me, at least. I didn’t know how. I didn’t understand why. But I rushed to Alexei’s side. I tried to shake his shoulder, but my hand went through his body. No. No. I needed his ethereal form. I needed him alive! This was my last hope.
Yurovsky stumbled away from his battlefield and plopped into one of the few kitchen chairs. He stared at our bodies. “It is done,” he said quietly. “I am most loyal.”
Let him revel in his victory. Let him think he’d won. Meanwhile, my heart was crumbling.
Zash’s own ghostly form raised itself to all fours, staring at his bashed body beneath him. My first breath of relief expelled from my lungs. He stumbled to his feet, a confused and terrified frown on his face.
Then he saw my fallen form—the one that Yurovsky had cut. And he fell to his knees beside it with a strangled cry. He moved to gently lift my head, but his hands went straight through me.
“I’m right here,” I choked, stepping from beside Alexei.
Zash’s head snapped up, his eyes wide as saucers. He pulled himself upright and I barely made it into his arms before the sobs came. “The spell worked. We’re ethereal. But . . . but I was too late. Alexei. He’s . . . he’s . . .”
“He’s not feeling too well,” came the young sarcastic voice.
I gasped and spun. Alexei’s ghost form sat up from his dying physical body. He swung his ghost legs over the edge of the bed and grimaced. “It’s not quite like last time, Nastya. I feel very weak this time.”
“Well, I should expect so.” Dochkin’s form rose from its lump of a body. “I’m surprised you’re alive at all.”
There was nothing else to do. I shrieked. Not in fright. Not yet in joy—the shock was still too new. But in . . . hope, maybe? “You’re all alive!”
Dochkin nodded. “For now. And only thanks to your quick thinking.”
I held tightly to Zash’s hand and took Alexei’s in the other. “How did I do that?”
“Well, I wasn’t exactly paying attention to what you were doing—since I was bleeding out, you know—but I told you the ink is loyal to the Romanov name, because I am loyal to the Romanov name . . . and I crafted the ink.”
“So . . . it just obeyed?”
“It is like the ink inside the Matryoshka doll. Do you know how my doll worked?”
“It released the next spell at certain times,” I said. “I couldn’t figure out if there was a pattern.”
“The doll created spells according to your need. The ink in each was not formed into a spell until it was needed. Each layer heard your pleas, sensed the needs of the Romanov family, and then became the spell you needed at the time. That is why I hide away in my little cottage. Only I have ever been able to set such a spell as that. I use my own language—known to no other spell master. My Matryoshka spells are the closest thing to a wish. That is why the commandant wanted to find me so terribly. I’m too powerful an enemy to the Soviets.”
Zash seemed to have swallowed his confusion enough to join the conversation. “But the spell that zoomed west. How did that help us? It gave us nothing other than to head west—no specifics on how to f
ind you.”
Dochkin’s mustache crinkled. “It was not intended to give you directions. If you recall”—his gaze slid to meet mine—“you were whispering your needs to the doll. That spell brought those desires to me so I could start on the spells for your arrival.”
It took three swallows to dislodge my voice. “So . . . you have the spells I wished for?” I thought about my desires that I’d proclaimed to the doll—that Alexei would be healed and that Dochkin would reverse the pain of my family’s deaths. That he would undo the entire event.
A clatter startled all four of us as Yurovsky tossed the bloodied knife onto the floor. He seemed to have caught his breath and stood from his chair. He then faced the many bottles on Dochkin’s table.
Dochkin took a deep breath, watching Yurovsky pick up one bottle and examine the handwritten label. “Yes, Nastya. I have the spells you asked for, but they will not be what you expect.”
I shifted my gaze from Yurovsky and his greedy fingers and landed on Alexei. The spells weren’t what I expected? Why didn’t that surprise me? “You can save Alexei, can’t you?”
“I’ve managed to make a spell that will restore his body to a state without bruises or bleeding or wounds, but his hemophilia will remain.”
“Nothing I haven’t dealt with before,” Alexei croaked from the bed. “And that’s far more healing than I’ve ever had before.” He fixed Dochkin with a serious look. “Do you think you can apply the spell in time for me?”
Dochkin shook his head and my heart might as well have stopped. “I cannot, my tsarevich. But your sister, the grand duchess, will be the one who might.”
“Because you won’t heal in time to apply it,” I concluded.
He gave me a grim smile. “I’m not going to heal at all, Grand Duchess. I will not survive the return. A throat slit is a race between suffocation and bleeding out. I suspect your spell caught me with mere seconds left.” He patted my arm. “It’s time for you to go.”
I stumbled back. “But . . . we need you!”
“I’m old, and I did what I could for my tsar.” He toyed with his mustache like Papa used to, hiding a sad smile.
Romanov Page 24
