Tsarina

by Patrick, J. Nelle

  “Where are we going?” Emilia asked me. I wondered that she assumed I had a plan.

  “How far are we from the Babushka’s house?” I asked Leo.

  “Not far,” he muttered. “You two doubled back on yourselves.”

  I exhaled. “All right. Come on.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “Ready?” I asked, grimacing as I looked at the blue, swollen spot near Leo’s elbow. He was down to a thin undershirt, the sleeve of which we’d rolled up as high as possible in order to see the break better. Despite the fire we’d built in the hearth, he was shivering from the combined cold and pain.

  “There’s no vodka,” Emilia called from the kitchen, letting a cabinet slam shut. “Sorry. I looked everywhere.” She didn’t sound terribly sorry, which seemed quite reasonable.

  “Figures,” Leo muttered. He gave me a hard look. “How bad is this going to hurt?”

  “More than stubbing your toe, less than getting shot. You’re a wrestler, I thought you’d be better with pain.”

  “I’m terrible with pain,” Leo admitted. “That’s why I just win at wrestling before I get hurt. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  I didn’t answer; instead, I grabbed Leo’s forearm and pressed hard against it with my thumbs. He jerked in pain, howled loudly, then fell backward as I pulled my hands away. He heaved himself to sitting, beads of sweat rolling down his face.

  “I always had a knack for setting breaks,” I said, smiling at my handiwork. Emilia walked to my side, handed me a kitchen towel, and helped me fashion it into a sling. Leo watched us, at first suspiciously, but then as if he suddenly could think of nothing at all to say. I rose, aware of how I was now unnecessarily close to him, and sat in one of the rocking chairs. Leo remained by the fireplace, back pressed against the wall as Emilia stoked the fire. She and I were barefoot, our heels wrapped in cold compresses to help the swelling go down.

  We were silent for a long time, during which Emilia brought over hot water with lemon in it for me, though the lemon was old and hardly flavorful enough to make it taste like anything. She sat down on the edge of the Babushka’s bed, held her cup tightly in her hands to warm her palms.

  “So,” Leo said, slumping down even more against the hearth. “You ran.”

  Emilia and I stayed silent; I sat up straight in the rocking chair. The three of us were at an impasse, one I knew we all recognized. Emilia and I couldn’t allow Leo to tell the Reds about our escape. Yet we clearly weren’t built for this end of Saint Petersburg. Yes, escaping again would be easy enough—especially with Leo’s arm hurt—but making it far with our virtue intact felt impossible.

  Leo adjusted the sling, fidgeted for a few moments like he wasn’t quite sure what to say. “I can’t believe you fit through the window. Makes me look like a complete fool.” He paused, met my eyes as he added, “I wouldn’t want anyone to find out, in fact, what an idiot I was.”

  “That would be embarrassing, indeed,” I answered, the tiniest bit relieved. That was settled, at least—he wasn’t planning to tell the Reds about our escape. There was no need to worry about Emilia being sent to the Fortress.

  “So,” Leo said cautiously. “We’ll need to leave early, tomorrow, to catch the morning train to Moscow.” He said this in a stilted way, an unspoken threat in his voice—that while he wouldn’t tell the other Reds this time, if we refused to go, he’d have no choice but to report us.

  But our plan could still work, perhaps. We could find Emilia’s uncle when we arrived, hand Leo over, go get the Constellation Egg from the Babushka. It was even better than before, actually; it meant Leo would pay for kidnapping us instead of running free in Saint Petersburg. I nodded, then glanced at Emilia meaningfully; she quickly looked away, but it was clear she understood that we weren’t going along as placidly as it might look.

  “Just don’t run again,” Leo said, interrupting my thoughts. “This area isn’t safe for anyone, but especially people like you. I can’t protect you if you don’t stay with me.”

  “And what if I don’t want your protection?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Maybe you don’t want it, Miss Kutepova, but right now you need it. Perhaps one day you won’t and we’ll reevaluate the arrangement.”

  “I look forward to it,” I said briskly, and Leo almost smiled, but stopped just short.

  “What’s this?” Emilia asked. She motioned to an assortment of bags at the foot of the bed, partially hidden by blankets. In a nest created by the folds was a kerchief with a half-dozen vegetables—carrots, beets, potatoes, all of which were small and scraggly-looking. Still, I couldn’t remember when I’d been so happy to see a carrot. My stomach rumbled—we hadn’t eaten since the tailor’s.

  “Food,” Leo said, sounding strangely embarrassed. “I got it while I was out.”

  “We can make soup!” Emilia said. “I saw a pot.”

  The glee in her voice broke me a bit; to be so happy over making a meager meal, while kidnapped, after nearly being assaulted . . . it seemed especially sad. Leo gave me a grim look, and for a moment I felt a certain strange solidarity with him in our shared pity for Emilia. I rose, followed her to the kitchen where she fumbled with a pot of water. Neither of us knew much about cooking—we’d never needed to, before—but we managed to break the vegetables into pieces and throw them in boiling water.

  “You should add some spices,” Leo suggested. He was still sitting by the fireplace, but had moved to face us. He shrugged—wincing, since it pulled at his broken ribs—then added, “Pepper, salt, maybe some basil. Whatever’s there.” Emilia paused, then began opening the dozens of tiny ceramic containers that lined one side of the kitchen. She dashed them into the pot with a manic vigor, brown hair falling from its pins. I couldn’t tell if she was moments from laughing or crying as she stirred the pot slowly.

  “There,” she said after fifteen minutes. “It’s done.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “I have no idea,” she said. “But it’s something, at least, isn’t it?”

  There was only one soup bowl in the house, which Emilia gave to me, offering to eat out of some sort of wide-mouthed mug herself. I glanced at Leo, who was studying his sling again; Emilia inhaled, dropped a serving—a small serving, but a serving—of soup into some sort of gravy boat, and walked it over to Leo. Emilia avoided his eyes, handed the gravy boat over, then joined me in the rocking chairs. I sipped at a spoonful of my soup.

  “This tastes like tea,” I said, frowning.

  “I think some of the spices were teas,” Emilia answered. “The Babushka really should label things better.”

  “I reason she didn’t anticipate strangers making soup in her house,” I said.

  “That makes two of us,” Leo answered, sipping his. It wasn’t good—not by a long shot—but it was something: it was food, it was warm, and it suddenly felt like all I needed in the world. I felt myself relax.

  No. You don’t get to relax until the egg is found. Until you and Alexei are together, forever, and the crown is safe in Romanov hands.

  Which will happen. Once you get to Moscow.

  Emilia fell asleep quickly. I wanted to follow suit, but my mind was too crowded despite the burning exhaustion in my eyes. I sat in the rocking chair, flipping through one of the Babushka’s cheap serial novels, the sweet sort with obsessive lovers and fearless heroines. I kept turning the pages even though it was hard to hold the thin book aloft; my arms were tired, my feet were still wrapped in now-room-temperature rags, and my hand ached from punching the boy in the alley.

  Leo was trying to get comfortable leaning against the hearth—if anyone could find a wall of stones cozy, it’d be him, and yet he appeared to be struggling. He twisted to one side, which apparently tweaked his arm. He winced, clutched it, uttered curses as the pain subsided.

  “It’ll get worse before
it gets better,” I said. “Especially your ribs. The bruises really come out the second day.”

  “Perfect,” Leo said, gritting his teeth as he shifted positions again. “What about the third day?”

  I frowned. “Most patients said it became a dull ache after the third day. Except the ones who had their arms amputated.”

  “You know how to amputate an arm?” Leo said. He was doing his best not to look concerned, but I could see fear in his eyes. Part of me wanted to relish it—after all, he’d caused us plenty of fear, but I’d seen fear like it before, dozens of times in soldiers at the hospital, and Leo’s was just as disconcerting as theirs. Scared young men, younger than they looked, someone’s lover, someone’s brother, someone’s son . . .

  “Tell me you’re not considering cutting my arm off,” Leo said seriously.

  “No,” I answered, blinking. “I don’t know how to cut your arm off. We were nurses, not surgeons.”

  “You and the grand duchesses?” Leo said. He studied his arm as he said this, like there was something interesting to be found in the makeshift sling.

  “Just Olga and Tatiana,” I said. “Olga asked all the young women at court to join her. I suspect it was her idea, in fact, to use the Winter Palace as a hospital.”

  “What about Emilia?”

  I shook my head. “Emilia can’t stand the sight of blood. Or the idea of bathing a man, or the idea of . . . dirt.”

  “I suppose that’s not unexpected.” He looked over at Emilia. “She has always seemed rather . . . delicate.”

  “Right,” I said, though I couldn’t decide if I was offended or not at being called indelicate by comparison.

  “So that’s where you learned to set broken arms,” he continued, looking back to me.

  “Set broken arms. Sew stitches. Patch burns. A handful of things,” I answered.

  “Did you like it?”

  I inhaled, considered the question for a moment before answering. “I liked helping soldiers,” I admitted quietly. “But so many came in with bullet wounds. Horrible, bleeding things.” I cringed, looked at the fire. “There was this one, my first week there. He was shot in the stomach, and the blood came through the bandages. There was just so much, I kept putting more on and more on and he was fading in and out.”

  “What happened to him?” Leo asked.

  “The doctors told me to move on,” I said. “That it was hopeless and there were men who could be saved coming in. The other nurses—most of them were experienced, not nobles—they listened. But I kept putting towels on his stomach, and he kept waking up and looking at me.” I stopped, looked down at the rocking chair, dragging my now-chipped and broken nails across its arm. “And then he died. Just like that, while my back was turned so I could get more towels. And then the man in the bed next to him died, and the man in the bed next to that.”

  “Sometimes,” Leo said, voice strangely rocky. He took a breath. “Sometimes it’s just too late.”

  I shook my head. “It was too late from the start. They never had a chance, not any of them.”

  “A bold thing for a general’s daughter to say.”

  “A thing only a general’s daughter could say,” I corrected. “I may be a lady, but I know the difference between a Gewehr and a Karabiner. I can tell you about every major battle Russia has fought for the last hundred years. I was in Odessa, lived through the rebellion there. And I can tell you, without question, that it’s too late for any man who goes to war. Even if he lives, he’ll never come back the same.”

  I was always so darkly happy to know Alexei would never go to war—would never change, would never bleed, would never hurt. Yet still, every patient I saw in the Red Cross Hospital made me think of him. Every time I failed to heal those soldiers, I saw him in their eyes. Alexei had always existed to me as a boy who needed to be fixed. The boy I was prepared to spend a lifetime fixing. Perhaps the Constellation Egg changed my future every bit as much as the Reds did—because even if I did get the egg before the Reds, if the Romanovs stayed in power and I became Alexei’s tsarina, the life I always anticipated would never happen. It would never be the same—because with the Constellation Egg, Alexei was no longer broken.

  Leo exhaled loud enough that it jarred me from my thoughts, then spoke. “The story is that the egg is what healed the tsarevich. That it’s the reason he’s been so healthy lately.” I didn’t answer, but my silence confirmed Leo’s suspicions. He looked down. “Lucky for him, I suppose, to have that power at his disposal. Unlucky for your soldier shot in the stomach that he wasn’t born the tsar’s son.”

  “I did everything I could for that soldier,” I snapped.

  “Perhaps you did,” Leo answered. “But you’ve never wondered, Natalya, how fair it is that by virtue of being born lucky, you get to rule a country? To never get sick? To be blessed with something like the egg—”

  “Fair?” I asked, shaking my head. “What makes you think the world is interested in fair, Mr. Uspensky? The world is the world, and we’re cast in whatever roles we fall into. It’s not my fault I was born wealthy any more than it’s your fault you were born poor.”

  “So we should just accept our lot and move on?”

  “That’s not what I said,” I answered. “You want to destroy a world of mountains and valleys to create a plain flat field.”

  “This isn’t about mountains or valleys or whatever you’re talking about. It’s about the fact that we’re expected to follow the laws, but have no role in making them. Pay taxes, but have no say in how they’re spent. We’re supposed to trust that a man who happened to be born luckier than the rest of us will do what’s best.”

  “He’s the tsar,” I said, my voice rising on the last word. I glanced at Emilia, waited to make certain I hadn’t woken her. She was still, breath slow and even. I turned back to Leo, continued. “He was educated by the greatest minds of Russia. He’s studied military strategy, agriculture, economics. Who would you trust more than him?”

  “The soldiers,” Leo said. “The farmers. The peasants.”

  “You mean people like Yuri?” I asked. “People like those drunks in the Winter Palace?”

  “And people like me,” he said.

  “Not your soundest argument, as you’re my kidnapper,” I re-minded him.

  “People like you,” he added, interrupting me. “Not you as Alexei’s fiancée. You as a person.”

  “I, as a person, trust my tsar,” I said. Leo sighed, drummed the fingers of his good hand on the hearth.

  “Perhaps we’re too different to ever agree,” he said. “I used to think anyone could be convinced. That people like you just needed to have it explained. That people like you didn’t understand, but could.” He looked up at me; the flames made his eyes look more orange than gray. “But I suppose you thought that about the Reds as well.”

  “I thought the Reds loved Russia,” I said coldly. “I see I’m wrong.”

  Leo firmed his jaw, somehow making it even more square. He inhaled deeply and looked over at Emilia, like he wanted to yell but was torn over waking her. Finally, he shifted, laid down in front of the hearth, his back to me. He bent his good arm up under his head as a makeshift pillow.

  “Good night, Miss Kutepova,” he said swiftly.

  I rose, was about to turn when a strange shadow caught my eye. Something just outside the kitchen window, bouncing in the breeze, almost like a lantern. I frowned, walked closer—was it a person? An animal? It cast strange shapes along the kitchen floor in the moonlight. I reached the kitchen, pressed my palms against the freezing window to look out.

  The back garden was frosted over, everything coated with tiny threadlike icicles. Except for the thing creating the shadow: a single sunflower. Tall, its stem bright green, thick leaves and a dark brown face curved up toward the moon, like the flower was watching it move across the sky. Rows and rows of fat y
ellow petals that faded to orange as they neared the flower’s center rustled in the wind, velvety and warm-looking.

  I frowned, stepped back from the window. They were all dead earlier, weren’t they? I was sure of it. Yet here it was, alive.

  Alive despite the cold.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Emilia and I woke to the sound of the Neva lapping at its banks, angry with the light rainstorm that had descended upon Saint Petersburg. I blinked, searched for Leo—he wasn’t by the fire, where I’d last seen him. Had he decided to go tell Viktor about our escape after all?

  “We’ll need to leave soon,” Leo said, voice low. I snapped my head around, realized he was peering out the window we climbed through yesterday. I felt my heart jump—did he see the sunflower? How could he possibly miss it? It had been right in the window last night. I hadn’t told him about it, hadn’t even woken Emilia to tell her. What made it bloom in the cold? Maybe it was because the Constellation Egg had been in this house; maybe it was the mystic herself, I had no idea. Either way, I didn’t understand it enough to inform Leo or to frighten Emilia. Leo stepped away from the kitchen looking bored.

  “What were you looking at?” I asked, so quickly that Leo tried to lift an eyebrow. He was met with little success, as that eye was still a bit swollen. I was impressed, though, that it hadn’t blackened entirely.

  “The Neva,” he said. “It looks miserable.”

  I exhaled—so the sunflower was gone. I found myself suddenly wondering if it had really been there to begin with. Did I imagine it? I frowned, put a hand to my temple. My movement woke Emilia. She yawned, tossed a bit, and sat up beside me, hair a knotted mess. She sighed, as if she had been dreaming of someplace else, and straightened her dress.