Tsarina

by Patrick, J. Nelle

  “I can’t even see the passenger cars,” he said. “They’re across the bridge, around the bend.”

  “Can you see why we’re stopped? Is there smoke?” I asked, wondering if the train was broken.

  “No,” he said, looking back in at me. I had to squint to see him, as the sun was growing heavy in the sky just behind his head. “There’s nothing. Except . . . hmm.” He leaned far out of the car and then, before I realized what he was doing, swung out and to the left, vanishing. I rushed to the door, looked over to see Leo clinging to a ladder that led to the top of the train.

  “If there’s ice on that, you’re going to fall and die,” I said.

  “How lucky for you that would be,” Leo answered, and began to climb, using his sling-arm for balance rather than support. There was, in fact, ice toward the top of the car; I saw him struggle with it for a moment, and held my breath until he regained his footing. He vanished over the side, but I could hear his footsteps above my head on the roof.

  I looked at Emilia, who was still sleeping, then up at the ceiling. The view from there must be spectacular—and it seemed a shame to let only the Red see it. I walked back to the door, poked my head around the side to see the ladder. I extended my fingers—I could reach. I could easily reach, which was perhaps more disconcerting, as it meant I had no excuse but cowardice—though that excuse was incredibly persuasive, especially when I looked down at the lake below. The fall might not kill me, but the freezing water certainly would. My stomach twisted, nearly made me lose my balance.

  “You can make it. Just don’t swing too hard.” Leo’s voice was suddenly directly over me. He was crouched at the edge of the car, looking down. “I almost did. It’s not as big a jump as you’re afraid it is.”

  “I’m not worried about the jump,” I grumbled. “I’m worried about the fall.” I held my breath, kept my eyes trained on the ladder, then swung out.

  Leo was right—I hit the ladder easily, wrapped my other hand around the rungs. My fingers burned with cold, but I held fast, then began to climb. It took only moments to reach the top, which turned out to be the most frightening part. I grasped at the roof, crawled my legs up the final few rungs. My right boot heel suddenly slid out from under me, squealing along the ladder. I grabbed tightly to the roof, crooked my other foot to keep from sliding farther.

  Leo dashed forward and grabbed my arms tightly. He didn’t need to—my foot found the support fast enough—but he hauled me up before I could tell him, sat me down atop the train as if I weighed nothing at all. There was a strange moment where I was in his arms, balancing myself. Leo made an apologetic sound in his throat, then stepped back, slinging his uninjured hand into his pocket. I stood with my feet apart, knees bent, arms out, afraid to budge.

  Leo, irritatingly enough, didn’t seem fazed by the height at all, walking casually toward the center. I hobbled behind him, keeping my eyes locked on the metal ground to avoid tripping. It was warmer up here, at least, with the sun directly on us.

  “You came all the way up here to stare at a boxcar?” Leo said. I sighed, looked up.

  And immediately regretted having spent even a half-second looking at a boxcar instead of this view.

  The sky stretched out forever, like a bowl of blue placed on top of us. The sun was setting in the gently sloping mountains on the horizon. Orange, gold, yellow, flickers of purple that glinted off a brush of snow in the fields that stretched for miles and miles. To the east, the fields faded into darkness, making it impossible to tell where the earth ended and the night sky began. This was not like the city, a place measured in blocks and buildings; it went on forever, went on longer than forever, and suddenly I felt very arrogant, to think myself anything grand compared to a place like Russia.

  “A Fabergé egg to rule all this,” I whispered under my breath.

  “To rule, maybe, but not to tame,” Leo answered, tilting his head back. We could see the ideas of stars in the sky, tiny flickers of light that were impossible to find on a second glance. “Being in Saint Petersburg, seeing this . . . it makes me miss Samara,” he said.

  “Why not go back there?” I asked.

  “And leave this lovely train ride with you?”

  I rolled my eyes at him. “You hate the tsar. You had a terrible job in the city. Why not go grow sunflowers again?”

  At this point, something in Leo’s face shifted. He let his eyes fall from the skyline, pried at a bit of the roof with his foot. “I left Samara because of my brother. I haven’t gone back for the same reason.”

  “You don’t . . . get along?”

  “We get along fine—in some ways, better than ever,” Leo said, hooking his fingers in his pockets and chuckling in an unamused way. “He’s dead. He died at Tannenberg. You know of it?”

  “Of course,” I said, torn between being horrified at his joke and overwhelmed with pity. Everyone knew about Tannenberg. The Germans tore the Russian army apart so badly one of the generals killed himself rather than tell the tsar what happened. I suspected the horror stories of that battle were what made Olga insist on noble girls helping the Red Cross nurses.

  “He should never have been there anyhow,” Leo said. “He was older than me, but probably half my weight. And he was the sort always taking in dogs and birds and . . . God, even a snake once. He wrapped a bandage around its head and everything.”

  I smiled despite myself. “Why did he enlist then?”

  “He didn’t,” Leo said. He took a deep breath, lifted his eyes to the horizon once more, like what he wanted to say was written in the trees. “He went to Saint Petersburg to try to find a better job—sunflowers didn’t pay enough once nobles started leaving Russia. He got there, got a job—a good one, making guns for the war—but there wasn’t any food. He’d go to work, and by the time the factories let out, all the shops were closed because there was nothing left to sell.”

  Leo now turned to me, though his eyes danced on and off mine. He licked his lips. “So he joined a group of Reds who wanted things to change. Who wanted the tsar to abdicate, wanted to create a government the people of Russia could trust. A few months later, the tsar’s secret police showed up at his apartment, hauled him out, and stuck him on a train headed to the front with a car full of other prisoners. They threw him into Tannenberg without a gun. Told him to find a dead soldier and just take his.”

  Leo’s jaw was stiff, his shoulders locked as he said this. I could tell he’d related this story dozens of times before, but also that the end never got any easier. Suddenly, I was the one with eyes dancing, unsure where to look.

  “We didn’t know any of that until I came to Saint Petersburg looking for him,” Leo continued. “Another soldier remembered him and told me. I had to write my mother and let her know. I suppose the government didn’t have time. We never even got his body back. He’s just lying in a field somewhere, I suppose.”

  He wasn’t in a field—as a general’s daughter, I knew this. Leo’s brother had been pushed into a mass grave, covered up, and abandoned without so much as a marker. I looked away, scared Leo might read this in my eyes.

  “They opened new factories,” I said meekly. “They made more guns. No one could have predicted the war would go like that—”

  “You aren’t going to convince me,” Leo said, though his voice wasn’t as cruel as I expected. “I know it’s not Alexei’s fault. Maybe it’s not even the tsar’s, deep down—maybe he didn’t know how bad things were. But why would he? How could you know what suffering is, when you’re sitting in a palace, graced by a powerful Fabergé egg? How can you know a soldier’s suffering when your wounds always heal?”

  “That’s why you want the egg for the Reds so badly,” I realized.

  Leo shrugged, looked like he’d said too much. “You said it wasn’t your fault for being born rich any more than it was my fault for being born poor. And you’re right. But if we don’t do any
thing to fix the world, if we just shrug and let children starve and soldiers die and people be treated like cattle . . . if we don’t fix the world, Miss Kutepova, I believe it becomes our fault.”

  I opened my mouth—I could have argued. I could have argued for another day, another week, another month, such was my conviction that the tsar was Russia’s rightful ruler, his reign inhibited rather than helped by the Reds. All my arguments, however, seemed very small, and I instead looked at my hands and said, “I’m very sorry about your brother.”

  “As am I, Miss Kutepova,” Leo said. He nodded toward the horizon. “But, say I did leave Saint Petersburg eventually. I’d want a house right on that spot by the lake, near those trees. I’d be able to see the sun rise and set.”

  “It’d be lovely,” I admitted. “It’s the sort of place Alexei would like to live too. He and his father, they’ve always loved the country—” I stopped when I realized Leo was now looking away, his shoulders suddenly appearing to hang lower on his frame. “Sorry,” I said quickly, though I wasn’t entirely certain what I was apologizing for.

  “It’s fine,” Leo said, but in a way that made me think it wasn’t. “Maybe you and Alexei will live there together, someday.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Tell me this, though,” Leo said, turning to look at me. “You’re afraid for Russia, but not for Alexei. Not at all. Why not?”

  “Simple,” I said. “The Babushka told me Alexei and I would be together when she read my tea leaves.”

  “And you believe her?”

  “I watched a mystic’s powers heal Alexei’s hand, right in front of my eyes. If they can do that, they can read the future.”

  “What if that’s not the future you want? Can you change it?”

  I gave him a confused look. “Why wouldn’t I want to be with Alexei?”

  Leo shrugged. “I don’t know. But there was a time when I thought my fate was to grow old and die on a sunflower farm—and I loved the idea of it. Now I think it’s to help Russia become the country she’s always been meant to be. The future I want has changed.”

  I considered this—it was so difficult to imagine Leo as a farmer. “The Babushka said you can’t change your fate. That no matter what, in the end, what will come will come,” I finally said.

  “Ah,” Leo answered, looking at me. His face was a map of shadows and light, with darkness in the hollows of his cheeks and by his nose, but his eyes bright, sparkling in the sun. He said, softly, “I’m rather sad to hear that, Miss Kutepova.”

  I turned back toward the view, tried to quell the awkwardness spinning around us—miles and miles of unspoiled landscape, and still it felt like we were locked in a tiny room. “You know, if the Reds get their way and divide up everyone’s money, you’ll never be able to afford a house there.”

  Leo exhaled, smiled—really smiled, which was perhaps as alarming as his laugh. “Fair, Miss Kutepova. But what I want because of selfishness and what I want because I know it’s right are two very different things. For example, if we’re being entirely honest, there’ve been several times when I’ve wanted to throw you off this train.” I folded my arms, dared him; he continued. “But I won’t, because I know it isn’t right.”

  “How generous of you,” I said, releasing the smallest of laughs, relieved that the banter was back to normal. “I hope I have the moral fortitude not to roll you out the door in the middle of the night. But you know us nobles. Corrupt to the core.” Leo grinned in response.

  “Natalya?” Emilia’s voice rose from beneath us. “Where are you?”

  “On the roof,” I said.

  “Are you . . . coming down?” she asked warily. “Because I’m certainly not going up there.”

  “Yes,” I said, though I immediately regretted it. I never wanted to come down, because up here, there was no revolution. There were no fires, no protestors, no divide between Russians. There was just space, space that looked plenty big enough for Reds and Whites.

  Space that looked big enough for a hundred different fates.

  I glanced at Leo, then started down the ladder.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Emilia and I huddled together that night, but the following evening, as we rolled along through darkened countryside, she was too cold for me to warm her. Leo and I exchanged worried glances as she struggled to uncurl her purple fingers.

  “That’s it,” he said, shaking his head. He rose, walked to the opposite side of the car, near the broken caviar crates.

  “What are you doing?” Emilia asked faintly.

  “I misspoke earlier,” Leo answered as he hauled wood from the broken crates into a pile by the door. The train was easing to a stop again, as it tended to do every few hours.

  “About what?” Emilia asked him. Her nose was permanently red now, her cheeks sallow in the moonlight that filled the doorway where the sun once had. I imagined I looked similar, which was too unpleasant to think about for long.

  “When I said I’d freeze or starve,” he said, his voice coming from the pitch darkness on the far side of the car. “As it turns out, I don’t much want to do either. We’re building a fire.” He emerged from the black, took the matchbox from his coat pocket, and opened it. He looked up, face in shadow. “There are only three.”

  “Better than zero,” I said. Leo nodded in agreement, then knelt down beside the pyre. He struck the match, keeping a hand over it to protect the flame from the wind.

  It didn’t take hold—there was no kindling, nothing to grab the flame. Leo frowned, then reached up and untied the sling on his shoulder. He winced as his arm relaxed, then opened and shut his fist. I could tell it still hurt—and he had no business taking a sling off so soon—but I kept my mouth shut. Leo balled the sling up and shoved it under a board, then struck the second match. Leo sighed, shook his head.

  “It’s the wood,” he said. “They’ve coated it to keep it from burning. We need something else.”

  The three of us simultaneously looked out the boxcar door as the train fully stopped. It was quiet now, unsettlingly so, and the moon was so bright the forest looked gilded in silver. The field directly outside the boxcar was frosted—anything from the ground would be too wet to burn, I was sure, but within the trees, certainly there was something . . .

  “No,” Emilia said, folding her arms and turning to Leo. “Absolutely not. You’ll get left behind, Leo, and even if you’re a Red, I don’t want you to freeze to death in the middle of nowhere.”

  “I wasn’t going to suggest I go get firewood,” Leo said. “I couldn’t possibly carry enough on my own to even make it worthwhile.”

  “But . . . if all three of us went,” I said.

  Leo nodded. “Exactly.”

  “So we’re all going to freeze to death?” Emilia moaned. She heaved herself to standing, walked to join Leo in the doorway; I was fast behind her. The three of us leaned out, looked down the line at the rest of the train, then to the trees. They were only a minute or two away if we ran, but it took far less time than that for the train to start up again.

  “We stopped for hours yesterday,” Leo said, though it sounded like he was trying to convince himself as much as Emilia and me.

  “And minutes this morning,” I said. We looked at one another.

  “Freeze or starve, Miss Kutepova?” he asked.

  “Neither,” I replied. I walked to the edge of the car, sat down, and eased myself off.

  The feel of real earth beneath my feet was astonishing. The ground was hard from cold, yet my heels felt wobbly and unstable, like I might sink into the soil at any moment. I took a step away from the train, trying to quell the panic that immediately rose within me—it was like swimming away from shore into dangerous waters. I turned back just as Leo jumped down beside me, making a guttural welch sound and clutching his ribs as he hit the dirt.

  “Fine, fine,” Emilia sai
d, looking almost wistfully back at our miserable boxcar before slinking to the ground. It took her several deep breaths before she dared step away from it.

  “All right,” Leo said. “Let’s just . . . walk fast.”

  No one moved.

  “We’ll be fine,” I said, and to my surprise, I almost believed it. I exhaled, my breath a plume of fog at my lips, and started forward. Leo and Emilia followed. The train was silent behind us, strange black boxes against a silvery landscape. Frost crunched underneath our feet as we moved across the field, all of us waiting to hear the train’s engines fire up, to turn and sprint back. We reached the edge of the forest and stopped, turned to look back at the train.

  “You wait here,” Leo told Emilia. “You can call for us if it looks like it’s moving.”

  “Alone?” Emilia said, looking at the trees fearfully. The forest seemed like a simple thing from the train—a wall of bright white birch trees, something flat and unimposing. Up close, it was more like a cave that stretched forever, the remaining leaves waving in the breeze in a way that made it look like we were underwater. Everything felt alive, in a way that made my skin prickle.

  “It’ll be fine,” I told Emilia, trying to mask the fear in my voice. “We’ll be fine.”

  “Natalya . . .” Emilia said, shaking her head and looking from the forest to the train. “Be careful.”

  “We need to hurry,” Leo said, then turned and walked into the forest. I smiled at Emilia, though I suspected the expression was lost to the dark, and went in after him.

  The forest was quiet and cold, so much colder than the boxcar, like it was holding in the chill of the day. We navigated by patches of moonlight that broke through the trees, holding our arms out ahead of us like sleepwalkers through the dark bits. Leo ducked down every few yards and felt around at the base of the largest trees, searching for wood protected from the rain.