Tsarina

by Patrick, J. Nelle

  “What do you mean?” the Babushka asked.

  “The egg is theirs,” Maria said, shaking her head as her thoughts swelled. “It’s like a crown—it belongs to the tsar and the one he loves, their children. What if there were no more? Of either?”

  “You’re suggesting we kill the Romanovs?” one of the younger mystics asked, eyes wide. She look frightened, like this was more than she was prepared for. She was twelve, perhaps thirteen, and likely still remembered life before her powers manifested, Maria thought. She didn’t know what a horrible thing it was to lose them. How shedding the blood of one family seemed a small price.

  Especially that family.

  Maria smiled, tugged at the little satchel of herbs around her neck absently, staring at the egg again. She reached forward, ran her fingers across the blue glass, closed her eyes, and felt the thrum of power from its core.

  “Not exactly,” Maria answered as she pulled her hand away. “It would take more than a handful of mystics to break through the protection the egg affords the Romanovs. But . . . the Babushka here has already pushed the Reds and the Whites to the edge. If they were to go over . . .” Maria gave a meaningful look, an even more meaningful smile.

  “People act foolishly,” the Babushka whispered, nodding, “when they grow desperate.”

  They’ll tear the country apart,” the younger mystic said, appalled. “Grigori Rasputin wouldn’t want—”

  A little gasp circled the room, like a current. Maria lifted an eyebrow and walked toward the girl. The young mystic shrank back against the wall—Maria was tall anyhow, but her presence made her a giant. She glowered down at the girl, piercing blue eyes brighter than anything else in the room—save the Constellation Egg.

  “Following what Grigori Rasputin wanted is what got us here to begin with,” Maria hissed. “If you’d rather follow the will of a corpse than the will of your priestess, perhaps there’s no place for you in the sisterhood, dear.” Her voice took a strange tone, like a song, as she said this. The girl blinked, suddenly stood up straight. Her teeth gritted, her hands clenched to fists as she walked out of the room.

  The others cast their eyes down as the young mystic broke into tears just outside the door, once Maria’s gaze was off her. Tonight, the girl would pack her belongings and leave the monastery. It wasn’t the first time Maria had hypnotized one of her own, nor was it the first time she’d expelled one from her camp. But it was the first time Maria felt out of control. The others could see her cracking, she was sure. Rasputin never cracked. Rasputin was always in control.

  Hated by them though he was, Rasputin still commanded respect among the mystics, Maria included.

  Rasputin was a better leader than her.

  Maria flung her arms down to her side, uttered a string of curse words. No, no, he wasn’t a better leader. He gave their powers away. He stole from his own people. He ignored his own family, his own kind, for Alexandra and her palace full of royal children. That woman led him on, tricked him into thinking she might, someday, leave the tsar for him. She used Rasputin for his healing powers, made him a broken shell of a man . . .

  Maria scowled at the thought of the tsarina. Remember how you looked at me, Alexandra? Like I frightened you? Perhaps you were right to be frightened of me.

  “Whisper to them,” Maria said aloud, first quietly, then louder as she turned to the remaining women in the room. “Whisper to the people of Russia with what power you have left.”

  “And tell them what, Maria?” a middle-aged woman asked.

  “Tell them they must act,” she said simply. “Tell them there’s no time for mercy, no time to waste. Drive the Whites to frenzy, drive the Reds to fear. Create a storm, sisters. A storm even the Romanovs with their protection cannot survive.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  We rolled into Moscow that morning. I almost missed it—I’d fallen asleep, but I was jarred awake before the others as the train slowed. I blinked—realized that I was looking at farmland. Fields recently harvested, houses in the distance with laundry on the lines, horses and cattle and life. I rose, went to the door, and looked ahead.

  Saint Basil’s. The cathedral poked out through the spruce trees, the bright gold onion dome the highest, then the red-and-green striped one just below it. I never grew tired of seeing it when I visited Moscow, but today it was especially inviting—it meant we were almost done. This horrible affair was nearly over.

  “We’re here.” Leo’s voice startled me. He walked to the train door, leaned against the side opposite me. I didn’t answer, so he continued. “Not long now, Miss Kutepova. You’ll be rid of me for good.”

  “I will be,” I said faintly. I felt like I should say more—I wanted to say more, but couldn’t work out what. Leo watched me for a moment, then turned to face outside the train.

  “Are you going to tell Emilia what happened in the woods?” he asked, his voice suddenly harder than it was a moment before. “Was it what I think?”

  “What happened?” Emilia said. I scowled at Leo, then turned to her.

  “Just the elk,” I said. “It actually did run at us, but we were fine. We didn’t want to scare you.”

  Emilia lifted her eyebrows. “You’re a terrible liar, Natalya.”

  I opened my mouth, shut it again. Leo snickered.

  “No, don’t tell me,” Emilia said, sighing. “I don’t care. Just as long as we get off this train. And then get on another train, to Paris. A train with a dining car.” Her words were short—she was angry with me—but also defeated. She really didn’t care at the moment.

  The boxcar now smelled like soot, and I suspected the heat caused some of the caviar to spoil. Leo kicked a few empty tins out the door, then grabbed the ladder, climbed a few rungs up to see better.

  “Do you both have your boots on?” he called down to us.

  “Yes,” Emilia said. “Why?”

  Leo swung back into the car, looked at us with wide eyes. “Because we’re going to have to jump off this train.”

  “Wait, why?” I asked, shaking my head as Leo grabbed Emilia’s coat and thrust it toward her.

  “The tsar doesn’t have a private platform here,” he said.

  Emilia shook her head. “I don’t—”

  “There’s a cargo platform,” I said, heart speeding up. “Where the tsar’s platform is in Saint Petersburg, there’s a cargo platform where they unload everything.”

  Now Emilia understood. We wouldn’t be able to wait for the train to stop and jump, because there would be rail line employees standing on the platform, prepared to offload the now-ruined crates of smuggled caviar. Even if Emilia and I were able to convince them that we were kidnapped nobility—which I doubted we could—it was likely they weren’t on our side of the revolution.

  Emilia shoved her coat on as Leo stood in the door, keeping an eye on the quickly approaching city. We were on the outskirts now, rushing through pastures and tilled fields. The station platform was located on the edge of Moscow; the city stretched out to its right. The platform itself was an exact match to the one in Saint Petersburg, clock tower and all. I could see people bustling about at the passenger platform, but the cargo platform was full of still figures, people waiting, waiting to unload—

  “Ready?” Leo asked needlessly. “Wait for it . . . and . . .”

  I thought he was going to count to three, but instead Leo reached down, grabbed our hands, and pulled us out in one swift motion. There was a split second where we were flying, when the wind was rushing through my hair, but then we hit the ground, tumbled forward. I was yanked away from the others, flipped over, grass mashed into my eyes, the ground was everywhere at once. My lip burst, blood seeped into my mouth, but finally, finally, I stopped.

  My head ached for a moment, but the pain faded quickly. I sprang to my feet, looked frantically for Leo and Emilia. Without a Fabergé egg to help them r
ecover, they were slower to rise, limping, wincing. Leo clutched his already wounded arm and Emilia sat up, rubbing the side of her head. I went to her first, eased my arms beneath her and pulled—

  “Natalya!” she said, pushing me away and pointing over my shoulder.

  Rail workers. They were sprinting toward us from the station—they had seen us jump. They were big, brutish men with stained faces and dirty shirts, and they would be here in seconds. My eyes widened.

  “Leo!” I shouted.

  “I see them,” he wheezed, then stopped, stared at me.

  Leo gave me a weighty look, lifted a finger and tapped the side of his lip. I narrowed my eyes, then realized what he meant. I touched the same spot on my own lip, realized that the place where I burst it after jumping was growing smaller, smaller. I drew my hand away, stared at Leo as it vanished entirely.

  “Come on,” he said, and we began to run.

  The rail workers were fast, but we had a sizable head start. Goats hustled out of our way as we shoved through their fences, Leo taking the time to tip over troughs to try to slow the workers down. The center of the city was ahead, where the houses grew close together and carts jostled down the street. The workers were cursing at us, voices gruff and furious.

  We hurried around the corner of the nearest house, took another turn, another, another, till we were just a block from the passenger platform and the city’s main street. The streetcars were still running here, people darting out of the way as they rolled along beside carriages. I could hear the rail workers behind us shouting to one another, trying to get an eye on us again. We needed to hide—now. I grabbed hold of Emilia’s hand and the collar of Leo’s coat and dove for the nearest store. We crashed inside, nearly slamming the door behind us.

  Everything was still.

  We were panting, sweating, choking on cold air and bruised lungs, but everything around us was beautiful. It was a silversmith’s, with large display cases of cutlery and fine cups, jewelry and christening rattles, all of which gleamed like mirrors under electric lights. We stood in the center on floors that were covered in thick Persian rugs. There were photographs on the walls of various nobles—one, even, of Alexei’s sister Maria, all holding pieces of silver I assumed came from this particular shop. The smell of sandalwood and cedar filtered around me; I breathed in deeply, let the scents take me back to my house in Saint Petersburg. For a beautiful, shining moment, I was able to pretend my hair wasn’t sticking to my face, that I wasn’t exhausted and thirsty and being chased.

  “This isn’t good,” Leo muttered.

  “What? We’ll just wait—” I said.

  “Out, all of you,” a new voice interrupted, deep and heavy. I snapped back to reality, realized the voice came with a man—and the man came with a gun: the silversmith, wearing a tarnished apron, glasses, and, most frighteningly, wielding a long rifle he had trained on the three of us.

  “Forgive us,” I said sweetly. “We ran to catch our train, but missed it. We thought we might do a bit of shopping while we wait for the next—”

  The man’s eyes widened—I could tell he was trying to sort out the contradiction of my upper-class dialect with my clothing. “Who are you?” he asked, voice quieter, but not softer.

  “I’m Natalya Demidova,” I said, offering the count and countess’s last name. “Perhaps you know my aunt and uncle?”

  The man laughed, a horrible squelching sound. “I’ll count to five before I begin shooting—”

  “We haven’t taken anything! We haven’t even touched anything!”

  “You expect me to believe you”—he motioned to me with the muzzle of the gun—“are related to Count Demidov? I’m far too old to fall for cons like this.”

  A flash of blue outside—the rail workers, just by the door. They were pausing at the corner of the street, looking for us in the crowd. We couldn’t go out just now, we’d be done for.

  “We renounced his wealth,” Emilia said swiftly. “In favor of the revolution.”

  “In which case, you don’t have money to buy any of my goods. Now. Get. Out,” he said, and closed one eye to aim. I looked back over my shoulder—the rail workers were moving away. Still, I backed up very, very slowly, running into Leo before we both turned and cautiously stepped out of the shop. The silversmith shut the door hard behind us, kept the gun in his hand as we walked away. Emilia was jumpy, prepared to run, especially when we realized we weren’t far behind the rail workers.

  “Walk,” Leo said under his breath, throwing an arm out in front of her. “Relax.”

  “They’re going to turn around,” Emilia hissed. “They’ll see us.”

  “Trust me, Emilia. Walk. That’s how I found you in Saint Petersburg,” Leo said. “Running attracts attention. Walking doesn’t.”

  The three of us locked eyes for a moment, then stepped forward as one. Leo shoved his hands into his coat pockets, while Emilia and I tried to affect bored, blank looks—forgettable looks. The train station soared above us, the clock tower indicating it was eight o’clock in the morning. There were signs of the revolution here—buzz about Lenin was around us—but other than that, Moscow seemed . . . normal.

  So normal that it reminded me of Saint Petersburg several days before the true chaos had begun. I found myself growing angry that there wasn’t running, wasn’t panic. If they weren’t going to bemoan the tsar’s imprisonment, surely they could celebrate their foolish revolution’s success? But apathy, going about as if nothing was happening when I was kidnapped and hurt and Alexei was the tsar in Ekaterinburg . . . I felt like I was in another world entirely, a universe where there was no Constellation Egg, no Babushka to find, no ransacked palaces. Didn’t they know? Weren’t they frightened?

  “We didn’t even touch anything!” Emilia said, and I realized she and Leo were arguing ahead of me.

  “But we couldn’t afford it,” Leo said, shrugging. The incident hadn’t shaken him at all. I wondered if he was accustomed to being threatened with a gun. It seemed something of an occupational hazard of being a Red.

  “Well, I know, and I know we look poor, but still. We just went in a store. There was no need for a gun.”

  “He didn’t care what we were, did he?” I asked, turning to Leo. I shook my head in disbelief. “Red or White. It didn’t matter.”

  “It doesn’t matter to most of Russia,” Leo said, his voice oddly gentle. “You and I may be black and white, Miss Kutepova, but there are plenty of shades of gray in between.”

  “You can’t be in between on something like this,” I said, voice shrill. I forced it to quiet as I looked around at the open stores, the women in fur muffs, the streetcars rolling by. “It’s our future. It’s our country, our tsar. They have to pick a side eventually.”

  Leo rocked back on his heels for a moment, scratched his cheek with his shoulder. “They will. Everyone will, eventually.”

  The three of us walked the length of the train station, then turned and paused outside a butcher shop. A couple passed by us, surely members of the nobility—out in the open, wearing furs, fine shoes, unashamed. I reached up, smoothed my hair into its pins in response, smiled politely at the woman as her eyes found me. She didn’t return the expression, letting her eyes glance off me like I was a lamppost or empty carriage. I tried to settle the gaping feeling in my stomach, turned to Leo as he spoke.

  “All right,” Leo said, apparently satisfied once the workers turned right and vanished. “Where would mystics be, in this city? The sooner we find the Babushka, the sooner you’re on your way to Paris.”

  “Excellent,” Emilia said. I gave her a short but weighty look. She nodded at me, though I think I saw a flicker of pity in her eyes. Mercy wasn’t a virtue her uncle was very familiar with, nor was forgiveness.

  “Near the square,” she said firmly. “If I’m remembering my last visit correctly, that’s where most of the mystics make th
eir money.”

  And where your uncle will be. Soon this will be over, I thought. I meant to exhale, but found my breath was lodged hard in my throat.

  Leo nodded curtly. “Lead the way then, Emilia.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Emilia knew Moscow well—she’d visited her uncle and various other society girls here plenty of times—but it was still difficult for me to leave this aspect of our plan to her entirely. I’d clearly underestimated her, though—she walked along, surefooted, I suppose driven by the idea of soon leaving Russia forever. By nine o’clock, we’d reached the square. We entered through the Iberian Gate: twin arches made of dark red bricks with bright white windows and cone-shaped copper towers. There was a tiny green chapel between them with a vividly sky-blue roof splattered with golden stars. We were supposed to stop and pray—everyone visiting the square was—but I wagered I should actually get the Constellation Egg rather than pray about getting it.

  “Leo?” Emilia said, turning back when she realized he’d fallen behind. He was staring at Saint Basil’s with wonder. I had to admit that as beautiful as it had been on the horizon, it was glorious up close. Were it not for the fact that I was preoccupied with our plot, I suspect I would also have wanted to stay and gaze at the striped onion domes, the turquoise and soft red arches that decorated the building like icing on a cake. The detail grew more impressive with each higher dome—the tower that held the highest dome, the gold one, had stars inside the arches, gold ribbons that rippled up to the dome and the cross on top of it.

  “It’s incredible,” Leo said, now turning his head to the cream-colored towers of the Kremlin. “I’ve seen pictures, but I didn’t realize it was all these . . . colors.”

  “You can come back and look another day,” I lied quietly.

  “Right. Of course,” Leo said, shaking his head as if he suddenly felt silly. “Maybe you should be thinking, Miss Kutepova, of what you’re going to say to the Babushka to convince her to give you the egg.”