Tsarina

by Patrick, J. Nelle

  “I am Matryona Rasputin,” she cried out to the sky. Her voice was the loudest thing, louder than gunfire, louder than the wind, louder than my heart. “Daughter of Grigori Rasputin. I claim this magic for myself. Let it be mine. I renounce those who have possessed it before me. I renounce all who would keep it from me.” She gripped the egg tight, so tight her fingers slipped on her own blood, and for a moment, I thought the entire pedestal might flip over. I looked up to the sky, the snow clouds and the stars that hung between them.

  “Here,” Maria said, and spun the knife around, offering me the hilt. “Do you remember—”

  “Yes,” I answered, taking it quickly. I stared down at the blade, wet with Maria’s blood.

  “Do it and put it on the egg fast,” Maria said. “Before it heals.”

  I nodded. Looked over at the Constellation Egg, which now had a little heap of snow balanced atop it. The egg was the color of Alexei’s eyes. Eyes I would never see again, eyes that would never see me again. Despite Leo, despite what healing him meant, I still loved Alexei. I loved him in a way that I knew would never stop, in a way that would hurt forever. It felt like something was unfurling in my chest, rising around my heart, my lungs, my arms.

  “Natalya,” he said, voice gentle. “You and I . . . we’re . . . it’s us, isn’t it?”

  “It’s us,” I whispered. “It’s always us.”

  Because our futures were intertwined. Even if he wasn’t in mine.

  I took the blade in my hand. I didn’t close my eyes, though I couldn’t help but flinch as I ripped it through the skin, cut so deep I felt the knife rake across bone. Maria’s mouth spread into a grin just as a clap of thunder echoed across the sky, followed by a collective gasp from the circle around us.

  I opened my eyes and followed their line of sight to the sky. Stars, shooting stars raining toward us. They streaked across the sky, leaving trails of pale gold that flickered away so quickly that it was impossible to tell when the light began and ended. The mystics gasped, pointed at the stars as Maria smiled harder, face devilish and wild. I dropped the knife on the ground, stared at my palm for a moment, then placed it over the Constellation Egg. The snow was intensifying; when I looked up again, it was tricky to tell the falling stars from the flakes.

  “Hurry,” Maria hissed at me, unable to take her eyes off the world around us. Under my hand, the Constellation Egg felt warm, then hot. It hummed to me, the liquid lightning pouring from it into my hand, up my arm, filling my body like it was replacing the blood in my veins. The snow increased again, now pouring down on us almost like rain, and I felt the temperature drop. It was getting more and more difficult to see the mystics that surrounded us amid the snowfall.

  “My name is Natalya Kutepova,” I called out, though my voice was a hoarse whisper. “I . . .”

  “Relinquish my claim . . .” Maria whispered. The snow continued to pour down, the temperature to drop, drop, lower and lower.

  “I relinquish my claim . . .” I repeated. I stalled again. Maria growled like an animal, so I continued, “Let it . . . let it move from me to—”

  Someone grabbed me, grabbed the arm I had extended over the Constellation Egg and pulled me around, so fast I had no time to understand what was happening. Leo’s hands held tight to my shoulders, his eyes found mine easily, like they were well practiced at doing so. A shadow behind him, Maria—

  I grabbed hold of Leo’s shirt, pulled him to me, and pressed my lips to his. Leo’s arm slipped from my shoulders, wrapped around me, lifted me up easily against him. His lips were soft, softer than I expected, and when he finally pulled away, he kept his face beside mine so I could feel his breath, could feel his lips curl into a gentle smile that I couldn’t help but match even though doing so frightened me.

  “Natalya—” he began, setting me down as he reached up to grab his chest. He frowned, then his eyes widened. I gasped as we both turned to look at the Constellation Egg.

  Maria grabbed my bloodied hand, yanked me so hard I fell from Leo’s arms.

  “Stop!” she demanded him, and he froze, hypnotized. She couldn’t look at me—it would break the hypnosis—so she merely growled from the corner of her mouth, “Natalya. Finish it! I’ll kill you both.”

  I turned to her—how did she not realize it was already finished? Maria gave a snarl-like smile, and I saw the cold rush into her mouth, turn the water there to a thin layer of ice. The snow was clumping in her hair, in her lashes, on her shoulders, like it was trying to bury her alive—the other mystics, I realized, were already buried, lumps of odd shapes in the snow. But the flakes barely touched me, a fact that Maria suddenly realized. She broke the spell on Leo to stare at me, then at the sky. Maria lifted her fingertips, ran them across her lips delicately; they split as the cold—my cold—caused the skin to crack and bleed. When she found my eyes again, she looked horrified.

  “I renounce nothing,” I said. “I renounce nothing and no one.”

  Russia listened to me—and only me—now. I could thaw ice, I could grow flowers, I could tame animals, I could heal.

  Leo was right—I could do a lot more than make the wind blow. I could make it very, very cold.

  Maria grimaced, causing her lips to crack further; the blood that spilled to her chin quickly froze in a dark purple line. She reached for me, but her motions were slow, deadened; I easily dodged her bony fingers and grabbed the Constellation Egg from the pedestal. I lifted the egg high above my head, then brought it down on the edge of the pedestal, hard. It shattered easily, a million flecks of light, each the color of Alexei’s eyes, splashing out into the snow. Maria tried to scream—her face made an expression like she was being killed, like someone she loved was being killed. But no sound came out, her voice devoured by the cold.

  Maria lowered herself to her knees—or fell, I wasn’t sure which—her eyes black and angry as her fingertips turned blue, her nails pale purple. She made a motion with her mouth, like she was trying to dart her tongue out, but her muscles were too stiff to do so.

  I glanced behind me; Leo was fine, standing straight as me despite the freezing temperature. He smiled at me wryly as we both turned to look at Maria. She was on the ground now, limbs blue, eyes dark and furious and wild.

  You should have learned from Napoleon. From the Poles. You can’t survive a Russian winter, I thought, unless you’re a true Russian.

  I looked to the sky as I urged the temperature to drop again.

  Snowflakes filtered around us, avoiding our eyes, and stars continued to streak down like a rainstorm of light. Finally, the blizzard I’d created turned to flurries, and the moon broke through the clouds to light the monastery in a silvery glow. It was quiet, so quiet now, as the snow absorbed every sound except our steady breathing. The world was blanketed with perfect white snow, uneven in places where it covered stones or garden beds.

  “Remind me,” Leo finally said, voice low, “to thank Emilia for teaching me the hairpin trick.”

  “I’m just glad you figured it out,” I said, wiping my nose with the back of my wrist. I glanced at the nearest lump in the snow, the shape that was Maria. I wondered if I should feel guilty. I didn’t.

  “I’m not sure I have figured all of it out just yet,” Leo said, touching the center of his chest. “It feels like I swallowed the sky.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know—I didn’t mean to.”

  Leo smiled. “Oh, I know you didn’t, Natalya. Because now you’re really stuck with me.”

  EPILOGUE

  (FOUR MONTHS LATER)

  Iwas writing Emilia a letter. Again. I’d started it a half-dozen times, at least, and each incarnation felt more ludicrous than the previous. I owed her an apology. I owed her an explanation. The first was easy, but the second, I worried, was impossible. I tried to conquer it immediately in the letter.

  Dear Emilia,

  I’m alive.
I never told you, but I possessed the Constellation Egg’s powers.

  The train rumbled in a way that made my handwriting shaky, but I held back my scowl—after all, Leo and I had our own sleeping compartment with wool blankets and tea service in the afternoon. If we arrived in Ekaterinberg according to schedule, the trip would take even less time than the ride from Saint Petersburg to Moscow. After eating stolen caviar in a freezing cargo hold, I wouldn’t dream of complaining about this trip. I sighed, looked outside.

  “We’re cutting through Samara,” Leo said, nodding toward the window when he noticed my gaze.

  “By your house?”

  “No.” He was in the seat across from me, back against the compartment’s sliding door so he could easily watch the world rolling by. He barely fit on the seat at all this direction; one arm and one leg hung off awkwardly, like he’d been poorly packed for the trip. He continued, “We lived north of the tracks. Lenin lived in this area, though, when he was young.”

  “How marvelous,” I said drily, and tried the letter again.

  Dear Emilia,

  I’m alive. Leo and I weren’t together, not in the way you thought. We’re going to Ekaterinberg.

  I refused to go back to Saint Petersburg, unwilling to see my city occupied by the people who killed Alexei. Leo refused to stay in Moscow, as the Whites were slowly but surely holding on to the city. We settled on Ekaterinberg. Leo seemed surprised when I suggested it, and questioned me until I said it aloud: Alexei was, in my mind, still trapped in Ekaterinberg. I had to visit him, if only his ghost.

  Leo didn’t question me after that.

  “Are those sunflower fields?” I asked, nodding out the window. The sky was bold, unapologetically blue, a color that reminded me of the ceiling of that chapel we hid in back in Moscow. The fields were freshly planted, full of rich, chocolate-colored earth.

  “Yes. But they planted too early,” Leo said, frowning, though I could tell seeing it tweaked something in him anyhow. He shifted, slid across the seat until he was so close to the window that it fogged where his breath hit. “I suppose there aren’t any sunflowers in Ekaterinberg.”

  “No,” I said. “Only snow, I think.”

  This seemed to crush something in Leo; he sank back a little in the chair, and while his face didn’t change, his gray eyes wavered. He focused on the fields rushing by, like he was determined to see at least one bloom before we left Samara and headed to colder land. I pushed my pen aside and lifted a hand to the window. Leo didn’t notice, but suddenly looked down, grabbed his chest. I supposed he was still getting used to it.

  Dear Emilia,

  I’m alive. The Constellation Egg’s magic is too, but it’s different now.

  Leo looked up at me, shook his head as an amused sort of smirk played at his lips. Outside, the fields began to change. We were moving so fast that it was mostly a blur; brown fields twisted, turned, were suddenly green, plants growing taller, taller, till there was a wall of green outside our window. Dots of yellow thickened like paintbrush heads held against a canvas too long, and then in one moment, they exploded into a thousand plate-sized suns, curling their heads up toward the real sun above. Leo laughed under his breath as we reached the edge of the sunflower fields. He turned his head to watch them vanish, then sat back in his seat, exhaled.

  “That was a lot,” he said, rubbing the center of his chest with his palm.

  “You could have stopped me,” I reminded him. He didn’t answer, instead casting me a grateful look, a small smile. I nodded, turned back to my paper, but it was useless. This, this was the thing I could not find a way to explain to Emilia. Not only that the Constellation Egg’s power worked for me, but that it was no longer in the Constellation Egg.

  It was in Leo.

  When I kissed Leo at the moment I was supposed to take Maria’s hand, the power went to him instead of her. The magic was still mine in every way, but Leo felt it too—deep in his chest, where it now lived. It healed him and worked for him in the slightest of ways, but he couldn’t draw it up of his own accord. At the very most, he could stop me from accessing it to make flowers bloom or candles spark and light, and even that took considerable effort on his part.

  I didn’t know the details—in fact, I suspected only Rasputin did.

  Was it because Leo and I kissed, or because I loved him?

  This was something I could not wonder aloud, could barely entertain the thought of, and something Leo and I spoke of only with awkward glances. Something I likely would not have admitted to myself, were it not for the egg revealing the secret to the world. Perhaps the Constellation Egg knew how I hated myself for not telling Alexei I loved him and was making it impossible for me to make the same mistake with Leo.

  It wasn’t a curiosity I allowed myself to dwell on often—after all, I would always love Alexei. Even though I knew he was gone, I still heard his voice in my dreams. There, he called me Natashenka, laughed with me, guided me through waltzes, and held my hand as we ran through the Winter Palace gardens in the moonlight. There, he always leaned in, whispered in my ear about Russia, about his plans, about his hopes for our country. Plans that now I was the only one left to see through.

  Dear Emilia,

  I’m alive, but I am not finished.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Russian Revolution, truth be told, needs little to no fictionalization to be a fascinating time period, full of beauty and horror and wonder. However, Tsarina isn’t meant to be a textbook—it’s meant to be a novel. I did an immense amount of research for this story and I’m proud to say that anything in this story that could be historically accurate is historically accurate. But . . . don’t write your history term papers based on this story, as there are more than a few historical indiscretions, which I’ll confess to here.

  First and foremost, I’m sad to report that Natalya Kutepova, Leo Uspensky, and Emilia Boldyreva are not real people. Many of the other characters are, however, very real—namely Grigori Rasputin and the Romanov family. It gave me great joy to write Alexei Romanov as a boy healed by the Constellation Egg, since in reality his hemophilia plagued him for his entire short life. I suspect he would have indeed been an excellent boyfriend, as he was every bit as empathetic, noble, and compassionate as described in this book, though he unfortunately died before he could undergo any romantic pursuits.

  Nicholas and Alexandra Romanov were, as described, very much in love. Olga and Tatiana really did train as Red Cross nurses during World War I. Rasputin’s love for Alexandra is fictional—I was excited to tell a story where he wasn’t merely a somewhat mentally unstable monk, though I’ll confess that’s the conclusion much of the historical record points to. The murder of the Romanov family is real, as are all the details about what happened in that Ekaterinburg basement—despite persistent rumors to the contrary, there were no survivors. All seven members of Russia’s last royal family are accounted for and rest in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, Russia. I confess I cried more than once while writing about their deaths.

  Maria Rasputin is real; she was indeed brought to court by her father, where she was doted on by noble ladies despite being a rather dirty, strange child. Her role as leader of the mystics, however, is entirely false—she actually left Russia after the revolution to become a tiger trainer in Paris, all the while fighting to salvage her father’s reputation and punish his murderers. She succeeded at neither.

  On a smaller scale: clothing is described based on images I found in period fashion catalogs. Street names, city details, and house descriptions are accurate as per 1916 maps of St. Petersburg and Moscow. The Winter Palace, the Iberian Chapel, and the statue of Minin and Pozharsky are real places you can visit. The battle of Tannenberg is real, as is the detail of Russian soldiers being sent into battle without weapons, instructed to take guns off their dead comrades. Russia’s tendency to burn down its citie
s and let the country’s brutal winter destroy invaders is real.

  While the Constellation Egg is real, its powers are, needless to say, not. I also did a bit of reorganizing with the Russian Revolution itself. In order to not have my characters milling around for the entire summer, I combined the February Revolution and October Revolution into a single event. Combining those revolutions means that the Provisional Government, which ran Russia in-between Tsar Nicholas’s fall and Lenin’s formal rise, is also omitted from the story.

  I would love to break down each and every historical accuracy (or inaccuracy) in this book, but obviously that would take another hundred pages or so. My hope is that, factual or fabricated, every line in Tsarina leads to a single truth: that when you forget that those you disagree with are people, not just your faceless opposition, you don’t end up proving who is right and who is wrong. You end up with a body count.

  In that way, perhaps, I suppose I do hope this story serves as a textbook.