Tsarina Page 3

  “Is there a newspaper?” I interrupted her as she walked toward the kitchen door.

  She gave me a halted look. “There was.”

  I groaned. “And Father asked you to keep it from me?” The maid nodded, and I groaned. My father was concerned I’d read the war news and be frightened.

  “At least tell me,” I asked the maid, before she could go. “What’s the front story today?”

  The maid sighed. “Germany is progressing slowly, but the army is having difficulties with wolves prowling around the forests outside of Minsk. The armies have called a temporary truce to fight off the packs.”

  “Wolves?” I asked, eyes widening. “My God.” The maid gave me a pointed look, and I tossed my hand at her. “I find it far more frightening to not know the details. My mind creates monsters more impressive than wolves.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the maid said. She curtsied and left the room. I said a silent prayer for my father and country, for the men my father commanded.

  This was the weight of being a soldier’s daughter—the constant concern that my father wouldn’t come home. That he’d be taken by a bullet, a bomb, or, now, a wolf. Alexei, on the other hand . . . he couldn’t be a soldier himself—or rather, could be technically, but because of his bleeding disease, he would never be able to ride into battle. This was something Alexei was keenly aware of, and to make up for it, he strategized. He planned, he read, he moved toy soldiers around on maps and memorized attack methods.

  And he did so safely. From a room where there were no blades, no guns, no explosions. Alexei considered this his greatest weakness—that he could only protect his country, his crown, and his people from afar. I considered this the happily ever after. At least, I did before the Constellation Egg. Now I couldn’t work out where I stood; was I glad the Constellation Egg kept him alive and well, or upset to know it meant he might one day ride into battle?

  It was a hateful thing, to be upset about something that made him well, but I couldn’t stop the thought from curling up into my mind like candle smoke. I wanted Alexei in the Winter Palace, safely surrounded by guards. I wanted him to be a hero, but a hero from afar. A hero who wouldn’t die young, who wouldn’t be wounded, who wouldn’t be in pain. A hero with a happily ever after.

  I abandoned my breakfast half eaten, and then went to fetch my coat from the closet. It was heavy, lined in fur and with what felt like a thousand silver buttons down the front. I had a matching hat, kid leather gloves, a fur stole—it seemed ridiculous for a short walk down the block, but the street looked mean and cold, largely due to the misty rain hanging over the city. I remembered what Alexei said, about the Constellation Egg allowing his father to make it snow on a whim; the clouds and cold were the norm, but this drizzly rain worried me. Did it mean the tsar was unhappy? Or merely that he had priorities greater than wishing for sunshine? I stepped outside and the wind whipped at me, tried to knock me back through my front door.

  I’d been to other countries during the summer, and truth be told, they weren’t all that different from Russia. Moscow, for example, felt like Paris in July. Saint Petersburg felt like London. In the warm weather, it might have been easy to mistake one city for the other. But there was no mistaking a Russian winter. It was a unique thing, a creature born and bred for Russian soil, one that sometimes brutalized the natives but often served as our secret weapon. Napoleon’s army was defeated not only by the Russian people, but by Russia herself—a story my father told me before bed as a child, one I was still particularly proud to recall. The Russians burned the city to the ground, destroyed the food, the shelter, even the water; the invading army froze to death. Not that I wanted to see Saint Petersburg burn, but I occasionally wondered if that would be the shortest route to both ending the war and quieting the Reds. Freeze them out, rebuild our country properly—a country that both respects its tsar and cares for its poor, supports its workers, loves its heritage. Though I suspected even fire wouldn’t quiet the Reds. Sometimes I questioned if they really wanted to make Russia better, or simply wanted to shout the loudest.

  I pulled my coat tighter, bowed my head into the wind. The people of the city were clever; their hats and scarves were tucked safely into their coats, their gloved hands lifted to shield their eyes from the sting of the air. It was a particularly enjoyable pastime, spotting the visitors—the people who didn’t know just how to bow into the wind, who hadn’t learned the slippery bits of the streets. I paused on a corner to allow a carriage to jangle past, the driver so bundled up he looked like a lump of darkened wool rather than a human being. Breath smoked from the twin black horses’ nostrils, and I found myself sorry for them—why shouldn’t they have coats as well? I passed the bakery and inhaled the scent of vanilla and cardamom.

  It didn’t take me long to reach Emilia’s house, a grand place they were borrowing from another family that left for Paris ages ago. It was enormous, nearly a palace, painted bright yellow with white pillars and filigrees along the roof. I approached the front door, twice as tall as me, and rapped on it gently. The middle-aged butler answered almost immediately.

  “Lady Kutepova,” he said warmly. “Here to visit the countess?”

  “I am—let her know I’ve arrived?” I said, gratefully brushing in, melting in the warmth of the foyer. My heels tapped across wooden floors, the sound bouncing back up the wide staircase before me. Every surface was touched with a fancy molding, an accent, like the entire room was carved rather than built. A maid hurried from a door behind the staircase to help me remove my coat, while the butler laid a hand gently on the stair railing and walked up to fetch my friend. I was shown to the nearby parlor and sat down, wondering if Emilia would have the forethought to bring a pack of bezique cards down so we had something to do.

  “Ten o’clock this time. You’re getting earlier and earlier, Natalya,” Emilia’s voice called out from the second-floor landing. I heard her heels on the stairs, clicking closer, closer, until finally she whirred around the corner.

  Emilia—her real name was Ludmila, but she refused to answer to it—hated wearing her hair up. As a result, it was always too puffy and needed to be smoothed. Her hair, however, was the only thing that needed assistance of any sort; everything else about Emilia Boldyreva radiated class, power, and money. She was smooth lines and shiny fabrics, and carried herself unapologetically. She was not proud to be wealthy; rather, she simply didn’t notice it, I suppose because it had been a part of her family’s legacy for so long. Today Emilia was wearing a chartreuse dress with a deep purple ribbon around the waist—shades I suspected would make me look pale as a corpse and colors I knew would be out of fashion soon, but were the pinnacle of style at the moment. They made her look like some sort of elaborate European flower, or a character from a play come to life.

  “Shall I start stalling till noon then?” I responded, grinning when she shook her head so quickly it loosened a few bits of hair.

  “Never. Bezique is even duller alone,” she said, holding up the pale blue deck of cards. “Like my dress?”

  “It’s lovely,” I said.

  “Don’t lie. It’s the most garish thing I own. Isn’t it delightful?” She twirled around to make her point, and I laughed. “Though what’s the point of wearing something like this if there’s no one to see you in it?”

  “Am I no one?” I asked teasingly, and Emilia rolled her eyes. She moved to my side, hugged me quickly, and we settled across from each other at the card table. I raked my fingers across the table’s pearl inlay while she dealt. She flipped the last card up—the six of hearts, the card we had to beat.

  “Is your newspaper still here?” I asked as Emilia trumped the six of hearts with an eight.

  “No—oh, Natalya, you’ve got to stop reading the stories. They’re the stuff of nightmares.”

  “My maid said the armies are having trouble with wolf attacks—”

  “See! Exactly what I
mean,” Emilia said, cringing at the idea. “You’ve enough to dwell on without adding wolves. For example—how many days has it been now?”

  “Hm?”

  “How many days?” Emilia asked again, now meeting my eyes. I sighed, put down the queen of diamonds. Emilia was quick when it came to matters of love; she was the sort of girl who, while the rest of us were learning to draw our letters, perfected drawing hearts.

  “Four months, two weeks, three days since I’ve seen Alexei,” I answered, a little embarrassed at how easily she saw through me. “We’ve never been apart for so long, not in all our lives.”

  “But he’s still writing you most weeks, isn’t he?” She stopped playing, gave me a sincere look.

  “Most days,” I said, smiling a little. “It’s hard, knowing he’s nearby yet I can’t see him—a thirty-minute train ride, but between the war and the Reds, the Alexander Palace might as well be on the other side of the world. I see his eyes all the time, in my dreams. I’m afraid one day, I won’t remember what they look like.”

  “Now you’re just being dramatic,” Emilia said playfully. “No one can forget Alexei Romanov’s eyes. That shade of blue? If you wanted them painted on a piece of jewelry, the artist wouldn’t be able to. That shade doesn’t come in paints.”

  I laughed a little, though the sound died quickly as I remembered those sorts of charms were for ladies whose husbands or lovers were away. Alexei was neither of those things, not officially. He was merely . . . mine. And I his, and—

  “Come on,” Emilia said, slapping her cards down on the table. She rose, extended a hand to me. “We should do something different today.”

  “Such as?”

  “Go out. Go . . . somewhere.”

  “To lunch? We did that on Thursday,” I said.

  “No,” Emilia answered. “On an adventure. We’ll go . . .” Her eyes lit up as the idea took shape. “We’ll go to the bookstore in Lower Nevsky.”

  “A bookstore?” I asked, surprised. “Why?”

  “There’s a mystic there,” Emilia said. “And I think it’s time we check in on our fates.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  We rumbled through the cobblestone streets of Saint Petersburg in the back of the Boldyrev family’s Type SMT, a cream-colored automobile that looked boring compared to the buildings around us. As usual, gray clouds were flocking to Saint Petersburg; they tended to roll in across the Baltic Sea and loom over our heads for months at a time. We fought back with buildings painted sunshine yellow, cathedrals of red, pale pink, gold, and orange. The automobile passed the Church on Spilt Blood, built where Tsar Nicholas’s grandfather was assassinated by a crazed Red—it boasted fat onion domes of checkered green, blue, and white that dominated the skyline above murals of Biblical scenes painted right onto the brick. Paris had blue skies and green meadows, perhaps, but our city glowed, invited you in out of the cold.

  Still, as we moved away from our side of town and into Lower Nevsky, things did become rather monotone—tall houses of plain brown that looked like they sagged under the weight of their residents. People were thick in the streets, on balconies, in windows, in long food lines that stretched around entire buildings. They all had a single-mindedness in their eyes that made them seem less like people and more like parts in some great machine. This section of the city often felt foreign to me—like the people were from a different country entirely. The people I saw outside the car didn’t care about who was courting whom, or the intrigues of foreign courts, or even the tsar’s plans for Germany. I wasn’t so self-centered to be surprised such people existed, of course, but it left me feeling adrift, uncertain what the people in Lower Nevsky did care about.

  Emilia and I huddled together in the backseat under a blanket; it felt like the driver’s body did more to block the wind than the pop-up roof. People turned their heads as we rolled by—perhaps they thought we were royals, as the tsar had an automobile identical to this one. Or perhaps they were Reds—Reds were everywhere in this neighborhood, hidden among the merchants. The driver glanced back at us worriedly as we took another turn, crossed over one of the canals, and rumbled ever farther from our neighborhood.

  “Relax,” Emilia told him, sounding annoyed. “You worry too much.” She often acted like this—like she was invincible, like the Reds were merely a prolonged nuisance. She was confident they could never hurt her, I suspect because she merely ignored anything that might warn her otherwise. It was ignorant, but a sort of easy ignorance that I envied from time to time. Perhaps she was right—my life was better without wolves.

  “It’s not just you I’m worried about, Miss Emilia,” the driver called back, voice low and rumbling like the car’s motor. He flashed a smile in our direction, one almost entirely obscured by the scarf wrapped high on his neck and the fur cap pulled down over his ears. “I’m the one who has to sit outside for the next hour.”

  “You don’t have to wait on us,” I said. “Go have some tea to warm up.”

  “Thank you, Miss Natalya, but if I leave you two alone in Lower Nevsky, General Kutepov will have me sent to Siberia.” He said so kindly enough, but it was probably true. My father tended to be black or white in his handling of staff, and no amount of telling him that usually I was the one to blame in any given catastrophe—getting lost in London, fattening his new dog, tipping sleds over more times than one could count—eased his anger, and more than once I’d borne the guilt of getting a member of our household staff fired. I certainly didn’t want to start offing Emilia’s employees as well.

  “All right then, here we are,” the driver said, easing the automobile to a stop at a storefront. The windows were fogged up, turning stacks and stacks of books into lumps of blue, yellow, and tan rectangles. There were no lines for this store—the people’s dire need for bread, after all, outweighed their need for books. The driver jumped from the front seat, nearly slipped on a bit of ice by the curb, then swung around to open the door for us. He helped us down and I linked my arm through Emilia’s. Together, we crunched through the snow and pressed open the bookstore door. A bell rattled, announcing our arrival.

  “Hello—oh! Hello,” the owner said, looking at us in mild surprise. I saw his eyes travel up our coats to our hair, the gemstones that hung from Emilia’s ears, the rings on my fingers. I smiled at him then spoke.

  “We’ve heard there’s a mystic who works here some days—is she in and available for readings?”

  “Ah. Yes—in the back. Right down that stack and on the left,” he said, motioning to an aisle of books. Emilia and I walked single file through them, our boots clacking on the floor, to the back of the shop. The smell of pages, cinnamon, and age mingled with the scent of incense here. There were thick worn-velvet curtains hanging down in a doorway; behind them, someone was quietly humming a song I could almost remember, but not quite. Emilia looked at me, brown eyes twinkling like this was a great game, and I grinned in response. Secretly, however, my heart was pounding, and had been ever since we left Emilia’s—this would be the first time I’d see a mystic since I learned about the Constellation Egg. Since I learned that a mystic had created a charm so powerful it could heal Alexei and save the country.

  I’d kept the Constellation Egg a secret, and of course Alexei and I never mentioned it in our letters, so I often felt like perhaps that entire night had been a dream. Could I possibly have watched starlight from a blessed egg heal Alexei’s hand, and kissed him for the first time all in the same half hour? It felt like a fable, and I was convinced that seeing a mystic, seeing a bit of old magic, would reassure me it wasn’t.

  Still, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Rasputin was, after all, a very different sort of mystic than the type who told fortunes from the back rooms of shops. I reached out tentatively, took a breath, then brushed the curtain aside.

  “It’s you!” Emilia cried.

  The mystic looked up at us from a wooden chair on the far
side of the table. She was old and squat, with deep-set eyes and heavy lips that reminded me of my childhood governess. She wore a thick brown skirt and billowy white top that made her look even larger than she was, and wrapped around her head was a floral shawl. Her eyes brightened upon seeing us, though there was something of a character in her expression—like she was interrupted while being herself and had to drum up the fortune-teller we expected.

  “Lady Kutepova, Countess Boldyreva!” she said warmly, smiling. Her teeth were crooked, yellowed. “I haven’t seen you in ages!”

  “Indeed not, Babushka,” I answered, taking her hand and squeezing it familiarly. “Emilia suggested we visit the bookshop today for a reading. I’m so glad she did—we’ve missed you!”

  We’d seen the Babushka many times before—she often set up shop outside our favorite movie theater, offering fortunes to finish off an evening of wine and American films. Occasionally, she was even invited to birthday celebrations, anniversaries, and engagement parties. That said, she always existed to me as a sort of ghost rather than a person—she came with the celebration and disappeared afterward, just like the decorations and fancy foods. It was strange seeing her here, a place clearly more permanent. The candles were burned so low they were little more than piles of wax. There were boxes and boxes of incense, of crystals, of tiny figurines and smooth rocks. The room was full, well used, and the table had a worn patch across the center, evidence of years of laying tarot cards across it.