Sasha
These woods would have run wild, if they’d been allowed to. Not far from here, the forests owned the land—tangled trees, ground rooted up by wild boars and badgers, vegetation-choked lakes that stories said were home to wicked spirits, because what else could thrive in water so black? But the woods outside Tsarskoe Selo were the tsar’s woods, and anything belonging to the tsar meant order, regularity, precision. It was winter now, but all year round these trees were as pristine as if a Dutch master had painted them. The only thing out of place was Aleksandr Nikolaevich, who knew he was as far from imperial splendor as it was possible for a man to be.
Long stretches of frozen track and heavy drifts made the trek from Saint Petersburg slow going, and because Sasha’s horse was property of the Imperial Army, he’d been forced to leave it at the final outpost and take the last fifteen miles to Tsarskoe Selo on foot. He’d intended to trim his beard before leaving camp, but that hadn’t happened either, and so he looked as bedraggled and ill-prepared as he felt with each step nearer to the Catherine Palace. What would Felix think of him, when he stumbled into the grand halls of the imperial estate? Hardly a celebrated hero returning from the wars. A vagabond, rather, begging for a place to stay.
The war was over, Napoleon and his Grande Armée fleeing west pursued by a determined force of regulars who would snap at their heels all the way to Paris, but no one had told Sasha’s nerves. Every sense was pricked for anything amiss. The trill of a bird. The creak of tall firs, dusted with snow and ornery with cold. The wind, muffled and hollow through the worn fur of his hat. No sign of danger, not yet, but that was the trick about danger; it seldom gave a sign. The fighting at the end hadn’t been like it was before, at the blood-soaked field of Borodino, the disastrous losses at Austerlitz, but it would take more than the retreat of the French emperor to convince Sasha that this was, in fact, a time of peace.
A gap between the trees, and the gilded roof of the Catherine Palace rose through the dusk, bright enough to make Sasha’s heart shudder. Its burnished domes were like a cathedral in the wilderness, glittering against the robin’s-egg walls. After so long at the front, the palace seemed like a dream, some fantasy one of Felix’s cooks would spin from sugar and marzipan. Another step, and it was gone, lost in the leafless tangle of branches. Beautiful, but insubstantial. It seemed impossible that such a delicate structure could exist in the same world where the roar of cannons rattled men’s teeth, where the choke of gunfire blotted out the sun. He kept to the path, forcing his thoughts down a different track. A warm fire. A chance to unlace his boots. A smile from Felix, the sound of his voice, not a dream of it but the reality, the true color of which could never be recreated, not even in the most faithful memory. He sighed at the thought, the thick cloud of his breath catching in his hat like frost. I told you I’d come back in one piece, he’d say to Felix, when they were alone. It takes more than a war to keep me away from you.
Then he stopped.
Without the crunch of his footsteps, the silence was total. And yet he was certain he’d heard something. A small thump. Muted, like a body falling into the snow.
The idea was nonsense. Forests made noises. Snow fell from tree branches. Birds shook dead twigs loose. Badgers raked their claws along tree bark for food to bring back to their setts. He’d been moving since dawn, that was all. Sit down, get something to eat, and the world would start to look like itself again.
The next sound was a soft exhale, distinctly human and not his own.
Sasha looked off into the woods. The woods looked back invitingly.
It wasn’t late, but dusk fell early now, and soon it would be dark in earnest. And while he no longer believed the midwinter stories his mother had told around the stove when he was a child, there was still no cause to go looking for trouble. Men weren’t meant to walk through woods alone, even manicured woods like these. Too many threats could lurk in the shadows: the scale-crusted vodyanoy, snatching travelers from the banks of its lake to gnaw on their bones beneath the surface; long-haired rusalki, ghostly women luring men to their graves to avenge their own deaths. Nonsense and superstition, fairy stories to keep children indoors after dark, but nightmares didn’t die as quickly as belief in them did.
Still.
That breath again, and this time a soft groan. A woman’s voice.
Sasha crossed himself and cut sideways into the woods. Despite his better judgment, curiosity remained like the itch of a healing wound, more insistent until every nerve twitched against it. Some instinct—what, he couldn’t have said—insisted that whatever had happened here, it was his responsibility.
It didn’t take long before the trees opened into a clearing ringed with tall pines. In the center, he saw a woman, lying on her side in the snow.
Had it been any darker, he’d have missed her entirely. Her long, thin coat was the same shade as the snow; in the dying light, she resembled a disembodied head and pair of hands lying in the powdery drift. Her hair covered most of her face, and it was not gray or blond but white—not the white of age, but of feathers, of sun reflected off a frosted window. She lay as if she’d fallen from a great height, one cheek pillowed against the snow.
Sasha’s mother always said a vila could change her appearance at will. Cunning spirits of the forest and the air who could assume the female form most pleasing to the man they meant to trap, their sharp laughter ringing as they rent their prey to pieces. He looked up, half expecting to see a grinning demon with silver eyes leering in the branches overhead. But his view to the sky was unbroken, pale gray shot through with red, minutes from sunset. The woman in the snow seemed to shimmer in the fading, otherworldly light. Was this what the painted angels in Petropavlovsky Cathedral would look like if they fell to earth?
A fallen angel, he thought grimly, and yet to his knowledge one angel in particular was famous for making that fall.
The figure shivered, and suddenly she was no longer a fiend, but a woman in need of help. He flinched, thinking of the boys in tattered French uniforms he’d seen lying on the Smolensk road, flesh blue and frozen stiff. He had witnessed enough of that and done nothing—but this was peacetime, this was different. And if Felix’s first glimpse of Sasha in months cast him as this poor woman’s savior, there were worse impressions to make.
Snowdrifts reached well past his ankles as he forced his way toward the woman. The thick boots of his uniform were ideal for heavy wear, but no clothing in the world was suited for a jaunt through uncleared snow in December. Damp and cold, he knelt beside her, ignoring the wet shock as the snow met his knees. The curtain of hair still obscured her face. He reached out a gloved hand to brush it back.
Her skin, what he could see of it, was nearly translucent and tinged with purple. She barely moved against his touch, but he could see no lacerations, no bruises, no broken bones, and her breathing was easy. He gritted his teeth, then shrugged off his overcoat and draped it over the woman, allowing winter to pierce the weave of his uniform. Lifting her was easier than he’d expected, as if her bones were hollow. As he forged a path back to the road, the woman’s heartbeat matched his, seemingly sympathetic to his shivering. In a few minutes, they’d both be inside, a soldier and a stranger in a palace of royals. What happened after that was outside his control, and things past control were past concern.
Soon the woods gave way to cleared paths and neat grounds, carefully manicured beneath the snow. He held the woman close and quickened his pace toward the Catherine Palace, that great hollow building with its five spires catching the last flares of the sun. Marzipan dream. Gilded prison. Either way, warm, and out of the wind.
The woman stirred in his arms; in shock, he nearly dropped her. It had only been a twitch, but that was enough. Alive enough to move. Thank God. Entering the palace holding a corpse wasn’t the effect he’d been aiming for.
“It’s all right,” he said under his breath. “We’re nearly there.”
The woman gave a soft hum and cracked one eye open, the lashes barely separating. One golden eye. A rich tawny yellow, bright as a coin.
He blinked, and her eyes were closed again, pale lashes against lilac skin. The inhuman color was gone, as if it had never been.
Because it had never been. Now was not the time to let his imagination run wild. Without his coat, the cold set in deep. He could feel his numbed hands falling slack around the woman, threatening to drop her at any moment.
When he kicked the side door in lieu of a knock, it gave way at once, which annoyed Sasha but did not surprise him. For all that he was the younger son of the tsar, Grand Duke Felix was startlingly lax in matters of personal safety. If Felix hadn’t left every door of the palace open in Sasha’s absence for robbers and brigands to stroll through and help themselves to imperial heirlooms, he supposed he should count himself lucky. Sasha set off in the direction of Felix’s private apartments. At the very least, he’d find a servant there to direct him. And to lock the door behind.
The Catherine Palace was the same as when he’d last seen it six months before, and for a hundred years before that. Time moved slowly for the imperial family, however quickly it passed for their subjects. Take a stroll down Krestovsky Island in Petersburg where Sasha had grown up, and barely one building in twenty was older than he was. Homes and taverns and shops bloomed and died like crocuses, progress cycling through and leveling anything that had outlived its utility. But this hall hadn’t been altered since the last tsar had walked through it, or the tsarina before him. Polished mirrors capped with gold, marble floors, portraits of severe-looking men draped in military medals looking down their noses at Sasha and the woman. Avoiding their eyes, Sasha watched the gentle ripple of the woman’s breathing instead. He was thirty-one years old, and yet the disdain in these paintings made him feel like the awkward youth he’d been when he’d first seen the imperial family, a new cadet with an ill-fitting uniform and hungry eyes. His boots left heavy prints of mud and snow along the marble, but that would be a servant’s task to deal with later. This garish palace could stand a brush of something natural.
Around another corner, Sasha at last came upon a footman, who stopped in his tracks with wide eyes and his mouth half open. Evidently he hadn’t expected an army captain and a half-dead woman to let themselves in at this point in the evening.
“The grand duke?” Sasha said tersely.
The footman blinked, taking in Sasha’s uniform, his familiarity with the palace, how little good arguing with him was likely to do. “With the musicians,” he said.
So this was Felix’s idea of security without Sasha to direct him. God grant him patience. “And where are the musicians?”
This second prompting seemed to jar the footman back to himself. “In the east parlor. Do you require—”
“No,” Sasha interrupted, already setting off. “I know the way.”
The footman, thankfully, did not pursue him.
Each step along the marble floor soured what remained of Sasha’s hopeful mood. It had been foolish to expect a private audience, but when he’d pictured this homecoming, he’d allowed his imagination to get the better of him. More than once, he’d dreamed up the scene: Felix would be alone in his bedroom, absently watching the snow fall through the window, only to look up at the faint sound of Sasha’s entrance. The distance separating them would shrink to nothing, and Felix would be in his arms again, and they could fall together into bed for as long as they chose to stay there. It was a pretty thought, but not worth the minutes he’d spent dreaming it.
Because the door to the east parlor was in front of him now, and though he could not see inside, the door was ajar, and he could hear. The careless dance of two violins in harmony, playing with more finesse than Sasha had heard in months—since the last time Felix had brought in a band of musicians from Petersburg, no doubt. And there, above the complex weave of the music, a tangle of voices, raised in song and smoothed along the edges with drink. One voice that, even in a chorus, Sasha would recognize anywhere.
The woman nestled closer against his chest, as if to remind him of her presence. He shivered, imagining long hair, cold fingers dragging him through a crack in the ice, in the earth. The sooner this woman wasn’t his responsibility, the happier he’d be. And if that meant interrupting this band of midwinter idlers, so be it.
Without the benefit of his hands, Sasha shifted his balance, then kicked the door open.
As if they faced such interruptions every day, the musicians didn’t miss a note. They were scattered across the parlor as if it were any peasant barn or bonfire, their unhandsome faces alight with drink. Beyond the violinists Sasha had heard from the hall, there was a young woman with a clarinet and a boy of perhaps fourteen with a hand drum, who alone looked up as Sasha entered. A grand brocade sofa sat near the center of the room, with two beautiful women sprawled along it, their skirts vibrant and their cheeks flushed, voices raised in song. One, the blonde, had a near-empty glass of wine in her hand. The other, the dark-haired one, sat on Felix’s lap, trailing one finger through his hair.
Sasha had hoped—had feared?—that the tsar or the tsarevich or the pressures of wartime would finally have forced the grand duke to grow up. But no, this was precisely the same Grand Duke Felix he had left. Tall, strong shouldered, and slim waisted, he still looked like a storybook prince, his pressed jacket slung over the back of the sofa and his cobalt-blue waistcoat carelessly unbuttoned. When Tsar Sergei had banished Felix from Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo two years ago, the understood intent had been to cool his son’s wayward spirit, or at least shame him with a taste of exile from the business of the capital. What he had done instead was give Felix a pleasure garden and the privacy to make the most of it. Sasha could have laughed, if not for the weight in his arms, and the curious twist in his throat as the dark-haired woman’s fingers trailed down Felix’s cheek.
Jealousy was familiar territory for Sasha, but Felix had always lacked the insecurity needed to comprehend it. The moment he caught sight of the curious pair in the doorway, Felix’s dark blue eyes flashed with delight, and he extricated himself from the tangle of limbs on the sofa.
“Sashka!”
The musicians stopped playing and turned to Sasha, standing there awkward and unannounced with a half-dead stranger in his arms.
“Sashka,” Felix repeated, slightly puzzled now. “And you’ve brought a wife with you. Good God, war has changed you, hasn’t it?”
The woman shifted in Sasha’s arms, and her hair fell away from her face with the smooth movement of water poured from a height. “Be serious,” he said, and he was briefly thankful that if he couldn’t get Felix alone, at least he’d come upon him in this careless company, a time and place where he didn’t need to bow and murmur “Your Imperial Highness” like any common man called before a Komarov. “Help me, would you? She needs a doctor.”
“Who is she?”
“How should I know that?” Sasha said tersely. “I found her on the grounds.”
“Aleksandr Nikolaevich, model of Christian charity,” Felix drawled. “I’ll recommend you for sainthood.” Authority blended with amusement as Felix gestured at one of the violinists. “Right then. Arkady, you can hold a person as well as an instrument, can’t you?”
“So I’ve been told, Your Highness,” the musician said with a wink, earning a laugh from the women on the sofa and a blush from the clarinetist.
Felix grinned. “Good. Take her to the bedroom at the end of the corridor. And send for my physician once you get her warm. We’ll want to know who she is and how in hell she wandered into my park, but that’s a question for tomorrow.”
“Yes, Your Highness,” Arkady said, as Sasha carefully transferred the woman to him. Sasha’s arms seemed to hover beside him, suddenly unburdened by the weight. He watched as Arkady carried the woman away, in search of a soft bed and a safe place to rest. He’d done his duty, but even so, he didn’t like the idea of turning his back on her.
“And you,” Felix said, spinning Sasha around to face him. All thoughts of the woman vanished with the warmth of Felix’s hand on his forearm, and that brilliant smile. “Well done, you. I suppose you’re the one to thank that Napoleon turned tail and ran.”
Sasha frowned, tasting gunpowder. “General Kutuzov won’t like you giving me the credit, Felya.”
“And when have I ever cared what that swaggering drunk likes?” Felix said, and God help him but the gleam in Felix’s eye seemed even wickeder now. That rumpled waistcoat, and his dark hair messy, and his attention fully, entirely, intoxicatingly on Sasha. “You’ve just won a war, Sasha, and saved a helpless maiden besides. Let me embellish a little. Enjoy the fairy tale for a night.”
He led Sasha toward the sofa, which the two women had already vacated. Their job was not to seduce the grand duke. It was to make sure Grand Duke Felix had everything his heart desired. And tonight—as Felix guided Sasha down onto the cushion and sat beside him, his mouth so desperately close to Sasha’s throat—what Felix’s heart desired was Sasha.
“Where are your manners, you good-for-nothings?” Felix said to the musicians, though the jab had no bite in it. “Get the hero something to drink.”
The softness of Felix’s fingers. The sight of Felix’s brilliant grin. The familiar chill of a glass pressed into his hand. It wasn’t at all how Sasha had imagined his return.
Not that he was complaining.
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