Romanov(3)

Papa and Maria—my partner in mischief and only two years older—spoke quietly in the hall. Maria paled beneath her long brown hair, but she gave a brave nod and then headed toward our room.

I hurried to take her place at Papa’s side. “What is the decision?”

“Your mamma will join me,” Papa finally said. “Maria will come as her companion.”

Not me.

He must have been able to see the resignation on my face, because he cupped my cheek with his hand and it sparked the fuse that led to the burn of tears. “Tatiana will manage the household in my absence. You have your own role to play.”

So it was decided. As simple as that. Like a surgeon slicing a heart in two. My heart pumped a broken rhythm. Everything was happening too fast. I was about to be left behind. There were too many unknowns.

I grabbed his sleeve. “Is there no other way?” My plea might as well have been a shout to the corridor of guards. But I had no reason to hide my love for my family.

Papa sounded equally as desperate in his reply. “I cannot see one, shvibzik.” He guided me up the hallway, away from the guards. “When Alexei is well enough to travel, you and your sisters will join us.”

I opened my mouth to protest—how I loved protesting—but Papa added a seemingly unrelated question. “When was the last time you read Pushkin’s novels?”

My jaw snapped shut like the bite of a nutcracker. Pushkin. Pushkin. A brief moment passed as though he wanted to be sure I understood the undertones of his question. So much of my family’s conversation these days consisted of hidden messages and code words.

Pushkin meant “secrets.”

The burn of my tears was snuffed. I couldn’t hold back the sly grin that crawled onto my face. “I was planning on reading one today.” As soon as he left, I would slip to the library and find whatever secret he’d hidden there for me.

Papa glanced over his shoulder. No guards in sight. We stopped. “Nastya, you know the most about spells. I did not trust Rasputin as Mamma did, but I know he instructed you and he likely did it well.” Code words were abandoned.

“He only ever had time to show me the basics.” And hardly even that.

“That is still more than your siblings. This is why you must guard the family Matryoshka doll and bring it with you when you join us.”

My throat cinched. Thirteen years ago, I’d watched Mamma and him open a layer of that painted doll and release the now-forbidden spell that brought us Alexei. I’d not seen the doll since. “Dochkin made that doll.” Vasily Dochkin, Russia’s most respected and skilled spell master.

“Da. Do not let the Bolsheviks take it.”

My mind raced through questions and answers. After Rasputin, the people grew too suspicious of spell masters, convinced they could control minds. So the revolution began—forcing Papa off the throne and hunting down spell masters one by one.

“The Bolsheviks would use the doll to find Dochkin and kill him,” I surmised. “I must protect him.” The revolutionaries were fools. They knew nothing about spell masters. Spells from the old artists of Russia were now forbidden. I liked forbidden things.

“That is not why I am entrusting it to you.” Papa glanced over his shoulder. “This doll, Nastya. It may be our family’s only salvation.”

A familiar thrill twirled in my chest. Papa was depending on me and not my eldest sisters, Olga or Tatiana, because he knew I could do it. I was sneaky—they were too honest. “I will not fail you, Papa.”

He kissed me on the forehead. “You never do. Now go help Maria pack.”

I spun on my heel and strode down the hallway of the Tobolsk governor’s house as though I was, once again, Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna back in the Alexander Palace.

I could pretend away Papa’s abdication.

I could pretend away our exile.

And now that Papa had given me a mission, I could—for the moment—pretend away the fear of never seeing him, Mamma, or Maria again.

I entered the bedroom that my sisters and I shared. Maria stood staring at her brown valise, looking far too vulnerable and unsure for her stocky eighteen-year-old frame.

I sighed and crossed the room. “You had to volunteer.” I pulled books from our shelf and stuffed them into Maria’s valise, making sure she had the essentials—Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov. I tried to set my envy aside—I wished I were going. But then who would Alexei have?

Maria snapped out of her helplessness, as I knew she would if I forced literature on her. She took the books out and replaced them with a beaded gown. “I could not let Mamma face Papa’s trial alone.”

I tried to slip in two of the discarded volumes. How did she expect to dispel the boredom on the train ride without books? “You’ll not need an evening gown at a court trial, Maria.” Nor, likely, ever again. Why she’d brought the gown to Tobolsk in the first place made sense only to Maria’s flirtatious mind.

If we were lucky, the trial would allow us—the last Romanov family—to disappear into a quaint Russian village and live out the rest of our lives as the common people did.

“It is Moscow,” Maria stressed. “I would rather have a flattering gown on hand than old dusty books.” She dumped the volumes out and I managed to catch all but Dostoevsky, which slammed to the ground, spine up. My soul cracked right along with the crisp pages.