Romanov(49)

I entered the toilet area and latched the door. Then I took the doll from my corset. My sweaty hands slid against the wood. I gripped the top half of the doll with one fist and the bottom half with the other. With a deep breath, I twisted.

The doll opened.

Inside rested a smaller doll. I didn’t see a spell or a word like when Rasputin had used spells. Gingerly, I lifted the inner doll and slid it into the space in my corset. It felt too small and loose now that it was not encased by its senior.

There, in the bottom part of the largest doll, sat a word. Painted in the glimmering rainbow spell ink: Ajnin.

I had never seen that word before—not in Russian, English, German, or French. This gave me no information. What sort of power did this spell hold?

As I stared at the word, it detached itself from the inner wood of the doll layer. It floated in the air, up in front of my eyes, the letters flickering as though on an invisible ribbon. I grabbed the top of the doll to recapture the spell before it was somehow enacted.

But the word seemed to sense my intentions. It swooped down and slipped between my lips. I gasped and the spell settled onto my tongue. It burned like a flame but tasted like embers and power.

Somehow I knew that once I spoke the mysterious word, the spell would be enacted.

I’d never heard of a spell entering a person’s mouth to be spoken. I’d never heard the word ajnin before. But this was a spell by Dochkin. This could save my family—and now it couldn’t be taken from me.

A fist pounded on the bathroom door. I jumped. “A moment, please!” Then I clapped a hand over my mouth. The spell hadn’t come out. I hadn’t said the word. I was able to speak other words freely.

My breath returned, and I closed up the empty shell of the Matryoshka doll before leaning close to the small mirror. I stuck my tongue out. The letters rested in the very center of my tongue. Like an unswallowed line of sugar. Barely visible.

The pounding on the door repeated. Zash’s voice came from the other side. “Nastya.”

Now I’d done it. The spell was in me. Dare I use it without knowing what it did? Was this the time? I slipped the empty doll shell up my sleeve, shut my mouth, and opened the door.

“What were you doing?” Zash hissed. “Do you want to raise suspicion?”

I lifted my chin. “I was doing my duties, as you commanded me to do. Sir.” Then I returned to our space and placed the now smaller Matryoshka doll back in my shoe.



July 15



It was a torrential day when the cleaning women came. We were sitting at our table, playing a family game of bezique. All of us but Mamma who lay in bed and Olga who read to her in the other room. Alexei sat in Mamma’s wheelchair with Joy on his lap.

“Zdravstvutye!” We greeted the four cleaning women with bright smiles. It was nice to see new faces. Kind faces.

We hadn’t had cleaning women before, but Yurovsky liked clockwork and cleanliness. He paced on the landing, eyeing us. Eyeing the cleaning ladies. His pocket bulged with his watch and I turned away. If he pulled it out, would it track me again? Would it detect the ajnin spell on my tongue?

None of the women returned the greeting beyond deep bows. We did not speak with them beyond the greeting, not wishing to bring trouble upon their heads.

We kept our quarters relatively clean, but I found myself staring after them longingly as they mopped and dusted and scraped bits of mud off the entryway. I wanted to put my hands to work. Not to play. I wanted purpose like they had purpose.

They continued to glance our way. A flicker here. A side-eye there. I couldn’t stop my grin. They were curious about the royal family. We probably looked a fright compared to their expectations—all of us girls in our black skirts and white frocks that we’d mended more times than we cared to count. Practically bald.

The ladies finished the entryway and hoisted their cleaning buckets toward the bedrooms. Yurovsky must have seen enough because he reentered his office. I stuck out my tongue—just barely—at his retreating form.

One cleaning lady giggled. I caught her watching me. I giggled, too, and hopped up from the table to help move the cots so they could reach the floor beneath.

“Nyet, nyet,” one lady said. “We can do it.”

“Oh, we welcome this opportunity for physical exertion,” I replied. Even Maria moved from the card game to help slide the beds. “At home we used to enjoy work of the hardest kind with the greatest of pleasure.” I wanted to go into detail about sawing wood with Papa and stacking logs.

They let us help. I relished the strain on my feeble muscles. I hoarded the reward of doing something. Of helping someone. But these were women from outside. From the city. We rarely encountered people from the city, and I had to risk further conversation. I had to know the temperament of Ekaterinburg.

“What is happening out there?”

The lady nearest me paused in her scrubbing. She glanced over her shoulder toward the entryway, then shoved her stiff brush over the wood, sending bubbles in a spray at my knees. “Unrest.” Her gaze met mine. Wide. Fierce. “The White Army is here.”





20



July 16



It was too much to hope for. That the White Army was here! In Ekaterinburg! I might have doubted the cleaning lady long after she left, but Yurovsky’s nervous pacing and constant in and out of his office the very next day affirmed her statement.