Romanov(78)

We were falling. Flying. Spinning through darkness and it was all I could do to keep my grip on Alexei and Zash. My body grew thin and weightless, then heavy and sluggish, then finally balanced back out. The spinning stopped. And I blinked color back into the world.

Bright greens, flickering blue, startling sunlight.

We were still in the woods, but no longer in the wild.

We’d been moved to a flourishing garden of trimmed grass, twisted rosebushes, and a stone-laid brook winding through it all. Gravel dug into my knees. Alexei lay in a heap on the ground before me, Joy swaying drunkenly at his swollen head. My hands pressed on Alexei’s chest as his blood seeped into the rocks beneath us.

Behind me, Zash grappled with another body—an angry, disheveled Bolshevik body.

Yurovsky had come with us.

Zash needed help. But one name chanted from the blood around my knees louder than the rest. Romanov. Romanov. Romanov.

Alexei lay paler than a snowfall. The world turned to silence around me. Through the haze of my panic, I saw the gravel path led to a carved house of wood and I knew where we were—not through recognition, but because the spoken spell had woven the answer with the threads of my veins.

Dochkin’s home. He was here. We were here.

“Nastya!” Zash croaked from behind. I spun, halfway to my feet before I caught his next strained words. “Get him . . . to . . . Dochkin.”

Just like that, the conflict in my soul between staying and helping Zash and saving my brother was loosed like a snapped rope. I gathered Alexei into my shaking arms, his blood sliding across my skin. His breath undetectable.

Though he weighed hardly more than the shoulder pack I’d carried the past few days, my knees threatened to buckle as I rose. My ribs screamed. I stumbled through the gravel, small stones jamming between the worn cloth of my shoes and my tender skin.

I reached the door, hefted Alexei over my shoulder, and lifted the latch. Before I entered, I looked back over my shoulder. Zash was on the ground, a hunting knife clenched in his fist, pinned beneath Yurovsky.

Iisus, help him.

I entered the house. “Help!” I blinked against the sudden dimness, willing my eyes to adjust. “Help! Help! Please, Vasily Dochkin!” The first thing that came into view was a quilted bed across the room. I managed two steps toward it before my legs gave out. I slammed into the wood floor, clutching Alexei close so he wouldn’t bruise.

But then he was weightless. Lifted from my arms and transported to the bed by two weathered arms of an old man. He had a long mustache and a bald head.

A sob rose in my throat. “Save him . . . please.” I pressed a fist against my chest and stared at the blood—the life—flowing out of my brother. Already dripping from the quilt onto the wood floor.

Dochkin bent over Alexei, tearing open Alexei’s uniform—buttons flying everywhere. “Come press on this wound.”

I was on my feet mere seconds after the word come. I pressed the palms of my hands over a bubbling red wound in Alexei’s abdomen. The moment I plugged the hole, Dochkin rushed to the kitchen.

His home was a wide one-space cottage. To my right rested a kitchen of sorts, covered in scraps of food but also bottles of ink and pieces of parchment. A double window lay propped open and birds pecked at seed on the sill, some hopping into the house and others flying around in the rafters.

Dochkin sifted through the bottles and jars. Alexei gave a shuddering gasp. I swung my attention back to him. His gasp turned to a gurgle. A wet cough. “Dochkin!” I screamed, pressing harder. But Alexei had more than one wound. I couldn’t stop them all. His body was a cracked dam, leaking and growing weaker. About to crumble entirely.

My scream echoed in the still house, mixing with the noise of clattering bottles and the scuffle outside. I twisted toward the kitchen. “Doch—” I choked.

Yurovsky had entered, silent as a cougar. He leaped at Dochkin from behind and pressed his knife to the spell master’s throat. Dochkin clutched a black jar in one hand, its stopper stained with silver-rainbow smears. Spell ink.

Where was Zash?

“Release the jar and surrender,” Yurovsky growled. “You are a traitor to your country.”

With a shaking hand Dochkin passed the jar to Yurovsky. The moment it passed from old weathered fingers to bloodstained ones, Zash stumbled into the cottage. Half his face was bashed in and a nasty gash across his hairline poured blood down his face. He held a river rock and rubbed a fist against his eyes as he took in the scene.

Alexei’s body stilled beneath my hands. “Alexei.” I freed one hand only to plug another wound. “Don’t give up! Alexei!”

Zash swayed but lifted the river rock, setting his gaze on Yurovsky. But Yurovsky threw first. The ink jar sailed across the room and smashed against Zash’s temple, glistening spell ink splashing everywhere. Zash collapsed to the floor, blood like a halo rippling around him. No. No!

The ink from the smashed jar rolled in a thick stream toward my boots.

“It knows your blood.” Dochkin pinned me in place with the intensity of his stare.

“Silence, old man!” Yurovsky gripped him tighter.

Dochkin’s throat bobbed against the knife blade and he spoke again. To me. “The ink is loyal to the Romanov—”

Slice. Splash. Fall.

Dochkin sank in a shredded heap, his throat split open like a seam. Time slowed. Even my scream of dismay seemed to take thrice as long to escape my mouth.