The Crown's Game (The Crown's Game, #1)(8)

But Yuliana was not Pasha—that was what his family and closest friends called him—in almost every way. Yuliana cared about economics and politics (she was carrying an enormous, rolled-up map at this very moment), and Pasha cared about hunting and reading. He was quick to smile and chatty with all the servants, whereas she had the propriety to maintain the hierarchy of her royal rank. And his hair was always a mess! No, Yuliana was nothing like Pasha, and thank goodness for that. The Russian Empire needed at least one Romanov in this generation with her head screwed on straight.

Pasha waited for her at the heavy gold doors that marked the entrance to their father’s study, not even out of breath. Two members of the Tsar’s Guard stood at attention, one on either side. They had likely already bowed to Pasha—he was the tsesarevich, after all—but they bowed again when they saw Yuliana.

“Is Father occupied?” she asked one of the guards.

“He is meeting with the tsarina, Your Imperial Highness.”

“Then we’ll come back later,” Pasha said.

“No, we won’t.” Yuliana shoved open the doors before her brother or the guards could protest. Not that they would. They’d long ago learned that it was better to allow Yuliana her own way than to suffer her wrath.

The tsarina jumped in her armchair at the sound of the doors flinging open, then burst into a fit of coughs. The tsar merely looked up from his desk and sighed. “Yuliana, how many times have I asked you to have the guards announce you properly? Look what you’ve done to your mother. Elizabeth,” he said to the tsarina, “are you all right?”

Yuliana glanced at the tsarina. A pale-blue handkerchief was pressed to her even paler face, her elegant hands shaking as she convulsed. “My apologies, Mother. I didn’t mean to frighten you.” Yuliana turned back to the tsar. “But Pasha has just returned, and he has much to say about the Kazakh steppe. It’s rather alarming.”

Pasha came up laughing behind her. “Only slightly more alarming than the way you enter a room.”

Yuliana shot him one of her famous scowls.

It only made him laugh more. Ugh. Brothers.

The tsar sat back in his chair, which, although simpler, seemed as much a throne as the one in the official throne room. “Your mother was in the middle of discussing plans for Pasha’s upcoming birthday,” he said. When he frowned, he looked a lot like Yuliana. Or Yuliana looked a lot like him. Severe blond statues, straight out of ancient Rome.

“It’s all right,” the tsarina said, having finally stopped coughing. She gathered her voluminous silver skirts and rose. “I was finished.”

“Mother,” Pasha said, “don’t go. What I have to say can wait.”

“It really can’t,” Yuliana said.

The tsarina smiled and kissed Yuliana on the top of her carefully coiffed ringlets, then stood on her tiptoes to peck Pasha on the cheek. “It’s fine, love, talk to your father.” The tsarina smiled at the tsar, too, and she departed the room.

Yuliana set her map—still rolled up, for now—against her father’s desk and sat in the armchair her mother had vacated. It hadn’t a trace of warmth, as if it were too much to ask the tsarina’s tiny, sickly body to produce enough heat to warm the cushions. But Yuliana pushed that out of her head. What was important right now was the Kazakhs and getting the tsar to do something about them.

“Father, what I—”

The tsar put up a hand. “Yuliana, why don’t you let Pasha speak? It’s he who was on the steppe, was it not?”

“Yes, well . . .” But she gestured at Pasha, for this was why she’d dragged him here in the first place, even though he’d wanted to go out to see his friends as soon as he’d arrived back in Saint Petersburg.

“So,” the tsar said to Pasha, “I received word that Qasim refused to sup with you?”

“Indeed, Father,” Pasha said, raking a hand through his hair, tousling it in that casually defiant way that all the girls of the nobility seemed to love. “Like waves of gold,” Yuliana had overheard Baroness Zorina’s daughter say at a recent tea. Yuliana had wanted to punch her in her vapid face.

“Although I abolished their khanate,” the tsar said, “the Kazakhs still look to Qasim as their leader. I sent you to dine with him for a reason, Pasha. I needed you to gather information for me, especially after the Kazakhs attacked our Cossack detachments earlier this year.”

Pasha leaned against one of their father’s bookcases, his elbows behind him as support. “But I learned what we needed to know, even without meeting with Qasim.”

“How?” the tsar said.

“I have my ways.” Pasha smiled.

The tsar rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I don’t think I want to know your methods,” he said.

“No, Father, trust me, you do not.” Yuliana tried not to smile—in general, she did not believe in smiles—but she couldn’t help it, because her brother brought them out of her. And Pasha had already told Yuliana the how of his espionage.

Pasha was notorious for slipping out of the palace in plain clothes, masquerading as one of the common people so he could waste his time playing cards with fishermen on the dock or frequenting taverns with his friend Nikolai Karimov. It was no different on the Kazakh steppe, where Pasha had left his officer’s uniform at the army’s camp and sneaked out in a plain tunic and trousers. Then he’d wandered through the main trading post, posing as an innocent traveler.