Felix
Complaining about living in Petersburg had been a fashionable pastime since the city was built, but Felix had never managed to summon the traditional disdain for its frequent floods and lack of basic necessities. He loved the city, honestly and without irony. Its cosmopolitan soul appealed to him, that sense of something diaphanous and rare just beneath the surface. It didn’t stagger under centuries of tradition the way Moscow did. Petersburg was a child among cities, little more than a century old, and that meant light, meant freedom, meant life. Exile from Piter had been more than a cause for shame—it had been a true loss, as though he’d been ripped away from part of himself. So while the prospect of confronting his father left Felix nauseous as the coach dragged forward from Tsarskoe Selo, wheels threatening to stick in the packed snow, the feeling that swept through him loudest of all was anticipation. This was home, after all. Good things had happened here, as well as the bad.
The coach heaved over the next hill, and there it was—Saint Petersburg.
Brilliant as a dream: sweeping boulevards and a diamond-crusted river that cracked the land into dozens of minor islands, the massive Bronze Horseman surveying the capital from the summit of its mountainous pedestal. Domes and multicolored rooftops, the glittering spire of Petropavlovsky Cathedral from within the heart of the tsar’s fortress, and not far from it the Winter Palace, grand enough to make Tsarskoe Selo look like a child’s retreat. Between the shimmering rooftops, the Neva and its tributaries wound their infinite paths toward the sea, the slick gray surface of the water shielded by a layer of ice thick enough to drive a troika across. This would always be Felix’s city, no matter how long he spent away: beautiful, delicate, full of possibility.
The coach descended into a maze of streets and boulevards, grand town houses and gated parks, until at last it reached the wrought-iron gates that led from Palace Square to the interior courtyard of the Winter Palace. Through the window, Felix kept one wary eye on the golden double-headed eagle that loomed over him from the gates. It was only a carving, only ornamentation, and yet he couldn’t help but feel that the eagle’s two sets of eyes, though facing opposite directions, were both fixed directly on him. He bit his tongue and held his breath like a field mouse hiding from a bird of prey.
Muffled shouting from outside the coach, the scrape of iron, and then the gates opened wide, allowing them to move through the grand neoclassical arch and into the courtyard. Felix hopped out the moment they halted, not waiting for the servant to come round and open the door. If he allowed himself to hesitate, he’d retreat into the coach and order the driver to disappear into the city, and no one at the palace would ever see Grand Duke Felix again. The air was so cold it felt like the inside of a scream.
Welcome home, he thought.
Even from outside, the palace was so lavish it seemed impossible that anything shy of seraphim might be allowed to live inside it. The three-story structure stood as if it, too, were an emperor, regal and disdainful in white and yellow, with gold capping every window and the base of every pillar. Felix saw no faces in the windows that surrounded him on all sides, but even so, the sensation of being watched was inescapable. No doubt three dozen servants had their eyes on him from behind the curtains. He hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his overcoat and tilted his head back, wondering absently whether he could hide on the roof, or whether his father’s servants would track him down even there.
Half of Felix’s household had arrived at the palace before him, the other half still filing through the gates. Up ahead, Felix saw Sasha dismount with the grimness of a cavalry soldier resigned to capture or death. Sasha handed the reins to another guard before approaching, each step striking the packed snow heel first. Felix turned his back on the captain. This visit was risky enough without the tsar discovering he’d fallen for a common soldier in his time away from the capital.
Sasha, evidently, could take a hint. “We’ll have your trunks sent up to your rooms, Your Imperial Highness,” he said, as stiffly as if he and Felix had never met. “For now, it would be best if you…”
“Ah! Felix! Returned from the ends of the earth at last.”
Sasha fell silent.
Felix sighed. “All right,” he murmured to himself. “No turning back now.”
Tsarevich Anatoli Sergeevich Komarov, Felix’s elder brother and next in line to the imperial throne, descended the stairs into the courtyard, his wife, Catarina, only a step behind. Some four or five servants hurried after, though what his brother intended to use them for, Felix couldn’t fathom. The epaulettes of Anatoli’s uniform gave his shadow an almost eerie angularity. He must have shaved only minutes ago: his close-cut beard was sharp as a knife’s edge. It made Felix, clean-shaven and permanently tousled, feel even younger than he was, like a child playing at the idea of a prince. His sister-in-law, meanwhile, had dressed with the same care for her clothes that a soldier paid to his weapons. Her gown, though simple and half concealed beneath a brocade shawl, was precisely the same pale yellow as the palace. As if to remind Felix that though she had begun life as the daughter of the king of Prussia, Catarina Petrovna was now more a member of the Komarov family than Felix would ever be.
“Tolya,” Felix said, leaning into the casual diminutive. “And dear Katya.” He kept his hands behind his back and cracked each knuckle in turn.
“We have enough staff here to attend the whole family, mon petit frère,” Anatoli said. He clapped Felix on the shoulder so hard Felix almost buckled. The two brothers had a similar build, but Anatoli was stronger, a consequence both of his conscious training and his brief military career. “You didn’t need to make your people travel all this way.”
As if Felix was meant to turn up in the back of a farmer’s wagon, one carpetbag in hand, and beg his brother the loan of an irritable manservant to scowl at him every morning over the shaving mirror. “Comfort of the familiar,” Felix said, weaving away from his brother’s touch. “They know what I like.”
Anatoli raised his eyebrows. “I should think everyone knows what you like by now.”
“Don’t be a beast,” Catarina admonished. She extended a hand for Felix to kiss, and when he stood straight again, she was smiling. Out of practice with reading her expression, he couldn’t be sure if she was mocking him or glad to see him. “Vous m’avez manqué, vaurien. Court is terribly dull without you.”
“Though I’ve come to quite appreciate dullness, really,” Anatoli added.
Felix’s lips tightened, but he kept his tone light. “There we differ, clearly. Can you show me to Father? I assume he’s expecting me. We’re already a little later than planned.”
Anatoli frowned. “I’m sorry about that,” he said. “Papa is in council with the British and Swedish ambassadors. With the alliance in its current state, even I don’t dare interrupt him. Have your people start unpacking, and he’ll send for you when he’s ready.”
Two years gone, and yet nothing at all had changed. He was every bit as capable as Anatoli; surely he deserved at least the same deferential audience as some overdressed diplomat from Stockholm. And yet here he was, left to cool his heels like any second-rate noble. No doubt the tsar had done it on purpose, to remind Felix of his place. Under the tsar’s control, utterly, and not important enough to necessitate any change to the daily schedule.
“Excellent,” Felix said crisply. “Sasha, when Mademoiselle Azarova’s carriage arrives, please see to it she finds a comfortable room. I think my brother wants me to make myself scarce, from the look he’s giving me.”
Anatoli’s smile never wavered. “Isn’t it possible I missed you?”
“Tsarskoe Selo is fifteen miles away, brother,” Felix said darkly, stalking past his brother and sister-in-law into the palace. “If you’d really missed me, you’d have survived the journey.”
Some days later, Felix stood in his suite of rooms in the Winter Palace and scowled at his reflection in the mirror. Behind him, three trunks’ worth of clothes lay scattered across the floor, the bed, the chair. What he’d finally settled on still felt wrong—no doubt it was wrong, in a dozen ways he wasn’t yet aware of, but he’d exhausted both his options and the time to explore new ones. The jacket was a deep royal blue that skimmed easily along his shoulders, with the lighter blue sash of the Order of Saint Andrew slicing his torso diagonally in a way that made him think of a bayonet wound. He didn’t have Anatoli’s medals and honors to ornament himself with, which made the sash feel like a joke, leaving him simultaneously under- and overdressed. With more than a little petulance, he flicked one section of hair deliberately out of place.
That first afternoon at the Winter Palace had stretched into more than a week, and Felix was still no closer to securing an audience with his father. There had been a different excuse provided at every turn: ministers to converse with, ambassadors to manipulate, generals and nobles and ministers to consult, a splitting headache to cap it off. And beneath all of it, one inescapable truth: that Tsar Sergei would rather do practically anything than speak to his second son.
Sofia sat in one of two armchairs flanking the tea table at the center of the room. She watched him examine himself in the mirror, her posture flawless and her expression unbothered. She had been his near-exclusive companion during his time in Petersburg, aside from the legions of servants populating every corner of the Winter Palace, whom Felix could not entirely avoid despite his concerted efforts. Sasha had kept his distance, for which Felix was privately grateful. They still had not addressed their quarrel at Tsarskoe Selo, and there simply wasn’t enough room in Felix’s head to confront that along with everything else.
He sighed once again and turned away from the glass. “I look ridiculous,” he muttered. “Go on, you can say it.”
“I wouldn’t say ridiculous,” Sofia said. Her smile hinted that whatever replacement word she’d have selected was no more complimentary. “But really. All this for the tsarevich?”
It was a fair point, but Felix refused to rise to the bait. Any move Felix made in Anatoli’s company would be relayed directly to their father in excruciating detail. Besides, given that even Anatoli had been avoiding him since his arrival, a meeting with his brother was at least a step in the right direction. Best to overprepare.
“Don’t think of it as me dressing for the tsarevich,” Felix said with a wink. “Think of it as me dressing for you, then having to spend an evening with my self-righteous brother instead.”
Sofia laughed. “A tragedy,” she said, “when you put it like that.” She rose from the chair and wandered toward the window, where the sun already dipped behind the rooftops of Petersburg. With her back to the room, Felix could only read her mood from the set of her shoulders. Impatient, but not yet angry. “Don’t let him intimidate you. You know how they are, they crush anything they see as a challenge.” She turned from the window, and her eyes were shadowed, beads of amber ringed in silver. “Show them you’re harder than that to get rid of.”
He grinned without meaning to. He was Grand Duke Felix, and there was nothing he couldn’t do. For the first time in many days, the plan that had been so urgent at the Catherine Palace began to seem possible again.
“If I cause an incident,” he said, turning to go, “there’ll be no one but you to blame.”
Anatoli waited for Felix in one of the west parlors, which backed up against the interior courtyard. Though it had been years since he’d walked these halls, Felix didn’t need the two footmen who had arrived to escort him: he could have found the room blindfolded. It was one their mother had liked to use, one where Felix used to come and sketch while Tsarina Natalya Fyodorovna answered letters or spoke in her native German to her brother and servants. Felix himself had never been permitted to speak his mother’s language in front of his father, who’d considered it impertinence bordering on treason. Still, his ear had known it well, and though it had been fifteen years since the tsarina had died, he could still feel her sharply angled German consonants in his memory. The parlor was an eerie place out of time, the words of his childhood preserved in the hang of its curtains. If Anatoli had wanted to make Felix feel small and unsteady, he’d chosen the perfect setting. The inside of his throat felt alive, as if an animal were trying to wriggle out of him. Enough of this. Petersburg was his home, and Felix was certainly able to stand up to Tolya, of all people.
Felix swallowed hard as the footman opened the door.
“His Imperial Highness Grand Duke Felix Sergeevich,” the footman said, with a bow. It was the proper form of address, but in front of Anatoli, the title held the hint of a sneer. It was the same disdain that hid in the ceremonial sash, the fine clothes, the artificial cheerfulness of his welcome. You don’t belong here. You never have. Felix entered the parlor like a chess piece, straight forward across the parquet.
“Come in,” Anatoli said, well after the fact.
His brother sat near the end of a rectangular table, flanked on both sides by sofas upholstered in blue damask. Behind him, at the sideboard, another two servants manned the samovar, both directing their gaze into the middle distance with the studied emptiness of someone trying to pretend they were not eavesdropping. A porcelain teacup hung easily in Anatoli’s hand, empty now. Though his silver jacket was absurdly elegant for an evening spent among family, he looked more effortlessly in command than Felix had ever managed. Felix sat stiffly, causing the chair to creak.
“I assume Father’s still in council,” Felix said coldly.
Anatoli set the cup aside and shrugged, as if to say What did you expect? “I asked him to join us, but he’s been cornered by the chairman of the State Council. You know how Bezkryostnov is when he gets in a snit.”
Felix nodded, though of course he didn’t know: the last chairman had been dismissed for the same display of liberal-minded impertinence that had gotten Felix sent away, and Bezkryostnov was the latest replacement. He bit his lip, watching his brother as the silent servants poured them fresh cups of steaming tea. Was the old Anatoli still somewhere inside this fine prince? The brother who had taught Felix all the best places to hide in the Summer Garden, who would brag to their mother on his behalf—You should have seen how Felya skated today, Mama, faster than anything, he’d have frightened a Cossack. That brother had to be in there somewhere: an entire person couldn’t vanish without leaving some trace behind. But ever since their father had begun supervising the tsarevich’s education in earnest, Felix could only spot the kind older brother he remembered in certain unconscious gestures, the way Anatoli held his cup between both palms, the tilt of his head. They sat sipping oversteeped tea hot enough to scald, with nothing more to say to each other than a pair of strangers.
“Katya’s well?” Felix asked, purely to break the silence.
“Wonderful,” Anatoli said. “Hoping to travel to Berlin in the spring for her brother’s marriage, now that the war is through.”
“Assuming we’ve chased Napoleon far enough away by then.”
“Yes. Assuming that.”
Another long silence. The sound of the clock in the corner was torturous.
“I’ve been thinking it over since the moment you arrived,” Anatoli said finally, setting aside his cup, “and I still can’t work it out. Franchement, that’s why I asked to see you. So you can help me understand.”
Felix did not move. There was something in Anatoli’s voice more alarming than curiosity. “Understand what?”
“Why you’re here.”
Anatoli stood and paced toward the window, hands folded behind his back. The disdain shone clearly even in his posture as he studiously looked away from Felix, watching the shadowed snow filling the courtyard that divided one half of the palace from the other.
“If you’d burned through your allowance already, you could have dealt with that in a letter. You know Papa would gladly make sure you had everything you needed.” Everything you needed to stay as far away as possible, Anatoli meant, but did not add. “Instead you come here, now, just when the damned war is over and Papa can finally start solidifying the stability he’s created. It’s as if you want to hurt him, though what he’s ever done to you to deserve it, I have no idea.”
Felix’s sip of tea served like oil to a fire, fanning his indignation higher. “Solidifying the stability he’s created”—a fine phrase, and true enough, so long as you closed your eyes and thought only of foreign ambassadors and trade negotiations and paid no attention to the city just outside these walls.
“I wonder what the people of Piter think of the tsar’s stability.”
When Anatoli turned back around, his lip had begun to curl, a cold and foreign anger coursing through him. Anatoli’s anger had always been hotheaded, impetuous, easy enough to dodge or wait out. This was their father’s rage, the kind that aimed before it fired. “You have no idea what the people think, Felya. Don’t pretend you do.”
Felix shoved his cup aside, his hands forming fists without his meaning them to. The sneering diminutive—little Felya, mon petit frère—pushed him past the point of being careful, and he spoke without thinking. “You tell me, then, if you’ve been listening so carefully. I never had you down as a defender of the people, but it’s been two years, and who’s to say? Men change. Maybe you’re fast friends with your servants now, even remember their names.”
Anatoli scoffed; both servants gazed expressionlessly ahead. “Soyez pas con. If you’d been here for more than ten minutes, you’d know yourself what they’re saying. God knows they’re saying it loud enough. If the people only understood they have the tsar to thank for bringing them peace.” He strode back toward the table, as if the citizens of Petersburg were arrayed just outside the window, clawing to be let in. “There are demonstrations and riots every other evening. Idiots demanding wild sums of money, land they have no right to, the onset of anarchy. You know why Father is with Bezkryostnov right now? Because there’s another assembly planned at the Andreevsky Market for the end of the week, and we need a way to tear out this uprising at the roots. Meanwhile, you’re out in the country, hosting balls and seducing chambermaids, and you think that qualifies you to give the tsar advice?”
Riots in Petersburg. And he, less than twenty miles away, unaware. Sofia had told him that the country had begun to slip out of control, but it was already so much worse than he’d imagined. Felix gritted his teeth and tried to remind himself that the ignorance wasn’t his fault, that his father had been the one to send him away, but there was no use lying, not to himself. It was his family’s duty to lead the people of this vast, aching country. And he’d willingly set aside that responsibility at the first obstacle.
Enough. No more.
“I thought that’s why we stood against Napoleon,” Felix said. The room felt colder than ever, the long table separating the brothers like a vast plain. If Felix measured its length in steps, how many would he count? Enough for a duel? “So our family could rule our own people. Is the job not as attractive now that some French usurper isn’t fighting you for it?”
“You don’t understand, Felix,” Anatoli said—the emphasis on his name cruelly condescending. “What it’s like in the city. What people are thinking. What they’re starting to want.”
What the people wanted, the tsar would have said, was immaterial. What the people needed was a strong voice to tell them what to want, and a stronger hand to guide them away from any alternatives. It had always been this way, in all the lessons Felix had sat through in his youth, tsar after tsar firm and decisive and final. Even he, who had avoided his tutors until one of them enlisted half a dozen guards to search the palace for him, knew that much. But now the people had known the end of the war. They’d known the privations of rationing, the French army bearing down on Moscow, setting their ancient city ablaze with their own torches rather than shame their country through surrender. They’d known all of that pain, and they’d fought, they’d proven themselves as brave as the officers they’d died beside, and for them, what had changed? What had the tsar’s famed peace done for them?
That was what Sofia had wanted to make him understand, back in the Hall of Lights. Small wonder the people of Petersburg were rioting. Hopelessness was a dangerous infection, and it could come to one of only two ends. Either the people would sink down, exhausted, into torpor and blind obedience—or a single spark would catch the dry tinder of their despair, and the city would go up in flames.
“Help me understand, then,” Felix said, leaning across the table toward his brother. “Let me help you.”
“We aren’t interested in the kind of help you have to offer,” Anatoli snapped. “You want to help us? Do the minimum we’ve asked of you and marry whichever German princess you can stand to speak to. And the sooner the better. Your reputation is making it less and less likely every day.”
A mad laugh bubbled up in Felix’s throat. His brother had no idea what Felix was capable of, the tactical skill and strategic brain behind the façade of the decadent prince. Tolya didn’t understand—as Felix did, perhaps for the first time—that their father had sent him away not because he was a fool, but because he was powerful enough to be listened to. He had no idea of the voice in Felix’s ear right now, the voice of a woman who believed in him, her faith as old and powerful as Russia itself.
The voice whispering, Stop waiting.
“You said Father is with Bezkryostnov?”
Anatoli blinked. “Yes. For hours yet. Are you listening to me?”
“Oh, I’m listening,” Felix said. “But charming as this has been, I didn’t come to Piter to meet with you. In fact, I might just pay Father and the chairman a visit. They’re in his study, I assume? He always liked the comfort of his own rooms for a good haranguing.”
“Felix,” Anatoli warned. “Don’t. You know what would happen.”
But it was too late. Felix was already halfway to the door, and the servants did not dare stop him.
The tsar’s study, dead center of the imperial apartments, was a straight shot along the bel étage from the late tsarina’s parlor, its door firmly closed. Not far—certainly not far enough for a shocked Anatoli to overtake and stop him, and none of the palace servants had worked up the daring to challenge a grand duke. A voice murmured inside the study, one Felix didn’t recognize. The chairman’s, no doubt—it lacked the tsar’s decisive cadence. A month ago, before Sofia’s arrival, Felix might have hesitated, frozen by the danger of what he was about to do, but not now. Now, the voice in the back of his head pushed him forward with the cold surety of the north wind.
Stop waiting.
Felix flung open the door and stepped into the tsar’s now deathly silent study.