Felix

Against the sumptuous adornment of the rest of the Winter Palace, the tsar’s private study was startlingly ascetic. It was the one room Tsar Sergei had free rein to decorate as he chose, unconstrained by the weight of tradition or the need to create a conspicuous spectacle of wealth to intimidate foreign leaders. If Felix’s father had his way, no doubt he would have outfitted the entire palace in this manner: polished oak furniture, forest-green velvet curtains, not a single cornice or column beyond those integral to the structure of the room. Sober. Practical. Felix had always privately believed his father would be happier far away from the excesses of Petersburg. Perhaps living in a small hunting dacha near Novorossiysk, dressed in furs and stalking an elk.

Reality, of course, had other plans for the Komarovs.

Bezkryostnov must have been speaking before the door opened: the man’s owlish face bore the unmistakable affronted expression of someone halted in the middle of a phrase. The wire-thin chairman stood in front of the vast rectangular desk at the south end of the room, staring at Felix in incomprehension. Felix ignored him entirely.

Behind the desk sat Tsar Sergei Alexeevich. His uniform was flawlessly creased, as though it hung in a wardrobe and not on a man. Those deep blue eyes—Felix’s eyes, one more part of the Komarov legacy that had carried forward—coolly sized up his son with neither anger nor surprise, only a faint undercurrent of disappointment. The welcome was even worse than Felix had feared.

“Good evening, Felix,” the tsar said. “I did not send for you.”

Felix swallowed, feeling his courage quail. Anatoli must have entered behind him; his father glanced toward the door as if expecting an apology to emerge from that direction.

“No,” Felix said. “I wasn’t sure you ever would.”

The tsar sighed, then made a swift gesture toward Bezkryostnov. “Nikolai Semyonovich,” he said wearily, “I’ll send for you in the morning to finish this discussion. For now, I think you had better leave us.”

Bezkryostnov did not wait to be told again. He bowed rapidly to the tsar, then darted around Anatoli and out of the room as if the hounds of hell were in hot pursuit. The tsar’s stern, handsome face looked wearier than Felix remembered it. Was that a consequence of his own arrival, or had years of on-and-off war with the French weighed more heavily on his father’s shoulders than he’d expected? They’d certainly left their traces in his hair. None of Felix’s memories of his father included the strands of silver that now shot through the tsar’s hair and beard.

“It may surprise you to hear this,” the tsar said, “but being tsar does not afford me an inordinate quantity of leisure time. When I ask Anatoli to tell you I’m otherwise engaged, I expect you to believe it.”

“I do believe it.”

“Then why are you here?”

Felix had heard that voice before, many times. It was the voice with which the tsar had addressed his wife, the single time Felix could remember Natalya Fyodorovna daring to raise a dissenting political opinion in front of the tsar’s ministers. It was the voice with which he’d banished Felix from the council chamber and then from the city. It was the voice all Komarov men were meant to have mastered so that it became as natural as breathing, the one that said, I value your opinion less than dirt, less than nothing at all.

The dread in his bones lasted only a moment before he squared his shoulders, surprising himself with his own boldness. It was as if Sofia’s words had dripped from his memory into his skeleton, steeling his spine. He was a Komarov. They might crush anyone else who attempted to challenge them, but it would take more than a curt voice and a stern brow to turn him away.

“We need to talk, Father,” he said. “We’ve needed to talk for years.”

The tsar exhaled and leaned back in his chair. His overall air was that of a man preparing for a theatrical production he had not wished to attend. Confronting his father still felt like squaring off with a bear, righteous determination or no.

“Talk, then,” the tsar said.

Felix cleared his throat. “The tsarevich told me about the assembly in the Andreevsky Market. I want to know what you intend to do about it.”

“Papa, I tried to tell him—” Anatoli began, but fell victim to the tsar’s silencing look.

“You can’t be surprised they’re starting to agitate,” Felix said. He was speaking too fast now, gesturing too broadly, but who was he to try to stem the tide? “What do you expect them to think, when they stop freezing in the streets long enough to see a fire blazing in every window of the Winter Palace? You think they look at pictures of their tsar done up in gold and all they think is, ‘Well, thank God the tsar is thriving,’ while they’re still shivering in clothes shredded by French bayonets?”

The tsar stood; Felix dropped back. Contained behind the desk, the tsar’s physical power had been masked. Now, in the open, he looked fully the man Felix remembered, all six feet three inches of him. This was the tsar who had broken a fox’s neck with his hands when the bullet had failed to kill the hunt’s quarry, who had drunk straight through the endless winter nights and spent the entirety of the next day riding as if sleep were for lesser beings not touched by God. Nothing could stop that man.

“And I suppose you know better than anyone what the people think,” the tsar said. “You’ve been chatting with them over tea, I expect. In the drawing room of the Catherine Palace. Every bedroom full up with beggars and prostitutes.”

Felix flushed but gave no further ground. “I know it.”

“How, exactly?”

He’d seen it in the shadows of a ballroom, a second reality creeping like a smoke screen over the first. Bloody wounds and mouths torn open in endless screams. He couldn’t possibly tell his father that. Was he mad after all? He must be, to think he could argue with the tsar and win.

The insistent echo of Sofia’s voice pushed him forward, shoving away his doubts. No, he wasn’t mad. He was the only member of this family who knew how to listen.

“Trust me that I know,” Felix snapped. “You would, too, if you ever set a toe outside your dozen palaces. When’s the last time you spoke to a person who isn’t a baron or a princess or a minister, Father? A few hundred of them can’t outweigh the three hundred thousand in the streets of your city.”

The flat of the tsar’s palm slammed against the desk, and Felix flinched as if he himself had been struck. Neither of the tsar’s sons dared to speak. This was the sort of silence one did not break without permission.

“You,” the tsar said, “are a child. A coward. And though I won’t dishonor your mother’s memory by suggesting it, there are days I wish you were no son of mine. Now get out of my sight, before I expend the very last of my patience.”

“You’ve been in this palace so long you’ve forgotten what your people—”

“Exactly.” The tsar’s voice fell like thunder, striking Felix silent. “They are my people. I’ve led them through everything. War. Uncertainty. Famine. Thirty endless winters, one after the next. And still they turn to me to set the country right, after every calamity that sets us back. Me, and the dynasty our family began. Do you know why?” The pause was long enough to invite a response, the silence too thick to permit it. “Because they know who I am. And in the darkest hours of this country, they turn to the Komarov on the imperial throne to steer the way with a strong hand and turn aside any threat. That is what General Kutuzov and I did with Napoleon’s Grande Armée. That is what Chairman Bezkryostnov and I are doing with the rioters in the Andreevsky. And it is what I will do with every agitator who thinks his own ideas are worth more than the safety and stability of my empire, whether it’s a band of lawless rebels in the street or my own son. Tu comprends?”

It was the longest sustained speech Felix’s father had deigned to deliver to him in years. Even in the months before his departure for Tsarskoe Selo, their conversation had been limited to terse, utilitarian exchanges: Good morning, Hand me that notice, Your brother is in the gallery. When the tsar turned his attention on Felix with this much force, it was hot enough to melt under.

“I understand you perfectly,” Felix said. “That doesn’t mean I agree.”

“Felix,” Anatoli said again, “for God’s sake—”

Felix turned to his brother, pivoting his anger without effort. Anatoli didn’t care what Felix had to say. All the tsarevich wanted was for their father to see him as the reliable son, the one who could be trusted with the throne in due course. The good son, who had not failed their father.

“You know I’m right. If you looked farther than your own nose for one minute, Tolya, you’d see it, too.”

The rest of the thought died on his tongue. Anatoli’s dark blue eyes were wide, his expression pleading. This wasn’t the disapproving, conservative brother he’d expected to chastise him for holding wayward opinions. This was how Tolya had looked at twelve, bending over him when Felix had fallen from that tree at the palace at Gatchina, anxiously checking his leg for a break before sprinting back to the house to call for help. His brother was frightened for him. He knew what their father was capable of.

A flicker of parallel fear danced through Felix, there and gone in an instant. If Anatoli didn’t have the stomach to point out their father’s mistakes, he didn’t need to stay here. Felix had never asked him to come to his defense.

“A strong hand is one thing,” Felix said. “But it only works so long as the people consent to be led. What happens when they change their mind? Push a brittle branch too far, and what happens when it snaps?”

A terrible silence followed.

“If you were not my son,” the tsar said slowly, “you would already be dead for what you’ve said to me tonight.”

Chilled but not daunted, Felix stood his ground. This was why he’d come. He’d argue all night, fight with everything he had, if it would make a difference. He would be the kind of man he knew he could be. The man Sofia believed in.

The unmistakable sound of a gunshot broke through the silence, followed by the crash of shattering glass.

Father and both sons looked at one another blankly.

“What…” Anatoli began.

Felix was already sprinting for the door, his brother’s protest fading to nothing in his ears.