Chapter 22

A Girl Who Slipped Through the Cracks of the World

Sylvie of a Single Name waited a very long time for the magical door to reappear.

She waited through breakfast and well into teatime, hovering around the blue palace’s windows. Each room looked more pastrylike than the last—crown molding icing, clotted cream walls, crème brûlée amber everywhere. Would lunch be served soon? She’d already scoured the crumbs from her pocket and was broadening her search for a kitchen she could plunder. A dining room she might raid.

No one seemed to live in this palace though. There was no king. No queen. There weren’t even servants. Only the priest Sanct prowled the halls, his robes dragging back and forth.

The sun was high in the blue-bolt sky when he finally stepped outside. Sylvie retreated to the highest cross of the chapel’s gold domes. She stayed cloaked as she watched the priest Sanct walk the park grounds. Was it just her imagination, or did the trees he passed drop some extra leaves? Their branches were definitely thinning—enough for Sylvie to see where the priest Sanct’s path led.

A second palace sat on the other side of the trees.

She flew toward it to get a closer look. This palace was smaller than the first and had been painted a pale yellow. Guards stood by the entrance. They could see the Sanct, eyeing him uneasily, but they didn’t cross their bayonets to deny him entry. He was known here. He was… welcome? As Sylvie soared toward the door, she saw four girls flocking to the robed figure. The youngest hugged him as if he were Père Noël, come to bring them Christmas gifts. The guards began muttering. Their words were strange, and their tone was dark, and Sylvie knew they felt the same way she did. They understood the wrongness of it.

What happened next was even worse.

The priest Sanct was greeted by an older woman, and though she wasn’t wearing any jewels, Sylvie somehow knew she was a queen. She led the priest Sanct upstairs to a room with drawn curtains. Sylvie couldn’t see anything through the window, but she could hear someone sobbing.

The queen said something, and the priest Sanct replied in kind.

The weeping started to fade.

Sylvie wished she could wish for a translation, but she was too far from La Fée Verte’s salon. She fluttered to the adjoining window instead, peering into one of the most elaborate playrooms she’d ever seen. A giant dog on wheels paraded by a river of model ships. Teepees and canoes lined the plush carpet. Honest-to-goodness airplanes were strung from the ceiling. The floor was littered with trains and cannons and other tiny tools of war.

None of the princesses were playing with these.

Sylvie figured that was what the four girls had to be—even though their clothes weren’t nearly as nice as their storybook counterparts. Servants would be a little less obvious in their eavesdropping, not pressing their ears to the door, the way these princesses were. The youngest was flat on her stomach, trying to peer beneath the crack, pearls askew around her neck. She looked close to Sylvie’s age, close enough to be her friend in a different life.

Or even… in this one.

It was silly, Sylvie knew. It was probably even stupid, considering the priest Sanct’s closeness with the royal family, but she figured she had to ask someone where she was.

Why couldn’t that someone be a princess?

The girls scattered all at once, the youngest rolling over a regiment of toy soldiers and yelping as the door opened. The priest Sanct stepped out. Past his shoulder, Sylvie could see a wall filled with tiny gold pictures of saints. A camp bed sat beneath them, but it was too dark to tell who might be lying in it. The queen was crying as she shut the bedroom door behind her, but her lips were fixed in a wobbly smile. She touched the priest Sanct on the shoulder and planted a kiss—a kiss—on his palm. More words were exchanged. Then the priest Sanct raised his hands and made the sign of the cross.

Just as he had with Céleste.

But there was something different about this rite. Something more… unholy. Sylvie could see his fingers plucking strands from the queen’s frayed countenance. Not imaginings. These strings were darker, and they didn’t break when the priest Sanct pulled them to himself. Merely faded, a little. If Sylvie squinted—just right—she could see thousands of these ties between the priest Sanct and the queen. So many that their shadows blurred together on the playroom rug, over its scattered tin soldiers.

Apparently, being a royal wasn’t all crowns and gowns, the way it was in stories. Princesses still had to sit for lessons like any other child. Well, the teachers were fancier here than they’d been at Sylvie’s old orphanage. Plus, they actually taught. Though the youngest princess seemed entirely uninterested in whatever her tutors said. She wriggled like a newly hatched tadpole during French lessons, tugging at her pearls and casting furtive glances toward Sylvie’s window.

Sylvie was still invisible. Her cloak stayed tight around her shoulders, but even without it, she wasn’t sure the princess would see. Neither she nor her sisters seemed to notice the gathering shadows around their mother.

The queen reminded Sylvie of a marionette show she’d watched once. Her smile had hooks. Her nods were one second off. The movements wouldn’t look so jerky without the priest Sanct standing as close as he was, smiling and nodding while he knotted more strings from Her Majesty’s head.

There was no storm cloud hanging over the youngest princess, though, when the tutors released her. She dashed out onto the sunny grounds with a joyous yelp, her long chestnut hair streaming every which way. There was a brown spaniel too, running with her to the nearby lake, where a rowboat waited. The wooden craft was meant to carry them to an island with a third palace. A play palace, Sylvie realized, as she flew toward the pale blue structure. It was only four rooms—built for royal children to escape to on lesson-free afternoons.

The princess placed her dog in the vessel and then climbed in herself before rowing over to the opposite boat landing.

Sylvie landed nearby.

Her cloak slid onto the ground.

The spaniel barked, but when the princess looked up, she only frowned, wagging her finger at the dog. Sylvie was disappointed, but she wasn’t surprised. She was so drenched in magic that only Sancts and Enlightened people seemed to see her these days, imaginers who wandered Paris past midnight or children who grabbed their mothers’ hands and pointed whenever Sylvie flew past. She was a gleam in their eyes, whereas their parents saw only empty blue sky. Sylvie had hoped the youngest princess was young enough to fall into that category. Oh, how she wished they could be friends.

Oh!

The wish must’ve been stronger than she’d thought. Strong enough to grow outside La Fée Verte’s salon. She’d never had an imagining do that before! Nor had one of Sylvie’s dreams ever broken while it was still on her head—but there was a flash. The air shimmered pink. The princess gasped and dropped the rope she’d been trying to tie to the dock. It slithered off into the water as she stared at Sylvie.

“Privet. Kto ty?”

Sylvie still wasn’t sure what language this was. She didn’t quite know what the dog was saying either, but soon the spaniel stopped barking—its tail wagged as it sniffed Sylvie’s hand. Licked.

“Hello,” she greeted. “My name is Sylvie.”

The dog’s tail wagged harder.

This seemed to set the princess at ease.

“That’s a fitting name for a fairy.” The other girl’s French was very good, despite how wriggly she’d been during lessons. “Though I’ve never met one before, so I could be jumping to conclusions.”

She was, of course, but Sylvie wasn’t quite sure how to explain her sudden appearance otherwise. Much less her monarch wings and magenta hair.

“Well, I’ve never met a princess,” she said, instead.

“I’m a grand duchess.” The other girl drew herself up into a pose fit for a postage stamp. “Anastasia Nikolaevna of the House of Romanov.”

“Is that a country?” Sylvie wondered.

“No, silly!” Anastasia giggled so hard that she snorted. “Romanov is my house!”

“Oh.” Sylvie glanced across the water, where the second palace presided over a well-trimmed lawn. “The blue one or the yellow one?”

The princess’s laughter made her lean back on the boat post. The sound was merry, pealing like church bells through the autumn landscape. “Oh! I like you. You’re funny.”

Sylvie hadn’t meant to be, but it was just as well, if the princess liked her. Already she had visions of them drinking tea and riding horses and doing other regal things together. Going to a real live ball, perhaps? Though it didn’t seem as if either one of Anastasia’s houses had hosted such a gathering in years…

“Why don’t you use the blue palace?” she asked.

“It’s called Catherine Palace,” Anastasia informed her. “My sister Maria thinks it’s haunted, but Mama says it’s just too big for us. That’s why we live in Alexander Palace instead. The yellow one,” she clarified. “I live there with Mama and Papa and Maria and Tatiana and Olga and Alexei. And Shvybzik, of course.” She nodded down at the spaniel sitting contentedly at his mistress’s side. “Where do you live?”

“I used to camp in a cemetery,” Sylvie said, “but now I stay in an enchanted salon. In Paris.”

“Paris!” The princess’s eyes lit with the word—blue, but not at all like the priest Sanct’s. “I’ve always wanted to go! But what are you doing all the way here in Tsarskoe Selo? Have you come to be my fairy godmother?”

It was Sylvie’s turn to laugh. “I’m not really a fairy.”

“Oh…” Anastasia’s brow creased beneath her fur cap. “Are you a ghost, then?”

“I hope not,” Sylvie said.

“So what are you?”

“I’m just a girl.” Sensing the other girl’s disappointment, Sylvie went on. “But I can grant you a wish, if you want!”

“Really?”

She hoped so. She hadn’t tried to conjure outside the salon before—the act was easy enough when she was surrounded by firefly lanterns and storybook smoke—but the fact she’d wished this meeting into existence was proof Sylvie could imagine something else. “Do you want a pony?”

Anastasia shook her head. “I already have one of those.”

“What about a fur coat?”

“I have a lot of those too,” the grand duchess said. “This is Russia.”

“I mean, a coat that grows fur when you step through snow! That way you’ll never have to wear layers!” It sounded lovely enough to Sylvie, shivering out here under the afternoon sun. Russia was much colder than Paris. “I could make us some smoky cocoa too!”

A hair began glowing before Sylvie even finished her sentence—she’d forgotten how hungry she was—and when she broke the strand, a steaming thermos appeared on the ground. As Anastasia knelt to touch it, the smoke shaped itself into a double-headed eagle and drifted up into the baring branches. For a moment, just a blink, it was easy to imagine them blooming.

The grand duchess’s smile grew back too when she examined the flask. “You… you made this out of thin air? But… how? I thought magic was just for saints and holy men!”

The mention of saints made Sylvie think of Honoré—the patron of pastry chefs. They’d need cakes to go with the cocoa, of course, so she set about plucking more hairs. POOF! Some croissants. FLASH! Some éclairs. CRACK! A fur coat that doubled as a picnic blanket.

“I just picture things and then believe them with all my heart,” she said, setting the plates down. “Sometimes saying it out loud helps.”

“Praying.” Anastasia nodded, tugging her Spaniel into her lap so he wouldn’t help himself to the pastries. “That’s how ‘Our Friend’ heals Alexei.”

Our Friend. She was talking about the priest Sanct.

But Sylvie didn’t mention him. Instead she asked, “Alexei?”

“He’s my younger brother. The tsarevitch. He’s supposed to be emperor one day, but he’s… well, if Alexei even gets a paper cut, he’ll bleed and bleed and bleed. The doctors can’t help him, but whenever Grigori Rasputin starts praying for my brother, the bleeding stops. The bruises vanish. Mama says he’s a miracle worker!”

Sylvie fought back a frown. This Rasputin must not be so bad, if he healed people. So why did chills crawl down her spine when they were in the same room? Why did she need another sip of cocoa, even now, to keep from shivering?

“That must make your mother happy,” she said carefully.

“Oh yes.” Anastasia nodded. “Mama worships the starets—that means ‘holy man’ in Russian. She listens to everything he says. Alexei isn’t happy though.” Anastasia stared back at Alexander Palace, toward the window with drawn curtains. “He gets sick of being sick. I wish I could change that…” She stared back at Sylvie. “Do you think you could?”

Suddenly the pastries felt flaky.

The cocoa clumpy.

“I don’t know,” Sylvie admitted. “I think your friend’s magic is different from mine. He’s… he’s a Sanct, and I’m just a daydreamer.”

“But that’s exactly what my brother needs! Some dreams! You’ll be perfect!” A thrill went from Sylvie’s ears to her wing tips at the grand duchess’s declaration. The fantasy of their friendship grew even stronger. “Oh, please, can I take you to meet him?”

How could she say no to that?

So it was that Sylvie of a Single Name found herself in the Alexander Palace playroom, enchanting a regiment of tin soldiers. Most of them were still spilled on the rug where Rasputin and the tsarina had stood—hours earlier—casting their conjoined shadow. This had been washed away by moonlight and by the faint pink pulse of Sylvie’s imagination. It was easier to conjure outside La Fée Verte’s salon than she’d first believed—probably because she’d been practicing on the Children’s Island all afternoon. After a picnic on a shedding fur coat, she’d imagined a snakelike rope that slithered out to Anastasia’s drifting boat. After it slithered too far, she imagined a bridge of ice that nearly melted when they were halfway over.

The soldiers were more manageable. They were small, designed to follow an imagination’s orders. Sylvie made them march toward the tsarevitch’s bedroom.

Anastasia stood by the door, her nightgown long and bright. “Alyosha?” she called.

The room was dark until Sylvie stepped in with her dreams’ light. The golden icons above the tsarevitch’s camp bed began to glow. Something about the saints’ eyes made Sylvie want to flip their frames around, but they’d been nailed too firmly to the wall. Instead, she tried curtseying when Alexei Nicholaevich sat up.

Both motions were clumsy.

The newly healed prince wasn’t at all what she’d expected. His skin was so pale, it was hard to tell where the sheets covered him. Or where the bleeding had been stopped. There were no bruises on his arms or legs, but his eyes had sunken into dark circles.

“Nastya?” His gaze drifted from his sister, to Sylvie, to the soldiers. “Is this a dream?”

“Yes! But you’re not asleep! I’ve brought someone to cheer you up!”

Suddenly, Sylvie wasn’t so sure she could. Her magic felt like a candle here—shuddering enough for a sudden breeze to snuff. What good would marching metal soldiers do when the tsarevitch himself seemed barely able to walk?

Alexei swung his feet to the floor, then knelt to examine the regiment. He giggled when they saluted him. Sylvie began to understand then why the Sanct at Stohrer gave away his pastries for the joy of them—a policy she herself was all too happy to take advantage of. The smile on Alexei’s face was worth it. So was his sister’s.

“This is Sylvie! She’s a not-fairy from Paris,” Anastasia said.

“What’s a not-fairy?” her brother wondered.

“She believes things and they come true!” the grand duchess told him. “Show him something else, please?”

They moved to the playroom then. The tin-soldier regiment marched behind the giant stuffed dog on wheels, which Sylvie enchanted to serve as Alexei’s steed. She plucked another hair—and the airplanes hanging from the ceiling cut loose from their strings, doing loop the loops and nose dives. She sent the model ships sailing across the carpet too, their cannons firing tiny gumdrops. A toy soldier speared one of these candies with his bayonet and brought the treat to Alexei.

“It tastes so real!” the tsarevitch declared, after swallowing the wintry spice. “How?”

“I tell myself stories,” Sylvie said. “And then I believe them to be true, but I can only do it because a real fairy taught me how.” That had to be the deciding factor, right? She’d spent so many years picking up sticks that never turned to swords, talking to cats who only meowed back, exploring tunnels that merely turned into dead ends.

“What are real fairies like?”

Sylvie thought of all the Sancts she’d come across over the summer: The baker. The bookseller. The bric-a-brac vendor. Rasputin. La Fée Verte. The hungry man. They were all so different. “Most have wings, of some sort.”

“So do you.” Alexei nodded at her butterfly wings.

“I wasn’t born with these,” Sylvie explained. “I made them up.”

“Maybe that’s how fairies are born,” the tsarevitch said. “Through stories. Isn’t that why they’re called fairy tales?”

One of the airplanes stuttered before crash-landing into the giant teepee. Sylvie could only stare as toy soldiers rushed to the scene. Was it really as simple as that? She had a hard time imagining La Fée Verte without her effervescent feathers, but maybe those had been imagined. Maybe—once upon a time—the Sanct had been just a girl too. A girl who’d slipped through the cracks of the world.

Something glimmered in the corner of Sylvie’s eye.

Not pink, but bronze.

She turned to see one of Anastasia’s hairs shining.

The grand duchess looked almost as surprised as Sylvie when she pulled the strand from her head. “Oh! I was just thinking about one of my favorite fairy tales…”

The phoenix had two heads—just like the bird that had flown out of the princess’s cocoa. It was small enough to roost in the playroom’s green fireplace, where it burned without coal nor logs, crooning a song that made Sylvie’s heart soar. Everything else inside her felt bigger too. What did it mean, that she’d taught the grand duchess magic?

“A firebird!” Alexei whispered. “A real firebird!”

Anastasia stared into the humming fire. More of her hair started to spark—hot, hotter. Pocket-sized bears danced there, next to toadstool tea parties and a zebra with color-shifting stripes.

Funny, that a princess’s dreams should look so much like an orphan’s.

Soon the tin soldiers were riding around on tiny ostriches and unicorns. The frigates were floating, firing bubbles out of their cannons. These popped against the bougainvillea blossoms that bloomed from the ceiling, then became butterflies, swirling into the firebird’s smoke. If Sylvie squinted, the playroom almost looked like a corner of La Fée Verte’s salon. Was this how the Quartier Secret had started? With a handful of dreamers? She’d never thought too hard about its beginnings before, but now that she was sitting here, it seemed important.

Was every Sanct once a human?

Was Sylvie still “just” a girl?

The grand duchess was having a grand time pulling imaginings from her head. Her brother watched raptly, clutching the ears of his stuffed-dog steed.

“What about the train, Nastya? Can you make it move too?”

“Why don’t you try, Alyosha?”

The tsarevitch squeezed his eyes shut. His breath teetered. The firebird’s light flickered against his drawn face—making the hollow spots even more hollow—and Sylvie was suddenly afraid the boy might fall onto his own soldiers. If one of their bayonets made him bleed, what would she do? What would Rasputin do, if he found Sylvie here? The Romanov children said the Sanct was their friend, but what kind of friend tangled a mother up in dark strings? What kind of friend only healed someone halfway?

Alexei—as wobbly as he looked—did not fall.

The train didn’t move either.

“Is it working?” he asked after a moment.

“No.” His sister sounded deflated.

“How about now?”

“You have to believe,” Sylvie insisted.

“I do!” Alexei opened his eyes and stared sadly at the train. “Maybe my hair is too short…”

Sylvie wasn’t sure that was it. One of her favorite designers in the salon was practically bald, and he still managed to pull outfits out of his head every evening. The tsarevitch’s hair stayed dull, the back parts matted from spending all day in bed.

“You’re probably just tired,” Anastasia reasoned. “You did nearly die this morning.”

“I don’t want to be tired,” her brother croaked.

“Then you should go back to sleep,” the grand duchess said, glancing at Sylvie. “We can try again tomorrow. Can’t we?”

Again, it felt hard to say no. Bubbles popped. Bougainvillea butterflies spun into the fire, where the double-headed bird was nestling itself into embers. Sylvie looked back at the train stalled on the carpet.

“I have to go home to Paris,” she said. “My friends need me.”

“We need you too!” Anastasia exclaimed.

Sylvie wondered if this was true. She could see darker knots in Alexei’s hair, far darker than his inherited brown. It was almost the same color as his mother’s. What was Rasputin’s magic doing to them?

And Céleste… what was it doing to her?

Sylvie had set out to break Rafe’s curse, but the shadows Marmalade had mentioned seemed to stretch further than that. Much further.

“Don’t leave us,” the princess said.

“Please,” added Alexei, his face forlorn.

An idea started to take shape as Sylvie stared at the siblings. It was impractical, maybe even impossible, but this wouldn’t stop her from trying to pull it from her head. “I think… there may be a way for me to go and stay.”

The journey back to Paris would have taken Sylvie nearly a week by train. Over one month as the crow flew. She didn’t bother testing this distance with her own wings. The best method to get home, she figured, was to go back the same way she’d come.

By magical door.

The portal still hadn’t reappeared in Catherine Palace, despite many more peeks through its frosty-dawn windows. It was just as well. What Sylvie really wanted was a secret passage of her own—a place where she and the grand duchess could meet. Not halfway, but both ways. At the City of Light and the Children’s Palace.

The play palace was the perfect location for an enchanted door, seeing as the Children’s Island was ignored by the rest of Tsarskoe Selo’s residents. Rowing a boat was too much trouble for the adults, and the three older grand duchesses considered themselves too grown for such a small building. There wasn’t much room for them regardless, since Anastasia and Sylvie had filled the house with toys they could no longer keep in the playroom after that first magical night. Boats that still spat out the occasional bubble or gumdrop. Most of Alexei’s soldiers. A whole menagerie of miniature animals. It wouldn’t do for Rasputin to get bitten on the ankle by a thumb-sized tiger.

There were doors everywhere now too.

Sylvie had spent the past two days pulling over a dozen doors from her head, but they led nowhere, opening to walls if they opened at all. She’d forgotten to add knobs to the first and hinges to the second. Minor details. The major one—the distance she was trying to compress into the space of a step—was harder to wrap her head around.

“We do need a place to put brooms,” Anastasia said, after the thirteenth try led to a shallow closet. “The tiny animals are messier than I thought they’d be.”

Sylvie looked down at an elephant that was giving itself a bath in a teacup. She wondered how her other elephant was doing. Was it still serving smoky cocoa to the salon’s guests? Had any of them even noticed she was gone?

She shut the thirteenth door. “The magic is too big, I think. I can’t—it’s hard to believe I can go back to Paris in a single step.”

“Isn’t that how you got here?”

Anastasia and Alexei had listened to the tale of Sylvie’s arrival several times. Each version changed—ever so slightly—becoming truer as she added in her talking cat and invisibility cloak.

She never told the Romanov children about the curses though. Or the dark strings she kept seeing around their mother.

“Yes,” she told Anastasia. “But I didn’t make up that door.”

“Someone must have, once!” the princess pointed out. “So you know it’s possible!”

This was hard to argue with. Also, it looked like they’d need a place to store mops as well as brooms. The teacup the elephant was bathing in had tipped over, spilling amber liquid that the tin-soldier regiment was marching straight through, leaving scores of tiny tea prints all over the wood.

“I just don’t know if I can do it,” Sylvie admitted.

“You can.” Anastasia sounded so sure. Her voice did not waver. Neither did her arm, when she reached out and took Sylvie’s hand. “I believe in you, Sylvie.”

There was something distinctly magical about hearing a princess say her name this way. It felt almost like a spell. A wish come true! They were friends! And they could stay friends if Sylvie could manage to conjure this door…

She squeezed her eyes shut.

She squeezed Anastasia’s hand.

She squeezed her thoughts through a keyhole, imagining home on the other side. Late-night bakeries and endless bookshops. A lobster gargoyle wriggling to the chime of its cathedral’s bells. A stone pelican ruffling its feathers several stories above. An overgrown island drifting down the Seine, past the Seer’s smoking houseboat. Sylvie wanted—so badly—to show these things to Anastasia.

The princess wanted this too. Sylvie could feel the other girl’s wish, as hot as a firebird, blooming between their palms, burning in a way that she could hold. Use.

I believe in you, Sylvie.

And Sylvie finally believed in a door.

It was unlike the others she’d pulled from her head. There was a FLASH, bright enough to trace the veins through Sylvie’s lids, and when she opened her eyes, she saw the door standing there. Brightest pink. There was a key in the lock, already turned. Ajar. Flaky scents of pain au chocolat slipped through the crack, and when Sylvie pushed it open, she found herself standing beside her neighborhood boulangerie—a tiny shop on rue de la Réunion. The lane was a thoroughfare from Père Lachaise’s south gate to more crowded streets. Until now, there’d been nothing magical about it.

Sylvie stepped out to study her door.

It was just as pink on the Paris side, where a second key dangled from the lock.

One, she noted happily, for each of them.

She handed Anastasia’s over with a smile. “Welcome to Paris, Your Majesty.”