Chapter 34

A Less Morbid Cheers

Sylvie of a Single Name sat by the fireplace of the salon’s library. Her cup of smoky cocoa steamed beside her, untouched, as Honoré recounted her expedition through Catherine Palace. Sylvie didn’t even lift it in a toast alongside the other Enchantresses and La Fée Verte: “To destroying the evil sorcerer’s heart!” Céleste’s purple aperitif clinked with Honoré’s silver drink and La Fée Verte’s glowing gold flute—their motions so exuberant that the glasses nearly chipped.

“What’s wrong, ma rêveuse?” Céleste paused before her drink could reach her lips. “Should we have a less morbid cheers? ‘To our happily ever afters,’ perhaps?”

Sylvie shook her head.

Honoré set her glass down too. “What, Sylvie?”

“It’s… I just don’t have much of an appetite.”

She could tell the other Enchantress didn’t believe her. “Here.” Honoré handed over her aperitif—the colors of the liquid inside started to shift. “As you said earlier, you’re older now. You should at least have a celebratory sip.”

Sylvie watched the silver tarnish into maroon. It would lighten into pink soon—the way it always did when she snuck tastes of the welcoming drink from the flute pyramid. Those had always made her think of her first proper picnic with the Enchantresses. A full plate of food with her newfound family. But as she gripped Honoré’s glass, a darker memory bubbled up. It didn’t have far to rise—for it was only one hour old.

Anastasia Nikolaevna with her skates slung over her shoulder.

Alexei on the edge of his camp bed, eyeing the blades.

“Too sharp,” his sister had said. “All we need is a distraction, Alyosha, not your death.”

Sylvie hadn’t known what to expect when the tsarevitch grabbed a book from his bedside table. Alexei was already as pale as the page he used to slice his finger—the tsarevitch put on a brave face as he ran his thumb across the gilded paper. Quick. Crimson. There was only a bead at first, as if the prince were holding a tiny ruby. Then it began to braid down his forefinger, lacing Alexei’s wrist. The amount of blood was unbelievable for the size of the cut. Sylvie shirked back to a corner of the bedroom, almost too stunned to wrap herself back in her invisibility cloak. By the time Anastasia screamed for their mother, the boy’s shirt was soaked with red, and the camp bed’s sheets were spattered. The tsarevitch lay down in them, and while it was the same color as roses, he looked like the worst possible ending of a fairy tale. A corpse no kiss could stir.

The bleeding was awful, yes.

But the “healing” was worse. Grigori Rasputin paused at the prince’s threshold, his grim nostrils flaring. For a moment, Sylvie feared he’d smelled her, but the scent of iron was too thick. Every breath of hers drowned with it. Alexei’s breathing sounded damp too. He gasped as his mother shadowed the foot of his bed. The Mad Monk leaned down toward the tsarevitch’s pillow and…

Drank.

The Sanct wasn’t swallowing with his throat, but Sylvie couldn’t come up with a better word to describe the scene. Prayers were whispered. Blood vanished. The ragged sounds from the bed stopped, and Alexei Nikolaevich still looked dead. His chest was not moving. Not moving. Sylvie too forgot to breathe. Anastasia let out a sob.

Just then, one of the luminescent icons on the wall above the bed fell, landing straight on the tsarevitch’s chest.

He sat up with a gasp.

His mother gasped as well, something that sounded like an alleluia. The Mad Monk made the sign of the cross again, knotting more dark strings between himself and the tsarina. Anastasia stopped sobbing, but her face stayed crumpled as she retrieved the icon from the carpet. She glanced in Sylvie’s direction, and when the grand duchess lifted the frame higher, Sylvie saw that it sat empty. No saint stood against the shining background…

The sight would’ve been enough to spoil anyone’s appetite. Sylvie wasn’t sure she could even toast to a happily ever after, not after she’d left the Romanovs like that, so she stared at her drink’s bubbles as they rose to the top. Popped.

“Rafe and I will take Terreur’s dream to him at dawn,” Céleste said. “Honoré can return to Russia and hide near Catherine Palace—once I’m healed, she can grab the heart and start stabbing.”

“I very much look forward to that.” Honoré grabbed another aperitif glass and raised it in a second cheers. The silver looked like molten metal sliding down her throat.

Sylvie swallowed. Her own drink was unsipped.

“What about Rasputin?” she asked.

“He can’t hurt me.” Honoré nodded at the dragon relic coiling up her arm. “Not with magic anyway.”

No, but Sylvie couldn’t get the scene from the tsarevitch’s bedroom out of her head. Alexei’s paper cut had nearly killed him, and the Mad Monk’s “miracle” had made things far worse before the prince became better.

“Rasputin will be distracted,” Céleste said. “It’s quite possible I’ll be in a ballroom in the opposite wing of the palace.”

“You shouldn’t underestimate him,” La Fée Verte told them. “He may serve as Terreur’s guard, but the Mad Monk is a fearsome Sanct in his own right. An entire empire believes the stories of Rasputin’s sorcery. That alone gives him immense power, but his hold over the royal family is… well, it doesn’t bode well.”

Sylvie kept watching the bubbles of her drink. Pop, pop, popping. It was the color of bougainvillea now. Rather darker than the aperitif she’d grabbed on her very first night here. It smelled different as well—no more pain au chocolat at a graveyard picnic. Instead she caught scents of orchids and waltzes and snow. Blue moonlight. A bluer wig. A princess’s hand in hers.

“I saw the tsarina this afternoon.” Honoré hesitated. “You’re right, La Fée Verte. It’s better for us not to tangle with Rasputin. While he’s healing Céleste, I’ll sneak into the Amber Room and steal the jewelry box. Once Terreur closes the Door to Everywhere—” Honoré drew a line across her throat. The dragon on her arm grinned.

“What do you want me to do?” Sylvie wondered.

“Just… don’t go peeking through the Catherine Palace windows with Anastasia,” Céleste told her. “Make sure the grand duchess knows to stay away. Take her to Stohrer or something.”

Just this morning, Sylvie might have argued differently. She had. But a magical bakery sounded like a much better distraction than the bloodbath she’d witnessed. Nay, inspired. Her aperitif shuddered in her hand, creating even more fuchsia fizz. She took a small sip, determined not to dwell on gore anymore. She pictured cakes in her future—Alexei’s too. After Terreur’s heart was stabbed, she and Anastasia could bring back a box of magical macarons to share with the tsarevitch. He deserved a sugary thank-you. He deserved far more than that, and when Sylvie of a Single Name became a Sanct, she’d find a way to make his blood thicker. His future brighter. As bright as La Fée Verte’s masque, or the smile that slid across Honoré’s face when she stared there, or the twinkle in Céleste’s eyes as the Enchantress entertained dreams of her own.

Sylvie raised her glass then, determined.

“To all our happily ever afters!” she said.

“We found it.”

The scene was just as Céleste had envisioned. La Ruche was awash in evening light—amber gasps of sun gave way to more velvety violets. Shadows sat softly on Rafe’s face as he perched on the edge of the mattress. His fox materialized on the pillow as he raked a hand through his wild black hair. His other hand fished for the watch.

“Really?” His whisper glimmered almost as brightly as the chains he pulled from his pocket. “When? Where? What does his heart look like? I always figured it would be something like a musket ball or a dried-out housefly—”

“Honoré didn’t say.” Céleste settled onto the bed beside him. “But we figured out Terreur has been hiding his heart in Catherine Palace. Sylvie left a blue wig in the royals’ nursery, and that led Rasputin to let slip he was guarding something. Honoré confirmed the heart’s location this afternoon—she’s going to return at dawn to stab it.”

“Dawn,” Rafe repeated, as he opened the watch. “What time does the sun rise these days?”

Céleste didn’t have to speak the answer, not when it was so clearly marked by the timepiece’s hands—8:45. The gears didn’t move when Rafe passed his relic to her. How many times had they traded their fateful hour back and forth, wondering when it would finally arrive?

“We’ve got the fucker.” The fire of it all crackled in Rafe’s eyes. His voice dipped precariously low. “I’ve spent so many moments imagining this one—where I’d stumble out of a sandy tomb with a scarab beetle in my fist or come across some book in Terreur’s study with the pages carved out. But no matter how many scenarios I pictured, there was always a part of me that feared I’d be trapped in his shadows forever.”

Céleste could hear this fear, still. She watched as his fox curled on top of the pillow, its nose tucked protectively under its tail. “You won’t, Rafe. At eight forty-five tomorrow morning, our deal with Terreur will be done. You and I, we’ll both be free.”

“I know…” Rafe kept looking at the watch in her hand. Even though the artist was seated, he somehow looked as if he were standing at the edge of a cliff. “It’s just, now that our hour is actually here, I can’t quite bring myself to believe it.”

Céleste understood. Hope was dangerous. It was the best and worst kind of feeling, coming so close to a far-fetched dream. She’d seen such things shattered too many times before. She herself had done the breaking, reeling men in, only to cut their purse strings loose.

But this hope between them?

It was different.

It was two golden chains pulled tight.

“You don’t have to believe in fate,” Céleste whispered, as she drew Rafe to her. “Just believe me.”

Most of their studio had fallen into darkness by then, but that didn’t matter. They could make their own light—kissing until sparks caught into something brighter. They didn’t need the landscape room to conjure anymore, Céleste realized, when she saw Rafe’s old horizons beside her salon scenes, both bathed in silver rays on this moonless night. They had each other. Wholly. Dreaming new futures for themselves until La Ruche itself shone like a star—and every constellation in the City of Light shifted.

They shimmered.

On and on and on, awaiting the dawn.