Anastasia Nikolaevna was not waiting at rue de la Réunion, come midnight. She wasn’t pacing the street’s cobblestones or retrieving her key from the pink door, as was her custom. Nor was the grand duchess waiting on the other side.
Her magical fur coat hung limp in the makeshift closet of the Children’s Palace. Sylvie paused beside it, struck by the rest of the room’s stillness. There were no jungle creatures bathing in teacups. No sentinels stood watch on the ramparts of the candy fort. No battleships shot more gumdrops into its sweetened walls.
The toys were gone.
It wasn’t hard to guess where. When Sylvie stepped outside, she could see light flickering through falling snow. A fire. From Alexei’s playroom window. And more shining things besides. Mon Dieu! Anastasia was so busy conjuring imaginings that she hadn’t thought to close the curtain. Sylvie had a crystal-clear view as she flew up to the window. Not only had the grand duchess brought up most of the enchanted toys from the Children’s Palace, but she’d created several new ones. A tiny model of the Orient Express looped around the nursery, pouring real smoke from its small stack. There was smoke from the double-headed firebird nesting in the fireplace, as well. Several miniature monkeys scaled the open drapes, startling to the carpet when Sylvie rapped on the glass.
Anastasia jumped too.
Her firebird spilled sparks all over the carpet, and the grand duchess had to rush to stamp them out before she went to open the window. “Oh, hello! I was hoping you’d show up—”
“What do you think you’re doing?” It struck Sylvie how much she sounded like Honoré in that moment. Her voice was a silver knife, slicing the wintry air. She looked back over her shoulder toward the park. There were too many flakes falling to see Catherine Palace through the trees, but that didn’t mean Rasputin wouldn’t see the winged firelight. The Mad Monk might come to investigate.
Or worse.
Anastasia picked up one of the fallen monkeys and glanced toward the open door to Alexei’s room. Dark, but for the icons over his bed. Thanks to the firebird’s glow, Sylvie could see dozens of eyes screaming back from the frames. She could see the tsarevitch lying beneath them. Somehow Alexei seemed even stiller than the paintings…
“He asked for the toys,” the grand duchess said, with a shaky voice. “I couldn’t say no, after what he did for us today.”
Sylvie shut the window and closed the curtains, but the nursery still felt like winter and knives. The same smells she’d come to associate with a hospital.
Or a morgue.
“Alexei?” She stepped over several regiments of tin soldiers and paused in his doorway. “How are you feeling?”
The heir to Russia’s crown turned his head then. It looked as if the Mad Monk had missed a spot of blood, there on the pillow, but as he reached for Sylvie, she could see it was something else oozing from the boy’s skull.
“Scared,” he said. “Scared and cold.”
Anastasia appeared beside her. The firebird soared over the girls’ heads, through the door, its flames catching the room’s gold decor just as they had in the opera house. Saint icons burned bright. The blade-edged pages did too. Anything can be a weapon. Even a fairy book. For that’s what it was. Sylvie had been too fraught earlier to notice its author, but now Andrew Lang’s name shivered to life. The rest of the cover was the missing color of her rainbow… only it was no longer purely lilac. The star-dancing fae was spattered with blood that the Mad Monk had missed.
This didn’t stop the woman from shining, though, as the firebird perched beside the book. Jewels of sweat started to sprout on Alexei’s brow—a phantom crown. It shimmered as the prince tried to push himself up.
“I’ll get better soon, right? Aren’t you close to finding the evil sorcerer’s heart?”
“Yes,” Sylvie answered, her own heart in her throat. It no longer felt as if it might be made of books. “But…”
“But what?”
Alexei had asked the question, but it was Anastasia who narrowed her eyes. Her firebird burned a few degrees brighter. Sylvie was starting to sweat now too. Words felt slick in her throat. “We can’t conjure here. I’m sorry, Alexei, but we have to take the imaginings away—”
“No.” There was something powerful in Anastasia’s voice. Imperial and ancient. The firebird perched at the end of her brother’s bed twisted both its heads, its feathers flaring. “No,” the princess said again. “Alyosha needs our magic!”
Sylvie glanced toward the curtains, wondering if they were thick enough. She looked back at the toy soldiers she’d animated, all those months ago, and wished their limbs would still. Instantly, the army froze, back to their factory-cast formations. A mechanical expression fell over the tsarevitch’s face too, almost bleak enough for Sylvie to stop, but too many other happy endings depended on this. She snuffed the sparks inside the battleships next. Their cannons went quiet.
“No!” Anastasia’s firebird swelled even brighter as the grand duchess knelt to the floor and gathered up the soldiers. “Stop this, Sylvie!”
“It’s too dangerous to have these toys here now,” Sylvie managed. “Let’s go back to Paris and wait—”
“I’m not leaving Alyosha.”
“We’ll come back. We can bring him some macarons.”
“He doesn’t need cookies! He needs…” Anastasia faltered then. She stepped out of Alexei’s bedroom, her whisper as dark as the nursery shadows. “Please, Sylvie. I can’t stand by and watch my brother… die. I can’t stay in this palace and watch my parents unravel. I can’t even see Mama anymore. I have to save my family. What’s the point of our magic if we can’t use it?”
Sylvie watched the model train loop around and around.
The imagining was Anastasia’s, which meant Sylvie would not be able to stop it.
Nor could she control the firebird that was growing far too large for the tsarevitch’s bedroom. Flames licked every which way. Normally, Anastasia’s signature imagining did not scorch its surroundings, but the princess was angry this evening. Angry enough that the edges of the bloody fairy book were beginning to turn brown. Alexei’s nightshirt was wet with sweat as the prince stumbled toward his window, coughing from the smoke.
“Nastya! It’s too hot!”
“Don’t!” Sylvie called, when the tsarevitch reached for his curtains. “Anastasia, you have to put your firebird out!”
“I can’t!” A look of panic flashed across the princess’s face.
The flaming bird flashed too, small fires spattering everywhere. The edges of the curtains singed as Alexei threw them open. He opened the window next. Fiery wings rushed into the howling night. Sylvie hoped the snow and wind would be enough to extinguish it; but this firebird was no longer like the imagining that had flown over them in the opera house. It was stronger than the storm. It was furious.
It was a midnight sun, burning bright enough to be seen from miles away.
The fires in the bedroom were spreading too. The air ribboned with heat as Sylvie looked over at the grand duchess. She understood then why the tents of the Carnaval des Merveilles sat empty, as empty as the imaginers’ eyes outside the Quartier Secret every dawn.
Anastasia’s were as blue as water, shimmering at the edges.
Sylvie could feel the bond between them.
She felt the exact moment she broke it, taking back the Enlightenment she’d wished on the princess all those months ago. Every single moment they’d experienced together evaporated from Anastasia’s mind. The fires went out too. The model train fell still, and a giant cloud of sparks drifted slowly down over Alexander Park. They left no marks on the thick blanket of snow. The grounds remained as blank as the grand duchess’s face. She was no longer a daydreamer, nor even a midnight waker, but a sleepwalker, turning back toward her bedroom without so much as a goodbye.
“What happened?” Alexei was still standing by the open window, carved thin by the wind.
“I—I had to take away her memories of magic so the starets wouldn’t see her firebird.” Sylvie herself couldn’t see anything beyond the first few meters of flurries, which danced against the light of her pink masque. “I’m sorry, Alexei.”
“I know.” Russia’s crown prince kept staring out into the snow.
He looked so damn lonely.
Sylvie reached out and touched Alexei on the arm. “I’ll Enlighten Nastya again after we steal the evil sorcerer’s heart,” she said. “I’ll come back tomorrow evening.”
The tsarevitch laid his hand on top of hers. His fingers felt like ice. Not just cold, but hard, digging into Sylvie’s wrist. She yelped and looked down, realizing too late that there was an extra shadow there, twining around his arm and coiling up hers, until she was too tangled to move. Someone else was controlling Alexei’s grip. Someone strong enough to use the tsarevitch to pull her to the open window, where the snow was now an eerie swirl of blue.
“Tak, chto u nas zdes?”
The Mad Monk called up to Sylvie from where the firebird’s ashes had fallen. His eyes were tunnels of ice with no light at the end; his robes lay ragged against the snow. When Sylvie tried to spread her own wings and launch herself from the window, the tsarevitch lashed out with another shadow-wrapped arm and tore.
Rasputin said something in cold, cold Russian. He tugged at the shadow strings that tied Alexei Nikolaevich to him, forcing a translation from the tsarevitch’s throat. “I think not, daydreamer.”
The Mad Monk kept pulling at the prince like a puppet. Alexei kept pulling at Sylvie’s wings. Red-hot pain ripped through her shoulder blades. And… orange. Orange dust flew everywhere as the butterfly wings were crushed to a pulp beneath the tsarevitch’s feet. It was almost like a ballroom dance, the way the Mad Monk moved him, the way Alexei’s arm stayed locked with Sylvie’s. Only the prince’s eyes seemed to stay his, clinging to echoes of her apology. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
The Mad Monk flew to their window.
Sylvie shuddered as Rasputin reached for her—only to stroke some hair. He didn’t even pull a strand, but the motion felt sinister. Even more so, when Rasputin’s spidery hand moved to the golden chains draped around his neck. He spoke in a crawling sort of voice—more words she could not understand, until Alexei translated once more.
“Pink is most unexpected.” The sentence seemed wrenched from the tsarevitch’s mouth. “But you will make a very pretty little saint.”