There were tears in the Tsarina's eyes as Anastasia rolled hers once more. She was used to her mother's fits of religious fancy.
The Tsarina gripped Anastasia’s arms tighter, forcing her to face the brewing storm of panic in her mother’s eyes. Anastasia was sure that Alexandra had been swindled once more by the priest in front of them. He had shown up during her salon hours, undoubtedly, to relay a terrible premonition.
Anastasia stood up and pulled her hands from her mother's grasp, promptly adjusting her dress, spinning on her heel, and walking out in a bustle of fabrics that echoed off the ivory walls.
She ignored the sounds of desperate pleas from her mother and the protests from the priest that followed her into the hallway, setting off to find her lady-in-waiting.
What Anastasia didn’t know was that the Tsarina had good reason to be obsessed over prophecies of all kinds. In the Tsar’s blood stirred magic — real magic, true magic — the genuine thing. The trouble was that magic was fickle when presenting itself; how the craft appeared was as unpredictable as the practice itself.
Nicholas’s family had fought for centuries to dampen it, tamper it, and tame it, believing the women in his lineage who possessed the gift were cursed, as the Orthodox Church began to rise to more significant and untamable political power.
When Alexandra made it to womanhood without ever expressing any ability, the bloodline was deemed pure, and she was free to have her marriage secured. Nicholas’s family jumped at the opportunity to secure a bride who had no ties to the dark practices. She had won the future Tsar for her betrothed.
The Tsarina was obsessed with the burden of being the family’s savior and was constantly worried that magic would emerge in her or her children. She spoke to every priest, did every ritual, and went as far as drinking a goblet of goat’s blood at a full moon before consummating her wedding to the Tsar.
As she watched Anastasia exit the chapel without a moment's hesitation, she felt a deep dissatisfaction in her bones that no ritual would bind whatever was brewing in her daughter.
"You're fired," she stood up and stared at the newest priest. Alexandra adjusted her skirts, fidgeted with a particularly heavy gemstone on her wrist, and snapped at the guards who jumped into action, dragging the priest through a side door exit, presumably to the dungeons. He would await his judgment day with the other failed occultists of the Tsarina.
???
Anastasia had left the chapel without a moment's concern for the priest's wellbeing. She assumed most of the men were charlatans, and anything that befell them during their con was just.
As she walked down the long corridors to her chambers, she couldn't help but stop and stare — as she often did — at all of the fineries on the walls. Despite having been born and raised amongst it, she knew that it wasn't normal. The ever-increasing wings added to the palace were not necessary but a tool to soothe her father’s never-ending desire for conquest.
She had never felt at home in the palace — she had never felt at home anywhere. She despised how stale and archaic the chapel felt, despite how her sisters seemed to find refuge when they knelt in the pews to say their prayers.
Without thinking, Anastasia began fiddling her fingers at her side, something she always did when she felt out of place — which was often.
Tiny light fragments danced between her fingertips like sparkling pieces of dust. You could hardly see them in broad daylight, especially when each room of the palace had jewels inlaid in the walls themselves.
It was the opulence of the halls themselves that had hidden Anastasia's secret for so long. It had hidden them so well, in fact, that Anastasia didn’t even know about the fire sparking beneath her skin. With a twitch of her pointer finger or the tap of her nail, the sparks would kick up and expel some of her nervous energy.
The rooms were so often full of the nobility, overflowing with hundreds of court members who never seemed to leave the palace, stuffed to the sides with servants and housekeepers and butlers, that no one noticed that whenever her fingers danced, so did the lights.
It wasn’t just the lights that spoke to her magic. Gas lamps would flicker, candles would shoot up higher, or people would find themselves gasping momentarily for air and blaming it on the wine.
The curse they had attempted to breed out the Romanov bloodline had returned. It was lying among them, hidden in their ostentatious wardrobes, ducking behind the light that flickered off the plated gold walls, tucked behind the ermine robes in portraits of rulers long dead.
The Romanov magic was back, and it was sleeping amongst them all.
The doors to Anastasia's chambers were guarded by two men, rotated so frequently that she never bothered to learn their names. She went to open her doors, only to have them opened for her, Anastasia’s presence being announced to her own chambers as though she was the Tsar herself returning to the throne room.
She rolled her eyes and skipped past them, the candles on the wall going out behind her as she snapped her fingers to an imaginary tune.
"Asya!" Anastasia's voice rang out as she began peeking through her drawing-room, "Are you in here?"
A middle-aged woman poked her head out from the bedroom, wiping her hands on an apron and smiling warmly at the Grand Duchess.
"YourHighness," she grinned like the greeting was a little secret between the two of them, and in a way, she supposed it was. She despised when people used her title, but Asya had convinced her that it would be a joke between them and only said it when others were within earshot.
Asya Ivanova had worked in the palace kitchens her entire life. Through a stroke of good fortune, she was the only woman available as a wet nurse when Anastasia was born. That made her nonexpendable, promoted to take care of the new Grand Duchess on the spot.
Asya had lost a child of her own, quickly becoming attached to Anastasia. That meant putting her soul into raising the girl, a soul that held something ancient that Anastasia mirrored… Magic.
She knew that Anastasia's magic was different from hers, something far greater and more powerful than she was used to dealing with but similar in its origins. Asya's family had been kitchen witches and healers for centuries, always lending a helping hand and making themselves indispensable in their villages.
As the Orthodox Church began crying heresy on anything that didn't align with their doctrine, those with power had fled more and more underground, forcing Asya to bind herself to nothing more than potions work subtle enough to give her plausible deniability. The more unpredictable part of her gift was the visions — the oracle talent that popped up as sporadically as spring rain.
