Page 34 of Bred By the Tsar

I feel it in the way the senior staff go smooth and blank when I pass, the particular politeness people use for a thing they expect to be gone by spring. I feel it the morning I come down to find photographers stacked three deep at the gates, long lenses pushed through the iron, and a footman drawing the curtains with a tight little best you stay back from the windows, miss. I feel it in the word that's started following me down corridors, just under hearing, in two languages: the American. The nanny. You know the one.

I am a scandal in silk that costs more than every house that ever turned me out, and the silk doesn't fool a soul. Everyone in this palace knows exactly what I am but the four people at our breakfast table.

It's Lena who undoes me, in the end.

She finds me in the window seat that same grey afternoon. The house hushed with its Tsar gone to the capital, Misha down for his nap. She sits at the far end of it, careful, leaving the exact correct amount of space, and she's quiet for a long time with her knees pulled up.

Then she says, to the window, not to me: "Green."

"Hm?"

"My favorite color." She picks at the hem of her sock. "It's green. The dark kind. Like the trees at the dacha in summer." A breath. "You said I could tell you. If I decided. No test."

I have to look very hard at the snow for a moment so I don't scare her by crying.

Less than a week ago this child told me not to bother learning her favorite color, because the others learned it and left. And now she has handed it to me across a window seat like a key, like a hostage, like the most dangerous thing she owns — here, I'll risk it, I'll let it matter — and I understand exactly what it cost, because I was a girl who guarded her favorite color too, once, in houses that didn't keep me.

"Green," I say, when I can. "I'll remember. The dark kind. Like the trees in summer."

She nods, fierce and small, and after a minute she scoots down the window seat and leans into my side, just slightly, just enough, and we watch it snow.

That's when I know I'm in real trouble. Not because of him. Because of this. Because I would now burn down the world before I'd let these two children lose one more person, and a girl with nothing to her name has no business loving anything she can't afford to keep.

The Dowager finds me there an hour later.

She doesn't sit. She looks at Lena asleep against my shoulder and then she smiles the venomous smile that means nothing good is coming.

"You and I should talk," she says. "Privately." She lifts one finger, and a nurse appears from nowhere and gathers Lena off my shoulder before I can find the words to object.

"There are things about this household you don't yet understand, and I think it's high time someone explained them to you." The smile sharpens to a point. "Come to my sitting room. Now."

10

Hazel

The Dowager's sitting room is warm and gold and beautiful, and I have never been so cold inside a room in my life.

There's a samovar steaming on a side table, an icon in the corner with a little flame guttering beneath it, a fire banked high — every signal a room can send that says you are safe here, sit, be at ease. It's a trap built out of comfort.

The Dowager Tsaritsa is a small woman, barely up to my shoulder, and swallowed in a high-collared dress of dense, lightless black she has plainly not taken off in years: the black of a widow who decided long ago that grief was the most powerful thing she owned and simply never set it down. Jet beads at her throat. A diamond the size of a thumb on one hand, an Orthodox cross on the other, and pinned over her heart an enamelled imperial brooch that surely has a name, a history, and a body count. Her silver hair is parted dead center and drawn back so severely it looks like it must hurt. Her face is powdered pale, pouched and finely lined and utterly still, set around the downturned mouth of a woman who has not been pleasantly surprised since before I was born. She looks like a portrait of a dead empress the museum keeps in a locked room. She looks like she could comfortably outlive the sun.

She gestures me into a chair like a queen seating a supplicant and pours two glasses of tea I will not be drinking. She takes her time, because time is one more thing she owns and I don't.

"Do you know," she says pleasantly, settling across from me, "I quite like you. That's the trouble. If you were stupid or grasping this would be simpler. But you're neither, so I'm going to do you the courtesy of the truth." She slides a leather folder across the table. "Open it."

I don't want to, but I open it.

A contract. The one I signed in a state office a lifetime ago, termination stamped across the top. Beneath it, a check. I have to read the number three times before it resolves into something real: ten million dollars. Ten. Seven zeroes trailing the one like a dare. More money than every house I ever lived in put together would sell for, more than I could spend if I tried, sitting on cream paper like a grocery total. Beneath that, an airline folder — a single ticket, a middle seat, home, departing this evening.

"Your employment is concluded," she says gently. "Generously. Ten million dollars — American, since that's the country you'll be going home to. It will buy you a very comfortable life anywhere on earth that isn't this one." She lets it settle, then adds, almost kindly, which is worse: "It is also, I'll be honest with you, a rounding error to this house. We will not feel it leave the accounts. I tell you that not to wound you, but so that you understand precisely what you are to the people who run this place: a line item. A thing that can be paid, and closed. A car is being loaded as we speak."

"He won't let you do this." My voice comes out smaller than I want. "Konstantin."

"Is across the city at the Duma until tonight, opening the winter session — and no one interrupts a sitting Tsar mid-chamber, not even for this." She smirks. “By the time he rises and reads his messages, you'll be over the ocean, and he'll be furious, and he'll rage, but then he'll be a Tsar with a country to run and two children to raise, and the rage will cool the way everything cools." She sips her tea. "It always cools, dear. That's the part you're too young to know yet."

And there it is — the thing I've been bracing against since the gates, said out loud at last in a warm gold room by a woman who's never once been wrong.

I make myself sit up straight. I make myself find the steel I keep for occasions like this, the kind that got me through every placement that didn't want me. "He chose me," I say. "He told the whole house. He told you."