Page 62 of Bred By the Tsar

Eight Months Later...

Ihave sent men to their deaths with a steadier hand than the one Hazel is currently crushing in hers.

It is, by some distance, the worst night of my life, and I would not trade a second of it. A private room at the top of the best hospital in the country, every specialist money and a crown can summon standing by.

But none of it, none of it, matters, because for the first time since I was twelve years old I am in a room where I do not get to decide what happens. I cannot order this to go faster. I cannot threaten the pain into leaving her. I, who can close a border with a phone call, can do precisely one thing of use tonight, and it is to let my wife break the bones in my hand and tell her, over and over, that she is the strongest person I have ever known.

"You're doing so well," I say, for the hundredth time, my mouth at her sweat-damp temple. "Moya dusha. Almost. I have you."

"You're terrified," she pants, half a laugh in it even now, even here. "Scared of a baby."

"Petrified," I admit, because I have learned to give her the truth, and because it makes her laugh, and her laughing is the only thing keeping me upright.

And then, after hours that age me a decade, there is a sound in the room that was not there before. Thin and furious and absolutely outraged to have been disturbed.

A girl. A daughter. Red and squalling and perfect, lifted up into the lamplight, and I simply stop functioning, undone on the spot, while they settle her on Hazel's chest and my wife sobs and laughs and says, “Hi, hi, there you are, I've got you, I've got you.”

I have to sit down. I, who have stood through executions, have to sit down.

"She's perfect," I manage, when I can speak. "You're perfect. You — both of you—"

"Do you want to know her name?" Hazel says.

We never settled it. We argued over it for months, gently, going in circles, nothing fitting.

I assumed we'd decide in the room. I assumed wrong, because my wife — my brave, impossible, bottomless-hearted wife — looks up at me with our daughter on her chest and says, very quietly, like she's been holding it close and afraid:

"I want to call her Tatiana."

The room goes very still.

"Hazel—" My voice doesn't work.

"She gave Lena and Misha to the world," she says, steady, certain, her eyes wet and unflinching on mine. "She gave them you. I'm not afraid, Konstantin. I don't want her erased from this family — I want her in it. I want our daughter to carry the name of the woman who was brave enough to die so two of my children could live." Her chin lifts, that flicker of steel I fell for across a study a lifetime ago. "Unless it hurts you. Then we don't. But I think — I think it might be the opposite of hurting."

Three years ago a woman died for me and I could not love her, and I have carried that like a stone in my chest every day since.

My wife has just reached in and turned the stone into something I can finally set down.

"Tatiana," I say, and my voice breaks on it, clean in half, and I press my forehead to Hazel's and let her feel me come apart, because she is the only person alive I will ever allow to see it. "Yes. Tatiana. Thank you. God, Hazel — thank you."

***

They bring the children in shortly after.

Misha barrels in first, four years old and indignant about having slept through the entire event, and clambers up to inspect his sister with the deep suspicion of a boy who suspects he is being replaced, until she grips his offered finger and his whole face changes and he announces, to the room, that she is pretty and he will be teaching her everything.

Lena comes in slowly.

She has been the careful one from the beginning — my daughter who remembers, who guards, who learned too young that the people who choose you can leave. She edges to the side of the bed and looks at the small bundle in Hazel's arms with an expression I know intimately, because it is my own: the look of someone deciding whether it is safe to want a thing this much.

"This is your sister," Hazel says softly. "Do you want to meet her?"

Lena nods, mute.

"Her name is Tatiana."

Her head comes up. "That's — that was my mama's name."