Anastasia

by Sophie Lark

She said it like a secret, like they might be the only two who’d ever read it.

“It’s a shapeshifter,” he rasped. “A wolf that’s not really a wolf at all, but a man prowling around in an animal skin.”

Rusya was the greatest nation on earth to my mind—vast and beautiful, with the kind of magic that only exists in places that have never been entirely tamed. I believed Andrei’s stories of monsters still roaming in the wild north. I hoped they were true.

We both accepted the thing we couldn’t understand, that seemed to happen every time we got close to each other. I didn’t know what it was or what it meant, but I could feel it even as we stood there on the bridge, even with my head pounding and my nose bleeding.

She was once Princess Dagmar of Denmark, a bold and clever beauty with the same dark curls and button-black eyes as her daughters.

She passed me the music box. Its mechanical innards made it heavier than it looked. The metal lid and sides were perforated with tiny mountains, stars, and moons.

Unconsciously, we both gazed at Nicholas’ portrait on the wall, trapped forever as Minnie had last seen him, never aging past their youthful love. And next to him, the man she’d married and had children with. Two very different brothers, one slim and thoughtful with the eyes of a poet, one brash and booming with the hands of a brawler.

I threw my arms around her and hugged her tight. Grandmother had shrunk, or I had grown. It was the first time I noticed myself taller than her.

I didn’t know what drew me to her over and over. Maybe I only wanted to feel that crackling energy that surged through my body whenever we stood close.

Her dress was simple by the standards of aristocrats, the material that shade of blue Anastasia seemed to love best. It was the color of the flowers that appear all in one day in spring in the steppes, turning the grass into a sea of hazy blue.

I couldn’t stop him as he rampaged through my mind. But I never allowed him a clear glimpse of Damien. I kept the secret of the Cossack soldier locked away tight in the most precious, the most private part of my brain. Hidden so deep that Rasputin would have to tear his way through everything else to find him.

Damien’s gloved hand slipped into mine, concealed by the lowered lights. Our fingers entwined.

Rusya belonged to monsters once. The towns of men were tiny, scattered along waterways. In the endless acres of forest so dense and dark they never saw sunlight, that is where the monsters dwelled. That is where they bred. A thousand demons spawned in the wilds of Rusya, and spread …

Tell me about all the beautiful cakes you had at tea, and tell me how you took a warm bath and walked around the park. Tell me all the books you’re reading, the records you play. Let me feel alive again.

Damien had been gone for over a year. He burned in my mind brighter than ever.

I was immersed in a fantasy of Damien stripping off his gloves to write his letter. His bare hands uncovered, flattening his paper across his knee, scribbling, bent close over the page, then signing just his initial as he always did, folding the letter, slipping it into the envelope, addressing it with my name

They want to meet my favorite princess.

I planned to save every dance for Damien, etiquette be damned. But I felt a strange shyness admitting it to him. He’d been away so long.

She ran to me, her whole face illuminated with a wild happiness that caught me like a whirlwind, so I swept her up in my arms and swung her around.

Our mouths met, her lips warm from the sun. I tasted her, and all the world stopped around us.

She was me and I was her and we were one together, something that held all the world in its grip, stealing this moment for us alone.

As Damien turned to leave, I plucked one of the white flowers pinned at my shoulder and threw it down to him. He caught it in his gloved hand and raised it to his lips without quite touching it. Then he tucked it away inside his coat.

Happy birthday, princess. You don’t ride horses like a Romanov. You ride them like a Cossack. So I made this for you, because that’s what Cossacks do—we put carvings of our favorite things on our saddles to remind us of home when we’re away. To remind us what we fight for.

I wrapped my arm around Damien from behind and pressed my face against his back. I held him tight and breathed in his scent, until his warmth flowed into me and I felt that vivid, electric power crackling in my hands.

I was riding along the edge of the Frost Forest when I felt something I hadn’t felt in two years: a lifting of my spirits. The desire to look up at the first glinting stars in the lavender sky. Pleasure in the scent of pine.

Her face flashed into my mind: eyes that bright and velvety blue, tilted up at the corners so they always seemed laughing, especially when she looked up at me. The spatter of freckles across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, usually a soft fawn color, but sometimes dark as chocolate from sun, disappearing by candlelight. And her mouth, wide, red, always quirked with some expression—curious, mocking, surprised, gleeful.

“The ones we love aren’t lost to us forever. Love endures past anything else. It’s the strongest energy in the universe. It changes and flows, but can never be destroyed.”