The Crown's Game
Page 7

“Is Father occupied?” she asked one of the guards.
“He is meeting with the tsarina, Your Imperial Highness.”
“Then we’ll come back later,” Pasha said.
“No, we won’t.” Yuliana shoved open the doors before her brother or the guards could protest. Not that they would. They’d long ago learned that it was better to allow Yuliana her own way than to suffer her wrath.
The tsarina jumped in her armchair at the sound of the doors flinging open, then burst into a fit of coughs. The tsar merely looked up from his desk and sighed. “Yuliana, how many times have I asked you to have the guards announce you properly? Look what you’ve done to your mother. Elizabeth,” he said to the tsarina, “are you all right?”
Yuliana glanced at the tsarina. A pale-blue handkerchief was pressed to her even paler face, her elegant hands shaking as she convulsed. “My apologies, Mother. I didn’t mean to frighten you.” Yuliana turned back to the tsar. “But Pasha has just returned, and he has much to say about the Kazakh steppe. It’s rather alarming.”
Pasha came up laughing behind her. “Only slightly more alarming than the way you enter a room.”
Yuliana shot him one of her famous scowls.
It only made him laugh more. Ugh. Brothers.
The tsar sat back in his chair, which, although simpler, seemed as much a throne as the one in the official throne room. “Your mother was in the middle of discussing plans for Pasha’s upcoming birthday,” he said. When he frowned, he looked a lot like Yuliana. Or Yuliana looked a lot like him. Severe blond statues, straight out of ancient Rome.
“It’s all right,” the tsarina said, having finally stopped coughing. She gathered her voluminous silver skirts and rose. “I was finished.”
“Mother,” Pasha said, “don’t go. What I have to say can wait.”
“It really can’t,” Yuliana said.
The tsarina smiled and kissed Yuliana on the top of her carefully coiffed ringlets, then stood on her tiptoes to peck Pasha on the cheek. “It’s fine, love, talk to your father.” The tsarina smiled at the tsar, too, and she departed the room.
Yuliana set her map—still rolled up, for now—against her father’s desk and sat in the armchair her mother had vacated. It hadn’t a trace of warmth, as if it were too much to ask the tsarina’s tiny, sickly body to produce enough heat to warm the cushions. But Yuliana pushed that out of her head. What was important right now was the Kazakhs and getting the tsar to do something about them.
“Father, what I—”
The tsar put up a hand. “Yuliana, why don’t you let Pasha speak? It’s he who was on the steppe, was it not?”
“Yes, well . . .” But she gestured at Pasha, for this was why she’d dragged him here in the first place, even though he’d wanted to go out to see his friends as soon as he’d arrived back in Saint Petersburg.
“So,” the tsar said to Pasha, “I received word that Qasim refused to sup with you?”
“Indeed, Father,” Pasha said, raking a hand through his hair, tousling it in that casually defiant way that all the girls of the nobility seemed to love. “Like waves of gold,” Yuliana had overheard Baroness Zorina’s daughter say at a recent tea. Yuliana had wanted to punch her in her vapid face.
“Although I abolished their khanate,” the tsar said, “the Kazakhs still look to Qasim as their leader. I sent you to dine with him for a reason, Pasha. I needed you to gather information for me, especially after the Kazakhs attacked our Cossack detachments earlier this year.”
Pasha leaned against one of their father’s bookcases, his elbows behind him as support. “But I learned what we needed to know, even without meeting with Qasim.”
“How?” the tsar said.
“I have my ways.” Pasha smiled.
The tsar rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I don’t think I want to know your methods,” he said.
“No, Father, trust me, you do not.” Yuliana tried not to smile—in general, she did not believe in smiles—but she couldn’t help it, because her brother brought them out of her. And Pasha had already told Yuliana the how of his espionage.
Pasha was notorious for slipping out of the palace in plain clothes, masquerading as one of the common people so he could waste his time playing cards with fishermen on the dock or frequenting taverns with his friend Nikolai Karimov. It was no different on the Kazakh steppe, where Pasha had left his officer’s uniform at the army’s camp and sneaked out in a plain tunic and trousers. Then he’d wandered through the main trading post, posing as an innocent traveler.
He passed stalls full of brightly colored caps, flat on top and intricately embroidered on the sides. There was a table that specialized in dried apricots. And another with sacks full of grain.
It was around the corner from the butcher’s stall, however, that Pasha stopped and loitered. A cluster of men gathered around the butcher, who held a cleaver over a side of lamb. The butcher was the youngest among them—twenty-five at the most—but he seemed to hold court over the others. Perhaps it was his hatchet of a knife that did it.
“The Russians are a pestilence,” one man said.
“Yes, a pestilence, a plague,” another added. “They think they can draw arbitrary borders and forbid us from migrating across them. We will not stand for it.”
“Patience,” the butcher said. “The plans for revolt are underway. Qasim’s men are prepared.”
“I hope so,” the first man said.
“Without a doubt,” the butcher said. He raised the cleaver over his head. The blade fell swiftly onto the lamb with an earsplitting thwack. “We will crush the Russian plague.”
“I heard the tsar sent his son here bearing gifts and empty promises,” one of the men said.
The butcher swung his cleaver, and it again hit the meat with a resounding smack. “Bring the tsesarevich to me, and I’ll show the tsar what we think of their gifts. I’ll skin his son like a lamb and send his carcass back with a bow tied on top.”
The men had whooped and roared. Then they had discovered Pasha, and he’d tried to convince them he wasn’t a Russian spy. When they didn’t believe him, fisticuffs ensued (Yuliana had stopped listening as carefully when Pasha got into the gory and glorious details of his fight), followed by a mad dash through the trading post, and Pasha successfully evading the last of his pursuers to return safely to camp.