Dreaming Anastasia (9 page)

Wednesday, 12:15 pm

Anne

Drink.” Ethan places the steaming mug of tea on the small wooden table in front of me. “It will help.”

“I doubt it,” I say, but I pick up the mug anyway and sniff. It's fragrant—like orange and some kind of spice—and when I take a sip, the tea is hot on my tongue.

“I've got honey,” he says. “Maybe some sugar too. Let me look…”

“It's fine,” I say. “It's fine.”

We're in the kitchen of his loft in an older area on the far side of town. It's one of those places that used to be all factories and warehouses and is now slowly turning residential,
slowly
being the operative word here. I'm very clear on the fact that I'm alone in a loft with him in a basically isolated area, and that the only reason I've let him bring me here is because we were chased by a giant pair of hands, after which some guys started shooting at us, and he's assured me—oh, right—that we'll be safe.

Ethan's said more than once that he's going to explain, but so far what he's done is make me a cup of tea, which involved boiling water in a kettle, packing loose tea leaves in a metal-strainer thing, and then combining the two in an actual teapot before pouring it into my cup.

“Are you going to drink some too?”

“I—well—yes,” he says, and it's clear he wasn't going to, but he walks over to the open shelves above the sink, pulls down another mug, and fills it with tea from the pot. Then, mug in hand, he sits down across from me.

“Is this how you always make it?” I ask. “I mean, this whole tea ritual?”

“It's not a ritual. It's tea. That's how it's made.”

“Not in my house. We use a tea bag.”

“Well,” he says. And takes a swallow of tea.

He's performed another ritual since we arrived, but that didn't have anything to do with tea. It did, however, involve some more of the muttering and hand waving he seems to know so well. Warding is what he called it.

As in magic. As in something that, up until this morning, I really didn't believe existed.

As in,
Anne, I've warded the doors and windows, so we should be safe.

Not that I'm feeling any great confidence about that at the moment. In fact, I'm doing my best not to freak out and just start screaming. The nine thousand
OMG where r u?
text messages from Tess on my cell phone aren't helping matters.

Neither is the fact that since the warding process, I haven't been able to get sufficient reception to text her again after my initial,
I'm ok. Talk 2 u later,
that I punched in when we got here. Now, I've given up on it, and my phone is tucked into my backpack, which is currently sitting on the floor at my feet.

We both take another few sips from our mugs. I glance around. I can see a bed over in a far corner, one of those armoire things where you can store clothes, a chest of drawers, a door that looks like it leads to a bathroom. A few other chairs. A laptop on a low table near a leather couch. Not really much else. If he lives here, he's been living pretty pared down.

“Okay,” I say. I set my tea back on the table. My pulse is bumped up enough that I can feel it in my throat. “Talk. Tell me what all this means. Explain to me why I shouldn't just run from here screaming. Which, by the way, I'm not sure I won't do at some point anyway.”

“It's a long story,” he says. He takes another sip of his tea. “But the main thing is that you're—”

“No.” I hold one hand up. “Not the part about me. Not yet. I—I need the whole story. I need to know who you are. Why you're here. Why I should possibly believe a word you're telling me.”

“You need to believe because it's true,” Ethan says.

“I'll be the judge of that. Start at the beginning. It's not like we're going back out there anytime soon.”

He rests his thumb on his lip for a moment, like he's thinking that over. Studies me with those blue eyes of his.

This is all just crazy
, I think. He's crazy. And I am too for ever listening to him. All this Anastasia stuff, and witches with removable hands, and huts that move on chicken legs. No one wakes up and suddenly gets swallowed by a fairy tale.

For a second, I think I really am going to scream, then try to find a way out of here—only Ethan finally begins.

“You must understand,” he says, “that what I'm telling you happened a long, long time ago. That I am—well, you will see. It isn't a simple story in that way. But the beginning—well, it's not so complicated.”

“Accepted,” I say. “Now talk.”

“I grew up in Russia,” he says. “When I was ten, the Cossacks rode into our village. I had gone to the market for my mother. She was pregnant again, and my younger sister, Masha, was ill. It was harvest time, so my father was out in the fields.

“When I got home, I found them. Masha was dead, stabbed by Cossack swords. My mother lay on top of her, her belly sliced open.”

Ethan sips again at his tea. His long fingers—the same fingers that wove the air as he performed the magic earlier—tighten around his mug.

“I was still on the floor holding them when my father ran in from the fields. I begged him not to go after the men who had done this. But he would not listen. How could he? His wife, his babies, were gone. I don't think he even really saw me as he turned and ran out the door.”

He pauses. I can tell that he's seeing it again. That however long ago it was, there's probably never enough time to shut out that kind of hurt. And I get that. I might not understand all the rest of this. But that part, I get.

“When I caught up with him,” Ethan says, and I can see the pain in his eyes as he remembers, “it was too late. He was stabbed from behind. The Cossack who killed him never even dismounted—just ran him through, pulled out this sword, and rode on. So there I was, orphaned at ten. In a few short hours, I had lost everything.”

Ethan rakes his long fingers through his hair and looks at me. He takes another drink of tea.

“After that,” he tells me, “I wandered from village to village. I lived with some cousins for a while, but when they could not even feed their own children, they closed their door to me. Winter was coming. I had the clothes on my back, a hunting knife that had been my father's, and the memories of my family's dead faces.

“And then,” Ethan says, “I met Brother Viktor.”

“Brother? Like a monk or whatever? You mean that's why you had that robe on in my dream? Is that what you are?” Tess, I figure, is going to be pretty disappointed. So much for her stealthy, hot-guy fantasies if Ethan is in some sort of weird religious order.

“Was,” he says. “Then. And for a long time. I was a believer then. Now, I suppose it is much harder to say. But yes, Viktor was of the Brotherhood. And for a time, so was I.”

Ethan stands then. He walks back to the counter, picks up a small, covered cup and a spoon, and carries them back to the table.

“I like it sweeter,” he says, pointing to his tea. “In Russia, we liked sweet tea. My father used to put a cube of sugar between his teeth so it would sweeten each sip as he drank it.”

I wait while he stirs in a couple of spoonfuls of sugar and shake my head no when he offers some to me. I know he's stalling. But I also know how it is to have a story you just don't like to tell.

“Viktor was older,” Ethan says then. “About ten years older than I. Maybe a little less. He saw me trying to steal some potatoes from a vendor's stand in the marketplace of a town I'd wandered into. When I failed, he followed me back toward the forest. I can still see his long robes billowing as he chased after me. I though he was some sort of officer, come to arrest me.

“But he didn't. He offered me some bread and cheese and told me he knew what I'd suffered. Somehow, I felt he did. He told me he could stop the violence raging through Russia. That there was a group, a Brotherhood, dedicated to protecting our land and destroying the forces bent on corrupting it. If I joined them, he said, I could do this too. I could protect other families, protect the tsar and his family from the evil that had tried to speak in his name.”

“You believed him?”

He nods. “Perhaps I shouldn't have. But I was young and I was frightened. And I was alone. Viktor seemed to be offering a lifeline. I don't remember that I even gave it much thought, although later I knew I should have. I just took it. And I was grateful.”

He stands up and paces back toward the counter, leans against it.

The mark on my arm sends out a sudden jolt of pain. I rub it and try to make it go away. Ethan watches but doesn't comment. Then he continues.

“I had nothing,” Ethan says. “He offered me—everything. And so I accepted.

“I was fed, clothed. I learned Russian history and philosophy and literature. I studied theology. And I was taught the ancient magic.”

“Exactly how much magic?” Even as I ask the question, I'm not really sure I want to know.

“Enough,” he says simply. “Mostly basic protection spells. Some a little more complicated. A few more dangerous than that.” His blue eyes darken a bit at that last part.

He knows I can see that there's much more to this than he is letting on. But I keep quiet—for now.

“It's not something I enjoy. But it is something I have learned to use—when I need to.”

“Like back there, in the park, with those men?”

“Yes,” he says. “Like that.” He looks at me closely—and then closer still. “You know I didn't kill them, don't you? Just slowed them down a bit so we could get away.”

“All right,” I tell him. “So you're this monk—well, former monk, I guess, who knows some magic. And your job was to protect the tsar.”

I pause because, let's face it, I know what happened to the Romanovs, and I'm sensing that protecting the tsar and his family is probably not high on the super-secret Brotherhood success stories list.

“But the dreams, Ethan. And these marks on our arms. And my hand glowing. Where does all that—where do I fit in to this story?”

“It's coming,” Ethan says. He walks back to the table and sits down again. He leans his elbows on the wood and clasps his hands together so that, for a second, it looks like he's praying. “I just need you to see all the pieces. Hell, at this point, I think I need to see them again too. Because even after I'm done telling you this part, I still have to figure out who—or what—is after us. And why.”

“Figure out? Like, you really don't know?”

“Like, I need to finish telling you so you'll understand.” There's an edge to his tone, but he smiles at me.

“Sorry,” I say, even though I'm pretty sure he knows I'm not. “It's just taking a long time.”

“You're young,” he says, as though that explains it.

“Getting older,” I tell him. “So go on.”

“A few years before the Revolution, Brother Viktor began to talk of a prophecy. He spoke of forces corrupting Russia from within—dangerous forces that would do anything to destroy the tsar and his family. They were everywhere, he said, even within the Brotherhood itself.

“I found nothing shocking in the idea of a corrupted Russia. How could I when my family was murdered in cold blood? But that this corruption had somehow seeped its way into the sacred Brotherhood? I wasn't sure what to think. These were the men who had taken me in, fed me, protected me. Could one of them—maybe more than one—really be my enemy?”

“Was it that Rasputin guy? I mean, from what I read, he seemed to have a bunch of control over the tsar's wife. And the way he died—all that poison and being shot, and then finally they had to drown him in the river. He certainly sounds like a candidate for corruption. Not to mention a makeover. That whole robe and hair thing—not exactly working for him.”

Ethan reaches up and smooths his own hair, then grins at me, which I guess is a good sign, or at least a sign that he knows how he looked back then.

“You've done some research,” he says. “But no, it wasn't Father Grigory. You are right—the tsarina trusted that crazy fellow, mostly, I think, because he offered her hope for her son, Alexei.”

“I know,” I tell him. What I don't say is that I've also seen what it's like for a mother when she realizes that she can't save her son.

“So who then?” I sit up straighter and roll my shoulders a bit, trying to relax my muscles.

“We never did know for certain,” he says. “I suspected a younger monk, Ivan. He'd become strange, avoiding Viktor, refusing to take his meals with the others. He would stay away from the monastery for weeks on end and come back wild-eyed, as if he hadn't slept in days. Right before the assassination, he simply disappeared. And then—then things changed, and there was no point in looking for him.”

Somewhere outside, a car honks, and we both look toward the window across the room. I'm not sure what
he's
thinking, but I know what's going through my head.
How in the world can he really be as old as I think he is?
Of course, I haven't looked in a mirror since this all started. It's possible that he's looking at me and thinking that I look about a thousand right now.

I push my bangs off my forehead. I just can't get my head around this. Even if he is old but looks young, why? How?

“Then what?” I ask him. Suddenly I'm even more impatient to hear the rest of it.

“Eventually it didn't matter. The Revolution was coming, and nothing—not even magic—was going to stop it. But Viktor told us there was one slim hope. He said there was a chance that we could save one person. That there was magic, old magic, that could help us. If we used them, we might be able to keep at least one member of the royal family safe.”

“It was Anastasia, right? The one. I mean that's horrible. But she was the one, wasn't she? That's what people have said all along, anyway. There are all those rumors that she's not dead. People think there's this whole conspiracy or something. Only now—what I asked you back in the park—you're telling me it's true, just not how people think?”