The Crown’s Game (32 page)

I
first fell in love with Russian history and literature when I was in college. I had read Dostoevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov
in high school, and curiosity led me to the Slavic Languages and Literatures Department at Stanford. I’d only meant to take a class or two; instead, I graduated three years later with a bachelor’s degree in the subject and an unabiding weakness for all things
Russian (including the food!).

The Crown’s Game
is a work of historical fantasy set in an alternate Imperial Russia, but its foundation is based on true events and places. Much of the research for this book was actually done while I was in college, although inadvertently—little did I know then that my adoration of Tolstoy and my obsession with nineteenth-century Russia would one day lead to Vika
and Nikolai.

I did, however, need to shore up on some historical details for
The Crown’s Game
, for which I referenced my old textbooks as well as Orlando Figes’s
Natasha’s Dance
and Martha Brill Olcott’s
The Kazakhs
.

An example of how I melded fact with fiction: Alexander I was the real tsar of the Russian Empire, from 1801 until 1825. He steered the country through much upheaval, including
the Napoleonic Wars, and eventually brought about a period of relative peace to the empire.

It is undisputed that Alexander I had many affairs; he flaunted his mistresses openly, bringing them to court and even having children with them. He did, however, reconcile with the Tsarina Elizabeth near the end of his life, as well as find solace in mysticism, for which many questioned him, but the tsarina
supported him. It was on a trip together to Taganrog, in an attempt to restore the tsarina to health, that Alexander died of typhus. Elizabeth soon followed (although I took some liberties with the dates of their passing), dying of a weak—some say broken—heart.

The Crown’s Game
diverges from actual history, though, in the story of the children borne by Alexander and Elizabeth. In reality, the
tsar and tsarina had two girls, both of whom died in infancy. In
The Crown’s Game
, however, their children are very much alive and grown, although they have a boy and a girl—Pasha and Yuliana—instead of two daughters.

Probably the most fun I had while doing research for
The Crown’s Game
was investigating the profanity of the time. I turned to one of my professors at Stanford for help on this
subject, and we have quite an amusing chain of emails discussing what Nikolai, Pasha, and Vika would or wouldn’t have said. I also reread parts of
War and Peace
in an attempt to cull some of the aristocracy’s exclamations from that period of time.

Many of the settings in
The Crown’s Game
were inspired
by my trip to Russia in 2003, when I took a cruise along the Volga River from Moscow to Saint
Petersburg. I remember seeing the shimmering wooden church on Kizhi Island and thinking it must have been constructed by magic—now it is indeed magical, as one of the locations in Nikolai’s Dream Benches.

And, of course, there is Saint Petersburg . . . perhaps I love it because one of my dearest friends lives there, or perhaps it’s because one can’t help but fall for the beautiful capital. Most
of Vika, Nikolai, and Pasha’s Saint Petersburg is based on the actual city, from Ekaterinsky Canal to Nevsky Prospect, from the bronze statue of Peter the Great to the Winter Palace. The waterways and rivers are real as well, as is the Neva Bay and the many small islands linked by bridges and ferries that form the capital city.

However, both Vika’s home, Ovchinin Island, and the new island she
creates are figments of my imagination. I like to think, though, that they’d fit right in with the actual islands that dot the Neva Bay.

I do have to confess we took artistic license with the cover of
The Crown’s Game
. The buildings in the crown would not have existed in 1825, but after many iterations, the team at Harper and I decided that this version best captured the essence of Vika and Nikolai’s
story. I hope the historians among my readers will forgive me this transgression.

As for whether the magic in
The Crown’s Game
is real, well . . . that depends. Do you believe in what you cannot see?

W
hen I first came up with the idea for
The Crown’s Game
, I emailed a few of my friends and said sheepishly, “So, hey, I started writing this crazy fantasy about two enchanters in a deadly duel who fall into impossible, bittersweet love, and it’s all set in magical, Imperial Russia. . . .” I wasn’t sure how they’d respond, but I was pretty sure it would involve good-natured laughing
along the lines of,
There goes Evelyn on another nutty whim
. But instead, all three responded immediately and emphatically with,
YES. Yes, yes, yes, write it.
So thank you, Stacey Lee, Sean Byrne, and Jeanne Schriel, not only for your friendship over the years but also for telling me to chase this idea and make it real.
The Crown’s Game
would not exist without you.

Thank you to my agent, Brianne
Johnson, for loving Vika and Nikolai from page one, and for your gushiness and your sharp editorial insights and your mirrored Instagram pictures of your cat. Many thanks, too, to Cecilia de la Campa and Soumeya Roberts of Writers House, for
bringing
The Crown’s Game
overseas, and to Dana Spector at Paradigm Talent Agency for giving Vika and Nikolai a tour of Hollywood.

I cannot express enough
gratitude to my brilliant and tireless editor, Kristin Rens, for helping me make this story bigger and brighter (and also darker) than I ever imagined possible. Kristin, you are the enchantress of publishing. Thank you to Alessandra Balzer and Donna Bray for championing
The Crown’s Game
from the very start. To Joel Tippie and Alison Donalty for the breathtaking, perfect cover. To Kelsey Murphy,
Jon Howard, Nellie Kurtzman, Caroline Sun, Megan Barlog, EpicReads, and the Harper sales team—I am so lucky to have you on my team.

Special thanks to Professor Richard Schupbach of Stanford University and his colleague Anna Bogomyakova for their expertise (and amusing emails) on nineteenth-century Russian swearwords. And to all my other professors and teachers at Stanford, for being there as
I fell in love with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Russia’s history.

This journey would not have been possible without the love, laughter, and wisdom from my writing family: Stacey Lee, Sara Raasch, Emily Martin, Sabaa Tahir, Monica Bustamante-Wagner, Tracy Edward Wymer, Anna Shinoda, Lara Perkins, Sean Byrne, Morgan Shamy, Hafsah Faizal, Dana Elmendorf, Elizabeth Briggs, Betsy Franco, Karen Akins,
Karen Grunberg, and Puja Batra. I owe you an infinity of cookies. And ice cream.

Thank you to Denis Ovchinin, my Russian pen pal since we were teens. For you, Den, I created an entire island. I hope you like it.

Thank you to Kevin Hsu and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
for your faith that one day, my words would become a real book.

To Paul, Dawn, and Karl Ehrlich, thank you for always cheering me
on.

Enormous thanks to the Tsar’s Guard! Your enthusiasm and devotion have made this one heck of a year. The tsar could not have a better army in his service.

Eternal love to Andrew and Margaret Hsu, the very best parents a girl could ask for. Thank you for never setting a curfew, for letting me major in something as “impractical” as Russian literature and history, and for always encouraging
my writing. I cannot wait to place this book—this real book!—in your hands. I love you more than you can ever know.

And last, but most important of all, thank you to Reese, for humoring me when my mind wandered to imperial Russia in the middle of breakfast, for spending weeks drawing a book cover for me, and for being proud of me and showering me with hugs and kisses. You are magic. You are the
light of my life. And guess what? I love you!

Photo credit Joyce Goldschmid Photography

EVELYN SKYE
was once offered a job by the CIA, she not-so-secretly wishes she was on
So You Think You Can Dance,
and if you challenge her to a pizza-eating contest, she guarantees she will win. When she isn’t writing, Evelyn can be found chasing her daughter on the playground or sitting on the couch immersed in a good book and eating way too many cookies.
The Crown’s Game
is her first novel. Evelyn can be found online at
www.evelynskye.com
and on Twitter @EvelynSkyeYA.

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The Crown’s Game

The Crown’s Heir

Cover art and design © 2016 by Joel Tippie

Balzer + Bray is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

THE CROWN’S GAME.
Copyright © 2016 by Evelyn Skye. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted,
downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

www.epicreads.com

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015955181

ISBN 978-0-06-242258-3 (trade bdg.) — ISBN 978-0-06-256060-5
(int.)

EPub Edition © April 2016 ISBN 9780062422606

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FIRST EDITION