“What do you mean?” he asked, mindful of the fragility of this conversation. Was it possible to recapture the past, to mend what they’d broken? Pasha ran his hands through his hair.
“I mean, your interpretation contemplates only romantic love,” Nikolai said quietly, as if he, too, understood the significance of their conversation. “But what about family? And friendship? I think we’ve all been blind to the importance of those. Me, most of all.” He rose and helped Vika up. When he released her hand, their halo of light vanished.
Pasha exhaled. It had been almost too intimate, seeing them glow together like that. “So you’re saying . . .”
Yuliana linked her arm through his. “The four of us here are the broken halves we’ve been looking for all along.”
Pasha held tightly to her. He was beginning to understand what Nikolai meant. Vika and Nikolai together made a whole. But so did Pasha and Yuliana, as family. And Pasha and Nikolai, not only as brothers, but also as friends.
Vika stood between him and Nikolai. She looked back and forth at them, pausing also to look at herself as if she were a fragile bridge that connected them. Perhaps she was.
She turned slowly to Nikolai. “The darkness is gone from your veins. You’re you again, right?”
He nodded.
“Then forgive Pasha for what he did to us at the end of the Game.” Her voice took on a sterner quality or perhaps more accurately, a fiery one. She was very much the passionate, resolute girl from the woods Pasha and Nikolai had encountered before the Game. “Grief and fear can twist even the best of us to do what we shouldn’t,” Vika said to Nikolai. “Give up the fight for the crown.”
“I—”
“It’s not you, Nikolai.” She shook her head, but her expression softened. “It was never what you wanted. Not really, anyway.”
He looked at the death surrounding them. At the soldiers who stood silently, obediently, waiting for their commands. “Blazes, what have I done?”
Nikolai closed his eyes and scrubbed at the back of his neck. But then he nodded again. “You’re right. All I ever truly wanted was to belong—to Saint Petersburg. To a family. To you.”
Pasha’s heart leaped into his throat. For more than one reason.
Vika turned to face him next. “Pasha, forgive and pardon Nikolai. He wasn’t himself, and the Decembrists had already plotted against you and your family ages ago. Nikolai was merely a convenient means to an end for them.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Pasha saw Nikolai flinch at Vika’s description of his role, belittled. He may have been humbled, but he still had plenty of pride.
It was that very pride that had blown up and propelled Nikolai to pursue the throne. To try to kill Pasha, twice. Could he forgive so easily?
And yet, look what not forgiving had led them to. Pasha had essentially sentenced Nikolai to death at the end of the Game. Then Nikolai had returned the favor.
It was not the most natural thing in the world to forgive your brother for attempting to murder you. But Nikolai was willing to swallow a great deal of pride to forgive Pasha. Pasha could do the same.
“We’ve both made mistakes,” he said. “Enormous ones.”
Nikolai scrubbed the back of his neck. “Yes, we have. I am eternally sorry. Words do not suffice.”
Pasha had to lean on Yuliana, so great was his relief. “I am sorry, too. For the end of the Game. For everything.”
“Mon frère,” Nikolai said.
Pasha smiled. “Mon frère.”
Yuliana touched Vika’s shoulder, and Vika stepped back, leaving space between Pasha and Nikolai.
Pasha crossed the short distance and pulled Nikolai into an embrace.
Nikolai tensed for a moment. Then he threw his arms around Pasha, too.
Together, they were whole.
Around them, the soldiers began to murmur their confusion over what the princes’ reconciliation meant.
Nikolai released Pasha from their embrace and said, “I fear I’ve slashed open a wound in Russia’s side with this coup.”
Pasha shook his head. “Yes, but at the same time, it would have happened, one way or another, as Vika pointed out. If our father hadn’t died, the Decembrists had been planning to rise against him next summer anyhow. They only moved sooner because they thought we wouldn’t be organized enough to counter them. But they didn’t account for Vika and Yuliana.”
“Or you,” Nikolai said. “I underestimated you, as well.”
Vika smiled at them and took Nikolai’s hand. They glowed again as if the sun shone down on them with particular favor. But this time, Pasha didn’t wince. He would get used to it.
“Now that you have all made up,” Yuliana said, “what shall we do with the Decembrists?”
Pasha looked at the square. Bodies lay splayed on the cobblestones, eyes wide but empty. His men had begun rounding up the rebels who were still alive.
He thought he recognized Ilya in the distance, near the Neva, arms up in surrender. Perhaps Pasha was wrong. But he was quite certain he wasn’t.
His stomach turned. Yet he didn’t let the nausea take over. As tsar, there would be many more difficult moments like these. He forced himself to look away.
“Pasha?” Yuliana asked.
He took several breaths. “Bury the dead with all the proper rites. Send the police to arrest those who’ve fled.”
“And then?”
And then what? Pasha looked at Ilya once more. He’d been a good guard. A friend, almost. A veil of sadness descended upon everything Pasha could see.
But Ilya must have had his reasons, just as Pasha and Nikolai had for what they’d done. And if Pasha could forgive himself and Nikolai, if he could understand that they were real people who’d made mistakes, then he could understand the Decembrists.
Pasha would allow himself to be sad, and angry, and everything in between. But he would also learn from his mistakes, and he would rule the empire his way, with compassion and love, even for his enemies.
“We’ll find a way to punish them,” he said, turning away from Ilya for the last time. “But no executions. And while I will not abolish the tsardom, I will consider some of their proposals to better the lives of the common man. It will take time, perhaps years, even decades, but we will set things in motion and do right by our people in the end.” He braced himself for Yuliana to scowl.
Yet she only took his arm and leaned her head against his shoulder. “It would be easier if we simply maintained Father’s course. But I admire you for making the harder decision. It’s not what Father or I would have done, but yours is the right one.”
“You think?” Pasha said.
She lifted her head and smiled, a warm, clear smile, the kind reserved only for her brother. “You’ll be a great tsar, Pasha.”
He smiled, too.
“Yes,” Pasha said. “I do believe I will.”
CHAPTER EIGHTY