In the library on the far side of the Winter Palace, Pasha paced in front of a leather armchair, his footsteps so fervent, there was already a deep path carved in the burgundy carpet.
“Who was she?” he asked himself aloud. “What was she? Was she even real?” The girl on Ovchinin Island had fled as soon as she spotted Pasha and Nikolai, and the ice at their feet had melted instantly the moment she was gone. Then Nikolai had grabbed Pasha’s arm and rushed them from the woods.
The rest of the hunting party had somehow not seen the lightning storm and fire. It was as if a drape of invisibility had been tossed over the small section of forest in which the flames were contained, and Pasha and Nikolai had happened to be close enough to be inside its folds.
And yet, Nikolai had refused to talk about it. At first, Pasha thought he’d imagined the girl entirely. But all the color had drained from Nikolai’s face—which was how Pasha knew that Nikolai had, in fact, witnessed the same miracle he had—and Nikolai hadn’t uttered a syllable as they sprinted to their horses and galloped out of the forest. Then, once it became apparent that the remainder of the hunting party had seen nothing out of the ordinary, Pasha had been prevented from speaking up, because if he had, they would think he was prone to hallucinations, and that was not an acceptable reputation for a tsesarevich, even one who had no desire to one day be tsar.
Which was how Pasha ended up pacing alone in the palace library, working out the morning’s events on his own. “There was lightning, a ring of fallen trees on fire. . . .”
Someone rapped on the open door. Yuliana peered inside the library. “Are you talking to yourself again?”
“Oh. Yuliana. I didn’t hear you come in.” Pasha ran his fingers through his hair, disheveling it even more than fleeing the forest had. It stuck up in dark-blond tufts, like peaks of torched meringue from one of their father’s many banquets.
“You’re muttering to yourself again.” She tapped her sharp fingernails on the door frame. Yuliana was two years younger than Pasha, but most of the time, she seemed to think herself twice his age. “The servants could hear. You don’t want them thinking the tsesarevich is a madman.”
Pasha sighed. “I think they’re rather accustomed to my mannerisms by now. If they don’t already think me mad, they will not think it because of today.”
Yuliana tilted her head. “Suit yourself. But at the very least close the door.” She dipped in a perfunctory curtsy on her way out of the library, then reached for the heavy wooden door and shut it fast behind her. It plowed into the frame with a decisive thump.
Pasha shook his head as soon as she was gone. Sometimes, he wondered how the tsar could be his father, although it was obvious the tsar was Yuliana’s. His sister and father were cast from the same steely resolve. And recently, Yuliana had even seemed the sterner of the two.
But back to the girl. Pasha began to pace the well-worn groove of the carpet again. “She rose as if the fire were nothing . . . no, as if she were part of the fire.” He tugged on his hair again. The girl’s appearance both unnerved and intrigued him. Had she already been there in the woods when the fire began? Or had she come out of the lightning, the cause of the very fire from which Pasha had sought to rescue her?
As quickly as he had begun, Pasha ceased his pacing and crossed the library to a towering bookshelf. The entire room was lined, floor to cathedral ceiling, with books—from old Church documents sealed in airtight cases to new treatises on politics and military strategy. What Pasha was looking for, though, was information on the occult. There would be no books on the subject in the Imperial Public Library, for the Church had ordered any materials on magic destroyed centuries ago. But the palace’s private library was a different matter; if magic did, indeed, exist, and if there were books written about it, they would be here.
As Pasha climbed the ladder to the upper reaches of the wall, a giddiness fluttered within him. Perhaps investigating the girl and her magic was one thing he could do better than Nikolai, who excelled at pretty much everything else, from dancing to sharpshooting to understanding the intricacies of bridge building. Not that Pasha was jealous; he didn’t begrudge Nikolai his talents at all, and in actuality admired him. But he could not help feeling the thrill of a little healthy competition, and Nikolai had seemed frightened of the girl, whereas Pasha had felt nothing but wonderment. Pasha grinned as he perused the highest shelves.