Page 243 of Golden Eagle

But he’d spent long enough in America, absorbing all manner of media, from social to structured classroom lessons, and it was harder and harder, after he’d felt great rushes of nostalgia for the empire’s faded glory, to justify imperialism itself.

His mother had always clung tightly to the autocracy, always urging Nicholas to be harsher, to stand his ground, to reject any Russian attempts at a more representative government. The Russian people needed and wanted an autocrat, she believed wholeheartedly.

And Russians had slaughtered their last autocrat.

How did he live with that? With knowing that Nicholas, that the Romanov dynasty, had not been the voice of the common people…but with remembering the man as Papa; as a loving, doting father, doing his best?

He realized he’d closed his eyes, and opened them. “There’s no place for me in this world. That’s the big, terrible secret of being immortal, isn’t it? You can never outrun the time that birthed you. You can never fit. That’s why we’re still secret, after all these centuries of existence: because relevancy is a uniquely human condition, isn’t it? It’s not possible for us.”

“Lex,” Dante said, tone disturbed. “I wasn’t – wasn’t expecting this.”

“My wholehearted mental breakdown? It had to happen sometime. I suppose it’s happening now.”

“You’re not – here, hold on.” Dante took his hand, and the scene was different, again.

A balcony at the head of a red-brick staircase, the low clouds, and Italianate lines of Moscow, the Kremlin. A woman stood there, her eyes glittering with unshed tears, white-rimmed with fright, but her chin lifted bravely. She held the hands of two boys, one on either side. One of them, Alexei could tell with a glance, was Peter as a boy, which would make the other his half-brother Ivan. Below, armored musketeers, stray beams of sunlight glittering on their uplifted pikes.

The Streltsy.

Voice trembling, the woman – Peter’s mother, Natalya – called down, “Here is the Lord Tsar Peter Alexievich. And here is the Lord Tsar Ivan Alexievich.”

“This is when the Streltsy revolted,” Alexei said, recalling it from stuffy lessons, days spent lying in his sickbed, Gilliard reading to him, while through the open window, the voices of his playing sisters floated up to him. “I thought, as a boy, that the Red Staircase must be named for the carnage that happened that day.”

“It wasn’t,” Dante said, faintly.

They didn’t stay long – but long enough to see Natalya flee into the safety of the palace, and for them to see the moment when anger, frustration, and miscalculation boiled over; when the Streltsy rushed up the staircase, took hold of their commander, and pitched him over the edge of the balcony – onto the pikes waiting below. He fell amongst the sharp points like an overripe melon, spouting blood from every terrible wound.

“Peter always hated Moscow,” Dante said, in the low, knowing tones of a historian. His childhood was a whirlwind of terrible violence, hiding under beds, clinging to his mother’s hand, a hairsbreadth from being murdered. That does something to a person: growing up amid that kind of turmoil, all the plots, the bloodshed.

“It was the same for Ivan IV: for all that hewasterrible, that he was doubtless mentally ill, the awfulness of his bloody childhood can’t be overstated. Do you know” – he turned to gauge Alexei’s expression – “upon whom Ivan modeled himself? Who he revered?”

Alexei did. He swallowed. “Vlad Tepes.”

They traveled again, to a Moscow that was centuries in the past, oil lamps and tallow candles burning in the frightful chill of a dark hall. To a tall, bearded man dressed in the Oriental dress of Muscovy. To his bride, a young, pretty, shaking thing in a fur cloak, bearing the gift of a throne, a chair crafted from her homeland of Byzantium. There was something of her uncle in the line of brow and nose; faint traces of the emperor Constantine whose horse had been cut from beneath him when Constantinople fell.

Dante offered him glimpses: the siege, the smoke of canon, an upended bag and the bloody head that rolled out of it…and the sound of awful, choked sobs in a voice he recognized with a start: Valerian’s.

“It’s connected,” Dante said. “It isallconnected. You are a part of it; an inheritor of it. You survived your own bloody childhood; it shaped you into what you are today.”

Alexei’s chest felt tight, his lungs squeezing. He was panting. “But it always ends badly. It’s just one long chain of disasters, one after the next, after the next…” And he was afraid. Terribly so. Wanted to drink, and fuck, and watch TV, and pretend he wasn’t a part ofanything.

“Maybe it doesn’t have to this time,” Dante said. “Maybe the three of you, all three Romes working toward a common cause – maybe you can get it right this time.”

“You want me to fight,” Alexei realized with a fresh wave of panic.

“I want the world to survive,” Dante corrected. “There’s a distinction.”

“I don’t–”

Dante gasped. He pitched forward at the waist with a sound like he’d been punched in the stomach. The vision around them misted away into nothing, until they stood in a vast field of white. No ground, no sky. Dante retched, dry-heaving, and gripped the sides of his head, fingertips digging so hard Alexei was afraid he’d claw his own scalp bloody.

“What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?” He put a hand on the back of Dante’s neck, and Dante shuddered.

He choked, and coughed, and wheezed out, “There’s someone – there’s someone else – here.In my head.”

“What?” But Alexei registered movement from the corner of his eye. He turned his head and saw a figure approaching, a man dressed in old roughspun rags, and furs, his arms bare, and pale, his face hidden from view by a deep hood – though hair spilled down his chest: long, wheat-colored tangles, some strands braided, some decorated with beads, and bits of dirty, ivory bone.

The sight of him sent a pulse of dread through Alexei so acute he thought he might vomit.

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