Page 242 of Golden Eagle

“You didn’tchooseto be sick.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that I was.”

“That was – Lex, that’s the result of nobility interbreeding. A lack of understanding of genetics,” Dante said, frowning, getting a bit huffy. “It isn’t yourfault.”

“Small consolation, when he ruined us.”

Dante didn’t argue that point; there were dozens of long-held, deep-seated political issues that had led to that moment they’d witnessed only minutes ago, in the dark forest, but Rasputin had been an overwhelming part of the final descent to disaster. There was no consoling that knowledge away.

The dizziness returned.

His parents, younger now, Mama’s face without the lines and weight of long years of stress, sat at a round, cloth-covered table, a glass ball on a stand at its center. Opposite them, a small, stocky man with a tidy salt-and-pepper beard.

Alexei thought he knew the man, but Dante explained, confirming: “Monsieur Philippe.”

As they watched, Philippe reached into his pocket and withdrew something that he placed into Alexandra’s waiting hand: a bell, small, brass, and tarnished.

“That’s Val’s,” Alexei said, because he knew that now. Not merely a token from a sorcerer, but a token from a legendary vampire: from one of the two immortal sons born of Remus of Rome.

He shivered.

“She gave it to one of her maids at the time of the Revolution,” Dante explained. “For safekeeping; she must have thought she’d get it back, or maybe she knew she never would, but didn’t want the Bolsheviks to have it. She believed it to be enchanted; to have real magic. Which it does, of a sort. And the maid she gave it to was Nikita Baskin’s mother.”

Alexei knew that, also, but it seemed more important, now. Having met Val, seeing the transaction as it had truly happened. It felt…prophetic.

He turned his back on the scene, sinuses burning with tightly-checked tears. “I thought you were going to show me my lineage, but we’ve just been peeking in on my parents.”

Dante blinked. “Quite right.”

The world tilted again.

A cascade of images followed, one after the next, too quick to be distinct, like the faces of playing cards just glimpsed as they were shuffled by expert hands. Alexei wondered if this was one of the glitches Dante had mentioned; if the history was sliding too fast through his hands. He glimpsed his grandfather – the one for whom he was named, another Alexei; as implacable, stern, and robust as Father had been placid, accommodating, and retiring.

It was only a glimpse, though, and then the past kept moving, a film reel on fast forward, until it paused, a moment.

A tall man sat astride a handsome, dun stallion, his saddle green velvet, his uniform that of a lower-ranking officer. Not a general, but merely a captain.

“Peter,” Dante explained. “At war with the Swedes.”

The next scene was of Peter, again, standing in a muddy street, looking proudly over a patch of land that didn’t look like it should have inspired anything like pride. The buildings were of rough-hewn logs, the architecture that of Old Muscovy; they looked temporary, unremarkable, and along a wide, obviously freshly-cleared street, construction was underway of tall, two-story houses with many windows, European in their look; the builders toiled away in the mud, struggling to build on what had originally been a marsh, slowly being filled in with humanity.

It took a moment of staring for Alexei to recognize the city he’d lived nearest as a boy. This was the humble, doubtful beginning of St. Petersburg, the naval power dream of its founder.

“Oh,” he said, some of the tension in his gut melting away. Here, finally, was a vision that didn’t put his heart in his throat. “The Nevsky Prospekt.”

“Yes,” Dante said. “He was strange, violent, overly passionate, and outright dangerous to those who served under him – but there’s no denying Peter was a visionary.”

“The enemy of traditionalists – and anyone who lay in the path of his expansion. Why are you showing me this?”

Dante turned so they faced one another fully, frowning.

“To show–”

“Me that I come from a long line of eccentric, violent empire builders? Yes, I’m painfully aware of the fact. Papa was the least ambitious of all, and yet he’s the one who paid the price for previous generations’ ambitions.”

The frown deepened. “You disapprove of your ancestors, then. I wasn’t aware.”

“I don’t…” He struggled for the words. He’d never been able to make proper sense of his feelings on the matter, indecisive and childish to the last. At moments, he felt savage pride for the Romanovs, for the things they’d accomplished, for the way they’d risen.

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