Page 37 of My Queendom for a Horse

“After we refused them, Mikhail Kurakin told me he’d destroy us. We didn’t worry about it much.” He frowns. “I suppose we should have.”

“Wait, you refused to help them?” I blink. “You said Kurakin was one of the other magical families. If their people were also starving, why didn’t you help them?”

Aleks stares at me.

“Were their people starving?”

“I can’t save the whole world,” he says. “No matter how much magic I have. Trying to do so would only have resulted in me failing my own people.”

“But there were only five magical families. You were helping two of them, and when the others came to ask for help, you what? Sent them packing?”

“Sometimes you have to sacrifice something you care about in order to save what really matters.”

“So that’s what you did? You sacrificed the other two families and all the people they ruled, to save your friends and their people?”

He scowls. “They took revenge on me for that decision. One day, while I was already stretched thin, my magic failed me, and then everything went black. Only a very powerful hex could rob me of my magic and then my consciousness like that.”

“So you have no idea what happened?” I ask. “You could have eaten bad mushrooms or something, and—”

“I didn’t eat anything bad.” His mouth is a flat line. “In all my life, my magic never once failed me. Not until that day, and while I was unconscious, I could also sense their magic—lightning and fire.”

“Then how did you free yourself?”

“I didn’t,” he says. “I simply awoke a year or so ago, trembling, and I heard a loud sound. I was encased in dirt on all sides.”

“You were buried alive?”

“In my equine form. I’m not sure whether it was because of my elemental magic, or whether I was placed underground by those who cursed me, but I was buried.”

“You were some kind of noble—”

“We were called Horse Lords by those who served us,” he says.

Horse Lords? It sounds ridiculous, but it doesn’t feel like the right time to laugh. “Okay.”

“I was captured shortly after I flailed my way free, and then treated like an actual beast.” He sneers. “Then that disgusting human won me in a bet, apparently. I never understood what he was saying until I met you and could suddenly understand him, but I always knew it was vile.”

“You have no idea how they cursed you, or what the terms are?”

“Only that it happened in nineteen seventeen.”

“Wait, wasn’t that the beginning of the Russian Revolution?”

He straightens, his eyes intent. “Something important happened that year? Something you’ve studied and recall more than one hundred years later?”

“I think that’s around when the entire royal family was murdered. The Romanovs, right?”

I’ve never seen anyone look quite as stricken as Aleks looks right now. “Nicholas?” He goes utterly still. “What about Alexei?”

“Is he the sickly one?”

Fury flashes across his face. “Is that what they said about him?”

“Um, look, I’m not trying to upset you.” For a moment, it feels as if time has stopped. For me, this is ancient history, but he sounds like he knew the Czar’s son quite well.

“This must be related,” he says. “I need to locate a reliable source of information and research the details. Surely some things must have been recorded.”

“I mean, I think a lot of it was,” I say. “But we have the internet for that kind of thing now.”

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