nobody ever let an inspiration-piqued isabel near wikipedia and/or jstor
armoured light
pg-13; ~5600.
athermal effects AU: ivan, svetlana, yuri, in the coup of 1762 (in which catherine the great deposes her husband, peter iii)
a/n: SO. this was for vega_ofthe_lyre for the AU commentfic meme, prompted as "kgb three, any imperial court, no length restrictions" and, like the most obvious self-fulfilling prophecy ever-as you can see-it got bonkers out of control in the comment box. i have no justification for this. this is a thing that i wrote and now it is over 5k. i hereby retract my brain as an object of practical use, okay, i just. i give up on me. i do! unedited. I WROTE IT IN A COMMENTBOX. ALL THIS EXISTED IN A COMMENT BOX. i don't even want to think about dividing that up. i also don't want to think about how many gross historical inaccuracies are probably all up on this; oh my god why are all my random giant historical pieces not in my ~srs study periods? i'm sorry. i'm so sorry.
The palace is quiet. Disconcertingly so.
Ivan is used to quiet-the Leib Guard does not speak much; they are the silent medalled columns behind Tsar Piotr's throne, and no one expects them to speak much, not throughout the day. But the barracks are hushed and quiet conversation seems to come strung with barbs.
Ivan holds his tongue. It is a skill he has never needed to practice much: he waits, silent, and listens in spite of himself. The whispers seem loud around him.
"Chin up, polkovnik."
"What's that?"
The man grins at him-not a bayonet carrier, but grinning with all the insolence of a fellow commander.
"It'll be all right. Don't worry so much! You've got your head on straight."
"I haven't seen you before."
"I'm Orlov's man." The man grins, white teeth against darker skin, a lazy shadow tracking along his jaw. His cravat is crooked; it suits him, somehow. "Yuri Pavlovich Volvakov at your service."
"No need for my service."
"Your name, perhaps?"
"Colonel Ivan Konstantinovich Tikhonov-" he represses an at your service; he is head of command and his own, now; at the Tsar's service, no more. Russia's service, that is. That's all that is.
The hallway around them is wide and empty. Yuri crooks an eyebrow, not looking like the name is new information.
"See you around, polkovnik."
"Good day." Ivan salutes him at half-height, watches him go, bemused. A dull ache pulls at the space behind his eyes. He feels exposed, somehow, but consoles himself with how little he has to hide.
In Princess Dashkova's cushy sitting room, Svetlana crosses her ankles beneath her gown, balancing the saucer of tea precariously on her knees, as she listens to the Princess explain her litany of guests.
"I'm entertaining a few of the guardsmen. Alexei said-" Svetlana does not miss the familiarity; she thinks of raising an eyebrow and decides against-"that I should acquaint myself personally with the Leib Guard."
She takes a sip, tasting powder in her mouth before the wash of sugared tea. "Are you holding a ball, Ekaterina Romanovna?"
"Soon, I suspect. Today, no. Tomorrow, no. Soon, very soon, but today, no. Today is for intimate conversation among friends."
"We are to be friends, then." Conscious of the slowness of her movements, the careful grace of her hands, she places the teacup on the table. "Will you enlighten me as to who has earned my friendship even before we've been acquainted?"
"Svetlana Mikhailovna," the princess tuts, and Svetlana casts her eyes down and smiles gently at her damasked lap.
"I'm merely curious, Princess."
"Alexei is sending his monsignor-"
"Oh, Yuri!" she laughs. "Well, of course-"
"And I have invited the Tsar's guardsman, Colonel Tikhonov."
Svetlana smiles. "We start at the top."
"Are we concerned with aught beneath? We shall be courteous to Ivan Konstantinovich-"
"Ivan," she weighs. Glancing up lightly at the princess's face, she speaks with a simmer of delicate cruelty, as she knows the princess enjoys. "How novel. Not born into Fontanka company, then. Bred into it? Can one really say 'bred' in such circumstances?"
The princess laughs and casts her an approving glance. "You have a nose for breeding that Tsarevna Ekaterina herself would appreciate. And shall, soon enough, I suppose."
I have learned it, Svetlana thinks. I was nothing before this tutelage-I could have been a Masha matched to this Ivan, presumption sewn up into my name.
She is lucky; the least she can do is be good-good at what the princess wishes her to be, the things she will not say. Feminine barbs and feminine savvy and beneath it all, an iron heart. There is no malice in her soul, not for this Ivan, not for any of the world's Ivans, not even for the temporary Tsar. It is iron hearts within damasked breasts that will win this war. The princess has taught her that much.
Yuri sprawls comfortably in the princess's parlor, tucking himself into the cushy chair in the corner. The princess ignores him, having learned ease in his company-he does not require conversation, not from most people.
He makes Svetlana laugh. She laughs easily, invitingly-with everyone, he's noticed, and convincingly. He's found that she laughs with him and means it, though. He tells her the truth, and that makes her laugh most of all.
She is agitated today, restless in her step even as she prettily walks the length of the room. "We've more company coming," she tells him; he resists saying I know. "Apparently bayonets serve as keys as well as weapons, when diplomacy is concerned. We're having a staff officer to tea."
"Be nice."
"Am I ever less?"
"You're always nice, Sveta, but don't hate him. The polkovnik's all right."
She glances at him, the rapid spark of her thoughts plain to him beneath her languid lids. "You've gauged him?"
Yuri opens his arms wide. "Take his bayonet and shove it through this heart of mine if I'm wrong."
"Such surety. Operatic surety."
"I'm not using it for anything else." He shrugs, smiling, and she laughs with small teeth bright and unhidden in her mouth, and she does not ask how he has gauged. She believes it's a talent that he has cultivated; she understands the mechanics, the necessity, of its ease and silence better than anyone else.
He values female companionship. They believe in what he does; the cleverer they are, the less unnerved.
He makes himself the best company possible, tries as best he can to mask his restive nerves with charm, and he is valuable.
(Ostrov had called him saint, once. After one party, when he had known at once which officers to trust and which officers to freeze, which Germans to bribe and which Frenchmen to tactfully suggest trips abroad-Saint Yuri Pavlovich of the Winter Palace, the big man had said, clapping a hand to his shoulder. Yuri had shrugged and smiled and behind his back he ground a fist against the crook of his arm-no, he had thought, no, no-
He has learned to accept compliments with good grace, knowing, with a braced throat, the alternative.)
The officer of the guard is stiff in the parlor, all stark lines and bright medals in the flora and silk of the Princess's décor. Sveta watches him, amused in spite of herself, trailing a finger around the eggshell-thin rim of her china teacup. He has foregone weaponry-at no little cost, she imagines-yet still he stands at attention, the sharp forged line of his shoulders seemingly ironed into his blazer, the fixity of his body limned in sashes and medals. He wears them easily, she thinks; it is himself that he wears with difficulty. "Sit," she smiles.
Yuri raises a hand, cocking a few fingers in something like a salute. "Good to see you again, polkovnik."
The guardsman does a fairly good job of not letting onto his discomfiture, and Yuri feels vaguely guilty-but not enough; it's better to be familiar, he thinks, and the guardsman makes for reassuring company, clever but linear, surprisingly frank in the soul. They could become familiar, he thinks, watching him-Ivan Konstantinovich, he thinks, relinquishing the military title; he's rummaged around in the man's head enough that he's earned rights to his name-sit carefully next to Sveta, who looks around him over at Yuri. She leans forward, almost effortlessly close to Ivan Konstantinovich; as if oblivious, and he follows her gaze politely, as if he is not swallowing beneath his high collar.
"Yurochka," she scolds, both charming and irritating at once, "you didn't tell me you knew our guest."
"You left our guest as a mystery to me."
"Svetlana," the princess chides without really chiding, "have you been speaking dramatics to Yuri Pavlovich again?"
"I, Ekaterina Romanovna?"
"No reason to tell him much." Ivan Konstantinovich clears his throat. "We're recent acquaintances."
"It's a season of friendship," Sveta says, smiling. "How shall we celebrate these lovely new ties?"
"A bit of music will do." The princess smiles complacently, looking at Yuri for only the briefest second. "Play the Ristori piece, Sveta, devushka, the tsarevna gave me a copy of the libretto herself."
Svetlana tilts her head at Ivan Konstantinovich. "Be a friend, Officer Tikhonov, and turn the pages for me?"
"Of course," he complies, and offers her his elbow.
As they make their way to the piano in the second room, the princess leans into Yuri. "You like him? I'm glad to know it. I've met him in company, and Alexei Grigorievich more often than I, and we all say he seems an awfully hard man to get the measure of."
"On the contrary," Yuri says, "he means everything he says."
"You're acquainted with the tsarevna?"
She casts him a glance, quirking an eyebrow. "You noticed."
"No, I mean-are you?"
"I've met, kissed her hand, raised my glass to her. We're not friends yet, no more than any citizen of the Winter Palace is." Her eyes are still on him, her hand tight on the crook of his elbow. "You must know the tsar. Truly know."
"In a manner of speaking."
"That's enough." She smiles, teasing, closemouthed. "You speak."
That isn't it, he thinks. The Lieb Guard is predicated on silence, on necessity-to guard the country, guard the throne; to guard the throne, guard the man within it. Tsar Piotr is a small man with a weak chin, light eyes; it is easy enough not to see him even when he is in the room, to filter in his commands without hearing his voice. Nowadays, easier than ever.
"I would not call him friends."
"Then we are of a kind." She seats herself at the piano bench. "How lonely those terms are."
"Not if we're of a kind," he points out, thinking only in pragmatism, but she looks up at him as if she's suppressing a laugh and he shakes his head. "Certainly not if Princess Dashkova is going to treat all the Tsar's officers to tea."
"This won't be your last time here."
"She's magnanimous."
"She's striving towards the elevation of the soul, in her own way. Much as the Tsarevna is. Lively minds require lively company." She tests a key on the piano-it is tuned to perfection. "Do you read much philosophy, Officer Tikhonov?"
The question takes him aback; he thinks of dog-eared pages in his desk, of his punctilious French and German delineated by the idealists of the West. "I do read, Svetlana Mikhailovna. Whose?"
"The tsarevna is a humanist," she says, "and all the tsarevna's women, all those who surround her drink in the ideals she espouses with every glass of wine raised in her name. We live on the brink of an exalted world, Ivan Konstantinovich-don't you think?"
Lingering unspoken: the ghost of the small man with the weak chin.
"Exalted." He weighs the word in his mouth. "So-not Hobbes, then, I suppose."
She laughs at that, truly laughs, gripping the edge of the piano and breathing deep into the air between them. "No," she says, slowly gathering herself, "not these days-she likes some of his doctrines, she likes absolutism, but he's not modern enough. No, it is to be John Locke's doctrine of the world's hopeful human heart."
"Much nicer," he says, looking fixedly at her face, refusing to scry below for her heart.
"Isn't it?" She rests lightly in the space between piano and bench, her dress an expanse of shining blue swallowing the space, bare neck curving as she simply looks up at him for an idle, silent moment. "That is the tsarevna's."
"She is the one who upholds such-fluency of thought within the palace. I think," he says carefully.
They sit, silent, watchful with each other, her fingers tracing along the ivory and ebony as through water. "Sit," she finally says. "The aria the Princess likes best is on the fifteenth page."
"Does she borrow her taste from the tsarevna?"
"She borrows everything from the tsarevna."
He has been rude, and she is still smiling, stretching her bare arms and hands above the keys. Almost to herself, she murmurs, "Yurochka has good taste in friends."
But we're not friends, he thinks, still baffled at the heart of it, but Svetlana Mikhailovna tips her chin at the papers and he settles his hands between them; he complies.
He understands the politics before they need to tell him. He doesn't have to be uncanny for that-he doesn't have to be Yuri Pavlovich.
He understands what he is to be asked.
It is at dinner with the princess and Orlov both, a full month later, in Orlov's warm golden dining-room surrounded by the princess and Orlov's warm and golden chosen company, when their words start to pull into something exact. Even then, they do not speak to him of the tsar. That is, as ever, the heart of it: they speak of the tsarevna, of philosophy and hypotheticals and sunrise on the Winter Palace; the princess drinks two glasses of Azeri wine, not French, served that evening to make a wordless point, and starts to inflect harder and harder every time she says Motherland. The party falls near silent around her; as she speaks of Mother Russia, she switches to French to more poetically articulate the depths of her feeling. When she slips into English turns of phrase Alexei Grigorievich gives her a warning look, and she pulls back; her words push and pull with heartfelt poetry, but the look in her eyes is even, not beseeching at all. It is a colonel's speech.
"You understand," she says in the end. "You understand."
Sveta watches him, as she always does. Later, she accepts his offer to play a game of chess, idling over her row of pawns. Neither of them is an intrinsically aggressive player; their pieces inch forward in formation as she speaks.
"My mother was a Frenchwoman, you know," she says, as if in confession, and he says nothing: they had spoken of the Motherland but this is not a weapon, not when the court speaks more French than Russian among its own (it's not Prussian; the tsar's more frequent mentions of Frederick II are beginning to make his back teeth itch. Have some bloody judgment, he thinks, and thinks of the Polish partition, of the near-French Russian court's subtle recoil at the drop of a Germanic terms, think like a country, not like a man-but he is a man, and little, smaller day by day).
Sveta clears her throat. "Your move."
He jumps a knight over a string of pawns and watches her castle in turn, protecting her queen. "As I said. The Princess has assured me-well, there's no assurance needed, I have the tsarevna's goodwill as long as I have hers, and she has promised me a place in her heart forever. But I remember my mother. Do you yours?"
Barely, he thinks, with a nod nevertheless. "A Russian."
"I supposed as much." She smiles, pushing her queen into a diagonal. "You have the look of a favored son. Your mother stops mattering once you're weaned, but your motherland-"
"I heard the princess."
"She's right, though, isn't she? You love her-" the soft inflection on a nonhuman syllable, and Sveta's forefinger tracing the queen's rounded crown, pressing gently down- "more than anyone."
It sounds right.
(More than any ruler, he thinks, is the question, and the answer earns a nod.)
He takes his leave before the game is won by either of them, kissing her hand before he leaves the room. Her fingers brush imperceptibly along his cheek.
The next day, he corners Yuri Pavlovich on the walk outside the palace, boots echoing on the stone path between the trees. "Listen to me," he begins, and Yuri shakes his head.
"No, polkovnik-" he says the military title with old affection now, and Ivan shakes his head as if he's been underwater, Yuri's voice like water in his ears. "Don't worry. I know there's a lot of talk of cutting power off at the head, but they won't make you cut off any heads of state-"
"No, no, no." Ivan shushes him, angry and prickling with nerves. "It isn't about that at all. And be quiet, would you-"
Yuri claps a hand over his mouth, turning the gesture's absurdity into a rueful rub of the chin. "I'm listening."
Ivan weighs his words, and then finds them coming out unweighed-there's no good way to say it, no practical way, no clever way. "You know too much," he says, finally, bluntly, "and you know it too well. I don't understand how. You're not a sneak-you just show up and know. I don't understand it," he says again. "I don't."
Yuri's typically ruddy face leaches of blood. "What's there to understand, Ivan Konstantinovich?"
Nothing, nothing Ivan can put into words.
He doesn't remember his mother very well, he does not think of the village of his birth, but he remembers superstition. (They all do, he thinks, everyone in Russia, everyone in the gloss and powder of the court, them especially: they who catalogue their country know its cherished monsters best of all, all the more acutely for their unwillingness to speak of them. Monsters and saints, he thinks, and magic thick and maddening in every particle of soil.)
"Do you believe in magic, then?" Yuri says with a very quiet laugh, a rise and fall of his shoulders, and Ivan looks him square in the eye.
"No." He lies with a steady face, offering the lie up like a gift. "Of course not."
The color of Yuri's face normalizes. He claps Ivan on the shoulder, hard, hand tight and lingering on his arm. It is not a threat. Ivan leans into it.
"You're a good man," Yuri says.
Ivan nods, wordless. "I'm needed back inside," he says and watches him walk along the path. His throat is tight; when Yuri is out of sight, he steps off the path and leans hard against the nearest tree, inhaling until his heart slows.
He is not afraid. Not for himself, not even for his country. He will not confess it, then, not to anyone, not least for the man whom he is somehow, suddenly fearing for. Emotion for emotion's sake, he thinks, angry with the string-tightness pulling at his chest; emotion that does not brook conversation.
The tsar is to leave for Oranienbaum at the beginning of July.
Ivan should have been the first to know about this; instead he recounts it carefully over tea with the Princess and Sveta and Yuri and is met with nods.
The tsarevna, he thinks; the palace runs with tight, confident, burnished cogs around her, and that reassures him. No cutting off heads, Yuri had said, and had touched his shoulder and glanced very pointedly at the bayonet always within reach, and this was consoling. Sveta's knee shifts against his leg on the settee as she moves in to pluck a berry from a dish, and this is more consoling than the rest.
He is grounded by them; the memory of them anchors him when he is alone with his thoughts: the flash of Yuri's grin, the curve of Sveta's arm, the deliberate looks and the choices of their hands, and he is calm. He thinks of Russia, borne on their backs. He thinks of Locke, dog-eared, in his hands and Sveta's and the tsarevna's. He thinks of Russia, mothered.
Tsar Piotr makes preparations for his trip, and calls in for a military escort the morning he leaves. He calls for the head of the palace body; it is Ivan who is sent for.
Piotr is finishing his dress when he arrives, securing his wig and slipping into his coat.
The room is vast, its ceiling taller than three men's reach, and still it feels confining. Ivan bows and feels the room constricting, forcing the bow despite its incongruity in his heart. When he rises, Ivan hands him a set of letters, the wordless mechanics of his body fulfilling their military duty. Piotr makes as if to open it, slim fingers fumbling along the seal, and Ivan reaches out, stopping his hands.
The man before him looks up, astonished.
"No, sir," Ivan says. "Not now-not until you're in the coach and out of sight of the palace. You may want to wait until you've arrived at Oranienbaum. It all depends on you, sir-but not now."
Piotr's face is pale with shock. "Remove your hand, Colonel Tikhonov."
Ivan removes his hand deliberately, sweeping his arm stiffly up against his body. "Do you understand?" he forces himself to ask.
"I understand nothing about this breach of protocol-"
There is a music to the precision of bayonetry; under his hands, the rifle swings with all the fluidity of a timed dance, with delicacy achingly pure, the point lands at the crook of the tsar's, the man's, collarbone. Beneath the metal tip lies the hollow of neck and shoulder, armorless flesh and vein. It is soft, even through the press of rich fabric; it indents almost imperceptibly. No further. He balances the gun in his hands. "Do you understand?"
"Ah," says the man who was tsar.
"You will not be returning to the Winter Palace."
"Ah," he says again, soft as a breath. His shoulders hunch, hollowing him in on himself. "Ah, yes."
Thank you, Ivan thinks, absurdly. No tsar, this man, only a man, and for one moment of absurd clarity he thinks of falling to his knees and kissing the man's hands-for being a man with a weak heart and a soft body, whose departure shall be no one's betrayal at all. Instead, he straightens his shoulders and straightens the gun, elevating it once more against the line of his body.
"Go to Ropsha."
"And live?"
"Yes," Ivan says, face unmoving and heart exulting, "live. There's life waiting for you there."
The man who was tsar smiles. The letters go into his pocket: one political and terse, Ivan knows, one from his mistress, whose name he has not yet learned but who he is assured is waiting and warm in Ropsha. Ivan walks behind him the length of the palace halls, out to the court and the crowd, solemn and proud as Piotr waves his goodbye.
When the Lieb Guard officially turns coat, Yuri finds Ivan at the door to the throne room, standing command himself.
"We are holding the chair for the tsaritsa," he says. His face is drawn in long, sharp lines, military-precise and unreadable, but he gives Yuri a look of pure, clear happiness. "And well done we're doing, too."
He is thinking of Ropsha, Yuri cannot help but catalogue; in spite of his inclinations, he pushes further, and he finds Ivan's thoughts lit, Locke-bright, with the belief that he is doing right, that the country has shaped itself and pushed his hand and-
bloodless, he thinks, it was bloodless, and he recoils.
"What is it, Yura?" Ivan asks, face humanizing for a moment, and Yuri, who has spoken with Alexei Grigorievich that day, who has ushered Ekaterina herself into and out of his chambers, despairs.
"Nothing." He shakes his head. "Nothing-I'm happy as you are."
"You've killed before," he says later, over vodka.
"Of course." Ivan stretches his shoulders, mouth thinning. He bites into a pickled onion, swallowing a shot of vodka in its wake. "No other way."
"How d'you mean?"
"Perhaps you've noticed the absence of Tikhonovs in the palace, Yura."
A title not inherited or bought, Yuri thinks. Won.
"That's the good part-the meat of it. Once you've seen what blades and bullets do to a man-" Another bite, another swallow-"you're glad when that's reprieved."
"Ivan." He reaches across the table. Ivan's loosened his collar, his blazer; Yuri's hand latches onto the fold of fabric, pulling him in. "Listen to me."
"Christ." Ivan looks into his face, exhales hard. "Christ and his saints-it's not a reprieve, is it?"
Yuri's fingers loosen.
"No."
Neither man moves away.
"Does Sveta know?" Ivan asks, finally, and Yuri laughs.
"Sveta," he says, her name warming his throat, and he doesn't have to push into Ivan's thoughts to know what he's thinking, "probably better than anyone."
"Probably?" It is Ivan's turn to laugh, his turn again to swallow a shot, this time without a bite before. "Never knew you to rely on probability before."
It feels to Svetlana as if she's never lived in a Russia that was not ruled by a tsaritsa; it feels, when she looks back, as if she has lived a life meant to rewrite history in its wake, smoothing its palimpsests under the footsteps of Ekaterinas. She does not remember her family and she does not remember a tsar. She has been toasting to the tsaritsa forever, she thinks, and it is nearly true.
"Take me to Peterhof," she says the day after the coronation, in the princess's rooms. Her voice is casual and languid as smoke; make no fuss, she has been telling herself for days. Her limbs stretch into the contours of the princess's chairs, willed into picturesque summer calm. "We ought to be summering in the country; the palace is stifling this time of year."
The princess laughs at her. "I'm not leaving the tsaritsa. Not now."
"Then," Svetlana continues-she knows the Ekaterinas, she thinks, knows the Princess most of all, more perhaps now than the Princess realizes-"give me an escort and send me to the dacha in Peterhof on my own. The household's active enough; they'll take guests. Any guests."
The princess's gaze cools. "You've been talking to Yuri."
"And you've been talking to Alexei Grigorievich."
"You think he does anything on his own?"
"No." Svetlana sits up. "That's exactly what I mean. If his man is coming to see me at Peterhof-"
"There is no talk of Ropsha."
"No one talks of Ropsha." Svetlana stares at the princess, daring her to say otherwise. "There is no one to talk of there."
"Are you offering," the princess asks, amused, "an alibi?"
"There is nobody can blame me for Russia's geography," Svetlana says, shrugging her bare shoulders.
The princess's face is writ by nature in impenetrable elegance, but when she smiles in earnest, Svetlana thinks with glorious satisfaction, how it glows.
They are three together in Orlov's coach, Yuri ahead and commanding the driver, Ivan by her side. The horses are Orlov's best, but still it insists on jostling its way along the country roads, and Svetlana finds herself physically conscious of the line of Ivan next to her.
He is quiet.
"Yuri," he says, as they pass through a hushed sweep of fields. Workers are tilling their way through the loam; Svetlana leans tactfully away, peering through the line of the curtains. The fields are writ in long lines of green and gold. Ivan's voice is tense, words jerking in his throat.
"I need to get in."
"They'll let you in."
"And remember."
"Yes."
"Is there-" he hesitates-"a cleaner way?"
"Like what?"
"Not remembering."
"Or not seeing. Ah."
"Is there?"
"I'll see what I can do."
"So it is a weapon." Svetlana closes the curtains and leans back against the corner of the coach. "I'd wondered."
"You knew?"
"Of course." She leans in, smiling at Yurochka. "I'm good with people. What you are-it's more than good. It's uncanny."
"Are you calling me magic, Sveta?" he teases-Ivan inhales sharply next to her-and she reaches out, pressing a hand to his knee.
"Shall I look for a feather tucked into your hat for safekeeping? Or better yet, a death's-bargain trapped in a hen's egg in your pocket?" The silence spreads between them, thick as butter. She pats his knee, grinning lopsidedly, and it breaks-he laughs, shaking his dark curls, unpowdered and unwigged in the carriage. "I don't think you've sold your soul, Yuri. I think you're a blessing."
Two of his fingers tap her wrist. "No, Sveta," he says, "I think this carriage is blessed with your gracious presence."
"Shut up." Her voice tartens as she takes back her hand, smoothing it back against the light fabric layers of her summer dress, pale green under her pale hands. "Shut up and weaponize that mind of yours," she says, so angry-jesting that for a moment both men forget that it is not a jest at all.
He isn't tsar, Ivan thinks when the carriage stops at the imperial estate's soft lawn. As he makes his way through the columns and colonnades, Yuri's hand on his back-
is this necessary, he thinks, rigorously untwitchy, and Yuri flicks him lightly on the back of his head (and he allows himself to be comforted, if wordlessly, by the continual press of Yuri's palm, the long second shadow at his side and what it means)-
He isn't tsar, Ivan reminds himself as they walk through the marble halls, finding their way to damasked walls and plush carpets even through the winding back doorways, as they walk to the heart of the estate.
He isn't Russia, Ivan remembers as the bayonet slashes across Piotr's throat.
They don't talk. Yuri grips his arm on the way out, but he is steady, steady and precise; he is trained, after all, and it is nothing but a learned skill, this.
They track two shadows and no footsteps; they leave no dirt and little blood. Not much needed to be spilt. He is good at his job.
Ivan is back first.
He had been the first to leave-if by seconds; Yuri had looked back, though, and she had felt like a child. I want to go, she had thought petulantly, not really wanting at all, and had felt the tug between her brows, known the thought to be audible. "Go," she'd said tartly, "don't pry."
He'd smacked himself on the forehead, a brief breaker of the solemnity, and he'd looked genuinely abashed. "I'm sorry." He'd flicked an eyebrow at her skirts. "You're a bit conspicuous as it is, you know."
"Go."
And it had been, in its own way, a compliment, a mark of technique every bit as potentially weaponized as his mind, as Ivan's-
Ivan stands before her, lowering his head as he sits. "Well?" she asks, moving in, and he spreads his hands. It is a gesture of acquiescence. His fingertips are red. Her eyes travel to the edge of the blade that tips his rifle and it is red, edged but not dripping. Clean, she thinks absurdly, and pulls his hands into her lap.
"You'll ruin your dress," he says mildly.
"No, I've a handkerchief-"
"Sveta."
"Somewhere."
She gives up. Her palms sink back against his. As her fingers lace lightly through his, she feels his lingering in the trace air above her skin, for a few moments before she pulls her fingers tight along his skin. "It's nothing," she says, "it'll rub away. It's nothing much."
His eyes drift, for a moment, shut.
"Vive la Reine Catherine?" she prompts, and his eyes flash open.
"It wasn't a war," he finally says. "There's that."
She unlaces her fingers from his, stroking lightly over the backs of his knuckles before she raises her hand to rest along the long line of his cheek. "Where's Yuri?" she asks, and her voice is very quiet, her breath falling into the small shared wealth of air between them.
"He sent me ahead. Said he'd do a circuit of the grounds, see if anything else needed to be-clouded, I think he said." A slight furrow shapes the space between Ivan's brows. "He's making it up as he goes along."
"He's good." She tilts her head. "Was that necessary? His extra time?"
"He was smiling when he sent me back."
"Was he," she murmurs, "how inappropriate," and her hand tightens on the hair at the base of his neck and his mouth is on hers.
She does not think of the tsarevna's lovers at the palace or the mistress likely still unknowing what has passed in the belly of the imperial estate; she thinks of the faint steel scent lingering on their skin and the ruddy wet fingerprints and warm dry palms pressing into the exposed curve of her shoulders, she thinks of Ivan's voice catching untempered in the back of his throat, she thinks of the thousand words she knows about worlds lit and living with sweepingly human hope, she thinks momentarily of nothing at all.
When Yuri returns, they are apart and she is daubing at the back of her neck with a handkerchief she shall later have to burn.
Her head is clear; he knows better. He knows, too, all the same, and he bites an amused expression back into his mouth.
"Onward," he turns around and calls out to the driver.
She dwells on what she had told the princess before they left: I am the tsarevna's to command, she had said, meaning then the tsarevna most of all, now considering the command-if this is what it is to be commanded, if living in the country's name must always mean blood. Judicious blood, she thinks: not a war. Just enough blood to call a birth, she thinks: mothering on national terms.
Yuri flashes her a hard-earned smile and Ivan's hand lies at her side, masked by the opulent folds of her skirt. They are going to Peterhof and their cares shall be burned away by the sun; they shall return to the palace fresh from the land and unvarnished, returning to something expected to be new.
pg-13; ~5600.
athermal effects AU: ivan, svetlana, yuri, in the coup of 1762 (in which catherine the great deposes her husband, peter iii)
a/n: SO. this was for vega_ofthe_lyre for the AU commentfic meme, prompted as "kgb three, any imperial court, no length restrictions" and, like the most obvious self-fulfilling prophecy ever-as you can see-it got bonkers out of control in the comment box. i have no justification for this. this is a thing that i wrote and now it is over 5k. i hereby retract my brain as an object of practical use, okay, i just. i give up on me. i do! unedited. I WROTE IT IN A COMMENTBOX. ALL THIS EXISTED IN A COMMENT BOX. i don't even want to think about dividing that up. i also don't want to think about how many gross historical inaccuracies are probably all up on this; oh my god why are all my random giant historical pieces not in my ~srs study periods? i'm sorry. i'm so sorry.
The palace is quiet. Disconcertingly so.
Ivan is used to quiet-the Leib Guard does not speak much; they are the silent medalled columns behind Tsar Piotr's throne, and no one expects them to speak much, not throughout the day. But the barracks are hushed and quiet conversation seems to come strung with barbs.
Ivan holds his tongue. It is a skill he has never needed to practice much: he waits, silent, and listens in spite of himself. The whispers seem loud around him.
"Chin up, polkovnik."
"What's that?"
The man grins at him-not a bayonet carrier, but grinning with all the insolence of a fellow commander.
"It'll be all right. Don't worry so much! You've got your head on straight."
"I haven't seen you before."
"I'm Orlov's man." The man grins, white teeth against darker skin, a lazy shadow tracking along his jaw. His cravat is crooked; it suits him, somehow. "Yuri Pavlovich Volvakov at your service."
"No need for my service."
"Your name, perhaps?"
"Colonel Ivan Konstantinovich Tikhonov-" he represses an at your service; he is head of command and his own, now; at the Tsar's service, no more. Russia's service, that is. That's all that is.
The hallway around them is wide and empty. Yuri crooks an eyebrow, not looking like the name is new information.
"See you around, polkovnik."
"Good day." Ivan salutes him at half-height, watches him go, bemused. A dull ache pulls at the space behind his eyes. He feels exposed, somehow, but consoles himself with how little he has to hide.
In Princess Dashkova's cushy sitting room, Svetlana crosses her ankles beneath her gown, balancing the saucer of tea precariously on her knees, as she listens to the Princess explain her litany of guests.
"I'm entertaining a few of the guardsmen. Alexei said-" Svetlana does not miss the familiarity; she thinks of raising an eyebrow and decides against-"that I should acquaint myself personally with the Leib Guard."
She takes a sip, tasting powder in her mouth before the wash of sugared tea. "Are you holding a ball, Ekaterina Romanovna?"
"Soon, I suspect. Today, no. Tomorrow, no. Soon, very soon, but today, no. Today is for intimate conversation among friends."
"We are to be friends, then." Conscious of the slowness of her movements, the careful grace of her hands, she places the teacup on the table. "Will you enlighten me as to who has earned my friendship even before we've been acquainted?"
"Svetlana Mikhailovna," the princess tuts, and Svetlana casts her eyes down and smiles gently at her damasked lap.
"I'm merely curious, Princess."
"Alexei is sending his monsignor-"
"Oh, Yuri!" she laughs. "Well, of course-"
"And I have invited the Tsar's guardsman, Colonel Tikhonov."
Svetlana smiles. "We start at the top."
"Are we concerned with aught beneath? We shall be courteous to Ivan Konstantinovich-"
"Ivan," she weighs. Glancing up lightly at the princess's face, she speaks with a simmer of delicate cruelty, as she knows the princess enjoys. "How novel. Not born into Fontanka company, then. Bred into it? Can one really say 'bred' in such circumstances?"
The princess laughs and casts her an approving glance. "You have a nose for breeding that Tsarevna Ekaterina herself would appreciate. And shall, soon enough, I suppose."
I have learned it, Svetlana thinks. I was nothing before this tutelage-I could have been a Masha matched to this Ivan, presumption sewn up into my name.
She is lucky; the least she can do is be good-good at what the princess wishes her to be, the things she will not say. Feminine barbs and feminine savvy and beneath it all, an iron heart. There is no malice in her soul, not for this Ivan, not for any of the world's Ivans, not even for the temporary Tsar. It is iron hearts within damasked breasts that will win this war. The princess has taught her that much.
Yuri sprawls comfortably in the princess's parlor, tucking himself into the cushy chair in the corner. The princess ignores him, having learned ease in his company-he does not require conversation, not from most people.
He makes Svetlana laugh. She laughs easily, invitingly-with everyone, he's noticed, and convincingly. He's found that she laughs with him and means it, though. He tells her the truth, and that makes her laugh most of all.
She is agitated today, restless in her step even as she prettily walks the length of the room. "We've more company coming," she tells him; he resists saying I know. "Apparently bayonets serve as keys as well as weapons, when diplomacy is concerned. We're having a staff officer to tea."
"Be nice."
"Am I ever less?"
"You're always nice, Sveta, but don't hate him. The polkovnik's all right."
She glances at him, the rapid spark of her thoughts plain to him beneath her languid lids. "You've gauged him?"
Yuri opens his arms wide. "Take his bayonet and shove it through this heart of mine if I'm wrong."
"Such surety. Operatic surety."
"I'm not using it for anything else." He shrugs, smiling, and she laughs with small teeth bright and unhidden in her mouth, and she does not ask how he has gauged. She believes it's a talent that he has cultivated; she understands the mechanics, the necessity, of its ease and silence better than anyone else.
He values female companionship. They believe in what he does; the cleverer they are, the less unnerved.
He makes himself the best company possible, tries as best he can to mask his restive nerves with charm, and he is valuable.
(Ostrov had called him saint, once. After one party, when he had known at once which officers to trust and which officers to freeze, which Germans to bribe and which Frenchmen to tactfully suggest trips abroad-Saint Yuri Pavlovich of the Winter Palace, the big man had said, clapping a hand to his shoulder. Yuri had shrugged and smiled and behind his back he ground a fist against the crook of his arm-no, he had thought, no, no-
He has learned to accept compliments with good grace, knowing, with a braced throat, the alternative.)
The officer of the guard is stiff in the parlor, all stark lines and bright medals in the flora and silk of the Princess's décor. Sveta watches him, amused in spite of herself, trailing a finger around the eggshell-thin rim of her china teacup. He has foregone weaponry-at no little cost, she imagines-yet still he stands at attention, the sharp forged line of his shoulders seemingly ironed into his blazer, the fixity of his body limned in sashes and medals. He wears them easily, she thinks; it is himself that he wears with difficulty. "Sit," she smiles.
Yuri raises a hand, cocking a few fingers in something like a salute. "Good to see you again, polkovnik."
The guardsman does a fairly good job of not letting onto his discomfiture, and Yuri feels vaguely guilty-but not enough; it's better to be familiar, he thinks, and the guardsman makes for reassuring company, clever but linear, surprisingly frank in the soul. They could become familiar, he thinks, watching him-Ivan Konstantinovich, he thinks, relinquishing the military title; he's rummaged around in the man's head enough that he's earned rights to his name-sit carefully next to Sveta, who looks around him over at Yuri. She leans forward, almost effortlessly close to Ivan Konstantinovich; as if oblivious, and he follows her gaze politely, as if he is not swallowing beneath his high collar.
"Yurochka," she scolds, both charming and irritating at once, "you didn't tell me you knew our guest."
"You left our guest as a mystery to me."
"Svetlana," the princess chides without really chiding, "have you been speaking dramatics to Yuri Pavlovich again?"
"I, Ekaterina Romanovna?"
"No reason to tell him much." Ivan Konstantinovich clears his throat. "We're recent acquaintances."
"It's a season of friendship," Sveta says, smiling. "How shall we celebrate these lovely new ties?"
"A bit of music will do." The princess smiles complacently, looking at Yuri for only the briefest second. "Play the Ristori piece, Sveta, devushka, the tsarevna gave me a copy of the libretto herself."
Svetlana tilts her head at Ivan Konstantinovich. "Be a friend, Officer Tikhonov, and turn the pages for me?"
"Of course," he complies, and offers her his elbow.
As they make their way to the piano in the second room, the princess leans into Yuri. "You like him? I'm glad to know it. I've met him in company, and Alexei Grigorievich more often than I, and we all say he seems an awfully hard man to get the measure of."
"On the contrary," Yuri says, "he means everything he says."
"You're acquainted with the tsarevna?"
She casts him a glance, quirking an eyebrow. "You noticed."
"No, I mean-are you?"
"I've met, kissed her hand, raised my glass to her. We're not friends yet, no more than any citizen of the Winter Palace is." Her eyes are still on him, her hand tight on the crook of his elbow. "You must know the tsar. Truly know."
"In a manner of speaking."
"That's enough." She smiles, teasing, closemouthed. "You speak."
That isn't it, he thinks. The Lieb Guard is predicated on silence, on necessity-to guard the country, guard the throne; to guard the throne, guard the man within it. Tsar Piotr is a small man with a weak chin, light eyes; it is easy enough not to see him even when he is in the room, to filter in his commands without hearing his voice. Nowadays, easier than ever.
"I would not call him friends."
"Then we are of a kind." She seats herself at the piano bench. "How lonely those terms are."
"Not if we're of a kind," he points out, thinking only in pragmatism, but she looks up at him as if she's suppressing a laugh and he shakes his head. "Certainly not if Princess Dashkova is going to treat all the Tsar's officers to tea."
"This won't be your last time here."
"She's magnanimous."
"She's striving towards the elevation of the soul, in her own way. Much as the Tsarevna is. Lively minds require lively company." She tests a key on the piano-it is tuned to perfection. "Do you read much philosophy, Officer Tikhonov?"
The question takes him aback; he thinks of dog-eared pages in his desk, of his punctilious French and German delineated by the idealists of the West. "I do read, Svetlana Mikhailovna. Whose?"
"The tsarevna is a humanist," she says, "and all the tsarevna's women, all those who surround her drink in the ideals she espouses with every glass of wine raised in her name. We live on the brink of an exalted world, Ivan Konstantinovich-don't you think?"
Lingering unspoken: the ghost of the small man with the weak chin.
"Exalted." He weighs the word in his mouth. "So-not Hobbes, then, I suppose."
She laughs at that, truly laughs, gripping the edge of the piano and breathing deep into the air between them. "No," she says, slowly gathering herself, "not these days-she likes some of his doctrines, she likes absolutism, but he's not modern enough. No, it is to be John Locke's doctrine of the world's hopeful human heart."
"Much nicer," he says, looking fixedly at her face, refusing to scry below for her heart.
"Isn't it?" She rests lightly in the space between piano and bench, her dress an expanse of shining blue swallowing the space, bare neck curving as she simply looks up at him for an idle, silent moment. "That is the tsarevna's."
"She is the one who upholds such-fluency of thought within the palace. I think," he says carefully.
They sit, silent, watchful with each other, her fingers tracing along the ivory and ebony as through water. "Sit," she finally says. "The aria the Princess likes best is on the fifteenth page."
"Does she borrow her taste from the tsarevna?"
"She borrows everything from the tsarevna."
He has been rude, and she is still smiling, stretching her bare arms and hands above the keys. Almost to herself, she murmurs, "Yurochka has good taste in friends."
But we're not friends, he thinks, still baffled at the heart of it, but Svetlana Mikhailovna tips her chin at the papers and he settles his hands between them; he complies.
He understands the politics before they need to tell him. He doesn't have to be uncanny for that-he doesn't have to be Yuri Pavlovich.
He understands what he is to be asked.
It is at dinner with the princess and Orlov both, a full month later, in Orlov's warm golden dining-room surrounded by the princess and Orlov's warm and golden chosen company, when their words start to pull into something exact. Even then, they do not speak to him of the tsar. That is, as ever, the heart of it: they speak of the tsarevna, of philosophy and hypotheticals and sunrise on the Winter Palace; the princess drinks two glasses of Azeri wine, not French, served that evening to make a wordless point, and starts to inflect harder and harder every time she says Motherland. The party falls near silent around her; as she speaks of Mother Russia, she switches to French to more poetically articulate the depths of her feeling. When she slips into English turns of phrase Alexei Grigorievich gives her a warning look, and she pulls back; her words push and pull with heartfelt poetry, but the look in her eyes is even, not beseeching at all. It is a colonel's speech.
"You understand," she says in the end. "You understand."
Sveta watches him, as she always does. Later, she accepts his offer to play a game of chess, idling over her row of pawns. Neither of them is an intrinsically aggressive player; their pieces inch forward in formation as she speaks.
"My mother was a Frenchwoman, you know," she says, as if in confession, and he says nothing: they had spoken of the Motherland but this is not a weapon, not when the court speaks more French than Russian among its own (it's not Prussian; the tsar's more frequent mentions of Frederick II are beginning to make his back teeth itch. Have some bloody judgment, he thinks, and thinks of the Polish partition, of the near-French Russian court's subtle recoil at the drop of a Germanic terms, think like a country, not like a man-but he is a man, and little, smaller day by day).
Sveta clears her throat. "Your move."
He jumps a knight over a string of pawns and watches her castle in turn, protecting her queen. "As I said. The Princess has assured me-well, there's no assurance needed, I have the tsarevna's goodwill as long as I have hers, and she has promised me a place in her heart forever. But I remember my mother. Do you yours?"
Barely, he thinks, with a nod nevertheless. "A Russian."
"I supposed as much." She smiles, pushing her queen into a diagonal. "You have the look of a favored son. Your mother stops mattering once you're weaned, but your motherland-"
"I heard the princess."
"She's right, though, isn't she? You love her-" the soft inflection on a nonhuman syllable, and Sveta's forefinger tracing the queen's rounded crown, pressing gently down- "more than anyone."
It sounds right.
(More than any ruler, he thinks, is the question, and the answer earns a nod.)
He takes his leave before the game is won by either of them, kissing her hand before he leaves the room. Her fingers brush imperceptibly along his cheek.
The next day, he corners Yuri Pavlovich on the walk outside the palace, boots echoing on the stone path between the trees. "Listen to me," he begins, and Yuri shakes his head.
"No, polkovnik-" he says the military title with old affection now, and Ivan shakes his head as if he's been underwater, Yuri's voice like water in his ears. "Don't worry. I know there's a lot of talk of cutting power off at the head, but they won't make you cut off any heads of state-"
"No, no, no." Ivan shushes him, angry and prickling with nerves. "It isn't about that at all. And be quiet, would you-"
Yuri claps a hand over his mouth, turning the gesture's absurdity into a rueful rub of the chin. "I'm listening."
Ivan weighs his words, and then finds them coming out unweighed-there's no good way to say it, no practical way, no clever way. "You know too much," he says, finally, bluntly, "and you know it too well. I don't understand how. You're not a sneak-you just show up and know. I don't understand it," he says again. "I don't."
Yuri's typically ruddy face leaches of blood. "What's there to understand, Ivan Konstantinovich?"
Nothing, nothing Ivan can put into words.
He doesn't remember his mother very well, he does not think of the village of his birth, but he remembers superstition. (They all do, he thinks, everyone in Russia, everyone in the gloss and powder of the court, them especially: they who catalogue their country know its cherished monsters best of all, all the more acutely for their unwillingness to speak of them. Monsters and saints, he thinks, and magic thick and maddening in every particle of soil.)
"Do you believe in magic, then?" Yuri says with a very quiet laugh, a rise and fall of his shoulders, and Ivan looks him square in the eye.
"No." He lies with a steady face, offering the lie up like a gift. "Of course not."
The color of Yuri's face normalizes. He claps Ivan on the shoulder, hard, hand tight and lingering on his arm. It is not a threat. Ivan leans into it.
"You're a good man," Yuri says.
Ivan nods, wordless. "I'm needed back inside," he says and watches him walk along the path. His throat is tight; when Yuri is out of sight, he steps off the path and leans hard against the nearest tree, inhaling until his heart slows.
He is not afraid. Not for himself, not even for his country. He will not confess it, then, not to anyone, not least for the man whom he is somehow, suddenly fearing for. Emotion for emotion's sake, he thinks, angry with the string-tightness pulling at his chest; emotion that does not brook conversation.
The tsar is to leave for Oranienbaum at the beginning of July.
Ivan should have been the first to know about this; instead he recounts it carefully over tea with the Princess and Sveta and Yuri and is met with nods.
The tsarevna, he thinks; the palace runs with tight, confident, burnished cogs around her, and that reassures him. No cutting off heads, Yuri had said, and had touched his shoulder and glanced very pointedly at the bayonet always within reach, and this was consoling. Sveta's knee shifts against his leg on the settee as she moves in to pluck a berry from a dish, and this is more consoling than the rest.
He is grounded by them; the memory of them anchors him when he is alone with his thoughts: the flash of Yuri's grin, the curve of Sveta's arm, the deliberate looks and the choices of their hands, and he is calm. He thinks of Russia, borne on their backs. He thinks of Locke, dog-eared, in his hands and Sveta's and the tsarevna's. He thinks of Russia, mothered.
Tsar Piotr makes preparations for his trip, and calls in for a military escort the morning he leaves. He calls for the head of the palace body; it is Ivan who is sent for.
Piotr is finishing his dress when he arrives, securing his wig and slipping into his coat.
The room is vast, its ceiling taller than three men's reach, and still it feels confining. Ivan bows and feels the room constricting, forcing the bow despite its incongruity in his heart. When he rises, Ivan hands him a set of letters, the wordless mechanics of his body fulfilling their military duty. Piotr makes as if to open it, slim fingers fumbling along the seal, and Ivan reaches out, stopping his hands.
The man before him looks up, astonished.
"No, sir," Ivan says. "Not now-not until you're in the coach and out of sight of the palace. You may want to wait until you've arrived at Oranienbaum. It all depends on you, sir-but not now."
Piotr's face is pale with shock. "Remove your hand, Colonel Tikhonov."
Ivan removes his hand deliberately, sweeping his arm stiffly up against his body. "Do you understand?" he forces himself to ask.
"I understand nothing about this breach of protocol-"
There is a music to the precision of bayonetry; under his hands, the rifle swings with all the fluidity of a timed dance, with delicacy achingly pure, the point lands at the crook of the tsar's, the man's, collarbone. Beneath the metal tip lies the hollow of neck and shoulder, armorless flesh and vein. It is soft, even through the press of rich fabric; it indents almost imperceptibly. No further. He balances the gun in his hands. "Do you understand?"
"Ah," says the man who was tsar.
"You will not be returning to the Winter Palace."
"Ah," he says again, soft as a breath. His shoulders hunch, hollowing him in on himself. "Ah, yes."
Thank you, Ivan thinks, absurdly. No tsar, this man, only a man, and for one moment of absurd clarity he thinks of falling to his knees and kissing the man's hands-for being a man with a weak heart and a soft body, whose departure shall be no one's betrayal at all. Instead, he straightens his shoulders and straightens the gun, elevating it once more against the line of his body.
"Go to Ropsha."
"And live?"
"Yes," Ivan says, face unmoving and heart exulting, "live. There's life waiting for you there."
The man who was tsar smiles. The letters go into his pocket: one political and terse, Ivan knows, one from his mistress, whose name he has not yet learned but who he is assured is waiting and warm in Ropsha. Ivan walks behind him the length of the palace halls, out to the court and the crowd, solemn and proud as Piotr waves his goodbye.
When the Lieb Guard officially turns coat, Yuri finds Ivan at the door to the throne room, standing command himself.
"We are holding the chair for the tsaritsa," he says. His face is drawn in long, sharp lines, military-precise and unreadable, but he gives Yuri a look of pure, clear happiness. "And well done we're doing, too."
He is thinking of Ropsha, Yuri cannot help but catalogue; in spite of his inclinations, he pushes further, and he finds Ivan's thoughts lit, Locke-bright, with the belief that he is doing right, that the country has shaped itself and pushed his hand and-
bloodless, he thinks, it was bloodless, and he recoils.
"What is it, Yura?" Ivan asks, face humanizing for a moment, and Yuri, who has spoken with Alexei Grigorievich that day, who has ushered Ekaterina herself into and out of his chambers, despairs.
"Nothing." He shakes his head. "Nothing-I'm happy as you are."
"You've killed before," he says later, over vodka.
"Of course." Ivan stretches his shoulders, mouth thinning. He bites into a pickled onion, swallowing a shot of vodka in its wake. "No other way."
"How d'you mean?"
"Perhaps you've noticed the absence of Tikhonovs in the palace, Yura."
A title not inherited or bought, Yuri thinks. Won.
"That's the good part-the meat of it. Once you've seen what blades and bullets do to a man-" Another bite, another swallow-"you're glad when that's reprieved."
"Ivan." He reaches across the table. Ivan's loosened his collar, his blazer; Yuri's hand latches onto the fold of fabric, pulling him in. "Listen to me."
"Christ." Ivan looks into his face, exhales hard. "Christ and his saints-it's not a reprieve, is it?"
Yuri's fingers loosen.
"No."
Neither man moves away.
"Does Sveta know?" Ivan asks, finally, and Yuri laughs.
"Sveta," he says, her name warming his throat, and he doesn't have to push into Ivan's thoughts to know what he's thinking, "probably better than anyone."
"Probably?" It is Ivan's turn to laugh, his turn again to swallow a shot, this time without a bite before. "Never knew you to rely on probability before."
It feels to Svetlana as if she's never lived in a Russia that was not ruled by a tsaritsa; it feels, when she looks back, as if she has lived a life meant to rewrite history in its wake, smoothing its palimpsests under the footsteps of Ekaterinas. She does not remember her family and she does not remember a tsar. She has been toasting to the tsaritsa forever, she thinks, and it is nearly true.
"Take me to Peterhof," she says the day after the coronation, in the princess's rooms. Her voice is casual and languid as smoke; make no fuss, she has been telling herself for days. Her limbs stretch into the contours of the princess's chairs, willed into picturesque summer calm. "We ought to be summering in the country; the palace is stifling this time of year."
The princess laughs at her. "I'm not leaving the tsaritsa. Not now."
"Then," Svetlana continues-she knows the Ekaterinas, she thinks, knows the Princess most of all, more perhaps now than the Princess realizes-"give me an escort and send me to the dacha in Peterhof on my own. The household's active enough; they'll take guests. Any guests."
The princess's gaze cools. "You've been talking to Yuri."
"And you've been talking to Alexei Grigorievich."
"You think he does anything on his own?"
"No." Svetlana sits up. "That's exactly what I mean. If his man is coming to see me at Peterhof-"
"There is no talk of Ropsha."
"No one talks of Ropsha." Svetlana stares at the princess, daring her to say otherwise. "There is no one to talk of there."
"Are you offering," the princess asks, amused, "an alibi?"
"There is nobody can blame me for Russia's geography," Svetlana says, shrugging her bare shoulders.
The princess's face is writ by nature in impenetrable elegance, but when she smiles in earnest, Svetlana thinks with glorious satisfaction, how it glows.
They are three together in Orlov's coach, Yuri ahead and commanding the driver, Ivan by her side. The horses are Orlov's best, but still it insists on jostling its way along the country roads, and Svetlana finds herself physically conscious of the line of Ivan next to her.
He is quiet.
"Yuri," he says, as they pass through a hushed sweep of fields. Workers are tilling their way through the loam; Svetlana leans tactfully away, peering through the line of the curtains. The fields are writ in long lines of green and gold. Ivan's voice is tense, words jerking in his throat.
"I need to get in."
"They'll let you in."
"And remember."
"Yes."
"Is there-" he hesitates-"a cleaner way?"
"Like what?"
"Not remembering."
"Or not seeing. Ah."
"Is there?"
"I'll see what I can do."
"So it is a weapon." Svetlana closes the curtains and leans back against the corner of the coach. "I'd wondered."
"You knew?"
"Of course." She leans in, smiling at Yurochka. "I'm good with people. What you are-it's more than good. It's uncanny."
"Are you calling me magic, Sveta?" he teases-Ivan inhales sharply next to her-and she reaches out, pressing a hand to his knee.
"Shall I look for a feather tucked into your hat for safekeeping? Or better yet, a death's-bargain trapped in a hen's egg in your pocket?" The silence spreads between them, thick as butter. She pats his knee, grinning lopsidedly, and it breaks-he laughs, shaking his dark curls, unpowdered and unwigged in the carriage. "I don't think you've sold your soul, Yuri. I think you're a blessing."
Two of his fingers tap her wrist. "No, Sveta," he says, "I think this carriage is blessed with your gracious presence."
"Shut up." Her voice tartens as she takes back her hand, smoothing it back against the light fabric layers of her summer dress, pale green under her pale hands. "Shut up and weaponize that mind of yours," she says, so angry-jesting that for a moment both men forget that it is not a jest at all.
He isn't tsar, Ivan thinks when the carriage stops at the imperial estate's soft lawn. As he makes his way through the columns and colonnades, Yuri's hand on his back-
is this necessary, he thinks, rigorously untwitchy, and Yuri flicks him lightly on the back of his head (and he allows himself to be comforted, if wordlessly, by the continual press of Yuri's palm, the long second shadow at his side and what it means)-
He isn't tsar, Ivan reminds himself as they walk through the marble halls, finding their way to damasked walls and plush carpets even through the winding back doorways, as they walk to the heart of the estate.
He isn't Russia, Ivan remembers as the bayonet slashes across Piotr's throat.
They don't talk. Yuri grips his arm on the way out, but he is steady, steady and precise; he is trained, after all, and it is nothing but a learned skill, this.
They track two shadows and no footsteps; they leave no dirt and little blood. Not much needed to be spilt. He is good at his job.
Ivan is back first.
He had been the first to leave-if by seconds; Yuri had looked back, though, and she had felt like a child. I want to go, she had thought petulantly, not really wanting at all, and had felt the tug between her brows, known the thought to be audible. "Go," she'd said tartly, "don't pry."
He'd smacked himself on the forehead, a brief breaker of the solemnity, and he'd looked genuinely abashed. "I'm sorry." He'd flicked an eyebrow at her skirts. "You're a bit conspicuous as it is, you know."
"Go."
And it had been, in its own way, a compliment, a mark of technique every bit as potentially weaponized as his mind, as Ivan's-
Ivan stands before her, lowering his head as he sits. "Well?" she asks, moving in, and he spreads his hands. It is a gesture of acquiescence. His fingertips are red. Her eyes travel to the edge of the blade that tips his rifle and it is red, edged but not dripping. Clean, she thinks absurdly, and pulls his hands into her lap.
"You'll ruin your dress," he says mildly.
"No, I've a handkerchief-"
"Sveta."
"Somewhere."
She gives up. Her palms sink back against his. As her fingers lace lightly through his, she feels his lingering in the trace air above her skin, for a few moments before she pulls her fingers tight along his skin. "It's nothing," she says, "it'll rub away. It's nothing much."
His eyes drift, for a moment, shut.
"Vive la Reine Catherine?" she prompts, and his eyes flash open.
"It wasn't a war," he finally says. "There's that."
She unlaces her fingers from his, stroking lightly over the backs of his knuckles before she raises her hand to rest along the long line of his cheek. "Where's Yuri?" she asks, and her voice is very quiet, her breath falling into the small shared wealth of air between them.
"He sent me ahead. Said he'd do a circuit of the grounds, see if anything else needed to be-clouded, I think he said." A slight furrow shapes the space between Ivan's brows. "He's making it up as he goes along."
"He's good." She tilts her head. "Was that necessary? His extra time?"
"He was smiling when he sent me back."
"Was he," she murmurs, "how inappropriate," and her hand tightens on the hair at the base of his neck and his mouth is on hers.
She does not think of the tsarevna's lovers at the palace or the mistress likely still unknowing what has passed in the belly of the imperial estate; she thinks of the faint steel scent lingering on their skin and the ruddy wet fingerprints and warm dry palms pressing into the exposed curve of her shoulders, she thinks of Ivan's voice catching untempered in the back of his throat, she thinks of the thousand words she knows about worlds lit and living with sweepingly human hope, she thinks momentarily of nothing at all.
When Yuri returns, they are apart and she is daubing at the back of her neck with a handkerchief she shall later have to burn.
Her head is clear; he knows better. He knows, too, all the same, and he bites an amused expression back into his mouth.
"Onward," he turns around and calls out to the driver.
She dwells on what she had told the princess before they left: I am the tsarevna's to command, she had said, meaning then the tsarevna most of all, now considering the command-if this is what it is to be commanded, if living in the country's name must always mean blood. Judicious blood, she thinks: not a war. Just enough blood to call a birth, she thinks: mothering on national terms.
Yuri flashes her a hard-earned smile and Ivan's hand lies at her side, masked by the opulent folds of her skirt. They are going to Peterhof and their cares shall be burned away by the sun; they shall return to the palace fresh from the land and unvarnished, returning to something expected to be new.