Authors: Joy Preble
Anastasia Forever
Copyright © 2012 by Joy Preble
Cover and internal design © 2012 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Series design by Cathleen Elliott/Fly Leaf Design
Cover photos © Elisa Lazo de Valdez/Corbis, Jon Feingersh/Getty Images
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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
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Wrigley Field, Tuesday, 12:22 pm
Wrigley Field, Tuesday, 12:59 pm
A Really Little Village Somewhere in Russia, Definitely
Not
This Century
Tasha’s Music Studio, Evening Maybe Wednesday, Maybe Not
The Ballet Theater, Evening Maybe Wednesday, Maybe Not
Theater Box, Beginning of
Giselle
Maybe Wednesday, Maybe Not
Theater Box, During
Giselle
Maybe Wednesday, Maybe Not
Tasha’s Flat, After the Ballet Maybe Wednesday, Maybe Not
Tasha’s Flat, After the Ballet Maybe Wednesday, Maybe Not
In Baba Yaga’s Forest, Wednesday
In Alexander Palace outside St. Petersburg, Definitely Not Present Day
Still at Alexander Palace and Not Happy about It
For Rose, Lily, Sylvia, and Lenaâwho struggled to get the journeys they deserved.
“Again and again the two of us walk out together
Under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
Among the flowers, face to face with the sky.”
âRainer Maria Rilke
After a certain number of lifetimes, one becomes capable of much if only out of sheer repetition. Like a magician's sleight of hand, I learned to trick the world into seeing things the way I wanted.
Only later did I come to realize that there was more to my story than what showed on the surface. Magic has a price. Anything of value always does. It was one I was willing to pay. But even I did not understand the true cost.
When I was a boy, my mother told me the tale of Koschei the Deathless. My mother's eyes grew bright and her skin went pink as though the telling was of great importance. Later I would know why, but even then I understood I needed this story. Marinaâfor she let me call her by her name; it was only just the two of us after allâalways knew.
I was Tsar Nicholas's sonânot that my father ever acknowledged me. But Marina made sure I understood that it was both my truth and my destiny. It forced us all to places we might not otherwise have gone: my mother to Baba Yaga's forest, my father to a blind refusal to see what needed to be seen, and meâ¦well, that is quite another tale.
“Stories within stories,” Baba Yaga loves to say. “Secrets within secrets.” How clever she thinks she is, this witch who has toyed with me since my mother first went to the forest to seek her. But she was not clever enough to stop me. Not clever enough to know the power of her words.
Koschei was a man who couldn't die. Or rather, who couldn't be killed. He had hidden his soulâas the tales goâinside the eye of a needle, tucked inside an egg that sat inside a duck, inside of a hare, locked in a solid iron box, and buried under a tree on some island that blinked and vanished as it saw fit.
As I grew older, I heard other versions. Sometimes the chest was made of gold. Sometimes the island was in a different ocean. Sometimes Koschei could be weakened. But always, always he lived. As long as his soul was hidden away, as long as he had made it impossible to find, he lived.
This was the seed my mother's story planted in me. That if I could not be my father's son, could not have the legacy of a tsar, immortality would have to suffice. I would cheat death and gain the knowledge and the power that came with living over and over.
I only knew this: I was willing to sacrifice my half sister for what I desired. My sweet Anastasia, who believed in me so deeply that, like our father, she blinded herself to what I really was. This is, I think, my only regret. That even as I found delight in the ease with which I was able to manipulate her to my cause, a piece of me ached at the destruction of this beautiful girl. Was I a monster? I prefer to see myself as a pragmatist. Still it pains meâthe look on her face that day we came back from the forest. The day I lost my immortality and Anastasia chose to return to the fate that I believe would have been hers anyway. Although by then truth was a fluid thing for me; when I told her I was sorry, I was not lying.
I asked Baba Yaga to take me because there was no other way to survive. No other way to gain access to all that I was about to lose: the magic, the spells, the secrets that reside underneath. I could not be other than what I have become.
Still, even the witch was unsure of my motives. I took pleasure in that for it proved my strength. I had found a way to compel the mighty Baba Yaga. The Bone Mother. The Death Crone. She was mad with it, unable to do anything but snap up a Romanov.
For a long time nowâat least as time goes in Baba Yaga's hutâI have belonged to the witch. She has owned my body and often my spirit, but not always my mind. And in those moments when she grew distracted or bored or mournful for her Anastasia and curious about Anne, I watched and learned and plotted. Always I knew there was a way. One day I understood what it was.
The witch had transformed my physical self by thenâhoned me down to bone in her own image. But as long as I breathed, as long as I could think and had strength enough to crawl, it was enough.
Koschei, I thought, as I brought the witch her sweet tea. Koschei, I repeated over and over in my mind as I huddled in the bed that was once Anastasia's. As I pulled the ragged comforter over the sticks that were my legs. Koschei, I said as the witch's black cat, her
koshka
, flicked its tongue at my fingers, harsh like sandpaper against skin as transparent as tissue. I bled onto the floor, deep red drops much thicker than anything else about me.
Here is what I hoped for that also came true: my great-great-granddaughter's heart betrayed her. Anne opened the door just enough. She let me free. She made her promises. And watched in shock as I rose from the dead.
Resurrected.
Oh, the sweetness of the horror on their faces as Baba Yaga's horseman galloped off with me. I surprised them all: my captor, my descendant, my protégé. Even sweet Lily who falsely believed she would have her revenge. She swims still, cursed as a
rusalka
. I am free.
The story goes like this: no one leaves Baba Yaga's forest the same as he entered. And that is true for me. I have left much behind. But transformation is good for the soul. If I cannot be what I hoped, then I will be something else. Better to prevail than to bemoan my losses. My will is intact, my life eternal once more. This time I will be more vigilant.
Secrets within secrets. But I won't tell. They'll have to kill me. Except that's the point. They can't.
Just before morning I dream of Russia. I'm a boy again, walking to town with my father, our boots making prints in the snow. The sun is shining and it's deeply cold outside, so cold that our breath puffs in tiny clouds of mist. I like walking with my father. Our house is small and cramped, but here I can move and stretch and talk man to man.
In my dream, things go wrong very quickly. It begins with a scream. We both turn as we hear the sound and run through the snow-covered grass toward its source, the river. Our footsteps crunch on the ground as we go, a harsh squeak each time our boots hit the frozen snow. I reach the riverbank first.
A girl is struggling in the water, her heavy coat dragging her down. She stares up at me, another scream gurgling from her lips as she slips under, then flounders to the surface, hands slapping the water wildly.
“Leave her.” The command comes from my father. Only when I turn to look at him, he wears Viktor's face. “You can't help her. You'll never help her. You're not strong enough.”
I ignore him, kneel at the water, and reach for the drowning girl. “Grab my hand,” I tell her. “I'll pull you up.” It makes no sense that the water is deep so close to the shore. But this is a dream.
“Fool.” My father's face is still Viktor's. “You think you know. You think you understand.”
“I can't let her die.” And in my dream I know this is Lena, the girl from our village who drowned but didn't drown. Who smiled at me with sharp teeth after she arose from the water, dead but not dead. Changed into a rusalka who beckoned me with a bony finger to join her in the depths. As a boy, I had run in terror, knowing that the boundaries had been broken, that there was another world which existed parallel to my own. A world where humans could transform into evil things. Where grieving mermaids waited to drag me under.
“She's not dead. She's chosen what she wants.”
I reach for her anyway. The water's almost frozen over, and the cold stings sharply as my arm plunges in. But in my dream, I'm still a boy and I can't stretch far enough. The rusalka treads water just out of reach.
“Help me,” she says. Her face is contorted with fear, but her eyes glimmer with something much darker. “You and the girl. Your Anne. Tell her, Ethan.”
With the mention of her name, Anne appears next to me, standing where Viktor had been. Or where my father had been. In my dream, my mind muddles with the shifts of people and moments. My arm is still thrust in the river, up to my elbow in the icy water.
“You haven't told me everything,” Anne says. “You know that's not fair, Ethan. Keeping stuff from me. I thought we were partners.”
“She's drowning,” I tell her. “We need to help her.”
“She can wait. You and I need to talk. Something's changed, E. I can feel it. You said you didn't have power any more. That you gave the last of it to me. But that's not exactly true, is it?”
Her words startle me. How could she know? Then again, how could she not? We're connected in more ways than either of us understand. The conduit between us has continued to grow stronger.
“Don't leave me,” the rusalka calls to us. “Don't let them take me. I'll tell you a secret. You just have to come closer.”
Around me, the air shimmers with cold in the sunlight. The rusalka shrugs out of her heavy wool coat. I watch as it sinks out of sight. She reaches one thin, bare arm toward me.
“You need to let the witch take her,” she whispers. “It's the only way. She has to know what to see. She has to know where he's been. Where you've been. Inside the insides, Ethan. Once she's heard the story enough times, she'll know what to do. She'll know how to stop him.”
Anne squats down next to me in the snow. She peers at the mermaid. “No one's taking me anywhere until I'm ready to go. Promise or no promise.”
The creature in the water bares her pointy teeth and makes a sound like a hiss. The air shimmers again. Above us, Baba Yaga's giant mortar flies into view, her pestle stirring the frigid air. It dips lower and lower until it hovers hugely above us, close enough that I can feel the heat of the witch's breath as she speaks from inside.
“Your girl has much to learn, Ethan.”
“I'm not his girl,” Anne says. “I don't belong to him. Or you.”
“Child.” Baba Yaga leans over her mortar and sends both her hands hurtling to the ground where they scuttle along the shore, flicking their fingers in the icy water. “So sure that you know. This is what I love about you.”
The hands on the ground move in the blink of an eye. Skitter behind us before I can react and push at our backs. We fall together into the water, Anne and I, as the rusalka screams and Baba Yaga howls and somewhere out of view, Viktor laughs.
The cold is unbearable. I reach for Anne, but I can't even see her anymore in the darkness of the water.
“You just have to let go,” the mermaid says from somewhere near me. “Anne is right. You've been holding things back. So many things, Ethan. Let go. Let yourself remember. And see what happens.”
I hold my breath for as long as I can as I sink deeper and deeper. And just as I think that I'm dying, I wake up.