“The King’s Man” (Part I)

Fog rose in clouds from the frozen ground and hung there, shimmering, in the weak winter sun. Andrei’s wife tore through it at a reckless pace, shredding it to ribbons with her mount’s iron-shod hooves. Neither joy nor laughter trailed in her wake. She had simply bolted, or her horse had. Either way, she was in danger of harming herself and that could not be allowed.

Viktor spurred his own horse into the sparkling swirl behind her. The fog closed over him like an icy shroud, stealing his breath before he could draw it. He called for her—“My queen!”—and the dulled notes of his voice alerted him to silence where there should have been a drumbeat gallop floating up ahead. His stallion fought the bit as he drew rein too sharply, but as the surly beast settled beneath him, he strained for a sound he desperately hoped not to hear.

There was nothing. Then there was a muted scuffle and the unmistakable whinny of a startled horse, and Zultan reared as a phantom grey mare charged past him with her stirrups flapping wildly against her flanks. Viktor was out of the saddle and running while his horse was still poised on its hocks. He plunged into the fog with his pistol half-drawn, roaring her name to let would-be ruffians know their game was lost before it began.

The fog thinned toward the wood. Viktor found her standing near a cluster of birches, her white fur and dark hair blending almost perfectly into the bark so that he might have missed her had he not been looking. He stopped short, skidding slightly in the snow, and rapidly assessed the scene.

She was utterly alone. He spied no fleeing cloaks, heard no thundering retreat. Andrei’s wife stood calmly in the crystal mist with frost jewelling on the tips of her fur collar. Viktor felt his breath die in his throat. She had always been beautiful, but grief had given her a fragile translucence that elevated her beauty to something ethereal. Viktor stared, caught himself, dropped to one knee, bowed his head to deny himself the vision. “My queen, are you hurt?”

“I’ve lost my horse,” she replied.

More than that, she had lost her husband, and in an entire year spent mourning, she had said not a word to him though they had spoken almost daily. He heard it now in her voice, the weight of loss and sorrow creating a similar effect to her tone as to her beauty. He could avert his gaze, but not his ears. In the muffling fog, sound took on sensation and became a soft caress. Viktor raised his head and let himself absorb her. Sable hair and velvet eyes, slender bones and eloquent grace. She was, and always would be, his icon.

“You called my name,” she said.

“I beg your forgiveness, my queen.”

She smiled. The icy mist insulated them from the real world and placed them in another time and place, a momentary world with no history and no future. Viktor stayed on one knee as Andrei’s wife approached him. Her furs were pristine, her cloak unmarred by the fall he had heard. With a start, he realized that she had not fallen at all, that she had dismounted and sent her mare flying back the way she had come. She saw the dawning in his eyes and stopped her progress. Her composure remained, but beneath the milk of her skin, she burned like a candle behind a frosted pane.

Normally immune to panicking, Viktor fought the urge to do it now. He stood instead, holstering the pistol to avoid meeting her eyes. His hands were clumsy—with cold, he presumed, lying to himself in hope of deceiving her as well, but the truth thickened in the space between them and when he finally got the damned weapon secured on his belt, he glanced up in the same instant as her fingers brushed his sleeve. They closed on his forearm, drew her in too near, and though he could have—should have—stepped back, he stayed where he was, waiting to hear the magic words.

“I loved my husband,” she said. “I wanted you.”

An eyebrow quirked. “Past tense, my queen?”

She pressed herself against him, put her lips less than a breath from his, so close than he felt a brush like falling snowflakes when she whispered, “I loved my husband. I want you.”

The growl came from somewhere so deep inside he wasn’t sure it was his. “Stacia.”

“Yes,” she murmured, her eyes turning dreamy as she sighed. For a heartbeat they hung together, trapped between their love for one man and desire for each other, then Viktor took her face in his hands and kissed her.

* * *

Andrei’s son, tricked out in full military regalia, studied himself in the full-length mirror. “Hm,” he grunted, emulating his uncle rather than his father, who had never grunted that Viktor could recall. Nikolai Andreivich Slovoyanov grunted a great deal for one so young, especially in the last year. Trying to be a man while still in the schoolroom. How well Viktor remembered Andrei at the same age, a task made easier by the resemblance in the boy before him now. Like his father, Nicky was tall and blond, with clear blue eyes and a winsome smile. Unlike his father, he was in robust health and had been so from the day of his birth.

Viktor remembered that occasion, too. “I have a son!” Andrei had crowed, flushed with pride and astonishment. “Imagine, Viktor, I have a boy, an heir to my throne and all of my Empire! My queen, my Nastacia, she has made me immortal!”

It had been difficult to set aside a lifetime of dread to share in the Tsar’s unbridled joy. Such purity had been Andrei’s gift, an irony given that his was the death feared by everyone else. He had been preserved through childhood, married to a princess, and made Tsar of all Russia by his fifteenth birthday. Fatherhood had come soon after, well in advance of a normal boy’s life plan, yet he had seized every moment and wrung it for all he was worth.

“Your father would be proud,” Viktor said, forcing himself back to the present.

Nikolai frowned at his reflection. “I wish he was here. Then I wouldn’t have to be on parade before every ambassador with a princess for sale.”

“Remember, my king, you are the buyer.”

Nicky snorted—something else his father had rarely done. His grandfather, on the other hand …

“Are you still in here? You’ll never get laid if you don’t come out of your room.”

“I doubt that’s entirely true, Uncle.” The boy spoke plainly, but his ears turned red enough to crisp. He appeared mildly discomfited by the chummy clap to his shoulder and tried not to duck his head as Andrei’s brother turned him about for inspection.

“You’re too handsome to be my nephew,” Grand Duke Yuri proclaimed. He grinned and applied a second hearty clap. “You could be my son.”

Nikolai tensed in his uncle’s hands. Viktor let himself take shape from the shadows where he had retreated on Yuri’s arrival. “Your Grace,” he said, politely but with an edge.

Yuri answered in kind. “Malokov. Still here, I see.”

“As my king commands, Your Grace.”

“It seems to me that your king was my brother and since he is gone, I don’t understand your purpose here. Perhaps you might explain it to me.”

Nicky nervously intervened. “Uncle, you know that I asked him to stay.”

“Do you know what he was before you were born?”

The boy clung resolutely to his station. “He was Papa’s friend. That makes him my friend. Is there something I can do for you, Uncle Yuri?”

The grand duke removed his hands from the young Tsar’s shoulders, keeping them aloft as he stepped back a pace. “Not at all, my king. I came to advise that your mother awaits her escort to the assembly. She has asked for you.”

Which meant that he had come from Stacia’s apartment. Viktor kept his muscles soft but casually laid his hand on the dress sword hung at his hip. Nikolai scouted for his hat, anxious that his mother not be kept waiting. Finding it abandoned on a chair cushion, he snatched it up and stuffed it beneath his arm. Head tipped high and spurs jingling, he walked to the door, then pivoted to face the room once more. Viktor’s heart plumped with affection at the desperate plea in the boy’s eyes. Of no one in particular, Nicky asked, “Must I marry one of them?”

“You can’t marry them all,” Yuri replied.

“What if I don’t like any of them?” And, silently, What if none of them like me?

“Then we’ll do this until we find one that suits.”

“Viktor?”

“It’s a ballroom, my king, not a stockyard. Try to enjoy yourself.”

“And stop crushing the life from your hat,” Yuri added, striding forward to rescue the flattened headpiece. Nicky let him take it, frowning slightly as he watched it reform in his uncle’s expert hands. Yuri was the glamorous one, always immaculately groomed in tailored coats and polished boots. He had taken similar pains with Andrei, sparing the Tsar unfavourable comparison by ensuring that both royal brothers cut fashionable figures in formal company. Even his mourning clothes had been stylish. Stacia had initially been more dazzled by him, an advantage that he likely intended to press now that his competition was no more. Yuri was a natural charmer, and Viktor might have been concerned had his lips not yet tingled from the memory of Stacia’s kiss.

He watched her son suffer the grand duke’s fussing with less than his father’s inherent good nature, and wondered himself why he was still at court.

to be continued …