"I shall be an autocrat: that's my trade.
And the good Lord will forgive me: that's his."

- Catherine the Great

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Alyosha is dying.

Anastasia takes her turn sitting beside his bed, but even as she reads the prayers, she knows in the core of her being that God has turned His face away from her little brother. This time there will be no last-minute miracle wrought by the scientists. This time no transfusion, no treatment, will save Alexei Nikolaevich.

He is fourteen, and he is dying.

At least he is no longer screaming in pain, although the swelling in his leg is greater than ever – black and immense, forcing the knee to bend, distorting the joint grotesquely. He is no longer screaming because, after days of it, he's lost his voice. Now he can only gasp and moan, his eyes sunken and dark, his body sheened with a cold sweat.

"Please, Mama," Anastasia says, barely above a whisper herself. She has lived this nightmare a thousand times since her brother was born, and it never becomes easier. They are all exhausted by Alyosha's agony, drawn tight and brittle under the strain of his suffering. She feels that at any moment she might crack in two. "Please let Dr. Botkin give him morphine."

Mama gives her a sharp, desperate glance. "No. The treatments are working. The bleeding is slowing. There is no need to put that poison into his body."

Anastasia holds her tongue. If Alyosha's bleeding is slowing, it's only because he's running out of blood: all of it is slowly and inexorably pooling in his lower leg. She struggles to remember what triggered this episode. Was he playing too roughly? Riding a bicycle? Climbing on the furniture in the schoolroom? No, no – this time he only stumbled and fell against a chair.

Hemophilia. She hates that word, more than any other in any of the many languages that she knows.

"Baby will be fine," Mama says, touching the icons at her neck, the icons at her waist, looking at the icons above his bed. Painted saints with empty eyes. Charles Darwin with his finches. "God will answer our prayers. He will be fine."

"No he won't," Anastasia says, flinging her prayer book aside, too angry to care about the impiety. "Prayers will not fix his life threads, Mama! Not prayers, not scientists, not anything!"

Her mother looks at her, shocked, furious, but before she can do more than draw breath, Anastasia presses a kiss to her brother's feverish forehead – I love you, please forgive me - and runs out of his room.

She is much too old to tear away like a frightened child, but she does. She flees past the servants, the guards, out into the grounds of Tsarkoye Selo, where she walks until she has stopped crying.

Anastasia wraps her arms around herself. Stands still on the pathway. Looks up at the twilight sky.

Perhaps it is not that God has forsaken Alexei. Perhaps it is that God has forsaken the rest of them.

The thought makes her shiver. She prays it isn't true.

"What am I to do?" she asks, small and alone.

The answer comes months later, when Papa draws her aside. He has aged a hundred years for every day since Alexei died, and he looks like a tired, sad old man now, not the gentle, laughing Little Father of her childhood.

She knows what he means to tell her. Four daughters are not equal to one son, but they are all the bargaining power that remains to Russia. Olga has been weeping for days that she will go to England as the bride of Prince Edward.

Papa says, "Forgive me, Nastya, but I must ask something of you."

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"And you are certain?" she asks Dr. Derevenko, fighting to keep her voice from shaking.

"Yes, Anastasia Nikolaevna," the man says. His voice is sad. "The results were very clear."

She is the cleverest of her sisters – not a boast; merely the truth – and for years has also been the most lazy in her lessons. But since Baby's death she has taken a keen interest in the fabricators' work, and she has a thorough understanding of it now. She knows more than her sisters, even Olga, who loves to study everything.

She knows more than Mama and Papa, who treat it as an extension of the Holy Church, a wonderment to be exclaimed over, marveled at, accepted on faith, forever shrouded in mystical light.

Anastasia knows the hard science. She knows what the careful diagrams of the test results mean. What's more, she knows what those treatments forced on Alexei were designed to do, what they failed to do, because the illness cannot be rooted out so easily.

Indeed, it cannot be rooted out at all.

She nods. Takes a breath. "Yes, everything is very clear. Thank you, Doctor," she says. "Please, do not mention this to my father. It would only… it would only upset him further."

"Of course, Your Highness." He bows and leaves her.

The paper confirming her fears trembles in her hand.

She holds a match to it and watches as it burns itself to ash in the dustbin.

Then she reads, again, the file from the Ministry of Internal Affairs – the one she stole from Papa's study. The one that talks in great detail about a certain Miss Deryn Sharp, common-born and bold as brass, the love of Emperor Aleksandar's life.

That young woman is, Anastasia thinks, the key to this.

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Anastasia does not cry.

She does not move, she does not speak, she does nothing at all until her new husband has fallen soundly asleep.

Then she rises – gingerly, because it rather hurts to walk – pulls on her dressing robe, and leaves the imperial bedroom. She doesn't like it, and not only because her marriage bed is a cold and loveless place. Everything here is so excessively opulent. She misses the plainly furnished nursery and the simple army cot of her childhood. Vienna is too rich a taste in her mouth.

Although right now all she can taste is blood.

She bit the inside of her cheek, she realizes, somewhere amidst that humiliating disaster called her wedding night. Well. She will forge onward. And Aleksandar did not seem upset when she requested that they sleep in separate rooms from now on.

Perhaps he hopes that Miss Sharp will change her mind about adultery.

There's a small growling mewl by her feet, and she looks down to see Sasha. Silly little bear; she'd rather have brought one of her dogs, but the fabricated animal makes more of a political statement.

She picks it up and holds it close. "Shhh, malenkaya," she whispers, and takes it with her.

Anastasia goes to the room she's designated as her salon and tries to make herself comfortable in the chair. She cannot. Her entire body aches. She wonders how much of that is physical, and how much is in her mind; her injuries have always been slow to heal.

The memory hits her abruptly: Alyosha on his bed, dark circles around his eyes, his skin pale, his hair damp with sweat, gasping for their mother with his last shred of strength.

The Lord has cursed our blood, she thinks, blinking hard to dispel the tears.

She tucks her feet under her and holds Sasha on her lap. The bear's warmth is soothing, and she strokes its soft fur absently as she sits in the darkened room and thinks.

In the morning she will be examined by the court physicians; they will pronounce the marriage consummated, and Austria-Hungary will be irrevocably bound to Russia. Both nations stabilized with one small sacrifice on her part.

And Austria secured with one, much larger, sacrifice on someone else's part.

Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova is a tsar's daughter, descended from three hundred years of autocrats. She can be as cold as the Russian winter when she must. Now she must.

She puts her mind on the future.

Will this work?

God have mercy if it doesn't.

God forgive her if it does.

"Seven months, Alyosha," she says softly, her fingers tightening in Sasha's fur. "Seven months."