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Prologue<br />
June 13, 1889<br />
The Winter Palace<br />
St. Petersburg, Russia<br />
3:02 AM<br />
The room is dark as she enters, but this does not alarm her. Katya Gorbunkova has gone down<br />
this marble staircase many times, while wearing feathered masks, great looping headscarves,<br />
costumes of every imaginable shape and size. From memory, she knows that the staircase leading<br />
from the performers’ level onto the stage of the Grand Ballroom has precisely thirty-four steps. She<br />
knows that the walls are robin blue, and the ceiling above her is dome shaped, with the pearlized<br />
sheen of an eggshell. The Russians love eggs - those symbols of rebirth, fertility, and spring. In the<br />
city of St. Petersburg, these humble oval shapes of the barnyard find their way into even the grandest<br />
architectural designs. The tsar’s private theater is no exception.<br />
The staircase could be notoriously difficult to navigate, even under the best of circumstances,<br />
for this theater, just as every other room in the Winter Palace, was designed more for the delight of the<br />
imperial family than for the convenience of their household staff. And each night when the curtain<br />
fell, even a prima ballerina became no more than a servant. Katya owed her livelihood and her life<br />
to the continuing good will of the tsar, a man who, despite a hulking frame which had earned him the<br />
nickname “the bear,” was in many ways a benevolent patron of the arts. Her life here in the palace<br />
might not be perfect, but it was an emphatic improvement over her first eighteen years on earth and<br />
she was not inclined to jeopardize that position.<br />
In fact, the only thing which would entice her to take this present risk was the chance to be<br />
alone with Yulian.<br />
It was ridiculous, really, that they should have to meet like this. She had her room, and he had<br />
his, both in the same wing of this monstrous 900-room palace, each tucked at the ends of halls so long<br />
that staring down then sometimes afflicted newcomers with vertigo. But her dance master was an<br />
unsympathetic sort, preoccupied with rehearsals for his upcoming ballet, and unlikely to be charmed<br />
with the news that the girl he had cast as Juliet had slipped from her room in the middle of the night to
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