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on that day as he had watched Yulian making a fool of himself over Katya, spinning her before the
others as the poet said some grand words in English, and Vlad had leaned his chair against the wall,
smoking his cheap cigarettes.
They were all dead now. Yulian, the poet, even the spinning girl. In retrospect he was sorry he
had not shaken her hand.
Vlad had no doubt there would be many more martyrs before this business was finished and he
also knew that the best men would go first. The idealists would fall in the earliest days while the men
like him – those who preferred whores and newspapers to ballerinas and sonnets - would survive a
bit longer. Perhaps he would even live to the end. What sort of world was this, he sometimes
wondered, where the better men went out in an early blaze of glory while the lesser ones trudged on?
For Vlad knew he was one of these lesser men. He knew this in his heart and if he ever had doubted
it, the world around him stood as a constant reminder that he was but a pale echo of his handsome,
brilliant, heroic older brother. His parents kept a religious shrine to Sasha at home, candles and a
host of icons, all those flat faced Orthodox saints who had collectively failed to save him. And the
Volya maintained a tribute of a different sort, flags and pictures of the dead boys, their school
portraits clustered on a wall in a shabby room. But both the godless and the god-fearing were in
agreement upon this one point: that Sasha Ulyanov had been entirely too fine for this world.
A carriage approached the gate and the guard stiffened to attention. Vlad and a few other
curiosity seekers stepped aside as the bars were wrested apart to allow entrance. The carriage rolled
to a stop slowly and there was a bit of business with the horses, one of them proving reluctant to turn.
Plenty of time for Vlad to look through the glass window and observe the three passengers inside: a
laughing boy his own age, his amused attention directed toward a younger girl who had her face
screwed up in some sort of crude jest. She was imitating someone - mocking them, Vlad realized. A
governess or schoolmistress most likely, some thankless imperial servant who had failed to earn the
approval of her spoiled young charge. And one of her brothers was entertained by her brattish
outburst while the other, the solemn young man positioned on the seat across from them, was not.
This was the tsesarevich, the heir, as handsome as he was claimed to be and dignified too, observing
his younger siblings with the world-weary tolerance of the first born. It was an expression Vlad had
seen before, on the face of Sasha.
They are a family, he thought. They are, when it is all said and done, no more than a family.
The tsesarevich was the same age as Gregor Krupin, the same age Sasha would have been if he
lived. Twenty, perhaps twenty-one. A man on the brink of owning the world. And just as the gates