“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” he could hear the priest murmuring detachedly, “We divorce thee of the name given to you by the devil. Welcome to your day of new birth… Rasputin.”
5
?????????? ??? ?????? -Fifteen Years Later
The stepsof the Summer Palace were Anastasia’s favorite place to read, as obnoxious as it was. It was an unusual reading place, not known for its quiet or its seclusion, but over the past fifteen years, Anastasia had come to fear her solitude for what she might find in it.
The back steps leading up to the Summer Palace held a gilded fountain in the middle, with water shooting up around the steps in a dazzling show. They were some of the most ostentatious steps in existence, designed and manicured by Catherine the Great.
Priests with dignitaries would come to walk the steps, showing off the gilded statues and shining archways. Men would frequently take their mistresses, as its semi-public status meant they needed no special permissions to see it, and could still boast of their presence on the palace grounds making it an especially attractive spot.
It was here that the Grand Duchess had pushed herself up against a railing, her nose so far into a book that it looked like a part of her features.
Not far behind her were two members of theleyb-gvardiya,the Russian Imperial Forces, who were constantly assigned to her.
True to her father’s threats, Anastasia had not been alone for a moment since that fateful day fifteen years ago. Her personal cabinet had all been replaced by women selected by the Tsarina and her priests; the priests often handed over the positions to their mistresses to bestow favor.
Anastasia used the knowledge that these women could be bribed only to secure her privacy in the water closet, and the chambermaids continued to report on her whereabouts as if they had been privy to that, too.
Anastasia, now at twenty - eight, was a shell of the teenager that she had once been. Her father hardly ever let her out of his sight, in addition to the constant presence of her guards.
No one knew what had transpired that night except for the priest, Tsar, Tsarina, and the three lords who had stood witness — and that boy she hadn’t seen, the boy who Anastasia often reflected on and made her want to tear her hair out in grief.
I’m so sorry!She wanted to find him and scream;I don’t know what happened, you must believe me!
She had inquired once as to his whereabouts, in hope of sending an apology or even expanding her circle by just one more person, and was rewarded immediately with a heady slap across the face by the Tsar.
One of his rings had clipped Anastasia beneath the eyebrow, where she still bore a tiny scar. She never spoke of it again.
To most of the court, it seemed as though Anastasia was her father's favorite — a prized possession that he kept at his side at all times.
While St. Petersburg had become a den of sex, wine, and filigree for its patrons and ruling class, it wasn't surprising that a highly Orthodox man would keep his unwed daughter from the festivities. Now, close to thirty, Anastasia was the only one of her siblings unwed.
During the many masked balls and soirees, she was never allowed a dance with a single suitor or visiting nobleman. Her father's obsession with keeping her magic under wraps had molted into a reputation that had accidentally made Anastasia the most desired of all.
"The finest opulence from the Tsar's table that no one seems to be allowed to taste," a lord had sniveled in the dark recesses of a ball one evening.
A spy loyal to the Tsar had overheard him and his tongue was cut out unceremoniously left behind a velvet curtain for some unfortunate young lovers to find during the next masked soiree.
The Tsar had tried on several occasions to arrange Anastasia's marriage, but it was the one time that she was able to put her foot down against her father. She had become a quiet, timid woman, not in the way that one is shy or conserving of their time. Rather, she was perpetually on guard.
There was a fire behind Anastasia's eyes that had been dimmed, while not yet extinguished, and she had the face of a woman silenced.
When the topic of marriage was brought up, her fires roared, if only for a few fleeting moments. She argued — rather effectively — that if she was truly to eradicate herself of the curse, they must be sure it had been exorcised from her before she was sent to a marriage bed.
"A nasty surprise if it is not, don't you think?" Her gaze would turn icy and she would often stare down whichever of her mother's priests had been granted an audience that time.
The threat that her magic would be unleashed and their secret exposed always proved a good enough reason to delay marriage. The lack of matrimony didn’t keep her from learning herself, however.
Anastasia had snuck off when she was a teenager and had enough trysts with stable boys who didn't know who she was, but it behooved her greatly to push a false picture of her ignorance on her father. That worked well enough for many years, but the Tsar grew impatient after a while.
The point of hiding her magic was to keep the gossips and revolutionists at bay, instead of losing interest, the gossips seem to morph like a hydra with every year that the Grand Duchess went unwed.
Anastasia's thoughts often drifted as she read, and found that reading proved a wonderful pretense for avoiding conversation. She gripped her book tighter and flinched, the fresh cuts on her knuckles cracking.
According to the gossip, Anastasia was potentially one of the most pious women at court, due to the amount of time that she spent with religious tutors. It couldn’t be further from the truth when in reality, it was a never-ending audience of the Tsarina's ever eclectic clerics who all promised new ways to test the Grand Duchess's magic and banish it.
Anastasia had no idea how to control it and never called it to the surface, so she could offer no explanation to the discussion. Unfortunately, that meant she could offer no rebuttal to each new “method" of testing her magic, often involving Anastasia enduring various stressors, as the tutors called it, to see if her magic ever clawed its way back to the surface.
