Rescued (3 page)

“He was
my
uncle,” Leonid said. “Mine. He is my sorrow to grieve.”

But Leonid accidentally spoke in Russian—and not just Russian, but the garbled dialect that he'd used when he'd first gone to the palace from his tiny village. Probably nobody understood him. Probably nobody understood Leonid at all.

*    *    *

It felt like night—or as much as any time could feel like anything in this nowhere of a no place.

Chip and Katherine were huddled together whispering in one corner of the room, their heads tilted together. Anastasia and Maria were in another corner, their arms linked, Maria's head on Anastasia's shoulder. They were so close that locks of their same-color, same-texture hair coiled together into one long curl dangling between them.

Leonid was alone.

He went to the far corner of the room, to the wall where he'd watched his uncle die.

“Is it possible that you could show me something privately, so secretly and quietly that only I will see and hear?” he asked.

He waited, and just at the moment he was ready to give up, the word “Yes” seemed to whisper from the wall.

It was followed by the word “Da.” The wall was willing to speak Russian to him.

“Show me . . . ,” Leonid decided to work up to what he both wanted and feared. “Show me the moment I first met Clothilde.”

It would mean seeing his uncle again, and that would be hard, but Leonid was ready to risk that.

The blank wall seemed to melt away, and Leonid could see a younger version of himself walking beside his uncle, the man just as tall and muscular and invincible-looking as ever. Leonid was perhaps eleven or twelve. The two of them had just arrived at Tsarkoe Selo from Leonid's village, and Leonid's mouth was agape with wonder at his first glimpses of palaces and Fabergé eggs and luxury. Really, at that point he would have been awed by anything beyond ramshackle wooden huts, but Tsarkoe Selo was the pinnacle of the glories of three hundred years of Romanov rule. The soaring ceilings, the gleaming parquet dance floors, the meticulously tended gardens . . . No wonder Leonid's eyes seemed perpetually on the verge of popping out of his head.

Young Leonid and his uncle Ivan stepped into a drawing room—though of course Leonid wouldn't have known to call it a drawing room then. Across the room, a young girl in a sleek black dress and a frilly apron looked up and smiled.

“Is that . . . is that one of the grand duchesses?” young Leonid whispered to his uncle.

Ivan seemed to be doing his best to hide a smile.

“No, just one of the maids,” he whispered back. “See her feather duster?”

Leonid had not. Not exactly. As much as he'd noticed the feathery thing in Clothilde's hand, he'd thought it was yet another adornment, an oversize bracelet perhaps—some luxurious fashion that had not yet reached his village.

And, indeed, no one used feather dusters there.

“Even maids at the palace are that beautiful?” young Leonid asked, his eyes widening with amazement.

Ivan laughed.

“This one is,” he said.

Clothilde
was
beautiful; it wasn't just Leonid's memory playing tricks on him. Against her crisp black dress, her long, dark hair glistened in the sunlight coming through the perfectly polished window. Her green eyes were warm with laughter, because of course she'd heard Ivan and Leonid's whispers. Her smile was more for Ivan than for Leonid—Leonid hadn't seen that then, but he did now. It didn't matter. Her eyes stayed kind when they alighted on Leonid in all his gawky, gaping awkwardness.

She walked toward Ivan and Leonid, and gave an exaggerated curtsy. Then she reached over and boldly brushed the hair from Leonid's forehead.

“Fresh from the countryside, I see,” she said. “I'm Clothilde. Pleased to meet you.”

“Fresh from France?” Ivan ventured to guess.

Clothilde laughed, in a way Leonid hadn't understood back then. There was an edge to it.

“That is what the tsarina—and I—would like everyone to believe,” she said.

Leonid would learn later that Clothilde had once been an ordinary Russian Masha, but it was more convenient to take on a French name and accent. French maids made more money; they were less likely to be fired, no matter how bad they were at dusting or pouring tea.

Back then, fresh from the countryside, Leonid could never have imagined trying to be anyone but himself. He never would have imagined that he
could
be anyone but himself: an ordinary peasant boy.

Leonid got lost in his thoughts—he missed whatever Ivan said back to Clothilde. He'd probably missed half the conversation the first time around too.

But he still remembered what Clothilde had said to him next.

On the wall, she was turning toward the impossibly young, naïve peasant Leonid. She was about to speak. . . .

“Be careful here, little country boy,” she said. “Don't go falling for every pretty girl you see.
I
saw you first.”

Leonid could remember how that had made him feel when he first heard those words. He felt
claimed
. He felt like Clothilde was really saying,
I've fallen in love with you just as much as you've fallen in love with me. This is my promise: We'll be together forever. We were fated for this moment. We were fated to be as one.

Now Leonid saw how completely Clothilde had been teasing him. It had been cruel, really, to flirt so outrageously with such an innocent.

But what if we were fated?
Leonid wondered.
What if Clothilde somehow sensed it, even then?

Could they still be fated now? Could they have been meant to share something that transcended even Leonid being yanked out of time?

“Stop,” Leonid told the wall, because he remembered that he'd stumbled over his own feet walking away from Clothilde that first day, and he didn't need to watch that. Also, he needed to do something before he lost his nerve. “Show me where Clothilde is right now.”

“There isn't any such thing as ‘now' in a time hollow,” the wall whispered back to him.

“I mean in 1918,” Leonid corrected himself. “In July. The day I . . . left.”

The scene on the wall changed. The palace drawing room disappeared; a cramped, dirty hovel appeared in its place.

It took Leonid a moment to recognize Clothilde. She wore a ragged dress now, her hair held back with a tattered ribbon. She stood by a pot hung over an open flame, and even without being able to see into the pot, Leonid was pretty sure it would contain nothing but watery soup. Clothilde was so thin Leonid could see the outline of her ribs through her dress when she bent over the pot. She had hollows in her cheeks that seemed deep enough to drink from.

Quick death by gunfire or slow death by starvation . . . were those the only choices for the tsar's servants after the tsar lost power?
Leonid wondered.

No—there was also what had happened to Leonid.

*    *    *

It turned out it was possible to talk with Alexei and the other injured boy, Jonah, even though they were recovering from their bullet wounds in a hospital in the far-distant future, and Leonid and the others were outside of time entirely.

Everyone crowded together in front of the center section of the wall, where they were going to see the two boys. The three girls jostled their way closest to the screen; Chip and Leonid held back.

“They're all concerned about their brothers,” Chip said with a shrug. At Leonid's blank look, he added, “Oh—didn't you know that Katherine is Jonah's sister?”

“No,” Leonid said, clipping off the word more than he meant to. “Nobody told me that.”

Chip shook his head and rolled his eyes a little.

“I guess there wasn't really time when we first met you to say things like, ‘Hello, my name is Chip Winston. I'm thirteen years old, and I live in Liston, Ohio. Who are you?'” he said.

Leonid had not known that Chip had a last name. Liston, Ohio, sounded like a disease to Leonid, but he guessed it was probably the name of a place in America.

“And it's like there's too much time in a time hollow,” Chip went on. “You think of things you should say or do, but then you're like,
Eh, I can do that later. What's it going to matter? Now, later, it's all the same
.”

Leonid had had that problem too. He'd thought it was just because he had seen people die, just because he had lost his homeland and his home time.

“Do
you
have any brothers or sisters?” Leonid asked Chip.

A shadow crossed Chip's face.

“I grew up thinking I was an only child in the twenty-first century,” he said. “Then when I went back in time, I met my brother and five sisters. My brother, Alex, was rescued with me, and I talk to him every day. I never knew my sisters very well, but . . . I miss them. They would have loved the twenty-first century. There was so much that wasn't possible for them in the 1400s. . . .”

Leonid braced himself for Chip to say,
What about you?
Leonid planned to say,
It was just me and my uncle
, because it would not do to talk about the happy little family he'd been part of at the palace: not just his uncle, but his aunt Manya and the three little cousins as well.

But before Chip could say anything else, Alexei and Jonah appeared on the wall. It looked like they were just on the other side of a window—an open window. Maria reached out as if she planned to touch Alexei's face; she jumped back when her fingers brushed only solid wall.

“It's so good to see all of you!” Alexei exclaimed.

“We're
not
going to get you out of trouble if you've been misbehaving,” Maria said. She seemed to be trying hard to sound like a stern, reproving older sister, even as she gazed adoringly at her brother.

Alexei lifted his hand like he was taking a pledge.

“God's honest truth,” he said. “I'm so grateful just to be alive. I've turned over a new leaf.”

“What if we kind of miss the bad old Alexei?” Anastasia teased. “I don't want you tricking me into going back in time ever again. But something like a toad slipped in my bed wouldn't be so awful.”

“Because that would mean we were together again,” Maria added. “And . . . that you were healthy enough to make trouble. You look good, Alyosha.”

“I feel good,” Alexei said. “Those bullets were
nothing
.”

For a moment, he looked like the same old Alexei who bragged that his toy soldiers could beat Leonid's toy soldiers every time. But then his face turned more serious. It was like watching him become an entirely different person.

“You're going to have to start calling me Gavin, not Alexei,” he said. “And I promise, I'm going to live as Gavin in a way that makes me worthy of how Katherine risked her life to save me.”

Leonid saw Chip squeeze Katherine's hand; he saw Maria and Anastasia nodding, too overcome to speak.

“He's even promised to stop snoring at night!” Jonah said, rolling his eyes and giving Alexei/Gavin a light, joking shove.

Alexei/Gavin did not even wince at the touch. He just shoved Jonah back and threw his hands in the air in mocking surrender.

Even though Alexei/Gavin was wearing a loose-fitting cotton shirt, Leonid could tell by the way it hung and by the way Alexei/Gavin moved that the boy no longer had huge, bulbous, painfully swollen joints; his elbows and wrists were shaped just like anyone else's.

“They did cure you, Alexei,” Leonid blurted out. “Praise be to God!”

“No, they—” Alexei/Gavin glanced down at his normal-looking body, and seemed to understand what Leonid meant. “This is how I have always looked as Gavin. Even in the twenty-first century, they have treatment for my hemophilia. I still
have
the disease, but I don't suffer from it like I did when I was Alexei. I understand the difference now.”

“Oh,” Leonid said. “That's good.”

Jonah and Katherine and Chip started talking then, something about trying to figure out how they could “call” each other regularly every day when Jonah and Alexei/Gavin were part of normal time and all the others were outside it. The time-travel concepts were far beyond what Leonid could grasp. He wasn't really paying attention, anyhow.

Because all he could think was,
Alexei won't need me in the twenty-first century. Nobody will need me there
.

Of course it had been worth it for Katherine to risk her life to go back in time and save Alexei, Anastasia, Maria, and Chip. They were royalty; they were important. History would remember them forever.

But what could Leonid do that made it worth saving him?

*    *    *

JB came back.

One minute there was nothing in the center of the room; the next moment the man from the future stood there as solid and real as anyone.

“JB!” Katherine exclaimed, jumping up and running over to hug him.

Chip also rose to shake JB's hand. Anastasia, Maria, and Leonid hung back.

JB looked around, raising an eyebrow at the screens everyone had been clustered around.

“Interesting choices,” he observed.

Chip had been showing Katherine scenes from England in the 1400s—all his pretty blond princess sisters looked happy enough with their lives. One had even become queen.

Maria and Anastasia had been watching their parents' courtship back in the late 1800s, and Leonid had been timidly hovering behind them, trying to decide whether he needed to hide the fact that he was watching too. It was so strange to see the tsar and tsarina as young people shyly gazing into each other's eyes. It was so strange to see the tsarina smiling and untroubled with pain; to see the tsar unburdened and unstooped.

“So often royal marriages are only for political reasons, bringing together a husband and wife who have nothing in common,” Maria said. “It is . . . comforting . . . to see how our parents always had more than that. To see how much they loved each other from the start.”