The only person who could get the young prince to behave was his older brother. Nikolai had worshipped Vasily, who could ride and wield a saber, and who was allowed to sit at state functions long after Nikolai was sent off to bed. Vasily was important. Vasily would be king one day.
Everything his brother did, Nikolai wanted to do too. If Vasily rode, Nikolai wanted to ride. When Vasily took fencing lessons, Nikolai begged and pleaded until he was allowed to join. Since Vasily was to study statecraft and geography and military histories, Nikolai insisted he was ready for those lessons too. Nikolai only wanted his brother’s notice. But to Vasily, Nikolai was little more than a constantly gabbling, mop-headed barnacle that insisted on clinging to his royal hull. When Vasily favored Nikolai with a smile or a bit of attention, all was calm waters. But the more Vasily ignored his little brother, the more Nikolai misbehaved.
Tutors took jobs in the wilds of Tsibeya. My nerves, they said. The quiet will be good for them. Nannies gave up their posts to tend to their ailing mothers on the coast. My lungs, they explained. The sea air will be a tonic. Servants wept, the king raged, the queen took to her bed with her headache powders.
One morning, when he was nine, Nikolai arrived at his classroom feeling very excited about the mouse in a jar that he planned to release in his teacher’s bag, only to discover another chair and desk had been set out, and another boy was sitting in them.
“Come meet Dominik,” said his tutor as the dark-haired boy rose and bowed deeply. “He will be getting a bit of education with you.”
Nikolai was surprised but delighted, as he had no companions his own age in the palace at all—though he grew increasingly frustrated as Dominik flinched every time Nikolai tried to speak with him.
“You needn’t be so nervous,” Nikolai whispered. “Mitkin is no fun, but he sometimes tells good stories about the old kings and doesn’t leave out the bloody parts.”
“Yes, moi tsarevich.”
“You can call me Nikolai if you like. Or we could come up with new names. You could be Dominik the … I’m not sure. Have you done any heroic deeds?”
“No, moi tsarevich.”
“Nikolai.”
“Be silent, boys,” said Mitkin, and Dominik jumped again.
But for once, Nikolai stayed quiet. He was busy devising how he might get Dominik to talk more.
When Mitkin stepped out of the room to retrieve a more detailed globe, Nikolai scurried to the front of the classroom and placed the mouse he’d found roaming the eastern wing beneath the fur hat Mitkin had left on his desk.
Dominik looked utterly terrified, but Nikolai was too excited to take much note.
“Wait until you hear the shriek that Mitkin makes,” Nikolai said. “He sounds like a scandalized teakettle.”
Tutor Mitkin did indeed scream, and Nikolai, who had meant to sit stone-faced, couldn’t restrain his own laughter—until Mitkin told Dominik to come to the front of the room and hold out his hands.
The tutor took a slender birch rod from his desk, and as Nikolai looked on in horror, Mitkin slapped it down on Dominik’s palms. Dominik released a small whimper.
“What are you doing?” Nikolai cried. “You must stop!”
Nikolai called for the guards, shouted down the hallway for help, but Mitkin did not stop. He smacked the rod against Dominik’s hands and forearms ten times, until the boy’s flesh was a mass of red welts, and his face was crumpled and wet with tears.
Mitkin set the rod aside. “Every time you act out or misbehave, Dominik will be beaten.”
“That isn’t right! It isn’t fair—the punishment should be mine!” But no one would raise the rod to a royal prince.
Nikolai protested to his mother, his father, anyone who would listen. Nobody seemed to care. “If you do as Tutor Mitkin tells you, there will be no more trouble,” said the king.
“I heard that little whelp mewling,” said Vasily. “It’s just a few lashes. I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss.”
The next day, Nikolai sat quietly in his chair. He broke his silence only once, when Mitkin stepped out of the room.
“I’m sorry for what happened yesterday,” he told Dominik. “I will never let it happen again.”
“It’s what I’m here for, moi tsarevich. Please do not feel badly.”
“You’re here to learn to read and write and add sums, and that is all,” said Nikolai. “I’ll do better. I vow it.”
Nikolai held to his promise. He kept silent every day after that. He did not sneak into the kitchen to steal almond paste. He did not disassemble anything valuable, run through the portrait hall, set any fires. Everyone marveled at the changes wrought in the young prince and applauded Tutor Mitkin for his ingenuity.
What they didn’t know was that, amidst all the quiet and calm, Nikolai and Dominik still somehow managed to become friends. They devised their own code to communicate in their lesson books and built toy boats with working sails that they launched in the abandoned water garden where no one ever ventured. They gave each other titles that changed with every day, some grand—Dominik the Bold, Nikolai the Just, and some less so—Dominik the Farter, Nikolai the Spider Squealer. They learned that as long as they didn’t trouble the calm order of the palace, no one much cared what they did, and that if they appeared to be working hard at their studies, no one bothered to check whether they were memorizing dates or trying to figure out how to build a bomb.
When he was twelve, Nikolai asked for extra reading in chemistry and Kaelish history and retired to the library every afternoon for hours of quiet study. In fact, the reading and essays took him little time at all, and as soon as he’d sped through them, he would disguise himself in peasant roughspun and sneak out of the palace to visit Dominik’s family in the countryside. He worked in the fields, learned to fix handcarts and farm equipment, to milk cows and gentle horses, and when he was thirteen, he took his first slug of home-brewed spirits from a beaten tin cup.
Each night, he fell into bed exhausted, happy to have occupation for the first time in his life, and in the mornings he presented his teachers with flawless work that made them wonder if perhaps Nikolai would become a great scholar. As it turned out, the prince was not a bad child; he just had no gift for remaining idle.
He was happy, but he was not blind. Dominik’s family was granted special privileges because of their son’s status at the palace, and still they barely subsisted on the crops they harvested from their farm. He saw the way their neighbors suffered beneath the burdens of taxes from both their king and the dukes who owned their lands. He heard Dominik’s mother weep when her eldest son was taken for the draft, and during a particularly bad winter, he heard them whisper about their neighbor Lusha’s missing child.
“What happened to Lusha’s baby?” Dominik asked.
“A khitka came for it,” his mother replied. But Nikolai and Dominik were not children anymore, and they knew better than to listen to talk of evil forest spirits.
“She drowned it herself,” Dominik told Nikolai the next day. “She had stopped making milk because her family is starving.”
Even so, things might have continued on that way if Vasily hadn’t discovered Nikolai sneaking back into the palace one night. He was fifteen by then, and years of getting away with deception had made him careless.