Chapter 4: The Daughter's Shore
The summons came on a Tuesday, in the form of a footman, which was itself a message. No one summoned the Supreme Divine Empress by footman. Catherine read the card twice: Your daughter requests her mother. Not Majesty. Not Empress. Mother.
She went. She told no one she was going, which was also a message.
Elizabeth's apartments looked west, and the setting sun came through the tall windows and lay along the parquet in long brass-colored bars. The room smelled of almonds and candle smoke. Fersen's sword belt hung on a hook by the door, and his boots stood under a chair, muddy to the ankle, a husband's boots in an empress's rooms.
Elizabeth stood at the window with her back to it, so the light came through her hair. She was nineteen now, one month a wife, and she had put off her slippers, Catherine noticed. Barefoot on her own parquet, in her own apartments, and the whole point of the summons standing in the door with her coat still on.
"Sit, Mama," Elizabeth said.
Catherine sat. She chose the chair without a cushion, the harder one, and folded her hands, and waited. It had been thirty years since anyone in Europe had asked her to wait.
"You took your time coming," Elizabeth said. "I felt you decide. That is the first thing I have to tell you. I felt you decide, from across the palace, the way I used to feel Maria Theresa's doubt crossing three hundred miles. It took you an hour and a half to talk yourself into coming, and I felt every minute of it."
"I read the card," Catherine said. "The card said mother."
"The card said what I meant." Elizabeth came away from the window and sat opposite her, on the cushioned chair, and drew one foot up under her. "Fersen is in the firing range with Paul. They are shooting at bottles. He knows why I sent for you and he is not happy about the bottles."
"Tell me."
Elizabeth was quiet for a moment. Her fingers went to the arm of the chair and pressed, once, the way her father pressed his fist to his chest.
"A month ago I bent the Metropolitan's chaplain by accident. I only looked at him. He wept and kissed the floor and had to be carried out." She said it flatly, a report. "That was nothing new. It was my power doing what my power does. But it came out differently, Mama. It did not go at him the way mine goes at people. It went at him the way Fersen goes at my foot."
Catherine felt something shift under her ribs, the old seam, fear and pride.
"Say it more plainly."
"The wave has changed direction. It still comes from me. But it no longer arrives as command." Elizabeth leaned forward. "The chaplain knelt because he wanted to kneel. He wanted it the way a man wants water. There was no pressure in it at all. That is what I felt when I felt you deciding whether to come. Not your will bending toward me. Your desire doing it, honestly, as if it had always been yours."
The sun had moved one bar further along the floor. Catherine watched it and said nothing, and Elizabeth let her say nothing, which no one in Europe did.
"The sovereigns have noticed," Catherine said at last. "Say that part too."
"Maria Theresa wrote to you. I know she did, because Paul showed me the letter before you sealed it." Elizabeth's mouth twitched. "She wrote the same thing to me a week later, in plainer words. She says the courts of Europe are reporting a change. Ambassadors coming home from here with no memory of compulsion and a settled love of Russia. Men who knelt to me at the birthday and cannot say why, and do not feel broken about it. She says, and I quote her, that the mother breaks and the daughter plants."
"She always did like an epigram." Catherine unfolded her hands. "And you. How does it feel from inside?"
Elizabeth looked at her own bare foot on the parquet.
"Smaller," she said. "And larger. Both. I cannot push a room the way I could at my birthday. I tried it last week in the council chamber and half of them only felt a warmth. But the ones I touch now, I touch all the way down, and they stay touched, and they are glad." She looked up. "Do you understand what I am telling you?"
"I think I am refusing to, until you say it aloud."
"Marriage changed it. Not marriage in general." A pause, very short. "Chosen devotion. His kiss is not the power and it is not against the power. It goes into the power. Every night, into it, and it comes out the other side as this. I did not ask for it and I cannot undo it, and I have spent a month trying to decide whether to tell you or run."
Catherine sat very still. Thirty years of a continent kneeling, and her first instinct, quick as a knife, was the old one: open the door in herself, exert, and feel whether her daughter's will still bent. She let the instinct die where it stood. That, too, was a message.
"Try it on me," she said.
"Mama."
"You came to me as a daughter and you came to me as an empress and you have not decided which one I should answer. I am telling you. Try it on me, and we will both find out which one is in this room."
Elizabeth stood. She stood the way Fersen had stood before the great chair, unhurried, and the sun was behind her and her face was in shadow. Catherine felt the air change. There was no weight in it, none of the honey-slow pressure she had poured over Petersburg and Vienna and London, no flood. It was warmth. It was the feeling of a fire lit in a cold room by someone who wanted you warm, and Catherine's chest ached with it, suddenly, the ache of being wanted without being taken.
The warmth reached for her and she felt her own knees weigh their choice.
"Stop," Catherine said.
It stopped. Instantly, completely, the way a held breath is released. Elizabeth stood in the shadow with her hands open at her sides.
"You stopped it on my word," Catherine said. "Thirty years ago I could not have said stop to a wave of mine, and neither could anyone."
"I know," Elizabeth said. "That is the third thing I came to tell you, and it is the one that frightened me." She sat down again, and her voice dropped. "It only works on you so far, Mama. It came to you and it touched you and you felt it, and I stopped it because you told me to. But for one heartbeat before you spoke, my knees wanted to go down. Mine. I have knelt to no one in my life, and for one heartbeat I wanted to."
The room was quiet. Down the corridor, faintly, came the crack of Fersen's pistol and the small far sound of a bottle going.
"So," Catherine said. "The question before us is whether this is a threat to the realm or its future."
"You first," Elizabeth said. "You are the one who built it. What is it?"
Catherine looked at her daughter, barefoot in the last of the sun, the one will in Europe her power had never been able to lift, and she found she was smiling, and she did not know at which part.
"It is a wager," she said. "Maria Theresa taught me the word. Come to the map with me, and bring your husband's boots inside before the servants talk."
Elizabeth fetched the boots and set them under the chair, toes to the wall, and the smallness of the gesture went through Catherine like a needle. The Empress of all Europe's daughter, tidying a husband's muddy boots because her mother had told her to. No wave had ever produced that.
The map hung on a stand by the cold stove, the whole continent of it, every border drawn in Catherine's colors now. They stood over it together. Elizabeth put one finger on Moscow and one on Paris.
"Thirty years to build this," she said. "And it holds because the kneelers stay knelt. If my power arrives as desire instead of command, the kneelers will not stay knelt. They will stand up and love the next warm thing that comes along."
"Maria Theresa stood up under the old power and never loved anything," Catherine said. "She is still writing me letters I answer in private. The old power did not hold her either. It only held her posture."
"Then what holds a realm, Mama?"
"Having something worth choosing," Catherine said, "and a family that chooses it in front of everyone, every generation, unasked." She looked at her daughter. "Your chaplain did not feel broken. Your ambassadors come home settled. I think you have not weakened the realm. I think you have finally finished it."
Elizabeth did not answer at once. She moved her finger from Paris to London, then back, tracing the sea crossing, the road her mother had walked on foot at the head of a court.
"There is a fourth thing," she said. "I did not put it on the list, because I do not know how to say it and stay polite."
"Say it impolitely. I am your mother before I am your empress tonight. I chose that chair."
Elizabeth turned from the map. The sun was nearly gone; the candles had been lit by someone, sometime, and the light had gone gold on her face. She looked older than nineteen and very like Peter.
"The power is learning," she said. "Not me. The power. It went out at you tonight and it touched you and I stopped it, and since then it has been quiet in me, quieter than it has been since I was born. It is waiting. I think it is deciding something, and I do not know what."
Catherine felt the seam under her ribs pull tight. "Deciding."
"It is not a person. I know it is not a person. But it came out of me at my birthday and it broke a room, and now it comes out of me and plants gardens, and tonight it touched the one will it cannot lift, and stopped on your word." Elizabeth's hands had gone to the back of the chair, gripping it the way her father gripped his fist to his chest. "It has never stopped on anyone's word before. Not mine."
"Then it has met its sovereign," Catherine said, and heard in her own voice how much she wanted that to be true, and how little she knew it.
Elizabeth let go of the chair. She crossed the parquet and stood in front of her mother, barefoot, her face half in candlelight and half out.
"There is one way to find out," she said. "And I am not commanded. I want to say that before everything, so it is on the record and you hear it plainly. No one commands this. I choose it."
"Choose what?" Catherine asked, though she knew.
Elizabeth went down.
She did not go the way the sovereigns went, all that practiced smooth ceremony of Moscow. She went down the way her husband had gone down in the great hall, one knee and then both, and then lower, onto the parquet itself, and she took the hem of Catherine's skirt and lifted it from her mother's slipper with both hands, careful, the gesture of a lady-in-waiting a hundred years dead.
"Mother," she said, to the slipper, "and Majesty. Both. You asked which one is in this room."
She bent her head and pressed her mouth to the toe of the slipper.
The warmth went out of Elizabeth like a door opening in a furnace wall. Catherine felt it come up through the floor, through the chair legs, into her own hands, and it did not push. It arrived the way arrivals happen when they have been longed for. And inside the warmth, unmistakable, was the thing Elizabeth had tried to describe: the power itself, attending. Learning. It moved over Catherine the way a great dog moves over a new master, reading, tasting, finding the shape of the hand.
And it found the shape, and it knew her.
Catherine's breath left her slowly. Thirty years of pouring herself over kings and cities and never once feeling a power arrive at her feet and recognize her. The warmth settled around her ankles like a held hem. It did not ask her to kneel. It could not. She felt it try, in its vast dumb learning way, and she felt it find the wall that was not a wall, the plain fact of her, mother and supreme sovereign, the one who had carried this thing into the world in her body and nursed it at her own breast, and the fact closed over it like water.
It bent the knee.
Not Catherine. The power. She felt it go down inside her daughter's kiss, felt the whole enormous force of Elizabeth's stronger, stranger, more commanding gift put its forehead to the parquet of the room and stay there, above her slipper and beneath her throne, and it would stay there as long as Catherine lived, and she knew that now the way she knew her own name.
"Elizabeth," she said. Her voice was not even, and she did not try to make it even.
Elizabeth drew off her mother's slipper. She set the bare foot on her own knee where she knelt, cradled the heel in one hand, and kissed the arch, long and warm and deliberate, a kiss with no bell anywhere in it. Then the instep, and the ball of the foot, and each toe in its turn, slow, thorough, a daughter learning scripture by mouth in the family way. Catherine sat above her with her hands loose in her lap and felt her eyes sting, and did not wipe them, because there was no one in the room to mind.
"Do you feel it?" Elizabeth asked against her skin. "Do you feel it watching?"
"I feel it," Catherine said. "It is kneeling. It will always kneel. It came out of me and it will go down to me, stronger than I am and lower than I am, for as long as I live."
"And after?"
"After, it will be yours," Catherine said. "And you will find out what kneels to you."
Elizabeth rested her forehead against her mother's ankle, breathing her in, and the warmth pulsed once around them both, patient, vast, schooled.
Down the corridor a bottle broke on the firing range, and a man laughed, and neither woman in the candlelit room moved until Catherine, drawing a long slow breath, lifted her foot from her daughter's knee and set it down, and said, "Now. The map, and then dinner, and you will tell Paul nothing and Maria Theresa everything, in your own words, in the plain ones."
Elizabeth rose. She knelt no more, but the warmth stayed low in the room, at ankle height, all evening.
They ate dinner off a side table, the two of them alone, and Elizabeth talked about Fersen's terrible marksmanship and Paul's worse one, and nothing was said about power until the sweets came. Then Catherine set down her fork.
"How far does the warmth go?"
"I do not know. I have never walked to the edge of it." Elizabeth broke a wafer. "It used to end where the honey ended. Now I honestly cannot say."
"Then tomorrow we will say it properly. You will sit in the council chamber and do nothing at all, and I will put a man on every border with a sealed report and a fast horse."
The reports came back over three weeks. Prussia, warm. Sweden, warm. The sea crossing puzzled the naval men; a thing that moved like honey in winter had somehow crossed salt water, and the Danish islands reported a settled love of Russia among fishermen who had never seen a Russian face. Catherine had the maps recolored and said nothing to the court.
Then, on a Thursday in November, the Ottoman courier arrived, and he had not been sent by anyone.
He was a young dragoman from the embassy in Petersburg, and he had ridden two hundred miles off his own decision to deliver one sentence to the throne room. He fell on the parquet at the foot of the dais before the guards could decide whether to strike him down. His cloak was crusted with road mud and frost.
"Majesty," he said into the floor. "The Porte sends no letter, because the Porte cannot write what has happened. I came because someone had to say it aloud. Constantinople is warm."
Catherine let him kneel there, shaking, while the heralds decided whether an unsent messenger was an insult or a gift. "Say the rest of it," she said.
"The Sultan woke on the feast of the Prophet's birthday and found his household praying toward the north. Not commanded. Praying. The ulema gathered and could find no sin in it, because no one had been compelled. The Grand Vizier says, and I memorized his words, that the Empress's daughter has done what three centuries of janissaries could not do. She has made the empire want."
The hall was very quiet. Catherine looked down the length of it at the man on the floor, and felt, at her ankles, the warmth that had followed her out of her daughter's rooms three weeks before and never quite left.
"Elizabeth," she said, and her daughter came up the aisle from where she had been standing among the courtiers, and the warmth rose with her like water in a lock.
"Did you send anything?" Catherine asked her. "A letter, a gift, an envoy, a wish?"
"Nothing. I have not thought of Constantinople since the summer." Elizabeth stood at the dais step and looked at the courier, and her face had gone very still. "Mama, I felt it cross. Last month, one night. I woke and it was out of me, the whole low warmth of it, gone east like a tide. I assumed it had gone into the garden. I did not know there was a further edge to go past."
"Europe was not the edge," Catherine said. "Europe was the wall of the garden, and your power has put its hands on the wall and found it low."
The courier, still on his face, spoke without being bidden, which was itself the new thing. "Majesty, the Vizier's words were that if the daughter plants, the father of nations should kneel to the gardener's house. He asks permission to say it to your face. He is coming himself. He is on the road now with forty riders and no army behind them."
"An embassy of forty riders to the Empress of Europe," Catherine said, "from an empire that has fought Russia in eleven wars."
"Twelve," said the courier. "He says eleven is how they count them and they are wrong."
Elizabeth laughed, one short breath through her nose, and Catherine did not. She was doing arithmetic of a different kind. If the warmth went east without being sent, it had gone wherever it pleased, and it would go south into Persia and on past Persia, and there was no treaty in her archive that covered a thing that traveled on its own.
"Stand up," she told the courier. He rose, and stood swaying, and she saw he was weeping without shame at having been spoken to by name of rank twice.
"You will eat in the servants' hall and sleep, and tomorrow you will tell the story again to my son, who keeps the records. The words of the Vizier you will say to him word for word." She paused. "And the twelfth war is noted."
When he had been led out, mother and daughter were left at the dais with the court pretending not to watch, and Catherine drew her daughter aside into the small window behind the throne.
"It went without you," she said. "That is the thing to be afraid of. The birthday wave was mine in you. This was nobody's."
"Or it was mine and I am larger than I was." Elizabeth looked out the window at the frozen Neva. "You said it would be mine after you. It may have decided not to wait for after."
"Then it has opinions, and I have spent my life teaching opinions where to stand."
Elizabeth turned from the window. "There is a simpler reading, Mama. It watched me choose Fersen. It watched me kneel to you. It has learned that kneeling by choice holds better than kneeling by force, and it is practicing. It sent itself east to find out what happens when a whole empire is warm with no army at all behind it." She smiled, and the smile was Peter's exactly. "The Vizier is coming with forty riders and no soldiers. That is the experiment's result arriving to be read."
Catherine felt the pull of it, the old hunger and the new one braided together. An empire that wanted instead of obeyed. A realm that held with nothing holding it.
"Then we will receive him in the great hall," she said, "barefoot protocol, the old rite, and we will see whether he kneels because he must or because the road here was warm." She took her daughter's arm, and the warmth came up through the parquet to meet them both. "And Elizabeth. You will stand beside me on the dais when he enters, and neither of us will push one inch. If Constantinople kneels tonight, it kneels on its own knees, and I want to watch its face while it decides."
The Vizier was eleven days coming. Catherine spent them in preparation, and the eleventh in argument.
She assembled the family in the small council room on the morning of the arrival: Paul with his ledger, Peter in his best coat, Alexei at the door, and Fersen, who had not been summoned and came anyway, because his wife was going and he went where she went.
"Barefoot protocol," Catherine said. "The old rite, performed in full, before the whole court. And no pushing. Not from me and not from you, Elizabeth. If Constantinople kneels, it kneels warm."
"And if it does not kneel?" Paul asked, pen already moving.
"Then it kneels cold, and we have learned something worth the ceremony." Catherine looked at her daughter. "There is another matter. The warmth has been following you for a month. It rose with you at the dais. If the Vizier goes down on the parquet and your power decides to attend the moment, I want it attended properly."
"Meaning what, Mama?"
"Meaning I do not know, and that is the problem."
It was Fersen who spoke. He had been standing at the wall with his arms folded, and he unfolded them now.
"You told me once there are two kinds of kneeling, and the knees know the difference. Your power knows it now too. It learned watching me." He crossed the room and stood beside Elizabeth, not touching her. "Put me where the kneeling happens. If the warmth comes out of you, it will come to where you are looking. Look at me."
Elizabeth turned her face up to him. "You are not frightened of it."
"I stood in it all winter," Fersen said. "It knows me. It went around me then and it will go around me now, and if it does not, it will find a man who chose his wife before it chose her, and that will confuse it, and confusion buys seconds. Seconds are what you need. I am offering seconds."
Catherine watched her son-in-law the way she had once watched Kaunitz, measuring the grain of a will. The offer was not brave. It was arithmetic. She had built a continent on less.
"You will stand at the foot of the dais," she said. "Beside your wife. That is an order, and also it is nothing, because you were going to anyway."
"Yes," Fersen said.
The hall received the Vizier at the fourth hour, with the candles lit against the early dark. He was a spare man, grey-bearded, in robes that had crossed three borders, and he walked the length of that hall on his own feet at his own pace with forty riders somewhere behind him and no army in the world at his back. The court held its breath in rows. Catherine sat the throne. Elizabeth stood at her right hand, and Fersen at the dais step below them both.
The Vizier stopped at the prescribed mark. He looked up the length of the dais at the two of them, mother and daughter, and something moved across his face that was not fear.
"Supreme Divine Empress," he said. "I have ridden through countries that love you and countries that obey you, and I can tell the difference from the road. I have come from one that woke up loving you. My Sultan sends his submission with no conditions, which he has never sent in his life, and I have come to perform the rite in person because he said a thing I will repeat exactly." The old man folded his hands. "He said, tell her the second empire has kissed first, and ask her what the third empire will do."
Catherine felt it before the words finished. The warmth at her ankles rose. It came up off the parquet like heat off a stove and it went toward the Vizier, unhurried, and it was not Elizabeth pushing. Elizabeth's face had gone white; her hands were locked behind her back; she was doing nothing at all. The power was doing it. Attending the moment, as she had feared, and arriving uninvited at the kneeling of an empire.
The Vizier swayed. He went to one knee, and then both, and his forehead came toward the parquet, and it was warm, all of it warm, no pressure anywhere in the hall, and Catherine saw Elizabeth's knees give a fraction of an inch. The warmth had turned. Part of it was coming back up the dais, toward the throne, toward her mother, and Elizabeth was standing in the path of her own gift and her own knees were weighing a choice.
Fersen moved. One step. He put his hand flat against his wife's back, between the shoulder blades, the heel of a man steadying a rifle, and he said nothing. He did not say her name. He simply stood where he had stood all winter, in the one place in Europe her power had never entered, and it entered the space around him and stopped.
Catherine felt the whole thing settle. The warmth lay down. It went flat along the floor like water finding its level, and it pooled at the Vizier's knees and at Fersen's boots and went no further.
The Vizier's forehead touched the parquet. He held it there, and when he rose to speak his voice was steady.
"Majesty. I knelt and no one moved in me. I want that written."
"It is written," Catherine said. "It was written the moment you said it."
Elizabeth had not moved. Fersen's hand was still on her back. She turned her head and looked at him, and her face was undone in exactly the way it had been undone in the great hall at her wedding.
"What did you do?" she asked him.
"Nothing. I stood here. That is the entire trick and you married it."
Catherine rose from the throne, and the hall went down with her still rising, and she stood above the three of them, the empress, the daughter, the Swedish captain with his hand flat on his wife's spine, and she did the arithmetic she had been doing since the courier came.
The power had surged. It had turned toward the throne. It had been stopped by a man with no gift at all, by absence, by the single room in Europe it could not enter, and it had stopped because Elizabeth had somewhere to look.
"You are the balance," she said to Fersen. "Say you understand what I am naming."
"A fulcrum, Majesty."
"More than that. Her power learned kneeling from you and learned choosing from you, and now it surges when empires kneel, and it must be stood against by the thing it cannot move." She looked at her daughter. "He will stand at your side. In the council chamber, on the dais, at every rite, from this day until you are on the throne and after. Where she is, you are. That is not a request and it is not an order and I have never said that sentence before in my life."
Fersen bowed, the small bow of an officer to a superior, not the deep one of a subject, and Catherine noticed the difference and let it stand.
"Then I have a condition," Fersen said.
Catherine raised an eyebrow. Thirty years, and a Swedish captain was negotiating.
"When she is Empress, and I am old, and the power is hers and larger than it is today," Fersen said, "someone must be able to tell her no and be believed. Paul can do it. I can do it. Between us we are two, and two is thin." He looked at his wife. "So we raise the next one deliberately. A third rite, if she will allow it. The rite of standing."
Elizabeth laughed, and it came out cracked. "You want to found an order of men whose whole duty is to disagree with me."
"I want there to always be one man in the room your power goes around," Fersen said. "I will not live forever."
The hall was silent. The warmth lay low along the parquet, at ankle height, listening, and Catherine felt it listening, and she felt the shape of the thing he was proposing settle into place the way a keel settles into a hull.
"Granted," she said. "Draw up the statutes with Paul tonight. And Fersen. Stand up straight. Your wife's knees are still deciding."
He straightened. Elizabeth drew a breath, and her shoulders came down from where they had been, and the warmth at the foot of the dais went still and quiet and stayed there, and the Vizier of the Ottoman Empire knelt on his own knees in the middle of it, waiting to be raised, entirely glad.
Catherine raised the Vizier with her own hand, which had not been done for a sovereign in thirty years, and led him to the long table and fed him from the imperial plate. He ate little and watched much, and when he left he went down the aisle backward, one step at a time, so as not to turn his back on the throne or, Catherine suspected, on the warmth that lay along the parquet like a patient cat.
The court emptied. The candles were put out by degrees. Then it was only the family again, in the small chamber behind the throne where Catherine had received Peter thirty years ago and broken him, though no one alive but Peter and Alexei remembered the second part of that.
She had them all in: Paul with his ledger, Peter in his good coat, Fersen and Elizabeth standing together with his hand still at the small of her back, and Alexei at the inner door, where the light did not reach his face.
"Sit," Catherine said. "All of you. What I have next is not a matter of state."
They sat. Paul closed the ledger, which he did only when something was about to be said that he must not write down.
"You have given me the rite of standing," Catherine said to Fersen. "One man in the room the power goes around. Two, with Paul. You are right that two is thin, and you are wrong about how to thicken it." She looked at her daughter, and then at her son-in-law, and let the silence do the first part of the work. "Blood."
Elizabeth's chin came up. "The power is not in the blood. It is in me."
"It is in you because it is in the blood. My mother had a flicker of it and never knew. I had the whole of it. You have more than the whole." Catherine folded her hands. "Fersen stood in your wave all winter and did not bend. That is a will, and wills breed true in his family; his father held a fortress for three days against a king. Put a will like that under a gift like yours, and the children will come out standing and gifted both."
"You are saying I should have children for the sake of the power," Elizabeth said, and her voice had gone flat the way the chaplain's report had gone flat.
"I am saying nothing of the kind." Catherine leaned forward. "I am saying you should have children for the sake of the house, and the power will take care of itself, because it always has. Listen to me. I did not have you for the realm. I had you because Peter had grown kind and I had grown lonely, and I will swear to that on any altar on the continent. The realm came after. It always comes after, and it is always welcome."
Paul cleared his throat. "The succession, then. If there is a daughter."
"There will be a daughter." Catherine said it as she said few things, plainly and without ornament. "The warmth kneels to me and it will kneel to Elizabeth, and one day it will kneel to that girl. She is the heir to the heir, and the realm will love her before she is born, because Elizabeth's love arrives in advance now. That is settled and I did not settle it."
"And sons," Fersen said.
"Sons." Catherine turned to him. "Sons who are not gifted, or gifted low, and stand anyway. Sons who learn the rite of standing at their father's knee and Paul's, and who keep the divine power in check when its knees are deciding. A daughter to carry the fire. Sons to bank it. That is the shape of the thing, and it is a good shape, and I have been trying to draw it for thirty years without knowing what was missing."
"Which was?" Peter asked, from the wall, softly.
"Choice on all sides," Catherine said. "You gave me that thirty years ago and I did not know the price of it until tonight."
Elizabeth had gone to the window. Her face was half toward the room and half away, and the candle caught the line of her jaw, which was Catherine's jaw. "You understand what you are asking," she said. "Not the dynasty. The arithmetic. A daughter of mine will have what I have, and larger, if the pattern holds. You are telling me to hand the world to a child who does not exist yet."
"I am telling you to raise one who can hold it," Catherine said. "The alternative is a stranger who inherits it by accident, and I have watched enough accidents on thrones to last both our lives."
The room was quiet. Down the corridor a clock struck the half hour, ten strokes, and Alexei shifted his weight at the door, the only sound he ever permitted himself.
"It will not be commanded," Elizabeth said at last. "You taught me the sentence. No one commands this. I choose it, and he chooses it, and the knees know the difference."
"I would not dream of commanding it," Catherine said. "I commanded nothing in this room tonight except the sitting."
Fersen laughed, once, and went to his wife at the window. He did not take her arm. He stood beside her and looked out at the frozen Neva with her, and the two of them had a silent conference in the glass that Catherine watched with an interest she did not trouble to hide.
"A daughter first," Fersen said. "Named for?"
"You," Elizabeth said. "Not your name. Your family's, the Swedish shape of it. She will be the first Empress of Europe with a foreign name, and everyone will ask why, and we will tell them it is because her father stood."
"That will irritate Maria Theresa into her nineties," Paul said, and wrote nothing, but his mouth did the thing it did instead.
Catherine rose. Her knees ached the way they ached after long ceremonies, and she pressed her palm flat on the arm of the chair and stood anyway, because there was one more thing and she wanted it said standing.
"There is a matter of timing," she said, "and I will be blunt, because the two of you are married and I am old and bluntness is the last luxury of the aged. The warmth follows Elizabeth. It attends her. If she is with child, it will attend that too, from the first month, and I want to be alive and on the throne when it does. I want to feel what it does with a grandchild in her body, and I want to be there to teach the creature manners before it teaches them to us." She looked at Fersen. "So. How soon, Captain?"
Fersen turned from the window. He looked at his wife, and his wife looked back, and something passed between them that had no power in it at all and was nonetheless the strongest thing in the room.
"By spring," he said, "if she consents."
"I consented a month ago," Elizabeth said, "and I have been waiting for you to stop shooting bottles and notice."
Paul put his face in his ledger so hard that the binding cracked. Peter made a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a sob and pressed his fist to his chest. At the door, Alexei looked very hard at the middle distance.
Catherine sat back down. She found her eyes stinging again, and this time there were people in the room, and she let them sting.
"Then it is settled, and none of it was commanded," she said. "Paul, you will draw up no statutes and write nothing. This is the house, and the house keeps its own records." She picked up her wine, which someone had refreshed, and lifted it. "To the daughter. To the sons after her. To the one man in the room the power goes around, and to the woman who chose him."
They drank. The warmth lay low along the floor, at ankle height, and it had gone, Catherine noticed, very still and attentive, the way it went when something was being learned.
It was already, she understood, practicing for the child.
Spring came late that year, and with it the news, delivered to the throne room by Elizabeth herself, who walked the length of it barefoot on her own decision and said it plainly to the assembled court.
"I am with child."
The warmth went through the hall like sun through glass. Not a push. A gladness. Half the court wept and could not say why, and the other half knelt, and Elizabeth stood in the middle of it with her hands folded and let them, because there was nothing to stop.
Catherine felt the change before the heralds finished announcing it. The warmth that had followed her daughter for months settled lower, gathered itself, and turned inward, toward the small place under Elizabeth's heart where the child was. It attended. It curled around the pregnancy the way a cat curls around a lamp, and Catherine, watching from the throne, felt the whole floor of the world rearrange itself by one inch.
"Twice warm," she said to Paul that evening, in the small chamber. "Do you feel it? There are two."
Paul set down his pen. "You are certain?"
"I am certain of warmth, and there is a doubling in it. A seam." She pressed her hand flat against the air, the old gesture, reading weather. "Two heartbeats under one gift, or one gift learning to divide itself. Bring me Fersen."
Fersen came in from the firing range with powder smoke still on his cuffs and heard the report standing.
"Twins," he said.
"Twins," Catherine said. "One will carry it. I have known that since before she was born. The question is the other one."
"Then we find out in nine months," Fersen said, "and not one day before. With respect, Majesty, you are counting a Dynasty out of a suspicion of warmth. My mother counted chickens the same way and was wrong twice."
Catherine looked at him a long moment. No one had spoken to her that way since Kaunitz, and Kaunitz had ended on his knees.
"Sit down, Captain," she said, "and pour the wine yourself. I find I like being wrong in your company."
The months turned. Elizabeth grew round and slow and radiant, and the warmth grew with her. By the seventh month it had stopped following her and simply lived where she lived, filling rooms before she entered them, so that servants crossing her apartments knelt at the threshold to empty floors and could not explain it. Peter the old consort sat with her afternoons and told the child, through her belly, the history of the family, beginning always with the drawing room.
"And in the drawing room," he would say, "I was a fool, and your grandmother was patient, and that is the whole of the constitution of Europe, and everything else is commentary."
Elizabeth laughed every time. The warmth laughed with her, low along the floor.
The labor came in the last week of April, two days of it, and the palace walked on eggshells from the Neva to the chapel. Catherine took over the antechamber herself and cleared it of everyone but the midwives, the doctors, and Fersen, who stood at the door of the birthing room with his back against the wall and his jaw set, refusing all three invitations to leave.
"She chose me," he said. "I stay where she chose me."
The warmth in the corridors was immense by the second night. It pressed at the birthing room door like a tide at a harbor mouth, and the midwives inside worked in it and wept as they worked and did not stumble once, because none of it pushed. It only wanted, the way a continent wants.
Near dawn Elizabeth screamed once, very loud, and the warmth broke over the palace like a wave over a seawall. Every bell in Petersburg rang without a hand on the rope. The ice on the Neva, rotting for a week, went out all at once with a sound like a door opening.
Then a cry. A first cry, thin and furious.
"A daughter," came the midwife's voice through the door. "Majesty, a daughter!"
Catherine stood up from her chair so fast it went over backward. And then, before anyone could move, a second cry answered the first, smaller, lower, stubborn, the cry of a man arguing with a bill.
"And a son." The midwife sounded astonished. "Twins, Majesty. A boy after her, close as a shadow. He came out gripping her heel."
They let the family in at dawn. Elizabeth sat propped against pillows, grey-faced and shining, with two bundles against her, and Fersen beside her on the bed with his hand on all three of them at once, which ought to have been geometrically impossible and was not.
Catherine approached the way she had once approached Kaunitz, slowly, reading. She bent over the first bundle.
The girl had her mother's dark hair and, when she opened her eyes for a moment, eyes that were not blue at all. They were grey, and they focused. On a day old. On Catherine's face, deliberately, the way a focus is deliberate, and the warmth in the room gathered itself around the small bundle and put its forehead down.
"Hello," Catherine said to her granddaughter, very quietly. "You are Catherine. You are the heir to the heir, and I am sorry about the name, because you will spend your life being compared."
"She will manage," Elizabeth said. "She has the advantage of being compared favorably."
The boy, when Catherine bent to him, was asleep. He had gone to sleep gripping his sister's wrist through the blanket, and he did not let go when the nurse tried, twice, to free it for the swaddling, so they swaddled them with the grip intact and the nurse wrote it in the record because Paul made her.
"And the boy?" Fersen asked. "Which is he?"
Catherine touched the small fist where it held the wrist. She reached out with the oldest part of herself, the part that had read Kaunitz and broken Peter and walked into London, and she felt the boy the way you feel a wall in a dark room. Not cold. Not gifted. Simply there, solid, the one thing in the room the warmth would have to go around.
"He is Peter," she said. "Named for his grandfather, and he will do exactly what his grandfather did, and it will be the most important work in the world." She straightened. "Look at his hands. He has hold of the future and he is not letting go, and no one commanded it. The house keeps its own records."
Peter the elder, who had come in behind everyone, stood at the foot of the bed with his fist pressed to his chest, and he wept the way he had wept at the wedding, from the door, and nobody minded.
"They will grow up arguing," Elizabeth said. She looked down at the joined bundles. "I can feel it already. She will be enormous and he will contradict her, and she will rule, and every time the power's knees start deciding, there will be his hand on her wrist."
"Every ruler in Europe will need one of him," Paul said, "and there is only one."
"There will be more," Catherine said. "There are always more, once the first one exists. The first one teaches the world the shape." She sat down on the edge of the bed, uninvited, for the first time in thirty years, and the warmth came up around her ankles and hers and the babies' altogether, and lay there, quiet, attending.
Somewhere across the city the bells had stopped and the ordinary morning noise of Petersburg resumed, cart wheels and gulls and the ice gone down the river. The girl opened her grey eyes again and found her grandmother's face and held it, and the boy slept on, gripping.
"Send word to Maria Theresa," Catherine said, without turning her head. "The wager is called. Tell her the daughter plants, and now the daughter has planted a daughter, and she may begin composing her letter of surrender at her leisure."
"And the son?" Paul asked, pen already moving, then stopping, because the house kept its own records.
"The son," Catherine said, "is holding his sister's heel. Tell the old woman that too. Tell her the heel came first this time, and held."
The testing began in June, in a chamber Catherine had chosen herself. It was deep in the Winter Palace, windowless, carpeted in felt so that no footfall carried, and for three days before the appointed morning no servant had entered it. She wanted a room with nothing in it that could kneel by habit.
She brought Paul to keep the record, Fersen to stand where he always stood, and Elizabeth, six weeks after the birth, still thinner than her portraits and steadier than ever. The twins remained upstairs with their nurses. Catherine had wanted them present and then, in the night, had thought better of it, and had not told anyone why.
"Lock the door from the inside," she said to Alexei, and he did.
The four of them stood in the felt quiet. Catherine walked the room's center once, marking it with her heels.
"Here is what will happen," she said. "I will draw the wave out of you myself. Not your power, my hand on your power. You will resist nothing. I want to see what it does when it is taken and given back."
Elizabeth folded her hands. "And if it does not come?"
"Then we have learned the most expensive lesson in Europe." Catherine lifted her chin. "Begin."
Elizabeth breathed out. The warmth rose.
It came slower than it had come in the months before the birth, and lower, staying under knee height, moving across the felt with no sound at all. Catherine reached into it the way she had reached into minds for fifty years, found the place where her daughter's will sat behind the gift like a hand behind a glove, and took hold.
The warmth did not resist her. It came to her.
It crossed the room in a single pulse and gathered around her ankles, then up her calves, and it pressed its whole weight against her the way a large animal leans on a door, testing. Catherine stood under it and let it lean. Paul's pen had stopped. Fersen had not moved, and the warmth flowed around his boots on both sides and rejoined behind him, going around him the way water goes around a post.
Then it stopped pushing, and began to ask.
Catherine felt the difference in her teeth. This was not the honey-slow pressure she had poured over kings. It was a question, enormous and patient, shaped exactly like a knock. It wanted to know whether she would yield to it, and it wanted to know the way a child wants to know, without malice and without any idea of the answer's cost.
"No," Catherine said aloud, to it, as to a person.
The warmth lay down flat on the carpet.
"Paul," she said. "Write that. It understands refusal."
"It understood refusal from the day it knelt in my rooms," Elizabeth said. Her face was pale but her voice was even. "That is not the test, Mama. You have not done the one that frightens you."
Catherine looked at her daughter across the felt-light of the windowless room. There had been no light in there but candles, and the candles had gone very still.
"Say it, then."
"Take it from me and hold it. Not a moment. An hour. Let it live in your hands while I stand here without it, and see what I am, and see what it becomes in you." Elizabeth drew a breath. "You have never held mine and yours together. I think you are afraid they will recognize each other."
Paul's pen scratched, stopped. "Majesty, I advise against this and ask that my advice be written down."
"Written. Advised against. Overruled." Catherine rolled her shoulders once, an old habit from the drawing room, and put out both hands, palms open. "Give it to me."
Elizabeth did not push. She opened, the way a hand opens, and the warmth left her.
Catherine felt it go, felt her daughter's mind close behind the loss like a door in a warm house, and then the whole of Elizabeth's gift was in her hands, hers to carry, immense and slow and smelling of nothing at all, though she would swear afterward it smelled of the Neva in April. It settled on her shoulders and around her throat where the sapphire hung. It did not kneel. It wrapped.
She held it. A minute. Five. Fersen's face across the room had gone carefully blank, and Elizabeth stood in the center of the carpet with her hands loose at her sides, bare of it, and Catherine saw what her daughter looked like with nothing, and it was the most frightening thing she had seen since a mirror in a Prussian bedroom at fifteen.
Because without the gift Elizabeth looked exactly like authority. Nothing had been subtracted. The room still oriented itself toward her, and Catherine understood that some of what she had been calling power had been her daughter all along.
"Do you feel it?" Elizabeth asked. "Is it heavy?"
"It is warm." Catherine's voice came out lower than she intended. "It is saying your name against my neck."
"It does that," Elizabeth said. "It learned words the week the twins were born. It has never used them with me. Ask it what it calls the children."
Catherine stood in the felt silence with another woman's soul on her shoulders and asked, aloud, in her own chamber of her own palace, the question she had asked no god in fifty years.
"What do you call them?"
The warmth answered. Not in sound. It put the words up through her skin the way dawn puts light through shutters, and the words were simple, and they were not the children's names.
It called them the hands. One left, one right.
Catherine opened her fingers. The warmth flowed off her like water off glass and crossed the carpet home, and Elizabeth took it back with a small sound, half a sigh, and stood straighter under it at once.
"The hands," Paul repeated, pen motionless. "Of what?"
"Of whatever it is building," Elizabeth said. She looked at her mother, and her grey-shadowed blue eyes were dry and very awake. "It is not practicing for the children, Mama. It is practicing with them. It has been holding their wrists since the delivery room. Yours was the heel." She smiled, and it was Peter's smile. "You told Maria Theresa the heel came first and held. You were more right than you knew."
Catherine walked to the inner door and put her palm flat on it, feeling for Alexei's weight on the other side, the one solid human thing at the edge of her sight. Thirty years of sealing doors, and here was her own power keeping hold of her grandchildren before they could walk, and calling itself a body.
"Unlock it," she said. "Bring the twins down. If it wants to show me its hands, I will look at its hands."
Fersen moved first, and had the bolt drawn before the sentence finished, and no one in the felt room was surprised that he had.
The twins came down the tower stair in the arms of their nurses, and the felt room changed the moment they crossed its threshold. The warmth rose off the carpet to meet them like a dog rising at a door, and then it lay down again at once, flat, careful, and it did not press near the bundles. It kept its distance the way a large animal keeps its distance from a lamp it has decided to guard.
The girl was awake. Her grey eyes found her grandmother across the room and held, and her small fist worked at the blanket. The boy slept, and even asleep his hand had found his sister's wrist again within a minute of being handed over.
"Put them down together on the carpet," Catherine said.
The nurses knelt and laid them side by side in the center of the room, and the warmth arranged itself around the two bundles in a shape Paul drew afterward from memory: two pools, joined at the edge, one larger and one smaller, and the smaller one did not yield to the larger. They lay against each other like two countries at a shared border, at peace and not merged.
"Now you have seen its hands," Elizabeth said. "And its hands have seen you."
Catherine stood over her grandchildren and felt the arithmetic of the century settle. "Then it is time the world saw them too. Paul. Draft no proclamation."
Paul looked up. "Draft no proclamation, Majesty?"
"None. The house commands itself this time. Send the letters in my own hand and Elizabeth's together. Every court in Europe presents itself in Petersburg by the first of October. Three generations of this house will stand on one dais, and every former crown in the world will do homage to all three at once, beginning with the consorts and ending with oaths to the child." She looked down at the bundles. "She will be in her mother's arms when the world swears to her. She will not remember it and it will not matter. The knees will remember."
Elizabeth picked up her daughter without being helped, and the boy came with her, still gripping. "You are calling all of them. Even the descendants who have never worn a crown."
"Especially them. Crowns ended. Houses did not." Catherine drew her shoulders straight. "Let every Hapsburg cousin and every Bourbon nephew come and see what a realm looks like when it is held by choice on all sides. And let Maria Theresa come, if her bones permit it, to watch her wager lose by a margin she did not budget for."
Autumn came early and hard that year, and with it came the world.
They came by road and by sea, the descendants of every throne Catherine had set down over fifty years, and they filled the Winter Palace until the city overflowed into guesthouses and barges on the Neva. Maria Theresa came, ancient, carried up the ambassadorial stair on a chair, and refused all help to the last twelve steps. George's son came wearing his father's look and his father's discipline. A Bourbon came who had never ruled anything but his own estates and was nervous in the presence of anyone who had.
The great hall had been prepared for the fourth hour of evening, candles against the early dark, and the dais built broad enough for three. Catherine sat at its center on the old throne. Elizabeth stood at her right hand, and against her hip, wrapped in white cloth, the infant Catherine, awake and grey-eyed and grave. Fersen stood at the dais step below them, at his post. Paul held the record at the left hand. Peter waited in the front rank with the old consorts' bench, and Alexei stood at the inner door where the light did not reach his face, eight years inside the room now and still burning where no one could see it.
The hall was full. Not one seat had been refused and not one house had failed to send its blood.
"The rite of the realm," Catherine said, and her voice carried without effort, "was performed to me by kings. The rite of the house cannot be commanded. Tonight you will see both, in the right order, so that your knees learn the difference before they are asked to choose."
She drew off her left slipper and set her bare foot on the cushion, the arch pale in the candlelight, and the hall's breath went out of it in one sound.
"Peter."
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.