Citadels of Fire Read online

  Prologue

  Life is a mystical and tragic thing.

  It is a journey often full of fear, when it ought to be full of hope. It’s fascinating to look back on your life and feel as though most of it was a precursor to the rest of it; to what was always supposed to be. It’s tragic to look with hindsight at the most pivotal crossroads of your life and realize you made the wrong decision, that you could have had so much more happiness. But that would have taken true courage. And true courage is something most people from my homeland lack. It is not their fault. It’s simply the way they are brought up to be. It is because of the Wall. It is what happens when people put up walls to protect themselves and end up hiding behind them—keeping themselves in, rather than the enemy out.

  Let me introduce myself. My name is Inga. I do not know what my born surname is, only that it is common. I am not a member of one of the powerful boyar families. I have taken to calling myself Inga Russovna because I am so much a product of my mother country. You see, I was born in Moscow, a stone’s throw from the Kremlin Wall.

  I was born beside it, have lived inside it, and now must escape from it.

  I only know about my birth because it was told to me by the first parent I remember: a drunken father. My earliest memories find me at his side as a child.

  My father, between mouthfuls of vodka, told me that my mother died because I was born. He remembered that the market booths had been moved from the field across from Red Square to the ice of the Volga River. The ice was only solid enough to hold such weight in the dead of winter; but winter’s heart or no, we Russians are not deterred. We venture out to market in our floor-length winter coats and fur shapkas. We’ve adapted to the icy chill of Muscovy.

  On the day I was born, though my mother’s belly was quite swollen, they ventured out to the market. My parents were poor, and so did not have servants to perform such tasks for them. They tarried near the walls of the Kremlin, looking at the wares of the booths. And then the pains came. She birthed me on the very spot. It was quick, once it began, and the blood made a bright stain on the snow. My mother grew a fever and died two days later, without ever having looked upon me. My father always talked of how much blood there was.

  “Inga,” he would say, “you were born surrounded by blood.”

  So much blood. My blood. My mother’s blood. Blood in the snow.

  My father told me this story often—nearly every time I managed to catch his attention. He told it in great detail—the blood, my mother’s screams, my mother’s death, the cold of the winter—as though he wanted me to memorize it, to understand how absolutely her death had been my doing. Of course I was only a child. I did not understand, but the story stuck with me and, to a great extent, defined me.

  Little did my father know that not many years hence, there would be more blood on the ground than snow. Perhaps then he would not make such a grand thing of a little blood at childbirth.

  I have often wondered about my father. Before my birth and my mother’s death, was he a good husband? Did he always drink? Did he beat my mother as he later hit me? I don’t know. Perhaps the story was not even true. Perhaps he was not even my father. I do not know, nor will I ever.

  If I begin to explore questions of this nature too deeply, I will lose myself in an abyss I may never come out of. A wise man once told me that this is what happens to mad men—they lose themselves, and then their sanity, and they never recover.

  Regardless, I must assume the story my father told me is true. I do not believe he was lying. I choose to believe that he was a good man once, and that my mother’s death corrupted him. I hated my father for many years for what he did to me. But at that time, I had never known real grief or loneliness. Once I did, I began to see what my father really was: a broken, empty man who did the best he could and always came up short. I wonder if he drank himself to death in the years after I left him, or if he died later in the great bloodbath that was to come. I don’t know, but I cannot judge him for his actions.

  Now, near the end of my life, I do not want to imagine the hardships he must have endured. I believe, having endured many of my own, that I understand him better. I understand the pleasing prospect a dark bottle can have. It can seem the only way to dull the unbearable pain of despair in the dark places of the world. Not that I condone it. I am not ready to turn my back on God just yet. But he was. He did, years before I can remember. So, by the time I was old enough to remember, I was already only a shadow to him.

  This is my story. The story of a servant girl in a Russian palace and the things I have witnessed. Some of the things I have not seen I have received first hand accounts of, and I include them for the reader’s understanding.

  I ask that the reader take in all these pages, reserving judgment until the end. At that time, the reader may take any conclusions he or she wishes from my story, for by then I will be gone. What you, dear reader, do with what you read will be of as little value to me as my tiny life was to the Kremlin.