“My brother,” she begged.

“Ew-bili,” I repeated.

I wondered if we shouldn’t just leave him for the guards to find. A decoy. And she understood this, the Grand Duchess did, for she saw the hesitation on my face.

“Bring him to me.”

In all the time that I’d spent in The House of Special Purpose I’d never heard any of the Royal Family issue a command, particularly none of the children. Yet Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna so ordered me. Dead or alive, she would not abandon her brother. And so wasting no time, I darted through the wood and back onto the road. I glanced into the distance and sure enough, there was the truck, stopped or perhaps stuck. There was little time, and so I grabbed Aleksei by the shoulders and pulled the boy out of the road and into the pine wood, leaving a swerving tail of blood behind. Reaching the trees, I stopped and took off my light jacket, which I in turn draped over the boy’s mutilated head. I then dragged him on, all the way to Maria, whereupon I laid him by her side. She immediately took his hand, then started to pull away my jacket.

It was my turn to order, and this I did, catching her hand, pushing it back, and commanding, “Nyet-s!”

She understood quite clearly, and she laid back, holding his hand, which she pinned to her chest. Her eyes blinked quite heavily as if she were about to fall into the most permanent sleep.

Suddenly her mouth moved, and she begged, “Please, you must go after them, after… after Tatyana…”

Tatyana? It couldn’t be. My mind exploded – I’d seen her shot, I’d seen that guard attack her with a bayonet, or was I all wrong?! Could she have been protected by her corset as well?

I demanded, “She lives as well?”

She gazed weakly at me. “You must go. You must bring her.”

She slipped away then, Maria did. At first I thought she’d simply expired on the spot, but then I saw her chest rise and fall, albeit quite slowly. Whether she was passing into some kind of shock or she was about to die I couldn’t tell, but this much I knew – I had to find out if indeed the Tsar’s second daughter, Tatyana, was still alive.

And so I said, “I’ll be back.”

Her head slowly rose and fell.

“Trust me, I’ll be back to take care of you. Just don’t try to move. Just wait. I’ll go see if your sister is… is…”

“Go,” she pleaded with the last of her strength. “Go now.”

“I’ll be back,” I chanted yet again, making a pledge as much to myself as to the Princess.

Those were my last words to her before I scrambled out of the woods. I had no idea how much blood she’d already lost, just as I had no idea how much longer Maria would live. I was so young and knew so little of such things.

So… I left her. I did exactly as the Grand Duchess begged, no more, no less. I abandoned her, which of course turned out to be the stupidest thing. I followed her command, hurried to the road, whereupon I saw all that blood pooled like motor oil on the dirt. I knew I couldn’t leave such an obvious sign, so I returned to the edge of the wood and took a large branch. And this branch I dragged over the blood of Aleksei and Maria so as to obscure it. Which I did. I swirled the dirt around, buried the redness as best I could, and then… well, then I threw the bloodied pine bough into the bushes and started running after the motor lorry, the engine of which coughed and sputtered in the distance. Already the depth of darkness had passed, and in the faintest of early light I could see it, that clumsy truck laden with all the bodies.

I ran and ran, my mind on fire. The vehicle passed over a railway embankment, and I was just catching up when suddenly I heard all this commotion. I heard shouting voices, the stomp of many horses, and I ducked behind a clump of birches. From nowhere a convoy of men, as many as twenty, charged out of the night. Most of them were on horseback, a few in small horse-pulled carts, and they were shouting with the drunken revelry of revolution. And murder.

“Give us Nikolashka!”

“Off with his capitalist head!”

“Death to the blood drinker!”

I quickly understood that this haphazard detachment of Reds had been told they would get the honor of killing the royal ones, not simply burying them. When they found out, however, that their hated Nikolashka and his traitress whore, the German bitch, were already dead, there was a fiery roar of disappointment and anger.

One of the men shouted, “We were told you would bring them to us alive!”

“We wanted to kill them!”

“You tricked us!”

They were so angry and so drunk that a second blood bath – Komendant Yurovsky’s very own – began to quickly boil. Someone fired a shot into the air. Another lowered his pistol and fired into the back of the truck itself.

Fearing the worst, Yurovsky shouted, “Long live the revolution!”

With that he ordered the driver, Comrade Lyukhanov, to move on. The convoy of men had no choice but to follow the motorized transport. And neither did I. Once they were all well under way, I emerged from behind the birches and ran after them. It was easier, of course, than ever to follow them, for the road was in terrible condition, which forced them to drive slowly. Plus the men made such racket. In such a way did I follow them for another twenty, thirty minutes when suddenly the lorry came to a sudden halt. The road had narrowed and the truck itself had become horribly stuck in the mud between two trees. They couldn’t budge it, not an inch, for the vehicle had sunk so deep. Sure, there’d been so much rain and now there was much mud. A whirlwind of shouting ensued – everyone had an opinion, of course – and Yurovsky and the other fellow in the cab of the truck climbed out. A great effort was made. Everyone pushed, but to no avail.

By this time I was able to get quite close. Too close, really, but I was desperate to find out if Tatyana lived as well. I positioned my young body behind a pine, and in the gray morning light I watched as first one, then two men jumped onto the back of the truck. I think they just wanted to see the bodies with their own eyes. But then one of the peasant men, groping for the touch of a royal bosom, reached into the bodice of a grand duchess and came up not with a breast, but a handful of bloody jewels.

“Brillianty!” he screamed with shocked glee.

With the diamonds finally discovered, a handful of men swarmed over the bodies like hungry maggots. Panicking, Yurovsky started jumping around, shaking his pistol overhead and screaming. He fired once into the air, and the comrades slithered off the truck like scared rats.

As for the lorry, it was quite obvious the vehicle was going nowhere. Yurovsky was desperate. Things couldn’t be going much worse, and he waved his gun around and ordered the men to transfer the bodies from the lorry to the carts. Because the horse-drawn carts were so small, however, they had to split up the bodies – two on that cart, three on that, one over there – and in that way Yurovsky didn’t realize that Aleksei and Maria were missing. Nyet, nyet, nyet, the komendant was so busy waving around his pistol and trying to control these men that he didn’t even count all the troopy, not just then, not just yet. And as soon as he was told the bodies had all been reloaded, off they went in single file through the woods.

The morning light was filtering softly through the trees by this time, and soon the mistakes began flowing like a mountain brook. Not five minutes passed before this line of murderers and murdered took a wrong path and became lost in the wood. To complicate matters even more, they came upon a group of peasants from the nearby village Koptyaki.

Threatening these simple people with his pistol, Yurovsky shouted, “There are Whites everywhere out here, so you’d better get home before we shoot you all!”

Finally, just as the northern morning sun was climbing into the sky, this convoy of carts and horses and men reached the ruins of the Four Brothers Mine, named after a cluster of old pines, where gold had once been sought.