But he had acted as if he hadn’t even heard her; it was possible he had not. It looked as if the teeth were rattling in his skull, and he had collapsed in another paroxysm of coughing. It had all come on so fast she could hardly believe it … though she had seen such a phenomenon before. Even in the military wards, it had often been the hardiest and most energetic young men who had fallen the fastest. It was one of the great mysteries of the disease. Dr. Botkin, who had cared for Ana and her sister, had suggested it was this very constitution that contributed to the victims’ demise. “Their own strength is their undoing,” he had said, shaking his head as he read their thermometers and ordered more cold compresses to bring down their fevers. “Be glad that you are frail and pampered princesses,” he’d said, and Tatiana had thrown a pillow at him.

Was that truly what had saved them? Or was it, as Rasputin had darkly ordained, that she carried in her blood a proof against the plague, that the deadly blood disease inherited from her mother, and passed on only to the male offspring, offered some immunity from the worst ravages of the Spanish flu? How strange, that her compromised nature might have been her greatest guardian.

She could serve as the messenger of doom, it seemed, but not one of its victims.

A block of ice bumped up against the boat, and a wave of icy blue water crested the starboard side and sloshed into the bottom, washing up and over her boots. She tried to lift her feet above the water, but she could not maintain her balance on the narrow thwart for very long. Both her feet were nearly frozen, but the left one in particular, wearing the boot specially designed to accommodate its deformity, had no feeling left in it at all. She longed to remove the boot and rub the life back into it, ideally before a roaring fire … but St. Peter’s Island was still far off.

And the closer they got, the less welcoming it appeared.

A gnarled black rock, swathed in mist and surrounded by jagged rocks sticking up out of the water like spikes, it was the least likely place on earth to have earned the name of sanctuary. But that, she knew, was precisely why it had been chosen. The followers of Father Grigori, who believed, as she did, that he was a prophet, had traveled all the way from Pokrovskoe to take refuge here, to build their church and to await the return of their starets. For Ana, his bodily return seemed unlikely — she knew all too well the ravages that had been inflicted upon him before his drowning in the Neva River — but she did not doubt the strength of his spirit. She did not doubt the image she had seen, swirling up out of the gun smoke in that cellar in Ekaterinburg, any more than she doubted the emerald cross, imbued with his powers, that she still wore under her coat and corset.

Sergei had taken his hand from the tiller and was pointing, with one shaking finger, ahead at the island. When she reached out and stroked the side of his face, he drew back in horror, afraid of infecting her, and insisted that she look for the fires. “They will light fires.”

And then, racked with a cough that drenched his own hand in blood, he had let go of the sail and let go of life. Blessing her, he had rolled over the side of the boat, and into the churning waters of the strait.

The last thing she had seen of him, as she lunged to the stern and his body was engulfed by the waves, was a frozen blue cornflower bobbing between the shards of ice. It was, undoubtedly, the one she had first given him by the train tracks in Siberia.

She’d have given every gem in her corset to reclaim it.

And then she had turned to the task of steering the boat through the blinding fog and the heaving waves, steadfastly looking for the fires that Sergei said they lighted on the cliffs every night. “They are the beacons to guide their prophet, lost and wandering in the dark, to their new home,” he had told her. And when she saw them burning like tiny candles at the end of a long and gloomy hallway, her heart had risen in her chest. The boat, as if guided by some miraculous hand, had passed through the rocks and reefs and tide pools, and ground to a halt on a narrow strip of pebbles and sand. When she had sunk to her knees on the beach, soaked to the skin and gasping for breath, she had thanked God for her deliverance. Over the crashing of the surf, she thought she heard the tolling of a church bell.

And in the last light of day — a day that was shorter in this northern part of the world than anywhere else — she had looked up to see her rescuers running down the beach toward her. But the prayer of thanks turned to ashes in her mouth as they closed the distance.

Far from coming to her rescue, these were a pack of black wolves, their eyes shining orange and their white fangs bared. The boat was gone, drifting back out to sea, and even if she had wanted to try to outrun them, there was nowhere to go. Pulling the cross from beneath her clothes, she clutched it tightly, lowered her head in prayer, and prepared to join her massacred family in Heaven. The wolves came on, and at any moment she expected to hear their bloodthirsty panting and feel their sharp teeth at her throat. But just as she braced herself for the attack, she heard a sharp, piercing whistle from the cliffs above, and when she lifted her eyes long enough to look through the veil of her own ice-rimed hair, she saw the wolves drawing up short, nervously pawing the sand, moving in circles around her, whining and barking like dogs at the kitchen door.

What had happened?

The lead wolf, with a white blaze on its muzzle, stepped closer — she could smell his rank breath — and stared at her hands, clutching the emerald cross, with an almost human curiosity.

The whistle came again, and all the wolves turned to look at the cliffside, where a man in a long black cassock was slowly descending an almost invisible flight of stairs. For a second, Anastasia thought, “My God, it is Rasputin!” But as he marched across the frozen beach, she saw that it was someone else — tall as Rasputin and as broad in the shoulder, but with a face that was more benign, less worldly, and unshrouded by a tangled black beard. There was an undeniable ferocity in Father Grigori’s features, but none in this priest’s. He waved one arm, and the wolves, except for their leader, were swept back like dust before a broom.

“Anastasia,” he said, dropping to his knees beside her, “I am Deacon Stefan.”

It was the man Sergei had told her about, the man who had led the pilgrims from his village.

Taking her into his embrace, he said, “We have been waiting a long time for you.”

The hot tears suddenly springing from her eyes warmed her face, and when the wolf with the white nose stepped forward to lick them, the deacon did not intervene.

PART FOUR

Chapter 61

It was a strange situation. That much, Dr. Frank Slater would have been the first to admit.

On the one hand, he was a patient at the Nome Regional Health Center, most of his time spent lying in the cranked-up hospital bed and under observation by closed-circuit camera and through the glass panels of the ICU doors, and on the other hand he was in charge.

The explosion on the bridge had left him with a concussion, two fractured ribs that made him wince with every deep breath he took, and more cuts and bruises than he could count. His malarial meds had had to be airlifted in — normally, there wasn’t much call for them in Alaska — but if anything, it was his chronic disease that had helped to save his life. Because of his already compromised immunological response, and the ingestion of his retroviral drugs, any exposure he had undergone to the Spanish flu had been mitigated. His system was already too weakened to mount the kind of stiff resistance that engendered the fatal cytokine storms that had killed so many millions.