Moscow, Russia
1850
I don’t understand why anyone would want to live in such a place like Russia. The land is much too vast, too cold, and not at all suitable for sustaining a growing population. But when the king asked me to go there and serve the czar who ruled over the vast land, I knew better than to refuse his orders.
Of course, Father, Christiana, and the twins Luke and Naomi would prefer if I stayed in Farnger Mansion (where the Farrington family lived), and Queen Victoria wanted me to stay in Buckingham Palace and serve her, but the king was firm with his decision. He cited the story about how I was responsible for the downfall of the Hawksley family and how 20 members of the family had secretly supported Fenton when tradition demanded that the family disown him completely. Those 20 people were found and executed when the treason was discovered.
So I must leave.
Fortunately, I was allowed to take Terra, Thorn, and Acacia with me when I departed for Moscow, as they were still babies. But I wasn’t allowed to take Ryland and Piers with me, as the king had kept them as his wards to punish me and to keep the Drake family loyal to his rule. Knowing my reputation, the king and queen kept my oldest sons away from me for that particular reason.
But that’s not all, as I saw someone I was going to marry. (To date, I should have realized that the soothsayer who had predicted my future was correct, as she had predicted my entire life when she saw me in the graveyard when I was 10 years old. So far, she was right when she said that I would never marry Thayer Hawksley and he would die, and she knew that I would have five bastard children. Yet she didn't know that I would destroy the Hawksley family or get myself banished to Russia. This goes to show you that soothsayers don't know everything!)
To start, Sir David Trichenberg was a powerful sorcerer with Atlantean roots; many people believed that he was a descendant of the notorious Ainysian rebel Ikel Tardivel, who had led his people and 10,000 Atlantean slaves to freedom during Nefaria’s Dark Age. (They were also responsible for the founding of Eirebul.) Apart from that, David had to be at least ten years older than me, as he seemed to be older than those particular years.
“They say he mourns for his first wife, Noelle Kohl, as she had died when their only son Leopold was born,” said Stannard Bigley (who had been my former betrothed and now my escort to the Imperial Court). “He is also angry with Noelle’s sister Michaela for refusing to mourn her sister’s death and acknowledge her only begotten nephew.”
“I see,” I said as I stared at young Leopold Trichenberg. The boy was 5 years old and already he had Czar Nicholas I wrapped around his fingers, as was the rest of the court. Yet Sir David’s daughters Josseline and Bernadette were shy and reserved; they were only 3 years old, the product of a failed union between their father and a French woman from the Loire Valley. My own children Terra, Thorn, and Acacia were just babies, with Acacia being 6 months old, Thorn being 18 months old and Terra was about 3 years old. Hardly the right age for three young children to travel from London, England to Moscow, Russia.
Nevertheless, I had to leave Britain to hide my disgrace and to prevent my family from suffering from my decision to destroy the Hawksley family. (Of course, it was known that when I left London, the Drake family immediately declared war on the Hawksley family, as they believed the Hawksleys had influenced the king into exiling me. So far, the two families had pulled many supporters to their sides and began fighting in the streets of Magical London.)
At the same time, Damon Rowes (the brother of Bram Rowes, who I was supposed to marry) said, "I heard that he threatened to take young Karl Kroger in retaliation for what happened to his niece Anna."
"And what happened to her?" I asked, as my morbid curiosity flared up. (Did I not mention how my curiously had almost killed me? The last time that happened, I had to deal with Fenton Hawksley and his evil plans to destroy the Drake family. And guess how well that turned out.)
"Her father sold her to a Roma tribe living in the Ukraine for refusing to obey his orders to kill her brother a few weeks ago," said Stannard. "Because of that, his wife Michaela no longer speaks to him and his daughter Christine is cruel to him.
"And it served him right for him to lose his oldest child," said Damon. "And because the Atlantean law of succession forbids a second-born child to replace a firstborn child, Leo will end up being his uncle's heir."
"Why not Karl?" I said, shocking myself. "Shouldn't he be his father's heir?"
"Normally, a son would inherit from the father, or a daughter if the father had no sons, as it's done in the Nomagic world, but Karl is a third-born child," said Damon. "The third-born child is often unlucky, as the firstborn is the heir and the second-born usually defers to the firstborn. The third-born, however, doesn't have any place in his eldest sibling's household and is cast out."
"So Karl isn't worth anything, despite the fact that he is a son," I said in shock. (If you think the Drake family is unfair to their sons, then you're in for a shock. In the Atlantean culture, third children, even if they're the firstborn sons, don't get to inherit anything from their families; small wonder most of them are leaving for the States to make their fortune there.)
"Even without his disability, Karl is as useless as a dog wearing shoes," said Stannard. "That is why many Atlanteans are debating his place in the Kroger family and whether it is right to remove him from his family before anything dire happens to him."
But that debate isn't important, as there's still more for me to describe:
Life in the Russian Imperial court was difficult, to say in the least. The czar is a hardened man who had very little time for silliness and idleness. (He had taken over from his idealistic older brother Alexander, who no one had seen since 1821.) Many of the courtiers were dealing with the hardened landowning nobility, who refused to see the status quo in Russia change. His oldest son, who was named Alexander, had been named after his older brother. Alexander was the same age as David, as they grew up together as foster brothers, but they did not get along. I took one look at Czarevitch Alexander and determined that we weren't going to get along, not if he looked at me with a scornful look on his face. The man had something about him that I didn't like.
But that's not all, as Sir David's father, Sir Ezekiel was whispering into the czar's ears, telling him to remove his support for the States, as the people there had enslaved an entire race of Africans to work in their cotton fields.
Of course, those words fell on the deaf ears of the czar, but not so with Sir David. He hated hearing about slavery, as his mother had been an African princess from the Congo. Nothing like discrimination and racism to boil a man's blood, isn't it?
To make this long story short, I remembered what the soothsayer had said about my marriage to a powerful sorcerer. Although Ezekiel Trichenberg was much too old for me, his oldest son was a widower with three small children. (Of course, Issac Trichenberg was closer to my age, but he refused to be tied to a woman who had three children out of wedlock, something that upset his mother. He also turned his brother and sister against me, making my life in the Russian court difficult. But that's not important.)
As my sixth month in Russia came and passed, I received some unexpected news. Phoebus had returned from his tour of Japan, saying that that country could benefit from reintroduction to the world. At the same time, however, the war between the Drakes and the Hawksleys had only gotten worse, with the deaths of Aunt Kelly and Cousin Courtney, both of who were responsible for breaking my betrothal to Jeremiah Hawksley. With those two deaths, the fighting quickly stopped, as everyone involved with marrying me off to Thayer and Jeremiah was now dead (save for my father, who was still in London).
But then another case presented itself; King Ernaut had died several and there was a mad scramble to find his heir. Many people had favored the Crown Prince Franquet while many others favored his younger brother Prince Conrad. But the archbishop decided to name the youngest of the king's sons, Prince Ihon, as the new king, claiming that the older sons were unfit to be king due to their dubious reputations. Many mages and spellcasters were up in arms over the whole thing, as they believed that the oldest son is the heir and the second son is the helper.
When Phoebus told me this, he also said, "The new king is just 12 years old, but he is already so wise. In fact, the first thing he did was lift your banishment. You're free to return home, Selena."
Home, I thought to myself as I thought about my father and sister. What was home if you had it taken away from you? I thought about Aunt Kelly and Cousin Courtney and how they had tried to make me into the perfect Drake daughter, but they failed as Gramma had failed. I also thought about little Paxton, who had to be about 13 years old at this point. No one knew what happened to him after he was removed from our home after being zapped during the first lightning storm.
What was home, if you cannot return to it?
"I'm sorry, Phoebus, but my place is here," I said as a matter of fact. "I cannot go back to England, even if King Ihon had reversed my banishment."
"But what about our family?" Phoebus cried out. "You can't abandon them, not after what you did to bring down the Hawksleys!"
"And I did that by selling my maiden's gift to the highest bidder, who just happened to be a Hawksley," I said. "I can't let that go. I made a huge mistake, and now I can't take it back!"
“I know about Rafael,” said Phoebus. “I know about how and why he tricked you into sleeping with him. But you outplayed him and his father in the end, didn’t you?”
“Not without me getting hurt,” I snapped angrily. “I was supposed to be like everyone else in that court!”
"But we're not like everyone else!" said Phoebus. "We can make it so you can return home and raise your children as Drakes, not as bastards! We can find you a new husband, a proper Englishman, not a man who is cold and stiff like those Russians you see around you!"
He droned on, but I could no longer hear him, not when I knew that deep down inside, I could no longer be a proper Drake woman. Not when my reputation as a whore, a witch, and a possible murderess was up in the air. I knew I had no place in England, not in Queen Victoria's court or among the Drake family. But I couldn't give up on my life, not when I had so much further to go.
Plus, there was also the matter of my marriage to deal with, as I knew who I was meant to marry. I couldn’t marry a British lord or a knight. I had to marry a Russian man, for better or worse. While Sir David's siblings hated me for being a whore, they also respected his decisions without argument. I had to use that to my advantage.
Yet, there was one more thing that I needed to consider.
I discovered that Rafael Hickman and his mother, Barbara, were executed several weeks after King Ihon took the throne; he convinced the council that their crimes were severe enough to warrant their execution. At the same time, Sir Seth St. Claire and his wife, Mary, were building their own family; Seth was forbidden from speaking to me and he couldn't write any letter to me per King Ernaut's orders. Also, my two sons Ryland and Piers (who had been living with King Ernaut at the time of his death) were sent to a monastery in Chetham to keep them away from the Hawksleys and the Drakes.
But I couldn't mourn for my lost babies, not when I had Terra, Thorn, and Acacia to worry about. Plus, with the Czar forcing me to marry Sir David Trichenberg (and me nor having a choice, due to my already stained reputation as a murderess and a witch), I really couldn't go home to my family at all. Nor could I refuse this marriage.
Before we can go any further, I did recall the soothsayer saying that I would marry a powerful sorcerer, and he would have three children before we would marry. But I should have noted that Sir David Trichenberg doesn't believe in fathering bastards, as he would rather marry the mother or keep her as a mistress than to have children and abandon them. I also recalled saying that I would never be cruel to any stepchild I would inevitably get with the marriage, which included Leopold, Josseline, and Bernadette. While the little girls were shy and clingy, Leo seemed to latch onto me. (I think this was because he never had a mother, as his own mother had died when he was a baby and his mother's sister couldn't be bothered with him, not when she was busy coddling her disabled only son.)
At the same time, I met David's mother Babila Elimbi (who liked to be called Babs); she wasn't as impressed with me as I thought. She always complained that I was too pale and skinny, both of which were not good for childbearing. David's other siblings Armand and Margaux appeared to be the same way, even if Margaux initially pitied me for being used like a pawn on a chessboard to further my family's cause and to destroy the Hawksleys.
I don't know my own children's opinions about their mother getting married, as they were too young to understand. But Terra isn’t too happy about his father being replaced with another man. But he never met Rafael, which may or may not be a good thing.
But when I stared at Isaac Trichenberg, (the youngest son in the Trichenberg family) all I could see was hate in his eyes. Little did I know that that hatred would lead to tragedy...
ns 15.158.61.20da2
