St. Petersburg, Russia
1881
It seemed that the war my daughter and I are fighting has reached a new chapter.
With the birth of Saida's daughter Safia Adinew Mekonnen (the czar had her christened as Evgenia Leopoldovna Turgeneva) in 1876, our future was now secured. Yet Saida said that she would not have any more children, a decision I disagreed with, but I understood where she was coming from with that. I had had four difficult pregnancies and I could have died in childbirth when my children were born.
But that's not all that happened.
In 1880, the Czarina Maria Alexandrovna finally died of her illness, to the grief of the imperial family. A few weeks later, the czar married his mistress, Princess Catherine Dolgoroky, in a morganatic marriage, which angered many people. (On that day, he also declared the marriage between Leopold Trichenberg and Slavena Shapiro as a morganatic marriage while declaring the union between Leopold and Saida as a true marriage.) By then, Leopold welcomed a second son with the popular aging Russian stage actress Alevtina Denisovna Lukina in 1878; his name was Demian. Slavena gave birth to a son named Vasily Leopoldovitch Turgenev in 1880; he was her only son. The czarevitch legitimized the births at Sir David's request.
The joy that should have come with the births of my granddaughter and the two little boys was forever dashed with the assassination of Czar Alexander II on March 13, 1881. When he died, the public appeared to be indifferent to the news of his death, as stories about his secret children and mistresses came to light.
A few days after the death of Czar Alexander II, the Czarevitch Alexander ascended to the throne as Czar Alexander III, which made the Grand Duke Nicholas Czarevitch Nicholas. I pitied that poor boy, as he was not yet 13 years old and he had a multitude of responsibilities on his shoulders. Plus, he has witnessed his grandfather’s death and we feared that his father could be next, as he was now the Czar of Imperial Russia.
And in the next 13 years, I knew the same thing would happen to Nicholas, as his father would die and he became the czar. Yet he had my daughter and a multitude of other people to help him as he grew up and prepared for his role as czar of all Russia. Little did Saida and I know just how much he would need us...”
Now that the story about Saba Adinew Mekonnen comes to an end, we see how she went from a warrior on the battlefields to being a hidden warrior in the Russian Imperial Court. Of course, you saw how she reacted to the infamous church bombing in Gillamoor that killed Selena Drake and everything that happened to the Drake family because of that bombing. Yet, Saba is forced to deal with her unusual circumstances in life and reluctantly trades in her desire to fight in the world’s wars for the desire to protect her family from its enemies. She also decided to build a family, knowing that she could fall in battle (physical or mental) at any given moment.)
Although we weren’t paying much attention to the scene when she is addressed by the czar regarding her seclusion from the court, Saba learned a tough lesson about family when she is forced to execute her own brother Amanuel Debaleko Girmai instead of embracing him as a brother, especially when it was proven that he would have tried to destroy her instead of being nice to her. That goes to show you that sometimes in life, we must destroy the things we love the most in order to get what we truly need in life.
As for Saba herself, you’ll see her in several more stories, as most of the stories in this anthology take place during the years 1881-1917, particularly during the reigns of Czar Alexander III and Czar Nicholas II.
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