Read The Trojan Icon (Ethan Gage Adventures Book 8) for Free Online Page B

looked into her eyes. “Nothing about a baby, but one pattern is suggestive, tsarina.”
    She was rapt. “What is it?”
    “I’m not sure if you should know, and certainly no one else should.”
    “Is it bad?”
    “I wouldn’t say so, but your reaction will be your own.”
    “Oh, please tell! You’ve made me so curious.”
    I took a breath. “Someday you’ll be reunited with an old lover.” That’s what the lines said, and I was certain they meant Czartoryski.
    “What? Who?”
    “You cannot get names from a palm, tsarina.” A small lie.
    “Oh my.” She sucked in her breath, eyes suddenly far away. Yes, we don’t forget love easily. “What a marvelous day this is. I was right to enlist you.”
    “Enlist me in what, tsarina?”
    “You’ll see. And I want to show you another mother, the God-bearing mother, so you understand Russia. And then something quite different that could change history. God sent you to us, I think.”
    The sleigh coasted to the fortress’s Nevsky Gate. Elizabeth told her footmen to wait and we climbed snowy steps, sentries peering down from the rampart above. We walked the pier and passed though a tunnel in the thick wall to the grounds inside. Soldiers snapped to attention as rigidly as Horus’s lead toys, but otherwise the huge fortress, star-shaped like a snowflake, seemed hushed and deserted this snowy morning. Its stone was frosted, and its parade ground was an unmarked blanket. Built against the far walls were the cells of the empire’s most dreaded prison.
    I expected a guard of honor for such an esteemed visitor, but we walked across the fortress courtyard alone, two monks swerving as if we were forbidden. “I’ve given orders to be ignored,” the Tsarina explained. This of course was impossible; soldiers gaped and several loped in all directions to warn of our presence. But the absence of the usual phalanx of attendants and guards clearly exhilarated Elizabeth, even as it made me feel more responsible for her. She wore bright blue boots on the slippery cobbles, the fur hem of her coat swishing the snow as we walked. Flakes hemmed it like diamonds. The bottom of her purple dress stained the color of wine from the wet. She held her mouth slightly open, like a little girl wanting to taste the snow.
    Government buildings surrounded the courtyard. Russia’s tallest church was opposite its newest mint, God and Mammon eyeing each other like duelists. Atop the cathedral’s golden spire was an angel that pivoted with the wind. Ethan had told me when we first toured St. Petersburg that the holy sculpture hadn’t prevented the tower from being struck by lightning. Any failure of divine protection always amuses him; maybe because it confirms that our family’s bizarre luck is as natural as storms.
    “I understand this cathedral burned,” I said to Elizabeth.
    “Yes, and was rebuilt by Catherine. Providence, perhaps, sent a thundercloud to encourage improvements. The new steeple incorporates a lightning rod to prevent another fire.”
    “Ethan admires Mikhail Lomonosov, the Russian Franklin. Lomonosov experimented with lightning and had a colleague killed by it, we’ve been told, and independently came up with the idea of the rod like Franklin did. He also managed to put lightning in a bottle, or rather he bottled its charge.”
    “Every disaster has odd benefit,” the tsarina said. “Lomonosov was encouraged to invent. Catherine built a better church and fortified her chance at heaven. The monks got a new carillon from Holland.”
    The result soars like a hymn, a rich yellow at the base and gold leaf on the spire, like a bridge between sky and earth. The top of the steeple certainly seemed to be poking heaven this day, its angel lost in the flurries. I felt it a conduit for sacred power, grace running down like lightning to cross the snowy plaza and dash against the evil of the prison walls.
    “I want to show you the Goddess-mother,” Elizabeth said. “This