Chapter 66

As a child, Illyra had traveled down the rocky, forest-covered Alaskan coast with her father, seeking gullible tourists off cruise ships for poker games. Her favorite village had been Sitka, once the capital of Russian America. At twelve, she’d looked across the gray, frozen Bering Sea and dreamed of the distant, ancient, mysterious land of the tsars. When wooden Orthodox churches were being hacked out of the wilderness in Alaska, St. Petersburg was already a century old, built on the orders of a tsar. She’d dreamed of someday seeing the palatial Russian city, the onion domes of its cathedrals shining with silver and gold.