The ancient caravan route connecting the Wild Lands -- the savage steppes of the Russian empire -- with the west ran from Kiev. Berkholzskoye, the Golitskov estate, bordered the River Dnieper, some fifty versts from Kiev. Sophia Alexeyevna had no memory of a place outside Berkholzskoye; no memory of a guardian other than her grandfather, Prince Golitskov; no knowledge of a world where the great Golitskov family had been once embedded in the fabric of society. The intrigue of the imperial palaces in Moscow or St. Petersburg meant nothing to a girl for whom the haunting, fearsome beauty of the steppes had always been a playground; for whom the romance of the caravan route leading to the civilized glories of Austria and Poland was the material of dreams; for whom the Cossacks, Kirghiz, and Kalmuks, the horsemen of the steppes with their long hair and wild laughter, were the princes of her. reveries as the girl became woman.

She was a child of the steppes who, if she ever looked beyond them, looked west, never east into the center of her homeland.

Old Prince Golitskov, from his embittered soul, had taught his granddaughter to keep her eyes turned away from the east and the court of the czarina Catherine. He had taught her that that court and that rule had destroyed her parents, and she should ignore its very existence. And while he taught her these things, he said nothing about his own fears that the heiress to the mighty fortune of the Golitskovs would not be left forever in the obscurity of the Wild Lands that she loved, under the unorthodox guardianship of an irascible old aristocrat who had early eschewed the duties and pleasures of the imperial court.

Such bitter thoughts, such prescient fears, did not plague Sophia Alexeyevna. On her twenty-first birthday, the day she attained her majority, she was told she was heiress to some seventy thousand souls scattered over estates comprising thousands of versts in this vast empire, but she had interest only in Berkholzskoye. Such immense wealth had no meaning for one who saw no need for it. She took for granted the sprawling mansion, the army of serfs, the magnificent horses, the well-stocked library. Her customary dress was a riding habit with a divided skirt, enabling her to ride astride. She had no reason to develop an interest in her wardrobe, since society did not abound in the steppes, and her grandfather was not one to encourage or welcome passing travelers beyond the obligatory courtesies.

Had she been asked, Princess Sophia Alexeyevna Golitskova would have declared herself utterly content with her life; she had horses, books, the companionship of her, adored grandfather, and the freedom of the steppes. The vague yearnings that occasionally disturbed the customary tranquillity of her sleep she put down to the extra glass of wine or the second helping of pashka at supper.

The ice on the River Neva was breaking at long last, great cracks resounding in the springlike air as the splits appeared, widened; the separated blocks drifted, growing smaller under the feeble rays of the sun.

The czarina Catherine stood at the window of her study in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, looking down at the river. In a week or two, the city would be open once more to shipping; the winter isolation would be over and the outside world could again enter Catherine's frozen empire.

"It is quite alarming to think she has attained her majority already. How life gallops away with one, mon ami." She turned back to the room, giving her toothless smile to its other occupant, a giant of a man in his mid-forties, long haired and one-eyed, no concessionary eye patch over the empty socket -- a veritable cyclops dressed as a courtier....