The cold morning air was a physical slap, sobering and sharp. Mikhail took a series of deep, measured breaths, forcing the boy's lingering panic down, letting Alistair's methodical calm take its place. The grand, audacious goal of seizing the throne was a distant star; the immediate reality was a black hole of debt and decay threatening to swallow him whole.
"First, a situation analysis," he murmured, his voice a hoarse rasp.
He began a slow, deliberate tour of his inheritance. The "manor" was a generous term for the two-story wooden house. It was a study in dereliction. Rot crept up the foundation timbers, shingles were missing from the roof like lost teeth, and a damp, musty smell clung to every room. The boy Mikhail's memories provided the context: his father had been a man of poetry and vodka, not of ledgers and labor, selling off silverware, then furniture, then parcels of forest to fund a slow, melancholic decline.
Outside, the picture was even grimmer. The stable, which his memory told him once housed a dozen horses, now contained a single, swaybacked mare and a perpetually hungry-looking milk cow. The barn held a pitiful mound of last year's rye, barely enough to see them through to the next harvest, let alone sell. A few chickens scratched listlessly in the mud.
He walked toward the three small, huddled tenant cottages. As he approached, a stooped figure emerged from one, wiping her hands on a rough apron. This was Matryona, the widow of his father's most loyal servant. She was old, her face a roadmap of worry, but her eyes, when they met his, held a flicker of wary concern.
"Mikhail Anatolievich," she greeted him, her voice brittle. "You are awake. The fever has broken, glory to God." She made a swift sign of the cross. "I have saved you some kasha."
"Thank you, Matryona," he replied, the Russian words flowing naturally. He made a conscious effort to soften his gaze, to project the image of the boy she knew, not the calculating stranger behind his eyes. "I need to speak with the men. With Ivan and Pyotr."
A shadow passed over her face. "They are in the fields, my lord. But… they are packing their things. They say there is no future in Volkovo. The soil is tired, the tools are broken, and the merchant from Pskov will take what little harvest there is for the debt."
This was the first crisis. Without his three tenant farmers, the lands would lie fallow. The estate would collapse before the first snow.
"Tell them I wish to see them here, at midday," Mikhail said, his tone leaving no room for argument. "I will not keep them long."
Matryona stared at him for a moment, a flicker of surprise in her tired eyes. The boy she knew was prone to fits of despair or angry silence. This quiet authority was new. She gave a short, stiff bow and shuffled away.
Mikhail spent the next few hours in his father's study. It was a dusty tomb of forgotten books and unpaid bills. He ignored the poetry, searching for the ledgers. He found them, the numbers telling a story of relentless, cascading failure. The debt to the merchant, a man named Semyonov, was 500 rubles, an astronomical sum. The interest alone was crippling. The barony's entire projected income from the rye harvest would be less than 80 rubles.
He was, in 21st-century terms, bankrupt. Liquidation was imminent.
But Alistair's mind wasn't thinking about liquidation. It was racing, sifting through historical data, agricultural science, and basic economic principles. The soil here wasn't dead, just poorly managed. Decades of planting nothing but rye had stripped it of nitrogen. The concept of crop rotation—planting legumes like peas or clover to replenish the soil—was known, but often ignored by tradition-bound peasants and lazy landlords.
When Ivan and Pyotr arrived at noon, they stood before him with their heads bowed, their faces set in grim resolve. They were strong men, their hands calloused and their backs bent from a lifetime of labor, but they looked exhausted.
"My lord," Ivan, the elder of the two, began. "We mean no disrespect. But we cannot stay. My family will starve if we remain."
Mikhail let the silence hang for a moment before speaking. "You believe the land is cursed."
Pyotr grunted. "It gives back less each year, my lord. We work harder for less grain."
"The land is not cursed. It is hungry," Mikhail said calmly. He picked up a piece of charcoal from the hearth and knelt, startling them. On the dusty floorboards, he drew a simple diagram of three fields. "This is our land. We have always planted rye in all of them. This year, we will do something different. This field," he pointed, "we will plant with rye as planned. But this second field, we will plant with peas. And the third, with clover for the cow."
The two farmers exchanged a look of pure confusion. Peas were peasant food, and clover was for grazing. To waste a whole field on them was madness.
"But… my lord, the grain…" Ivan stammered. "We need the grain for the debt, for bread."
"The harvest from one field will be small, I know," Mikhail conceded. "It will not be enough to pay the merchant Semyonov. I will deal with the merchant." That statement, delivered with unshakable confidence, stunned them into silence. "The peas will feed your families and put food in our own stores. More importantly, they will feed the soil. Next year, the field where we planted peas will give us a rye harvest twice as large. The year after, the clover field will do the same. In three years, we will have three strong fields, not one dying one."
He then walked to the broken plow near the stable, its iron tip shattered. "And this. My father would have sold a tree to buy a new one. I will not. Pyotr, your cousin is a blacksmith in the village, is he not? Tell him Baron Volkov has a proposal. I will give him logging rights to five birch trees, but not for coin. In exchange, he will repair this plow and craft three new scythe heads and two hoes for us. His payment will be the wood itself."
This was basic barter, but framed as a strategic partnership, it felt revolutionary. He was turning a liability—the need for new tools—into an asset by leveraging a resource they had in abundance: trees.
The farmers were speechless. They were looking at their young baron as if for the first time. The fever hadn't just broken; it seemed to have forged a new man entirely. He spoke of crop rotation like a university professor and negotiated with the shrewdness of a merchant.
"I am not asking you to stay for my sake," Mikhail said, his voice softening slightly. "I am asking you to wager one year's hardship alongside me for a future where your children do not go hungry. I will share in the labor. Your portion of the peas will be yours entirely. And when the harvest comes, the debt to Semyonov is my burden. Yours is to work the land with me. Do we have an agreement?"
Ivan and Pyotr looked at the diagrams on the floor, at the confident glint in their young lord's eyes, and then at each other. It was a mad plan, but it was the only plan they had heard in a decade that didn't involve despair. Slowly, Ivan nodded. "We will try, my lord. We will try."
After they left, a sense of grim satisfaction settled over Mikhail. He had stopped the bleeding. It was a tiny, insignificant victory, but it was a start.
He returned to the dusty study and unrolled a tattered map of the Pskov governorate. With a piece of charcoal, he put a small 'X' over the tiny speck labeled 'Volkovo'. His new empire. It was pathetic. An island of debt in a sea of ignorance.
But as he stared at the map, its borders seemed to melt away. In his mind's eye, the map expanded, swallowing the table, the room, the world. It became the sprawling, immense tapestry of the Russian Empire. From Poland to the Pacific, from the Arctic ice to the mountains of the Caucasus. A nation teetering on the edge of a blade, ready to fall into ruin.
His gaze sharpened. He was here now. The master mechanic was finally standing before the engine. A cold, predatory smile touched his lips once more.
"Let's see what a little pressure in the right place can do."