In alternating chapters, Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia tell how their privileged lives as the daughters of the tsar in early twentieth-century Russia are transformed by world war and revolution.

In 1916, teenaged hemophiliac and heir to the Russian throne, Alexei Romanov, escapes into the future to elude the murderous Rasputin, and meets his modern-day cousin, fifteen-year-old Varda, who is working on a cure for hemophilia and who wants to help change history by saving his family.