The Crown’s Game (12 page)

“Present company excluded, of course.”

“Of course,” Pasha said. “But listen. I have an idea. Unrelated to that ruckus.”

“Another drink?” Nikolai reached for the vodka.

Pasha waved him off. “I’m going to hold a ball for my birthday.
Father will think I’m finally rising to the level of pomp expected of a tsesarevich, and Mother will be thrilled that I might find a wife.”

“And your real purpose?”

“I’m going to invite the lightning girl.”

The bottle of vodka slipped from Nikolai’s hand, and he lunged to catch it and also charmed it at the same time so it would not crash and spill all over the food on the cutting board. But
as soon as he snatched the bottle, his eyes darted up to Pasha’s. Had he seen? Nikolai should not have done that. In his tipsiness, instinct had taken over.

Pasha looked at the bottle and Nikolai’s hand for a few seconds. Then he shook his head and said, “Nimble catch, Juliet.”

Nikolai exhaled.

“So . . . ,” Pasha said, as he fiddled with the cutting board, “I went back to Ovchinin Island the
other day. I discovered the girl’s name.”

Nikolai thumped the bottle of vodka onto the table. “You went to the island to look for her? Are you mad?” Perhaps Pasha
was
included in the fools whom Nursultan harbored.

“Are you afraid of her?” Pasha asked.

More than you’ll ever know,
Nikolai thought. Not only because the lightning girl could very well kill him, but also because her Canal of Colors
had stirred something in Nikolai he hadn’t known was there. Of course, her waterways were a swaggering jibe at his work on Nevsky Prospect. And yet, there was also something deeper there, something more untamed. All these years, Nikolai had been alone, with only Galina’s minor magic keeping company with his own. But now there was suddenly another enchanter in his life, and he felt a paradoxical
kinship with her. It dissolved the edges of his loneliness, like finding the path home after years of wandering the wilderness on his own.

And although it was arrogant how she’d changed the colors in the canals just to taunt him, Nikolai also admired that she wasn’t afraid to do so.

Which made the girl all the more dangerous. She was the enemy. Nikolai could not afford to be drawn in.

He was
also afraid that Pasha would fall for her, seeing as he had already gone far out of his way to track down her details on Ovchinin Island. How could Nikolai kill the girl
if his best friend became infatuated with her?

Aloud, Nikolai said, “A rational person would be wary. A rational person would not go seeking to invite someone like that to a ball. Why invite her? To entertain your guests with
feats of fire? You can hire the flame-eaters from the circus for that.”

Pasha picked at the label on the vodka bottle. “Or perhaps I will ask her to dance.”

“Pavel Alexandrovich.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Fine, then. Pasha.”

“What?”

“You can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“Invite her. Dance with her. You’re . . .” Nikolai lowered his voice to a whisper. “You’re the tsesarevich of the Russian Empire.”

“So?” Pasha threw up his arms. “Doesn’t that mean I can do whatever I please?”

“You know it doesn’t. Your mother has rules about whom you can even flirt with, let alone dance with.”

“Guidelines.”

“What?”

“Whom I can flirt with. They’re guidelines, not rules.”

“Pasha.”

The tsesarevich slumped in the booth. He jammed his hands in his hair, and it rumpled to such an extent, it finally looked
as if he were a patron of low enough birth and means to frequent this tavern.
Someone like me,
Nikolai thought. He, too, sank lower in the booth.

After a bit more wrenching, Pasha finally released his
abused locks and said, “You know, I’ve been reading a great deal about mystics and enchanters. They’re not evil, contrary to popular belief. They’re misunderstood. And the Church and the people’s
irrational fear of their powers have driven them underground, to hide their magic. How dreadful is that? Imagine how taxing it must be to hide your true self every minute of your entire life.”

Nikolai bit his lip.

“I want her to know it’s all right,” Pasha said.

“To what?”

“To live in the open.”

“Married to the heir to the throne?”

Pasha scowled. “That is not what I meant.” He picked up
the now-warm shot of vodka Nikolai had poured for him earlier, muttered a toast to the tsar’s health, and gulped it down. His mouth puckered, but he didn’t bother to chase the vodka with beer.

“She’s not the type of girl you can send a glass slipper to and make into a princess,” Nikolai said.

“You never know.”

“She could turn out to be the wicked fairy godmother instead.”

“Now you’re conflating
your fairy tales. The wicked fairy godmother is from
The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood
, not
Cinderella
. And why are you convinced the lightning girl is dangerous?”

So many reasons.

Nikolai rubbed the back of his neck. “We know nothing about her.”

“Her name is Vika.”

Nikolai’s scar burned at the same time that the knot in
his chest—that foreboding sense of kismet that had begun when he saw the
Canal of Colors—tightened.

“‘Though she be but little, she is fierce.’”

“Quoting Shakespeare won’t sway me, Nikolai.”

“Then what can I do to dissuade you from searching for the girl again or inviting her to the ball?”

Pasha topped off their glasses. “You can’t.” Then he lifted his glass and toasted, “To the lightning girl. And all else that may come.”

“W
hy hasn’t he killed her yet?” Galina’s teeth chattered, even though she was inside the cabin while the Siberian blizzard raged outside.

“Because I taught Vika well,” Sergei said. He cast a look at the fireplace, and the flames expanded, filling the small cabin with more heat.

“Well, I also trained Nikolai well.”

“It’s been only five days since the oath.”

Galina turned
up her nose. “He ought to have dispatched her by now.”

Sergei recoiled. But he quickly composed himself, for to show Galina that her comment had ruffled him would only encourage her to mention Vika’s death more than she already did. He had learned this lesson from their youth, when Galina would torture him mercilessly with whatever made him most uncomfortable. Like murdering squirrels in the
park with her glare and laughing when they fell out of the trees, their eyes already glassy and unseeing. And then
laughing harder as Sergei mourned them through a curtain of snotty tears.

“We don’t know what form the Game has taken,” Sergei said. “You imagine an outright duel, but knowing Vika, I suspect it’s something more subtle. She did not spend her entire life confined to a tiny island
only to have her magic—her freedom—constricted to a few short days in the Game. She’s going to savor the experience. Both you and your student would be gravely mistaken to take that as complacency or lack of skill.”

Galina smirked and stalked over to the kitchen table. It had originally been constructed of coarse logs, but Galina had changed it into Italian marble. “You haven’t grown too attached
to the girl, I hope? Have you even told her you aren’t her real father?”

Sergei furrowed his brow. “What are you implying?” He’d thought everyone believed she was his daughter. He certainly thought his sister, whom he hadn’t seen in decades, would think so.

Galina conjured up a cup of steaming tea. “Honestly, Sergei, she looks nothing like you. And even though you did not care to check on me
in Saint Petersburg all those years, I did check on you—actually, I paid someone to do it from time to time, because that sort of work is beneath me—and I know for a fact that you never married or had even a mistress. But it’s fine if you want to pretend Vika is your daughter. It’s . . . sweet, even.” Galina’s mouth puckered. “All right,
cloying
is more accurate. But that’s your choice. All I
want to know is, where did you find her?”

“I—I didn’t—”

“Sergei.”

“Fine.” He knew if he didn’t answer, she’d keep pestering him, and seeing as they were trapped in this cabin together, it was far less painful to relent now than to continue taking her abuse. Galina already knew the crux of the truth anyway. “I found Vika on the side of a volcano on the Kamchatka Peninsula, when I was there on
a research mission studying winter herbs. Her mother, a volcano nymph, had abandoned her.”

Galina sat back in her chair. “I thought nymphs were extinct.”

“So did I.”

“Huh.” Galina contemplated the fact for a moment, then leaned forward again and said, “The girl really
isn’t
your daughter, then.”

How like his sister to be able to shrug off the existence of a magical creature in order to torment
Sergei some more. He grumbled. “Blood determines nothing. Vika is my daughter, no matter what you say.”

“For someone as surly-looking as you, you’re disgustingly soft.”

“It’s better than being surly on both the outside
and
the inside like someone else in this room.” Sergei reached over and helped himself to Galina’s tea, ignoring her scowl. “I suppose you’ve remained cold and distant from your
student, haven’t you? You are so very talented at alienating people.”

“Why would I form an attachment to a half-breed orphan from the steppe?” Galina scoffed. “I trained him because it was my duty to do so, and because I want to see my enchanter demolish yours. I like winning, you know.”

Oh, yes, Sergei knew. Although more accurately, Galina
should have said she liked winning against
him
. It
had always been about beating him, beginning when they were small children and she wanted more of their father’s attention. She’d never outgrown her insecurity at being born a girl, even though their parents hadn’t played favorites between them.

“It’s a pity raising Nikolai didn’t stir any maternal instinct in you. It would have been nice if Vika had grown up with a friend in the family to play
with.”

Galina plucked her teacup out of Sergei’s hands. “Maternal instinct? Ha! You can’t stir something that doesn’t exist, thank goodness. And as for Vika having a friend, that is ridiculous, and you know it. They are enchanters, Sergei. They were always going to have to fight each other and die. They couldn’t know who the other enchanter was, let alone be friends. Besides, you hate Saint Petersburg
and would never have come to visit. I would never have visited you on that godforsaken island, either, because I hate . . . nature.” She glared again at sheets of freezing, tumbling white outside the window.

“You honestly don’t love Nikolai, then? After all those years, you can’t say that even a single beat of your frigid heart belongs to the boy?”

Galina smiled, and her teeth gleamed at the
points, as if she filed and polished them to appear that way. Except Sergei knew she’d always looked like that. She had always been a wolf.

“Every beat of my heart belongs to myself,
mon frère
. You’d do better if you kept yours to yourself, as well. We did our jobs as mentors, and that’s that. No need for us to hurt unnecessarily when one of them dies, but that’s exactly
what will happen if you
insist on remaining attached to your student.”

Sergei snorted. As if he could so easily discard every memory of Vika—from watching her go from crawling to walking to leaping through trees, from teaching her the alphabet to how to conjure a doll to how to summon rain from a barren sky, from telling her she could grow up to be Imperial Enchanter to finally leading her to her fate at Bolshebnoie
Duplo. No, it was impossible to extricate Vika’s life from his; he wouldn’t be who he was now without her.

Sergei plucked a slice of slightly burnt onion bread from the plate on the table. Even this reminded him of Vika, not only because she would have brought him a perfect loaf from Ludmila’s bakery, but also because she would have shared it with him.

“Bread?” he said to Galina, a peace offering,
of sorts. Or as close to peace as was possible for siblings in a cramped Siberian cottage.

She waved it away. “You know I don’t eat peasant fare. Besides, why you insist on baking bread yourself when you can simply conjure it, I will never understand.”

He wagged a finger at her. “Food is one thing magic does not do well. You know that. That’s why you hire a cook at home. Although I can’t imagine
you in the kitchen, even if it were possible to conjure decent meals.”

“I doubt magic could make bread much worse than what you bake.”

Sergei shrugged, slathered butter on his burnt slice, and crammed the entire thing into his mouth.

“I’m going to die of hypothermia before they finish the Game,” Galina said. “It’s only October, for heaven’s sake. It’s
downright indecent for there to be a blizzard
in the middle of October.”

Sergei chuckled and opened a book on the medicinal herbs of Siberia. He didn’t mind the snow—he rather liked it, actually, especially when it fell so heavily that one forgot it was composed of individual snowflakes rather than a single blanket of fleece—and he enjoyed how much the blizzard upended his sister.

“A little precipitation never hurt anybody,” he said. “Settle
in, dear city girl. It may be a very long winter.”

A
izhana rose with the sunset at her back, casting a long, barbed shadow on the dry earth. It had taken her much longer than she’d anticipated to traverse the distance from her grave, but now, finally, she’d reached the cluster of yurts she’d seen shortly upon resurrection. The brown grass snapped and whimpered under her feet.

She clomped her way to the fire pit, her left
leg dragging a bit behind her right, for the left foot hadn’t fully reanimated. The women who’d been tending the meat on the spit shrank back. Aizhana recognized a handful of them, their faces the same but for age-cursed wrinkles.

“Where is my child?” she asked Damira, who in her fifties was the eldest of the women.

Damira stared at her with unblinking eyes. Perhaps it was at how Aizhana looked.
Her face was skeletal, with yellow-gray skin stretched taut in places and sagging in others. Her hair was missing in patches, and what she did possess hung limp and dirty like decaying fishing nets. Or
perhaps it was how Aizhana smelled, as she had been dead for nearly two decades, and simply infusing a decaying body with new energy would not undo that unfortunate fact.

“Wh-what are you?” Damira
asked. “What do you want?”

“I want my baby.”

“I don’t know who—”

“You don’t recognize me?” Aizhana bared her yellowed teeth.

“Someone run to the pastures to summon help,” Damira whispered to the other women.

“I would not advise it.” Aizhana raised a fingernail in the air. It was as long and sharp as a blade.

The women remained obediently in place—or more accurately, they were too terrified
to move. Aizhana limped to the edge of their fire. “I am going to tell you a story,” she said as she settled herself on the ground. Damira, who was the closest, had enough sense not to wince at Aizhana’s stench.

Aizhana took in a long breath. The smell of roasting meat filled her with a distant memory, and she fell swiftly into her tale.

Once, many years ago, there was a girl with golden eyes
who lived happily among her people. She was renowned not only for her fleet-footed dancing and fine embroidery, but also for her extraordinary touch. She was a faith healer, and she could redirect energy from one part of an ill or wounded person to another part. From a strong stomach to a weak spleen, or from powerful lungs to an arrow wound. Because of that, she was one of the most valuable girls
in the tribe, and as befit her position, she was betrothed to their leader’s son.

But then, when she was sixteen, a regiment of Russian soldiers arrived near her village. Curious, she and the other girls snuck out to spy on them. They intended only to have a peek.

She did not expect one of the soldiers to spot her in the grasses. She did not expect to fall swiftly in love with his confidence
and easy grace. She did not expect she would abandon her tribe to spend her nights in his bed, living hungrily on his love and his kisses.

She certainly did not expect to wake one morning to find him and his entire regiment gone.

The tribe took the girl back in, but she was disgraced, condemned to scrubbing laundry and hauling the manure of yaks. Eight lonely months crawled by. And on the nine-month
anniversary of her first night in the soldier’s bed, she gave birth to a baby boy. The umbilical cord wrapped like a noose around his neck.

“No!” The girl uncoiled it and touched the bruise already formed on his fragile skin.

Death stole into her yurt, reached out with its bony hands, and attempted to lift the boy away.

But the girl snatched the baby back. “You cannot have him.” She hugged
the child, the only thing she had, and heard his pulse fluttering like a dragonfly, trying to escape. “Shh . . . ,” she said. “Shh. I am a healer. I will save you.”

And then she thought of all the times she’d healed a wound or nursed an ache. It was simply a matter of moving energy, of shifting the patient’s strength from one place in a body to another. She looked at the gasping baby in her arms.
What is stopping me from channeling my energy to him?
Nothing. It would either work, or it wouldn’t.

She focused on the place where the baby’s skin touched hers. Then she felt her own energy flowing hot with the fear of losing him. She directed her remaining strength into his veins.

The boy cried, so loudly it shook the walls of her yurt.

Death cocked its head and moved to take the girl, who
lay weak on the dirt floor. “But I’m not dead,” she whispered.

Death paused. And then, instead of picking her up, it knelt and passed its skeletal fingers over her eyes to shut them. Because she was brave enough not only to face and defy Death, and also to outsmart it, she was rewarded with sleep in ante-death, the space between the living realm and the dead.

But she would not stay in ante-death
forever. She swore with her last breath that when she was strong enough, she would rise again.

The women around the fire pit quivered.

“Do you remember me now?” Aizhana smiled in a way that once would have been sweet, but now was nothing but rotting gums and disdain.

“You rose from the dead,” Damira said, scrambling away. She did not go far, though, before she bumped into the other women.

“No. Were you not listening? I was never dead. I was merely not living. But I have returned, and I want my boy. Where is he? Is he out shepherding or hunting with the men?”

“He . . .”

“Is he out shepherding or hunting with the men?” Aizhana asked again, the screech of her voice rising.

Damira’s eyes widened. “I . . . We haven’t seen him in eleven years. He left the village.”

Aizhana scraped
her fingernails against her papery temple. They rasped like claws against molted snakeskin. “He could not have left on his own at age seven. What did you do?”

Damira sniveled. The other women held one another, as if something so simple would protect them.

“Where is he? What did you do?” Aizhana snarled.

“A Russian aristocrat came. She wanted him. You have to understand, he was too much for
us. We didn’t know what to do with his power—”

“You lived with me among you all those years. How could a boy be any different?”

“He was. He
was
different!” Damira said. “You were a healer. You made people better. You were a force of good. He was . . .”

“Like a demon,” another woman, Tazagul, said. Her face glowed in the light of the fire. “He had too much power. It came from somewhere other
than the people who needed to be healed. He wasn’t like you.”

“My son is not a demon!” Aizhana howled, and her shriek nearly drew blood from the women’s ears.

But if he wasn’t a healer, then what was he? Could he be an enchanter? It would make sense, the way Damira and Tazagul described him. Healers utilized small magic, and the energy came from their patients. But enchanters could use greater
magic.

“Whatever he was, we did not know what to do with him,” Damira said. “And the Russian woman offered two horses and two sheep to take him away to train—”

“You
sold
my son? For four animals?”

“No, we—”

But that was all Damira got out before Aizhana pounced on her and slashed her throat with her wicked nails. Thick, hot red spurted everywhere. Aizhana grinned. Then she siphoned off the
energy as Damira’s life left her body.

“What have you done?” Tazagul said, trembling. She and the other women still kneeled on the ground, too paralyzed to flee. They gaped at their dead kinswoman.

“Even if I was disgraced, my son was innocent, and you were supposed to mother him in my stead,” Aizhana said, her voice now a low growl. “That is how a village works. But you left him without a mother,
and now I will leave all
your
children without theirs.”

She lunged at the women. She shredded them with her nails, ten merciless blades compelled by vengeance. And as she killed them, she absorbed their energy, just as she’d done to the worms and the maggots in the ground.

She was now so full of both life and death that it would take more than a mere bullet to kill her. And her left foot seemed
almost awake. Which was good. For apparently she had a long journey ahead.

Nikolai,
she thought.
I am coming for you
.