The Crown’s Game (25 page)

S
ergei cried out from his bed. Galina dropped the armload of firewood she was moving near the fireplace—with nothing else to do in Siberia, and with Sergei indisposed, she had begun finding solace in the daily chores of their household—and rushed to his side.

His forehead beaded with sweat, and his black eyes were open but seemed not to see her. “Galina . . .”

“Shh,
mon
frère
.” She dipped a nearby washcloth in a basin of water and dabbed it on his head. “I’m right here.”

“Something happened. There’s no more.” Delirium tinged his whisper.

The composure Galina had been trying to keep fell from her face. Her jaw tightened. “No more what?”

“No more of me left.” He rolled toward the sound of her voice, his eyes still unseeing. “Tell Vika the truth about who I am.
Who she is. And tell her I loved her.”

Galina dropped the washcloth back in the basin. “Sergei, no.”

“I am finished.”

“No! I shall write to the tsar. I’ll request that he declare a winner and end the Game. You will recover.”

“Hm?” Sergei grunted.

“You’ll get better.”

But he ignored her. It was as if his ears were failing him, as well. “Tell Vika I am proud of her. And not to be upset at
me for the bracelet, and for not telling her about me, or about her mother. I did it all because I love her.”

“Sergei . . .”

His eyes drifted closed. Then they flitted open again, only to droop and fly open once more.

“Please don’t go,” Galina whispered.

“Sing to me,” he said.

She swallowed the dread lodged in her throat, and she began to sing his lullaby. Her voice carried out from the cabin
across the fields of snow.

     
Na ulitse dozhdik,

     
S vedra polivaet,

     
S vedra polivaet,

     
Zemlyu pribivaet.

Sergei sighed when she finished, and she tucked the sheets tightly around him. “Sing again,” he said.

So Galina did.

At the end of the song, Sergei let out a low moan. Buzzards screeched outside. And then the light in Sergei’s eyes snuffed out.

Her brother was gone.

She buckled on the bed beside him and cradled him in her arms. And for the first time since their father died, Galina cried.

T
he night was shaded in midnight blue, and quietude kissed the air. Moonlight shimmered upon Saint Petersburg’s streets, and sleepy ripples rolled through its canals.

There was no one out at this hour but the two enchanters. Nikolai smiled as Vika’s footfalls on the cobblestones fell into sync with his. Unintentional and yet so inevitable.

After the tsar and tsarina had
gone, he and Vika had taken a winding path through the city. Neither of them spoke, but they were both content with having no real destination at all. The Game was still upon them, of course, but the restlessness, the disquiet it normally inspired, had lifted, at least for now.

Nikolai watched as Vika moved beside him, impossibly light, impossibly strong. She had evanesced two entire people to
the southern edge of the empire. She was a marvel. She was magic itself.

She glanced over at him and smiled.

If only tonight could stretch on forever,
Nikolai thought.

But suddenly, Vika gasped. She grabbed onto the leather bracelet around her wrist. Her knees gave way beneath her, and she collapsed.

It was so fast, Nikolai didn’t have time to catch her. Her head slammed into the cobblestones.
If not for the embankment, she would have tumbled into the canal.

Nikolai rushed forward. “Vika, are you all right?”

But she didn’t move or even murmur. She lay limp on the ground with one arm hanging over the embankment, her fingers dangling over the canal. Nikolai’s own heart pounded as he reached to take her pulse.

It was there. Stuttering, like a broken metronome, but there. Barely.

Thank
the heavens.

He scooped her up and cradled her against his body, and for a moment her magic, albeit weak, meshed with his, and he felt again that hot jolt like their connection at Pasha’s ball. And then, as quickly as it had come, it was gone, and Vika was just an unconscious girl in his arms.

Nikolai held her tighter. “It’ll be fine,” he said, both to Vika and to himself, as he hurried toward
the Zakrevsky house, which was only a few blocks away. “Everything will be fine.”

But that was a lie, for there was nothing about him and Vika that would ever be fine. What a fool he’d been to think tonight could be any different.

When they arrived at his house, he charmed open the front door, hurled away all the protection charms he’d cast, and rushed her straight upstairs to his room. The
door swung shut behind him.

“Vika,” he whispered.

She didn’t respond. Her head lolled over his arm. She was a rag doll.

He laid her down gently on his bed and covered her with a wool blanket. “Vika,” he said, louder now. But still there was no response. He checked her pulse again. It stammered, but it was there.

He tried shaking her softly, careful not to jostle too hard.

Nothing.

If only
he could see inside her, like she could when she healed animals, then he could figure out what had gone wrong and how to fix it. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried. But he couldn’t; it was all just a mass of red muscle and pink organs and crisscrossing veins. Living things were messy. It wasn’t like seeing through the straight walls of a library at all.

He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his
hands.
Think. If I can’t use magic, then what? What would an ordinary person do?

There was a girl who worked in the kitchen, one of Renata’s friends, who constantly fainted. The cook kept smelling salts around to revive her.

Yes. Try that.

Nikolai opened his eyes and snapped his fingers. A silver vial of smelling salts appeared. He fumbled with the cap, and it clattered to the floor when he
finally wrenched it off.

He wafted the salts under Vika’s nose. “Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.”

After a few passes, she stirred, and her eyes flickered open. “Nikolai?”

“I thought I’d lost you.” He dropped onto the bed beside her. The knot in his chest unraveled.

“Where am I?”

“In my room. Thank goodness you’re all right.” This wasn’t the death Vika’s tea leaves had foretold. Nikolai threw the
smelling salts onto his nightstand. He didn’t care that they spilled.

“What happened?”

“You fainted.”

“Oh.” Vika’s eyes fell closed. “Yes. I remember now.” The red of her hair spread like blood against his white pillowcase.

It was so beautiful, and so . . . baleful. He had to touch it. His fingers reached out.

But her eyes opened again, and he stopped. He stuffed his hands beneath him and
sat on them to restrain himself. “Are you all right?” he asked instead.

“I . . . I don’t know. It felt like something latched onto me and sucked all my energy away. It happened so quickly.” She passed her hands over her face and her torso, as if checking for abrasions. Her right hand circled her left wrist. “My bracelet. It’s gone.”

“What?” Nikolai whirled to his desk. Had something happened
to both their gifts? He uncharmed the drawer and threw it open.

But his knife was still there in the hidden compartment. It seemed intact and untampered with. He slid his drawer shut again and charmed the lock. Then he turned back to Vika, who had drifted off again. “Vika,” he whispered. “Was the bracelet enchanted? Did it have any special power?”

“I don’t know.”

“How could it have fallen off?”
He remembered how tightly it had cinched to her wrist at Bolshebnoie Duplo.
And she’d been holding it when she collapsed by the canal.

“I don’t know.” Vika turned her head and coughed.

“I’m sorry. This isn’t the time to interrogate you.” He swirled his hand in the air, and a glass appeared in it. “Here. Water.”

“Thank you.” She managed to sit up and take a sip. Then she rested heavily against
his headboard, as if even that small movement was too much work. “I haven’t been this weary since the Game began. I feel . . . inadequate.”

He looked again at her hair, and its fierceness—from the red down to the black stripe—seemed to represent everything she was. “You’re anything but inadequate. You conjured an entire island. You evanesced the tsar and tsarina. Even now, your color is returning.
You’re not at all as weak as you think.”

But as he said it, conflict again knotted in Nikolai’s chest. For part of him wanted Vika weak enough so he could win the Game, but that part of him was rapidly losing ground to the part that wanted her to keep on fighting, to continue sparring with him.

And to the part of him that wanted to kiss her. That wanted to ask her to stay, to put out the candles
and see what happened if the scars of two enchanters touched in the night.

The ground beneath him trembled at the thoughts. In fact, the entire room shifted. The paintings on his wall tilted. The glass of water spilled. Even the armoire moved several feet. Nikolai tried to clear his mind.

There are things more dangerous than a little magic,
he thought.

Vika tensed on the bed, and he could sense
a new shield
around her, stuttering. “What are you doing?” she whispered.

Nikolai shook his head, and the earth ceased its shaking. “I’m sorry. I was just thinking.”

She scrutinized him for a second, then released the flimsy shield she’d cast around herself. “You have forceful thoughts.”

Never had a statement been so true. Deuces, he wanted to kiss her. Touch her. More.

“Be careful,” Vika
said, still eyeing him from his bed.
His
bed!

“
With what?” he managed to say without his voice pitching high or revealing too much. Or so he hoped.

“With thinking,” she said.

Nikolai nodded. “I know.” He turned away from her and tried to focus on the wall. On something plain and quotidian and not tantalizing at all. “Thinking can be a perilous sport.”

A
s soon as the sun rose, Aizhana heard the news of the tsar and tsarina’s departure.

It would have been easier if the tsar had stayed put in the capital. It would have made killing him much simpler. However, the past eighteen years had been anything but simple, and Aizhana would not let a small bump in her plans derail her.

She stowed away on the caravan of luggage at the
Winter Palace. She would follow the tsar and tsarina to the South. They would not foil her vengeance so easily.

T
wo days after Vika’s uncharacteristic fainting incident, an envelope flew through the air and tapped its corner against her kitchen window. Vika leaped to open the glass pane and let the letter inside.

“What is it?” Ludmila asked.

The envelope was covered in frost, and the return address said only
Siberia
.

“It must be Father.” Vika smiled so brightly, the muscles in her face
ached.

“How do you know?”

“Who else in Siberia would charm a letter to me this way?”

What was inside? Where precisely
was
Sergei, and what had he been doing all this time? Vika tried to tear the envelope open, but her hands trembled, and her fingers acted as if they’d been reduced to useless sticks. She dropped the letter, and it skittered across the tiles, under the table.

Vika crawled to
retrieve it. The talon-shaped table legs
seemed to stretch their claws at her. She scrambled to snatch the precious letter from their clutches.

When she had the envelope again, she tossed it into the air and flicked her middle finger and thumb at it. The wax seal broke, and the stationery inside slipped out and somersaulted down to Vika’s hands. She unfolded it along its deep creases.

But the
letter was not in Sergei’s handwriting. It was something both harsher and more looping. Galina’s.

The bottom dropped out from Vika’s stomach.

Dear Vika,

We are not ordinarily to communicate with the enchanters during the Game, but in this instance, I believe the rules will permit it of me.

I am writing with the sad news that Sergei has passed. He wanted to let you know he was proud of you,
and that he loved you as if you were his own.

Which brings me to another difficult point. On his deathbed, Sergei expressed his wish that I tell you the truth of your origins. He was not, in fact, your father. Like me, he was a mentor, and he found you on the face of a volcano, abandoned by a nymph. The identity of your father is unknown. But Sergei considered you his daughter until the end,
and he wanted you to know he was sorry he deceived you. He had thought, perhaps wrongly, that it was for the best.

My brother’s death is as much a shock to me as I am certain it will be to you. My apologies that this letter does not bear a happier report.

With condolences,

Galina Zakrevskaya

The letter tumbled to the floor. There was no magic to suspend it. Vika stood paralyzed in the center
of the kitchen.

There were no thoughts.

Ludmila picked up the letter and read it, a fat tear rolling down her cheek as she finished. She placed her plump hands on Vika’s shoulders and steered her to her bedroom.

“Sit,” Ludmila commanded.

Vika did as she was told.

Ludmila collapsed on the bed beside her. The mattress heaved with her weight.

“Come here, my sunshine.” She gathered Vika to her
bosom. Vika did not resist.

There was nothing, nothing, nothing.

Nothing except Sergei being gone.

N
ikolai sat restlessly at a table in the corner of the Imperial Library’s public reading room. It had been a week since Vika evanesced the tsar and tsarina—and nearly two since Nikolai created the Dream Benches—but Vika still had not taken her fourth turn in the Game. So Nikolai tried to pass his time here in the library until his scar alerted him that it was his turn, but he
fidgeted so much that another patron complained, and the librarian had to ask Nikolai to relocate.

Now he stared again at the words in a book of French poetry, but he couldn’t make any sense of the verses. Why would a woman be compared to a carriage wheel? Or death to an otter in a creek? He considered going back to perusing the tomes on the occult throughout European history. They were soporific,
but at least they seemed based in reality.

However, his thoughts wandered to Vika instead. At first, Nikolai had thought she needed time to recover after fainting by the canal. But then he remembered that she’d
walked out of his house the other night almost her old self. She’d been a bit shaky, but nothing a little sleep wouldn’t fix. After all, she was the girl who’d conjured an entire island
after a night at Pasha’s ball. She was not easily fazed.

Where was she? Even Ludmila’s pumpkin was closed. Perhaps that was it, something had happened with Ludmila, and Vika had gone to help her. It made sense. (He’d conjured a few new stone birds—harmless ones—but they hadn’t seen any sign of Vika, or Ludmila either.)

Nikolai pressed his fingers into his temples, so hard he actually drew blood
from his skin.
You have to stop obsessing.
Having Vika in his bedroom had scrambled his brain. He needed to reassess his priorities again.

Forget how soft she was when you cradled her in your arms. Forget the way her hair smells like honeysuckle and cinnamon. Focus on the Game.

Nikolai scratched his fingernails down the sides of his face until they found their familiar place behind his neck.
He stared blankly at the French poem below him and lowered his forehead to the pages, resting, ostensibly, on the library table.

He was still in that position when someone thrust a heavy book onto the table.

Nikolai started.

Pasha slid into the seat across from him. He wore his best—or worst, depending on opinion—disguise, that of an unkempt fisherman. He was unshaven and dressed in a rough
tunic and trousers, so bedraggled he could have emerged straight from the bottom of the bay. It was certainly not the look of a tsesarevich. But it also was not the look of someone who would ordinarily frequent the Imperial
Library. A few patrons eyed Pasha with disdain.

“What are you doing here?” Nikolai whispered.

“Searching for you. You’ve been avoiding me again.”

“No. I’ve only been . .
. ill.”

“But not too ill to read French poetry?” Pasha tilted his head to better see the slim volume on the table.

Nikolai flipped it closed. “On the contrary, the poetry made me only more ill.”

Pasha smirked. “Regardless, I’ve tracked you down once again.” He tapped the cover of the book he had brought. “This explains everything.”

Nikolai glanced down at the book, and his stomach lurched,
as if Pasha had brought the smell of fish past its prime into the library with him.
Russian Mystics and the Tsars
. “Where did you get that? And what do you mean it explains everything?”

“I’ve had it for a while, but you were so against me pursuing Vika and seemed . . . repulsed, almost, by the idea of magic that I hadn’t shared the book with you. I didn’t want you to think me a fool. But it really
does explain everything—the enchantments around the city. The island. Vika.”

Nikolai swallowed but didn’t speak. Had Pasha finally caught up to Nikolai’s deceit?

“I thought the charms around the city were merely amusements well timed with my birthday,” Pasha said. “Oh, how vain I was! They
are
a game, but an ancient one: the Crown’s Game.”

Nikolai gripped the edge of the table as if the library
were a ship heeling beneath him. His knuckles were bone white.

“Don’t you want to know about the Crown’s Game?” Pasha asked.

Nikolai shook his head.

“Well, I’ll tell you anyway.” Pasha began, in a low voice, to relay the details of the contest between enchanters. He started at the beginning, in the age of Rurik, and wound his way through a catalog of past Games, his eyes lightening and darkening
as he recounted the history. Nikolai held the table even tighter.

Only when Pasha had finished did the color seep back into Nikolai’s hands. Pasha had not mentioned Nikolai’s involvement in the Game. Yet.

Pasha poked the
Russian Mystics
book. “Have you nothing to say? Nikolai! I’ve just informed you that there’s an ancient contest of magic taking place in our midst, and that the girl I almost
kissed is in the center of it and might die.”

Nikolai groaned and brought his head back down to the incomprehensible French poem. “You almost kissed her?” he asked into the table. Jealousy blazed inside him. So much for trying not to think of Vika in that way. “When? Where?”

“On the island, soon after the benches appeared,” Pasha said. “I tried to kiss her, but she told me she wasn’t ‘in a position
to fall in love.’”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. But she promised I’d know if it changed.”

Nikolai wanted to disappear into the table. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you sleep too damn much and never come out with me anymore. But I’m telling you now, and you’re flat on the table, falling asleep again.” Pasha thumped his hand on the book.

Someone nearby shushed him, then made a
fuss of standing up and relocating to a table much farther away.

“I’m not falling asleep,” Nikolai muttered. It would have been impossible to. Pasha had (almost) kissed Vika. How could Nikolai have even thought he’d have a chance with her? Of course she would fall in love with Pasha. Pasha was the heir to an empire, and he was smart and dashing and could win a war with his smile. He was also
not at risk of dying in the Game.

And that explained why she’d told Pasha she wasn’t currently in a position to fall in love. She still didn’t know how the Game would end. But if she won, then she
would
be in a position to fall in love. She would be Imperial Enchanter, and she would no longer fear commitment to Pasha, for she would know she could live happily ever after.

And Nikolai would be
alone. No, dead. Exactly as his tea leaves had predicted.

Pasha knocked on Nikolai’s head. “Then if you’re not asleep, talk to me. You’re my best friend. I think I love her, and she might die.”

Nikolai peered up from the table. “You cannot love her. You hardly know her.”

“If there were ever a girl a man could fall in love with without knowing, it would be Vika. I have to stop the other enchanter.
Say you’ll help me.”

Were the library truly a ship, this would be the moment that it sank.

“Nikolai.”

He shook his head.

“Say you’ll help me.”

Nikolai exhaled deeply. Why did Pasha have to get involved?

And yet, Nikolai had to respond. He couldn’t hide against the table forever.

He pulled himself upright and charmed away the nausea and despair from his face, although it cost him what felt
like the last of his integrity to do so. Instead, he put on the facade of being the same Nikolai he had always been, the practical one to Pasha’s whimsy.

“I told you the first time we saw her, Pasha, that Vika is not the kind of girl you can give a glass slipper to and expect to turn into a princess. Likewise—assuming this Crown’s Game is not mere legend—you cannot interfere. She wouldn’t want
you to.”

“But perhaps in this instance—”

“No. She would not want your help. And regardless, you would be of no assistance. What would you do? Murder the other enchanter? For what other way is there to stop him?”

“I don’t . . . I admit I didn’t think it through quite that far.” He tugged on his hair, and the fisherman’s cap fell off.

Nikolai picked it up and tossed it back at him. “I’m right,
you know.”

Pasha turned the fisherman’s cap in his hands.

“Let it go,” Nikolai said, as much to Pasha as to himself. “Forget about trying to control the Game, and let it take its course. It will end how it needs to end.”

Pasha frowned. “I wish there were something I could do to change it.”

Nikolai closed his eyes. “Me, too, Pasha. Me, too.”