The Crown's Game Part 11

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 gla.s.s slipper to and make into a princess," Nikolai said.

"You never know."

"She could turn out to be the wicked fairy G.o.dmother instead."

"Now you're conflating your fairy tales. The wicked fairy G.o.dmother 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 Ca.n.a.l 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 gla.s.ses. "You can't." Then he lifted his gla.s.s and toasted, "To the lightning girl. And all else that may come."

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

"Why 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 gla.s.sy 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 coa.r.s.e 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 G.o.dforsaken 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 frre. 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 b.u.t.ter 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."

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.

Aizhana 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 antic.i.p.ated to traverse the distance from her grave, but now, finally, she'd reached the cl.u.s.ter of yurts she'd seen shortly upon resurrection. The brown gra.s.s 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 gra.s.ses. 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.