The Crown's Game Part 22

But why not try? Ever since the Game began-ever since she'd moved to Saint Petersburg-Vika had felt stronger. Maybe it was being close to Nikolai, their magic magnifying against each other. Or maybe the challenge of the Game simply pushed her to be better. But whatever it was, it allowed her to perform enchantments greater than she'd ever created before and to get by on almost no sleep, even after conjuring an entire island.

Of course, in the past, she'd only been able to evanesce a few feet, and it would be a few miles to the island. But it was worth an attempt. If it didn't work, there was always a boat to steal.

Vika closed her eyes. She imagined herself disappearing and reappearing again on the new island.

Do it.

Do it.

Go . . .

She squeezed her eyes shut tighter. Nothing happened except everything got blacker.

Vika huffed and opened her eyes. Perhaps she would have to steal a boat.

Except I don't want to, she thought. She really, really wanted to evanesce. In fact, this intensity of wanting reminded her of the same spark she used to feel right before she mastered a new skill, like mending a fox's sprained ankle or beckoning the snow. It was a combination of pure will and the right moment that had allowed her to do those things. And now, with this increased power, with all this new energy from the Game . . . this was the moment. Vika knew this would be the moment she would learn to evanesce. It had to be.

Perhaps she needed to approach it differently. Rather than jumping from one place to the next, perhaps Vika needed to feel the sensation of evanescing, in order to coax it to happen. Provide her body with actual instructions, so to speak.

She closed her eyes again. But this time, instead of commanding her body to disappear and simply reappear, Vika first envisioned her body, whole, and then, when she could see every detail of herself, she began to think of her body not as one, but as an infinity of tiny pieces.

I am no longer Vika Andreyeva, she thought. I am composed of minuscule bubbles.

She felt herself begin to disintegrate.

And then she really did become those bubbles. I am effervescent! It made so much sense now. Vika was a master of the elements, and now she had become an element herself. She'd become a fizzy, magical rain.

The wind heard her desire to evanesce, and it whooshed through her window and blew her away.

The island, her thoughts whispered, and the wind obeyed, whisking her like champagne raindrops over Nevsky Prospect, past the colorful ca.n.a.ls, and across the Neva River and bay. It carried her over the island and swirled down to the gardens. Then it deposited her dissolved quintessence at the foot of the main promenade.

Vika's sense of self was nebulous; if she'd had a head, it would have felt full of clouds. But although she was not much more than sparkling fog, she retained the impression that she used to be something more. Come back together, she thought, although she was not sure what it was that she was supposed to be.

The tiny bubbles, however, knew. She'd shepherded them all safely to the island, and one by one, they reunited. She blinked, for a moment staring at her hands and feet as if she'd never seen them before. Then the memory of being human rushed back, and she laughed and wiggled her fingers and toes.

"I did it." Vika touched her arms and legs and neck and head, and yes, every single piece of her was there. She laughed again. She stretched and she spun, and she found that her body worked exactly as it should. "I did it!" She wasn't tired at all.

After another minute, she remembered to look around her, because she'd come to the island not for the experience of evanescing, but to uncover Nikolai's move. She stood at the beginning of the promenade in the middle of the island's gardens, and as she took in her surroundings, she gasped. Where there had been only a canopy of leaves when she'd left yesterday, golden globes now ornamented the branches, suspended by invisible string and floating in the breeze. The soft glow of the lanterns complemented the orange light of the rising sun.

Across the path from her was a new bench. Although Vika was not tired from the evanescing, her breath was a bit unsteady, as if her newly reconst.i.tuted lungs were still relearning how to breathe. So she walked over to the bench. It looked ordinary enough, except for a bra.s.s plaque on its seat back that said Moscow in both Russian and French. And magic wafted off the bench in a mist of pale-blue vapor.

Will this kill me if I sit?

No one answered except the larks and wrens she'd put in the trees, singing her favorite folk songs.

But Nikolai's magic reached out, the pale-blue mist curling in wisps around her. The tugging began again in the center of her chest.

So she took a deep breath and dropped down onto the bench. It was reckless, but Vika had done plenty of reckless things before, and for a great deal less in return.

As soon as she made contact with the wooden slats, her chest swelled with warmth as it had at the masquerade. At the same time, the park around her began to fade. Then, like a watercolor, a new scene filled in. She stood along the Arbat, the main thoroughfare of Moscow, surrounded by opulence. Corinthian columns and intricate mahogany veneers adorned the houses, and women in fashionable gowns strolled arm in arm along the street. The entire city had been rebuilt after its citizens had burned it down to prevent Napoleon from pillaging it, and here Moscow was, shiny and proud and new.

It was like being in a dream. Vika could sc.r.a.pe her boots against the dirt, feel the autumn chill upon her skin, even take in the rich smell of mushroom and meat pies wafting in the air. And yet, for all the reality of the scene, the people on the Arbat couldn't see her. When she said h.e.l.lo, they did not greet her.

She strolled away from the Arbat and continued walking until she came to Red Square. She marveled at the white Kremlin walls and paused to admire the red brick and the cupolas of St. Basil's Cathedral, built to resemble a bonfire rising to the sky. Vika had never been to Moscow, but it was beautiful to behold.

After a while, she had gotten her fill of churches and monuments and squares. She was ready to leave Moscow except . . . how? It was not as if Nikolai had provided an obvious exit. Her heart pounded faster. She looked all around her, at the people who could not see her and the city that was too fake to be real but too real to be feigned.

Oh, the devil, it was a trap. He'd finally caught her. Her stupid curiosity had led her here, and now she'd be stuck in Moscow forever. It was even worse than being confined, as Sergei used to say, to the jinni bottle that was Ovchinin Island. Now she was literally trapped on a bench in a dream.

A never-ending, lonely dream.

But wait. Dreams could be woken from. Right? Yes, please, please, please, be right.

Vika shook her head from side to side and yawned. She stretched her arms above her head and opened her eyes wide. A few seconds later, Moscow began to fade away, and reality and the island came into view again. She exhaled.

She was free.

And even better, it had not been a trick. Nikolai had not tried to hurt her, just as she had not tried to hurt him with this island. She sighed and leaned back against the bench.

Then it dawned on her how incredible it was what Nikolai had created.

There were other benches along the promenade. If this first one had been such a glorious rendition of Moscow, what else had he done? She stood and hurried across the gravel path-the benches zigzagged across the promenade, each fifty or so yards from the next-and wandered to the next bench.

A subtle fog hung over this one, too. Sea green, rather than blue. It also had a bra.s.s plaque on it, but instead of Moscow, it was labeled Kostroma. Kostroma was a small city at the junction of the Volga and Kostroma Rivers, and famous for the venerable Ipatievsky Monastery and the Trinity Cathedral, both beloved by the tsars. Had Nikolai been to all these places? A p.r.i.c.k of jealousy twinged inside her.

She wanted to sit on the Kostroma bench, but she was still a little skittish from panicking inside Moscow. So she ran down the gravel path to look at the next one instead. Kazan. The largest city in the land of the Tatars, where mosques and Orthodox churches coexisted, and where the tsar had recently founded the Kazan Imperial University.

After Kazan came Samara, then Nizhny Novgorod, seat of the medieval princes, followed by Yekaterinburg on the Ural Mountains, the border of the European and Asian sides of the empire.

Vika spun in a circle in the middle of the promenade, looking at all the benches behind and in front of and around her, each with a different plaque and a different, subtle mist about it. "It's a dream tour of the wonders of Russia," she said aloud.

The next bench was Kizhi Island, known for its twenty-two-dome church constructed entirely of shimmering silver-brown wood, each piece painstakingly interlocked at the corners with round notches or dovetail joints. Legend had it that the builder used only one ax to construct the entire church, and when finished, tossed the ax into the nearby lake and declared that there would never be another ax like it.

Now that one, she would sit on. Maybe after she'd seen all the others. Vika was sure she could spend hours on Kizhi Island.

Next came benches for the crystal clear waters at Lake Baikal in Siberia, the glacier-capped Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus Mountains, and the Valley of Geysers on the Kamchatka Peninsula.

The second-to-last bench was not a historically significant location. It was not a particularly populous one, either. It was not as stunning as Lake Baikal or Mount Elbrus or the Kamchatka Peninsula, and hardly anyone knew it existed. But these were Nikolai's benches; he was the final arbiter of what qualified as a wonder of Russia. And he had decided this would be the penultimate one.

"Oh . . ." Vika pressed her hand to her necklace. A golden mist shimmered around the bench, as if swathing it in autumn sunset. It was Ovchinin Island.

She reached out and traced the bra.s.s plaque with her finger, following each engraved letter from beginning to end. She did this twice, and then she lowered herself onto the bench. All apprehension from the Moscow bench disappeared at the antic.i.p.ation of this next dream.

As soon as she sat, the garden once again faded away. And when the fog burned off, a birch forest encircled her, and wolverines and foxes and pheasants cavorted at her feet.

"Home," she whispered.

She hiked through the woods, to a break in the trees, and looked out over the Neva Bay. Nikolai had captured the view of Saint Petersburg from Ovchinin Island flawlessly. He had also included her new island, a small isle of green in the middle of the deep-blue bay. She smiled but knitted her brow at the same time. It was an odd sensation, to know that she was actually on that island, and yet to feel that she was somewhere else, on the outside looking in.

She continued hiking, pushing her way through overgrown shrubbery and crossing a log over Preobrazhensky Creek. She came to the clearing where she'd emerged from the fire, where Nikolai and Pasha had first seen her. In Nikolai's dream version, the trees still smoldered, and thin plumes of smoke trailed from the singed trunks into the sky.

There were also two patches of ice on the forest floor, with two pairs of footprints embedded in them, still fresh as if the boys standing there had recently fled. Vika laughed. How funny, the details he'd included just for her!

But what she wanted to see most was her house. Now that she was back on Ovchinin Island-or the daydream of the island-the yearning for home that she had been suppressing bubbled to the surface and propelled her toward the last hill of the forest. She began to run, as fast as she could.

As she ascended the hill, however, her vision started to blur. She tried to push onward, but the haziness continued, and although her feet moved, the setting remained the same and her progress halted. It was as if she ran the same spot on the hill over and over again.

Ah . . . this was the edge of Nikolai's knowledge, the perimeter of the Ovchinin Island he'd created. He had never been to her cottage, so he couldn't include it in his dream. All he could conjure was what he had personally seen and what he could embellish from his experience.

Vika stood another minute longer at the base of the hill, then shook herself awake and out of the scene before too much disappointment could set in. It was still a marvel what Nikolai had created; she couldn't fault him for failing to include her home. And perhaps it was better that her house remained absent, for soon the people of Saint Petersburg would be here on the island, sitting on these benches and walking through these same dreams. She wouldn't want them opening the cabinets and drawers in her house, even if they were imaginary.

There was only one more bench left on the promenade. Vika rose and approached it slowly, even considering whether she ought to go back to the beginning and sit on each of the other benches before she came to the end. But she was already here. She sped up to discover what the final bench held.

She stopped short when she saw it.

"No!"

Nikolai lay limp across the final bench, one arm falling off the seat and dragging on the ground, and Vika dashed over, visions of her tea leaves flashing through her head. Death is coming soon, Renata had said. But Vika hadn't thought it would be this soon.

She shook him, but he didn't react, and his chest didn't rise and fall as it should have. There was no breath puffing out into the chilly morning air. His dark hair fell in disarray across his face.

How much energy had it taken him to create the dream-state benches? All of it?

"Nikolai . . ." She touched her hand to his cold cheek.

But then his eyelashes fluttered.

And Vika gasped as she was towed into another dream.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO.

Nikolai was watching a golden eagle fly across a vast plain when Vika appeared beside him.

"Nikolai!"

He turned and blinked at her. Her voice seemed too loud in the quiet of the savanna. He took several steps back. "Vika? How are you here?"

"The bench . . . I thought you were dead. I touched you, and it brought me."

"I'm not dead."

She exhaled and touched her scar. "Thank goodness."

The walls he'd erected around his heart crumbled a little. He tried to remind himself that she was his opponent, but it was difficult when she was right there. "I'm definitely not dead. But I think I'm still asleep."

She looked around her and took in the surroundings. "You're creating these benches in your sleep?"

He nodded.

"Amazing . . . Then this is a dream, too. Where are we?"

"The Kazakh steppe."

"It's beautiful."

His walls crumbled further. Nikolai knew he was being foolish, but like at the masquerade, he felt no desire to rebuild them. She was here. She'd been worried he was dead. He shoved aside the warnings blaring in his head.

"See the eagle?" He pointed upward at the stately bird soaring across the sky with its golden-brown wings outspread. "This is a special type of falconry. If you look carefully, you can see the eagle's master, the berkutchi, on his horse near the base of the mountain."

Vika squinted in the direction Nikolai was pointing. She nodded when she saw the stout man on horseback. "Yes, I see. I can barely make him out, but he's there."

The eagle glided above them without a sound. It flapped its wings on occasion but mostly used the wind to carry it across the clouds.

"There are many animals on the island where I live," Vika said. "They bring me their stomachaches and broken bones."

"To heal?"

Vika nodded, eyes still on the eagle in the sky. "I can do it if it's not too complicated a wound. A clean break or a straight cut."

Nikolai shook his head. "I didn't know enchanters could also be faith healers. I'm impressed."

She shrugged. "I don't think I'm a faith healer. They work with shifting energy, right? But what I do is different, and certainly based in magic. I imagine it's a bit like sewing. Matching up the fabric and the threads. Lining up the flesh and the veins. Although I'm wretched at creating clothes."

"Your masquerade gown was not wretched."

"It also wasn't fabric." She smiled.

Nikolai had to concede that she was right.

They watched the eagle as it soared farther across the plains. Vika turned her head to follow it. "I like this dream. The eagle hunting is stunning. This bench may be your best one."

"Thank you. There's actually an old Kazakh proverb that says, 'There are three things a real man should have: a fast horse, a hound, and a golden eagle.'"

Vika wrinkled her nose. "And what about a real woman?"

Nikolai laughed. "A real woman should have those things, too."

She watched as the eagle continued to glide over the steppe. "How do you know all this? How did you create all those benches? Surely you haven't traveled to each of the places you conjured. Unless you can evanesce there?" Her eyes widened.

Nikolai began to walk through the long, dry gra.s.s, and Vika followed. "No, I can't evanesce at all. I've tried. However, I have spent a great deal of time in libraries over the years, and I've also heard many stories from Pasha of his and his father's travels both abroad and within the empire. I gleaned all these details from them. Yet I cannot claim that my dream depictions are entirely accurate; I admit to taking a fair amount of artistic license, for much of what I have to base things on are paintings. But there are a few places I have actually been: Moscow, your island, and here."