The Crown's Game Part 27

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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.ses, 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 pa.s.sed 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 ca.n.a.l.

"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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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."

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE.

As 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 b.u.mp 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.

CHAPTER FIFTY.

Two 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 gla.s.s 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 pa.s.sed. 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 ident.i.ty 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.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE.

Nikolai 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 pa.s.s 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 ca.n.a.l. 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 rea.s.sess 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 amus.e.m.e.nts 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.