The Crown's Fate
Page 24

“I’m clearly not dead,” he said.
“You look a little dead.”
“That’s actually impossible for you to judge, for you can’t even see me.”
“I amend my earlier statement. You don’t look particularly alive.”
Nikolai sighed and rested his forehead on the door frame. “Well, I am. And I have nowhere else to go, because it’s not exactly easy for a shadow to walk into an inn and ask for a room. Can I stay here?”
“It’s a library, Nikolai. And the Game is over. I am no longer your mentor, nor am I required to house you.”
He pressed his head into the doorway for another moment before he stood up straight. “Right. Of course you’d say that. I don’t know what I was thinking.” He turned back to the stairs. He would go down to the kitchen in the basement to Renata.
“I’m sorry,” Galina said.
Nikolai paused.
“After my brother passed away,” she said, “I couldn’t bear to have your things right here, inside my house, reminding me that you were gone as well. So I got rid of them. I did not expect you to come back.”
Nikolai tilted his head at her. “Galina, do I detect a sentimental spot—”
She cut him off with a scowl. “You still can’t stay. Have you looked at yourself in the mirror? You’d frighten the servants to death.”
Nikolai nearly laughed. He’d forgotten how stridently forthright Galina could be.
But then he walked past his former mentor to the mirror that hung between paintings of proud Zakrevskys from the past. The mirror in which he’d always made one last check of his appearance before he left the house.
Nikolai gasped at his reflection.
He touched his face. He was all blur, his edges not quite defined, and the rest of him, a haze of charcoal gray. Like a storm cloud in boy form, he was just there enough that his finger did not pass straight through his cheek, but not quite there enough to be solid.
Galina was reflected behind him, her lips curled in what might have been an amused grin, if her mouth had known what to do with such an expression. But smiles were foreign to it, so she merely looked like a wolf surveying her supper. “It’s not as if you haven’t been a shadow before,” she said.
True. But before, his silhouette had only been a shroud, a deception created for the oath at Bolshebnoie Duplo so that his opponent in the Game—so that Vika—couldn’t see him. But Nikolai had been himself beneath the shroud then. Now he was shadow through and through.
He dragged his finger along his jaw, as if that would make the line clear and sharp again, like it used to be. It didn’t.
“I need to see Renata,” he said, his voice as faint as his appearance. Renata would console and ground him.
Galina turned up her nose. “She’s not here. I fired her.”
“You what?”
“She disappeared in the middle of her work yesterday, leaving laundry unfolded and dishes to be cleaned. Intolerable.”
Yesterday afternoon. She was with me, in the steppe dream. Nikolai grit his teeth as guilt pricked him.
“Where is she now?” he asked.
“I do not know and I do not care. Are we done here? I’m glad you survived the Game. It was . . . interesting to see you again.” With that, Galina levitated, as was her wont—she never did like her feet to touch the floor for long—and floated past him, down the hall to her own rooms. She shut the door.
This, as Aizhana had predicted, was the moment when reality caught up to Nikolai.
He had no one else to go to, no one else who wanted him. He didn’t know where Renata was, and he couldn’t face Vika, not after the way she’d looked at him when he’d animated Peter the Great, the horror and disappointment in her eyes. And an inn, as Aizhana had pointed out, would not rent a room to a shadow.
In the past, Nikolai could have spent a night or two at the Winter Palace. He temporarily warmed at the memory of the times he’d slept on the chaise longue in Pasha’s antechamber.
But the potent indignation that had appeared inside Nikolai as he escaped the steppe dream now reared its head again.
No, he thought, as he stopped his reminiscing. The memories piled up against one another, like a caravan of carriages halted too suddenly. Nikolai clenched his jaw and ignored them. I will not set foot in the palace again until it is mine.
Soon enough.
But for now, there was nobody left. Only his mother.
Nikolai watched himself in the mirror for another minute, his once proud shoulders slumped.
Then he trudged down the stairs and out the front door. To the Black Moth, the only place, apparently, he belonged.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Aizhana couldn’t read the expression on Nikolai’s shadow face, but she knew he did not want to be here. She looked around at the dingy room—even at a boardinghouse as disreputable as this, a hooded woman who refused to show her face could rent only a room in the shack behind the decrepit inn’s main building—and she saw the home she’d offered her son through his eyes. The straw mattress crawling with lice. The washbasin in the corner, cracked and stained brown and yellow-green by things better left unknown. The stench from the outhouse just outside their window. “It is better than nothing,” Aizhana said.
“I have my doubts,” Nikolai said, turning for the door.
“Stay.”
“Why?”
“Because I want you to.”
Nikolai hesitated.
Did her love finally mean something to him? Or had he simply been forsaken by everyone else? Either way, hope bubbled inside her, like a mud pit in a sulfur spring. It was an awful thing to hope that her son’s former friends and mentor had abandoned him, leaving Aizhana as his last resort, but if that was the only way . . .
“It’s not much,” she said, “but at least you would have me. Which I realize also isn’t much. And if you have nowhere else to go . . .”
Nikolai pointed to the mattress. “I won’t sleep on that.”
“This is the only place that will take me,” Aizhana said. “I’ve tried.” She hunched over herself. Nikolai’s resistance shriveled her black heart even more than it already was. All she wanted was to be close to her boy. Through eighteen years of ante-death underground, that was all she’d wanted, and it held true even now.