The Crown's Fate
Page 39

The crowd was larger than she’d initially thought. They formed a tight-knit ring, six to seven people deep. Vika tried to shove them aside but was met with snarls and elbows.
One of the men she attempted to push away glared at her. But when he looked at her—or, more likely, recognized the black stripe in her red hair—he grabbed her arm. “You!”
Vika jerked back, but his grip tightened. “You’re the witch! You’re the one who has my Misha vomiting blood tonight!”
“It’s not my fault,” Vika said, not that he would believe her. “But it’s not that girl’s either, and I have to stop them from burning her before it’s too late. Release me.”
The man spit in Vika’s face. “You’re not going anywhere. And for all we know, that’s your sister at the stake. Better to burn her just in case than to be sorry.”
Vika charmed the spit off her cheek and flung it back at the man’s face. He yelped.
“I respectfully disagree on both counts,” Vika said. “It is not better to kill someone ‘just in case.’ And I am absolutely going somewhere.”
With that, she commanded the wind to rush at her assailant, and it lifted him off his feet, hurling him onto a snowbank several yards away. The string of profanities he shouted at Vika were equally blown away.
And then she evanesced into the center of the mob.
They cried out as she rematerialized. “It’s another witch! The girl has called her kin!”
Vika stepped between the red-haired girl, who was tied to one of Nikolai’s upended tables, surrounded by broken chair legs, and the hysterical crowd. “You poor thing,” she said to the girl, “to be born looking like me. But don’t worry. I’ll get you out of here safely.” Vika conjured an iridescent bubble around herself and the pyre, and she charmed the ropes that lashed the girl to the firewood to come undone.
The girl fell to her knees. Silent tears and snot streamed down her face, and her entire body shook.
The mob pounded on the outside of Vika’s bubble shield.
Vika wrapped her arms around the girl. “You’re safe now.”
The girl shook her head.
“I put up an enchantment to protect us.”
“But what about after you’re gone?” The girl’s voice was so hoarse, it was more like scratches on dry air than proper words.
“You can’t hide from us forever!” a woman punching at the shield yelled.
A man opposite her shouted, “The Lord will bring justice! Beware, daughters of the devil!”
Vika looked from them back to the girl. “Where do you need to go? Do you have family? I’ll take you where you feel secure.”
The girl shook her head again. “They won’t stop at me. Everyone who looks like this . . .” She tore at her hair. It was plastered against her head by tears and sweat, the dampness making it all the redder. “We’re doomed.”
Vika touched her own hair. What was she to do? She couldn’t change the color of every red-haired girl in Russia. Besides the impossibility of so large an enchantment, it would also be held as evidence against the girls of their witchcraft.
Vika had to capture Nikolai soon. His dark magic had to be stopped. It was the only way to end this.
“Come on,” Vika said, gathering the girl closer to her chest. “We’re leaving.”
“But what about them?”
The crowd had begun to stab at the bubble shield with knives, sticks, anything sharp they could find.
Vika looked at the mob. If only she could distract them. But what could possibly steal the attention of a crowd intent on killing witches?
More witches.
Vika chewed on her lip. She’d never conjured illusions before. Yet she had just cast a permanent shield around Pasha (or hoped she had), and she’d never done that before either. Ironically, it was the people’s new belief in magic that was fueling Bolshebnoie Duplo to generate more power, which in turn allowed Vika to cast stronger enchantments to use against the very people who feared them.
“I don’t know if this will work, but it’s worth a try,” she said.
She plucked a hair out of her own head and waved her arm at the smoke billowing off the base of the pyre. Vika tossed the hair into it, and the smoke swirled into the shape of a girl with a head full of wavy red hair.
Vika commanded the wind to blow through the smoke girl, breaking it into tiny puffs and carrying it to the outside of the mob’s circle. There, each puff expanded into a full-size illusion of a girl made of flesh and blood, not smoke. The crowd was suddenly surrounded by dozens of witches.
The people screamed. “It’s an entire coven!”
“The devil has brought his army!”
“Everyone, fight back!”
In their panic, they turned away from the pyre and lunged at the new witches who had appeared.
Vika leaned toward the girl. “They’ll be occupied for a few minutes. Tell me where we should go.”
The girl trembled. “Lake Ladoga,” she whispered. “My aunt has a dacha in the woods.”
“All right then. Don’t be alarmed, I’m going to dissolve us into tiny bubbles in order to transport us there.”
The girl didn’t even flinch. Vika doubted much else could compare to the horror of being nearly burned alive on a pyre.
Vika took one more look at the red-faced crowd around her, battling an imaginary enemy. Then she evanesced herself and the girl away.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

In other parts of the empire, the growth of Bolshebnoie Duplo’s magic manifested itself in wilder ways. . . . In the middle of the Siberian woods, a dilapidated hut shook as if it were a bird ruffling its feathers. Its two front windows blinked, shaking off the dirt and moss that had accumulated on its sills during the centuries the house had slept. Beneath the foundation, stilt-like chicken legs stretched and lifted the entire hut twenty feet off the snow-covered floor. The joints of the chicken legs—and of the hut itself—creaked as they began to stomp through the forest.
Baba Yaga’s house was awake. Now it needed to find its owner. Then they could begin tricking—and eating—unsuspecting travelers again.
On the Kamchatka Peninsula in the far east, volcano nymphs grinned with needlelike teeth and danced, their lithe, naked red bodies like flames in a bonfire. The frosty ground around them quaked, and their volcanoes spewed smoke and ash. The craters had been dormant for hundreds of years, since their caretakers—the nymphs—had not had enough magic to stoke the fires in the volcanoes’ bellies.