The Crown's Fate
Page 43

“Thank you, Ludmila,” Vika said. “I really don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Vika made her way through Sennaya Square, toward the Black Moth. Before coming here, she’d stopped at Letniy Isle, where she’d set Ludmila’s painted egg on its side on the ground at Candlestick Point and enlarged it to the size of a small house. There was no door, and there were no windows, for she couldn’t allow Nikolai a way out. It still looked exactly like a raspisnoye yaitso, but much bigger. Inside, though, Vika furnished it as luxuriously as she could. Hopefully, it would be livable, as far as jail cells went.
As for location, Candlestick Point would not have been Vika’s first choice, but it was both a big enough space and out of the way, the latter being important, considering she was using the egg to trap Nikolai and needed to isolate him.
Now, however, Vika slunk through the poorly lit streets of Sennaya Square. There was nothing fantastical about this place, only the grim reality of poverty and all the struggles and cunning it took to survive it. Prostitutes on the street corners sneered at Vika, as if she were competition they had to frighten away. Performers offered to show her magic tricks in exchange for a ruble, when the only magic was how quickly they could make that ruble (and the rest in the audience’s purse) disappear. And everywhere, it was dank, and buildings were falling apart, and streetlamps went unlit, making the square even more wretched.
Vika heaved a sigh of relief when she found the Black Moth, although it was in worse repair than most of Sennaya Square, if that were possible. But this was where Poslannik’s messenger had said Nikolai was. She still couldn’t feel his magic; his barrier shield was strong. Vika had to hope Poslannik and his army were right.
She walked along the side of the inn and charmed open each set of drapes as she passed the rooms, peering in to see if she could find Nikolai. She scanned the entire building. Twice. No Nikolai.
But what if this was not the entire inn? Sometimes there was a courtyard where the washing was done. . . .
Vika evanesced to the other side of the building and rematerialized in a small square of dirty snow, including a wooden tub, a scrub brush, and soap. Molodets, she praised herself for guessing correctly.
Here, too, was a squat shack so dilapidated, its walls seemed propped together only by the mounds of snow at the base of the rotted boards. There were three rooms, two with the curtains open and one with drapes drawn, with no candlelight inside.
She pressed herself against that filthy window. This close, she could feel Nikolai’s protections, like thick walls of metal encasing the room.
Vika heated the air to sweltering. Perhaps she could attack his barrier by melting it, as she’d done to Peter the Great’s statue.
His magic didn’t budge. Only the snow all around the shack puddled and trickled away.
But there ought to be seams where the door opens. Possibly also at the windowpanes.
Vika directed her magic to prod where glass met wooden frame.
Solid, solid, solid . . . Seam.
All right, let’s try this again. She held her breath as she focused her magic as intensely as a soldering iron. It might not have worked in the past, but now she channeled the amplified flow of power from Bolshebnoie Duplo into this one tiny point in Nikolai’s barrier.
A corner of his enchantment melted open, and that was all Vika needed. She released her breath and charmed the curtains slightly apart. The moonlight slivered in, and there was Nikolai on the bed, his sharp, graceful silhouette dignified even in sleep.
The invisible string in her chest tugged fiercely, and she thought of the myth Pasha had told, about Zeus splitting a whole into two halves, who were damned unless they found their other piece again.
It was hard to imagine a pair more damned than her and Nikolai.
Which made it both inevitable and more difficult to do what she’d set out to do. “I’m sorry,” she said through the window. “But this is for your own good.”
Vika focused and dissolved him into bubbles. She cracked the windowpane open and watched as his components streamed out into the frigid air.
“To the painted egg,” she directed his essence. The wind picked up and blew him in that direction.
Another shape stirred inside the room. Vika startled. Had Nikolai had a girl in there with him? Vika thought of Renata, and her stomach twisted and betrayed how much she still cared about him, how much she hoped that he could still be saved, despite trying to convince herself she couldn’t love him anymore.
The figure in the room hissed and jumped from the bed. A patch of moonlight illuminated her face, and it was not, it turned out, much of a face at all. Nor was it a girl.
Vika gasped and evanesced herself away.
The last thing she saw was the thing’s golden eyes, narrowed with drops of black at the corners, oozing like viscous ink.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Nikolai woke with a shock, his head disconcertingly fizzy. Was it from kissing Renata? Perhaps taking energy from her was less like drinking tea with lemon and sugar, and more like wine spiked with stars. He rubbed his eyes and propped himself up on the bed to get his bearings. He couldn’t have been asleep long. His fingers gripped for the sheets but found themselves in a pile of loose feathers. But not loose, exactly, for although there was no mattress holding them together, they stayed in place in the shape of a bed. As if by magic.
“What is this?” Nikolai scrambled off the feathers and onto a rug of purple flowers, as soft as the finest Persian rug in the Winter Palace. “And where is this?”
He spun in a circle. He was inside a room, that was for sure, for there were walls painted blue with a pattern of small white spirals. But the wall was strangely arched, as was the ceiling. Nikolai ran out of the bedroom into the hall.
It connected him to a parlor and a small kitchen (no stove or oven, he noted), both decorated with furniture as if the craftsman had never heard of nails or upholstery. Rather, there were enormous abalone shells with smooth, iridescent indentations suited for lounging, and lamps powered by glowing moths. And a desk made not of wooden boards, but of a single, polished boulder, with volumes about architecture and clock making, as well as memoirs of travelers from abroad, lined up on the stone.
“Am I in another dream?”
“I’m afraid we’re both completely awake,” Vika said.
Nikolai spun again.
There was no one else in the room.