The Crown's Game
Page 36

All around Nikolai, the crowd stampeded out of the open square. The storm kept coming, like Zeus himself out for revenge in one of Pasha’s favorite myths. Nikolai rubbed the back of his dry neck—he’d conjured a waterproof shield over both himself and the Jack’s and ballerina’s boxes at the first hint of rain—and sighed. The girl had made quite a display of commanding the weather. The immensity of her power was impressive indeed.
Nikolai snapped his fingers, and the crank and music from the Jack’s box stopped. He could hardly hear it anyway. There would be no show tonight.
A bolt of lightning slammed into the cobblestones mere feet away from him.
“Merde!” Nikolai leaped back from the pulverized pavement.
Another bolt slammed into the ground behind him. He jumped again, but this time he cast the strongest shield he could conjure and sprinted for cover.
The Winter Palace. If only he could make it across the square—
The path in front of him burst in an explosion of electricity and mortar and stone.
“The tsar won’t be happy if you demolish his square while you try to kill me!” Nikolai yelled as he continued to run. “And I doubt this qualifies as something impressive for the tsesarevich’s birthday!” He didn’t know where the girl was, but she had to be near if she was directing the lightning straight at him.
She responded by whipping the rain into his face, aiming a thousand stinging needles at him all at once. They bounced off his shield.
“You’ll have to try harder!” He was almost at the palace. Only ten more seconds and he’d be at a door.
The girl unleashed the lightning again. Several bolts ruptured the sky, ferocious veins of searing white in the darkness, and they convened on one target: Nikolai’s shield.
The crack blew all sound out of his ears, and he was thrown to the ground as the lightning shattered the invisible layer protecting him. The palace was still too far. It was Nikolai against the weather now.
The sky crackled and popped again. Recharging, readying for attack.
He remembered the girl rising out of the fire on Ovchinin Island. He didn’t think he could fight that. Not without a shield.
But if Nikolai was going to die, he was going to do it with dignity. He reached for his top hat, which had skittered away on the cobblestones and finally gotten wet. He brushed it off and rose to his feet.
Then he turned to face the ballerina’s purple box in the center of the square. He wasn’t sure where the girl was, but he could address the puppet he’d created in her stead. He took a deep breath and stood as still and as serenely as he could, given the circumstances of thunder bellowing all around him.
Electricity buzzed in the air. Nikolai tried to conjure another shield, but it sputtered out.
“I don’t blame you.” He tipped his hat in the ballerina’s direction, but unlike the time he did so after the other enchanter had tried to drown him, there was nothing mocking in his gesture now. “I don’t blame you if this is the end.”
Then the sparks in the sky extinguished themselves, and the gray clouds blew away with a hiss. Not a trace of violence—or even rain—remained.
And the scar at Nikolai’s collarbone warmed.
She’d ended her turn. Nikolai exhaled. She had spared his life. He let his posture slide.
Whether the girl was actually showing him mercy or simply toying with him to draw out the chase, Nikolai would take it. He would live to play another day.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

It was the fortitude in his voice. And the grace in his poise. That’s why I wasn’t able to kill him, Vika tried to convince herself. But in reality, it was his eyes. There was a sadness in them, a deep pool of it, which she could see even from where she hid inside the ballerina’s box. The lid was cracked open just an inch, but it had been enough for her to falter.
There’s always next time, she thought as she curled up next to the limp ballerina with the red handkerchief spilling from her porcelain heart. Vika had thought she would relish the irony of her opponent trying to kill her in a box, only to turn it on him and kill him from the box. But it hadn’t worked out for either of them.
It’s all right, she told herself. I still have three more turns. I’ll kill him the next time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The next morning, Pasha was once again in the palace library, although this time, instead of reading Russian Mystics and the Tsars, he was poring over reports from the Imperial Council. He had fallen asleep during yesterday’s meeting—he had, at least, attended it, as he’d promised his father—but afterward, Yuliana had shoved into his arms these stacks of paper on topics ranging from the state of the corn and sunflower harvests to the worsening siege in Missolonghi. “The ministers are thorough, I’ll give them that,” Pasha said aloud to himself as he flipped through yet another pile of papers. He yawned and tapped his pen on the top page, which was filled with tables of data on wheat yields. Surely there must be a better way to rule a country than to read reports from afar.
And yet, what other way was there, when the country was so vast? The tsar could not be in all places at once.
Pasha yawned again. He was just about to skip the wheat tables to read an account of the current situation in the Crimea when Gavriil, the captain of his Guard, poked his head into the library.
“Your Imperial Highness, please forgive the disturbance, but you asked to be informed of any, er, important developments.”
Pasha threw the report onto the table and sat up straighter. “Yes?”
“Well, Your Imperial Highness, a, uh, giant glass pumpkin has appeared along the Ekaterinsky Canal.”
Pasha grinned. “Excellent.” Because he hadn’t wanted to miss a thing, Pasha had ordered his Guard to inform him of any new happenings around the city, especially if they seemed . . . unusual. He disliked reducing his Guard to messengers and gossipmongers—he suspected they resented it—but it gave them something productive to do instead of the typical routine of losing track of him and panicking before his return.
Pasha rose from his armchair, no longer seeing the Imperial Council reports stacked before him. “Inform the stables to ready my carriage. I’ll go to the pumpkin at once.”
The guard knitted his brow.
“Is there something unclear about my instructions, Gavriil?”