The Crown’s Game (6 page)

The fire grew hotter and burned at such reckless speed, the branches in the middle of the pile collapsed to embers the instant a flame licked them.

Then, as the blaze devoured the remaining length of the trees, lashing its way out to the edge
of the circle, a small figure rose from the center, itself engulfed in flames.

“You see, Father,” a girl’s voice said calmly, almost cheerfully, “I told you I’d master it today. Fight fire with fire, not water or ice.” Then she whistled a short tune, and the fire on her arms, her torso, her skirt, snuffed out. The only flames left were on top of her head, a wind-tossed mess of loose red curls,
and one lock of black. She whistled again, and the fire on the fallen trees went out as well.

Pasha stepped backward onto a leaf. It crunched, ever so softly, but the girl whirled around. “Who’s there?”

Nikolai and Pasha stood frozen, and not just metaphorically. She had iced their feet to the ground.

“Who are you?” Pasha whispered as he gaped at the cinder-smudged girl.

She stared at them
for another moment. Then she spun on her heel and fled, a streak of red hair and gray dress dashing into the woods and disappearing into its shadowed depths.

But Nikolai didn’t need her to tell them who she was. He already knew. He had never seen the girl before, but she had to be the one.

The other enchanter in the Game.

T
he tsar’s message came to Sergei as the lightning storm in the forest ended. The note, on imperial stationery, was brief but clear:

Bring your enchanter to Bolshebnoie Duplo on 13 October.

The Crown’s Game will then commence.

What? The Crown’s Game? Sergei sagged onto the threshold of the cottage. It couldn’t be. All this time, he’d assumed Vika was the only enchanter. He’d
sent word to Galina when he discovered Vika’s abilities, but she’d never informed him that she had an enchanter in her tutelage as well. He clenched his fists. So typical of his sister!

His anger was short-lived, though, for he did not have the energy to devote to it. Besides, what could be done about it now?

Because Galina had kept from Sergei that she, too, had a
student, there’d been no reason
for Sergei to think another enchanter existed. It was the way it was supposed to be—when the Imperial Enchanter died, his or her magic returned to Russia’s wellspring, and there it recharged and eventually sought out another vessel in which to grow. It was rare that more than a single enchanter existed at once. As far as Sergei knew, it had happened only a handful of times in the thousand years
since Russia was born. And he’d immersed himself so completely in the small sphere of his and Vika’s life here on Ovchinin Island that he hadn’t paid attention to whether another enchanter’s “otherness” lingered in Russia’s air.

But now my Vikochka is not just one, but one of
two, Sergei thought. And he knew how the Game always ended: there was only room enough for one Imperial Enchanter, for
he or she needed access to the full force of Russia’s magic. And therefore, the magic killed the loser of the Game.

Sergei sat paralyzed, his trousers covered in dirt.
How can this be? Especially when I thought I still had two years to train her, to spend with her. Now I have only three days. . . .

And worse yet, how could he tell Vika, when he could hardly handle the truth himself?

He needed
time to think. He looked to where the lightning storm had just abated. And he hiked into the woods in the opposite direction.

N
ikolai stumbled into the kitchen at the Zakrevsky house immediately upon returning from Ovchinin Island. His eyes searched the room, but there was no one around. Perhaps Galina had decided to lunch at a restaurant with some of her society friends, as she often did, and the staff had been able to take a break. Thank goodness for all his mentor’s ridiculous obligations.

Nikolai
fumbled for a glass of water and drank it greedily. A good portion of its contents sloshed onto his woolen breeches. He filled another glass and gulped that down, too, before he dropped into the lone wooden chair in the corner.

A few minutes later, a servant girl walked into the kitchen with an armful of freshly laundered aprons. She started when she saw Nikolai and nearly dropped the aprons
on the dusty stone floor. Then she tossed them onto the countertop and hurried to kneel at his side. “Nikolai, you’re shaking! Are you all right? Did something happen on the hunt?”

Nikolai rubbed his face with both hands. He could tell Renata what he’d seen. Besides Galina, Renata was the only one who knew of his abilities. Not that he’d shared them with her purposely. Two years ago, he had forgotten
to lock his bedroom door while he was reassembling a music box with his mind—these disassembly and rebuilding projects had begun when he was a child as lessons from Galina—and Renata had walked in with clean linens for his bed while the music box’s cranks and gears were suspended in midair.

“Oh!” she had said. “Forgive me, Master Nikolai, I—I—”

The pieces of the music box had gone clattering
onto the desk. He’d snatched them up and stuffed them into the pocket of his waistcoat. “It’s not what it seems.”

She looked down at the scuffed toes of her boots. “That they were floating of their own accord? Of course not, Master Nikolai.”

“I could make you forget what you saw.” He raised a finger to his temple.

She trembled. “No need, sir. I promise I won’t tell a soul.”

“How can I trust
you?”

“I read tea leaves, Master Nikolai. I don’t fear what you do.”

Nikolai lowered his finger. “You read leaves?” He’d never met anyone who could do that. Or anyone who’d admit to it. The Russian Orthodox Church had quashed magic as superstition and heresy centuries ago.

“Yes,” Renata said.

“Show me.”

He followed her to the kitchen, and Renata poured him a cup of tea. When he drained it,
she studied the gnarled black leaves that remained.

Then she shook her head so violently, her braids lashed across her face. “Perhaps it
would
be better if you made me forget what I saw in your room, sir.”

Nikolai frowned, then looked from the teacup to Renata and back again. “No. There’s something in those leaves that you’re frightened to relay. Tell me. I won’t hold it against you.”

She swallowed
hard.

“I give you my word.” Which, to Nikolai, was a serious thing, because if your word could not be trusted, you were nothing as a gentleman, and that was its own dreadful shame.

Renata nodded. But she took another moment before she spoke, her voice shaky. “You see there is a cluster of leaves on the left, but a single one, isolated, on the right? It means . . . It means you’re lonely.” She
hunched over the cup, as if waiting for Nikolai to cuff her. She had been hit on numerous occasions by Galina, for much lesser offenses.

But Nikolai only chewed his lip. “I see.” It was an audacious thing for a servant girl to say, but it was nothing particularly remarkable. Any one of the servants could have made a similar observation; after all, Nikolai spent an inordinate amount of time in
his room on his own, doing what, they did not know. “What about the jagged leaf along the bottom?” he asked.

Renata’s eyes widened, and she shook her head, jangling her braids yet again.

“Tell me.”

Nikolai restrained himself from reassuring her not to be afraid. He needed to know what the leaf meant.

“The jagged one represents . . . death. You were born of death, and . . .”

“And what?”

“And death will . . . it will follow you, always. The bottom leaf is the path of your life, and this one is a long and jagged blade.”

Nikolai had shuddered then, and he’d felt as if his heart stopped for more than several beats. But he had been grateful that she was willing to tell him, despite her fear of reprisal. Perhaps the fact that beneath the elegant clothing and practiced airs he was a
poor boy from nowhere gave her a reason to have faith in him. In truth, he was as much a nobody as she was. Nikolai had smiled sadly at how clumsily he fit into this life.

So began their friendship, and now they were huddled together in the kitchen once again, as they had been many times in the past.

“Nikolai.” Renata pried his hands from his face. “Tell me. Did something happen on the hunt?
Is the tsesarevich all right?”

Nikolai hunched forward, so close to Renata that his head almost rested on hers. “Pasha is fine.”

She released the breath she’d been holding. “And you? Are you all right?”

“That, I do not know.”

“Why not? What happened?”

“I saw her, Renata. I know who the other enchanter is.” A tremor ran through him, although it was disconcertingly
hot rather than cold. A true
fever chill.

“Is she so formidable?”

“She rose from a bonfire all aflame, as if she were a phoenix.”

Renata’s grip on his hand tightened. “You’re as pale as one of the countess’s porcelain figurines.”

Nikolai slumped farther into the hard wooden chair. How in blazes would he beat the girl when the day for the Game finally came? The girl need only cast one fiery lightning storm like the one
on Ovchinin Island, and the tsar would declare it all over.

“Her magic is enchantment beyond my grasp,” he said.

“It isn’t,” Renata said. “You wield fearsome power of another kind. You can see through walls, remember?”

“It’s not the same.”

Renata shook him. “Precisely. Perhaps her power is elemental because she lives on that island. But yours is commanding in a cosmopolitan way. You can manipulate
an entire orchestra at the opera, instruments and all. You can rearrange the insides of a clock to make it a microscope. You’ve simply learned to use magic differently.”

Nikolai buried his face in his hands. “I hope you’re right.”

“I hope so, too.” Renata reached up and brushed her fingers through his hair. She had never been so bold before, and Nikolai did not know what to do with the gesture.
She let her touch linger, then withdrew her hand and lowered her voice. “And I hope this is not where the jagged leaf in your cup comes to pass.”

I
n the library on the far side of the Winter Palace, Pasha paced in front of a leather armchair, his footsteps so fervent, there was already a deep path carved in the burgundy carpet.

“Who was she?” he asked himself aloud. “
What
was she? Was she even real?” The girl on Ovchinin Island had fled as soon as she spotted Pasha and Nikolai, and the ice at their feet had melted instantly
the moment she was gone. Then Nikolai had grabbed Pasha’s arm and rushed them from the woods.

The rest of the hunting party had somehow
not
seen the lightning storm and fire. It was as if a drape of invisibility had been tossed over the small section of forest in which the flames were contained, and Pasha and Nikolai had happened to be close enough to be inside its folds.

And yet, Nikolai had
refused to talk about it. At first, Pasha thought he’d imagined the girl entirely. But all the color had drained from Nikolai’s face—which was how
Pasha knew that Nikolai had, in fact, witnessed the same miracle he had—and Nikolai hadn’t uttered a syllable as they sprinted to their horses and galloped out of the forest. Then, once it became apparent that the remainder of the hunting party had
seen nothing out of the ordinary, Pasha had been prevented from speaking up, because if he had, they would think he was prone to hallucinations, and that was not an acceptable reputation for a tsesarevich, even one who had no desire to one day be tsar.

Which was how Pasha ended up pacing alone in the palace library, working out the morning’s events on his own. “There was lightning, a ring of
fallen trees on fire. . . .”

Someone rapped on the open door. Yuliana peered inside the library. “Are you talking to yourself again?”

“Oh. Yuliana. I didn’t hear you come in.” Pasha ran his fingers through his hair, disheveling it even more than fleeing the forest had. It stuck up in dark-blond tufts, like peaks of torched meringue from one of their father’s many banquets.

“You’re muttering
to yourself again.” She tapped her sharp fingernails on the door frame. Yuliana was two years younger than Pasha, but most of the time, she seemed to think herself twice his age. “The servants could hear. You don’t want them thinking the tsesarevich is a madman.”

Pasha sighed. “I think they’re rather accustomed to my mannerisms by now. If they don’t already think me mad, they will not think it
because of today.”

Yuliana tilted her head. “Suit yourself. But at the very least close the door.” She dipped in a perfunctory curtsy on her way out of the library, then reached for the heavy wooden door and shut it fast behind her. It plowed into the
frame with a decisive thump.

Pasha shook his head as soon as she was gone. Sometimes, he wondered how the tsar could be his father, although it
was obvious the tsar was Yuliana’s. His sister and father were cast from the same steely resolve. And recently, Yuliana had even seemed the sterner of the two.

But back to the girl. Pasha began to pace the well-worn groove of the carpet again. “She rose as if the fire were nothing . . . no, as if she were
part
of the fire.” He tugged on his hair again. The girl’s appearance both unnerved and
intrigued him. Had she already been there in the woods when the fire began? Or had she come out of the lightning, the cause of the very fire from which Pasha had sought to rescue her?

As quickly as he had begun, Pasha ceased his pacing and crossed the library to a towering bookshelf. The entire room was lined, floor to cathedral ceiling, with books—from old Church documents sealed in airtight
cases to new treatises on politics and military strategy. What Pasha was looking for, though, was information on the occult. There would be no books on the subject in the Imperial Public Library, for the Church had ordered any materials on magic destroyed centuries ago. But the palace’s private library was a different matter; if magic did, indeed, exist, and if there were books written about it,
they would be here.

As Pasha climbed the ladder to the upper reaches of the wall, a giddiness fluttered within him. Perhaps investigating the girl and her magic was one thing he could do better than Nikolai, who excelled at pretty much everything else, from dancing to sharpshooting to understanding the intricacies of bridge building. Not that Pasha was jealous; he didn’t begrudge Nikolai his
talents at all, and in actuality
admired him. But he could not help feeling the thrill of a little healthy competition, and Nikolai had seemed frightened of the girl, whereas Pasha had felt nothing but wonderment. Pasha grinned as he perused the highest shelves.

There were dusty spines of poetry from the last century, and novels from abroad in French, English, and German. How had he not seen
these before? Out of habit, he reached for several. But he stopped short of pulling them out. This was not the time to lose himself in fiction and the study of foreign literature.

He pushed the ladder sideways, for it had wheels connected to a track on the top and bottom, until he found a row of books on Roman and Greek mythology, followed four shelves below by European fairy tales, and then
on the fifth by Russian folklore. The last book on the fifth shelf was a thick leather volume titled
Russian Mystics and the Tsars
.

“Et voilà,”
Pasha said to himself. He pulled the book from its place between
Vodyanoi, the Catfish King
and
The Death of Koschei the Immortal
, unleashing a flurry of dust possibly dating from earlier than the previous tsar. He waved the dust away and slid down the
sides of the ladder, not bothering with the rungs. His feet landed on the carpet with a solid thump.

Pasha opened the book and sank into his favorite armchair at the same time, his movements easy and graceful, a subconscious compilation of all his experiences growing up in the imperial household, from participating in formal court functions to learning to fence, from watching ballet to being
reprimanded when his own posture faltered.

He flipped to the table of contents. The page was yellow and crackled with age.

     
Chapter 1. Mysticism in Ancient Russia

     
Chapter 2. Mystics, Enchanters, and Faith Healers

     
Chapter 3. Extinction of Nymphs and Faeries

     
Chapter 4. Power, the Wellspring, and the Crown’s Game

He stopped skimming when he saw the subject of chapter 15,
the last one in the book: “Mysticism in Modern Times.”

Pasha smiled so broadly, it was as if he’d discovered the secret to eternal life. This was the sort of book one ought to read in pieces, to properly appreciate and savor each bit. And yet he wanted to devour it whole. Messily and all at once.

But he didn’t, because he was the tsesarevich, and crown princes had better manners than that, even
when it came to tomes that promised to unveil an entire new world inside.
I should, however, at least have the luxury of reading out of order,
he thought.

And he thumbed his way to the last chapter, for although this book had been written ages ago, he figured this was the best place to try to understand the girl—what she did and what she was. Pasha hooked a leather ottoman with his foot and dragged
it closer, then settled deep into his armchair for a long afternoon of reading.

But he did not admit to himself, either aloud or even quietly in his own head, that he was interested in the girl for more than just her magic.