The Crown's Game Part 13

The bubble around Vika quivered.

I am tied irretrievably to my enemy, she realized.

The Jack and ballerina continued to twirl around the sky. The music soared louder and louder. It crescendoed to a furious trill. And then it suddenly broke off into silence.

Every muscle in Vika's body tensed. The Jack and ballerina halted their dance, as if they, too, were startled.

The crowd gasped then and pointed at the ballerina's chest. Although she hadn't heard Vika's earlier warning, the ballerina heard the audience now. She looked down at the bodice of her dress. A red silk handkerchief blossomed from where her porcelain heart ought to be.

"I knew she couldn't trust him," Vika said.

The ballerina's painted mouth formed a devastated O. She glanced at the Jack. He looked not at her, but at a cloud near his feet, his wooden mouth set in a grim straight line.

Then the ballerina went limp and plummeted from the sky into her box. The Jack hung his head. The ballerina's lid lowered and latched with a click.

Palace Square burst into deafening applause. Everyone clapped and howled.

Everyone except Vika, for something had begun to press on her from above, forcing her to her knees. What? How? I have a s.h.i.+eld- But then she saw them, thousands of tiny needles protruding from the cobblestones at her feet. They must have appeared while she was busy watching the Jack and ballerina. The needles bowed in unison, as if they knew she'd finally seen them, before they retracted into the ground.

Those impertinent needles punctured and destroyed my s.h.i.+eld! Vika hadn't even known it was possible. But perhaps that was the problem. She couldn't properly protect herself from something of which she was unaware.

She pushed her hands upward and tried to stand, but the pressure of whatever was pus.h.i.+ng on her was too strong. Vika flung herself forward to escape, but smashed into an unseen wall.

She spun to the left. Trapped.

To the right. Blocked off.

Backward. Another wall.

It was as if she was inside the ballerina's music box.

"No!"

The invisible cube kept shrinking, and Vika's lungs burned as the air grew thin. She was nearly at a crouch.

In front of her, Ludmila cheered, oblivious to what was happening. Could n.o.body see Vika? The enchanter must have cast a deception shroud around her. And the invisible box was now almost the same size as she was, with little room to spare. Vika pressed outward with her palms one more time and kicked with her feet. She rammed the top of the box with her head.

If I stay inside, I'll die, and I'll never see Father again, never become Imperial Enchanter, never have a chance to become who I was meant to be.

As the sides of the cube squeezed out the last of the air, Vika felt all its edges against her. She pushed up, down, in every direction again, rebounding like a marble rattling in a box too small. The corners pressed inward. The walls crushed against the sides of Vika's ribs.

Oh, mercy. She winced at the pressure that she knew would soon turn into pain.

But what if they weren't walls? What if they weren't solid, but vapor instead?

"Steam," she gasped.

The inside of the box began to grow hot and humid.

Vika hovered on the brink of a faint. Just a little more . . .

She ran her fingers along the sides of the box and imagined them transforming from gla.s.s-or whatever they were-into steam. Please, please, turn into steam.

The walls of her near coffin exploded. Vika tumbled out of the stifling mist. She wheezed as air rushed to fill her empty lungs.

And then, from somewhere on the other side of Palace Square, came a voice. It was quiet, yet it cut through the noise of the still-applauding crowd.

"Bravo," it said, and Vika knew the compliment was for her, not for the Jack and ballerina's show. "Your move, Enchanter Two."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.

She was still alive. He was still alive. Nikolai was glad, but he wasn't. Because now it was the girl's move, and every time she had another move meant another time Nikolai might die.

The next evening, just as an audience formed in Palace Square to wait for the Jack and ballerina to dance again, the sky darkened. It went from pale blue to storm gray in the time it took the nearby clock tower to chime six times. Nikolai looked up, along with everyone else in the square.

There were no clouds. But the sun was gone, and a diaphanous drizzle began.

The would-be audience murmured. The men were glad they had hats on their heads, and the women found scarves in their bags with which to cover their hair.

"It's just a pa.s.sing sprinkle," a thin man said to his even thinner wife.

"It must be. The fishmonger this morning predicted suns.h.i.+ne all day."

The jack-in-the-box's crank began to turn, and its tinny scales started to play once again. Everyone in the crowd returned their focus to the boxes. Everyone except Nikolai, who kept his gaze planted firmly upward. What are you playing at, lightning girl?

A second later, her namesake lightning splintered the sky into shards, and a flood of rain gushed out from its cracks. It drenched the crowd and drowned out the sound of the Jack's music. People ran for cover, their once-sufficient hats now tumbling onto the cobblestones upside down and full of water, their scarves no more than sopping rags plastered onto their heads.

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 s.h.i.+eld 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 s.h.i.+eld 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 s.h.i.+eld.

"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 s.h.i.+eld.

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 s.h.i.+eld.

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 circ.u.mstances of thunder bellowing all around him.

Electricity buzzed in the air. Nikolai tried to conjure another s.h.i.+eld, 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 fort.i.tude 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 gla.s.s pumpkin has appeared along the Ekaterinsky Ca.n.a.l."

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?"

"No, Your Imperial Highness. It's just . . . I was confused because you informed me of your intended whereabouts rather than . . ." He trailed off.

"Rather than sneaking out?" Pasha grinned even more brightly. "It's only because I have greater roguishness planned."

Pasha could see the line stretching from the bakery kiosk before he saw the pumpkin itself. Word had spread quickly about Madame Fanina's incredible confections, and the carriage had to stop a block away because the crowd was too thick to pa.s.s through.

A handful of his guards dismounted their horses while Pasha disembarked from the carriage.

"Make way for His Imperial Highness, the Tsesarevich Pavel Alexandrovich Romanov!" Gavriil called.

Pasha flushed. "I could have waited in line," he muttered.

But it was too late for that, for everyone on the street had turned to catch a glimpse of the crown prince. And then the entire queue bowed low, like a line of dominoes tumbling onto its knees. The Ekaterinsky Ca.n.a.l glittered red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet beside them.

As Pasha walked past, men and women rose and reached to kiss his hand. He smiled kindly as they declared their love for him and prayed for his health, and his heart swelled to span the far reaches of the empire. He loved it, not because they kissed his hand, but because the people of his country were infinitely more real in the flesh than in Imperial Council meetings and reports.

Halfway through the line, the pumpkin rose into view. Pasha bounced in his boots. I knew it! It was the gla.s.s pumpkin he'd had commissioned for the baker on Ovchinin Island! Well, a very enlarged version of it. Pasha recognized the crystalline curl of the green vines around the stem, and the ripples the imperial gla.s.sblower had chosen to incorporate into the pumpkin's orange ribs. The only modifications that had been made to the pumpkin-other than its size-were a window cut out of it and a counter tiled with enormous pumpkin seeds from which to serve Ludmila's patrons.

Pasha could hardly wait to reach the kiosk. He had to force himself to slow down and not plow through the men and women who still wanted to kiss his hand.

Eventually, his guards led the way to the counter, and Gavriil once again announced, "His Imperial Highness, the Tsesarevich Pavel Alexandrovich Romanov!" Pasha grimaced.