The Crown’s Game (21 page)

N
ikolai landed on the Stygian-black shore of the new island at half past ten. He had “borrowed” a rowboat from the dock and charmed it to sail across the bay. The waters were savage at this late hour, a combination of the wind and the tide, and if it weren’t for the enchantment to smooth the way, the boat would have ended up capsized or smashed against the rocks.

Once on solid
ground, Nikolai unpacked a bundle of balsa wood and sandpaper from his satchel. He was quite sure now that the island wasn’t a trap, as it hadn’t tried to swallow him whole or otherwise kill him the last time he was here; perhaps the ball had changed something after all. What he wasn’t sure of was what that meant for the Game.

But the scar beneath his collarbone still burned, insisting that Nikolai
play. If he didn’t, he would burn slowly, painfully, to his death. And so self-preservation plunged him forward with his turn, even though he no longer knew how he wanted the Game to end.

First, he intended to build the island a proper dock. This place—this magic—was something the people of Saint Petersburg should have the chance to see, even if they couldn’t understand it.

Nikolai slashed his
index finger through the air, slicing the wood boards into sticks. He charmed notches in the wood where the pieces could fit snugly together. He enchanted the sandpaper and set it about evening out the rough edges, before he commanded the pieces to fit themselves together.
Just like being a child again.
A simple project, like the ones Nikolai had mastered when he was only a boy, when Galina had
taught him the physics of construction and architecture by drilling him with kit after kit of model bridges and towers and masted ships.

When the miniature dock was finished, Nikolai leaned over the rocky edge of the island and dropped the model pier into the water. Now was where the effort came in. He gritted his teeth and focused all his energy on the dock, and it began to expand, growing larger
and larger until it was wide enough and long enough for a ferry to anchor itself at the end.

Sweat trickled down the back of Nikolai’s neck. His jaw cramped as he pressed onward, fighting the hostility of the waves and extending the dock’s posts into the floor of the bay. Finally, he embedded them deep in the sandy bottom.

Then he collapsed on the shore and lay on his back, panting.

But there
was no time to rest. There was so much more to do before daybreak. Nikolai gave himself another moment to catch his breath and then climbed back to his feet, picked up his bag, and dragged himself to the center of the island.

Now for another enchantment.

Wire. Nikolai snapped his fingers.

And paper. He snapped again. And there, in the midst of all the trees, a spool of wire and a large sheet
of crepe paper appeared in the air.

Nikolai began to hum a snake-charming song, an eerie, hollow tune. The wire unfurled and twisted up in wide spirals, as if it were a cobra at Nikolai’s command. When it was round and full, like the circular ribs inside a globe, Nikolai halted his melody.

The crepe paper came next. With a flick of his wrist, the white paper wrapped itself around the wire and
instantly, the metal frame turned into a paper lantern. Nikolai tapped the top of the lantern, and it lit up, despite having no candle inside.

“Now I need about a thousand more.”

The lantern leaped to action and flew straight up into the sky. There, it began to multiply. Two, four, eight, sixteen, on and on until they had doubled ten times and reached a thousand and twenty-four. Nikolai pointed
in every direction, and that sent each of them zipping to a different part of the garden, the island now lit up by a seemingly endless string of glowing paper orbs.

“Voilà,”
he whispered. He hardly had enough energy to speak.

And yet, he produced a tiny bench from the satchel, purchased as part of a dollhouse set, and put it on the ground. Then he blew on the bench, and where there had been
one, there were suddenly ten. Nikolai flung his arm outward, and the benches shot off and planted themselves along the main promenade, each bench equidistant from the next. There,
they began to enlarge, like the model dock and the jack-in-the-box and ballerina had done before.

When the benches had grown to full size, Nikolai fell to his knees, all his muscles shaking. His shirt was drenched with
sweat, his hair damp against his forehead. He wanted to lie down right there, melt into the gravel, and sleep for days. He could use his overcoat as a blanket. The waves slamming against the shore would be a fitting, violent lullaby.

But it was already past midnight, and there was still so much,
too much
, to be done before the sun rose in seven hours. At least the next part of his turn could
be accomplished in his sleep. It would be a fitful sleep, but Nikolai would be able to recover a little while he worked. In theory.

He scraped himself off the ground and staggered to the nearest bench. There, he shrugged off his overcoat and laid it on top of the seat, then lay down and stretched out his legs, thankful he’d decided to make the benches extra long. He pulled his satchel under his
head, like a pillow, and closed his eyes to sleep. But before he drifted off, he reached over and drummed his fingers several times on the armrest, and he whispered to the bench, “Moscow. This one is Moscow.”

And then his entire body relaxed, and he fell into a dream.

A
t dawn, Vika’s scar flared, and she knew that Nikolai’s move had been made. She was also certain it was on the island, as sure as she knew that her hair was red. What Vika didn’t know was how Nikolai had interpreted her island. She didn’t even know herself whether she’d intended it as a means to cooperate or merely the next step in one-upmanship. Had she ruined their connection
by fleeing the masquerade? Was Nikolai still merely an opponent? Or was he something more? Vika both feared and hoped for the latter option.

She climbed out of bed and peeked out of her curtains. It was barely light outside. And yet, she couldn’t wait several more hours until the ferries began to run and someone could be convinced to take her to the island. She could, of course, go down to the
dock and commandeer a boat for herself. But even that seemed too slow. If only she could evanesce.

But why not try? Ever since the Game began—ever since she’d moved to Saint Petersburg—Vika had felt
stronger. Maybe it was being close to Nikolai, their magic magnifying against each other. Or maybe the challenge of the Game simply pushed her to be better. But whatever it was, it allowed her to
perform enchantments greater than she’d ever created before and to get by on almost no sleep, even after conjuring an entire island.

Of course, in the past, she’d only been able to evanesce a few feet, and it would be a few miles to the island. But it was worth an attempt. If it didn’t work, there was always a boat to steal.

Vika closed her eyes. She imagined herself disappearing and reappearing
again on the new island.

Do it.

Do it.

Go . . .

She squeezed her eyes shut tighter. Nothing happened except everything got blacker.

Vika huffed and opened her eyes. Perhaps she
would
have to steal a boat.

Except I don’t want to,
she thought. She really, really wanted to evanesce. In fact, this intensity of wanting reminded her of the same spark she used to feel right before she mastered
a new skill, like mending a fox’s sprained ankle or beckoning the snow. It was a combination of pure will and the right moment that had allowed her to do those things. And now, with this increased power, with all this new energy from the Game . . . this was the moment. Vika
knew
this would be the moment she would learn to evanesce. It had to be.

Perhaps she needed to approach it differently.
Rather than jumping from one place to the next, perhaps Vika
needed to
feel
the sensation of evanescing, in order to coax it to happen. Provide her body with actual instructions, so to speak.

She closed her eyes again. But this time, instead of commanding her body to disappear and simply reappear, Vika first envisioned her body, whole, and then, when she could see every detail of herself, she
began to think of her body not as one, but as an infinity of tiny pieces.

I am no longer Vika Andreyeva,
she thought.
I am composed of minuscule bubbles.

She felt herself begin to disintegrate.

And then she really did become those bubbles.
I am effervescent!
It made so much sense now. Vika was a master of the elements, and now she had become an element herself. She’d become a fizzy, magical
rain.

The wind heard her desire to evanesce, and it whooshed through her window and blew her away.

The island,
her thoughts whispered, and the wind obeyed, whisking her like champagne raindrops over Nevsky Prospect, past the colorful canals, and across the Neva River and bay. It carried her over the island and swirled down to the gardens. Then it deposited her dissolved quintessence at the foot
of the main promenade.

Vika’s sense of self was nebulous; if she’d had a head, it would have felt full of clouds. But although she was not much more than sparkling fog, she retained the impression that she used to be something more.
Come back together,
she thought, although she was not sure what it was that she was supposed to be.

The tiny bubbles, however, knew. She’d shepherded them all safely
to the island, and one by one, they reunited.
She blinked, for a moment staring at her hands and feet as if she’d never seen them before. Then the memory of being human rushed back, and she laughed and wiggled her fingers and toes.

“I did it.” Vika touched her arms and legs and neck and head, and yes, every single piece of her was there. She laughed again. She stretched and she spun, and she
found that her body worked exactly as it should. “I did it!” She wasn’t tired at all.

After another minute, she remembered to look around her, because she’d come to the island not for the experience of evanescing, but to uncover Nikolai’s move. She stood at the beginning of the promenade in the middle of the island’s gardens, and as she took in her surroundings, she gasped. Where there had been
only a canopy of leaves when she’d left yesterday, golden globes now ornamented the branches, suspended by invisible string and floating in the breeze. The soft glow of the lanterns complemented the orange light of the rising sun.

Across the path from her was a new bench. Although Vika was not tired from the evanescing, her breath was a bit unsteady, as if her newly reconstituted lungs were still
relearning how to breathe. So she walked over to the bench. It looked ordinary enough, except for a brass plaque on its seat back that said
Moscow
in both Russian and French. And magic wafted off the bench in a mist of pale-blue vapor.

Will this kill me if I sit?

No one answered except the larks and wrens she’d put in the trees, singing her favorite folk songs.

But Nikolai’s magic reached out,
the pale-blue mist curling in wisps around her. The tugging began again in the center of her chest.

So she took a deep breath and dropped down onto the bench. It was reckless, but Vika had done plenty of reckless things before, and for a great deal less in return.

As soon as she made contact with the wooden slats, her chest swelled with warmth as it had at the masquerade. At the same time, the
park around her began to fade. Then, like a watercolor, a new scene filled in. She stood along the Arbat, the main thoroughfare of Moscow, surrounded by opulence. Corinthian columns and intricate mahogany veneers adorned the houses, and women in fashionable gowns strolled arm in arm along the street. The entire city had been rebuilt after its citizens had burned it down to prevent Napoleon from
pillaging it, and here Moscow was, shiny and proud and new.

It was like being in a dream. Vika could scrape her boots against the dirt, feel the autumn chill upon her skin, even take in the rich smell of mushroom and meat pies wafting in the air. And yet, for all the reality of the scene, the people on the Arbat couldn’t see her. When she said hello, they did not greet her.

She strolled away
from the Arbat and continued walking until she came to Red Square. She marveled at the white Kremlin walls and paused to admire the red brick and the cupolas of St. Basil’s Cathedral, built to resemble a bonfire rising to the sky. Vika had never been to Moscow, but it was beautiful to behold.

After a while, she had gotten her fill of churches and monuments and squares. She was ready to leave
Moscow except . . . how? It was not as if Nikolai had provided an obvious exit. Her heart pounded faster. She looked all around her, at the people who could not see her and the
city that was too fake to be real but too real to be feigned.

Oh, the devil, it was a trap. He’d finally caught her. Her stupid curiosity had led her here, and now she’d be stuck in Moscow forever. It was even worse than
being confined, as Sergei used to say, to the jinni bottle that was Ovchinin Island. Now she was literally trapped on a bench in a dream.

A never-ending, lonely dream.

But wait. Dreams could be woken from. Right? Yes, please, please, please, be right.

Vika shook her head from side to side and yawned. She stretched her arms above her head and opened her eyes wide. A few seconds later, Moscow
began to fade away, and reality and the island came into view again. She exhaled.

She was free.

And even better, it had not been a trick. Nikolai had not tried to hurt her, just as she had not tried to hurt him with this island. She sighed and leaned back against the bench.

Then it dawned on her how incredible it was what Nikolai had created.

There were other benches along the promenade. If
this first one had been such a glorious rendition of Moscow, what else had he done? She stood and hurried across the gravel path—the benches zigzagged across the promenade, each fifty or so yards from the next—and wandered to the next bench.

A subtle fog hung over this one, too. Sea green, rather than blue. It also had a brass plaque on it, but instead of Moscow, it was labeled
Kostroma
. Kostroma
was a small city at the junction of the Volga and Kostroma Rivers, and famous for the venerable Ipatievsky Monastery and the Trinity Cathedral, both beloved by the tsars. Had Nikolai been to
all these places? A prick of jealousy twinged inside her.

She wanted to sit on the Kostroma bench, but she was still a little skittish from panicking inside Moscow. So she ran down the gravel path to look
at the next one instead.
Kazan
. The largest city in the land of the Tatars, where mosques and Orthodox churches coexisted, and where the tsar had recently founded the Kazan Imperial University.

After Kazan came Samara, then Nizhny Novgorod, seat of the medieval princes, followed by Yekaterinburg on the Ural Mountains, the border of the European and Asian sides of the empire.

Vika spun in a circle
in the middle of the promenade, looking at all the benches behind and in front of and around her, each with a different plaque and a different, subtle mist about it. “It’s a dream tour of the wonders of Russia,” she said aloud.

The next bench was Kizhi Island, known for its twenty-two-dome church constructed entirely of shimmering silver-brown wood, each piece painstakingly interlocked at the
corners with round notches or dovetail joints. Legend had it that the builder used only one ax to construct the entire church, and when finished, tossed the ax into the nearby lake and declared that there would never be another ax like it.

Now that one, she would sit on. Maybe after she’d seen all the others. Vika was sure she could spend hours on Kizhi Island.

Next came benches for the crystal
clear waters at Lake Baikal in Siberia, the glacier-capped Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus Mountains, and the Valley of Geysers on the Kamchatka Peninsula.

The second-to-last bench was not a historically significant location. It was not a particularly populous one, either. It was not as stunning as Lake Baikal or Mount Elbrus or the Kamchatka Peninsula, and hardly anyone knew it existed. But these
were Nikolai’s benches; he was the final arbiter of what qualified as a wonder of Russia. And he had decided this would be the penultimate one.

“Oh . . .” Vika pressed her hand to her necklace. A golden mist shimmered around the bench, as if swathing it in autumn sunset. It was Ovchinin Island.

She reached out and traced the brass plaque with her finger, following each engraved letter from beginning
to end. She did this twice, and then she lowered herself onto the bench. All apprehension from the Moscow bench disappeared at the anticipation of this next dream.

As soon as she sat, the garden once again faded away. And when the fog burned off, a birch forest encircled her, and wolverines and foxes and pheasants cavorted at her feet.

“Home,” she whispered.

She hiked through the woods, to
a break in the trees, and looked out over the Neva Bay. Nikolai had captured the view of Saint Petersburg from Ovchinin Island flawlessly. He had also included her new island, a small isle of green in the middle of the deep-blue bay. She smiled but knitted her brow at the same time. It was an odd sensation, to know that she was actually on that island, and yet to feel that she was somewhere else,
on the outside looking in.

She continued hiking, pushing her way through overgrown shrubbery and crossing a log over Preobrazhensky Creek. She came to the clearing where she’d emerged from the fire, where Nikolai and Pasha had first seen her. In
Nikolai’s dream version, the trees still smoldered, and thin plumes of smoke trailed from the singed trunks into the sky.

There were also two patches
of ice on the forest floor, with two pairs of footprints embedded in them, still fresh as if the boys standing there had recently fled. Vika laughed. How funny, the details he’d included just for her!

But what she wanted to see most was her house. Now that she was back on Ovchinin Island—or the daydream of the island—the yearning for home that she had been suppressing bubbled to the surface and
propelled her toward the last hill of the forest. She began to run, as fast as she could.

As she ascended the hill, however, her vision started to blur. She tried to push onward, but the haziness continued, and although her feet moved, the setting remained the same and her progress halted. It was as if she ran the same spot on the hill over and over again.

Ah . . . this was the edge of Nikolai’s
knowledge, the perimeter of the Ovchinin Island he’d created. He had never been to her cottage, so he couldn’t include it in his dream. All he could conjure was what he had personally seen and what he could embellish from his experience.

Vika stood another minute longer at the base of the hill, then shook herself awake and out of the scene before too much disappointment could set in. It was still
a marvel what Nikolai had created; she couldn’t fault him for failing to include her home. And perhaps it was better that her house remained absent, for soon the people of Saint Petersburg would be here on the island, sitting on these benches and walking through these same dreams. She wouldn’t want them opening the cabinets and drawers in her house, even if they were imaginary.

There was only
one more bench left on the promenade. Vika rose and approached it slowly, even considering whether she ought to go back to the beginning and sit on each of the other benches before she came to the end. But she was already here. She sped up to discover what the final bench held.