The Crown’s Game (3 page)

N
ikolai’s pocket watch clicked as the hour struck two in the morning. He ought to have gone to bed long ago, but here he still was, standing in front of a tri-fold mirror in his bedroom as a measuring tape and several pins flew around him, designing a new frock coat. For a once pudgy orphan from the Kazakh steppe, Nikolai had grown up to be rather striking. His eyes were dark and
fierce, his face and body all sharp planes, and yet there was an impossible fluidity to the way he moved—in fact, even in the way he stood—that was both incongruous with his trenchant edges and an inseparable part of his being. It was a brooding sort of elegance not often seen on a boy of eighteen.

The clothing he tailored was, of course, necessary for life in the heart of the capital. There
was always an invitation to lunch or to play cards or to go to the countryside to hunt. But Nikolai had had to fend for himself in every one of these realms, for his mentor and benefactor, Countess Galina Zakrevskaya, was not about to spend a kopek on him for
new boots or a proper rifle for shooting grouse, and certainly not for dance lessons, even though Galina’s friends deemed it fashionable
to invite her charity case to their balls.

And so Nikolai had learned to barter. He delivered packages for the tailors at Bissette & Sons in exchange for bolts of cloth. He sharpened swords for an army lieutenant in return for lessons. He served as an unpaid assistant to Madame Allard, the ballroom instructor to all the debutantes, and as a result, learned to dance in the company of the prettiest
girls in the city. Nikolai knew he was worth at least the same as the noble-born boys in the capital, and he refused to give anyone an excuse to prove otherwise.

So while Nikolai might not have
belonged
to Saint Petersburg society, he was
in
it, in his own ill-fitting way. And all the while, Galina’s daft admirers praised her for her
caritas
and her ability to polish a rough Kazakh stone into
the semblance of a proper Petersburg jewel. Galina did not correct them.

Now Nikolai stood very still while his scissors hovered above a mahogany table on the other side of the room, cutting through a panel of black wool. He pointed at the scissors to slice a notch in the lapel.

Before they had a chance, though, Galina barged into his room—it was her house he lived in, after all—and halted the
scissors in midair.
“Arrête.”
She spoke French, just as she had the first time he met her, when he was a child and still living in a nomadic village on the Kazakh steppe. Then, French had been gibberish to him. But now the language was second nature, and Nikolai was rather proud that he spoke it without an accent. All the aristocracy in Saint Petersburg spoke French.

Nikolai shifted from his
position in front of the mirrors, where the cloth tape was still busily flying about.

“No step in the lapels,” Galina said.

“But I like them notched.”

“For informal frock coats, that is acceptable. But this one ought to be formal. And make it double-breasted.”

Nikolai bit the inside of his cheek. How utterly like Galina to deny him something as simple as notched lapels. But he swirled his
hand in the air as he relayed new instructions to his scissors. They repositioned themselves and began snipping again.

“Actually, we don’t have time for this.” Galina clapped her hands three times, which made the jeweled bangles on her wrists jingle, and the wool and scissors vanished.

“Hey!”

“Get dressed to go out and meet me downstairs in five minutes. It’s time for a lesson.”

“It’s two
o’clock in the morning.”

Galina shrugged and glided out of his room.

Nikolai sighed. Ever since her husband, the old war hero Count Mikhail Zakrevsky, had died six years ago, Galina had grown even more intractable than she’d been before. So it was no accident that Nikolai had turned out a touch morose. He’d endured Galina’s lack of pity for a sum total of eleven years.

Nikolai eyed his bed.
Without the project of his frock coat, a curtain of fatigue suddenly threatened to drop over him. His pillows crooned a siren song.

He could refuse Galina’s command. It was inhumane to train at this hour.

But if he disobeyed, he would have to leave, because he
was only given a place in the Zakrevsky house as long as he was Galina’s student. And he could not give that up, because studying with
her was his ticket to becoming more than a no-name orphan. He could be Imperial Enchanter someday.

However, it wouldn’t be as easy as knocking on the Winter Palace door and asking for the job. Well, it would have been, if Nikolai were the only enchanter in Russia, but it so happened that there had been two enchanters born after the last one perished. It was an anomaly, having more than one enchanter
at a time, but not completely unprecedented. Like Mother Nature’s occasional deviations from the norm, so Russia’s magic sometimes gifted the empire with a pair of enchanters rather than only one.

But there was a solution for that. “It’s a game,” Galina had told Nikolai when she’d taken him under her tutelage. “The one with the best magic wins.”

He’d been only seven when Galina came to the Kazakh
steppe—the border between Asia and the Russian Empire—and she’d been unlike any woman Nikolai had ever seen. A dainty hat perched atop carefully coiffed brown curls. A voluminous gown made of iridescent purple fabric that shimmered in the sweltering midday sun. And preposterously high-heeled boots that looked like an accident waiting to happen on the uneven terrain of the grassy steppe.

An accident,
that is, if the woman were actually walking. Nikolai twisted the hem of his tunic as he studied her. He focused on the space between the ground and the soles of her tiny feet and discovered that there was, indeed, a space between, if only inches. She levitated and merely moved her legs to create the illusion of walking. And she did so without seeming aware of it, as if the movement had been
a part of
her for decades. Nikolai grinned and puffed out his chest. The other children in the village wouldn’t have noticed. They would simply have thought the woman was preternaturally graceful.

When she floated to a stop in front of him seconds later, she stooped—although still hovering—and asked,
“C’est toi que je cherche?”

Nikolai tilted his head, and the fringe of his dark hair fell in
his face. He could not understand the woman’s language.

The woman muttered something to herself. Then she spoke again, this time in halting Russian, as if she had learned it by eavesdropping on others but not actually speaking it herself.
“Eto ti?” Are you the one I’m looking for?

Nikolai screwed up his face at her pronunciation.

“I am the Countess Galina Zakrevskaya,” she said, “and I have
come for you. Where are your parents?”

“Mama died when I was born,” Nikolai said without regret. He had not known her, so he had not had the opportunity to form an attachment. “And my father is also long gone.”

Galina nodded, as if she had expected as much. “Then you are all alone?”

“I have the village.” Nikolai pointed behind him at the cluster of colorful yurts, round tents decorated with
brightly colored patterns woven in a rainbow of zigzags and stripes.

“I doubt they will mind one less mouth to feed,” Galina said.

Which was true. The villagers had traded him to Galina all too easily, in exchange for two horses and two sheep. They’d been happy to be rid of the boy with powers they did not understand, that seemed to them to stem from the devil.

So now, even though Nikolai grumbled
as he glanced at his pocket watch and at the empty space where his scissors and cloth had just been, he only half meant the curses he swore under his breath.
I didn’t come all this way from the steppe only to revert to a sheepherder,
he thought.
And I certainly don’t intend to continue as an errand boy.

He commanded the ivory-inlaid doors of his armoire to open, and clothes flew out to meet him.
He didn’t know what Galina had planned, but he did know he needed to be more than presentable. She was very particular about appearances, which was ironic given that she’d never bought him so much as a handkerchief. It was as if she expected him to create something out of nothing.

Perhaps that was precisely the point.

Nikolai snapped his fingers, and a black cravat tied itself expertly around
his neck. Next, a blue paisley waistcoat (which Nikolai had made last month) buttoned itself around him. Then, finally, a black frock coat enveloped him, although he smiled smugly as he chose one with notched lapels, because Galina be damned, it was two in the morning, and if there was any time that was informal enough for notched lapels, it was in these dead-eyed hours between twilight and dawn.

Oh, and a hat. He couldn’t forget his top hat.

Having dressed, Nikolai flicked his fingers at the door to open it. He strode down the hall and, seeing no sign of Galina, slid down the curved wooden banister to the first floor. The grandfather clock at the base of the stairs showed four minutes past the hour. Nikolai hurried across the Persian rug in the drawing room, through the foyer—dark since
the candles in the chandelier were dormant—and out the front door.

Galina was already tapping her high-heeled boot on what would be the cobblestones had her feet actually touched the ground. But of course they didn’t. Galina had always thought the ground was both literally and figuratively beneath her.

She arched her brow as she took in Nikolai’s notched lapels. Then, after just enough scrutiny
to push him to the brink of cringing, she turned abruptly and started down the street, toward Ekaterinsky Canal, without giving any hint as to where she was headed, nor what she intended to do.

Nikolai swore under his breath again and hurried to follow.

T
hey wound through streets lit only by occasional lamps, their reflections shimmering on the damp cobblestones. Galina led Nikolai past grand mansions with pastel facades and ornate windows trimmed in white and gold, over the stone bridges that traversed the city’s many canals—which had earned Saint Petersburg its nickname as the “Venice of the North”—and through grand squares empty
of everything but bronze statues protecting the night. The dark closed in on Nikolai, and he pulled his coat tighter around himself. He thought again of his cozy bed. Where in the devil’s name was Galina taking him?

Eventually, they arrived at the front door of the Imperial Public Library, on the corner of Nevsky Prospect—the wide, main boulevard of the city—and Sadovaya Street. The library was
an immense stone building painted powder blue, with white statues flanked by white columns. It housed national and foreign treasures, like Voltaire’s personal library, and since Galina had not wanted to pay for
Nikolai’s enrollment at either a gymnasium or a military cadet school, Nikolai had educated himself in his scraps of free time within these very walls. The Imperial Public Library was one
of his favorite places in the city. And now, at two thirty in the morning, the building somehow seemed even grander to him, looming like a shadow too colossal to be restrained.

“Please tell me you don’t intend for me to break into the library?”

Galina looked down at him, for she was now hovering a foot in the air, since there was no one in the streets at this hour other than drunks, whose hungover
morning stories would never be believed. (Which raised the question, again, of why Nikolai had to be dressed so neatly.)

“As if I would so disrespect a national institution!” Galina said. “No, I simply want you to reshelve some of the books inside. They have been misplaced.”

“Reshelve them . . . now? From outside?”

“Of course now, and of course from outside.” She threw her hands in the air.
“Do you think we’re out here because I wanted a walking companion?”

“I—”

“The Game will begin soon. You can feel it, can’t you?”

Can I?
Nikolai stuck out his tongue, as if he could taste the difference in the air. And in fact, he could. It was like . . . cinnamon. With a dash of death.

Nikolai’s stomach, which was already unsettled from being denied sleep, sank to the bottom of his boots.

Galina carried on as if her announcement about the Game were ordinary news. “There are five books slotted into the wrong spaces on the shelves.”

Nikolai took a deep breath.
Don’t think about the Game yet. Focus on this single task.
Besides, he was probably wrong about the air, for who’d ever heard of magic tasting like cinnamon? And taste buds that detected death were not to be trusted. Death
wasn’t a flavor or even a scent.

“What are the titles of the books?” he asked Galina.

“You don’t need them. This is about concentration, Nikolai, and working under pressure.” She glanced up at the sky, and even though it was still pitch-black but for the streetlamps, she acted as if she could already see the sun’s first rays. “Tick-tock. I estimate three hours, perhaps less, before the underlings
of the city begin to scurry about on their errands and someone reports you to the Tsar’s Guard.”

Nikolai’s stomach remained firmly splattered at the soles of his boots. There were hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of books in the library. And he had to find five that were out of order? In three hours? He sank onto the corner of the street and leaned back against a flickering lamp.

“Don’t
be pathetic,” Galina said. “Oh, and don’t let anyone catch you charming anything, of course.”

Nikolai barely nodded. This had been drummed into him every time she gave him a lesson in a public place. He had to protect his identity. Galina was quite certain the other enchanter didn’t know Nikolai existed, but just in case, he had to hide who he was. It would give him the advantage of surprise
when the Game commenced.

Of course, Galina hadn’t bothered telling him who the other enchanter was or how she knew in the first place. “I’m a mentor,” she’d said by way of nonexplanatory explanation, invoking again her long bloodline of ancestors whose task it
was to train enchanters. “And in any case, it isn’t important who the other enchanter is. It will only distract you from focusing on what
is
important: making yourself the best enchanter you can be. Moreover, I’m quite sure my teaching is far superior to what the other mentor can offer. As long as you do as you’re told, of course.”

And so it went. Galina would make demands, and Nikolai would comply.

Now she drifted away from the library, down Nevsky Prospect, in the direction from which they had come.

“If only her lessons didn’t
take place in the middle of the night.” But Nikolai took a deep breath and cracked his knuckles. Exhaustion could be overcome; he’d done it plenty of times before.

He tossed aside his self-pity and rose from where he’d sat against the streetlamp. He focused on the Imperial Library’s impenetrable walls.
Imagine they are transparent,
he thought.
Imagine the walls are nothing but air.

They held
on to their solidness for a moment. And then the walls seemed to shimmer before evaporating from Nikolai’s sight altogether, and he could see straight through them.

At first, everything seemed too airy, too insubstantial, as if he’d entered a dimension inhabited solely by ghosts. But slowly, the rooms began to fill in, first the tables and chairs, then the columns and shelves, and finally, the
books themselves.

Nikolai gasped. Seeing the hundreds of thousands of books now, when he had an impossible task to accomplish, was so much more daunting than in the past when he had browsed the shelves.
I’ll never be able to sort through all of
them.
Even if he had been physically inside the library, it would take weeks, perhaps months, to check all the spines to ensure they were in the proper
order.

If he were more powerful, he might have been able to command all the books in the library to fly off the shelves at once and direct them to reorder themselves correctly. But that was the sort of dream one had after too many glasses of wine followed by too many shots of cheap vodka.

In his mind, Nikolai walked through the inside of the library, from the more popular reading rooms full
of newspapers and magazines, to the rare documents room, which required special permission—at least, permission was required for those who could not see through walls and peruse the holdings in the middle of the night.

If I can isolate the books that have been touched within the last twenty-four hours—maybe not even that long, since Galina likely visited near the end of the day to minimize the
risk of the librarians undoing her work—then I can command those books to reshelve themselves in the right places.

He clasped his hands in front of him, as if in prayer, and concentrated on catching the attention of every last book in the library.
If you were moved yesterday, I command you to move again, now. Slide forward, pull yourself off the shelf.

Nikolai held his breath. Some of the volumes
quivered in place.
Slide forward, pull yourself off the shelf,
he willed again. A few books started to move, just an inch. He knit his brow.
Slide forward, pull yourself off the shelf!

And then all at once, a few hundred books leaped off the shelves and came to a sudden halt, suspended in midair. Nikolai smiled.

Now go back to your places,
he commanded the books.

They did nothing but hover.

Hmm. Nikolai twisted his mouth. It would not be as simple as he’d hoped, for his plan apparently didn’t work if the books weren’t told specifically where to go. Still, it was only a few hundred books. He could do that. He could check the numbers on the spines against the numbers of the adjacent books, push back the ones that belonged, and pluck out the ones that did not.
Unless a convention of
anarchists visited the library yesterday, most books ought to be in their rightful spaces.

And so Nikolai began the painstaking sorting. The first book was a Russian dictionary; the books on the shelf behind it were all labeled with the same classification number.
You may slide back.
It obeyed and slotted itself neatly in place. The next several books were similarly in their corresponding spaces.
Apparently, they had just been taken off the shelves to be perused, but the patrons had put them back correctly.

After forty-five minutes, though, Nikolai had not found a single misplaced book. He rubbed the back of his neck. Perhaps this strategy wasn’t any good. Perhaps the charm he’d cast on the books was faulty. But it was creeping toward four in the morning now, too close to when the city
would wake, and Nikolai couldn’t start all over. He had to press on before he was discovered.

The next book floating off its shelf was a manual on the cultivation of wheat. But it had been placed beside economic treatises, which was clearly wrong even without comparing the numbers on the spines. “Finally,” he said aloud. Nikolai directed the wheat manual several aisles down to its brethren.

One down, four to go.

But a pair of voices sounded from around the corner of Sadovaya Street. Nikolai inhaled sharply, then darted around the other corner of the library and pressed himself against the wall.

It was a couple of fishermen staggering home—or perhaps to the docks on the banks of the Neva River—after a long night at a tavern. They stopped a mere foot from where Nikolai stood holding
his breath and every muscle. One of the drunkards unfastened his trousers and relieved himself on the streetlamp. The other laughed and undid his trousers, too, but he aimed his stream at the other man’s.

“You motherless bastard!” The first fisherman waved his own stream like a stuttering liquid saber at the other’s. A urine duel commenced.

Deuces! Were they eight years old?

The fishermen convulsed
with laughter as they “battled” with their stinking yellow swords. Nikolai plastered himself flatter against the wall as the second drunkard’s aim grew even worse and came within inches of Nikolai’s boots.

Finally, they finished and tottered on their merry, unfettered way. Only when their sloppy footfalls receded did Nikolai allow himself to exhale.

He worked at a quicker tempo thereafter and
found three more books in the wrong sections. Only one misplaced title remained. But Nikolai was no longer the only person on the street. It was now a quarter after five, and others had begun trickling past. Nevsky Prospect was, after all, one of the busiest streets in the city. And those people had begun casting strange glances at the well-dressed young gentleman who stood as if in a trance on
the corner of Nevsky Prospect and Sadovaya Street.

A flower girl across the street eyed him. She waved over a man carrying several crates of apples.

Now or never,
Nikolai thought. There were only thirty or so books that needed to be checked. He was not powerful enough to handle the movement of an entire library of books, but surely he could handle thirty? He clasped his hands even tighter in
front of him and murmured, almost to himself, “Return to your proper places! All of you!”

Inside the library, two dozen books shot straight back into their spaces. Five or six, on the other hand, whizzed through the air, a couple nearly colliding with each other, and weaved their way through the library, back to their correct rooms, correct aisles, correct shelves.

Nikolai dropped his arms to
his sides and blinked when it was done. All he could do now was hope that the misfiled books he’d found included the five Galina had shuffled herself.

The apple man set down his crates and began to march toward Nikolai. Nikolai spun on his heels and hurried down the street. “You! Sir!” the apple man yelled, not at all polite despite his use of the word “sir.”

Nikolai did not turn around. Instead,
he careened around a corner and darted into an alleyway. He checked around him—left, right, up, down—to make sure no one was watching from a doorway or window. Then he passed his hand over the length of his body from head to toe and cast over himself the illusion that his gentlemanly clothes were actually those of a working man. Top hat to crushed bowler hat. Frock coat to suit of coarse flannel.
Cravat to stained handkerchief. And so on, down to the frayed laces of his worn brown boots. When Nikolai emerged from the
alley, the apple man ran right by him.

Nikolai exhaled for the thousandth time since Galina had dragged him out into the night.

And now, finally, he could go home and sleep. That is, if Galina did not have another surprise there waiting for him.