The Crown's Game (The Crown's Game, #1)(17)
He scooped all the crumbs into his hand and crushed them.
“Just say it.”
He closed his eyes. “The tsar can have only one Imperial Enchanter. The enchanter who loses the Game dies.”
“No . . . Why?” The mug in Vika’s hands melted from pottery to clay.
“Each country’s wellspring emits a finite amount of magic at any given time. It is not without limits. So the number of enchanters must be limited as well.”
“But there have apparently been two of us all these years, not to mention you and your sister—”
“Yes, but the minor charms we conjure are relatively inconsequential,” her father said. “As for you and the other enchanter, you’ve been splitting Bolshebnoie Duplo’s magic between you. That’s fine while you’re training; in fact, it was likely better that you didn’t have access to all of it while you were young and learning to control your powers. However, to serve the tsar—and to protect the empire from its enemies—the Imperial Enchanter will need all of Russia’s magic, especially since Bolshebnoie Duplo is no longer as potent as it was when the people of our country still adhered to the old ways. The Imperial Enchanter must be the only major conduit of what magic remains. There cannot be any dilution.”
It hadn’t occurred to Vika that there might be an occasion when she couldn’t execute an enchantment, for lack of magic. It had always been there when she needed it. But then again, she’d never attempted anything on as large a scale as Sergei was implying. She hadn’t a clue how much power it might take to lead a war.
“I could steal Morocco’s magic,” Vika said. But the joke came out desperate and flat.
Her father scarcely pretended to smile. “Even Yakov Zinchenko wasn’t powerful enough to steal magic from so far away. And magic is loyal to its countrymen, for it is those very countrymen whose belief sows it. Morocco’s magic wouldn’t answer to a Russian.”
The kitchen grew colder. Vika hugged her arms around herself.
But why did death on the journey to becoming Imperial Enchanter shock her? Her father had warned her, hadn’t he? There had even been a lesson when Vika was younger—a horrible lesson—in which he’d asked her to resurrect a stillborn wolverine pup. Vika had clenched her fists and gritted her teeth and mustered all the power she had to focus on the pup’s heart, trying to feel if there were anything broken inside, anything she could move back together. She’d checked its muscles, its lungs, its stomach, liver, and every other organ, only to be met with silence. It turned out that had been the entire purpose of Sergei’s lesson: to show her that death was real, and an inescapable part of the Imperial Enchanter’s job.
So it should be no great revelation that dancing with death—defying death—could be part of the Imperial Enchanter’s initiation.
Vika packed the clay from the former pitcher in her hands. It hardened into a ceramic cannonball. “I don’t fancy dying.”
Her father emptied the bottle of kvass. “Then the only option is, you cannot lose.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
After telling Renata about the girl in the bonfire, Nikolai had spent the early evening on a prolonged walk around Saint Petersburg. The brisk fall air and the tranquil shush, shush, shush of the water in the canals had helped calm his nerves a little; at least he’d managed to talk himself out of changing his appearance and fleeing to the steppe for the rest of his life.
When he came home and unlocked his bedroom door, however, his heart nearly burst out of his chest. There were animals everywhere—monkeys bouncing and shrieking on top of the armoire, vipers slithering across every inch of carpet, and a Siberian tiger on his bed. The tiger roared and leaped toward him.
“Sacre bleu!” Nikolai smashed the door shut from the outside and locked it tight. Then he snapped his fingers several times, and five new dead bolts appeared and slammed into place. The tiger rammed the other side of the door again and again. Nikolai’s pulse pounded in his head to the same violent beat.
He was still plastered against the hallway wall, between a mirror and a portrait of an ancient Zakrevsky, when Galina appeared.
“Ah, Nikolai, you’re home. I thought I heard you come in. You really ought to work on your stealth.”
“Wh-what is that?” Nikolai pointed a shaky finger at his room.
“Do you like them? They’re my pre-Game gift to you. You have no idea what I had to go through to have them shipped here. Which do you like most? The tiger? The snakes? Or the poisonous lorises? Good gracious, you prefer the painfully adorable lorises, don’t you?”
Lorises. That was what they were. Not monkeys. Nikolai peeled himself off the wall. “Why are they in my room?” He enunciated each syllable, as if that would help Galina comprehend what he was asking.
She checked her reflection in the mirror and wiped away a small smudge of makeup. “The Game is beginning—well, it will as soon as you take the oath. And if you are to have a chance at winning, you need all the practice you can get.”
The Game is beginning?
“You do want to win, don’t you?”
“I—”
“Of course you do.” She smiled, now that she knew her makeup was flawless. “If you win, you’ll finally have wealth and respect. Well, respect in a warped sense, since no one can ever know exactly what we magical types do for the tsar. But regardless, they’ll know you’re an adviser of some sort, and besides, half his Imperial Council does nothing anyway. In any case, it’s everything a poor orphan like you never had and could only, until now, dream hopelessly of.”