The Crown's Game (The Crown's Game, #1)(23)

Nikolai knitted his brow, although no one could see him do so in his current shadow form. He could not bring himself to look at the girl.

“And don’t take too long to win,” Galina continued. “I don’t fancy being trapped in limbo with my tiresome recluse of a brother. Oh, and try not to irritate the household staff while I’m away.”

Nikolai sighed. He had always known, from the day Galina came for him on the steppe, that she would not be a mother to him, but still, he had hoped for a little more than this before she saw him off to the Game, and, perhaps, to his death. But she was already gliding away.

Her brother offered her his arm, and although Galina curled her lip in disdain, she took it.

“I hope it isn’t too cold where we’re going,” she said.

“I hope you do not plan to complain the entire time,” he retorted.

“Oh, if it bothers you, mon frère, I shall. Ceaselessly.”

Dust began to swirl around them, first as individual particles, and then, picking up speed, as an opaque tornado. The storm swallowed the mentors inside itself, and Nikolai, being the closest to where the pair had stood, had to raise his hand to shield his eyes. The tornado grew taller and faster, and when it had almost reached the cavern ceiling, it shot out of the cave and into the labyrinth, the howling of the wind reverberating and deafening.

And then it was gone, out of Bolshebnoie Duplo and toward wherever mentors go to wait. Only silence remained.

“I have one more request,” the tsar said, as if a magical whirlwind had not just swooped away two entire people. “The tsesarevich’s birthday is next week. I suggest you consider that your theme for the Game. Impress him to impress me.”

Nikolai arched a shadow brow. Interesting. Perhaps the tsar cared more for Pasha than he let on, even to Pasha himself.

“Am I clear?” the tsar asked.

“Yes, Your Imperial Majesty,” Nikolai and the girl said.

“Good.” After a long pause, the tsar rose from his wooden throne. “Then let the Crown’s Game begin.”





CHAPTER FOURTEEN


Half a continent away, tall blades of grass trembled. The earth, still parched this early in the autumn, quaked in a cloud of dust. A fissure cleaved through the hard-packed dirt, and a shriveled hand punched its way to the surface, its sinewy muscle clinging to the bone like dried meat tethered to a brittle pole.

It didn’t take long for the rest of Aizhana’s body to emerge. During her many, many years underground, she had slowly, painstakingly stolen energy from worms and maggots to consolidate into a life force strong enough to resurrect herself. Now she climbed out of the earth and stretched, her limbs stiff from being dead—no, nearly dead—and she brushed the dirt off her withered skin.

She sucked in a breath between her teeth (what was left of her teeth, that is) and averted her eyes from the dry husk that hung from her body. The skin is the least important, she reminded herself. What matters is that my insides are healed.

But why now? Aizhana had been hoarding wisps of energy for so long, but nothing until this moment had been able to pull her completely free from her decomposing half slumber. What was it that had shifted the balance in her world?

Aizhana drank in the endless brown horizon around her. She reached for the sky, cracked her joints, and rattled her aching bones.

Whatever it was that had woken her, she did not know.

But whatever you are, she thought, I will find you.





CHAPTER FIFTEEN


While the tsar was away on state business, Pasha slipped out of Saint Petersburg. He had read the entirety of Russian Mystics and the Tsars, twice, and he had it in his head that he’d go back to Ovchinin Island to track down the mysterious girl from the woods.

He had wanted to drag Nikolai into making the trip with him, despite his friend’s reaction to their last encounter with the girl made of lightning, but when Pasha inquired at Countess Zakrevsky’s home, a servant had informed him that Nikolai was out.

Which was how Pasha came to be on Ovchinin Island alone. If Nikolai couldn’t accompany him, he didn’t want anyone else. Perhaps it was all right this way, though. It gave Pasha more opportunity to investigate the lightning girl on his own.

But as Pasha stood on the docks of the island’s small harbor, he had no idea where to look. Caught up in the adrenaline of finding the girl, he had failed to make any concrete plans beyond sneaking out of Saint Petersburg in disguise and unseen.

I suppose the forest is a good place to start, he thought. Although where in the forest? The same spot as the bonfire? If he could find it without a lightning storm directing the way. A different place, because she might not inhabit the same spot twice? But why wouldn’t she? Russian Mystics and the Tsars did not cover the rules of rising out of magical flames. For all Pasha knew, there might be only a single location from which the lightning girl could emerge.

The other possibility was that she didn’t come from the fire at all, but rather, the fire came from her. Or the fire came at her, from the lightning. Or . . . the lightning came because of her, like she was a magnet for firestorms. Pasha took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair. There were so many possibilities.

The captain of the ferry Pasha had taken disembarked from his boat and walked past Pasha on the dock. He was several yards away when he turned back around. “Ahoy, boy. D’you need directions somewhere?”