The Crown's Game (The Crown's Game, #1)(41)
The top of the box exploded open on the final do! and out leaped a life-size jack-in-the box. Vika and the rest of the crowd gasped and jumped back.
But the Jack—who was no longer in the box, and who had legs where his accordion body ought to be—stood still in front of his box, wavering slightly back and forth as if he were still on his springs. Vika watched him carefully. There was something devious about his wooden grin.
Beside him, a tinkling version of the music from the ballet Zéphire et Flore began to play from the purple box. But unlike the red one, the lid of the purple box started to open as soon as the song began. As it lifted, a life-size ballerina doll, wearing a periwinkle-blue dress and fairy wings, rose on a spinning platform, as if she were part of a music box. Now Vika had two dolls to track.
As the song came to an end, so did the ballerina’s twirling. It was then that the Jack came back to life. He bowed to the ballerina, one toy to another, then danced to her box and offered her his hand. “Don’t take it,” Vika whispered. “Don’t trust him.”
But the ballerina placed her delicate porcelain fingers in his wooden ones and pranced down to the cobblestones in the square. Vika shook her head.
Ludmila pressed up to the ribbon fence, and because they shared an invisible bubble, Vika found herself pulled to the edge of the makeshift stage as well. The figure in the palace window likewise leaned forward as far as he could. Was it the tsar, keeping track of the Game? Or the tsesarevich, watching the show put on for his birthday?
A melody pealed out from the purple box again, this time for a pas de deux. The Jack led the ballerina to the center of their cobblestone stage, where they bowed once again to each other. Then he set his hands gently about her waist, and she lifted onto the points of her shoe, both arms arched overhead, and spun as ethereally as a fairy.
They danced as the music played. The ballerina spun. The Jack leaped. And when together, he lifted her, light as the doll that she was. Then the music began to soar, and their dancing did as well, with the ballerina and the Jack whirling together so quickly they began to levitate into the sky.
“How are they doing that?” someone behind Vika asked, as if he had forgotten they were not real people.
“There must be strings,” another person said.
But next to Vika, Ludmila said, “They’re like puppets manipulated by masters they cannot see.”
Too true. Vika knew the ballerina represented her, and the Jack the other enchanter. Like the puppets, she and her opponent had never had a choice: their destiny was a pas de deux, a splendor and a torment fated for the two of them.
And yet, there was something about the other enchanter, about the magic he chose, that drew her to him, as if the bond between them was not an altogether evil thing. It was more like a tenuous thread attempting to reconnect two halves of a whole.
And although Vika hated to admit it, she’d dreamed of him more than once. Each time, he would appear as a shadow boy, but each morning, just before she woke, she would catch a glimpse of his real face. . . .
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 shield—
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 shield! 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 pushing 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 nobody 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.