The Crown's Game (The Crown's Game, #1)(42)

If I stay inside, I’ll die, and I’ll never see Father again, never become Imperial Enchanter, never have a chance to become who I was meant to be.

As the sides of the cube squeezed out the last of the air, Vika felt all its edges against her. She pushed up, down, in every direction again, rebounding like a marble rattling in a box too small. The corners pressed inward. The walls crushed against the sides of Vika’s ribs.

Oh, mercy. She winced at the pressure that she knew would soon turn into pain.

But what if they weren’t walls? What if they weren’t solid, but vapor instead?

“Steam,” she gasped.

The inside of the box began to grow hot and humid.

Vika hovered on the brink of a faint. Just a little more . . .

She ran her fingers along the sides of the box and imagined them transforming from glass—or whatever they were—into steam. Please, please, turn into steam.

The walls of her near coffin exploded. Vika tumbled out of the stifling mist. She wheezed as air rushed to fill her empty lungs.

And then, from somewhere on the other side of Palace Square, came a voice. It was quiet, yet it cut through the noise of the still-applauding crowd.

“Bravo,” it said, and Vika knew the compliment was for her, not for the Jack and ballerina’s show. “Your move, Enchanter Two.”





CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE


She was still alive. He was still alive. Nikolai was glad, but he wasn’t. Because now it was the girl’s move, and every time she had another move meant another time Nikolai might die.

The next evening, just as an audience formed in Palace Square to wait for the Jack and ballerina to dance again, the sky darkened. It went from pale blue to storm gray in the time it took the nearby clock tower to chime six times. Nikolai looked up, along with everyone else in the square.

There were no clouds. But the sun was gone, and a diaphanous drizzle began.

The would-be audience murmured. The men were glad they had hats on their heads, and the women found scarves in their bags with which to cover their hair.

“It’s just a passing sprinkle,” a thin man said to his even thinner wife.

“It must be. The fishmonger this morning predicted sunshine all day.”

The jack-in-the-box’s crank began to turn, and its tinny scales started to play once again. Everyone in the crowd returned their focus to the boxes. Everyone except Nikolai, who kept his gaze planted firmly upward. What are you playing at, lightning girl?

A second later, her namesake lightning splintered the sky into shards, and a flood of rain gushed out from its cracks. It drenched the crowd and drowned out the sound of the Jack’s music. People ran for cover, their once-sufficient hats now tumbling onto the cobblestones upside down and full of water, their scarves no more than sopping rags plastered onto their heads.

All around Nikolai, the crowd stampeded out of the open square. The storm kept coming, like Zeus himself out for revenge in one of Pasha’s favorite myths. Nikolai rubbed the back of his dry neck—he’d conjured a waterproof shield over both himself and the Jack’s and ballerina’s boxes at the first hint of rain—and sighed. The girl had made quite a display of commanding the weather. The immensity of her power was impressive indeed.

Nikolai snapped his fingers, and the crank and music from the Jack’s box stopped. He could hardly hear it anyway. There would be no show tonight.

A bolt of lightning slammed into the cobblestones mere feet away from him.

“Merde!” Nikolai leaped back from the pulverized pavement.

Another bolt slammed into the ground behind him. He jumped again, but this time he cast the strongest shield he could conjure and sprinted for cover.

The Winter Palace. If only he could make it across the square—

The path in front of him burst in an explosion of electricity and mortar and stone.

“The tsar won’t be happy if you demolish his square while you try to kill me!” Nikolai yelled as he continued to run. “And I doubt this qualifies as something impressive for the tsesarevich’s birthday!” He didn’t know where the girl was, but she had to be near if she was directing the lightning straight at him.

She responded by whipping the rain into his face, aiming a thousand stinging needles at him all at once. They bounced off his shield.

“You’ll have to try harder!” He was almost at the palace. Only ten more seconds and he’d be at a door.

The girl unleashed the lightning again. Several bolts ruptured the sky, ferocious veins of searing white in the darkness, and they convened on one target: Nikolai’s shield.

The crack blew all sound out of his ears, and he was thrown to the ground as the lightning shattered the invisible layer protecting him. The palace was still too far. It was Nikolai against the weather now.

The sky crackled and popped again. Recharging, readying for attack.

He remembered the girl rising out of the fire on Ovchinin Island. He didn’t think he could fight that. Not without a shield.

But if Nikolai was going to die, he was going to do it with dignity. He reached for his top hat, which had skittered away on the cobblestones and finally gotten wet. He brushed it off and rose to his feet.

Then he turned to face the ballerina’s purple box in the center of the square. He wasn’t sure where the girl was, but he could address the puppet he’d created in her stead. He took a deep breath and stood as still and as serenely as he could, given the circumstances of thunder bellowing all around him.