The Crown's Game (The Crown's Game, #1)(67)

She was free.

And even better, it had not been a trick. Nikolai had not tried to hurt her, just as she had not tried to hurt him with this island. She sighed and leaned back against the bench.

Then it dawned on her how incredible it was what Nikolai had created.

There were other benches along the promenade. If this first one had been such a glorious rendition of Moscow, what else had he done? She stood and hurried across the gravel path—the benches zigzagged across the promenade, each fifty or so yards from the next—and wandered to the next bench.

A subtle fog hung over this one, too. Sea green, rather than blue. It also had a brass plaque on it, but instead of Moscow, it was labeled Kostroma. Kostroma was a small city at the junction of the Volga and Kostroma Rivers, and famous for the venerable Ipatievsky Monastery and the Trinity Cathedral, both beloved by the tsars. Had Nikolai been to all these places? A prick of jealousy twinged inside her.

She wanted to sit on the Kostroma bench, but she was still a little skittish from panicking inside Moscow. So she ran down the gravel path to look at the next one instead. Kazan. The largest city in the land of the Tatars, where mosques and Orthodox churches coexisted, and where the tsar had recently founded the Kazan Imperial University.

After Kazan came Samara, then Nizhny Novgorod, seat of the medieval princes, followed by Yekaterinburg on the Ural Mountains, the border of the European and Asian sides of the empire.

Vika spun in a circle in the middle of the promenade, looking at all the benches behind and in front of and around her, each with a different plaque and a different, subtle mist about it. “It’s a dream tour of the wonders of Russia,” she said aloud.

The next bench was Kizhi Island, known for its twenty-two-dome church constructed entirely of shimmering silver-brown wood, each piece painstakingly interlocked at the corners with round notches or dovetail joints. Legend had it that the builder used only one ax to construct the entire church, and when finished, tossed the ax into the nearby lake and declared that there would never be another ax like it.

Now that one, she would sit on. Maybe after she’d seen all the others. Vika was sure she could spend hours on Kizhi Island.

Next came benches for the crystal clear waters at Lake Baikal in Siberia, the glacier-capped Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus Mountains, and the Valley of Geysers on the Kamchatka Peninsula.

The second-to-last bench was not a historically significant location. It was not a particularly populous one, either. It was not as stunning as Lake Baikal or Mount Elbrus or the Kamchatka Peninsula, and hardly anyone knew it existed. But these were Nikolai’s benches; he was the final arbiter of what qualified as a wonder of Russia. And he had decided this would be the penultimate one.

“Oh . . .” Vika pressed her hand to her necklace. A golden mist shimmered around the bench, as if swathing it in autumn sunset. It was Ovchinin Island.

She reached out and traced the brass plaque with her finger, following each engraved letter from beginning to end. She did this twice, and then she lowered herself onto the bench. All apprehension from the Moscow bench disappeared at the anticipation of this next dream.

As soon as she sat, the garden once again faded away. And when the fog burned off, a birch forest encircled her, and wolverines and foxes and pheasants cavorted at her feet.

“Home,” she whispered.

She hiked through the woods, to a break in the trees, and looked out over the Neva Bay. Nikolai had captured the view of Saint Petersburg from Ovchinin Island flawlessly. He had also included her new island, a small isle of green in the middle of the deep-blue bay. She smiled but knitted her brow at the same time. It was an odd sensation, to know that she was actually on that island, and yet to feel that she was somewhere else, on the outside looking in.

She continued hiking, pushing her way through overgrown shrubbery and crossing a log over Preobrazhensky Creek. She came to the clearing where she’d emerged from the fire, where Nikolai and Pasha had first seen her. In Nikolai’s dream version, the trees still smoldered, and thin plumes of smoke trailed from the singed trunks into the sky.

There were also two patches of ice on the forest floor, with two pairs of footprints embedded in them, still fresh as if the boys standing there had recently fled. Vika laughed. How funny, the details he’d included just for her!

But what she wanted to see most was her house. Now that she was back on Ovchinin Island—or the daydream of the island—the yearning for home that she had been suppressing bubbled to the surface and propelled her toward the last hill of the forest. She began to run, as fast as she could.

As she ascended the hill, however, her vision started to blur. She tried to push onward, but the haziness continued, and although her feet moved, the setting remained the same and her progress halted. It was as if she ran the same spot on the hill over and over again.

Ah . . . this was the edge of Nikolai’s knowledge, the perimeter of the Ovchinin Island he’d created. He had never been to her cottage, so he couldn’t include it in his dream. All he could conjure was what he had personally seen and what he could embellish from his experience.

Vika stood another minute longer at the base of the hill, then shook herself awake and out of the scene before too much disappointment could set in. It was still a marvel what Nikolai had created; she couldn’t fault him for failing to include her home. And perhaps it was better that her house remained absent, for soon the people of Saint Petersburg would be here on the island, sitting on these benches and walking through these same dreams. She wouldn’t want them opening the cabinets and drawers in her house, even if they were imaginary.