The Crown's Game (The Crown's Game, #1)(68)

There was only one more bench left on the promenade. Vika rose and approached it slowly, even considering whether she ought to go back to the beginning and sit on each of the other benches before she came to the end. But she was already here. She sped up to discover what the final bench held.

She stopped short when she saw it.

“No!”

Nikolai lay limp across the final bench, one arm falling off the seat and dragging on the ground, and Vika dashed over, visions of her tea leaves flashing through her head. Death is coming soon, Renata had said. But Vika hadn’t thought it would be this soon.

She shook him, but he didn’t react, and his chest didn’t rise and fall as it should have. There was no breath puffing out into the chilly morning air. His dark hair fell in disarray across his face.

How much energy had it taken him to create the dream-state benches? All of it?

“Nikolai . . .” She touched her hand to his cold cheek.

But then his eyelashes fluttered.

And Vika gasped as she was towed into another dream.





CHAPTER FORTY-TWO


Nikolai was watching a golden eagle fly across a vast plain when Vika appeared beside him.

“Nikolai!”

He turned and blinked at her. Her voice seemed too loud in the quiet of the savanna. He took several steps back. “Vika? How are you here?”

“The bench . . . I thought you were dead. I touched you, and it brought me.”

“I’m not dead.”

She exhaled and touched her scar. “Thank goodness.”

The walls he’d erected around his heart crumbled a little. He tried to remind himself that she was his opponent, but it was difficult when she was right there. “I’m definitely not dead. But I think I’m still asleep.”

She looked around her and took in the surroundings. “You’re creating these benches in your sleep?”

He nodded.

“Amazing . . . Then this is a dream, too. Where are we?”

“The Kazakh steppe.”

“It’s beautiful.”

His walls crumbled further. Nikolai knew he was being foolish, but like at the masquerade, he felt no desire to rebuild them. She was here. She’d been worried he was dead. He shoved aside the warnings blaring in his head.

“See the eagle?” He pointed upward at the stately bird soaring across the sky with its golden-brown wings outspread. “This is a special type of falconry. If you look carefully, you can see the eagle’s master, the berkutchi, on his horse near the base of the mountain.”

Vika squinted in the direction Nikolai was pointing. She nodded when she saw the stout man on horseback. “Yes, I see. I can barely make him out, but he’s there.”

The eagle glided above them without a sound. It flapped its wings on occasion but mostly used the wind to carry it across the clouds.

“There are many animals on the island where I live,” Vika said. “They bring me their stomachaches and broken bones.”

“To heal?”

Vika nodded, eyes still on the eagle in the sky. “I can do it if it’s not too complicated a wound. A clean break or a straight cut.”

Nikolai shook his head. “I didn’t know enchanters could also be faith healers. I’m impressed.”

She shrugged. “I don’t think I’m a faith healer. They work with shifting energy, right? But what I do is different, and certainly based in magic. I imagine it’s a bit like sewing. Matching up the fabric and the threads. Lining up the flesh and the veins. Although I’m wretched at creating clothes.”

“Your masquerade gown was not wretched.”

“It also wasn’t fabric.” She smiled.

Nikolai had to concede that she was right.

They watched the eagle as it soared farther across the plains. Vika turned her head to follow it. “I like this dream. The eagle hunting is stunning. This bench may be your best one.”

“Thank you. There’s actually an old Kazakh proverb that says, ‘There are three things a real man should have: a fast horse, a hound, and a golden eagle.’”

Vika wrinkled her nose. “And what about a real woman?”

Nikolai laughed. “A real woman should have those things, too.”

She watched as the eagle continued to glide over the steppe. “How do you know all this? How did you create all those benches? Surely you haven’t traveled to each of the places you conjured. Unless you can evanesce there?” Her eyes widened.

Nikolai began to walk through the long, dry grass, and Vika followed. “No, I can’t evanesce at all. I’ve tried. However, I have spent a great deal of time in libraries over the years, and I’ve also heard many stories from Pasha of his and his father’s travels both abroad and within the empire. I gleaned all these details from them. Yet I cannot claim that my dream depictions are entirely accurate; I admit to taking a fair amount of artistic license, for much of what I have to base things on are paintings. But there are a few places I have actually been: Moscow, your island, and here.”

“You’ve been to the steppe? But how? It’s so far from Saint Petersburg.”

Nikolai pulled on a strand of hair, which was neatly combed, in contrast to the tired mess on his head on the other side of this dream. “Can you not tell from the near black of my hair? Or the shape of my eyes? The steppe is where I was born.”