The Crown's Game (The Crown's Game, #1)(78)

“Vika,” he whispered.

She didn’t respond. Her head lolled over his arm. She was a rag doll.

He laid her down gently on his bed and covered her with a wool blanket. “Vika,” he said, louder now. But still there was no response. He checked her pulse again. It stammered, but it was there.

He tried shaking her softly, careful not to jostle too hard.

Nothing.

If only he could see inside her, like she could when she healed animals, then he could figure out what had gone wrong and how to fix it. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried. But he couldn’t; it was all just a mass of red muscle and pink organs and crisscrossing veins. Living things were messy. It wasn’t like seeing through the straight walls of a library at all.

He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. Think. If I can’t use magic, then what? What would an ordinary person do?

There was a girl who worked in the kitchen, one of Renata’s friends, who constantly fainted. The cook kept smelling salts around to revive her.

Yes. Try that.

Nikolai opened his eyes and snapped his fingers. A silver vial of smelling salts appeared. He fumbled with the cap, and it clattered to the floor when he finally wrenched it off.

He wafted the salts under Vika’s nose. “Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.”

After a few passes, she stirred, and her eyes flickered open. “Nikolai?”

“I thought I’d lost you.” He dropped onto the bed beside her. The knot in his chest unraveled.

“Where am I?”

“In my room. Thank goodness you’re all right.” This wasn’t the death Vika’s tea leaves had foretold. Nikolai threw the smelling salts onto his nightstand. He didn’t care that they spilled.

“What happened?”

“You fainted.”

“Oh.” Vika’s eyes fell closed. “Yes. I remember now.” The red of her hair spread like blood against his white pillowcase.

It was so beautiful, and so . . . baleful. He had to touch it. His fingers reached out.

But her eyes opened again, and he stopped. He stuffed his hands beneath him and sat on them to restrain himself. “Are you all right?” he asked instead.

“I . . . I don’t know. It felt like something latched onto me and sucked all my energy away. It happened so quickly.” She passed her hands over her face and her torso, as if checking for abrasions. Her right hand circled her left wrist. “My bracelet. It’s gone.”

“What?” Nikolai whirled to his desk. Had something happened to both their gifts? He uncharmed the drawer and threw it open.

But his knife was still there in the hidden compartment. It seemed intact and untampered with. He slid his drawer shut again and charmed the lock. Then he turned back to Vika, who had drifted off again. “Vika,” he whispered. “Was the bracelet enchanted? Did it have any special power?”

“I don’t know.”

“How could it have fallen off?” He remembered how tightly it had cinched to her wrist at Bolshebnoie Duplo. And she’d been holding it when she collapsed by the canal.

“I don’t know.” Vika turned her head and coughed.

“I’m sorry. This isn’t the time to interrogate you.” He swirled his hand in the air, and a glass appeared in it. “Here. Water.”

“Thank you.” She managed to sit up and take a sip. Then she rested heavily against his headboard, as if even that small movement was too much work. “I haven’t been this weary since the Game began. I feel . . . inadequate.”

He looked again at her hair, and its fierceness—from the red down to the black stripe—seemed to represent everything she was. “You’re anything but inadequate. You conjured an entire island. You evanesced the tsar and tsarina. Even now, your color is returning. You’re not at all as weak as you think.”

But as he said it, conflict again knotted in Nikolai’s chest. For part of him wanted Vika weak enough so he could win the Game, but that part of him was rapidly losing ground to the part that wanted her to keep on fighting, to continue sparring with him.

And to the part of him that wanted to kiss her. That wanted to ask her to stay, to put out the candles and see what happened if the scars of two enchanters touched in the night.

The ground beneath him trembled at the thoughts. In fact, the entire room shifted. The paintings on his wall tilted. The glass of water spilled. Even the armoire moved several feet. Nikolai tried to clear his mind.

There are things more dangerous than a little magic, he thought.

Vika tensed on the bed, and he could sense a new shield around her, stuttering. “What are you doing?” she whispered.

Nikolai shook his head, and the earth ceased its shaking. “I’m sorry. I was just thinking.”

She scrutinized him for a second, then released the flimsy shield she’d cast around herself. “You have forceful thoughts.”

Never had a statement been so true. Deuces, he wanted to kiss her. Touch her. More.

“Be careful,” Vika said, still eyeing him from his bed. His bed!

“With what?” he managed to say without his voice pitching high or revealing too much. Or so he hoped.

“With thinking,” she said.

Nikolai nodded. “I know.” He turned away from her and tried to focus on the wall. On something plain and quotidian and not tantalizing at all. “Thinking can be a perilous sport.”