It was as if they were placeholders for the furniture. Nikolai could take away the specific chairs Vika had conjured, but he couldn’t take away the essence of “chair” itself.

Likely if he tried to vanish the walls of the egg, they would go translucent yet stay intact, just like everything else. “So this is how you keep me imprisoned, is it? Clever.”

To test his theory, Nikolai vanished the entire kitchen—cabinets, counter, plates, and food. As he suspected, faint outlines of each item remained.

“But can I replace what you’ve created, as long as its concept is the same?” he asked, as if Vika were there and they were merely discussing a magical hypothesis. “Let’s see.”

Nikolai turned to the ghost of the desk, but instead of polished granite, he wanted a metal one. He focused on the outline and imagined it filling in. A bar of iron appeared, and then another and another, and within minutes, Nikolai indeed had a desk designed like a small truss bridge.

“Voilà,” he said.

He tapped his fingers, and two armchairs molded of silver filled the space where the abalone chaise longues had been. Beneath his feet, a violet Persian rug replaced the carpet of live flowers. And the kitchen he redesigned like the exposed interior of a clock, with visible screws and pendulums and gears. One need only pull a lever, and an orange or a slice of bread would slide down a chute onto a plate made of a shiny brass cog.

Nikolai turned to the curved walls of the egg then and smiled. He had to concentrate harder on them, since they encapsulated the rooms of his prison completely and were therefore much larger than a few pieces of furniture, but after a while, the colors of the walls began to fade.

Vika’s magic trickled into Nikolai, and it was both comforting in its spiced warmth and unsettling in how it warred inside him, like drinking a pitcher too many of mulled wine.

I’ll have to dispose of Vika’s magic as soon as I get out of here, he thought. He shifted uncomfortably in his skin.

The walls, however, had faded as he’d hoped, and while still solid and intact, were now an empty, pale gray. Now he could transform them into a material he could better control.

Nikolai turned the phantom walls into bronze. He lacquered the outside to mimic the intricate paint of the traditional raspisnoye yaitso, decorating it in blue with white enameled spirals swirling on the surface and a serpent made of pure gold wriggling across its center. He thought of Swiss cuckoo clocks and how they often had mechanized surprises inside, and thus created a hinge that would open to reveal the inside of the egg and its redone rooms and furniture. If Nikolai worked hard enough he could actually make the hinge work and . . .

Crack the egg open.

He tumbled out of the egg and landed on the gravel of Candlestick Point. The enormous egg behind him opened straight through the middle, like a jeweled music box, to reveal the contents inside.

If the people of Saint Petersburg weren’t so frightened of magic now, they would have had a lovely new site on Letniy Isle to enjoy, Nikolai thought. Then he laughed sardonically, for the trouble with magic was, of course, his doing.

As soon as he got back onto his feet, he purged himself of Vika’s magic. Beds of lilacs, blue hyacinths, and a rainbow of roses sprung up around Nikolai’s egg. He took several steps back and stared at the garden for a moment. He’d never created something so vivid and alive before.

But then he shook it off. It had been Vika’s magic, not his.

He returned to the Black Moth. But his mother was not there.

Damn it.

It did not take long to hear in the streets the announcement that the tsar’s murderer had been apprehended, and Aizhana was to be hanged.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Nikolai located Aizhana easily. Her hanging was to take place in the courtyard of the Peter and Paul Fortress, and a crowd had already begun gathering around the gallows as the sun rose. She wasn’t on the platform yet, but she would be led there soon. She had to be somewhere nearby.

Click, click, click.

That sound. Nikolai listened harder. Aizhana’s fingernails.

Click, click, click.

Nikolai skirted the edge of the crowd, sticking to the shadows between the buildings that comprised the sprawling fortress. He homed in on the clicking and followed it to the red brick of the Kronverkskaya Curtain Wall.

She’s here.

Nikolai could not simply free her, though. Aizhana wouldn’t be under the watch of ordinary police. It would be Vika there, for who else could restrain a woman who’d slaughtered dozens of the Tsar’s Guard and then the tsar himself? Nikolai hesitated for a moment. Every time he had to face Vika was harder than the last. He felt her slipping away from him, when all he wanted was to have her by his side.

Nikolai took a deep breath, though, and stepped inside one of the doors that led to the part of the building that housed barracks. Again, he kept to the shadows and darted through the halls past soldiers as they departed the mess hall and prepared for the execution.

Click, click, click.

I’m nearly there.

Two police stood guard at the entrance to where Aizhana was being held. Nikolai waved his hand in the air, and the men’s pistols unholstered themselves and hit the guards in the backs of their heads. They slumped unceremoniously to the ground.

This was why ordinary men were insufficient for watching an enchanter’s mother.

Nikolai opened the door and slipped inside another hall, this one darker than the ones in the barracks. A few lamps hung from sconces in the wall, their flames flickering and taunting. Which room was Aizhana in?

Vika leaned against a wooden door in the middle of the hall. “You liberated yourself from my painted egg.”

“You made it difficult.”

“Not difficult enough, apparently.”

Nikolai advanced a few steps. “Is my mother in there?”

“Yes, but I can’t let her escape, too.”

“I don’t want to have to hurt you.”

“She killed the tsar, Nikolai. That’s not excusable, and she’s going to die today. That said . . . I’m not heartless. I didn’t have the chance to say good-bye to Father before he passed.” Vika looked directly at Nikolai, her eyes covered in a sheen of tears. “I’m going to walk over here, to the other end of the hall—which, mind you, is not very far—but I’m going to study this sconce on the wall, and if you should happen to find your way into the cell for a minute to say farewell to your mother, well, I might not notice.”