A moment later, she released Ludmila. “I suppose I ought to let you return to the bakery. Bolshoie spasiba for helping with the burn, and for supper.”

Ludmila flicked a finger under Vika’s chin. “Hold your head high, my sunshine. Remember, it’s not magic that defines you. It’s you that defines you. That’s all the truth that there is.”

Vika watched as Ludmila left and hiked back down the snowy hill. Thankfully, the storm had slowed to a flurry. When she was gone, Vika returned to the kitchen.

Her wrist hurt, but not as much anymore. She made a poultice with herbs from various glass jars Father had kept in the cabinet, and wrapped the cool bandage around her forearm and bracelet. Then she sliced the Borodinsky bread Ludmila had brought, heated a sausage, and made tea.

Vika sat down near the pech, warmed by the fire, and took a bite of her bread, chewing thoughtfully.

She might not have been able to use magic, but Ludmila was right—she wasn’t powerless, either. I am who I make myself to be. She finished her bread and sausage and sipped at her tea.

Then Vika smiled, picked up an oreshki cookie, and popped the entire thing in her mouth.

It was time to figure out what, exactly, she was going to do, and who she was going to be.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

As Nikolai stepped inside the rowdy tavern, he was hit by memories. The Magpie and the Fox used to be his and Pasha’s, where they came when Pasha wanted to sneak out of the palace and be anyone other than tsesarevich, and where Nikolai could put aside the strains of his enchanter training and feel like a normal boy. Nikolai’s stomach soured. He almost turned back around to head for the door.

But then what had begun as a queasiness in his stomach quickly shifted to a hard knot of anger. Why should Nikolai have to abandon the tavern simply because Pasha had once frequented it? Not everything should default to Pasha for the mere reason that he was heir to the throne. Besides, Nikolai would take the crown from him, somehow—perhaps even more easily now that Vika was forbidden from using magic—and then everything that was once Pasha’s could and would become Nikolai’s.

He just needed to figure out how. He needed a new plan.

He also needed something to eat.

Nikolai snuck into a dark corner of the tavern—he hadn’t cast his facade, for he wanted to move about unseen, a shadow among shadows—and swiped a few slices of rye bread and smoked fish off a wooden platter at a table where the conversation had grown too animated for the patrons to pay attention to their food.

He moved deeper into the tavern and lurked around a group of rowdy gamblers, who already had five empty vodka bottles on their table next to their piles of coins and bills.

“You should have seen the look on the girl’s face when I cornered her,” one of the men said, his mouth full of half-chewed pickle.

“Did she scream with horror when you unbuckled your belt and she saw how tiny your member was?” another man said, as he drew a card from the deck.

“I think you’re confusing your own experience with mine.” The first louse of a man spit on the floor. “The only screams were from the girl and her sister begging me for more.” His fellow gamblers guffawed, and he sneered in victory.

A serving girl walked by at that unfortunate moment, and the man smacked her rear end. He was met with more hoots of approval from his drinking mates.

Swine, Nikolai thought. As a silhouette, his sense of propriety might have waned, but it had not yet disappeared entirely.

But the dark energy within him bubbled for another reason—it wanted more of its own kind, even though Nikolai didn’t necessarily need it, since Aizhana’s strength was more than enough. But the energy was greedy, and it craved more darkness. That made these men perfect targets.

Nikolai reached out of the shadows to touch the first gambler’s back.

The energy shuddered through to him, and with it, he felt the magic in his fingertips hum ever stronger, pulsing with shadow. Nikolai almost sighed out loud, for energy was like water—no, vodka—after being parched for too long. He took and took until the man’s head bobbed, drowsy from what Nikolai stole.

His friends only pointed and laughed. “The Great Stanislav of Sennaya Square can’t hold his drink anymore!”

Nikolai let go. The Great Stanislav of Sennaya Square? He edged around to get a better look at the man’s face. No, not a man, but a boy Nikolai’s age. The face was rougher than he remembered, skin leathered from long days in the sun, but it was the same reprobate with whom Nikolai used to play cards. Stanislav was a liar and a swindler and a brute, and that was only a list of his best qualities.

Stanislav mumbled something, then slumped onto the table, face in a platter of herring, and began to snore. His friends laughed harder, then emptied his pockets of the rest of his rubles.

Each is worse than the next, Nikolai thought as he watched them. All the better for me. He decided to take energy from every single one of them.

When he was finished, they were all asleep with their faces smashed in the herring. Nikolai scooped up the bills and coins and poured them into the serving girl’s apron pocket as she walked by. “For you,” he whispered. It was that tiny bit of propriety, that sliver of sunlight that still existed within him, that made him do it.

The servant girl looked all around her but couldn’t find her benefactor. When she dipped her hand into her apron pocket, though, she smiled and said, “Thank you.”

Nikolai felt both wonderfully vile and horribly saintly in the moment, and that strange oil-and-water roiling churned within him again, like it had when he’d absorbed some of Vika’s magic in the egg. He frowned and spat on the floor, as if that would rid him of the discomfort of being good.

He began to walk away, but then he paused. Stanislav’s and the others’ shadows were following him. Well, not exactly following, for they weren’t alive by any means, but they stretched thin, as the shadows of the girl and her father at the toy shop had done, one end stuck to their owners, the other attracted to Nikolai.

He took another step, and then another and another, and the shadows from other patrons began to cling to him, too. Nikolai watched as more shadows joined, stretching thinner and then thinner still, until he was on the far side of the tavern. The Magpie and the Fox was striped with eerie, willowy silhouettes from one end to the other.

Nikolai grinned. And then, when the shadows were on the brink of nearly snapping, he waved his hand to release them from his pull. They sprang away.