But a few of the horses slipped on the ice, casting off Pasha’s soldiers as they fell. It sent the rest of the cavalry into even more disarray.

The Decembrists aimed their muskets.

Forget finding Nikolai right now, Vika thought. We need a distraction to give our men time to regroup.

“I’ll be back!” she said to Pasha, and she abandoned her horse and evanesced into the air, rematerializing on a cloud. From up here, she could see all the troops clearly. The Decembrists stood in two formations, a square and a rectangle, in front of the statue of Peter the Great and the Neva. They were surrounded on all sides by Pasha’s cavalry and infantry (other than a small gap along the river). And Pasha and Yuliana sat on their horses on the far side of the square behind a line of light artillery.

Vika hid herself in the folds of the cloud and threw up her arms. “I need a storm. A ferocious one.”

The wind howled in answer to her command and shot into the clouds around her, stirring them into a gray frenzy. The clouds spread across the sky like a blanket of gray fleece and grumbled with thunder in their bellies.

Ice like liquid silver swirled around Vika’s torso, stronger than she’d ever felt the weather before. A blizzard whipped around her skirt. Snowflakes drifted from her fingertips.

She’d become what she’d once worn only as a costume: she was Lady Snow.

She whipped sashes of snow from her blizzard skirt and hurled them, one after another, and they grew as they traveled, changing from small arcs to a full storm. She inhaled deeply and blew with all her might at the Decembrists below, and her breath transformed into bitter, blistering wind that screamed as it tore through the sky. The clouds around her, too, burst open, unleashing lightning and sleet, needles of fire and ice pelting down from above.

Pasha wanted the Decembrists to look up at us, after all. And so they did, eyes wide at the surprise storm—or perhaps afraid of magic—their muskets lowered in a frantic attempt to hide from the blizzard that seemed to attack only their section of Peter’s Square.

In the meantime, Pasha’s cavalry calmed their horses and re-formed their lines.

The liquid silver of Vika’s bodice chilled the air until it dropped to near-Arctic temperature. She continued to stoke the storm by adding more from her skirt. Each time she took a sash, more snowflakes flurried to take its place. She was eternal winter. Ironic, Vika thought, for a girl born of a volcano. Within seconds, the Decembrists were buried knee-deep in snow.

And then the blizzard halted. Or rather, it continued to rage around Vika but somehow failed to reach its targets on the ground.

“What? No.”

A shield, cast not of Vika’s magic, pushed up against her storm. It was invisible to the ordinary eye, but from her vantage point so close to it, she could see its components, a thousand clear umbrellas blocking the onslaught. Snow piled on top of the umbrellas, accumulating like icy white clouds in contrast to the gray ones that had created them.

Vika tried to throw more of her blizzard. But Nikolai’s shield stubbornly persisted.

When a mountain’s worth of snow had piled on each umbrella, they began to tilt, all away from the Decembrists in the center of the square and toward Pasha’s forces around the edges.

Oh no.

“Watch out!” Vika yelled, even though there was no way they could hear her from so far away.

The umbrellas fell sideways all at once, and an avalanche plummeted from the sky. Pasha’s troops looked up and shouted. Some tried to dive out of the way, but gravity was unforgiving, and the torrents of snow smashed down on the soldiers.

Suddenly, it was quiet. Pasha’s men had been buried alive.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

Nikolai looked up at Vika as his umbrellas caused an avalanche to crash down on Pasha’s soldiers. Wind and snow whipped around her, stirring her hair into a frosty fire of fury.

A warm flame inside Nikolai flared to match it.

Her strength intimidated the Decembrists. Yet it made Nikolai want her more.

But then the chill of ambition washed over the flame, the wanting. Nikolai turned away from the sky.

He had buried Pasha’s soldiers, but his own men needed something more to encourage them. Reinforcements. But where to find them?

Nikolai closed his eyes. And smiled.

Dolls, like at his fete. He could supplement the Decembrists’ forces with toy soldiers.

With eyes still shut, Nikolai recalled every toy shop he knew of within Saint Petersburg. There was the one from which he’d acquired the servers for the Neva fete, and another closer to Ekaterinsky Canal, where he’d purchased the marionettes during the Game, when he was working on what would become the Jack and ballerina. There were dozens of other stores, too.

Nikolai clapped his hands twice.

Across the city, wooden soldiers bolted awake. They creaked upright and oiled their metal joints. They gathered their muskets and their ammunition, straightened their felt hats, and marched, their boots upon the shelves like the staccato of gunfire, in response to Nikolai’s summons.

When the toy regiments were all assembled, their tinny bugles sounded. Their generals barked commands. The soldiers burst through shopfronts, leaving shattered glass in their wake. They sped through the air, and within minutes, an army in miniature had assembled alongside the Decembrists in Peter’s Square.

Nikolai’s soldiers shifted their focus from Pasha’s men, many of whom were beginning to dig themselves out of the snow, to the toy soldiers, who had begun to grow, rapidly, to full human size.

“What in heaven’s name—!”

But then, some of the men began to look from the statue of Peter the Great to the Neva, to the toy soldiers. Nikolai could almost see the cogs and gears turning in their minds as they put it all together. The enchanted statue. His fete. And now this.

“They’re like the dolls from the tsesarevich’s party on the river,” someone said.

Nikolai stepped out then from where he’d been hidden among the troops. He looked enough like himself—that is to say, he wore his facade so he did not appear as shadow—that some of the Decembrists recognized him. Not all of them, for Nikolai had not been famous before he became, well, infamous for surviving death, but a few soldiers here and there recognized him, perhaps from the occasional moments he waved from the window of his house.

“Your Imperial Highness,” those men said, and saluted.