“Father! You’re all right.” She lifted the edge of the shield around the front door to let him in. He stumbled into the entry.

“No, I’m not all right.”

“Were you attacked?” Vika secured the protection charm and rushed to his side. Sergei was a big man, but right now, he seemed . . . small. Not literally, but he didn’t take up as much space in the entry as he normally did. On the contrary, it was as if the space pushed on him and shoved him inside himself. “I’m sorry,” Vika said. “I didn’t mean to be seen, but I got carried away, and—”

“You were seen?”

“Yes, and now they’ve come after you.”

Her father laughed, but in a mirthless way. “Oh, Vikochka, don’t worry about being seen. Because things are so much worse than that.” He tromped away from her and into their tiny kitchen.

Vika rushed in on his heels. “What are you talking about?”

“You will have to meet my sister soon, as if that weren’t bad enough.”

“You have a sister?”

“In Saint Petersburg. It’s all related to . . .” He sank into a chair at their small dining table. “I need some kvass first.”

Vika brought a bottle of Sergei’s homemade brew and poured him a mug. He downed it in a single gulp.

“We leave tomorrow for Bolshebnoie Duplo,” he said.

“What?” The Enchanted Hollow. Vika knew the name like a pilgrim knew of Jerusalem. Every country—every country that still believed in the old ways, that is—had a physical, mystical heart from which its magic emanated, and Russia’s heart was Bolshebnoie Duplo. Vika leaned across the table. “You know where Bolshebnoie Duplo is?” The name had always sounded to her captivating and wicked all at once.

“Yes. Knowing its location is part of my duty as your mentor.”

“Your duty? Why exactly are we going there?”

“It is where you will take the oath for the Crown’s Game.”

“The Crown’s Game.” Vika did not even bother to inflect her tone upward this time, for everything now was a question mark. She was beyond using punctuation. “I don’t know what that is.”

“I didn’t think there was a need for it. . . . I thought you were the only enchanter. But you’re not, and that means there will be a . . . a test. A competition.”

Vika wrapped her fingers tightly around her father’s mug. The glaze on the ceramic heated at her touch. There’s another enchanter. And there will be a competition.

Sergei didn’t meet her eyes. He reached for a stale slice of bread on the table instead. “I’m in as much shock as you are. I had no clue my sister was mentoring an enchanter. I haven’t heard from her since I left Saint Petersburg twenty-five years ago.”

He tore the bread into pieces. And then into smaller and smaller pieces until it disintegrated into a pile of fine crumbs.

“What aren’t you telling me, Father?”

He scooped all the crumbs into his hand and crushed them.

“Just say it.”

He closed his eyes. “The tsar can have only one Imperial Enchanter. The enchanter who loses the Game dies.”

“No . . . Why?” The mug in Vika’s hands melted from pottery to clay.

“Each country’s wellspring emits a finite amount of magic at any given time. It is not without limits. So the number of enchanters must be limited as well.”

“But there have apparently been two of us all these years, not to mention you and your sister—”

“Yes, but the minor charms we conjure are relatively inconsequential,” her father said. “As for you and the other enchanter, you’ve been splitting Bolshebnoie Duplo’s magic between you. That’s fine while you’re training; in fact, it was likely better that you didn’t have access to all of it while you were young and learning to control your powers. However, to serve the tsar—and to protect the empire from its enemies—the Imperial Enchanter will need all of Russia’s magic, especially since Bolshebnoie Duplo is no longer as potent as it was when the people of our country still adhered to the old ways. The Imperial Enchanter must be the only major conduit of what magic remains. There cannot be any dilution.”

It hadn’t occurred to Vika that there might be an occasion when she couldn’t execute an enchantment, for lack of magic. It had always been there when she needed it. But then again, she’d never attempted anything on as large a scale as Sergei was implying. She hadn’t a clue how much power it might take to lead a war.

“I could steal Morocco’s magic,” Vika said. But the joke came out desperate and flat.

Her father scarcely pretended to smile. “Even Yakov Zinchenko wasn’t powerful enough to steal magic from so far away. And magic is loyal to its countrymen, for it is those very countrymen whose belief sows it. Morocco’s magic wouldn’t answer to a Russian.”

The kitchen grew colder. Vika hugged her arms around herself.

But why did death on the journey to becoming Imperial Enchanter shock her? Her father had warned her, hadn’t he? There had even been a lesson when Vika was younger—a horrible lesson—in which he’d asked her to resurrect a stillborn wolverine pup. Vika had clenched her fists and gritted her teeth and mustered all the power she had to focus on the pup’s heart, trying to feel if there were anything broken inside, anything she could move back together. She’d checked its muscles, its lungs, its stomach, liver, and every other organ, only to be met with silence. It turned out that had been the entire purpose of Sergei’s lesson: to show her that death was real, and an inescapable part of the Imperial Enchanter’s job.

So it should be no great revelation that dancing with death—defying death—could be part of the Imperial Enchanter’s initiation.

Vika packed the clay from the former pitcher in her hands. It hardened into a ceramic cannonball. “I don’t fancy dying.”

Her father emptied the bottle of kvass. “Then the only option is, you cannot lose.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

After telling Renata about the girl in the bonfire, Nikolai had spent the early evening on a prolonged walk around Saint Petersburg. The brisk fall air and the tranquil shush, shush, shush of the water in the canals had helped calm his nerves a little; at least he’d managed to talk himself out of changing his appearance and fleeing to the steppe for the rest of his life.