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.”

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

As soon as the sun rose, Aizhana heard the news of the tsar and tsarina’s departure.

It would have been easier if the tsar had stayed put in the capital. It would have made killing him much simpler. However, the past eighteen years had been anything but simple, and Aizhana would not let a small bump in her plans derail her.

She stowed away on the caravan of luggage at the Winter Palace. She would follow the tsar and tsarina to the South. They would not foil her vengeance so easily.

CHAPTER FIFTY

Two days after Vika’s uncharacteristic fainting incident, an envelope flew through the air and tapped its corner against her kitchen window. Vika leaped to open the glass pane and let the letter inside.

“What is it?” Ludmila asked.

The envelope was covered in frost, and the return address said only Siberia.

“It must be Father.” Vika smiled so brightly, the muscles in her face ached.

“How do you know?”

“Who else in Siberia would charm a letter to me this way?”

What was inside? Where precisely was Sergei, and what had he been doing all this time? Vika tried to tear the envelope open, but her hands trembled, and her fingers acted as if they’d been reduced to useless sticks. She dropped the letter, and it skittered across the tiles, under the table.

Vika crawled to retrieve it. The talon-shaped table legs seemed to stretch their claws at her. She scrambled to snatch the precious letter from their clutches.

When she had the envelope again, she tossed it into the air and flicked her middle finger and thumb at it. The wax seal broke, and the stationery inside slipped out and somersaulted down to Vika’s hands. She unfolded it along its deep creases.