Vika Andreyeva was a confluence of minuscule bubbles, streaming through the wintry dusk. For a few moments, she gave herself up to the thrill of the magic, to the escape of evanescing. I am the sky. I am the wind. I am freedom, unleashed.
As soon as Vika rematerialized on the Kazakh steppe, though, solid reality replaced the joy of being everything, yet nearly nothing. She was here to work, to carry out an official assignment as Imperial Enchanter. She sighed.
Only half an hour earlier, she had appeared at the royal stables, where Grand Princess Yuliana Romanova had been grooming her horse. Or rather, a stable boy was grooming her horse, brushing its chestnut mane, while Yuliana pointed out every tiny knot.
The boy didn’t see Vika appear in the corner of the farthest stall, but Yuliana’s sharp eye missed nothing.
“Leave me,” the grand princess said, shooing the stable boy away. He jumped and skittered off, well trained not to linger against Yuliana’s wishes.
When he was gone, she turned to Vika and said, “Baroness Andreyeva, it would be preferable if you entered the room—or the stable—the proper way, by being admitted and announced by the guards. Like everyone else.”
Vika cast Yuliana a sideways glance. “My apologies, Your Imperial Highness. It’s just that, you see, I’m not ‘like everyone else.’” She crossed her arms.
Yuliana huffed.
“I’m here because your messenger said you wished to see me?” Vika curtsied with more than a touch of sarcasm. Hay clung to the hem of her dress as she rose. She noticed but left it there. Vika had grown up in a forest; it seemed strange, almost, not to have bits of mud and leaves clinging to her.
Yuliana arched a brow at the hay. “I need you to do something.”
No How are you? Or Thank you for coming. Not that Vika was surprised.
“What is it?”
“Manners, s’il vous plaît,” Yuliana said.
Vika dipped her head and allowed it to bob down heavily. “Of course, Your Imperial Highness. I am at your service.”
Yuliana rolled her eyes. “My brother and I need you to go to the Kazakh steppe.”
“Pardon?” Vika jerked her head upright.
“Are you deaf now, too, along with being impertinent? I said, we need you to go to the Kazakh steppe. The last time Pasha was there, talk of another rebellion was underway. We need to find out if their plans have developed any further, but our traditional means of gathering intelligence via scouts is slow. However, you could evanesce to the steppe and come back all in the same day. We’ve never had information so fresh.”
But Vika was hardly listening. She couldn’t go. That was where Nikolai, Russia’s only other enchanter, was from, and now he was gone because he’d lost the Crown’s Game. . . .
How can I possibly walk through the steppe, as if it were just another place? Vika’s heart stomped to the beat of a mazurka, painfully aware of the wrongness of each solitary move without Nikolai as her partner.
She shook her head. “I don’t want to go. You can’t send me there.”
Yuliana had marched up to Vika, kicking hay in every direction. “I can, and I will. You’re the Imperial Enchanter. Do your job.”
Which was how Vika found herself on the steppe now. She gave herself another moment, not only to recover from evanescing—it always took a few seconds to get reoriented—but also to brace herself for facing this place that reminded her too much of what—whom—she’d lost only two weeks ago.
She took a very deep breath. This is part of my duty. All my life, I’ve wanted nothing more than to be Imperial Enchanter, and this is what it entails. I can do this. But it was a victory tinged with bittersweet.
She took another long inhale.
Before she left Saint Petersburg, Vika had transformed her appearance to blend in more easily with the Kazakhs, changing her hair from red to black, and her clothes from a puff-sleeved gown to a tunic-like koilek, a collared dress, and a heavy shapan overcoat made of sheepskin.
A few paces from the dark corner where she hid, the tented marketplace bustled. There were tables piled high with nuts, and bins of spices. Stalls selling fur-lined boots, and others boasting silver jewelry, all intricately patterned and inlaid with red, orange, and blue stones. There was a table that specialized in all manner of dried fruit, and everywhere there were people, smiling and inspecting goods and bargaining.
A girl walked by, carrying a tray of enormous rounds of bread. They must have just come out of an oven, for their yeasty warmth filled the air. The smell, which reminded her of Ludmila Fanina’s bakery at home, comforted Vika and pulled her out of her brooding.
Besides, brooding didn’t suit Vika. It was more Nikolai’s disposition than hers, and she was actually incapable of being melancholy for long before something inside her itched to move along. The one time she’d submerged herself in sorrow, after Father’s passing, she’d come out of it more agitated than ever, and she’d nearly destroyed Nikolai’s home in response, only to become mortified with regret halfway through. Vika would not make the mistake of wallowing again for too long. She clenched her fists and stashed away the swirl of emotions that surrounded her thoughts of Nikolai, as hard as putting away those feelings could be.
The bakery girl set down the tray at a stall a few yards away and began unloading the loaves onto the display. A crowd of women immediately surrounded the table, drawn to the fresh bread like garrulous seagulls to a picnic, and started yammering for the girl’s attention.
Ludmila would love to try Kazakh bread.
Brilliant! Vika’s eyes brightened. It would give her something to focus on other than Nikolai.
She conjured a few Kazakh coins in her palm. Then she evanesced the money into the bakery girl’s till and in exchange, evanesced a round of bread all the way back to Ovchinin Island, where both Vika and Ludmila Fanina lived. The loaf would arrive at Cinderella Bakery, Ludmila’s shop, still warm and steamy. Vika sent a brief letter with the bread, even though she was quite sure Ludmila would know who’d sent it.
And now back to the task at hand.
Vika left the bakery stall and walked around the perimeter of the marketplace. The only flaw in Yuliana’s plan was that unless the people were speaking Russian or French, Vika wouldn’t understand what they were saying.
But why can’t I?
Being the only remaining enchanter in Russia did mean Vika could ask more of the empire’s magic, since she no longer had to share it. And she’d always been able to understand animals, like her albino messenger rat, Poslannik, by casting an enchantment over them. It had simply never occurred to her to translate another human language, because she’d needed only Russian, rudimentary French, and the speech of wolverines and foxes on Ovchinin Island.
As Vika walked, she began to conjure a dome, of sorts, to surround the entire marketplace. The enchantment began on the ground, like a shimmering veil of liquid crystal rising from the dirt. At least, that was how it appeared to her, for Vika could see the magic at work.
The enchantment trickled upward toward the sky, flowing as if it were not subject to the rules of gravity. It climbed the outside of the marketplace, then arched over the tops of the tents, enclosing the shoppers and vendors and their goods inside.
But not really. The dome wasn’t solid; the people couldn’t see it or feel it, and they could enter and exit as they pleased. Vika’s magic would only capture the scene, and then she’d be able to take the enchantment back to Saint Petersburg to replay it for Yuliana and Pasha, who could walk through the memory dome as if they themselves had been here.
It also included an enchantment to allow Vika to understand Kazakh. Or an attempt at an enchantment like that, anyhow. If she could listen in, she could better root out whether there were any new developments in the region’s unrest.
She smiled grimly at the marketplace before her. I hope this works, she thought, for if it did, she could capture scenes in other places, like the borders where the Russian and Ottoman empires chafed at each other. Such information would be invaluable.
She also hoped it failed, because spending the rest of her days alone, spying at the edges of the empire, would be no life at all.
The dome enchantment glistened lazily under the winter sun, its liquid crystal walls ebbing and flowing as the magic soaked up every word and action taking place within its confines. Vika picked up bits and pieces of the conversations. “Two pairs of boots . . .” “That’s too expensive for a leg of lamb . . .” “But Aruzhan hates dried apricots—”
But then there was a lurch at the top of the dome, and Vika gasped as ripples stuttered over the surface of her enchantment, and a hole broke open into a jagged crack. Her power stumbled, as though the flow from Bolshebnoie Duplo—Russia’s magical source—had suddenly been blocked. The sparks that normally danced through her fingertips were snuffed out.
What?
Her chest tightened, as if the air were being wrung from her lungs. The ripples threatened to build into something more, to cascade down the sides of the dome, undoing it all.
Vika opened her arms to the air, palms up, and labored to catch her breath while attempting to control the enchantment. She pulled on the magic that already existed, attempting to draw it up and over to patch the crack at the top of the dome. It was like tugging on fabric that was already stretched too tight; there wasn’t enough of the magic to go around.
But then, as quickly as it had hitched, the power flowed smoothly through Vika again. She was almost certain it wasn’t her doing—the magic had hardly budged when she pulled on it—but somehow, the ripples on the dome flattened into a serene surface, flowing over the crooked tear at the top to make it whole.
She dropped her arms by her sides, sweat beading on her forehead. What could have possibly caused a hitch like that in the magic? Her power had never faltered so completely before.
Fatigue suddenly trampled her, like being run down by a carriage pulled by half a dozen spooked horses.
And Vika laughed at herself, for in her head, she could hear what Ludmila would say, what she had been saying: Too much work and not enough cookies. You need to take care of yourself, my sunshine. Rest and eat more sweets.
Rest. Vika shook her head. There was no such thing as rest for an Imperial Enchanter, certainly not one at Yuliana’s constant command.
But that doesn’t mean there can’t be more cookies. Vika’s stomach growled.
She evanesced a few more coins to the nearby bakery stall. A moment later, a chakchak cookie appeared in her palm, a cluster of fried dough piled together with syrup and walnut bits. Vika took a crunchy, honeyed bite.
She smiled. Popped the rest of the cookie into her mouth. And sent money for a handful more.
Being Imperial Enchanter wasn’t all bad.