Vika nearly collapsed as she stumbled into Cinderella Bakery. She had just returned from safely depositing the hunted girl at her aunt’s dacha near Lake Ladoga, and now the entire night—Nikolai’s fete, the attempt on Pasha’s life, the pyre intended for Vika—had begun to catch up to her.
It was only half past four in the morning, but Ludmila’s was where Vika needed to be. Her cottage was too empty without Sergei, and the bakery was the closest place to comfort she knew. The door to Cinderella was ajar, and as Vika stepped inside, the scent of yeast and sugar wrapped around her like a favorite blanket, warm and smelling of home.
The entire surface of the counter was already covered with the morning’s loaves. There was a glass bowl filled with apple jelly, and another with sour cherry jam. The pech—an enormous stone oven that took up the center of the bakery—was full with trays of piroshki and an iron pot of kasha simmered in its hearth.
“Vee-kahhh!” Ludmila sang as she bounced around the kitchen, waving a wooden spoon. “How wonderful to see you. I’m just about to have a snack.”
“Actually, I—”
“Oh, my sunshine!” Ludmila stopped with her spoon in midair. “You look like you’ve flown through a hurricane of hail. Sit down and I’ll . . . I’ll get you something to eat. Cookies. You need cookies.” She pulled out a chair from the small table in the corner and practically shoved Vika onto the seat. Before Vika could say a thing, she’d already pushed a plate of sushki—ring-shaped cookies—in front of her.
“Please, eat,” Ludmila said. “No, first tell me you’re all right, and then eat.”
“I’m not going to lie and say I’m all right when I’m not.” Vika poked at one of the sushki. “But I’m alive, which I suppose is something.”
Ludmila’s forehead creased, and she shook her head. “They ask too much of you.”
Vika sighed. “It’s my job to do what needs to be done.”
“But fighting Nikolai again? That was not part of the bargain.”
The last time Vika had seen Ludmila was right after Nikolai had threatened to take the crown from Pasha. She had been too busy to visit the baker since. Ludmila would worry even more if she knew all that had transpired in the days that had passed.
Ludmila used a long, fork-like stick to pull the pot of kasha from the hearth but nearly upended the kasha in the process. Vika startled but managed to cast a quick spell to form a gentle barrier, protecting Ludmila from the pot, and the pot from Ludmila. The baker didn’t even notice anything had been unsteady. She set the pot on the counter and began to ladle kasha into bowls instead.
A white moth flitted in through a crack in the window and landed in Vika’s hair, near her ear.
Vika listened to it intently.
“That was quick,” she said, once the moth had finished. “Well done. Thank you.”
The moth fluttered its wings and took off through the opening in the window again.
“Do I want to know what that was about?” Ludmila asked.
Vika began to push her chair back from the table. “Poslannik’s army found Nikolai.”
“They did?” Ludmila set down the bowls of kasha so abruptly, some of the porridge spilled onto the tablecloth.
This time, Vika didn’t bother with a charm to clean it up. She was too preoccupied with the moth’s news. “He’s staying in Sennaya Square.”
“Sennaya Square . . . it doesn’t seem the sort of place a boy like Nikolai would live.”
“Not the Nikolai I used to know. But this one . . . perhaps he fits into Sennaya Square just right.” Vika frowned at the kasha. Not because the porridge had done anything wrong, but because it was the most immediate thing in her sight.
“So what will you do?” Ludmila asked.
“I have to arrest and imprison him.”
“Nikolai will hate being confined. He only just escaped from the steppe bench.”
“I know.” Vika buried her face in her hands. “But he tried to kill Pasha last night—”
“He did what?” Ludmila flung her hands in the air and knocked a basket of raspisnye paskhalnie yaitsa—intricately painted Easter eggs—off the edge of the table.
“My eggs!” Ludmila flew out of her chair.
Vika conjured a cushion onto the wooden floor. The raspisnye paskhalnie yaitsa tumbled onto it, a split second before they would have shattered on the ground.
Ludmila crawled on her hands and knees. “You rescued them. Bless you.”
There were several dozen, one for each year since Ludmila had been old enough to take part in the painstaking process each Easter of drawing on the eggshells with beeswax, dying them to color the unwaxed parts, and repeating the process many times with more wax and different layers of dye, until the eggs were multicolored and delicately patterned.
Vika crouched to help her and picked up a blue egg decorated with white spirals and a gold serpent in the middle.
“The symbols all have meanings, you know,” Ludmila said. “That one is a talisman against evil and disaster. Maybe you should carry one with you when you go after Nikolai.”
“I doubt a talisman will help against him,” Vika said. “He was powerful before, but now there’s something awful driving him, and with the increase in Bolshebnoie Duplo’s magic, I’m the only one who can stop him.” She looked at the egg. “It is beautiful, though.”
“Yes, it is.” Ludmila’s eyes brightened. “Nikolai appreciates beautiful things, doesn’t he?”
“Yes . . .” Vika cocked her head, not following Ludmila’s train of thought.
“What if you confined him not in an ordinary prison, but in a gilded cage, so to speak?” She tapped the egg in Vika’s hand, a little more firmly than necessary. “He was a gentleman through and through, even till the last of the Game, and I find it hard to believe some of the old Nikolai isn’t still inside that shadow. Perhaps a little kindness will coax him out.”
“I don’t under— Oh.” A smile spread across Vika’s face. The egg could be enlarged, and Nikolai could be evanesced and trapped inside. Vika could make it comfortable, and as handsome within as the eggshell was without. It would still be a prison, but it would be as pleasing as a prison could be.
“Would you be willing to part with this egg?” she asked Ludmila.
She nodded. “That egg has been waiting all its life to be called to a higher purpose. Much grander than sitting at the bottom of a pile in my old basket.”
Vika pulled her coat off the back of her chair and put it on. She tucked the painted egg into her pocket and headed to the door.
Behind her, Ludmila rose from the bakery floor. “You’re not going to eat?”
Vika turned around. “Oh! I . . .”
Ludmila smiled kindly. “I’m only teasing. I think I can make a dent in this food on my own. You have an empire—and an enchanter—to rescue. Go, go!”
“Thank you, Ludmila,” Vika said. “I really don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Vika made her way through Sennaya Square, toward the Black Moth. Before coming here, she’d stopped at Letniy Isle, where she’d set Ludmila’s painted egg on its side on the ground at Candlestick Point and enlarged it to the size of a small house. There was no door, and there were no windows, for she couldn’t allow Nikolai a way out. It still looked exactly like a raspisnoye yaitso, but much bigger. Inside, though, Vika furnished it as luxuriously as she could. Hopefully, it would be livable, as far as jail cells went.
As for location, Candlestick Point would not have been Vika’s first choice, but it was both a big enough space and out of the way, the latter being important, considering she was using the egg to trap Nikolai and needed to isolate him.
Now, however, Vika slunk through the poorly lit streets of Sennaya Square. There was nothing fantastical about this place, only the grim reality of poverty and all the struggles and cunning it took to survive it. Prostitutes on the street corners sneered at Vika, as if she were competition they had to frighten away. Performers offered to show her magic tricks in exchange for a ruble, when the only magic was how quickly they could make that ruble (and the rest in the audience’s purse) disappear. And everywhere, it was dank, and buildings were falling apart, and streetlamps went unlit, making the square even more wretched.
Vika heaved a sigh of relief when she found the Black Moth, although it was in worse repair than most of Sennaya Square, if that were possible. But this was where Poslannik’s messenger had said Nikolai was. She still couldn’t feel his magic; his barrier shield was strong. Vika had to hope Poslannik and his army were right.
She walked along the side of the inn and charmed open each set of drapes as she passed the rooms, peering in to see if she could find Nikolai. She scanned the entire building. Twice. No Nikolai.
But what if this was not the entire inn? Sometimes there was a courtyard where the washing was done. . . .
Vika evanesced to the other side of the building and rematerialized in a small square of dirty snow, including a wooden tub, a scrub brush, and soap. Molodets, she praised herself for guessing correctly.
Here, too, was a squat shack so dilapidated, its walls seemed propped together only by the mounds of snow at the base of the rotted boards. There were three rooms, two with the curtains open and one with drapes drawn, with no candlelight inside.
She pressed herself against that filthy window. This close, she could feel Nikolai’s protections, like thick walls of metal encasing the room.
Vika heated the air to sweltering. Perhaps she could attack his barrier by melting it, as she’d done to Peter the Great’s statue.
His magic didn’t budge. Only the snow all around the shack puddled and trickled away.
But there ought to be seams where the door opens. Possibly also at the windowpanes.
Vika directed her magic to prod where glass met wooden frame.
Solid, solid, solid . . . Seam.
All right, let’s try this again. She held her breath as she focused her magic as intensely as a soldering iron. It might not have worked in the past, but now she channeled the amplified flow of power from Bolshebnoie Duplo into this one tiny point in Nikolai’s barrier.
A corner of his enchantment melted open, and that was all Vika needed. She released her breath and charmed the curtains slightly apart. The moonlight slivered in, and there was Nikolai on the bed, his sharp, graceful silhouette dignified even in sleep.
The invisible string in her chest tugged fiercely, and she thought of the myth Pasha had told, about Zeus splitting a whole into two halves, who were damned unless they found their other piece again.
It was hard to imagine a pair more damned than her and Nikolai.
Which made it both inevitable and more difficult to do what she’d set out to do. “I’m sorry,” she said through the window. “But this is for your own good.”
Vika focused and dissolved him into bubbles. She cracked the windowpane open and watched as his components streamed out into the frigid air.
“To the painted egg,” she directed his essence. The wind picked up and blew him in that direction.
Another shape stirred inside the room. Vika startled. Had Nikolai had a girl in there with him? Vika thought of Renata, and her stomach twisted and betrayed how much she still cared about him, how much she hoped that he could still be saved, despite trying to convince herself she couldn’t love him anymore.
The figure in the room hissed and jumped from the bed. A patch of moonlight illuminated her face, and it was not, it turned out, much of a face at all. Nor was it a girl.
Vika gasped and evanesced herself away.
The last thing she saw was the thing’s golden eyes, narrowed with drops of black at the corners, oozing like viscous ink.