Nikolai needed to escape the painted egg, but he also needed to conserve energy. He frowned as he looked at the curved walls surrounding him.
I suppose I could try reabsorbing Vika’s magic. . . . It would be like repurposing his own magic when he’d attempted to escape the steppe dream. Of course, that hadn’t worked, but hopefully this was different.
He snapped his fingers at the abalone chaise longues, and both disappeared, the magic seeping into Nikolai. It was liquid and sweet, like cinnamon sprinkled atop honeysuckle nectar. But something inside him recoiled at it, as if it could not mix with magic Vika had touched, even though the magic itself had originally come from Bolshebnoie Duplo.
Nikolai furrowed his brow, but as he took the desk made of polished rock, Vika’s energy warmed him, and he dismissed his initial worry that there was something wrong with either him or her. The difference in his and Vika’s magic was simply like oil and water; his had always been mechanical, whereas hers was natural. It made sense that his energy didn’t quite know what to do with magic accustomed to commanding lilacs and eggs and wind and snow.
After he took the carpet of flowers, though, Nikolai noticed he could still feel the softness of petals beneath his feet. He looked around the interior of the egg, and phantom outlines of the chaise longues and the desk remained, neither there nor not there.
“What in the name of . . . ?”
It was as if they were placeholders for the furniture. Nikolai could take away the specific chairs Vika had conjured, but he couldn’t take away the essence of “chair” itself.
Likely if he tried to vanish the walls of the egg, they would go translucent yet stay intact, just like everything else. “So this is how you keep me imprisoned, is it? Clever.”
To test his theory, Nikolai vanished the entire kitchen—cabinets, counter, plates, and food. As he suspected, faint outlines of each item remained.
“But can I replace what you’ve created, as long as its concept is the same?” he asked, as if Vika were there and they were merely discussing a magical hypothesis. “Let’s see.”
Nikolai turned to the ghost of the desk, but instead of polished granite, he wanted a metal one. He focused on the outline and imagined it filling in. A bar of iron appeared, and then another and another, and within minutes, Nikolai indeed had a desk designed like a small truss bridge.
“Voilà,” he said.
He tapped his fingers, and two armchairs molded of silver filled the space where the abalone chaise longues had been. Beneath his feet, a violet Persian rug replaced the carpet of live flowers. And the kitchen he redesigned like the exposed interior of a clock, with visible screws and pendulums and gears. One need only pull a lever, and an orange or a slice of bread would slide down a chute onto a plate made of a shiny brass cog.
Nikolai turned to the curved walls of the egg then and smiled. He had to concentrate harder on them, since they encapsulated the rooms of his prison completely and were therefore much larger than a few pieces of furniture, but after a while, the colors of the walls began to fade.
Vika’s magic trickled into Nikolai, and it was both comforting in its spiced warmth and unsettling in how it warred inside him, like drinking a pitcher too many of mulled wine.
I’ll have to dispose of Vika’s magic as soon as I get out of here, he thought. He shifted uncomfortably in his skin.
The walls, however, had faded as he’d hoped, and while still solid and intact, were now an empty, pale gray. Now he could transform them into a material he could better control.
Nikolai turned the phantom walls into bronze. He lacquered the outside to mimic the intricate paint of the traditional raspisnoye yaitso, decorating it in blue with white enameled spirals swirling on the surface and a serpent made of pure gold wriggling across its center. He thought of Swiss cuckoo clocks and how they often had mechanized surprises inside, and thus created a hinge that would open to reveal the inside of the egg and its redone rooms and furniture. If Nikolai worked hard enough he could actually make the hinge work and . . .
Crack the egg open.
He tumbled out of the egg and landed on the gravel of Candlestick Point. The enormous egg behind him opened straight through the middle, like a jeweled music box, to reveal the contents inside.
If the people of Saint Petersburg weren’t so frightened of magic now, they would have had a lovely new site on Letniy Isle to enjoy, Nikolai thought. Then he laughed sardonically, for the trouble with magic was, of course, his doing.
As soon as he got back onto his feet, he purged himself of Vika’s magic. Beds of lilacs, blue hyacinths, and a rainbow of roses sprung up around Nikolai’s egg. He took several steps back and stared at the garden for a moment. He’d never created something so vivid and alive before.
But then he shook it off. It had been Vika’s magic, not his.
He returned to the Black Moth. But his mother was not there.
Damn it.
It did not take long to hear in the streets the announcement that the tsar’s murderer had been apprehended, and Aizhana was to be hanged.