Vika tried to shut off her brain and feel the magic, as Nikolai had instructed. She used to do that more often when she was younger, but ever since the Game began, she’d found herself thinking more and feeling less.
She closed her eyes. She didn’t need to enchant anything to sense the presence of magic that already existed. Even normal people, if they were aware enough, would be able to identify what was ordinary and what was extraordinary. They just hadn’t had the practice to know the difference.
The invisible string that connected Vika to Nikolai twitched. She let her feet follow, and she tripped a little down the steps, along the canal, through the streets toward the bay.
Toward Letniy Isle.
Of course. Nikolai’s benches were there, and where else were circumstances less real than there, where dreams constituted a reality in which a shadow boy had lived?
Despite everything that had happened, Letniy Isle was the place that still tethered them together.
Or it could be a trap.
Vika stood on the banks of the Neva a moment more. It would be wiser not to go.
But sometimes, destiny pulls so taut, one follows no matter what the consequences might be. Besides, caution was not part of Vika’s vocabulary.
Well, perhaps a tiny bit of caution would be smart, given that she didn’t have use of magic right now. She rang the bell again.
The footman opened the door and didn’t even bother to speak this time. He simply arched a brow.
“Could I borrow a quill and ink?” Vika asked.
“If you have a response for His Imperial Highness, I can simply relay it to him.”
“No, I’d rather write it down.”
The footman sighed, closed the door in her face (again), and returned a minute later with a quill and an ink pot. Vika flipped over the note card Nikolai had sent her and, holding it on her lap, composed a quick message on its blank side:
Pasha,
I’ve gone to Letniy Isle to meet Nikolai. It’s possible it’s a trap, although I hope not.
However, if you do not hear from me by sunset, please reinstate my ability to use magic so that I can free myself.
—V
The footman tapped his boot. Vika rose and pushed the quill and ink pot back into his hands. “Thank you.” She turned and descended the front steps.
“What about the note for His Imperial Highness?” the footman asked.
Vika turned back and winked. “Oh, it’s for a different Imperial Highness.”
The footman puffed out his chest and grumbled.
Vika smirked as she hurried off, stopping at the Winter Palace to leave the note for Pasha with a guard (the palace was on the way to the ferry), then made her way toward the singular place that existed only because of her and Nikolai.
She closed her eyes when she arrived; she didn’t need to see what they’d created. Vika knew the layout of the island because she’d invented every tree and rock, every path and every dead end. She knew the lanterns Nikolai had charmed to drift above the leaves and branches, and she knew his Dream Benches. But what she didn’t know was where their magic truly intersected, and how.
The tugging in her chest guided her. It was still faint, so she lost the pull as she wandered through the maple grove, overwhelmed by the remnants of her own magic and the sugar-sweet scent of syrup in the air. Vika almost opened her eyes, but she stopped herself. She concentrated harder instead.
Remember Nikolai, she thought. Remember his warmth and elegance, not the cruel magic from the dolls’ fete and the carriage of swords, but when his magic was like silk dancing in the wind.
The breeze quickened around Vika—her breath did, too—and with it came what felt like a wisp of silk that curled around her body before it spun away again.
But it was enough. She chased its wake, and, although she lost the feel of the silk, she heard something. The wistful melody of an oboe. She followed it and found the thread again. The music accompanied Nikolai’s magic! Not like the orchestra at his party on the Neva. This was as quiet as the lullaby a bird murmurs to its unhatched eggs.
Had music always been there?
Vika knew that the answer had to be yes. Only she hadn’t noticed, because she’d been too busy trying to kill Nikolai during the Game, or at least not be killed herself, and she’d only seen what his power could do on the surface. She’d never listened, never delved deeper.
What else is there, Nikolai?
With her eyes still firmly shut, Vika walked past the pink and red flowers she’d planted along the gravel path and turned onto the main promenade. The oaks rustled above, and the birds warbled a folk tune, but these were all Vika’s creations, so she ignored them. She held fast to that single wisp of silk, though, with its melancholy oboe, and as soon as she moved near the first Dream Bench, she was hit by the fragrance of sun-drenched grass mixed with mandarin and . . . was that thyme?
“Nikolai.” It was not as if he smelled of all those things, or any of them, for that matter. Not when Vika had been in his physical presence. And yet, the combination was the steppe and Saint Petersburg, French and Russian, all at once. It was the perfumed footprint of his magic, another dimension Vika had never noticed before. How had she missed so much of him? And was it lost completely now, to the darkness that consumed him? Vika worried her bottom lip.
The fragrance and the music led her past the Moscow bench, past the ones for Kostroma, Kizhi Island, and Yekaterinburg, until she arrived at the bench for Lake Baikal in Siberia.
She lowered herself onto the bench, slowly enveloped by the pale purple mist that surrounded it. She inhaled, and then she dozed off.
Vika woke on the other side of the bench in the dreamworld of Lake Baikal. Before her spread a sapphire pool of fathomless blue, pure glacial water in a crater created by a volcano. Violet-gray mountains surrounded the lake on all sides, and a cool breeze blew across the water, even though it was summer here.
Vika gasped as she stood and looked around.
But she’d hiked these mountains before, in the dream, and they had been just as beautiful. What was it that was drawing her here now? What was special about this place?
“Nikolai,” she said aloud, “I’m here. I’m looking for you. Where are you?”
A trail appeared before her, as if the mountains had opened and created a new ridge for her to follow, although when she inspected it more closely, the mountains hadn’t moved at all. But wasn’t that the beauty of Nikolai? He could be so contradictory. He could appear to be one thing and be something else entirely, brooding and ambitious yet joyful and self-sacrificing. Of course his magic could be opposites at once as well.
Vika hiked along the path that was and wasn’t there, leading her between two of the violet mountains. The sky here was so blue, it seemed counterfeit. But of course it is, Vika thought. This is Nikolai’s creation. He can make the sky any color he pleases.
On distant peaks, animals moved, perhaps deer hopping from ledge to ledge, or wolves out for a hunt. Vika’s trail was quiet save for her boots crunching on the rock, the path behind her disappearing as she walked, the way before her unfurling with each step forward.
As she pushed onward, the music grew louder, almost audible to a normal ear now. What a strange sensation to be hiking alone though the mountains of Siberia with an oboe accompanying her. At one point, she looked back over her shoulder, and Lake Baikal was nowhere to be seen. It was impossible to judge the distance she’d traversed. For all she knew, Nikolai could be leading her to the Arctic Circle now. But she continued walking, not only because there was no trail back, but also because the tugging in her chest grew stronger. This was a path solely for her, and no one else. She had to follow it to its end.
And then the season changed abruptly. Vika’s eyelashes froze at the tips, and she shivered, even though she wore her coat from the real Saint Petersburg winter. A gust of snow blasted at her and nearly knocked her off the path, which had now become a tightrope of sorts, a thin line of pebbles floating over a vast abyss, with nothing but sharp crags and the gaping mouth of a valley below.
I can’t die in a dream, I can’t die in a dream, Vika told herself, but she couldn’t stop her heart from pounding when it seemed as if she really could slip and fall to her death at any moment. Why had the terrain suddenly changed? It was as if Nikolai had wanted her to find him, but now that she had come, he had changed his mind. Was she supposed to turn back? But how? Even the tightrope disappeared behind her, leaving the tiny stepping-stones ahead of her as her only option.
Or perhaps it was a test of her own will, and whether she really wanted to find him or not.
The magic of Nikolai’s dream swirled around her, the silkiness and the perfume sliding against her skin, the oboe crescendoing. He’s not just a shadow boy with darkness in his veins. The thought came to Vika like a recollection. Like she’d forgotten he was an actual person and only now remembered—truly remembered—that Nikolai was complex and real. She had made a similar error earlier with Pasha, forgetting he was more than the black-and-white caricature she’d painted of him in her head. She would not make the same mistake with Nikolai.
I do want to find you, she thought, as if he could hear her.
The sky turned dark, like midnight, and the tightrope vanished. Vika shrieked at the sudden changes and grasped at the air, as if she could hold on to the nothingness to break her fall. She began to plummet like Icarus from the sky.
A golden eagle, larger than any in real life, soared down from the moon. It dove straight at her, but then caught Vika on its back.
“Oh, thank heavens.” She nestled into its warm brown feathers and lay herself flat across its back, not wanting to ride it like a horse and be blown off by the wind, for the eagle careened through the sky at near-reckless speed. Her ears popped as the eagle darted in and out of the clouds, and Vika’s hair trailed behind her like a flame, so bright that if anyone were watching, she and the eagle would appear to be a shooting star, streaking across the night.
Vika’s heart skittered like a frightened rabbit, but against her ear, she could hear the eagle’s pulse beating steady and strong. She tried to calm her own heartbeat.
Then it occurred to her that this was the type of magic she would have thrilled at before the Game. Before Nikolai tried to kill Pasha. Before she was suspicious of everything Nikolai did.
Vika half smiled. She sat up on the eagle’s back now, opened her eyes, and tried to enjoy this respite from reality, the cold night air blowing across her face. She looked at the stars above them, and it was as if they were sailing through the immense sea of midnight, explorers charting oceans where no one else had ever been. Nikolai’s oboe was now joined by an entire symphony, and the woodwinds crooned along with the gentle melody of the strings, the chimes ringing softly like a sprinkle of starlight.
The eagle soared faster, and Vika whooped, smiling broadly now, feeling alive even though she was asleep, feeling whole even though half of her lay on the other side of the bench. Magic, how she had missed it!
The eagle landed softly at the top of another mountain. But it had taken only two steps when the ground trembled beneath them. Steam and heat and the stench of sulfur rose nearby.
Vika froze.
A volcano. Like the one on which Sergei had found her, an exact replica, it seemed, of the volcano etching he’d carved into her wardrobe at home. Vika touched her scarf; her mother’s basalt pendant lay beneath it. Only the necklace wasn’t there, for she’d given it to Pasha. Her throat suddenly seemed too exposed despite being covered with a thick layer of wool.
“Why did you bring me here?”
The eagle shrieked. She couldn’t understand it, because she couldn’t use magic to translate what it said.
The eagle growled and shook her off its back. Without waiting for her to move out of the way, it flapped its great wings and took off into the air, leaving her stranded on the mountainside.
Vika clung to a small shrub to avoid being blown away. She shivered in the snow, but when the eagle was gone, she rose and brushed the ice off her coat. “I am fierce,” she said, repeating what Ludmila had said of her. “This is only a dream. I refuse to allow something as silly as an imaginary eagle and a made-up volcano to rattle me.” She walked quickly, proudly, to the edge of the crater, as if this would further prove her point.
But it was not a cauldron of lava, as Vika had expected. Rather, it was a long, narrow tunnel that went straight down, like a cylinder bored into the volcano.
Vika bit her lip. There was nowhere else for her to go but down. The only other option was to wake herself from this dream, and that was not an option, for Vika did not simply back away because something was perilous. Like caution, quitting on account of danger was not a part of her lexicon.
She looked at the hole again. It was a perfect circle, something created not from nature but by something—or someone—else. She latched onto a nearby tree and leaned over the edge of the opening. “Hello?” she called down.
Pure, untainted silk swirled up to meet her.
And then . . . “Bonsoir, Vika.”
She’d found Nikolai.