Nikolai glared at Pasha. It was his fault that this had happened! If Pasha hadn’t turned on Nikolai at the end of the Game, then Nikolai wouldn’t have had to exact revenge. . . .
He could end it now, though. Pasha was right in front of him. Vika, too. She was unconscious, on the brink of death. Nikolai could finish her and eliminate Pasha’s fiercest weapon protecting the crown.
But at the thought of killing Vika, Nikolai’s silhouette flickered. It was already faint after the fatigue of battle, and now when he looked at Vika, his anger sputtered.
He had stopped his soldiers’ attack for a reason. For Vika. The battle had taken a toll on his strength, as well as on the cold darkness that fueled his obsession with vengeance, and in the moment she fell from the sky, a flash of warmth had flared inside him, a sliver of his past.
She was dying, and if she was gone, his hope of one day being tsar with Vika as his tsarina could never exist. Nikolai sagged in the snow.
What was left of Aizhana’s energy rumbled inside him. Don’t give up. You’re so close to the throne, it seemed to say.
Nikolai hadn’t been able to fight the chill before, but the stark reality of a future without Vika sparked the truth of what he wanted. He had spent his entire life feeling alone, and she was his chance of finally having someone else who understood him. Someone else who was different. Someone with whom to explore and push the bounds of what they could do.
I don’t want what Aizhana wanted for me. I don’t want to be tsar at the cost of those I love. He had known this before his mother infected him with her energy. Now he had enough clarity to know it again.
He pushed back on the chill that tried to spread inside him. It was all he had left of his mother, but Nikolai could remember her love while still understanding that it was deeply flawed.
Au revoir, Aizhana.
Yuliana ran up to where he and Pasha sat with Vika in the snow. “Save her!” Yuliana said to Nikolai. “Do whatever it is you did at the end of the Game. Give Vika your energy.”
Nikolai shook his head. “I . . . I can’t.”
“What do you mean, you can’t?” Pasha said.
“My energy is tainted. It came from my mother; there’s too much death and darkness in it.” Even as he said it, he fought internally with the cold that still lived in his veins. But he looked around him to strengthen his resolve. He looked at the soldiers—those who were still alive—standing tense, staring at their two princes and princess on the bloodied snow. At the dead men who littered the cobblestones. And at the ones beyond his line of sight, who had drowned in the icy river. “Devil take me, look at what that energy has done to me, what I’ve done with it. I won’t transfer that to Vika.”
“You’d rather have her die?” Pasha asked, head shaking, the space between his brows creased.
Nikolai closed his eyes for a brief moment. When he opened them again, he said, “If it means choosing between that and making her live as I have, then yes, she’d be better off dead.”
Yuliana lowered herself to the small space of ground between the boys. “Can you transfer someone else’s energy to her instead?” she said quietly. She slipped off her glove and offered her hand.
Pasha blinked at his sister. Nikolai was surprised, too. Yuliana had never shown this sort of tenderness to anyone outside their family before.
Yuliana smiled sadly at Pasha. “You love her. So I love her, too.”
Her unexpected warmth thawed some more of Nikolai’s chill.
“If it’s going to be anyone’s energy,” Pasha said to Nikolai, “give her mine.” He released Yuliana’s hand and pulled back his jacket cuff to offer his wrist.
Nikolai grimaced at Pasha’s bared skin, the blue of his blood visible at his wrist. “I’m not a vampire. Besides, I can’t do that. If I try to transfer your energy, mine will get commingled with it as well.”
Pasha glared at him for the vampire comment. But he withdrew his arm and wrapped it around Vika instead.
Nikolai looked down at her in Pasha’s lap. Their clothes and the makeshift tourniquet were soaked with melted snow and blood.
“We need to stanch the bleeding,” Nikolai said. “But I can’t heal wounds like she can. Even if I had her hand . . .”
His eyes shifted to the statue of Peter the Great.
“What about her hand?” Yuliana said.
“I wouldn’t be able to mend flesh,” Nikolai said, gaze still on the statue. “But perhaps I could manage metal.”
“What in blazes are you talking about?” Pasha said.
“Peter the Great,” Nikolai said. “It’s not made of just any metal. It’s full of old magic.”
Yuliana turned to Nikolai. “Can you use it?”
He took a deep breath. “I hope so.”
Pasha looked down at Vika, the bandage bloodred. He swallowed the growing lump in his throat. “I hope so, too.”
Nikolai knelt on the frozen cobblestones by Vika’s side. There was every chance this would not work. There was every chance that it would. He fought the instinct to hold his breath until he knew which way it would turn out.
“What are you doing?” Yuliana asked.
“Shh,” Pasha said. “Let him work.”
Nikolai nodded to him briefly in thanks. All the soldiers (both his and Pasha’s) seemed also to follow Pasha’s command, for the whole square fell silent.
Nikolai hardly noticed, though. All he saw and heard was Vika, unconscious, breathing unsteadily.
Hold on, he thought. Please.
Nikolai rose to his feet and focused on the statue a few yards away. Peter the Great seemed to watch Nikolai in return.
“I’ve never thought that sash across your chest added much to your outfit,” Nikolai said, as if the statue could hear (or care about) his opinions on fashion. “But I believe we can use it for a better purpose.” He reached out and pinched his fingers together, then pulled back, as if he was drawing something in.
The sash, indeed, followed his motion. It slipped off Peter the Great and floated through the air like metallic silk. When it reached Nikolai, it melted. The bronze shimmered in the cup of his palms.
He turned back to Vika and knelt beside her.
“Tools,” he whispered.
An entire toolbox’s worth of gears, cogs, nuts, screws, and springs appeared on a mound of snow next to him.
Nikolai looked at Vika’s right hand—her only hand—and nodded at it. The liquid bronze trickled upward, into the air, from his palms and began to replicate the shape of Vika’s other hand, but mirror opposite, a metal left to her flesh-and-bone right.
With his own hands now free again, Nikolai plucked a series of tiny, delicate springs from the snow and inserted them into the bronze. The springs sank into the metal hand and found their way to its fingertips.
Next, he added levers and gears to the fingers, mechanisms that would allow them to bend. He conjured some oil and squirted it into the metal, willing it to find its way to grease the new joints.
Then he crafted a flexible network of lightweight rods, connected by filament-thin wire and tiny screws. It could bend and curl, open and close. He merged this into the shiny metal palm.
When finished, the hand appeared cast of smooth bronze but moved as if both molten and entirely human at the same time.
“Et voilà,” Nikolai whispered.
“An artificial hand,” Pasha said, not bothering to hide his wonder. “You’re going to attach it?”
“I’m going to try,” Nikolai said. “That’s where the old magic comes in, I hope. I wouldn’t be able to do this on my own.” He gestured at Vika in Pasha’s lap. “Transfer her to me, please.”
Pasha hesitated.
“You must, mon frère,” Yuliana said.
Pasha stroked Vika’s hair. He closed his eyes. But when he opened them, he shifted Vika gingerly over to Nikolai’s lap.
Nikolai’s pulse raced, not like the mazurka his and Vika’s hearts had twice danced to, but more akin to the frenzied height of a Kazakh folk dance.
He took the bronze hand from the air. “Please let this work.”
He charmed the tourniquet to unwind itself from her wrist—it was soaked so thoroughly, the red was nearly black—and Nikolai put everything he had in concentrating on Vika’s wrist. He pressed the bronze hand to meet her bloodied stump.
As soon as metal touched flesh, the old magic from the statue seeped into her, and the bronze began to meld to her skin. Metallic streaks streamed up her forearm, like glimmering watercolor bleeding into flesh-colored paint.
She went from limp to stiff. She inhaled sharply.
Vika woke with a start. She looked up at Nikolai. Then down as she flexed the bronze fingers of her left hand.
“What have you done?” Her brow furrowed.
“I . . . I’m sorry,” he said.
She turned her bronze hand from side to side.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, for it was the only thing Nikolai could say.
Vika glanced around them, past Nikolai and Pasha and Yuliana, to the soldiers standing watch, no longer fighting, around the square.
“Is it over?” she asked Pasha.
Pasha nodded slowly. “I think so.”
She looked at Nikolai. Through Nikolai. He was so weak now, he was hardly even a shadow anymore. But he nodded, too.
She frowned at her metal fingers some more. Then she said to Nikolai, “Quite honestly, it’s ugly. And heavy. But it will be more satisfying now to punch you.”
He didn’t know if he was supposed to laugh.
“Why did you do it?” Vika asked. “You could have won and taken the throne with me incapacitated.”
Nikolai sighed. “Because when you were hit—when it was like the end of the Game and you were going to die again—what I truly wanted broke free of the darkness, and everything became clear.”
“I don’t understand.”
He looked into her eyes. Her fiercely beautiful, defiant eyes.
His single dimple crinkled his shadowed cheek, as he smiled fully for the first time in a very long time. “It’s because you said you loved me. And I didn’t forget.”