The smell of laundry soap floated across the steppe dream. Nikolai would know that scent anywhere.
Renata.
He scrambled to his feet from where he lay in the brown grass. He wouldn’t hide from her, for he knew Renata was here for him, unlike Vika, who seemed to have come for Pasha’s benefit.
As soon as Renata saw him, she cried out and ran, alternately tripping in the grass and shoving it away.
“Oh, Nikolai, it’s true, you’re alive!”
She opened her arms as if to embrace him, but Nikolai stepped back.
“Careful,” he said. “I’m alive, but I’m not quite solid. You’ll fall straight through.”
Renata stopped, arms still outstretched. “I don’t understand.”
“Nor do I.” He exhaled loudly. Nikolai was accustomed to knowing the answers, and if he didn’t, to being able to reason them out. But his current predicament didn’t appear to care for logic. “I seem to have some substance, but not much. I’m a bit of a conundrum.”
Renata smiled. “You always have been.”
Nikolai made a small sound under his breath—something akin to laughter, but not quite—and dipped his head to concede the point. Then he stepped forward and wrapped his arms around Renata, loosely, so that his shadow would not blur into her.
As soon as he had her against his chest, though, Nikolai relaxed. “Thank goodness you’re alive, too.” He hadn’t realized until that moment how worried he’d been about Yuliana keeping her promise to release Renata and Ludmila after the conclusion of the Game. But here Renata was. Whole, and streaming tears down her cheeks, and very, very much alive. “You’re all right.”
“I’m all right now that I know you’re here.” She looked up and smiled, wiping away her tears with her sleeve.
“My being a shadow doesn’t frighten you?” Nikolai asked.
Renata shook her head, and the ends of her braids whipped against her neck. “You’re still you. I’m so glad Vika told me you were here—”
“Vika told you?” Nikolai’s voice cracked.
He turned slightly away from Renata. How embarrassing to wear his hope so plainly.
She noticed, of course. “Yes, but . . .”
“But what?”
Renata reached for one of her braids. Nikolai recognized the movement, a tell for when she was nervous. She’d always been the lousiest of the Zakrevsky house servants when it came to lying or hiding things.
“Say it,” he said.
Her fingers tightened around the braid. “I . . .”
“Renata, please.”
“I think there’s something between Vika and Pasha.” Her words came out in such a rush, Nikolai could hardly understand them. And yet he caught the essence of them.
His silhouette felt suddenly heavier. “I beg your pardon?”
Renata looked everywhere but at Nikolai. “Vika wears a bracelet Pasha gave her, made of rubies and gold.”
“But—”
“She said she belonged to him.”
“As his Imperial Enchanter, perhaps—”
“Nikolai.” Renata ran her hand gently down his arm. “We thought you were dead. She had no reason to wait for you.”
“But I haven’t been gone very long.” He shook her off and started scratching at the back of his neck. “Damn Pasha.”
Renata pressed her lips together.
“If it weren’t for Pasha demanding the end of the Game, none of this would have happened.”
Renata shifted away from Nikolai. “The Game was going to have to end no matter what.”
“But he didn’t have to callously send us off to kill each other, as if our lives meant nothing to him at all.”
“Would you not have made your fifth move if he hadn’t?”
“Perhaps I would have let the wands burn.” Nikolai touched his frock coat where his collarbone was. “Perhaps I would have chosen to be incinerated, and then I really would have died.”
What little energy Nikolai had seemed to drain away, and he lowered himself onto the ground, resting his head on top of his knees. The grass was so tall, it thrashed in the wind against his face.
Renata crouched at his side. “You’re upset. You have every right to be.”
All the muscles in Nikolai’s shadow body tensed, and when he spoke, every word was equally tensed. “Pasha and I were like brothers. Do you know what it’s like to have someone you love—someone for whom you would lay down your life—betray you? It’s like having my heart scraped out of my chest with one of Galina’s caviar spoons, bit by excruciating bit. I wander alone in this steppe dream day after day, replaying my friendship with Pasha, and whenever I think of the first time he foolishly stepped into Sennaya Square to play cards with us, or of how it felt when he and I would abandon a hunt to spend hours climbing trees and fishing in streams and laughing about nonsense together, it gouges my heart to pieces all over again.”
And yet I still miss him, Nikolai thought.
Renata inched closer. “I’m sorry. But the tsesarevich is, too. If you could see it for yourself—”
Nikolai sighed. “Yes, well, I need to get out of this bench first.”
“You need to rest.”
“No, I need to gather more strength.” Nikolai rose to his feet. It was better, anyway, to shove away the discomfort of his myriad feelings about Pasha, to bury them deep inside himself to be dealt with at another time. There was plenty of other suffering from his lifetime crammed in the depths of his heart.
“Where are you going?” Renata asked.
“To the yurt village.”
“May I come?”
Nikolai looked down at where she still crouched in the grass. “You really want to?”
She nodded. “I’d go anywhere with you.”
I’m a fool for not loving her, Nikolai thought. Renata had always been there for him, even when he was terrible. It’s just that Vika—
But Nikolai shook himself out of it. There were more important things to think of right now.
“Thank you,” he said to Renata. “I have a new idea for getting out of this bench. Come with me to see if it works.”
Back in the village portion of the dream, Nikolai explained, “I’m repossessing some of the magic I used to create this scene. I can’t seem to get enough energy from the people who visit, so I need to find another source. I thought I might be able to erase some of this dream and absorb the magic I originally used to create it.”
“You’re going to take all this away?” Renata looked at the villagers, who were gathering around the fire for dinner. She smiled sadly.
“They’re illusions,” Nikolai said. “Don’t lament their demise.”
He focused on the horizon, where the sheep were led each day to graze. That part of the dream began to shimmer, as when heat hazes the skyline, and then the scene seemed to dissolve slowly. Nikolai gasped as the fields vanished for good and the magic that had once created it found its way back into his body, like liquid sunshine trickling into his veins.
Only a blur of nondescript summer color—yellow and green and blue—marked the new border of the steppe dream where the fields had once been.
The children watering the sheep were the next to go. One, two, three of them vanished midstep. The men relaxing by the fire went next, disappearing as if evaporating. With each subtraction from the scene, a tiny burst of energy flared within Nikolai.
He erased the women preparing dinner. For a few seconds, a knife continued slicing onions. Then Nikolai absorbed that image, and the rice pilaf, too.
Renata blinked at where they’d all been a moment ago, mouth slightly open.
He watched her. He’d forgotten the glow that shone about Renata whenever she saw him conjure—or in this case, vanish—something new. Her awe was its own kind of magic.
After watching her a second more, Nikolai began to wash away the yurts. They faded slowly away, like watercolors diluted too much. All the while, his body temperature rose.
Oh! He hadn’t realized it before, but he hadn’t been hot or cold or anything in between since the end of the Game. In ante-death, it seemed, certain sensations were suspended.
But now I can feel warmth again.
All that remained of the steppe dream was where Nikolai and Renata stood, the grassland, and the mountains in the distance.
“I feel more alive than I have in . . . wait. How long has it been?”
“A fortnight since the end of the Game.”
Nikolai frowned. It seemed both much longer and shorter than that. The passage of time must also be something that got lost in ante-death. Especially when paired with an endless dream.
Still, he felt more himself now than in the past two weeks. Nikolai reached up out of habit to adjust his top hat. His arm passed in front of his face.
His arm—no, all of him—remained entirely shadow.
“No.”
“What is it?” Renata asked.
“It can’t be!” Nikolai checked his other arm, and his legs and his torso. Black and gray, here but not here, real but entirely imaginary. “It was supposed to work! Why aren’t I solid again?”
Renata sighed. She cut it short, but not before Nikolai heard.
“Maybe you’ll be visible when you’re no longer in the dream,” she said hastily, as if to make up for letting her disappointment slip. “You just need to leave this place first. Come with me. Let’s try.”
Nikolai clawed at his sleeve. It didn’t even feel like wool, not really. Just . . . air. Slightly soft, black air. His pulse raced inside his shadow heart. And who even knew if that pulse existed or not?
“Nikolai.” Renata pried his fingers off his sleeve and squeezed them with her own, although she did so lightly and did not close her hand all the way. It worked, and her fingers didn’t pass straight through his, but rather rested around where his shadow was, like she was holding on to nothing.
I am nothing.
Nikolai couldn’t move.
“Wake up with me,” she said with more force in her voice than usual, as if she knew where his thoughts were taking him. But of course she knew. Renata knew him almost as well as he knew himself. “Breathe,” she said, “and let’s pull ourselves away from here.”
All right. Breathe. I can do that. Nikolai inhaled.
“Again,” Renata said.
He took another, deeper breath. Then he squeezed Renata’s hand gently, and she must’ve felt at least some pressure from his touch, because she smiled. It was a small measure of comfort, knowing that he did, in fact, exist.
Renata shook her head to jostle the dream out of her mind. Within moments, she began to fade.
But Nikolai remained rooted in the steppe.
Renata frowned. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said, her voice already distant, halfway back to reality. “I’ll wake, then fall back asleep to return.”
“Don’t,” Nikolai said. He dropped her nearly transparent hand from his.
“But—”
“No! Leave me. I want to be alone.”
Renata’s mouth opened as if to say something, but no words came out. Possibly because her ability to speak had already returned to the other side of the bench.
But more likely because she didn’t actually say a thing. For when she had disappeared completely, she did not return.
Nikolai looked at the empty space where she’d been. “Thank you,” he said. He had truly meant it when he said he wanted to be alone. And Renata had understood that.
He walked a few paces in the direction of the mountain, the only thing left besides the grass here on this illusory steppe. Then Nikolai fell to his knees and bowed forward until his head pressed against the dirt. His hat tumbled off. A single despondent sob racked his shadowed body.
The long grass cut tiny scratches in his skin, as the wind whipped the blades at his face. He was not whole, and yet he could still be wounded. And the barrenness of the plains stretched into an empty, blurred horizon, promising an eternity of loneliness and confinement and misery.
“I’ll find another way,” Nikolai said. “Because, devil take me, I cannot stay here.”