Nikolai groaned as he woke in the steppe dream. His neck was stiff, damn it, probably from falling asleep curled up on the hard-packed dirt. And it was dark now, with no moon in the black sky—the very limited sky, since he’d gotten rid of the majority of the dream. He groaned again.
But then he stretched his limbs, and they weren’t creaky like his neck was. Rather, they felt almost normal again.
Nikolai conjured a lantern so he could examine his body in the dark. He held his breath as the light flickered across his arm, and . . .
He let out all the air in a single puff, because he was still composed of shadow.
But nevertheless, something was different. It wasn’t warm, as his energy usually felt, but it was some kind of strength. Dark, like his shadow form, and a bit cold, like a trickle of ice water in his veins. How strange. He furrowed his brow. What was it?
And yet the feeling was not unwelcome. Nikolai climbed carefully to his feet, brushing off the bits of grass that clung to him. He pulled his shoulders back and rotated them several times. Shook out his hands. Twisted from side to side.
Yes, he was definitely stronger than he’d been a few hours before. Perhaps all he’d needed was sleep, and some time for his past magic—that which he’d repurposed from the dream—to reinvigorate him. But was it enough?
It had better be. He didn’t want to think about what it meant if it was not.
“Shh,” he said to the uncertainty trembling inside him. When it stilled, Nikolai tried to imagine waking, to stir himself from the dream. He yawned. He stretched. He shook his body in inelegant ways that would have embarrassed him had anyone else seen.
But nothing changed. He remained firmly surrounded by the steppe. The golden eagle landed beside the lantern and cocked its head at him.
Come on, damn it. Nikolai rubbed at the back of his stiff neck. Using magic had always been second nature to him; it had always been there whenever he needed it. But it was as if magic had forgotten him now that he’d lost the Game, lost his body, lost his grip on reality.
Or was it that he had forgotten magic?
Nikolai concentrated on the memory of it. When he was a small child and just discovering his abilities, he’d delighted not only in the tricks he could play on the other village children, but also in the sensation of magic itself.
Yes, Nikolai thought. That’s what I need. To recall the feel of it. That silken quality of its ebb and flow, the heat of its power, the subtlety of its butterfly kiss. He remembered how magic could buoy him like a rising tide, and how it could wash over him like a crashing wave.
He was not only a shadow, but a shell, without it. The longing for that missing, essential piece of him ached as badly as the Game’s scar had once seared.
That was not the only feeling that haunted him, though. For some reason, there was also an echo of Aizhana’s voice, her exhortation from the last time he saw her in this dream: The so-called tsesarevich should not be the one to ascend to the throne. Because Nikolai was first in line.
He shook his head, trying to jostle away the thought. Thinking about Pasha risked opening Nikolai’s most unbearable memories and emotions, for his heart contained a roiling cauldron of sadness and injustice and anger, and if he did not keep the lid secure, the pot would boil over.
When he was younger, Nikolai hadn’t known how to keep his feelings in check. He’d been mistreated as a child on the steppe and then grown up under Galina’s tyrannical rule. He used to hurl daggers through projects of his that failed, and he would sometimes sew his own mouth shut—magically, of course (real needle and thread would hurt too much)—when he was upset but wanted to keep inside what he felt were inappropriate sentiments. But as he grew older, Nikolai figured out how to bury his past under gentility and grace, even though it was still there, just beneath the surface.
Now, however, he gasped as iciness spread inside him, like spindly tentacles, reaching for that secret cauldron in the depths of his heart.
“No!” he said.
But he was powerless to fight it, for that very energy was the only energy of substance that Nikolai had, and all he could do was double over in horror as it lifted the lid on everything he didn’t want to feel.
Nikolai tallied his brother’s wrongs in his head. Pasha’s betrayal. The apology that meant nothing because it had come too late, come at a memorial service after Pasha thought Nikolai was already dead. And the fact that Pasha could continue to live his gilded life, with Vika by his side, while Nikolai was stuck in ante-death as a shadow . . .
Had that been Pasha’s hope all along? That by forcing the end of the Game, Vika would prevail? She’d been the stronger of the two enchanters. And with Nikolai out of the way, Pasha would be able to swoop in on Vika, taking advantage of her grief.
Damn you, Pasha. Damn you to the ninth circle of hell.
Nikolai shivered, but the chill simultaneously steeled his muscles.
And then a new idea pushed its way forth, growing quickly, like fractals of ice on a frozen windowpane. If he escaped from this dream—this nightmare—he could make Pasha suffer. He could claim the crown for himself.
But a spark of light within Nikolai pushed back. I once loved Pasha, and he loved me. . . .
And yet men declared duels for insults far less than what Pasha had committed. So why shouldn’t he suffer consequences for his actions? Dante’s ninth circle was too good for a traitor like him.
I deserve to be tsar as much as Pasha does.
And as the idea of wearing the crown settled into Nikolai’s mind . . . there it was. Magic. Like a cold flame, flickering inside him. He seized it and felt it swell.
“Yes . . .” Magic had not forsaken him! It had not abandoned him because he’d lost the Game.
His golden eagle landed beside him in the grass and nodded at him.
“You’re right,” Nikolai said. “I need to go.”
He did not take in his surroundings one last time. He did not bid them farewell. For if he never saw this steppe dream again, it would be too soon.
“Wake me up,” Nikolai whispered.
The stars above him blurred, like specks of salt dissolving into the imaginary night. The scent of grass was replaced by the smell of maple candy and oak.
He was still a shadow, but it didn’t matter. He was sitting on a bench on an island in the middle of the Neva.
Sitting, firmly rooted, in reality.