Page 12 of The Crown's Game
“I know more than a few who are willing.” Nikolai nudged the prince with his boot. Every girl in the Russian Empire would sell her soul to be the tsesarevich’s Cinderella.
Pasha responded by yanking Nikolai’s boot straight off his foot.
“Hey!”
Pasha laughed and hurled the boot into the shrubbery. “You know I want more from a wife than a girl fawning at my feet.”
“Well, all I want is a boot to cover my feet.” Nikolai hobbled through the grass and rocks in the direction his shoe had disappeared.
Then the peace of the morning was shattered by a crash of thunder. It was so violent, it shook the leaves on the birches and vibrated through the ground. Nikolai and Pasha both leaped up.
Nikolai lurched through the bushes, struggling to pull on his boot while squinting at the sky. It was still bright blue, save for a black cloud above the easternmost side of the forest. A sharp bolt of lightning split the azure, and for a moment, Nikolai wondered whether it could ever be pieced back together again.
“We need to take cover,” he yelled over the next crack of thunder.
Another bolt of lightning flashed, and this one struck a tree in the distance, black smoke instantly feathering into the sky. Then, in a brief period of quiet, a girl’s scream carried from the east with the wind. Nikolai leaned in the direction from which it came. It did not sound like a call for help. It sounded like . . . a battle cry.
No sooner had her scream left the air than thunder and lightning stormed down in rapid succession. There was no rain, though, only fire, bursting from the lightning to the trees until the sky to the east was obscured by orange and yellow and black.
“The girl! We have to help her!” Pasha said.
“Stay here. I’ll go.” He couldn’t let Pasha run straight into the center of a storm like that. What if something happened to him?
But Pasha was already running deeper into the woods.
“Damn it.” Nikolai chased after him. But his boot was unlaced, and he tripped in a puddle of mud. Pasha hurtled onward and disappeared between the trees.
Nikolai glared at his laces, and they whipped into action and secured themselves in a double knot. Then he sprinted as fast as he could, weaving through bushes and leaping over fallen trees, pushing deeper into ash-thick air with every stride.
By the time he caught up, Pasha was already at a standstill, not a hundred feet from the edge of the flames.
“What is this?” Pasha pointed at the ring of blazing fallen trees before them, a perfect circle.
“I don’t know,” Nikolai said. But there was no way this could have been an accident of nature. He spun around, searching. Something had done this on purpose. Someone. He could feel the otherness weighing on the air, thick and heavy. And again, that taste of cinnamon tinged with the portent of death. Nikolai swiped at his mouth as if that would obliterate the taste and foreboding.
The pile of fiery tree trunks began to move, lifting from the center. He and Pasha both staggered back and drew their hunting knives, and Nikolai positioned himself between Pasha and the inferno. He would not lose the future tsar of the Russian Empire without a fight, although what he was fighting, he hadn’t a clue.
The fire grew hotter and burned at such reckless speed, the branches in the middle of the pile collapsed to embers the instant a flame licked them.
Then, as the blaze devoured the remaining length of the trees, lashing its way out to the edge of the circle, a small figure rose from the center, itself engulfed in flames.
“You see, Father,” a girl’s voice said calmly, almost cheerfully, “I told you I’d master it today. Fight fire with fire, not water or ice.” Then she whistled a short tune, and the fire on her arms, her torso, her skirt, snuffed out. The only flames left were on top of her head, a wind-tossed mess of loose red curls, and one lock of black. She whistled again, and the fire on the fallen trees went out as well.
Pasha stepped backward onto a leaf. It crunched, ever so softly, but the girl whirled around. “Who’s there?”
Nikolai and Pasha stood frozen, and not just metaphorically. She had iced their feet to the ground.
“Who are you?” Pasha whispered as he gaped at the cinder-smudged girl.
She stared at them for another moment. Then she spun on her heel and fled, a streak of red hair and gray dress dashing into the woods and disappearing into its shadowed depths.
But Nikolai didn’t need her to tell them who she was. He already knew. He had never seen the girl before, but she had to be the one.
The other enchanter in the Game.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The tsar’s message came to Sergei as the lightning storm in the forest ended. The note, on imperial stationery, was brief but clear:
