Page 110 of The Crown's Fate
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 addedmuch 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—heronlyhand—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 bronzebut 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.
