Page 112 of The Crown's Fate
Their connection was both torment and rapture. It was bewildering yet simple, wretched yet joyous, but in a way that Vika could not, anddidnot, wish to escape.
It was life, compacted to its essence.
As his old energy—and some of her own—flowed back to him, Vika could also feel the dark, chilly edges of Aizhana’s energy. Vika squeezed Nikolai’s hand.
His shadow began to recede where they touched, like spilled ink dripping away from his fingertips back into an unseen well. The coldness of Aizhana’s energy also drew back, chased away by the warmth that tumbled from Vika’s body.
“I know this energy,” Nikolai whispered.
Vika imagined pushing harder on his shadow, and more of it fell away. Nikolai’s human form slowly returned—traveling first from his fingertips and up his arm, then across his torso, into his other arm, his legs, his feet. It spread over his collarbone, where the wand scar had once been. Up his neck, along the line of his jaw, and over the sharp planes of his cheeks.
The shadow had receded. Vika gasped, hand over mouth, hardly believing who was before her.
But it was him again. Finally. Her Nikolai.
He looked down at himself, held his arms out and turned them from side to side, touched his face and his chest, all as if not quite believing. Finally, though, he looked at Vika. “You saved me.”
“Yousavedme,” she said.
“Perhaps we saved each other. It seems we have a habit of doing that.”
Vika looked from her own hand to Nikolai’s, now also flesh and blood. Then she laughed, not so much from happiness, but from extraordinary, overwhelming relief. “Yes. It seems we do.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
Pasha helplessly watched the halo surrounding Vika and Nikolai.
“It’s how they defied the Game, isn’t it?” Yuliana said, linking her arm through his and gesturing at the same time at the halo. “They’re part of each other. And stronger when united.”
There was a pain in Pasha’s chest, the dying of hope that Vika would choose him, but he gritted his teeth and nodded.It was never a choice,he realized.It was always Nikolai, whether any of us knew it or not.
He stood, pulling his sister up with him. “This is what Plato meant,” he said, although mostly to himself, “when he wrote of two broken halves finding each other.”
Nikolai looked at him and shook his head. “I don’t believe that. Or, more accurately, it’s only part of what we’re all looking for.”
Pasha stepped back. He wasn’t surprised that Nikolai knew which allegory he spoke of—they’d always had ashared love of books—but he was surprised at Nikolai’s tone. It was almost as if they were in the library in the Winter Palace, debating philosophy. Friends again.
“What do you mean?” he asked, mindful of the fragility of this conversation. Was it possible to recapture the past, to mend what they’d broken? Pasha ran his hands through his hair.
“I mean, your interpretation contemplates only romantic love,” Nikolai said quietly, as if he, too, understood the significance of their conversation. “But what about family? And friendship? I think we’ve all been blind to the importance of those. Me, most of all.” He rose and helped Vika up. When he released her hand, their halo of light vanished.
Pasha exhaled. It had been almost too intimate, seeing them glow together like that. “So you’re saying ...”
Yuliana linked her arm through his. “The four of us here are the broken halves we’ve been looking for all along.”
Pasha held tightly to her. He was beginning to understand what Nikolai meant. Vika and Nikolai together made a whole. But so did Pasha and Yuliana, as family. And Pasha and Nikolai, not only as brothers, but also as friends.
Vika stood between him and Nikolai. She looked back and forth at them, pausing also to look at herself as if she were a fragile bridge that connected them. Perhaps she was.
She turned slowly to Nikolai. “The darkness is gone from your veins. You’re you again, right?”
He nodded.
“Then forgive Pasha for what he did to us at the end of the Game.” Her voice took on a sterner quality or perhaps more accurately, a fiery one. She was very much the passionate, resolute girl from the woods Pasha and Nikolaihad encountered before the Game. “Grief and fear can twist even the best of us to do what we shouldn’t,” Vika said to Nikolai. “Give up the fight for the crown.”
“I—”
“It’s not you, Nikolai.” She shook her head, but her expression softened. “It was never what you wanted. Not really, anyway.”
