Page 43 of The Crown's Fate
“Quickly, we need to get him out of plain sight,” Yuliana said to Ilya under her breath. She laughed—forcibly—and said loudly enough for those nearby to hear, “You really shouldn’t drink so much before eating.”
Ilya hoisted Pasha’s arm around his shoulder, and the two staggered back toward the palace with Yuliana close behind.
But Pasha doubled over after a few yards. He convulsed and coughed into the snow.
“I think I’m bleeding,” he whispered when the fit had passed.
Yuliana gasped as Pasha’s hand came away from where he’d covered his mouth. It was slick and deep crimson.
“Here,” Ilya said, steering them to the other side of a snowbank. It wasn’t much, but it was some cover from the partygoers.
Pasha collapsed. He coughed some more, and red spattered the dirty snow. His consciousness rapidly bled out with it.
But just as everything was about to go black, Pasha grappled at the collar of his uniform and yanked the basalt necklace out. He clutched his fingers around it.
“Vika,” he whispered. “Can you hear me? I need you.”
His voice and his lungs gave out. And then everything went as dark as the basalt.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Vika jerked upright from the log upon which she sat. She was home on Ovchinin Island, next to Preobrazhensky Creek, but Pasha’s voice was as clear as if he were sitting right beside her.
He sounded like the bewildered boy who’d stumbled upon her here in the woods, in the middle of lightning and flame. The one who’d asked her for her first dance at his masquerade. The boy who’d almost kissed her in the maple grove.
Unlike Nikolai, who had become increasingly, painfully unfamiliar, this sounded like the Pasha she knew. Vika’s remaining resistance against him crumbled like a fortress made of sand.
“I hear you,” she said. “And I’m coming.”
Vika appeared at the snowbank along the Neva moments later.
“He ate a tart that Nikolai tainted,” Yuliana said.
Vika took in the crimson snow. It was all she needed to know that whatever Pasha had consumed had been a tart only in appearance.Nikolai, what have you done?Her heart stopped beating.
It resumed several seconds later, but the rhythm was different. Their mazurka was forever done. Vika’s entire body drooped.
“Can you evanesce him back to the palace?” Yuliana asked.
Vika stared, half here but half still lamenting the loss of Nikolai.
“Vika!”
“What? Oh.” Vika shook her head, jostling away the heaviness that was Nikolai. She had before her a boy who was still here and who needed her attention, right now. “The tsesarevich is too fragile. I don’t want to risk it. But I can cast a shroud so that if anyone comes upon us, they’ll see only a mound of snow.” She enchanted the air around them, then dropped to her knees.
“Pasha, it’s Vika. I’m here.” She was fully aware this was the first time in a long time that she’d called him by his name, in his presence. But that was because it finally felt necessary and right again. He wasn’t just “Your Imperial Highness.” He was Pasha.
He stirred, eyes closed and body limp. “Blood ... Nikolai ... fitting this is how it ends ... ,” he muttered.
“This isnothow it ends,” Vika said. “I’m going to strip you from the waist up.”
“You’ll do no such thing!” Yuliana said. “He’s the heir to the throne.”
“Well, he won’t be heir if he dies, and I’ll be much betterable to see whatever it is inside him if I strip off his clothes. So I’m going to do it whether it’s proper or not.”
“He’ll freeze to death.”
Vika scowled but snapped her fingers, and a fire roared to life at her side. There was no wood, just flame rising out of the snow.
