Page 51 of The Crown's Fate
The girl shook her head again. “They won’t stop at me. Everyone who looks like this ...” She tore at her hair. It was plastered against her head by tears and sweat, the dampness making it all the redder. “We’re doomed.”
Vika touched her own hair. What was she to do? She couldn’t change the color of every red-haired girl in Russia. Besides the impossibility of so large an enchantment,it would also be held as evidence against the girls of their witchcraft.
Vika had to capture Nikolai soon. His dark magic had to be stopped. It was the only way to end this.
“Come on,” Vika said, gathering the girl closer to her chest. “We’re leaving.”
“But what about them?”
The crowd had begun to stab at the bubble shield with knives, sticks, anything sharp they could find.
Vika looked at the mob. If only she could distract them. But what could possibly steal the attention of a crowd intent on killing witches?
More witches.
Vika chewed on her lip. She’d never conjured illusions before. Yet she had just cast a permanent shield around Pasha (or hoped she had), and she’d never done that before either. Ironically, it was the people’s new belief in magic that was fueling Bolshebnoie Duplo to generate more power, which in turn allowed Vika to cast stronger enchantments to use against the very people who feared them.
“I don’t know if this will work, but it’s worth a try,” she said.
She plucked a hair out of her own head and waved her arm at the smoke billowing off the base of the pyre. Vika tossed the hair into it, and the smoke swirled into the shape of a girl with a head full of wavy red hair.
Vika commanded the wind to blow through the smoke girl, breaking it into tiny puffs and carrying it to the outside of the mob’s circle. There, each puff expanded into a full-size illusion of a girl made of flesh and blood, not smoke. The crowd was suddenly surrounded by dozens of witches.
The people screamed. “It’s an entire coven!”
“The devil has brought his army!”
“Everyone, fight back!”
In their panic, they turned away from the pyre and lunged at the new witches who had appeared.
Vika leaned toward the girl. “They’ll be occupied for a few minutes. Tell me where we should go.”
The girl trembled. “Lake Ladoga,” she whispered. “My aunt has a dacha in the woods.”
“All right then. Don’t be alarmed, I’m going to dissolve us into tiny bubbles in order to transport us there.”
The girl didn’t even flinch. Vika doubted much else could compare to the horror of being nearly burned alive on a pyre.
Vika took one more look at the red-faced crowd around her, battling an imaginary enemy. Then she evanesced herself and the girl away.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
In other parts of the empire, the growth of Bolshebnoie Duplo’s magic manifested itself in wilder ways... .
In the middle of the Siberian woods, a dilapidated hut shook as if it were a bird ruffling its feathers. Its two front windows blinked, shaking off the dirt and moss that had accumulated on its sills during the centuries the house had slept. Beneath the foundation, stilt-like chicken legs stretched and lifted the entire hut twenty feet off the snow-covered floor. The joints of the chicken legs—and of the hut itself—creaked as they began to stomp through the forest.
Baba Yaga’s house was awake. Now it needed to find its owner. Then they could begin tricking—and eating—unsuspecting travelers again.
On the Kamchatka Peninsula in the far east, volcano nymphs grinned with needlelike teeth and danced, their lithe, naked red bodies like flames in a bonfire. The frosty ground around them quaked, and their volcanoes spewed smoke and ash. The craters had been dormant for hundredsof years, since their caretakers—the nymphs—had not had enough magic to stoke the fires in the volcanoes’ bellies.
But now, by some miracle, they did. And as the air above them clouded red-gray, the nymphs laughed and drank blue honeysuckle wine and felt giddy with the knowledge that one day—hopefully soon—they would be strong enough to make the volcanoes erupt, to chase away the humans who dared to build villages and encroach on what was the nymphs’ land.
In the southern part of the empire, along the Volga River, a peasant boy trudged out of his family’s cottage to fetch water. He shivered in the winter chill, and it was difficult to see, because the moon barely shone through the cloud cover. But the boy pushed onward. His mother had been ill for days, and she desperately needed more to drink. The pitchers in the cottage were empty. This task could not wait until daylight.
The boy set down his bucket on the riverbank and began to chip at the ice with a pickax.
It should have taken him a long while to get through the river’s surface. And yet, three swings in, the ice cracked and parted. Water gushed upward, as if it had been waiting for the boy to free it. He hurriedly pressed the lip of his bucket into the water before it froze over again.
