Page 95 of The Crown's Fate
“So ... what is it you wanted to show me?”
Renata took several sips. “I—I can move the tea.”
“What do you mean?”
Renata drank until there was only a quarter of the tea left. “Let me show you.”
She stared at her cup. Nothing happened at first. But then ripples fanned out from the center of the liquid, and the leaves inside it began to quiver, subtly floating toward the edges, as if there were a current in the tea.
“Heavens,” Vika whispered.
Renata blinked. The tea stopped moving.
“I interrupted your concentration,” Vika said. “Forgive me. Continue, please.”
Renata gritted her teeth and stared again at her cup. The leaves quivered, then continued to drift. They stopped close to their original place, but in an entirely different pattern.
“You can control the leaves.” Vika shook her head, still astonished by what she’d just witnessed. “But how?”
Renata smoothed a wrinkle in the table runner. It was one Ludmila had knit for Vika and Sergei ages ago. She kept going over the same spot, even though it was already smoothed down.
“Renata?”
“Aizhana gave me some energy,” she blurted out. “But it wasn’t for me. It was for Nikolai. Some must still be inside me, though, and now I can do this.” She waved her hands at the cup.
Aizhana had given Renata energy?But why, then, isn’t Renata doing horrible things like Nikolai?Vika thought back to the conversation she’d overheard between Nikolai and his mother, right before her death.
Aizhana had explained her love for him, her desire to help him at all costs, which explained why she’d stooped to passing her energy to him through trickery. And ... oh.
Aizhana had also confessed to killing Galina. Which meant it was Galina’s energy, not her own, that had been passed on to Renata. Could that explain the difference? Could it be that the mentor’s magical energy heightened Renata’s talent for fortune-telling?
But how would Aizhana have managed to transfer only Galina’s energy, without tainting it with any of her own? Vika frowned. She didn’t know the mechanics of energy transfer. That was a Karimov specialty.
“Please say something,” Renata said. “Am I a monster now, too, because of Nikolai’s mother?”
Vika shook her head. “I don’t know what exactly Aizhana did, but I doubt you could ever be a monster. You’re too good and pure.”
Perhaps that was it. When Aizhana gave Nikolai energy, he was already weak, a shadow in the Dream Bench, driven by anguish. But Renata had been strong, and driven by love.
“Think of the cup half full, right?” Vika said. “You can now change fate.”
“I ... I don’t know.”
“Well, on the chance that it’s true ... I have an idea.” Vika rotated her hand so her palm opened upward. She smiled as a small woven pouch appeared in it. Even the simplest feats of magic provided such joy now.
Renata craned her neck to get a better look. “What’s inside?”
Vika loosened the drawstring and poured several threads of bright red saffron into her hand.
“It looks like your hair,” Renata said.
“Exactly.” Vika plucked the thread on top and dropped it into her tea. “That will represent me. Should I drink until there’s only a little bit left?”
Renata nodded slowly, beginning to catch on.
Vika did so and set the cup back on its saucer. Black leaves settled on the bottom in a V. The thread of saffron hovered over the point at the base of it, where the leaves diverged into two lines. “What does that mean?” she asked.
Renata fingered her braids. “It means there are two people whose paths have split. And you—the saffron—are doomed to be caught between them.”
