Page 107 of The Crown's Fate
The soldiers loyal to the throne continued shooting at the Decembrists. But the Decembrists were not ill-prepared mercenaries. They were men from the same army who fired upon them. Their commanders shouted, and the rebels loaded and fired back. Bodies began to fall on either side.
At the same time, some of the shadow soldiers turned and aimed at Nikolai. Or rather, at the mass of ice. He must have been commanding them from within, for they opened fire and blasted off ragged chunks. They shot at him again and more ice fell away.
Vika flung more frost at him, but she couldn’t replace quickly enough the pieces that were exploding away.
Nikolai burst free from the inside, sending spears of ice through the air. They harpooned through some of Pasha’s soldiers. Then he began snapping his fingers, conjuring bullets, hundreds at a time. He shot them at Pasha’s forces, and as Vika had warned, it was as if there were ten thousand Decembrists facing them.
Despite heavy fire, Pasha held his horse steady. “Vika,” he shouted over the whiz of bullets and the battle cries of the men, “we need to do something to break their formations!”
“I know ... but what?”
“Shake them somehow!”
“All right.” Vika nodded to herself.I’ll literally shake them off their feet.
She stared down at the center of the square.
Focus. Focus. Focus.
The ground near the Decembrists’ boots began to ripple, like soft waves on a peaceful day along the Neva. Some of the men lost their balance. Others continued to fire, though, including Nikolai with every snap of his fingers.
But then the cobblestones cracked like bolts of thunder, and Vika’s rocky waves grew, the crests higher and the lengths longer. The ground reared and hurled the Decembrists ten feet in the air and every which way. When they landed, the men’s bodies snapped. The shadow soldiers burst in puffs like smoke.
Mercy.Nausea wracked Vika’s body with every broken bone and limp soldier. They lay one on top of another, a chaotic jumble of limbs and muskets and drums and flags.
Vika had thought she would need this power if it came to war with foreign enemies. She’d never imagined she’d use it against Russia’s own men. Her heart rose to her throat. She wanted to look away, but she couldn’t.
Pasha’s army continued to fire.
The Decembrists shrieked as their front lines collapsed. Some shoved their dead comrades out of the way and fumbled for their muskets again. But too many had fallen.
“Retreat! Retreat! Retreat!” the Decembrists yelled.
They stumbled over the dead bodies. More soldiers crumpled under fire. The ones still capable of running clambered over the piles of men, tripping over them onto the icy, blood-stained cobblestones, and fled past the statue of Peter the Great. They retreated onto the frozen Neva.
Pasha’s infantry was quick to respond. They were already loading cannons and aiming at the river.
“No!” Vika cried.
Too late. The cannons fired and blasted through the Decembrists and the ice, flinging hundreds of men into the Neva’s frosty depths. They would freeze and drown in a matter of seconds.
Even though they were Nikolai’s men, Vika threw magic at the river, like fishing lines to haul the soldiers out. There was already too much death. The tea leaves had been right, and it seemed that she and Renata had failed at changing the prophecy. All Vika could do now was try to minimize the lives that were lost. From the sky, she attempted to keep the Neva from freezing over while she also dragged body after body out of the water, hundreds of invisible lines cast at once.
But there were too many. She had so much power, andyet she could not save them all. Tears streamed down her face as winter prevailed and the Neva froze over, hundreds of men trapped in the icy graveyard below.
“Cease fire!” Pasha yelled.
The relentless firing of cannons was deafening, and his officers didn’t hear. More cannons fired. More ice collapsed, taking with it several hundred soldiers more. The toll would be at least a thousand, and Vika was nearly spent. Yet she renewed her attempts to save these men from drowning, too.
Nikolai still stood at the Thunder Stone. He flung his arm out in front of him and pointed at the cannons.
A regiment of toy soldiers spun on their heels and charged. The creaking of their wooden legs squealed even over all the explosions and gunfire, a disturbing cacophony of magic and war whipped together.
A cannonball ripped through the toy soldiers’ advance, blasting off painted heads and splintering limbs. But the rest of the toys continued undeterred. They had no feelings, no fear, only Nikolai’s orders, whatever those were.
And then the toy soldiers were upon Pasha’s men. The two sides grappled with each other, fighting flesh to wooden hand. A few of Nikolai’s troops seized cannons and began to shift where they were aimed.
Pasha’s soldiers—or were they Yuliana’s?—raised the butts of their muskets and smashed the toy faces. They took back the cannons and pushed down on the barrels to realign them.
