Vika walked a few more blocks from where the initial crowd had gathered. Here, too, there were people along Nevsky Prospect, but they were fewer and farther between, and they shifted away to give her a wide berth when she stopped in the center of the boulevard.
Vika closed her eyes, and with Nevsky Prospect quiet, focus came rather easily, even though the stability of the city hinged upon her performance. She pictured the fir tree that grew outside her cottage, and the thought of home made her smile, despite the circumstances. She and Father used to decorate it every year, dressing its lopsided branches with golden beads and wooden ornaments and Vika’s favorite, moths she enchanted to flutter around it with glowing wings. She’d heard, as a child, of lightning bugs in warmer climes, so she’d worked with what she had here in Russia to create her own sort of fireflies.
When Vika opened her eyes, what seemed like stars on a string appeared in the sky. They twinkled brightly, even though it wasn’t night. As they drew near, their forms came into view. Moths, with lighted wings, carrying a twig from her fir tree.
They dropped the thin branch into Vika’s waiting hand.
“Spasiba,” she thanked them.
They bobbed in the air for a second, then flew to the rooftop of the nearest building, landing to rest after their speedy flight from Ovchinin Island.
Vika examined the twig the moths had brought. The wood was healthy and strong; the leaves, full and dark green. She brought it to her nose and inhaled. There was possibly nothing better than the smell of Christmas. Hopefully, the people of Saint Petersburg would think so, too.
“Let’s make you into a tree, shall we?”
She knelt and set the twig on the ground. She rubbed her gloves together and flung her hands apart.
The twig seemed to explode as it burst from one small branch into thousands of enormous ones. The crowd gasped, and the force of the twig’s instantaneous growth pushed even Vika backward.
The tree trunk kept expanding and expanding until it was several feet across, and the treetop reached at least a hundred feet high.
Vika’s smile broadened, amplified by the heady perfume of fir mingled with sap and snow.
“And now for decorations.” Vika clapped her hands, and immediately, lacy garlands of pale-blue flowers—blue mist sage, one of Father’s favorites—appeared and draped themselves around the tree. Chunks of ice creaked and leaped up from the Neva, then melted until they formed themselves into glistening crystalline orbs hanging like ornaments from the branches.
The moths resting on the palace rooftop flew back toward her and fluttered their wings impatiently. Vika nodded.
They zipped through the air to the tree. As they did so, even more glowing moths flew in from all around the city, lighting the sky. They wove in and out of the branches, swooping up and down—magic, glimmering tinsel.
Vika looked around at the people on the boulevard. The crowd was much closer now. Most of their eyes didn’t glisten with fear anymore, either, but with the wide-eyed curiosity Lena had earlier displayed.
But Vika wasn’t finished. She still needed to charm the tree to give gifts to children who approached it.
What could the tree give? If this were Nikolai’s enchantment, he could conjure intricately wrapped presents, each with a different toy—a kit for building model bridges, a windup doll, a music box that played Christmas songs. But that wasn’t the sort of magic Vika excelled at. She was better with the elements and nature, but a child like Lena wouldn’t be happy with a box full of snow.
There was, however, food. It would be tricky, because food conjured from magic was never, as Father had claimed, as delicious as that cooked by hand.
But what child was ever picky about candy?
Vika snapped her fingers, and deep-violet sugarplums appeared all over the tree, hanging by black licorice stems. The lower boughs of the tree grew heavy with enormous candy pinecones, each a different color and flavor, from strawberry red to marmalade orange to honeysuckle-berry blue. And tufts of white cotton candy, like sweet snow, floated down onto the branches. Wherever a child could reach, a treat could be found.
Vika stepped back to survey her tree. It was impressive and lustrous and above all . . . innocent. She couldn’t use something this pure as a weapon. And she wasn’t going to kill Nikolai anyway.
I’ll give it fire, Vika thought, but not as Yuliana wanted.
Vika conjured a small flame at her fingertips and blew on it. It flew to the base of the tree and wended its way to the center of the trunk. From there, it began to light the tree from within, fiery and hot. The flame burned in the trunk but remained contained inside the thick layers of bark, and it shot up, up, up through the middle. The fire destroyed the tree’s soul and at the same time fueled it, imparting the wood itself with light and life from the inside out.
Finally, the flame reached the very top of the tree and exploded forth, flickering fiercely into the sky.
Lena cried out and clapped her little hands together.
But Vika didn’t celebrate. She looked at her enchantment and saw herself. And Pasha and Nikolai. It’s only a question of whether our bark will hold . . . or whether the fire will eventually consume and kill us all.
The rest of the people on Nevsky Prospect remained quiet and still. They no longer shouted about witches and devils, but they also didn’t clap or cheer. It was as if they understood how precarious everything was, and that darkness could not be deterred by a single fiery Christmas tree.
Or a single fiery girl.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Yuliana’s antechamber was littered with paper. Several boxes of her mother’s correspondence were upended across the floor, the remnants of the late tsarina’s floral perfume haunting the room like a ghost. Yuliana’s own notes cluttered the small desk in the corner, displacing the stack of Imperial Council reports, which stood so tall on the floor that it was nearly impossible to see her sitting cross-legged on the rug behind them.
She was combing through her mother’s letters—well, the ones that were sent to the tsarina, since Yuliana obviously didn’t have the ones her mother had sent out—and looking for mentions of Alexis Okhotnikov, as well as anyone else who could have been the tsarina’s lover nearly eighteen years ago. Her mother had often felt isolated in court life, and hence was an incessant letter writer, finding solace in news from her friends.
The problem, however, was that her mother’s friends had also been incessant letter writers, which meant there were thousands of envelopes to go through.