Pasha laughed—blazes, it felt good to break the tension like that, if only for a second—and led the way toward the Neva, where Nikolai’s party was already lively on the ice.
Every man and woman in Saint Petersburg appeared to be here. They skated to the music of a string orchestra. Laughed beneath chandeliers of candles, and gold garlands and bells and bows held aloft by stone birds in the night sky. Devoured a feast and talked with their mouths full, chairs packed with merchants next to sailors next to laundry girls.
And all around them, life-size dolls with porcelain faces bustled about, refilling wineglasses and refreshing empty platters with more food.
Pasha shivered. The dolls were beautiful, but they were also all wrong. Elegance tainted with haunting. “They’re like the Jack and ballerina, gone spine-chillingly mad.”
“I think Nikolai himself has gone mad,” Yuliana said as she took in the scene. “Perhaps you should use your necklace to summon Vika. If the invitations went out only to the people of Saint Petersburg, she won’t have received one out on her island.”
Pasha frowned. “We’ve asked a great deal of her lately. Give her a night at home in peace. Besides, you and I have been to enough fetes in our lives that we can handle another one. We’re merely gathering information.”
Yuliana pursed her lips at him skeptically.
A group of fisherman walked past, and one said, “This party is extraordinary.” He took a long swig from a bottle of vodka.
Another nodded, a bottle in his hand, too. “Let’s hope the tsesarevich does this for us every year.”
A third fisherman chimed in, “If he does, I think I could get used to magic.”
“Hear, hear!” the first man said. He raised his bottle in the air, and the group guffawed and continued through the snow to the ice rink.
“Well, that’s a good thing, that they’re beginning to accept magic,” Pasha whispered to Yuliana.
She clutched his arm a bit more tightly. “It would be if you and Vika had truly created this fete. But it’s Nikolai’s. Something is bound to go bad.”
Pasha shivered again.
Someone cleared his throat behind them. Pasha nearly jumped out of his boots.
“My apologies, Your Imperial Highness,” Ilya whispered as he leaned in. “But I only wanted to make my presence known in the event that you need me.”
Pasha settled back into his boots. He’d made the decision to tell the Guard that he and Yuliana would arrive at the fete later, around midnight, which was partly true, for he’d only meant to steal through the party right now as reconnaissance before making an official appearance, as himself, later on. But of course, if anyone would discover that he’d snuck out of the palace early, it was Ilya. This was, after all, why Pasha had chosen him to spy on Volkonsky and the constitutionalists. Ilya was awfully good at knowing and seeing things he wasn’t supposed to know and see.
Pasha’s stomach growled.
“Perhaps you’d like something to eat while you investigate?” Ilya asked.
“Not a bad idea.”
“It’s a terrible idea,” Yuliana said.
A life-size porcelain doll skated by carrying a fresh tureen of borscht. Pasha inhaled deeply, the warmth of the beet soup wrapping around and through him, just as another doll glided up to him with a plate of miniature tarts, filled with caramelized onions, gruyere cheese, and thyme.
“Tarte à l’oignon?” she asked in a dainty voice perfectly suited for a porcelain doll.
He smiled. “Merci.” He popped one into his mouth as Yuliana cried out, “Pasha!”
He swallowed and shrugged. “I couldn’t resist. It’s been so long since supper, and tarte à l’oignon is one of my favorites.”
Yuliana flung herself at him and shook him by the shoulders. “I know! And Nikolai knows! Why else would he serve a French country tart at a party where all the other food is Russian?”
“Sacré bleu,” Pasha whispered.
The sweetness of the onion was already turning acrid on his tongue. No, not acrid. Metallic. Yuliana was right. Nikolai had done this on purpose. He must’ve seen through Pasha’s disguise—of course he knew most of what Pasha had in his wardrobe, since they’d snuck out innumerable times together over the years—and sent a doll specifically with the tart.
“Yuliana—” Pasha clutched at his throat with one hand and his stomach with another. His knees gave way beneath him as something sharp lanced through his insides.
Ilya lunged and caught him.
“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.