Vika half smiled. She sat up on the eagle’s back now, opened her eyes, and tried to enjoy this respite from reality, the cold night air blowing across her face. She looked at the stars above them, and it was as if they were sailing through the immense sea of midnight, explorers charting oceans where no one else had ever been. Nikolai’s oboe was now joined by an entire symphony, and the woodwinds crooned along with the gentle melody of the strings, the chimes ringing softly like a sprinkle of starlight.
The eagle soared faster, and Vika whooped, smiling broadly now, feeling alive even though she was asleep, feeling whole even though half of her lay on the other side of the bench. Magic, how she had missed it!
The eagle landed softly at the top of another mountain. But it had taken only two steps when the ground trembled beneath them. Steam and heat and the stench of sulfur rose nearby.
Vika froze.
A volcano. Like the one on which Sergei had found her, an exact replica, it seemed, of the volcano etching he’d carved into her wardrobe at home. Vika touched her scarf; her mother’s basalt pendant lay beneath it. Only the necklace wasn’t there, for she’d given it to Pasha. Her throat suddenly seemed too exposed despite being covered with a thick layer of wool.
“Why did you bring me here?”
The eagle shrieked. She couldn’t understand it, because she couldn’t use magic to translate what it said.
The eagle growled and shook her off its back. Without waiting for her to move out of the way, it flapped its great wings and took off into the air, leaving her stranded on the mountainside.
Vika clung to a small shrub to avoid being blown away. She shivered in the snow, but when the eagle was gone, she rose and brushed the ice off her coat. “I am fierce,” she said, repeating what Ludmila had said of her. “This is only a dream. I refuse to allow something as silly as an imaginary eagle and a made-up volcano to rattle me.” She walked quickly, proudly, to the edge of the crater, as if this would further prove her point.
But it was not a cauldron of lava, as Vika had expected. Rather, it was a long, narrow tunnel that went straight down, like a cylinder bored into the volcano.
Vika bit her lip. There was nowhere else for her to go but down. The only other option was to wake herself from this dream, and that was not an option, for Vika did not simply back away because something was perilous. Like caution, quitting on account of danger was not a part of her lexicon.
She looked at the hole again. It was a perfect circle, something created not from nature but by something—or someone—else. She latched onto a nearby tree and leaned over the edge of the opening. “Hello?” she called down.
Pure, untainted silk swirled up to meet her.
And then . . . “Bonsoir, Vika.”
She’d found Nikolai.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Nikolai could see her silhouette framed by the imaginary moonlight coming through the circular opening above him. He hadn’t known if she would come, or if she would be able to without the use of magic, but he thought that if they were still connected as they’d been before the end of the Game, then . . . perhaps there was hope for them yet. After all, she’d come to his house. It was possible, now that Pasha had taken away her magic, that Nikolai could convince her to join him.
“I’m coming down,” Vika yelled.
Before Nikolai could answer, Vika simply dropped straight from the hole in the ceiling, plummeting quickly at first, but then floating down like a feather to the ground. In fact, she was riding on a feather. From the golden eagle he’d conjured to bring her here.
“You do know how to make an entrance,” Nikolai said.
She curtsied.
“What are we doing in this volcano?” he asked, still hanging back in the shadow, out of the moonlight.
Vika stuck her hands on her hips. “Funny, I thought you would be able to tell me. You didn’t create this?”
Nikolai shook his head as he took in the porous black rock that constituted the walls of the cylindrical room around him, and sulfur nipped at his nose. He had no connection with volcanoes. Vika was the one whose mother was a volcano nymph. “I just reconnected myself to the magic that created the Dream Bench,” he said, “but I didn’t dare enter it fully. I thought I might get stuck again.”
“So you’re not sitting on the bench with me right now?”
“No. I’m nearby, though.”
“This is neutral ground for us to meet, then.” Vika gestured to the dark room, which was incredibly detailed—being, uniquely, a cell carved in the depths of a seething volcano—and at the same time, blandly black and nondescript.
“I still don’t quite know how we created it,” Nikolai said. “It’s as if you’ve tapped into my magic to combine something of yours with mine.”
“Except I’m not casting any enchantments right now.”
Nikolai frowned. He’d forgotten for a second that she couldn’t use magic. But if not, then how was it that his thoughts were blending with something of Vika’s? Was it because he’d taken apart her egg and touched her energy then? Or did it go farther back, to the end of the Game, when he’d given her nearly all of his?
“I’m not allowed to use magic,” Vika said, as if Nikolai didn’t know about Pasha’s edict. “I’ve been declared illegal by the tsardom.”
“I—I’m sorry about that,” he said, which was not at all a sufficient answer, but it was the only one Nikolai could come up with, as he was still wading through his own questions.
“Not as sorry as I am.” Vika frowned.
This brought him away from his thoughts, and he smiled. She was so pretty, even when she was piqued—even more so, actually, because it made her wildness glint in her eyes.
Nikolai wanted to kiss her.
The old version of him would have held back. But this one, with ambition and audacity in his veins, didn’t. He took one long stride and wrapped his arm around Vika’s waist.
She froze.
Nikolai bent his head and crushed his mouth against hers. His shadow had substance enough that although he blurred slightly into her, he could still feel the warmth and softness of her lips.
Vika gasped and pulled back. She gaped at him.
But then she reached her hand to the back of his head and drew him down and smashed her mouth against his. She kissed ferociously, just like her enchantments. Her lips parted, and their tongues found each other and danced like their mazurka at the masquerade, frenzied and hot. Their bodies pressed closer. Nikolai’s edges blurred into hers.
Kissing Vika was like consuming fire and being consumed by fire, all at once. It heated away some of the chill that coursed through him. And this was a kiss that wasn’t even real; it was happening between figments of themselves in a dream. How would it feel to kiss Vika on the other side of the bench?
She ripped her mouth away.
Nikolai let out a small breath. Still wanting.
“I don’t know what to do with you,” Vika said, her face only inches from his. She seemed torn between wanting to lean in again and wanting to run away.
Nikolai looked at her but didn’t say anything. He couldn’t.
“We’re tied together, you and I,” she said. “But I don’t know if I’m drawn to you because I’m supposed to love you, or if it’s because we’re destined always to fight.”
“Perhaps it’s both,” he managed to say.