Pasha picked up both blades and weighed them in his hands. He chose the lighter one. Not as strong, but easier to maneuver. Agility was often underestimated in the face of strength.
Bogdan grabbed his sword with one hand, and his crotch with the other. The gesture that followed was the opposite of polite.
All right. This wouldn’t be anything like the gentlemanly fencing matches to which Pasha was accustomed. But he’d adjust. It couldn’t be that different, could it?
Bogdan swung his sword in a broad arc, viciously enough to sever Pasha’s head. Pasha yelped and leaped backward.
Never mind. It was very different.
“Pretty Boy is quick on his feet,” Bogdan said. The crowd jeered.
Pasha advanced and attacked.
Bogdan parried and lunged at Pasha.
Pasha deflected and attacked again. Their swords moved quickly, like flashes of violently choreographed silver. Once in the rhythm of the fight, it was not so different from the beat of fencing. Parry-riposte, parry-riposte, parry-riposte. Deflect-attack, deflect-attack, deflect-attack.
Bogdan lunged again, but Pasha suspected it was a feint. He didn’t parry. Bogdan quickly recovered and changed tactics.
Pasha dodged. But then he stumbled as a muscle in his abdomen cramped, exactly where Vika had extracted Nikolai’s poisoned gear.
Luckily, Bogdan was slow, at least in comparison to Pasha. Pasha inhaled sharply, forcing himself to ignore the cramp, and advanced to execute his own feint.
Bogdan moved to parry. Not fast enough, though. Pasha circled his sword under Bogdan’s and pressed the point of his blade against Bogdan’s hairy chest, right in the center above his heart.
Bogdan’s nostrils flared like those of an incensed bull. He scowled down at Pasha.
Pasha’s muscles ached, but his hand was steady. A bit more pressure from his sword, and Bogdan’s blood would spill.
Bogdan glared at Pasha for another long moment. Then he dropped his sword on the ground and raised both hands in defeat. Suddenly, he began to laugh, a deep, rumbling belly laugh. “Not bad, Pretty Boy. Not bad.”
Pasha held the cramp at his stomach. “I beg your pardon?”
“You’re the best fighter here. Other than me, of course.”
Pasha didn’t point out that he had actually just defeated Bogdan.
“How long are you in town, Pretty Boy? And how strong is your allegiance to the imperial family? Do you really care about that bastard tsesarevich, or were you just defending the late tsarina’s honor out of respect, as any good man should?” Bogdan shot a glare at Yuri. Yuri shrugged and giggled.
Pasha carefully set his sword on the ground. As carefully as he could he answered, “I don’t think it’s fair to insult the dead. They cannot defend themselves.”
“And what about the living?” Bogdan asked.
“The living can fight.”
Bogdan grunted in agreement. “We could use more men like you. Especially since your company is stationed outside the city.”
Pasha borrowed a bottle from a nearby soldier and took a couple of drinks before he spoke again. “What do you mean, you could use more men like me?”
“Do you believe in Russia?”
Pasha nodded.
“And do you believe all men are worth the same in God’s eyes?”
The soldiers around them began to chuckle under their breaths.
“Watch out!” Yuri shouted, seeming to have forgotten that Pasha had been about to punch him not too long ago. “Bogdan will try to recruit you to fight the tsesarevich and kill his witch.”
Bogdan glared at him.
“It’s all right,” Pasha lied. “I already know. Word has reached my company, too.”
A crooked smile spread across Bogdan’s face then, revealing a bear’s worth of yellowed teeth. “Better than we’d hoped. We’ll see you then, when we march against the tsesarevich and block his path to Moscow?”
Pasha hesitated. The constitutionalists already had concrete plans? They were going to ambush him on the road next month so he couldn’t go to his coronation ceremony?
“Don’t look so worried,” Yuri said, pointing his near-empty bottle in their direction. “If you and your men don’t show, Bogdan will single-handedly block the road. He’ll just sit in the middle of it. And he’ll sit on the witch, too!”
The soldiers broke into rowdy guffaws and clinked bottles. Pasha pulled himself together and faked a hearty laugh along with them.
But Bogdan didn’t laugh. And inside, Pasha didn’t either.
CHAPTER SIXTY
The creeping of Nikolai’s energy, like those centipedes within her veins, still haunted Vika, even a couple of days later. It was powerful, of course, for Bolshebnoie Duplo’s magic had only grown with the people’s increasing fear, but there was something else to it that worried Vika more: it was restless, its hundreds of thousands of feet in nonstop motion, impatient to get wherever it was intending to go. And the fact that even before Aizhana’s death, before Nikolai had grown even colder and angrier, he’d tried to kill Pasha . . .
This was why Vika had tasked herself with following Nikolai. Something was afoot. Another plan. Another attempt at the throne. And having fought against him in the Game, she knew his next move would only escalate.
The one benefit to not being permitted to use her powers was that she could trail him undetected. She didn’t need to cast a barrier shroud around herself. She could simply wear a large-brimmed hat and pull her scarf over her nose, and she blended in with the rest of the people hurrying through Saint Petersburg, going from here to there or generally trying to get out of the streets as soon as possible in case of another magical debacle.
Nikolai left his house in the early evening. Vika, with Poslannik riding in a pocket in her coat, kept some distance between them, but she never let him get too far. He walked briskly along Ekaterinsky Canal, then turned onto Nevsky Prospect. She hurried so she wouldn’t lose him in the bustle of shoppers, which at this point consisted mostly of servants picking up crates of crackers, cured meats, pickles, and other provisions for their masters, who seemed (from the servants’ hurried conversations) to think they might need to barricade themselves indoors in the event of magical apocalypse. It was the sort of scenario that ordinarily would have made Vika laugh for its ludicrousness. But given the violence of Nikolai’s enchantments, she could not find even a splinter of humor in the people’s reactions now.
For a moment, she lost Nikolai in a sea of top hats that had emerged from Bissette & Sons. The shop was closing for the night, its customers released back into the world in a stream of bespoke suits and fine wool coats. The men began as a cluster, but then parted and all began to go their separate directions, weaving this way and that through the crowds.
“No, no, no,” Vika said, as her eyes tried to follow first this hat, then that one, then another. “I can’t lose him,” she muttered. “I won’t.”