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, and yet 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.
Nikolai pushed farther out with his arm, and the cannons flung the men off them and swiveled their aim straight upward, so that any cannon fire would shoot up and fall directly back down on Pasha’s men, rather than on the broken Neva that was drowning and freezing the Decembrists.
Except one cannon did not pivot completely. It was angled upward but still slightly toward the river, and the fuse was burnt to its end.
In the midst of the chaos and the noise and her attempts to save the drowning, freezing men, Vika didn’t see the cannonball until it was already careening toward her.
She gasped, paralyzed for a moment.
Then her instincts kicked in, and she commanded the wind to shift the cannonball’s path.
It was going too fast, though, and its heat carried it straight through the blizzard undeterred. Vika tried to throw herself out of its way, but she was a split second too late, and the cannonball smashed into her left hand.
It ripped it off completely.
Vika screamed. It was as if a lightning bolt had shot through her arm and lit it on fire from within. She hurtled through the air. The sky went dizzyingly round and round. Everywhere there was shouting and smoke and cannon fire.
And then all of it snuffed out to black.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
No!” Pasha shouted as Vika began to tumble from the sky, blood following her like crimson streamers. He kicked his horse into action, and as they charged into the center of the square to try to catch her, he yelled at his infantry, “Cease fire! Cease fire! Cease fire!”
They finally heard him and stopped their attack.
Pasha spurred his horse to jump the last distance and caught Vika just as she was about to hit the ground.
“Stop everything!” Nikolai yelled at the Decembrists, although not many of them actually remained. At least a thousand had perished into the icy Neva. Hundreds lay dead on the cobblestones. Volkonsky had fled with most of his men in retreat. But the few hundred who remained fighting halted. The toy soldiers went rigid without Nikolai’s magic to move them, and the last of the shadow regiments dissolved in smoke.
“Is she all right?” Nikolai ran to where Pasha held Vika on his horse.
As if this wasn’t his fault. As if he could simply ask Pasha something like that, after all of this.
But right now, Pasha didn’t care. All he cared about was Vika.
He slid off his saddle as his horse came to a halt. He laid Vika on the frozen ground and cradled her head in his lap. Blood continued to gush from her wrist where her hand had been severed, red mingling with the snow and filling the crevices between the cobblestones. He tore off his uniform jacket, sending buttons flying, and grabbed a handful of his shirt to tear a strip from it. He wrapped her wound tightly with the fabric. “Vika, can you hear me?”
She didn’t respond.
Nikolai knelt beside her. “I’m sorry, Vika. I didn’t mean for this to happen—”
“What did you think would happen?” Pasha snapped, suddenly coming back to the reality of what had transpired.
Nikolai narrowed his eyes. “I could’ve asked the same of you about the end of the Game.”
“And yet you didn’t learn from my mistakes.”
“You forced her into this.” Nikolai pointed at Vika’s bandaged wrist.
Except the bracelet he was looking for was no longer there.
Pasha’s stomach lurched. The gold cuff had been torn off with her hand.
Vika was nearly as pale as the snow now, as her life drained out red onto the tourniquet he’d made. Pasha held her closer. “This can’t be our final fate.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
Nikolai glared at Pasha. It was his fault that this had happened! If Pasha hadn’t turned on Nikolai at the end of the Game, then Nikolai wouldn’t have had to exact revenge. . . .
He could end it now, though. Pasha was right in front of him. Vika, too. She was unconscious, on the brink of death. Nikolai could finish her and eliminate Pasha’s fiercest weapon protecting the crown.
But at the thought of killing Vika, Nikolai’s silhouette flickered. It was already faint after the fatigue of battle, and now when he looked at Vika, his anger sputtered.
He had stopped his soldiers’ attack for a reason. For Vika. The battle had taken a toll on his strength, as well as on the cold darkness that fueled his obsession with vengeance, and in the moment she fell from the sky, a flash of warmth had flared inside him, a sliver of his past.
She was dying, and if she was gone, his hope of one day being tsar with Vika as his tsarina could never exist. Nikolai sagged in the snow.
What was left of Aizhana’s energy rumbled inside him. Don’t give up. You’re so close to the throne, it seemed to say.