“Hey!”
“Get dressed to go out and meet me downstairs in five minutes. It’s time for a lesson.”
“It’s two o’clock in the morning.”
Galina shrugged and glided out of his room.
Nikolai sighed. Ever since her husband, the old war hero Count Mikhail Zakrevsky, had died six years ago, Galina had grown even more intractable than she’d been before. So it was no accident that Nikolai had turned out a touch morose. He’d endured Galina’s lack of pity for a sum total of eleven years.
Nikolai eyed his bed. Without the project of his frock coat, a curtain of fatigue suddenly threatened to drop over him. His pillows crooned a siren song.
He could refuse Galina’s command. It was inhumane to train at this hour.
But if he disobeyed, he would have to leave, because he was only given a place in the Zakrevsky house as long as he was Galina’s student. And he could not give that up, because studying with her was his ticket to becoming more than a no-name orphan. He could be Imperial Enchanter someday.
However, it wouldn’t be as easy as knocking on the Winter Palace door and asking for the job. Well, it would have been, if Nikolai were the only enchanter in Russia, but it so happened that there had been two enchanters born after the last one perished. It was an anomaly, having more than one enchanter at a time, but not completely unprecedented. Like Mother Nature’s occasional deviations from the norm, so Russia’s magic sometimes gifted the empire with a pair of enchanters rather than only one.
But there was a solution for that. “It’s a game,” Galina had told Nikolai when she’d taken him under her tutelage. “The one with the best magic wins.”
He’d been only seven when Galina came to the Kazakh steppe—the border between Asia and the Russian Empire—and she’d been unlike any woman Nikolai had ever seen. A dainty hat perched atop carefully coiffed brown curls. A voluminous gown made of iridescent purple fabric that shimmered in the sweltering midday sun. And preposterously high-heeled boots that looked like an accident waiting to happen on the uneven terrain of the grassy steppe.
An accident, that is, if the woman were actually walking. Nikolai twisted the hem of his tunic as he studied her. He focused on the space between the ground and the soles of her tiny feet and discovered that there was, indeed, a space between, if only inches. She levitated and merely moved her legs to create the illusion of walking. And she did so without seeming aware of it, as if the movement had been a part of her for decades. Nikolai grinned and puffed out his chest. The other children in the village wouldn’t have noticed. They would simply have thought the woman was preternaturally graceful.
When she floated to a stop in front of him seconds later, she stooped—although still hovering—and asked, “C’est toi que je cherche?”
Nikolai tilted his head, and the fringe of his dark hair fell in his face. He could not understand the woman’s language.
The woman muttered something to herself. Then she spoke again, this time in halting Russian, as if she had learned it by eavesdropping on others but not actually speaking it herself. “Eto ti?” Are you the one I’m looking for?
Nikolai screwed up his face at her pronunciation.
“I am the Countess Galina Zakrevskaya,” she said, “and I have come for you. Where are your parents?”
“Mama died when I was born,” Nikolai said without regret. He had not known her, so he had not had the opportunity to form an attachment. “And my father is also long gone.”
Galina nodded, as if she had expected as much. “Then you are all alone?”
“I have the village.” Nikolai pointed behind him at the cluster of colorful yurts, round tents decorated with brightly colored patterns woven in a rainbow of zigzags and stripes.
“I doubt they will mind one less mouth to feed,” Galina said.
Which was true. The villagers had traded him to Galina all too easily, in exchange for two horses and two sheep. They’d been happy to be rid of the boy with powers they did not understand, that seemed to them to stem from the devil.
So now, even though Nikolai grumbled as he glanced at his pocket watch and at the empty space where his scissors and cloth had just been, he only half meant the curses he swore under his breath. I didn’t come all this way from the steppe only to revert to a sheepherder, he thought. And I certainly don’t intend to continue as an errand boy.
He commanded the ivory-inlaid doors of his armoire to open, and clothes flew out to meet him. He didn’t know what Galina had planned, but he did know he needed to be more than presentable. She was very particular about appearances, which was ironic given that she’d never bought him so much as a handkerchief. It was as if she expected him to create something out of nothing.