“Aizhana? I’m here to arrest you, but I don’t want to hurt you—”

A crate came hurtling at Vika. And another and another and another. Vika flung out her hands and smashed each one in the air, the splinters of wood and glass blasting in all directions. Had she not been an enchantress with a shield around her, she would have been impaled at least a dozen times.

So much for hoping Nikolai’s mother was a harmless woman incapable of killing the tsar.

When the crates stopped flying, Vika shook wood and glass slivers from her coat. She exhaled loudly. “Well, there goes your chance at me taking it easy on you.”

Aizhana hissed and climbed up from behind a stack of crates. She crouched on a box, baring her yellowed teeth and wickedly long nails, a huntress ready to pounce.

“You killed the tsar,” Vika said.

“I did it for my son. Whom you’ve taken.”

“Nikolai is safe.”

“I do not believe you.”

Vika quirked her brow. “That’s not my problem.”

Aizhana shrieked, a high-pitched keening worse than a thousand nails screeching against an endless pane of glass. Vika cringed, and her hands flew to cover her ears.

Aizhana leaped over the crates, golden eyes glowing, talons extended. She slammed into Vika’s shield, but because Vika had her hands over her ears, she lost her balance, and they both tumbled backward to the storeroom ground, rolling apart in a tangle of arms and legs, knocking into crates and shattering more bottles.

Vika scrambled to her feet, levitating to avoid the hazardous floor. Aizhana rose just as quickly. A wedge of wood protruded from her shoulder, and she ripped it out as if it didn’t affect her and threw the stake aside. The blood on her tunic seeped out of the fabric and seemingly back into her skin.

“You can heal yourself,” Vika said as she caught her breath.

“Never seen it done before?” Aizhana sneered.

“On the contrary. I, too, can heal wounds and mend broken bones. You’re not as special as you may think.”

“Arrogant child! You have not begun to see what I am capable of.”

“I could say the same to you.”

Aizhana lunged at Vika again.

But this time, Vika was prepared. She conjured a wall of ice in front of her. Aizhana crashed straight into it. Then, in the moment that Aizhana lay dazed on the wood and glass on the floor, Vika melted the wall and reformed it as shackles around Aizhana’s wrists and ankles, the ice thicker and stronger than any iron forged by ordinary man.

Aizhana snarled as she came to. She struggled against the restraints, attempting futilely to smash them against each other, and rattled at the icy chains.

“I told you it would be better if you came without a fight,” Vika said as she took in the mess of the storeroom. “Now look at what you’ve left for me to tidy up.”

Aizhana hissed at her. Vika threw a gust of wind at her head and knocked her unconscious.

“I am not even sorry about that,” Vika said.

Then she walked around the storeroom and charmed the broken crates back together, stacking them neatly in a corner. She commanded a broom to sweep up glass shards and a mop to clean away the alcohol (it would take too much time to sort the mud out of the liquid, and to separate the beer from the vodka and direct them back to the correct bottles).

When the storeroom was in some semblance of order, Vika returned to where Aizhana lay slumped on the floor. “I suppose the most efficient way to get you to the fortress is to evanesce you.” But Vika wrinkled her nose at the thought of her magic touching each of Aizhana’s putrescent particles. And who knew if the decaying body could survive being taken apart and put back together again? She could arrive as a pile of bones and strips of leathery skin.

Yuliana would be furious if she didn’t get the hanging she’d demanded.

“All right, no evanescing,” Vika said with no small measure of relief. “I’ll have to transport you another way, in a manner deserving of a woman of your stature.”

She snapped her fingers and a wheelbarrow appeared. She levitated Aizhana and dumped her inside in a heap. She snapped her fingers again and a tarp—made of extra-rough hemp, for minimal comfort—secured itself over the lump of Aizhana’s unconscious body.

“There we go, a prison carriage suitable for a monster.”

Vika paused, though, as a wave of remorse roiled through her. This was Nikolai’s mother, monster or not.

But a moment later, she remembered that Aizhana had murdered the tsar and tried to kill her, too, and any leniency Vika felt quickly evaporated. She opened the storeroom door and charmed the wheelbarrow to float over the glass yeti teeth, then land in the snow and roll itself. She also cast a shroud over them so passersby would not see.

And then Vika escorted the wheelbarrow onto the dark early morning streets, all the way to the Peter and Paul Fortress, where Aizhana would finally meet Death, once and for all.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Nikolai needed to escape the painted egg, but he also needed to conserve energy. He frowned as he looked at the curved walls surrounding him.

I suppose I could try reabsorbing Vika’s magic. . . . It would be like repurposing his own magic when he’d attempted to escape the steppe dream. Of course, that hadn’t worked, but hopefully this was different.

He snapped his fingers at the abalone chaise longues, and both disappeared, the magic seeping into Nikolai. It was liquid and sweet, like cinnamon sprinkled atop honeysuckle nectar. But something inside him recoiled at it, as if it could not mix with magic Vika had touched, even though the magic itself had originally come from Bolshebnoie Duplo.

Nikolai furrowed his brow, but as he took the desk made of polished rock, Vika’s energy warmed him, and he dismissed his initial worry that there was something wrong with either him or her. The difference in his and Vika’s magic was simply like oil and water; his had always been mechanical, whereas hers was natural. It made sense that his energy didn’t quite know what to do with magic accustomed to commanding lilacs and eggs and wind and snow.

After he took the carpet of flowers, though, Nikolai noticed he could still feel the softness of petals beneath his feet. He looked around the interior of the egg, and phantom outlines of the chaise longues and the desk remained, neither there nor not there.

“What in the name of . . . ?”