When he came home and unlocked his bedroom door, however, his heart nearly burst out of his chest. There were animals everywhere—monkeys bouncing and shrieking on top of the armoire, vipers slithering across every inch of carpet, and a Siberian tiger on his bed. The tiger roared and leaped toward him.

“Sacre bleu!” Nikolai smashed the door shut from the outside and locked it tight. Then he snapped his fingers several times, and five new dead bolts appeared and slammed into place. The tiger rammed the other side of the door again and again. Nikolai’s pulse pounded in his head to the same violent beat.

He was still plastered against the hallway wall, between a mirror and a portrait of an ancient Zakrevsky, when Galina appeared.

“Ah, Nikolai, you’re home. I thought I heard you come in. You really ought to work on your stealth.”

“Wh-what is that?” Nikolai pointed a shaky finger at his room.

“Do you like them? They’re my pre-Game gift to you. You have no idea what I had to go through to have them shipped here. Which do you like most? The tiger? The snakes? Or the poisonous lorises? Good gracious, you prefer the painfully adorable lorises, don’t you?”

Lorises. That was what they were. Not monkeys. Nikolai peeled himself off the wall. “Why are they in my room?” He enunciated each syllable, as if that would help Galina comprehend what he was asking.

She checked her reflection in the mirror and wiped away a small smudge of makeup. “The Game is beginning—well, it will as soon as you take the oath. And if you are to have a chance at winning, you need all the practice you can get.”

The Game is beginning?

“You do want to win, don’t you?”

“I—”

“Of course you do.” She smiled, now that she knew her makeup was flawless. “If you win, you’ll finally have wealth and respect. Well, respect in a warped sense, since no one can ever know exactly what we magical types do for the tsar. But regardless, they’ll know you’re an adviser of some sort, and besides, half his Imperial Council does nothing anyway. In any case, it’s everything a poor orphan like you never had and could only, until now, dream hopelessly of.”

Nikolai clenched his teeth. It was just like Galina to think he was so unoriginal that his fantasies would be the same as the dreams of any other common boy. Of course he wanted to be Imperial Enchanter. Nikolai’s entire life—at least since he was seven—had been predicated on that one goal. He was an Imperial Enchanter-in-Training. There was nothing else he wanted to be. And he would certainly make a lousy sheepherder at this point.

But becoming Imperial Enchanter was about much more than wealth and power to him, unlike what Galina was suggesting. It was also about becoming closer to Pasha, who was like a younger brother to him, and closer to a family of some sort, even if it wasn’t Nikolai’s own. Because, needless to say, Nikolai had no real family. He was, and always had been, alone.

“What do you get if I win?” Nikolai asked. For surely there was something in this for Galina. She was not the self-sacrificing type. Not by any measure.

“I did it for our country,” she said, “and I did it for the tsar. If you prevail, I have the honor of having been your mentor.”

Nikolai arched a brow.

“And of beating my brother.”

“You have . . . relatives?” Nikolai couldn’t help that his jaw dropped. It seemed impossible that Galina came from an actual family. But of course she had mentioned before that she descended from a long bloodline of mentors. It made sense that if she had a brother, he’d be a mentor, too. And that besting him in a competition would motivate her.

“But enough about rewards,” Galina snapped. “You need to secure victory first. We leave tomorrow for the site where you will take the oath to begin the Game. So what you need to be focused on is your last opportunity for training, and that begins with the tiger and snakes and lorises in your room.” She clapped her hands, and one by one, the locks Nikolai had conjured began to unbolt. Only the last lock remained latched. She smiled viciously as she pushed him toward the door.

“But what am I to do with—”

“Kill them before they kill you. Do you want to know how you really win the Game? How you ensure it? You don’t play nice, Nikolai. If you’re smart, you’ll think of the Game like a chess match. You could take your time, plotting moves to frustrate your opponent, prancing about the chessboard and showing off your abilities while trying to paint the other enchanter into a corner. Or . . .” Galina’s smile grew sharper. “You could go straight for the king. The girl, in this case. Use your magic to kill her and end the Game yourself. Don’t give the tsar the chance to choose anyone but you.”

Nikolai’s limbs liquefied. Or at least he felt as if they had. “I have to kill her?”

“Did you think the losing enchanter would simply get to live happily ever after?”

“I . . . Well, what else was I supposed to believe? You never even hinted at it before.”

“Would you have continued your training if I had?”

Nikolai just stared at her.

“That’s what I thought. The animals in your room are your final lesson. If you want any chance at winning the actual Game, you’d better get accustomed to blood on your soul.”

And with that, Galina unlatched the last lock and shoved Nikolai to the dangerous side of his bedroom door.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Vika expected Bolshebnoie Duplo to be an enormous hollow of a tree, but there were no trees in this dusty place. In fact, there were no holes at all, only the sheer granite base of Tikho Mountain, the expansive, overcast sky, and the unnerving quiet of solitude. But after a three-day journey, her father swore this was where they needed to be.

Vika and Sergei had arrived at the mountain on horseback several hours ago, having spent the previous night at an inn in the nearby village of Oredezh. Galina and the other enchanter were nowhere to be seen. And the tsar, her father had explained, would be the last to arrive, for tsars did not wait for anyone.

If only Vika and Sergei could have evanesced here, it would have taken a lot less time. But Vika almost laughed aloud at herself for the thought. Evanescing took incredible amounts of power, energy, and concentration. You needed to dissolve yourself completely, then convince the wind to carry you to your destination—all while keeping the dissipated components of yourself in close proximity to one another—and finally, reassemble yourself and materialize. Vika had only ever succeeded in evanescing once, and she had moved a mere two feet before she panicked and put herself together again. She had spent the remainder of the day dead asleep on the banks of Preobrazhensky Creek.