Now that one, she would sit on. Maybe after she’d seen all the others. Vika was sure she could spend hours on Kizhi Island.

Next came benches for the crystal clear waters at Lake Baikal in Siberia, the glacier-capped Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus Mountains, and the Valley of Geysers on the Kamchatka Peninsula.

The second-to-last bench was not a historically significant location. It was not a particularly populous one, either. It was not as stunning as Lake Baikal or Mount Elbrus or the Kamchatka Peninsula, and hardly anyone knew it existed. But these were Nikolai’s benches; he was the final arbiter of what qualified as a wonder of Russia. And he had decided this would be the penultimate one.

“Oh . . .” Vika pressed her hand to her necklace. A golden mist shimmered around the bench, as if swathing it in autumn sunset. It was Ovchinin Island.

She reached out and traced the brass plaque with her finger, following each engraved letter from beginning to end. She did this twice, and then she lowered herself onto the bench. All apprehension from the Moscow bench disappeared at the anticipation of this next dream.

As soon as she sat, the garden once again faded away. And when the fog burned off, a birch forest encircled her, and wolverines and foxes and pheasants cavorted at her feet.

“Home,” she whispered.

She hiked through the woods, to a break in the trees, and looked out over the Neva Bay. Nikolai had captured the view of Saint Petersburg from Ovchinin Island flawlessly. He had also included her new island, a small isle of green in the middle of the deep-blue bay. She smiled but knitted her brow at the same time. It was an odd sensation, to know that she was actually on that island, and yet to feel that she was somewhere else, on the outside looking in.

She continued hiking, pushing her way through overgrown shrubbery and crossing a log over Preobrazhensky Creek. She came to the clearing where she’d emerged from the fire, where Nikolai and Pasha had first seen her. In Nikolai’s dream version, the trees still smoldered, and thin plumes of smoke trailed from the singed trunks into the sky.

There were also two patches of ice on the forest floor, with two pairs of footprints embedded in them, still fresh as if the boys standing there had recently fled. Vika laughed. How funny, the details he’d included just for her!

But what she wanted to see most was her house. Now that she was back on Ovchinin Island—or the daydream of the island—the yearning for home that she had been suppressing bubbled to the surface and propelled her toward the last hill of the forest. She began to run, as fast as she could.

As she ascended the hill, however, her vision started to blur. She tried to push onward, but the haziness continued, and although her feet moved, the setting remained the same and her progress halted. It was as if she ran the same spot on the hill over and over again.

Ah . . . this was the edge of Nikolai’s knowledge, the perimeter of the Ovchinin Island he’d created. He had never been to her cottage, so he couldn’t include it in his dream. All he could conjure was what he had personally seen and what he could embellish from his experience.

Vika stood another minute longer at the base of the hill, then shook herself awake and out of the scene before too much disappointment could set in. It was still a marvel what Nikolai had created; she couldn’t fault him for failing to include her home. And perhaps it was better that her house remained absent, for soon the people of Saint Petersburg would be here on the island, sitting on these benches and walking through these same dreams. She wouldn’t want them opening the cabinets and drawers in her house, even if they were imaginary.

There was only one more bench left on the promenade. Vika rose and approached it slowly, even considering whether she ought to go back to the beginning and sit on each of the other benches before she came to the end. But she was already here. She sped up to discover what the final bench held.

She stopped short when she saw it.

“No!”

Nikolai lay limp across the final bench, one arm falling off the seat and dragging on the ground, and Vika dashed over, visions of her tea leaves flashing through her head. Death is coming soon, Renata had said. But Vika hadn’t thought it would be this soon.

She shook him, but he didn’t react, and his chest didn’t rise and fall as it should have. There was no breath puffing out into the chilly morning air. His dark hair fell in disarray across his face.

How much energy had it taken him to create the dream-state benches? All of it?

“Nikolai . . .” She touched her hand to his cold cheek.

But then his eyelashes fluttered.

And Vika gasped as she was towed into another dream.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Nikolai was watching a golden eagle fly across a vast plain when Vika appeared beside him.

“Nikolai!”

He turned and blinked at her. Her voice seemed too loud in the quiet of the savanna. He took several steps back. “Vika? How are you here?”

“The bench . . . I thought you were dead. I touched you, and it brought me.”

“I’m not dead.”

She exhaled and touched her scar. “Thank goodness.”

The walls he’d erected around his heart crumbled a little. He tried to remind himself that she was his opponent, but it was difficult when she was right there. “I’m definitely not dead. But I think I’m still asleep.”

She looked around her and took in the surroundings. “You’re creating these benches in your sleep?”

He nodded.

“Amazing . . . Then this is a dream, too. Where are we?”

“The Kazakh steppe.”

“It’s beautiful.”

His walls crumbled further. Nikolai knew he was being foolish, but like at the masquerade, he felt no desire to rebuild them. She was here. She’d been worried he was dead. He shoved aside the warnings blaring in his head.

“See the eagle?” He pointed upward at the stately bird soaring across the sky with its golden-brown wings outspread. “This is a special type of falconry. If you look carefully, you can see the eagle’s master, the berkutchi, on his horse near the base of the mountain.”

Vika squinted in the direction Nikolai was pointing. She nodded when she saw the stout man on horseback. “Yes, I see. I can barely make him out, but he’s there.”

The eagle glided above them without a sound. It flapped its wings on occasion but mostly used the wind to carry it across the clouds.