The Crown's Game (The Crown's Game, #1)(5)
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.
Perhaps that was precisely the point.
Nikolai snapped his fingers, and a black cravat tied itself expertly around his neck. Next, a blue paisley waistcoat (which Nikolai had made last month) buttoned itself around him. Then, finally, a black frock coat enveloped him, although he smiled smugly as he chose one with notched lapels, because Galina be damned, it was two in the morning, and if there was any time that was informal enough for notched lapels, it was in these dead-eyed hours between twilight and dawn.
Oh, and a hat. He couldn’t forget his top hat.
Having dressed, Nikolai flicked his fingers at the door to open it. He strode down the hall and, seeing no sign of Galina, slid down the curved wooden banister to the first floor. The grandfather clock at the base of the stairs showed four minutes past the hour. Nikolai hurried across the Persian rug in the drawing room, through the foyer—dark since the candles in the chandelier were dormant—and out the front door.
Galina was already tapping her high-heeled boot on what would be the cobblestones had her feet actually touched the ground. But of course they didn’t. Galina had always thought the ground was both literally and figuratively beneath her.
She arched her brow as she took in Nikolai’s notched lapels. Then, after just enough scrutiny to push him to the brink of cringing, she turned abruptly and started down the street, toward Ekaterinsky Canal, without giving any hint as to where she was headed, nor what she intended to do.
Nikolai swore under his breath again and hurried to follow.
CHAPTER FOUR
They wound through streets lit only by occasional lamps, their reflections shimmering on the damp cobblestones. Galina led Nikolai past grand mansions with pastel facades and ornate windows trimmed in white and gold, over the stone bridges that traversed the city’s many canals—which had earned Saint Petersburg its nickname as the “Venice of the North”—and through grand squares empty of everything but bronze statues protecting the night. The dark closed in on Nikolai, and he pulled his coat tighter around himself. He thought again of his cozy bed. Where in the devil’s name was Galina taking him?
Eventually, they arrived at the front door of the Imperial Public Library, on the corner of Nevsky Prospect—the wide, main boulevard of the city—and Sadovaya Street. The library was an immense stone building painted powder blue, with white statues flanked by white columns. It housed national and foreign treasures, like Voltaire’s personal library, and since Galina had not wanted to pay for Nikolai’s enrollment at either a gymnasium or a military cadet school, Nikolai had educated himself in his scraps of free time within these very walls. The Imperial Public Library was one of his favorite places in the city. And now, at two thirty in the morning, the building somehow seemed even grander to him, looming like a shadow too colossal to be restrained.
“Please tell me you don’t intend for me to break into the library?”
Galina looked down at him, for she was now hovering a foot in the air, since there was no one in the streets at this hour other than drunks, whose hungover morning stories would never be believed. (Which raised the question, again, of why Nikolai had to be dressed so neatly.)
“As if I would so disrespect a national institution!” Galina said. “No, I simply want you to reshelve some of the books inside. They have been misplaced.”
“Reshelve them . . . now? From outside?”
“Of course now, and of course from outside.” She threw her hands in the air. “Do you think we’re out here because I wanted a walking companion?”