The Crown’s Game by Evelyn Skye Read Free Book Online

throne, I shall abdicate immediately.”
    Nikolai perched on the log next to him. “You’d do no such thing, and you know it.”
    “Ah, but I can dream.” Pasha openedhis eyes. “The pressure is not only from my father these days. It’s also my mother. She thinks it urgent that they find me a wife.”
    “I know more than a few who are willing.” Nikolai nudged the prince with his boot. Every girl in the Russian Empire would sell her soul to be the tsesarevich’s Cinderella.
    Pasha responded by yanking Nikolai’s boot straight off his foot.
    “Hey!”
    Pasha laughed andhurled the boot into the shrubbery. “You know I want more from a wife than a girl fawning at my feet.”
    “Well, all I want is a boot to cover my feet.” Nikolai hobbled through the grass and rocks in the direction his shoe had disappeared.
    Then the peace of the morning was shattered by a crash of thunder. It was so violent, it shook the leaves on the birches and vibrated through the ground. Nikolaiand Pasha both leaped up.
    Nikolai lurched through the bushes, struggling to pull on his boot while squinting at the sky. It was still bright blue, save for a black cloud above the easternmost side of the forest. A sharp bolt of lightning split the azure, and for a moment, Nikolai wondered whether it could ever be pieced back together again.
    “We need to take cover,” he yelled over the next crackof thunder.
    Another bolt of lightning flashed, and this one struck a tree in the distance, black smoke instantly feathering into the sky. Then, in a brief period of quiet, a girl’s scream carried from the east with the wind. Nikolai leaned in the direction from which it came. It did not sound like a call for help. It sounded like . . . a battle cry.
    No sooner had her scream left the air thanthunder and lightning stormed down in rapid succession. There was no rain, though, only fire, bursting from the lightning to the trees until the sky to the east was obscured by orange and yellow and black.
    “The girl! We have to help her!” Pasha said.
    “Stay here. I’ll go.” He couldn’t let Pasha run straight into the center of a storm like that. What if something happened to him?
    But Pasha wasalready running deeper into the woods.
    “Damn it.” Nikolai chased after him. But his boot was unlaced, and he tripped in a puddle of mud. Pasha hurtled onward and disappeared between the trees.
    Nikolai glared at his laces, and they whipped into action and secured themselves in a double knot. Then he sprinted as fast as he could, weaving through bushes and leaping over fallen trees, pushing deeperinto ash-thick air with every stride.
    By the time he caught up, Pasha was already at a standstill, not a hundred feet from the edge of the flames.
    “What is this?” Pasha pointed at the ring of blazing fallen trees before them, a perfect circle.
    “I don’t know,” Nikolai said. But there was no way thiscould have been an accident of nature. He spun around, searching. Something had done this onpurpose. Some one . He could feel the otherness weighing on the air, thick and heavy. And again, that taste of cinnamon tinged with the portent of death. Nikolai swiped at his mouth as if that would obliterate the taste and foreboding.
    The pile of fiery tree trunks began to move, lifting from the center. He and Pasha both staggered back and drew their hunting knives, and Nikolai positioned himselfbetween Pasha and the inferno. He would not lose the future tsar of the Russian Empire without a fight, although what he was fighting, he hadn’t a clue.
    The fire grew hotter and burned at such reckless speed, the branches in the middle of the pile collapsed to embers the instant a flame licked them.
    Then, as the blaze devoured the remaining length of the trees, lashing its way out to the edgeof the circle, a small figure rose from the center, itself engulfed in flames.
    “You see, Father,” a girl’s voice said calmly, almost cheerfully, “I told you I’d master it today.