Kazakh stone into the semblance of a proper Petersburg jewel. Galina did not correct them.
Now Nikolai stood very still while his scissors hovered above a mahogany table on the other side of the room, cutting through a panel of black wool. He pointed at the scissors to slice a notch in the lapel.
Before they had a chance, though, Galina barged into his room—it was her house he lived in, after all—and halted the scissors in midair. “Arrête.” She spoke French, just as she had the first time he met her, when he was a child and still living in a nomadic village on the Kazakh steppe. Then, French had been gibberish to him. But now the language was second nature, and Nikolai was rather proud that he spoke it without an accent. All the aristocracy in Saint Petersburg spoke French.
Nikolai shifted from his position in front of the mirrors, where the cloth tape was still busily flying about.
“No step in the lapels,” Galina said.
“But I like them notched.”
“For informal frock coats, that is acceptable. But this one ought to be formal. And make it double-breasted.”
Nikolai bit the inside of his cheek. How utterly like Galina to deny him something as simple as notched lapels. But he swirled his hand in the air as he relayed new instructions to his scissors. They repositioned themselves and began snipping again.
“Actually, we don’t have time for this.” Galina clapped her hands three times, which made the jeweled bangles on her wrists jingle, and the wool and scissors vanished.
“Hey!”
“Get dressed to go out and meet me downstairs in five minutes. It’s time for a lesson.”
“It’s two o’clock in the morning.”
Galina shrugged and glided out of his room.
Nikolai sighed. Ever since her husband, the old war hero Count Mikhail Zakrevsky, had died six years ago, Galina had grown even more intractable than she’d been before. So it was no accident that Nikolai had turned out a touch morose. He’d endured Galina’s lack of pity for a sum total of eleven years.
Nikolai eyed his bed. Without the project of his frock coat, a curtain of fatigue suddenly threatened to drop over him. His pillows crooned a siren song.
He could refuse Galina’s command. It was inhumane to train at this hour.
But if he disobeyed, he would have to leave, because he was only given a place in the Zakrevsky house as long as he was Galina’s student. And he could not give that up, because studying with her was his ticket to becoming more than a no-name orphan. He could be Imperial Enchanter someday.
However, it wouldn’t be as easy as knocking on the Winter Palace door and asking for the job. Well, it would have been, if Nikolai were the only enchanter in Russia, but it so happened that there had been two enchanters born after the last one perished. It was an anomaly, having more than one enchanter at a time, but not completely unprecedented. Like Mother Nature’s occasional deviations from the norm, so Russia’s magic sometimes gifted the empire with a pair of enchanters rather than only one.
But there was a solution for that. “It’s a game,” Galina had told Nikolai when she’d taken him under her tutelage. “The one with the best magic wins.”
He’d been only seven when Galina came to the Kazakh steppe—the border between Asia and the Russian Empire—and she’d been unlike any woman Nikolai had ever seen. A dainty hat perched atop carefully coiffed brown curls. A voluminous gown made of iridescent purple fabric that shimmered in the sweltering midday sun. And preposterously high-heeled boots that looked like an accident waiting to happen on the uneven terrain of the grassy steppe.
An accident, that is, if the woman were actually walking. Nikolai twisted the hem of his tunic as he studied her. He focused on the space between the ground and the soles of her tiny feet and discovered that there was, indeed, a space between, if only inches. She levitated and merely moved her legs to create the illusion of walking. And she did so without seeming aware of it, as if the movement had been a part of her for decades. Nikolai grinned and puffed out his chest. The other children in the village wouldn’t have noticed. They would simply have thought the woman was preternaturally graceful.
When she floated to a stop in front of him seconds later, she stooped—although still hovering—and asked, “C’est toi que je cherche?”
Nikolai tilted his head, and the fringe of his dark hair fell in his