The Crown's Game

Vika Andreyeva can summon the snow and turn ash into gold. Nikolai Karimov can see through walls and conjure bridges out of thin air. They are the only two enchanters in Russia, and with the Ottoman Empire and the Kazakhs pressing at the borders, the tsar needs a powerful enchanter beside him.

So he initiates the Crown's Game, an ancient duel of magical skill and the greatest test an enchanter will ever face. The victor becomes Imperial Enchanter and the tsar's most respected adviser. The defeated is sentenced to death.

Evelyn Skye's YA fantasy sets its magic against a nineteenth-century Saint Petersburg of ballrooms and imperial politics, and gives its two duellists the worst possible complication: each is the only other person in the world who understands what the other can do. It is the first of two books, followed by The Crown's Fate.