Wicked Saints

by Emily A Duncan

  Something slammed into Nadya’s back and suddenly the chilling bite of a blade was pressed against her throat. The boy appeared in front of her, his crossbow back in his hands, thankfully not pointed at Nadya. It was clear he could only barely see her. He wasn’t Kalyazi, but Akolan.

  A fair number of Akolans had taken advantage of the war between their neighbors, hiring out their swords for profit on both sides. They were known for favoring Tranavia simply because of the warmer climate. It was rare to find a creature of the desert willingly stumbling through Kalyazin’s snow.

  He spoke a fluid string of words she didn’t understand. His posture was languid, as if he hadn’t nearly been torn to pieces by blood mages. The blade against Nadya’s throat pressed harder. A colder voice responded to him, the foreign language scratched uncomfortably at her ears.

  Nadya only knew the three primary languages of Kalyazin and passing Tranavian. If she wasn’t going to be able to communicate with them …

  The boy said something else and Nadya heard the girl sigh before she felt the blade slip away. “What’s a little Kalyazi assassin doing out in the middle of the mountains?” he asked, switching to perfect Kalyazi.

  Nadya was very aware of the boy’s friend at her back. “I could ask the same of you.”

  She shifted Bozidarka’s spell, sharpening her vision further. The boy had skin like molten bronze and long hair with gold chains threaded through his loose curls.

  He grinned.

  A thud sounded nearby, startling him, but it was the recognizable sound of someone slamming face-first into a tree. Anna’s muffled swearing followed. Nadya rolled her eyes and sent up an apology to the heavens. The stars and moons relit in the sky, making the world seem three times brighter.

  “We’ll be hearing prophesies about the end of the world for the next twenty years now!” Anna cried. She had her venyiashk drawn, her gaze wary as she looked just past Nadya’s shoulder.

  Nadya crouched, stabbing her bloody voryen into the snow. She looked up at the Akolan boy, lifting her hands as she straightened. Caution was necessary, they were in the middle of a war zone, but she had just saved their lives. He eyed her before letting out the tension on the crossbow.

  She glanced behind her to see a tall Akolan girl sheathing her curved dagger. Her thick, dark hair fell in waves around her shoulders and she wore old, weather-beaten Kalyazi clothes, but her gold nose ring glinted new in the moonlight.

  When Nadya turned to shoot Anna a pointed look, the priestess sighed and dropped her blade as well.

  “Who are you?” Nadya asked.

  The boy ignored her. “Did you do that?” he asked, pointing at the sky.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped.

  “Ridiculous, as you say. My name is Rashid Khajouti, and my lovely companion—”

  “Can speak perfectly well for herself,” the Akolan girl said, sounding amused. Her hand no longer lingered near the hilt of her dagger and she moved away from Nadya to show she meant no harm. “My name is Parijahan Siroosi. I suppose we should be thanking you, not threatening you.” She glanced at Rashid. “There were more Tranavians than we initially thought.”

  They had made quick work of them, regardless. Nadya’s gaze landed on a crossbow, dropped by a Tranavian soldier, near her feet. She picked it up. The image of Kostya flashed in her vision. It took everything she had to not smash the weapon to pieces.

  “Why were two Akolans planning on taking down a group of Tranavians in the middle of the night?” she asked, running her fingers over the wood of the crossbow, trying to dispel the image of her dead friend.

  “I could ask the same,” Parijahan said.

  “We have a clear and obvious reason to be killing Tranavians, in general,” Nadya pointed out.

  Rashid chuckled. Parijahan shot him a look and he fell silent.

  Something felt off, but Nadya couldn’t place what it was. The way the Akolans had relaxed after initially being so aggressive, the stillness of the night air around them: the pieces weren’t lining up right.

  Horz?

  “Yes, love?”

  That wasn’t all of the Tranavians, was it?

  “I thought you knew.”

  She cranked the crossbow to set the bolt and turned it on the Akolan boy. Anna moved at the same instant, her venyiashk drawn against Parijahan’s neck. There was no possible way she could have known the reason for Nadya’s sudden defense, but she trusted Nadya enough to move without question.

  It was that kind of blind trust that made Nadya uncomfortable.

  “You’re our voice to the people, love,” Horz said. “You’d best get used to blind adoration.”

  “There are more Tranavians nearby,” Nadya said to Anna.

  The Akolans just exchanged a knowing glance. There was something else going on here.

  But before she could think of what to do, Rashid hefted his own crossbow and fired.

  She ducked instinctively, in an attempt to knock the bolt into her shoulder or arm, somewhere less deadly than her heart.

  But she heard the thud of the bolt hitting flesh and a strangled cry and it took her brain a handful of painful seconds to catch up. It hadn’t been her. She hadn’t been hit.

  “You missed.” A new voice spoke, this one rich with a thick Tranavian accent.

  A chill dragged down Nadya’s spine. Tranavian words bouncing off the walls of a dark cavern as her home burned above. Was the voice the same? It sounded the same. The same lilt—even though the words were Kalyazi this time—and a distinct presence of authority.

  How had the prince caught up already? It was too late, it was over.

  She turned.

  There was a Tranavian soldier on his knees in the snow, a crossbow bolt sticking out of his shoulder. His face was expressionless, his eyes glassy. Behind him stood a tall, wiry boy with sharp, wild features and long black hair. The boy’s hands were covered in blood, a crumpled spell book page in one, the other held outstretched toward the soldier in the snow.

  “I go and find the one you let get away and you don’t even have the decency to kill him,” the boy said, and tutted at Rashid.

  His fingers twitched, just slightly, and whatever spell he had caught the soldier up in changed and the man crumpled to the ground, dead. He dropped the page and used the snow to wipe the blood off his hands.

  It wasn’t the prince. Nadya wanted to be relieved—because maybe this meant she was safe—but she had felt the wave of power as the boy cast his magic. It was strong. Far stronger than the power she had felt from even the Tranavian prince during the attack.

  “We could have gotten information out of him,” Parijahan pointed out, then simply moved away from Anna’s blade.

  Anna shot Nadya a desperate look, but she just shrugged, equally bewildered. The only Tranavian she could now feel nearby was the mage, but he clearly knew the Akolans.

  They needed to leave. This commotion was happening dangerously close to the monastery, to the prince. Nadya saw her chance when Rashid began picking through the soldiers’ belongings. But the Tranavian boy took a step closer and she froze, suddenly aware the situation had moved from benign to deadly in only a few short seconds.

  The way he looked at her was too discerning, too focused. Even in the darkness, Nadya could see his eyes were such a pale shade of blue as to be nearly devoid of color. He was the second Tranavian with eyes like ice she had seen in as many days.

  His gaze flicked to Anna, but then returned to her.

  “Names?” he asked.

  Parijahan shook her head.

  “We very politely gave them our names, but I suppose Kalyazi don’t appreciate manners,” Rashid said.

  A smile slid over the Tranavian’s face, slightly feral. His canine teeth were oddly sharp; everything about him was sharp in the most unnerving way. There were three vertical lines tattooed down his forehead in black ink, ending at the bridge of his straight nose.

  “Wise of them.”

  Nadya was beg
inning to see her mistake in not taking the opportunity to run. There were only three of them, and none of them could be much older than her, but there was something so off-putting about the Tranavian. She couldn’t put a name to it, but she knew—intrinsically—he would not hesitate to kill her if she made any indication of hostility.

  Would he hand her right back to the prince? Or would he kill her here and take whatever power her blood might harbor for his own?

  She might have failed to protect the monastery, but she would die before she let herself fall into the hands of a Tranavian.

  He stepped closer. She froze, all cavalier thoughts of heroism escaping her. She didn’t know if she could actually fight off this boy if it came to it, and maybe waiting out the situation would get her to the other side alive. He took her string of prayer beads in one hand. A hiss of displeasure escaped her lips. No one touched her beads but her.

  “You both came from the monastery, yes?” His Kalyazi was almost perfect but for the crackling Tranavian accent that hardened his words. Beating the consonants into submission.

  The answer was too obvious to deny. She fought against the urge to step back because even the foot of space he was giving her was much too close. This boy was a heretic, he profaned the gods and cast blood magic. Around him the air snapped with wrongness.

  “So which one of you is the one with magic?” His voice lowered.

  “Kalyazi don’t have magic,” Anna said, a beat too quick.

  The boy gave her a shrewd glance before returning to Nadya.

  “It was you.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, but her traitorous voice shook. Each moment they stood out in the open was another chance for the prince to come upon them. Maybe that was exactly what he wanted. Maybe he was just stalling.

  He smiled, the expression dangerous and chilling and far too appraising. He reached down and took Nadya’s hand, pressing it to his lips as if he were a court nobleman and not a renegade blood mage out in the middle of enemy territory. “My name is Malachiasz Czechowicz,” he said, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that she had just been given something. Something she had not asked for and could not envision ever wanting.

  She did not give him her name and he dropped her hand.

  What was that?

  Nadya elected to ignore it, clenching her teeth and fighting the urge to step away.

  “We need to get out of here,” Anna said, moving closer to Nadya.

  She nodded, and stooped down, carefully picking up her voryen and sheathing it, aware of the way Malachiasz tensed as she did so.

  “The danger has passed, and we haven’t yet finished our introductions,” Rashid said pointedly.

  Nadya couldn’t see any reason to lie. “There’s a prince on our trail and the longer we spend out here, the closer he gets. We thought the group you had your sights on was part of his company, but it looks like they were merely stragglers. We’ll be on our way now before he has the chance to catch up.”

  Rashid’s eyes narrowed. Malachiasz’s head tilted to one side, his hand lifting to rest on the spell book at his hip.

  “Prince? The Tranavians have as many princes as you Kalyazi. You’ll have to be more specific,” Rashid said lazily, but his expression creased with alarm.

  “The High Prince,” Anna snapped.

  Parijahan glanced at Malachiasz. “The High Prince is this far into Kalyazin?”

  They don’t know, Nadya realized, an almost giddy sense of relief rushing through her. The Tranavian was a problem, but he wasn’t a part of the prince’s company.

  “The monastery burned yesterday,” Nadya said, tripping over the words. It was too raw.

  Parijahan pushed Malachiasz out of the way. “So you need somewhere safe to wait him out?”

  Nadya blinked. “What?”

  “Parj…” Malachiasz said, his voice a warning.

  She ignored him. “Come with us,” she said earnestly. “We can keep you safe from the prince.”

  Nadya’s gaze strayed to Malachiasz. Parijahan followed it.

  “He won’t harm you.” It would have been more reassuring if she sounded confident.

  “I make no promises,” he murmured.

  “I won’t have anything to do with any Tranavian,” Nadya said. “Except to kill them.”

  “Yes, I can see that,” Malachiasz said. He nudged one of the dead soldiers with the toe of his boot. “An admirable skill set. She’s not going to take you up on your offer, Parijahan. We should go.”

  “The actual High Prince is near?” Rashid asked.

  “Blood and bone, I should have left you both in those gutters,” Malachiasz snapped. He bent down and snatched a spell book off one of the dead soldiers, then stalked into the trees.

  Rashid shrugged at Parijahan and took off after him. Parijahan watched the boys disappear.

  “Technically,” she said conspiratorially to Nadya, “he would have been killed by the Kalyazi soldiers he was antagonizing had we not come along. But Rashid did end up unconscious in a gutter.”

  Nadya felt like she was going to explode with nerves. The most she and Anna could do would be to hike a few more miles into the mountains and hope the High Prince didn’t already have their trail.

  “Can you truly keep us safe?” she asked as Parijahan turned back to her. Nadya didn’t like the thought of being anywhere near that blood mage, but if there were straggling bands of Tranavian soldiers this deep into the mountains, they could happen upon another at any time and not be so lucky. Nadya didn’t want to think about what this could mean for the war effort.

  Parijahan nodded. “There’s an abandoned church nearby. We found it a few weeks ago and have made it almost livable. It could fall around our ears at any second, but at least it’s warm.”

  Anna let out a sharp breath. Nadya glanced at her, but Anna just shook her head.

  “And you’ll do this … why? You put a dagger to my neck.”

  “I did, but it was very dark. And you helped us. I have a bad habit of picking up those who’ve helped me.” She smiled wryly, but her expression became deadly serious as she glanced up at the sky.

  It was clear she knew Nadya had cast the magic. There had never been any true point in trying to hide it. Using her power was inevitable, and the minute she did, people would know Kalyazin had clerics again after a thirty-year absence.

  One cleric, at least.

  Parijahan rubbed the hilt of her dagger. “I think you can aid us in doing the impossible.”

  5

  SEREFIN

  MELESKI

  Svoyatovo Radmila, Nymphadora, and Agrippa Martyvsheva: Triplets blessed by the god Vaclav, the Martyvshevas lived in the center of the dark Chernayevsky Forest in quiet communion with their patron until the heretic Sergiusz Konicki invaded. When he tried to force the Martyvshevas to renounce their patron, they resisted. Konicki killed Nymphadora and Agrippa, burning them and half the Chernayevsky Forest. Radmila fled to safety, spent seven years in contemplation with Vaclav, then hunted Konicki down and burned him alive like he had her sisters.

  —Vasiliev’s Book of Saints

  The next morning, Serefin woke with a raging hangover and a prisoner to interrogate. It was early, before dawn, and he lay on the stone-hard pallet, staring up at the ceiling and contemplating his fate.

  If they found the cleric within the next few days—he was certain they would—it meant a speedy return to Tranavia. It had been years since he had been in Tranavia for longer than a few months. The war was all he had.

  He wasn’t sure he remembered how to be the High Prince instead of the blood mage general at the helm of the army.

  Serefin sat up and was rewarded by a headache pounding a hammer against his temple. He groaned, running a hand through his hair. He shrugged on his coat and tried to ignore that his mouth tasted as if he had chewed on sawdust all night.

  He opened the door to find his entire company in a panic.

  “Your Highness, I was just coming to w
ake you,” Ostyia called.

  He blinked at the pair of soldiers who were crashing through the hall past her, shouting something about the end of the world.

  “I’m going back to bed,” he said. He’d had enough of this ridiculous country and their ridiculous religion and maybe the end of the world would stop the absolutely blinding headache he had acquired.

  “Serefin!”

  “Oh, yell a little more, Ostyia, please.”

  He turned back, regretting the motion immediately as the room spun. He pressed a hand to his face, slouching against the doorframe.

  She was fighting a smile. He was going to kill her. “Do you want me to get you something for that hangover?” she asked sweetly.

  “No—yes, water, just water.” He waved a hand. This wasn’t fair. He was certain she’d had more to drink than him the night before. “Then someone tell me what’s going on.” He rested his forehead against the stones, cool against his skin.

  Ostyia returned a few moments later, handing him a full skin of water. It didn’t help. He kept a hand pressed to his temple as he signaled her to brief him.

  “Sometime around three o’clock in the morning everything in the sky went out.”

  He flinched as he raised an eyebrow. Why did that hurt? “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means the whole world went dark for about fifteen minutes last night.”

  Serefin’s eyes narrowed.

  “Also a scout we sent in the direction of the Kalyazi girls never returned,” Ostyia continued. “Are you allowed to kill people if you’re the hand of the divine?”

  He ignored that.

  “Should I order the rest of the company to move out? We can have them sent ahead.”

  He considered her suggestion. “Hold that order.” He wanted to send the rest of the company with Teodore while he sought out the cleric.

  “You’re giving her time to get away.”

  “I still have her trail. I need something more to ground the spell. We’re going to get it now.”

  Serefin followed Ostyia through the sparse and cold hallways of the monastery and into the opulent sanctuary. He didn’t understand why so much money was poured into creating something for the purpose of gods who would not care a bit for it, but he could still appreciate beauty for what it was.