Wicked Saints

by Emily A Duncan

  Ostyia shot him a disbelieving look. “He’s been stepping on you for ages now.”

  “Has he?”

  Serefin hadn’t had a moment’s respite in years. With the country at war it stood to reason, but anytime he returned to Grazyk to remind the country that they did have a prince, he was turned around and sent right back to the front. He was tired, beginning to fray at the edges, as if the barest touch would shatter him. He didn’t want to play political games as soon as he returned to Tranavia, but that was his fate.

  Ostyia was right, the rift was growing deeper. His father had been trying his hardest to gloss over the truth. His son was a talented blood mage, and he was not. If he pushed Serefin out of sight, the slavhki of the court would never recall the son was more powerful than the father.

  Serefin jumped down off the wall, sliding on the icy stone of the courtyard before turning around and facing his friends. “Well? We might as well put on a good show.”

  “Is that what it will be? A show?” Ostyia asked.

  “If it’s a Rawalyk, then yes,” Kacper said.

  “Meaningless dramatics for the sake of the nobility,” Serefin said, then shrugged. “There’s something else here. I might as well see what it is. I’m sure it won’t be good.”

  Ostyia’s eye narrowed. “I know that look. What are you planning?”

  Serefin wasn’t sure he was planning anything yet. He had a feeling, a creeping dread that wouldn’t allow him to run home and play the part of the prince without some misgivings first. Maybe it was a product of being battered alive by this war, of seeing death and destruction every day for years. Maybe he was just growing irrational. Either way, it was there.

  “What if my father is using the Rawalyk to install a puppet as his heir? Someone who can be manipulated.” Serefin was too opinionated, too powerful, too much of a threat to Izak Meleski’s sovereignty. “If he ties someone to the throne through me and then I meet an unfortunate accident…” he trailed off.

  “Oy,” Ostyia murmured.

  “Just how paranoid do I sound?”

  “Very.”

  He nodded. “I’ve been leading armies for three years,” he said, voice soft. “And you don’t go onto a battlefield without a strategy. But sometimes, reconnaissance is necessary. So I’m going to go home. I’m going to see what this nonsense is about, and then I’m going to deal with it as necessary. That may mean playing the prince and participating in needless dramatics. It could mean something entirely different. We may as well go and find out what this battle is going to look like.” With that, Serefin started down the seven thousand steps.

  8

  NADEZHDA

  LAPTEVA

  The goddess of vision, Bozidarka, is a goddess of prophecy. Be warned: for her gifts can break a mortal’s mind and her blessings are not so easily interpreted.

  —Codex of the Divine, 7:12

  No more was said about plans to kill kings. After Nadya had stuttered through her disbelief that it was even possible, Parijahan had suggested they speak more in the morning.

  Killing the Tranavian king could end the war, but better still—at least for her—it would be some small justice for Kostya’s death. She would take the risk for that. She didn’t know if it would be possible—doubted it immensely—but the conversation made her warm to the Akolans. Even if she was still waiting for the right moment to put one of her voryens in the Tranavian’s heart.

  Nadya passed a restless night in a chilly room with hard beds and thin blankets stolen from Tranavian soldiers. She was up before dawn breached the horizon, slipping out of the room and down the hall. She was used to waking before the sun to pray and wanted to be somewhere suitable to do so.

  Anna was still asleep when she stepped out into the hallway. She found Parijahan in the gutted sanctuary, sitting at the table with ragged maps spread out in front of her.

  “You were serious, weren’t you?” Nadya asked. She sat down across from the Akolan girl.

  “Why would I joke about something like this?” Parijahan replied, without looking up. She wore her dark hair in a loose braid that curled over her shoulder. “There were more of us, once. A boy who lost everything when the Tranavians burned down the forest he and his family used as their livelihood, a girl who grew up in a refugee camp, Kalyazi siblings from Novirkrya who were conscripted into the army when they were children but then defected.”

  Novirkrya was a village just on the southern border, near Lidnado, a small country that hated both its neighbors in equal measure and had remained miraculously apart from the war for the near century it had been raging, likely out of spite alone.

  “There are so very few faithful left in that country,” Marzenya noted.

  “What happened to them?” Nadya asked.

  “This country, this war. The siblings had to flee north to avoid the army catching them, but it was like that for most.”

  But the two Akolans and the Tranavian remained?

  The others trickled into the room. Anna sat down next to Nadya, leaning her head against Nadya’s shoulder.

  “Well,” Anna said, “we’re still here.”

  “No High Prince,” Parijahan said.

  Rashid brought food into the room; bowls of kasha—a thin gruel Nadya knew well—and loaves of hard, black bread which he set on the table before he curled up on the pile of pillows in the corner. He was dressed in layered, golden brown Akolan robes with long, slit sleeves.

  “Nobody warned me that Kalyazi assassins rise before dawn.” He yawned.

  Malachiasz entered the room clutching half a loaf of black bread and looking like he hadn’t slept at all. His long hair was tangled and there were dark smudges of shadow underneath his pale eyes. He flopped onto the pillows beside Rashid and put an arm over his face.

  “They don’t, but acolytes who have to answer the call to prayer at three in the morning do,” Nadya said.

  “And they call us barbarians,” Malachiasz mused.

  “We call you heretics. It’s different. And accurate,” Nadya snapped.

  He sat up and rolled his eyes, then stuck most of the bread in his mouth. He opened his spell book and dropped a quill in the crease between the pages.

  “Don’t you dare start bleeding all over that while we’re eating,” Parijahan said.

  Malachiasz looked up, a knife already in his hand, the blade poised on his forearm, bread still half in his mouth. Parijahan stared him down. After a long silence he meekly lowered the blade.

  Nadya looked down at the map, Parijahan passing her a bowl of kasha. “I need to get to the military camp in Tvir,” she said. She couldn’t truly entertain their wild plans about assassinating kings. There were things expected of her, she couldn’t just abandon those duties at the first obstacle. She was the vessel that would flood the world with the gods’ touch once more.

  “Tvir? Are you planning to waltz straight into the hands of Tranavia, towy dżimyka?” Malachiasz asked.

  She wracked her basic understanding of Tranavian for what he’d called her. Little bird? Confused by both his meaning and the vaguely condescending way he’d said it, she elected to ignore him completely.

  “Clearly, you had a protocol to follow, yes?” he continued. “An important mage like you?”

  Nadya found it difficult to ignore his continued condescension.

  “But if you go to Tvir, you’re going to die. It fell to Tranavia two months ago.”

  Anna paled. Nadya tried to ignore the despair that hit her in the chest. It settled right between her ribs, hammering at her with each beat of her heart. This was hopeless; she was going to die before she had a chance to do anything for her country.

  “Everything was destroyed,” Parijahan said softly, cutting through some of the tension between Nadya and Malachiasz. “The military camp, the nearby village. We were close by when it happened. We got lucky and escaped. Others were not so lucky.”

  Anna rubbed her forehead. When Nadya looked to her for some kind of direction,
or something, she just shrugged. “That was all I ever was told to do,” she said. “The next outpost is…”

  “Not close,” Rashid said.

  A door slammed shut before Nadya. “So I should listen to the plans of two foreigners who have welcomed my enemy with open arms?”

  Malachiasz smiled.

  Parijahan pursed her lips. “When I was thirteen, my older sister was to be married to a Tranavian slavhka. There was no love, it was a political marriage, but Taraneh was hopeful. They had met once before the marriage and he seemed…” she trailed off, shaking her head. Her gaze was firmly locked on a corner of the room. “Normal. A blood mage, but what Tranavian isn’t? Regardless, the wedding went fine—”

  “The wedding was not fine,” Rashid interrupted.

  Parijahan’s face twisted. “We thought nothing of it, it stood to reason there might be some tension.”

  Foreboding weighed heavy in the Akolan’s words and Nadya shifted uncomfortably. She glanced at Malachiasz, but he was watching Parijahan with a careful expression on his face, not hostile or mocking, just gently attentive.

  “My family is well off—”

  “Be honest, Parj,” Rashid said softly.

  She sighed. “My family is one of the three high Travasha of Akola. My sister was murdered a month after her wedding, in a foreign land, for her dowry.”

  “And Akola didn’t go to war over that?” Anna asked.

  “There was never any proof the Tranavian did it. It looked like an accident, my sister drowned in one of Tranavia’s hundreds of lakes.” Parijahan laughed bitterly. “Of course, because Akola is a land of deserts, why would a prasīt know how to swim? But Taraneh was a fine swimmer; her favorite place in the world was the oasis near our family home.”

  “So what are you doing here?” Nadya asked. And what are you doing with a Tranavian blood mage?

  “There were some rash decisions made,” Rashid said.

  “I took revenge,” Parijahan said matter-of-factly. “And now there is one less slavhka in the Tranavian court.”

  “Why not return to Akola after? Why stay here?”

  “I don’t want anything to do with a family that will not avenge the death of their daughter. Tranavia cannot win this war,” she said fiercely. “Let them live with their blood magic and their corrupt politicians in their own country, but they cannot be allowed to spread beyond their borders.”

  Nadya thumbed at her necklace, searching for the god of truth—Vaclav’s—bead. She was bewildered when Vaclav confirmed that all three were being truthful with her. Even the Tranavian.

  “None of this explains him,” Nadya said, pointing to Malachiasz.

  “I’m an enigma,” Malachiasz replied archly. “There were rumors about you, towy dżimyka, on both sides of the war. The Kalyazi cleric come to save the country from the Tranavian scourge.”

  A chill cut through Nadya. She couldn’t tell if he was goading her or not.

  “What are you saying?”

  “Tranavia knows you exist, clearly, why else would the High Prince himself—prodigy tactician of the war—attack a monastery in a location that provides no strategic advantage? And if Tranavia knows, then all of Kalyazin knows as well.”

  There was something else he was saying and it took Nadya longer than she would have liked to catch up.

  “You three are here … because of me?”

  “Doesn’t that make you feel important?”

  He was mocking her again. She sighed.

  “We followed the rumors to this area, yes,” Parijahan said. “I didn’t think anything would come of them, but here you are.”

  Nadya knew divine intervention when she saw it, but something still felt wrong. There was a path she was supposed to walk and this wasn’t it. Working with a heretic wasn’t it. It couldn’t be.

  She ran her spoon around the now empty bowl. “I need time to consider this, to … pray. Do you have a plan for getting into Tranavia?”

  “You can’t be serious,” Anna said.

  “What choice is there?” Nadya retorted.

  “They don’t have a plan,” Malachiasz answered, cutting off Rashid before he had a chance to reply. He closed his spell book with a loud snap. “Go pray,” he said to Nadya, putting the full weight of his loathing on the word pray. “Ask your gods to accomplish the impossible.”

  * * *

  A pathway led through the trees to the remains of a small stone altar. All that was left was a bench and a carving of a purposefully ambiguous figure meant to portray Alena. It was calm outside, early morning light flickering through the empty tree branches, striking the carving so that it drew the sunlight into itself. Nadya settled herself down cross-legged on the bench.

  She tugged her necklace over her head, rubbing her fingers over the beads. She needed to refocus, to work through the trauma of losing her home and her friends. She only felt blank when she thought about the monastery, about Kostya. Where would she be when the agony of losing everything finally caught up with her; would she be in a place where she could handle it?

  She had spent too many sleepless nights wishing she had some small part of her parents to hold on to. All she had was the knowledge her mother had always possessed that her daughter was touched by the gods. Her mother had shown up nine months pregnant on the monastery steps, staying only long enough to give Nadya her name before she was gone, so Father Alexei always told her.

  Lapteva wasn’t even an uncommon surname. It was everywhere. It wasn’t until Nadya was fourteen when she realized no family was returning for her, that her fate lay within the monastery walls and nowhere else. The abbot was the closest thing to a father she would ever have.

  Thinking about Father Alexei made her heart ache. He was dead now, along with everyone else she had known and loved. Kind Marina with her warm laugh, who would smuggle Nadya probov—flat, but tasty, flour cakes—when no one was looking. Dour but talented storyteller Lev, who could spin fables and legends that always made Nadya fear to go to bed at night.

  One evening, he told her a story about a Tranavian monster known as Kashyvhes who drank blood and controlled victims with its mind. While she was walking through the dark halls of the monastery to her chambers that night, Kostya had jumped out of a closet. She punched him so hard he had to go to Ionna, the healer, for a split lip.

  Now they were gone, and the monastery was empty. Its golden relics gutted and icons defaced. The altar probably lay shattered, the statues of saints had likely lost their heads and their hands. All that beauty—holiness—desecrated for the sake of magic and blood.

  But she couldn’t force the feelings and so she sat with an empty heart and a blank mind and waited to see if her gods would talk to her. This time she was alone.

  Ask the gods to do the impossible. The arrogance, Nadya thought. She wasn’t convinced they could do it, but if Malachiasz was right, there was nowhere for her to go. Maybe she should take that as a sign and accept that circumstance was forcing her into this situation that could very well end in disaster.

  She was walking back to the church when she spied Malachiasz slipping through the trees. Curious, she followed, pulling at her prayer beads. She had only taken a few steps when he stopped. Her hand immediately dropped to her voryen.

  “Are you going to put one of your pretty blades into my heart, towy dżimyka?”

  “I’d like to,” she said. “Why do you call me that?”

  He turned to face her, one hand lifting to rest against the spell book strapped to his hip. “What am I supposed to call you?”

  She still hadn’t told them her name. She didn’t know why it felt important to keep it to herself; why she felt like giving this boy her name would be giving him more than he deserved. Maybe she was just being irrational.

  “Nadezhda Lapteva,” she said, then added, “Nadya.”

  Malachiasz looked almost relieved, but Nadya was probably just imagining things. He nodded.

  “Well then, Nadya, please, you are welcome to joi
n me.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “So you can take me back into the woods and murder me?”

  “You were following me,” he pointed out.

  Heat rushed to her face.

  He smiled, then turned to go. “We’re not enemies, Nadya.”

  “Not right now, you mean.”

  He paused, glanced back at her, then nodded. “You have nothing to fear from me.”

  Yet. Nadya heard it in his tone, even if he didn’t mean it—even if he never meant it. He was a Tranavian mage and they were enemies by default.

  She followed him.

  The trees were thick in this stretch of the mountains and even with their leafless, snow-covered boughs it was hard to see through them. All was quiet except for the crackle of ice underneath their feet. Nadya was trying to figure out just where they were going when Malachiasz held out a hand, stopping her. He pressed a finger to his lips.

  They had stopped at a high point on an overhang where the mountainside cut off precariously. Malachiasz shifted to the edge, dropping down into the snow. Nadya hesitated, then moved beside him.

  It took her a second to parse out what she was seeing below, and when she did she nearly shot back to her feet and fled.

  Malachiasz clamped his hand down on her shoulder, pressing her down into the snow. She froze like a startled rabbit; the only defense mechanism she had left. His fingers tensed against her, a pressure that maybe was supposed to be reassuring. He pulled his hand away.

  He had led her straight to the High Prince.

  Malachiasz leaned close to Nadya and she tensed as he tipped his face down to hers, lips at her ear.

  “My magic will be felt the moment I use it.” His voice was a low murmur. “They won’t feel yours.”

  She cast him a sidelong glare and then yanked her glove off and thumbed at her necklace until she found Zlatek’s bead.