Ruthless Gods

by Emily A Duncan

  “I did. I would be lying if I said I haven’t been waiting for some kind of vengeance.”

  “I would be lying if I said I didn’t want it.”

  “Look at us, being honest with each other!”

  She rolled her eyes. “Do you regret it?”

  “It’s war,” he said. She gave him a pointed look, and he sighed. “Nadya, if I let myself regret everything I’ve done, I wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning.”

  She made a thoughtful sound.

  “Is this you deciding ‘well, revenge it is, then’?”

  “Not worth my time. Serefin, having watched your court, I can safely say any chaos that might ensue from your death would hardly be enough to deter anything out at the front.”

  “Ah, saved by my own deeply dysfunctional court.”

  Nadya glared at him. “What does all this have to do with Żaneta?”

  “Her father is going to stage a coup if I don’t bring her forward soon.”

  “You think that he won’t do it regardless of your actions?”

  “Ah, ruined by my own deeply dysfunctional court.”

  She was right. He wasn’t going to stop what was spinning into motion. The mysticism growing around him was making everything worse. How could Tranavia be ruled by someone touched by something no one understood?

  And that voice. It whispered to him constantly, but if he didn’t answer, it wasn’t real. If he told no one, it wasn’t real.

  Or maybe he was simply his father’s son and losing his mind as well.

  They sat in silence. He didn’t know what to do, and she couldn’t really help—if he was overthrown, she would be hanged.

  “We can’t get her without a Vulture,” Nadya said. Then, softer, “Have you heard anything…?”

  He shook his head, cutting her off. Every few weeks she would ask after Malachiasz and he would always give the same answer.

  It was a lie. But she wouldn’t want to hear the things he had heard. The rumors of deaths and dark magic that could only be caused by his cousin.

  “You’ll figure something out,” she said. “You have to.”

  Novel, that the we had become just him fixing things. That was the thing: he had no choice. Nothing would change if he didn’t stop this in its tracks.

  2

  NADEZHDA LAPTEVA

  A goddess of winter knows the taste of bitter cold and broken bones, of frozen ground choking out life. A goddess of death knows vengeance and the burning hatred that fuels the wars of men. Marzenya is benevolent—when she wishes—but cruelty sits easier upon her shoulders.

  —Codex of the Divine, 399:30

  There were a surprising number of Tranavian holy texts for the last—maybe the last?—hopefully not the last because she had failed so utterly—cleric of Kalyazin to read as she bided her time, captive in the heart of Tranavia.

  Not captive, technically, Serefin would chide, you just shouldn’t leave.

  The definition of a captive, then, she would reply, but she understood. Nadya was in constant danger the longer she remained in Grazyk, but staying in the palace kept her within Serefin’s fragile sphere of protection. Granted, protection he seemed puzzled at extending to her. She had no magic and wouldn’t survive the journey through Tranavia to make it home. The well of power she had touched had either dried up or had never been truly hers. And as much as she hated it, she lingered, hoping for the return of the sad, broken boy who had brought her here. She was frustrated with how much hope she felt every time she asked Serefin if he had news and how quickly it crumbled when he told her no.

  Why should she hope for the boy who had betrayed her so completely? Her fury had tempered to a numb ache as months of silence passed. She had no more anger left in her to fight Serefin, much less Malachiasz’s ghost.

  So she skulked around the palace and dragged what religious texts she could find up into the little corner alcove. None of them were particularly helpful. Her gods were her gods, as it was, and there was little a book written centuries ago by a Tranavian priest could inform her that she didn’t already know.

  But there were occasional glimmers among the pages of what she was missing, hints at why she had failed so fully. Why the gods no longer spoke to her, and how a boy twisted into the form of a monster was able to tear himself into pieces and reassemble in the shape of something potentially divine.

  At times the books she found spoke of old religious sects and saints Nadya did not know. How many clerics had been abandoned like Nadya? Her heart would be broken, she thought, if there was anything left of it to break.

  After Serefin wandered off, clearly no closer to a decision than before, she left the library—abandoning the pile of obscure, ultimately forbidden texts stacked in the alcove. She hid the ladder in a random part of the room every day. As yet no one had disturbed her ever-growing stacks, but she was caught in a silent war with the old librarian who perpetually acted like someone using the library was the worst thing that could possibly happen to him.

  “There you are!” Parijahan tugged Nadya away from the direction of the kitchens where she had been planning on smuggling out some bread and cheese, and toward her chambers. “There is a court dinner tonight and you must attend.”

  Nadya groaned. “Serefin didn’t mention that.”

  “He said if he did you would do such a spectacular disappearing act that even I wouldn’t be able to find you. Clearly he was correct.”

  “I’ll kill him,” Nadya muttered as she let Parijahan drag her back to the rooms they shared.

  “You would have done that by now if you were going to,” Parijahan replied evenly.

  The Akolan girl was wearing simple, loose trousers and a blouse in complementary shades of dark gold. Her black hair was tightly braided; the golden ring in her nose caught the light every time they passed a window. They had dropped the pretense of Parijahan acting as Nadya’s servant, though Parijahan continued to decline Serefin’s offers to have her own rooms and be treated as the noble she truly was. Too suspicious, she said, and Nadya had noticed there were a handful of slavhki that Parijahan always went out of her way to avoid.

  Even with the king of Tranavia finally dead, Parijahan was more on edge than ever, her secrets held with a firm grip from Nadya.

  Malachiasz’s betrayal was just as brutally unexpected to Parijahan, but questioning her about it got Nadya nothing but cryptic answers that meant little. Asking Rashid was worse. The Akolan boy was far too good at spinning his words, so he said absolutely nothing but took ten minutes to do so.

  “Did Serefin tell you anything else?” Nadya asked.

  Parijahan shook her head. “Is it me, or does he look like he hasn’t been sleeping?”

  “Not just you.” There had been dark smudges underneath Serefin’s pale blue eyes and stubble dusting his pale jaw and cheeks. And he had reeked of alcohol. “Frankly, I don’t blame him.”

  Nadya couldn’t say she had been sleeping well, either. The months since that night in the cathedral had been hard, and when she slept she saw things she didn’t particularly want to consider. But at least when she was asleep she didn’t have to confront the silence in her mind. She wasn’t used to being alone with her thoughts and found she hated it.

  “Read anything interesting?” Parijahan asked. It was her standard inquiry after Nadya’s visits to the library.

  Nadya always shrugged noncommittally. She didn’t even know what she was searching for. Mostly she was hiding. From herself, from Serefin, from Parijahan.

  “There was a Tranavian saint named Maryna Cierzpieta whose head was cut off, but she picked it up and went on her way.”

  Parijahan cast her a sidelong look. “I can’t tell if you’re making that up or not.”

  Nadya pressed a hand over her heart. “This is my religion, Parj, would I lie?”

  Parijahan snorted.

  “I’m serious! She started a cult of personality and everything. It all died out about one hundred and thirty years before Tranavi
a broke from the gods.”

  Parijahan made a contemplative noise as they reached their rooms. Nadya flopped onto a chaise in the sitting room.

  “You’re not locking yourself in that library every day to read stories about saints you already know.”

  Frustrated, Nadya’s fingers went to her prayer beads, the shock hitting her anew when she found her neck bare. It was a daily occurrence and she was still waiting for it to stop hurting. She gathered her hair back and began braiding it instead.

  “How did he decide on the path he took?” she finally asked. “How did he get the idea that he should be the one to unseat the gods? He must have read it somewhere. Something started him down that road. I have to find it.”

  Parijahan moved across the room, sitting next to Nadya. “Or, he’s simply an idealistic boy who found something to blame. You’re not going to find answers to that problem in old books.”

  “I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do,” Nadya said softly.

  Parijahan took her chin and angled her face toward hers. “Don’t you dare. He hurt you. You don’t get to fling yourself into trying to save him when he clearly did not want to be saved.”

  “I know.” No one knew the gods did not speak to Nadya anymore. She was nothing but a Kalyazi peasant. Good for little, useful for less. She wasn’t trying to save him; she wanted to understand. It was her fatal flaw, her desire to understand. It was what he had used so willingly in the tapestry of lies he had woven around her.

  “Besides…” Parijahan said, her voice shifting, calculating and sly, “if he got his grand ideas from a book, shouldn’t you be looking in the cathedral?”

  Nadya shuddered. She had been avoiding that place for months. The thought of going back chilled her to her core … and yet …

  Parijahan noticed her hesitation. “He’s not there,” she said. “You’re safe.”

  An impossible position, the hating and the missing all at once.

  “Are you scolding me, or encouraging me? It’s very unclear.”

  Parijahan smiled ruefully. “Maybe a bit of both?”

  “How long do we have until the dinner?”

  Parijahan noted the sun’s position through the window with a shrug. “We have time.”

  * * *

  Nadya gazed up at the broken statues lining the entrance of the massive black cathedral, and wondered if she was more afraid now that she knew what lurked inside. If the terror settling in her limbs was because, this time, she was walking in unprotected.

  Parijahan spared the crumbling face of the cathedral a passing glance, unfazed. Nadya had come to find that indifference a comforting aspect of the Akolan girl. Parijahan wrenched the huge wooden doors open.

  It was deathly quiet. Nadya swallowed thickly. She didn’t want to remember the last time she was here, fingers tangled with Malachiasz’s, trusting him against all reason. And she certainly didn’t want to intrude on any Vultures in their home.

  But it wasn’t their home once, she thought. She trailed a hand against the wall, wondering which god this church had belonged to when Tranavia still cared for such things. Panic began to claw at her chest from the silence in her head so she shoved the thoughts away, following after Parijahan, who was—unfortunately—intent on where she wanted to go.

  “Oh, Parj, must we?”

  “Where else?” Parijahan replied.

  She had a point. There hadn’t been so much as a whisper as to what had happened to the Black Vulture. Though Nadya asked, the reality was she didn’t want to know.

  To know would be to acknowledge the blackened scar on her palm each time it heated, a burning itch lasting for hours before it went away. To acknowledge the pull of her heart to something far away, as if linked to someone. She didn’t know what had happened the night she carved Velyos’ symbol into her palm, then Malachiasz’s. Something had happened when she had stolen his power to use with hers. When she had done the impossible.

  It remained, still. The sludgy, inky darkness of Malachiasz’s magic slumbered somewhere deep within her.

  Parijahan tried the door to Malachiasz’s chambers, a small smile flickering at the corners of her lips when she found it unlocked.

  Nadya hesitated. Nothing had changed since she had been there last. Malachiasz’s patched-up military jacket hung off the back of the chair where he’d last tossed it. Paintings were stacked in every spare corner of the room and piles of books surrounded the bookshelves. Piles and piles of books.

  Parijahan whistled low. “There you have it.” She picked up the jacket, frowning at it before she handed it to Nadya.

  She waited until Parijahan turned away before she pulled the jacket on over her dress and tucked her face against the collar. It smelled like him still, iron and earth and boy in a way that was comforting and painful, and the pang in her chest was a vicious stab.

  It was hard to parse her feelings about Malachiasz’s betrayal. With time she had hoped she might untangle her mess of emotions. She knew how she was supposed to feel and how everyone expected her to feel. But she couldn’t figure out if any of those things were true of her.

  Yes, she was furious and hurt, but she also caught herself waiting for him to burst into her rooms, a whirlwind of dark hair and bad jokes and painfully brilliant smiles. She missed him.

  But that wasn’t who he was anymore. Idealistic, but powerful and cruel, his body twisted and his mind shattered.

  Nadya desperately wanted to stop thinking about him altogether. He had lied to her for months, making himself out to be an anxious boy who had made a mistake and needed help fixing it. Instead he had used her to gain a power so terrible it had driven out the last of his humanity.

  The silly, condescending Tranavian boy with the sly smile, who chewed on his fingernails when he was nervous, was gone. Maybe forever. And she was so deeply sad that it had swallowed the heat of her anger. He didn’t deserve her sadness, but that didn’t make a difference to her heart.

  “Did he plan this from the beginning, do you think?” Nadya spoke up quietly.

  Parijahan looked up from where she was riffling through a stack of paintings. “Are you finally ready to talk about this?”

  Nadya shrugged.

  “I spent months with him and he never seemed remotely interested in finding you,” Parijahan said. “I had to convince him to come with us when we started following rumors about a cleric. In the end, something forced him to flee to Kalyazin, and later return here. He never said what.”

  “Well, he’s a liar.”

  “He is very good at lying,” Parijahan agreed. “If only because he’s actually telling the truth while he does it.”

  The door to his study rested like a black stain in the wall. What did she hope to find here? The thing that set him on his reckless quest to destroy her gods? Something else?

  She paged through the books mindlessly. They were eclectic piles: history, novels, magic theory. But she didn’t understand blood magic enough to comprehend the latter. She was wasting her time.

  Parijahan opened the door to his study. She coughed as she stepped inside the room. Nadya didn’t immediately follow, though something tugged her toward the doorway. She heard Parijahan shift around papers on his desk, and she shivered, a chill suddenly pulling down her spine.

  Magic.

  Something she had not touched in quite some time.

  “What do you have?” she called. Her stomach churned. There was something familiar and terrible yanking at her, a call that sent a deep wave of dread crashing over her.

  “Some of his spells, I think,” Parijahan said, unaware of Nadya’s sudden anxiety.

  Nadya flinched as she stepped into the study. The palm of her left hand ached, a dull pain steadily and sluggishly working its way up her arm. Sweat broke out on her temples. She was too hot and too cold and she could feel—she could feel—

  She snatched the papers out of Parijahan’s hand, crumpling them in her tight grip. She was breathing hard and couldn’t shake the feelin
g that something was very wrong. There was something moving, something hungry that wanted with such a deep and powerful ache it was going to swallow everything if it wasn’t stopped.

  “Nadya?”

  She slammed a hand down onto the desk. “No,” she said flatly. “This isn’t how magic works.”

  She spread the spells out in front of her. Her heart tripped at the sight of Malachiasz’s messy, borderline incomprehensible scrawl. She shouldn’t be able to feel his power, shouldn’t be able to feel him. Not now, not after so much time had passed.

  She could read Tranavian, but the words blurred. Frantic, she riffled through more of the pages, digging out hastily scrawled notes and diagrams underneath the spells. Endless markings Nadya did not understand.

  “I shouldn’t be here,” she whispered as horror continued to curl around her core. She lifted a page that had clearly been dipped in blood, the bottom stiff and dark. The top she could read, and she wished she couldn’t.

  Notes on Kalyazi magic, on divine magic, on her magic. Notes on how her magic and blood magic might intersect, how they shouldn’t but could, how there is something else changing very slowly and it might be new or it might be a melding of both.

  Serefin had mentioned, once, finding Tranavian spell books with Kalyazi prayers scrawled inside on the battlefield. It was an impossible combination. Why was Malachiasz studying it?

  She froze; the something else on the other end of that thread of connection had grown nearly tangible. A gaze from far away turning on her where previously there had been none. It was a power so much greater than her own, infinitely dark. Magic that did not belong to her hummed underneath her veins with a painful tug toward the one who truly owned it.

  She never should have stolen his power.

  But surely he had known what she intended when she’d dragged that blade across his palm? It had been his idea once—a sly musing she would be stronger if she used his blood. Abhorrent, horrible, and yet, she had done exactly what he wanted in the end. Just another twisting of truth to push her to unwittingly aid his incomprehensible plans.