Nadya couldn’t figure out if the small piece of spine was from an animal or something … larger. She decided to not think about it. She shifted away from him and he returned to his seat across from her. Tension threaded back through the room as the temporary ease between them passed.
“Have you taken into consideration that I may refuse to cross your entire frigid country for no other reason than you asked?”
“You could, certainly,” she replied. “And that would be the end of this.” And the end of whatever we had. But maybe that would be better. They part here, now, and she would no longer have to lead him to his own destruction. He would survive a little longer; so would she. She wouldn’t have to lie like this.
He scowled.
“I’m hardly trapping you here, Malachiasz.”
Each time she said his name there was a second where his eyes flickered closed and his body shuddered, where he pulled a little closer to the semblance of something human and she would have him for a little longer before he took a step back to the monster.
He coughed like his chest was caving in. There was blood at his lips that he hastily wiped away.
“At the risk of sounding suspiciously earnest,” he said carefully, his voice scratchy, “I would like to help.”
“You might change your mind when I tell you what I need you for,” she muttered down at the map. “And you’re right, it is suspicious.”
When she looked up, he was watching her. No, studying her, as if he wanted to get back the lost months they had spent apart. The feeling was ridiculous. They had barely known each other for a year—less, truly. He had lied about everything. Anything more from him was another game to get back into her good graces.
Except … what would be the point? She had already done all he had wanted her to.
What if he was being honest with her?
Nadya met his icy pale eyes. This was going to be harder than she thought.
17
SEREFIN MELESKI
Svoyatovi Arkadiy Karandashov: Tsarevich of Kalyazin, he united the east and the west. Many miracles have been performed over his grave.
—Vasiliev’s Book of Saints
He was surrounded. Even as the tsarevna lifted her sword and rested the flat against her shoulder, looking Serefin up and down with a wry grin, he couldn’t see any way to run. Blood magic could only do so much when swords were held inches away from major arteries.
“It’s funny,” she said, “when someone burst into the outpost, saying there was a Tranavian in the nearby village, I expected some half-dead soldier, not, well, the most important of Tranavians.” Her sharp, dark eyebrows turned down in mock confusion. “Who knew the king of Tranavia was so reckless?”
Serefin sighed. He went to pull a hand through his hair and found the point of a blade inches away from his neck.
“Easy,” he said. “I just fought off an assassin from my own people, I don’t want another fight.”
“No,” she said soothingly. “Of course not.”
He unclipped his spell book and let it fall to the ground. “You’ve rendered me powerless, congratulations.”
She motioned to one of her soldiers who quickly picked it up. Serefin couldn’t help the light twinge of panic at losing it, but there were worse things that could be lost here.
Yekaterina eyed Serefin. “And cut off the sleeves of his coat.”
“And leave me defenseless against your Kalyazi winter? How cruel.”
“You shouldn’t be in Kalyazin to begin with,” she replied. “And I do hope you have a good explanation for this. I didn’t think this was the way you lot did things. Covertly and whatever.” She waved a hand vaguely. “Or get your hands dirty—well, outside all the blood, I suppose.”
“It’s complicated.”
“A shame.” She hefted her sword and rested the tip against Serefin’s sternum. “I suppose killing you won’t do me much good, will it? We’ve heard things aren’t going so well in Tranavia.”
“Oh? Your spies are that good?”
She sneered. She had fine features and pale skin. The Kalyazi royal family wasn’t much better off than the Tranavian, because as far as Serefin knew, Yekaterina only had one invalid of a younger sister. So like Serefin’s father, the tsar had sent Yekaterina off to the front when she was only a young girl. Unlike his father, her father had not had her murdered for a blood magic ritual. What a lucky royal that made her.
Yekaterina considered him. She sighed. “I’ll have to actually talk to you, won’t I? Ugh. Misery.”
“Truly, I am terribly sorry this isn’t the time for senseless slaughter. My heart weeps.”
“Gods, you’re worse than I imagined.”
“Infinitely flattered.”
She rolled her eyes. Serefin noticed a necklace of teeth strung around her neck and his stomach dropped. His message would never reach Ruminski, because the Vulture was never going to make it out of Kalyazin. He hadn’t known the tsarevna was Voldah Gorovni, and yet it made a sick sort of sense.
And gave Serefin a terrible idea.
“Did you add him to your collection, then?” he asked, nodding to the teeth.
Yekaterina frowned, her hand lifting to touch the necklace.
“I was hoping he would send a message for me, but it is what it is. He did try to kill me,” Serefin continued. “Are you very good at hunting Vultures?”
“Fix this place back up,” she ordered, her soldiers rushing to obey her commands. “I’m starving. Put him somewhere while I find some food.”
Serefin was pushed onto a bench, his wrists tied behind his back.
Yekaterina sat down across from him, a plate of herring and rye bread already in her hands. She was wearing the military outfit of a Kalyazi officer, though Serefin couldn’t figure out her rank, which suggested she didn’t have an actual military ranking and the army only deferred to her because of her blood.
Awkward.
“Kind of you to not kill me on the spot,” Serefin said.
“The rumors say you killed your father to become king,” she replied.
He tilted his head. “Actually, your cleric killed my father.”
Yekaterina went dead still. “What?”
“Nadezhda Lapteva? Nadya? An absolutely infuriating girl. Someone so small should not be able to be so opinionated.”
“The cleric was in Tranavia?”
“I thought your spies were good?”
She flushed.
“Don’t worry. She’s fine. Well, she might not be fine. The last time I saw her she was going into the Salt Mines to treat with the Black Vulture.” Yekaterina’s expression waned further. “A boring story really, and frankly, I would love to do away with my current Black Vulture. She probably made it out alive, though, the two of them had a stunningly bizarre relationship, but truly who can say?”
She sat in stunned silence. Serefin smiled.
“Ah, I see I have something you want.”
“You know where she is?” Yekaterina asked, voice hushed.
Serefin had no bloody clue where Nadya was, but he had to hope Kacper and Ostyia were still with her. He had to hope they were all right because he wouldn’t be able to survive the alternative. He missed them desperately. He missed Kacper, he realized with a shock. He had grown too used to Kacper’s calm and constant presence and the days without him had a very specific kind of loneliness to them that Serefin wasn’t ready to parse.
Yekaterina leaned back in her chair. He heard her swear softly in Kalyazi.
“You have me in an awkward situation, you know that?” Yekaterina said.
“Oddly, I’m not feeling a great deal of pity for you.”
“What’s wrong with your eye?”
“You are incredibly charming, do you know that? Do people tell you that?”
“There are rumors about you…” She leaned forward again, resting her chin in her hand. “But they were so ridiculous I wrote them off.”
“The war has changed and we all kn
ow it but no one knows how to stop it,” Serefin said. “What are we even fighting for?”
“You are heretics.”
“And you lot are deluded,” Serefin replied. “What are the rumors?”
“You died the night before your father. You were brought back in a tide of blood.”
“Yes.”
She stiffened, but recovered remarkably well. “But there have been no whispers of the cleric’s involvement.”
“The whole affair was rather messy. I tried to keep her out of it for obvious reasons.”
“Why would you protect her?”
“Because I didn’t need Kalyazin storming my capital to get her back. I’m a strategist, dear, and knowing where your cleric was would only bring your people more hope.”
Yekaterina considered that. “You’re more trouble alive than dead,” she said.
“You don’t have to flatter me.” He shivered, nonetheless. The tsarevna would either lock him up or have him executed; there was no in-between here.
She finished her meal and stood, moving around the table. She ran a hand through Serefin’s hair, then wrenched his head back.
“You’re very pretty for a Tranavian,” she murmured.
“Thank … you?” He had to get out of here.
“Shame. My father says a beautiful king will always hide a cruel agenda.” She leaned her face close, mouth at his ear. “Better if you had been ugly.” She traced the scar down his face. “Better if this had done its job.”
A chill settled in the pit of his stomach. Yekaterina reared back.
“What do you think, hanging or beheading? Should I cut your throat? Looks like that’s already been done to you once; let’s just finish the job. What kind of execution does the king of Tranavia deserve?” She grinned. “Actually … I have a better idea.”
Serefin closed his eyes. There was going to be no talking his way out of this one.
* * *
Serefin had been taken to a stone church outside the village. Not so much a building as a carelessly carved out boulder that had slid down from the mountains thousands of years ago with onion domes slapped on top.
The tsarevna had wrapped a black headscarf around her hair, iron temple rings swinging at the sides of her face. She shouldered open the door, nodding a greeting to the priestess in the entranceway. She kissed her fingers and touched an icon near the door to the sanctuary.
There was a fragile silence in the church, thin ice near breaking, and underneath it something horrific. Serefin had been in plenty of Kalyazi churches during his time at the front. But never one that felt … alive.
Serefin’s vision split. He hissed through his teeth as the icons changed—faces clawed out and defaced—the candles melted down to pools of wax, the patterns carved into the walls turning to bones inlaid into the stone. He froze, a shudder rippling through him, and the Kalyazi soldier had to shove him forward.
But his bad eye wasn’t finished yet. He wished he could cover it and make this stop.
You cannot live with one eye closed.
He could try. But like on the boat, his left eye refused to close and he was forced to watch as terrifying shadows with too many teeth and too many eyes slunk about in the dark corners of the church.
He had stepped into the domain of something large and ancient and its gaze had turned upon him.
Sweat beaded at his temples. His vision snapped back back back until there was no church, no boulder to carve it from, only a clearing and an ancient stone slab, blood dripping down its sides. A blade stained crimson lying in the dust. The eye of the gods on a sacred place.
There was movement around the altar, or the memory of it. Of people long turned to nothing more than dust and ashes, and an action, committed so many times that the bones of the earth remembered it. A life taken on that altar again and again and again, a circle returning to its origin point.
Everything Serefin knew about the Kalyazi was turning out to be fantastically deluded. He had thought them pious, backward people, afraid of magic that wasn’t sanctioned by their gods. But he also thought their gods only sanctioned a specific kind of magic—that of clerics. He was no longer certain that was true.
It answered why Kalyazin had spent a century fighting a war against a country that used a great deal of magic when they had very little. But what magic were they using and how had it gone unnoticed by Tranavia for this long?
He had a terrible feeling he was about to find out.
“Take him downstairs,” Yekaterina said, sounding bored. “I want more answers before I deal with him.”
His arm was gripped by a middle-aged man. He was unassuming in appearance; blond hair, dark eyes, half his face in shadow from his lopsided hood, not particularly memorable, unlike the cult members in Tranavia.
Until he pushed his hood back and Serefin got a look at the scars ravaging half his face. Made by claws—claws with the right distance between them to be fingers. He wore a necklace of teeth like the one around Yekaterina’s neck.
“You’re back early,” the man said, eyeing Serefin.
“Yes, well, my plans were changed by this one,” she said. “I’ll be with you both shortly.”
The man yanked Serefin down the hall, opening a door that led to a set of stairs, descending into darkness. The man took a torch from the wall and went first. The hallway stretched on and on—it seemed like they would never reach the end—but finally the man stopped. He did not open the door, instead turning to Serefin after placing his torch in a sconce.
“None have passed through these halls not of the order in a very long time. Especially not the enemy,” the man said.
“No? How shocking.”
The man watched him a bit longer. Serefin let out a sigh of relief. He had no idea who Serefin was. Likely the tsarevna only knew what he looked like—as he knew what she looked like—on the off chance they met in battle.
This was exactly the kind of mess he would get into without Kacper around to keep him from doing something senseless. The man shoved Serefin into the room, a dimly lit study. He indicated for Serefin to sit, and waited by the door.
The man was clearly Voldah Gorovni, same as Yekaterina. Though Żywia had mentioned that the Vulture hunters had had a resurgence, Serefin hadn’t expected to find them. This was the luck that he needed, strangely enough. This was the answer to his Malachiasz problem.
Maybe he could talk his way out of this, after all.
Yekaterina appeared a few minutes later. “What do you know about what happened at Kartevka?”
Serefin stared up at her blankly. What? He considered the mountain of military reports Ostyia had shoved in his face back in Grazyk. He had read maybe half of them before falling asleep at his desk. Kacper had woken him, gently dragging him back to his chambers, talking the whole way about how he should have let Serefin stay there so maybe the ache in his back the next day would be enough to get him to take care of himself.
“I understand this is something of an interrogation, but can I ask questions?” he asked hopefully.
Yekaterina’s lips twitched. He thought she was going to refuse, but she nodded, gesturing for him to continue.
“Do you actually kill Vultures, or are the teeth for show?”
Yekaterina quirked an eyebrow.
“Because,” Serefin continued, “I haven’t really heard of any Vulture killers until recently, which suggests you aren’t very good at your job. But, that aside: Would you like to kill the Black Vulture?”
She froze. “Surely you don’t share the rule of your entire country with a monster.”
“My confidence in your abilities is severely waning as your information appears to once again be incorrect.”
She scowled, reached into her jacket pocket, and tossed something at Serefin. He leaned forward—they hadn’t tied his hands, an oversight on their part, he could still cast magic so long as he could draw blood—and caught a string of iron teeth.
“How disgusting,” he said, examining t
he trophy. “But I’m listening.”
“Monsters are monsters,” she said. “They can all be killed.”
“How?”
“You think I’ll reveal our secrets to you?”
“Ah, you’re right, the weird eye just isn’t enough, is it?”
Serefin had her at that. She knew what his eye meant, even if he wanted to deny it to himself.
“I would like the Black Vulture’s teeth for my collection,” she said thoughtfully.
“He has lovely teeth, I promise you.”
And even though this was working out in Serefin’s favor, even though this was something that had to be done, hearing those words rattled him. All he could think about was the scrawny boy with wild black hair and a vibrant grin that he’d dragged around the palace as a child. The boy who had carried a pile of books into his room to read to him when Serefin was recovering from his eye injury and couldn’t see a damn thing. Who had probably kept him from going mad with boredom.
Thinking about that clever boy sent another pang of regret through Serefin. Malachiasz had the potential to be a powerful ally. Instead he had made himself the enemy.
His brother had to die and Serefin had to do it before whatever had claim of him led him into the forest and tore him to pieces.
18
NADEZHDA LAPTEVA
Svoyatova Aleksasha Ushakova: Stricken by Devonya, she was stripped of all power. Her bones are cursed and rest in the vault underneath the Baikkle Monastery, ruining all who touch them.
—Vasiliev’s Book of Saints
Someone latched onto Nadya’s forearm, dragging her into a derelict barn on the farm property. She yanked out a voryen, the stitches in her side pulling dangerously and warmth blooming at her waist.
She was face-to-face with Kostya. He ignored the dagger trained at his side, studying her with a strangely dispassionate expression.
She relaxed. “There you are, I’ve been looking for you.”
“I’ve been trying to discern what happened to the Nadya I know,” he said.
She flinched. The coldness in his dark gaze was that of a stranger.
Ruthless Gods Page 17