“I was going to ignore what I saw earlier, but … you’ve been bewitched somehow. I—” He broke off when she lifted her corrupted hand.
“Creature he may be, he knows a lot about magic. And whatever this is? It is magic.”
Kostya took her hand, horror etched onto his features. He dropped it, disgusted.
“It’s you,” he said quietly.
“Kostya…”
“They got to you. I was warned, gods, they told me you’d be susceptible. They told me you would falter.” He began to pace.
“Who did?” The woman who had given him the pendant?
He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have let you go. I’ve ruined everything.”
“You?”
“You were supposed to go west! You were supposed to listen to the gods! Not some monster who has done this…” He waved to her hand in revulsion. “To you.”
“Supposed to,” Nadya said flatly. “There was never a definitive plan. I was supposed to go to the nearest military base, but when the monastery burned I was stranded in a forest with Tranavians swarming the mountains. I did what I had to to survive.”
“It would have been better if you hadn’t,” Kostya muttered.
She recoiled. Something in her heart split off. He couldn’t see her anymore. She was only the sum of her mistakes.
“You don’t mean that.”
He didn’t speak.
“Kostya, who told you I would falter?”
“Does it matter?”
More than you know, she thought. The idea that there was some other greater plan that she did not know about terrified her.
She closed her eyes. Let out a breath. “If I tell you the truth, promise you will listen to me.”
“What else could you possibly have to tell me?” he cried.
“The gods don’t talk to me anymore,” she whispered. She didn’t open her eyes. She didn’t want to see his face.
“Nadya.” She heard the horror in his voice. The anger. The betrayal.
“I am trying to make this better,” she said. “I am trying to fix what I’ve done wrong. If I go with you I can’t do that.”
She opened her eyes. Kostya stared at her, his face blank, eyes hard. He reached out and very carefully took her string of prayer beads in his hand.
“I thought…” he said quietly. “I thought you were supposed to be elevated above all others. Perfect. I thought the whispers about you were wrong, but…” His grip tightened. “Then there’s no hope.”
Nadya didn’t have a chance to ask him what that was supposed to mean. He pulled hard against the necklace, yanking her forward and snapping the cord. The sound of her wooden prayer beads against the floor was loud against her ears.
And something snapped inside of her.
Tears filled her eyes. The only thing she had left of the gods was broken. “What have you done?” she cried, shoving him away and scrambling to pick up a bead, trying to rethread it onto the broken cord. She couldn’t get the bead to slide over the frayed edge and suddenly everything she had pushed aside came rushing to the surface. She choked back a sob, pressing the back of her hand to her mouth.
Kostya made a sound of disgust and slammed out of the house.
After another bead slid through her fingers and rolled away she collapsed on the floor, shoving her hands against her eyes as she tried to bite back sobs.
He hadn’t let her explain. He hadn’t listened.
She had thought … what? That Kostya would forgive her? That he would ignore how she had forced him into the same quarters as the monster who had kept him prisoner?
A soft hand stroked her hair in passing. Malachiasz padded barefoot across the room, stooping to pick up a handful of beads. He returned and sat down in front of her.
He was quiet. He was the absolute last person she wanted right now. She couldn’t see the frayed cord through her tears but that didn’t stop her from attempting to rethread one of her beads. Would she even be able to remember their order?
“These are literally burning my hand,” Malachiasz finally said. “Please take them?”
That startled a laugh out of her. She held out her hands and he gently placed the beads into her palms, closing her fingers over them.
He settled back, pulling his leg up and resting his chin on his knee, watching her.
“Sorry,” she said, sniffling. “I woke all of you up.”
“Nothing to apologize for, I wasn’t asleep anyway. Rashid, however, might kill you come morning.”
That somehow cracked another laugh out of her. She pooled her beads in her lap, counting them. She was still missing a few.
“I thought I could make him understand.” She swiped at her eyes. “If I just explained…” But there was so much she couldn’t explain. “He wants me to be the girl from the monastery and I lost her long ago.”
Malachiasz inclined his head. “Is this something you want to talk about with me?”
“No, I … I want you to leave, Malachiasz.”
Sadness cracked across his face before he shuttered it away. “That’s fair,” he whispered. He started to get up.
“I thought…” Nadya trailed off. Malachiasz paused before slowly sitting back down. “I don’t know. I’m stupid. I shouldn’t have expected him to trust me.” She stuck the cord in her mouth, trying to smooth the strands so she could get the beads on. “He was my best friend and I thought he knew me but I guess…” She stopped, unable to voice what she feared. That Kostya had only ever been friends with the cleric and not Nadya. She didn’t want to believe the worst in him. He had a right to be furious. He had a right to want Malachiasz dead. What she was doing didn’t make sense and it was impossible to ask him to understand.
She only wished he had listened.
“You’re not stupid or naive,” Parijahan said, sitting down next to her.
“Well, a little naive,” Malachiasz interjected.
Parijahan kicked him.
Nadya laughed but it quickly morphed into a sob. Something flickered across Malachiasz’s face that she couldn’t bring herself to think about. She was going to lose the only family she had left because of him and she couldn’t stand it. She wished she didn’t need him for a greater cause.
She wished she didn’t want the boy who had ruined so much.
Parijahan gently took the cord away from her. “You give me the beads in order and I’ll string them.”
Nadya nodded. She handed her the bead she thought was next but worried she was wrong.
“Do you think he’ll come back?” Malachiasz asked. He coughed into the crook of his arm, a harsh, painful noise.
Nadya shrugged. They were still in Tranavia and Kostya barely spoke the language. He wouldn’t last long out there. But she didn’t know if he could stand to look at her anymore.
“What if I can never go back?” she said softly.
Malachiasz sighed. She rubbed at her eyes before she met his gaze. Understanding filled his pale eyes, and that frightened her. Feelings of solidarity between her and a monster were not things she ever thought she would have to battle with.
Parijahan gathered up the rest of the beads in Nadya’s lap and even though they were holy objects, Nadya let her. Parijahan stood and put the cord and beads on the table.
“Come on,” she said, returning to Nadya and holding out her hands. “Bed. Things won’t seem as bleak in the morning. Morning is wiser than evening.”
“Still pretty bleak,” Malachiasz said.
Nadya kicked him this time. “That’s a Kalyazi saying,” she said to Parijahan, frowning.
“It is.”
She let Parijahan tug her to her feet. Everything was strange and wrong. She couldn’t stop seeing Kostya’s face. The disappointment on it was chewing her up inside.
She followed Parijahan back to their room. Parj was right. Sleep would help.
Morning was wiser than evening. Things would be better then.
She would make things right.
21
SEREFIN MELESKI
A slow corrosion, a deep hunger. Tens upon hundreds upon thousands locked in a tomb, alive, whole, screaming, waiting. Waiting. Waiting.
—The Volokhtaznikon
Serefin woke up in that damn forest again.
His right eye was completely blind. He started to panic—heartbeat fluttering wildly in his chest, because his right eye was the one that worked—but a distant part of him knew this wasn’t real.
He could feel blood dried on his cheek, but his left eye wasn’t bleeding. It was crystal clear, jarring; he was used to compensating for his bad eye and his sense of equilibrium was off.
Not real not real not real, he thought, spinning around.
This was … not like the last forest. This wasn’t real like the last forest.
The tree to his right was pale and scarred, the branches stretching up into the sky, splintering into shards of bone. There was something dark and slow dripping down a hollow in the trunk. Blood.
A scream tore through the forest, wrenching and agonized. A sharp crack like a tree branch being snapped in two nearby. Serefin whirled. He forgot to breathe. Where the deer skull had appeared like a mask the last time, now it was a grotesque reality. Ivy grew around the neck and into cracks in the skull. The jaw bone was decayed, the teeth sharp like nails.
“I’m surprised to see you so soon,” it said. “I thought you were resisting.”
“I didn’t come here because I wanted to,” Serefin said sullenly.
The creature—monster, god—leaned a spindly hand against the tree of bone. The skull tilted to one side. The bottomless darkness of its eyes was unsettling. Serefin had to look away but everywhere he turned were more things to fear.
Had the damned tsarevna killed him? Was that how he had ended up here? Could he wake up from this?
“Are you finally ready to talk?” the creature asked.
“Anytime we talk you give me enigmatic responses to my questions and tell me you want revenge. That’s not particularly helpful,” Serefin said. But he was ready to talk. He was ready to put a name to this horror so he could figure out how to escape it. He wasn’t going to be able to fight off its pull much longer.
But did he give in? Let this creature take his eye and his mind and do whatever it wanted with Serefin? There had to be another way.
He tried to step away from the creature and nearly tripped, unused to his center of gravity being flipped.
“I suppose it’s easy to infer the particulars of your goal,” Serefin said. “You’re a Kalyazi god, clearly, but which one.”
“I have told you: I am not a god. Velyos is my name. You have not earned it, but you may keep it if it will cease your struggling.”
He hadn’t taken that as truth before. Surely gods thought of themselves as … something else?
“Then what, pray tell, are you?”
“What happens to a god who becomes not a god?”
A monster, then. “So, you were banished?”
“Banished, condemned, imprisoned, there are many words for what happened to me,” Velyos replied.
“And you want revenge on the pantheon that kicked you out,” Serefin said flatly.
How on earth could he do anything about that?
“We all want things,” Velyos said. “The goddess of death wants that little cleric of hers to burn your paltry country to ashes, and she will go to drastic measures to see it through. She is a goddess of vengeance. I am a creature of a more particular sort.”
Dread threaded through him. He knew he couldn’t trust Nadya, but he rather wanted to be able to; it was disappointing to be reminded he couldn’t. It was only a matter of time until she stabbed him in the back.
But maybe this was his way out. A mortal deal, a cosmic deal, surely one would lead him to the goal he sought. Nadya was granted power by her gods. Maybe …
“If I want to kill a Vulture…” he started.
The claws on the bone tree shifted, scraping down and leaving blood and scratch marks in its wake.
“If you want to kill a monster, you come to the one whose domain houses the greatest of monsters,” he said. “And, thus, have come to the right place.”
* * *
Serefin feared he had made a grave mistake, given something to Velyos that he shouldn’t have. But it was too late to turn back. Serefin was dealing with something greater than himself.
He feared the creature would see his threats through and take Serefin’s eye. And even though it hardly worked, Serefin wanted to keep it in his head where it belonged.
What hid underneath that skull?
Serefin didn’t care to find out.
The forest of bone cleared to a massive stone temple. Dark pillars were carved in front of a doorway that stretched out of sight. Serefin paused, taking it in. He could feel power emanating from that place, but he couldn’t identify it. It was just sheer, raw power. An ache in his chest, in his bones. Something older than the earth that hungered, deeply. Waiting, always waiting, to split apart and devour everything.
“What is this?” he asked.
“You want to kill monsters,” Velyos said simply. “I have brought you to the being who can accomplish that.”
Serefin’s whole body went cold. “Not you, then?” He thought he was only going to have to be caught up in the affairs of one of Kalyazin’s horrors.
“Not me, no. This one is stronger. This one knows monsters. He sleeps, though, you see.”
Well, that didn’t make him feel any better.
“The problem with claiming—” Velyos started. Serefin hated that word. “—a Tranavian is that you don’t know anything,” Velyos complained.
“Alas,” Serefin said dryly. “I suppose you should pick someone better suited.”
“Dear boy, I’m afraid she made herself unavailable and now there is no one better suited than you.”
Serefin swallowed hard.
“I don’t have time to give you a lesson in my kind,” Velyos said wearily. “Find someone else to help you with that. My domain was once the forest … and the dead.”
“And what about this other one? The one who sleeps?”
“The darkness and the hunger therein,” Velyos said simply. “Entropy. And monsters of the dark were kept by his hand. They are waking up, you see. That boy, the other one—”
“Malachiasz,” Serefin whispered.
“Yes. Another Tranavian. Funny, that. He has awoken a darkness these lands have not known in many an age. In everything, in himself, in someone whom darkness never should have touched.”
“Can it be stopped?”
“Is that not what you’re doing here?” Velyos asked.
He supposed it was. Would stopping Malachiasz stop whatever was waking up?
“Time is limited, of course. The rest of the pantheon will eventually rain their destruction on your paltry country. Perhaps they’ve already begun? It is so slight, the way the divine touch the world. Such discord that only a few peoples have sown over so few years. Such wrath from the gods.”
Serefin felt sick. He looked up at the massive doorway. “What has stopped them?”
“The gods cannot directly touch the mortal realm. That is what clerics are for.”
“But Nadya—”
“You think the little cleric has lost her power? The girl held in the grasp of not only vengeful Marzenya, but the entire pantheon? No. That girl is so much more than she knows.”
Serefin frowned.
“Don’t mistake a moral lesson to be a revoking of power. Don’t underestimate how easily the girl can get in the way. How quickly everything can spiral into disaster if she wakes up. Let her sleep forever, let her never know the truth.”
Serefin didn’t know what to make of that. Or if it was any of his concern, all things considered.
“I just want to kill the Black Vulture,” he said. “I want my throne and to end this ceaseless war. I want our business to be at an end.”
“Mostly all t
hings that can be seen to reality.”
Mostly.
“I go no farther here,” Velyos said, stopping. “It is not my place, though it borders on my domain.”
“You’re fine with me getting power from someone else?”
“You see things so simply.” Velyos sounded amused.
“I hardly see at all, actually,” Serefin said.
Velyos waved a hand.
Serefin didn’t particularly want to go inside the temple before him. The last time he had been shoved toward a great unknown, he had died. If he thought hard about it, searched the dark corners of his mind, he could almost remember what it felt like. The flash of pain; the darkness.
But his father could barely cast a spell, and that left only one other person who could have killed him. Serefin could call it protecting his people from a horror. He could call it punishment for treason. Or he could call it what it was: revenge.
With a final glance toward the creature at his side, Serefin began to climb the steps up to the doors.
Around the pillars were strange, unnerving carvings. Skulls—open mouthed—facial features displaced from their faces. Jagged teeth and wide, terrified eyes. Chaotic and obscene. Serefin hurried past and up to the doors, which weren’t much better. He paused.
Whatever waited for him inside couldn’t possibly be good.
But Serefin was the king of Tranavia. He was the king of a country of monsters. He wasn’t afraid.
He was lying to himself.
But he wasn’t awake and he wasn’t asleep. He was … dead? Again? Truly, what could happen to him here?
Terrible things. Well, at least Ruminski won’t have to waste coin on assassins.
“I told you he sleeps and yet still you linger,” Velyos said, clearly irritated.
“If he sleeps how can he help?”
“Simpleminded fool,” Velyos muttered.
Serefin rolled his eyes. But the creature had a point. The longer he lingered, the more time passed in reality. If that mattered.
How long had Serefin been tied to that altar?
Serefin placed his palm flat against the door. Something gave. Something caught—pulled directly over his heart.
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