Ruthless Gods
Page 22
There was a monastery in Takni’viyesh, nestled within the woods. From there, a long stretch of forest cut through the heart of Kalyazin, leading up to the northwesternmost point they were trying to reach. It would be unwise to make the journey all the way through the forest—especially with the eyes of once sleeping monsters upon them.
Nadya had only seen flickers out of the corner of her eye. The antlers of a leshy. The cut of black cloth and singular, gleaming eye of a likho. And other, darker creatures long shunted away into myth and fable that Nadya knew with growing certainty weren’t so false.
But the monastery was a bastion of calm in the midst of the dangers of the forest. High wooden walls surrounded the complex, and yet, as they advanced, Nadya grew inexplicably terrified.
Would this monastery feel like home? Or would it feel alien and strange to the person Nadya had become? This was a very bad idea, she suddenly decided.
Someone leaned out over the top of the wall as they drew closer. Kostya squinted up, an odd look on his face.
“Is that—”
He didn’t have the chance to finish as the figure disappeared. The gates opened shortly after. Nadya glanced at Kostya, confused.
A giant of a man with a long graying beard, sharp, dark eyes, and brown skin strode out past the gates. He wore a sword openly at his belt.
“Oh,” Kostya murmured. “Ivan Novichkov.”
Nadya blinked, bewildered, as the man approached them. She knew the name, but it was a vague recollection coming from far away, from before.
“I was going to ask your business but now I see two faces I have not seen in many years,” the man said, his voice unexpectedly warm.
Kostya clearly wasn’t as confused as she was. Had she met this man before? Why couldn’t she remember him?
He inclined his head to the monk. “You know us?”
“From Baikkle, yes?” The man’s gaze trailed back to the others, sharpening slightly on Malachiasz before he returned to Nadya and Kostya, who nodded. “Impossible to forget the only Kalyazi who lives what I’ve spent my life studying.”
Nadya blinked. Ivan bowed slightly to her. “Nadezhda.”
“Have we met?” she asked.
“My wanderings took me to the Baikkle Monastery many times,” he said. “But you were very young. You did not grow much taller.”
Kostya laughed. Nadya’s heart clenched at the sound. Here was the boy she grew up with, found once more at the walls of another monastery.
“And what companions do you travel with?”
“Oh, a strange group,” she said, formality kicking away some of her nerves. “We seek the monastery’s aid and shelter.”
Ivan nodded as if she needn’t even ask, calling over a sister and instructing her to heat the bathhouse for the travelers.
“Brother Ivan,” she said, moving forward, voice low. She hesitated. She had to warn them of Malachiasz, but she didn’t know how this monk would react. “One is Tranavian.”
His countenance did not waver. Though Kostya’s face darkened and he rolled his eyes.
Ivan gave Nadya a wry smile. “So I see. And how did little Nadezhda come to be the traveling companion of a Tranavian? Are we not at war, child?”
“We are. It’s a long story.”
“I should like to hear you tell it.”
Nadya nodded encouragingly to the others as members of the monastery came to take them to eat and rest. Malachiasz immediately shot to Nadya’s side.
“I don’t think—” he started in Tranavian before he broke off, glance flicking from Ivan to the monastery. “I don’t think I can go inside.”
Nadya grabbed Malachiasz’s arm, pulling him away.
“It’s hallowed ground, Nadya, I can’t—”
“You’d have to believe in the gods to believe hallowed ground is a real thing,” she said.
The desperate look he gave her said that he didn’t think now was the appropriate time to be making jokes or picking a fight about theology.
“What do you think is going to happen?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t know—I just—”
“So, you’re saying that grand plan of yours worked and you’re some god?” she said, voice low enough that no one would hear her.
“No, blood and bone, clearly that I’m here means it didn’t work, haven’t you picked up on that yet?”
He blinked rapidly, anxious, fingers picking at his cuticles, the skin around his thumbnail welling with blood. When a cluster of eyes opened up at his cheek, her stomach dropped. They were rimmed with … teeth.
He’s getting worse.
“I’m sure the gods are waiting for a better time to strike you down,” she continued.
He glared.
“Can you hide that?” Against her better judgment, she reached up and touched his cheek near the eyes.
He flinched. She dropped her hand.
“Doubtful, but I’ll try,” he said, covering the spot. He snapped his hand back down, yelping. His fingers were wet with blood.
He looked horrified.
“Did your own face just bite you?”
He made an odd, strangled sound, nodding slowly.
“Go,” she said, before she did something regrettable and made this worse.
The trembling energy around Malachiasz quieted as he cooled to jagged pieces of ice. “There is no reason I have to follow you there.”
She reached out, taking his hand. He tensed. “You’ll be fine,” she said softly, pressing her thumb against the base of his palm. The same way she had when they had first arrived in Grazyk and he had seen the Vulture’s cathedral. But that had been a lie. Was this a lie, too? “We’ll talk when we’re inside. I promise.”
She had been avoiding him. And it had been the wrong move. Push him hard enough and he would be gone and she would have no way to get to the mountains. He had been a perfectly good teacher in how to manipulate and she wasn’t above using his own methods against him.
He so clearly did not want to go inside but she nudged him toward a sister waiting to show him into the monastery and he went. She returned to Ivan, who was watching Malachiasz.
“Darkness clings to him like a shroud,” the monk said quietly.
“Ah, yes, that’s the Tranavian, and he’s a strange one,” Nadya agreed, totally ignoring how she had just been given something very near to an omen.
She also ignored the look the monk gave her. At least she wasn’t being blithely ignorant. She was well aware of what Malachiasz was. Kostya was watching him, as if waiting to see if Malachiasz died on the spot once he stepped past the threshold.
“I would like to hear what has brought you to this corner of Kalyazin,” Ivan said.
Could she talk to this man, trust him? He was blindly trusting in her because she was the cleric, but she couldn’t remember him. She had barely admitted to Kostya what had happened to her, could she truly tell another Kalyazi the truth and expect them to listen without judgment?
“I don’t have a particularly happy story to tell you,” she said, voice soft.
Ivan wasn’t deterred. “We do not live in particularly happy times, Nadezhda, but I should like to hear it. Go with Sister Vasilisa, we will talk later.”
Nadya waited until Kostya left, not wanting him to be the one to tell Ivan who Malachiasz was. Kostya clearly knew what she was doing because she was on the receiving end of yet another of his dark looks as he entered the monastery.
“Not a happy story at all,” Nadya muttered, before she went off with Vasilisa.
interlude iv
TSAREVNA YEKATERINA VODYANOVA
Katya wiped the Tranavian’s blood off her hands with some measure of disgust. She almost felt bad about the whole affair, especially knowing there was a pair of Tranavians waiting at the inn who almost certainly knew the king and she would have to deal with them. But it had to be done and she did like the dramatics of it all.
“You’re just going to leave him down there?” the
priestess of the small church, Pavlina, asked.
Fyodor’s scarred face was as impassive as ever.
“If he doesn’t come up in a few hours, he’s dead. Do with him what you will,” Katya said, drying off her hands. “He’s probably fine, though, and should stagger out of here in about an hour.”
Pavlina pursed her lips, disapproving.
“I’m not going to tell anyone that your church still has an altar to the old gods underneath it, and you’re not going to tell anyone that I tested a theory and carved open the king of Tranavia’s chest in your basement,” Katya said.
“Vashnya Delich’niy…”
“It’s fine.”
“If you make this war go on longer because you had a theory, the gods will never forgive you.”
“The gods,” Katya said, shrugging on her coat, “have let this war go on for too long as it is, so I honestly can’t say I’m too concerned about their forgiveness.”
That earned her another disapproving glare; she would probably have to make an awkward confession later. Not here, perhaps with a different priestess. She had terrorized this one quite enough. She’d wait till she was home. “Told off a priestess in the middle of nowhere! Carved open the king of Tranavia! Had a grand time, ultimately.” Dionisiy, her priest back home in Komyazalov, would not find it as amusing as she did.
She left before she could say anything else to make the priestess pray harder for the tsarevna’s obviously damned soul. She had to face those two damn Tranavians anyway. She had received the report of her soldiers dragging them in from the woods right as she’d entered the church and she was simply not in the mood for more Tranavians. Katya had read enough military reports to know what the pair who shadowed the king looked like; it wasn’t a far leap to assume these two were here with him.
Katya thought she’d had her heart’s fill of dramatics for the day, but when she returned to the inn and went to the room where they were keeping the Tranavians, she slammed in, shouting, “The king is dead, long live the queen!”
She enjoyed the horrified silence that followed maybe a little too much. But then the boy’s shoulders slumped in a truly agonized way and there was a pang of regret.
“Only kidding! He should be fine, if a little banged up. You’re with him, right?” She kicked the door closed, ignoring her guard Milomir’s protests. They had taken the Tranavians’ spell books; she wasn’t really in danger here.
The boy exchanged a glance with the girl. “We were searching for him, yes. What did you do to him?” There was an undercurrent of anger in his tone, but mostly he just sounded worried. He was pretty. Dark skin, long eyelashes, an edge to him that made her think, if the king was truly in danger, he would be the one she should worry about.
“Oh, no, I’m still asking the questions here,” she said, taking a chair and sitting down, immediately kicking it back onto two legs so she could rest her legs against the side table.
The Tranavian girl was perched on the bed. She was also pretty. Pale, with one gorgeous eye focused in on her. If Katya wasn’t trying to make a point she might be flustered.
“Letting your king wander off by himself while in the middle of enemy territory isn’t particularly wise,” she noted.
They both appeared as though they hadn’t slept in a very long time. As if they had been riding very hard over a very far distance. Katya frowned. Had they lost him? She was intrigued—by Serefin, but mostly by the god that had him in its clutches. How did that happen?
“Has he been acting strange lately?”
“Sorry, who are you?” the girl asked.
“Oh, was the—” Katya pointed at the door. “—introduction not enough? My name is Yekaterina, Katya to friends—”
“Are we friends?” the girl asked.
“Are we?”
“Ostyia,” the boy said, his voice edging on disapproving.
“Tsarevna of this frigid horror show at your service.” Katya affected something close to a bow without getting up or dropping her feet from where they were propped on the table.
The Tranavians exchanged a glance.
“Anyway! Serefin! Acting weird with that strange eye? Yes?”
“Yes,” the girl, Ostyia, said. She wasn’t wearing an eye patch over her scarred eye socket and her black hair looked like she’d hacked it off herself with a dull blade.
The boy—Kacper, if her reports were correct—frowned, then crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the wall next to the window.
“Interesting. Since he was killed by his father, yes?” Katya asked.
Kacper flinched.
Katya waved a hand. “We have good spies and you slavhki are rumor mills.”
“Why are you asking?” Ostyia asked.
“I’m not a slavhka,” Kacper muttered.
Katya tucked that little tidbit away. “He’s the one who blundered into me with all that strangeness swirling around him. I’m just trying to figure out if it can be useful.”
“Useful for what?” Kacper snapped.
Well, he was certainly the more hostile of the two.
“I would like this war to end as much as anyone else. But,” she allowed, “I don’t have that power.”
“But your father—”
“My father will not accept a truce. He will accept surrender and nothing more,” Katya said. “We are risking invasion from the Aecii in the north with each year this war continues, but,” she waved a hand, “victory or death.” She paused. “Gods, I didn’t just tell you that.”
“Where is Serefin?” Kacper asked.
“By the time our conversation is over, he’ll be here. He’s not dead—well, he’s probably not dead. If I’m right about any of this, he’s not dead.”
Kacper stiffened.
When Katya had first set eyes on the king of Tranavia, what was most apparent was that there was something wrong. She had heard the rumors that the Meleski heir was a drunkard—and he had certainly been drunk or was trying to be when she arrived—but there was more to it than that. His eye held the touch of the gods. She wanted proof, and proof was what she got. And maybe if she killed him here it could end the war, but Tranavia had their Vultures and those were becoming a growing problem with each passing day. The Black Vulture had to die to stop that order and if the Tranavian king wanted him dead, Katya thought maybe they could come to an understanding.
The king arrived not much later. Milomir practically shoved him inside. His shredded shirt was hanging open, showing the—rather excellent, if she did say so herself—job Katya had done on his chest, blood and dirt streaked against his face.
He let out a whimper at the sight of his friends, stumbling and nearly collapsing. Kacper was across the room in a heartbeat, clutching Serefin’s arm and keeping him steady. Serefin paused, pressed a hand blearily against the side of Kacper’s face, and stepped back to turn on Katya. He had a knife in his hands.
“Oh, silly me, I left that behind, didn’t I?”
“What. Did. You. Do?” he ground out through gritted teeth, the blade at her throat.
She studied his face. The thing was, none of the rumors their spies had brought them from Grazyk made any sense. She was hoping the ritual would shed some light on what had happened but she still wasn’t sure.
And he knew the cleric somehow! Katya had been searching for her with little success for months.
She looked at him intently. His eyes had gone that strange midnight blue with shattered stars instead of pupils.
“Velyos, huh?” she said. “You’ve been caught by a fallen god.”
Serefin blinked.
“Most don’t even know who he is,” she continued.
“But you do,” he said flatly.
“I do.”
Serefin grimaced. He considered her, his hand absently resting over the carving on his chest. “This hurt, you know that?”
Katya shrugged. “I’m sure you’ve had worse.”
“He’s had worse,” Kacper said.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“End of the war, riches and fortune without having to work for it, the admiration of as many pretty people as possible?”
He moved to gingerly sit at the edge of the bed next to Ostyia.
“I think the war is the least of our problems,” she finally said, growing serious. “If I could sit here with you and end this damned war right now, I would. But neither you nor I have the power to do that.”
“I mean, technically, I have that power. Blood and bone, don’t ask me for a truce,” he said with a groan. “I’d been trying for months to get you people to listen to me without success. This isn’t on me.”
She shook her head. Katya had no power and the mere fact Serefin was in Kalyazin meant he didn’t have nearly as much power as he should. It would be pointless for them to kill each other here even though the idea of killing the king of Tranavia was still so very nice to think about. Katya liked dramatics, but she didn’t really like murder. If the latter led to the former, that was acceptable, but killing the rightful king of Tranavia in a tiny Kalyazi village tucked at the edge of the Dozvlatovya reach wasn’t particularly dramatic.
“Why are you out here?” she asked.
He leaned back on one hand, very plainly not wanting to answer. She could wait him out too if she needed.
“Velyos?”
He nodded slowly. “And you?”
That was a harder question to answer. Officially, Katya had been sent to the front. In reality, she had been sent to a military encampment that saw no action. It was boring. And with the rise of the Vultures, the order she had joined at thirteen as a curiosity was suddenly useful and not boring at all.
“I follow whatever promises to be the most dramatic,” she said, winking at him.
Disgust crossed his face. A hard one to win over, this Tranavian.
“Kalyazin can’t survive this winter,” she said, sighing. “Something tells me Tranavia can’t, either.”
Serefin glanced at Kacper who slowly shook his head.
“I didn’t think so,” Katya said softly. “I was hoping to figure out why this was happening, and I have a feeling you might have an inkling.”