Ruthless Gods

by Emily A Duncan

  Not dead, that was too much to hope for, but hopefully down for long enough to be dealt with.

  She was knocked off balance as Kostya fell. This couldn’t be happening. Kostya would be fine, he had to be fine.

  But his chest had been flayed to ribbons. A sob caught in Nadya’s throat. She reached for more power, for anything, but it slipped through her fingers.

  “You will be no more, child,” Marzenya said gently.

  I don’t care, Nadya snapped. Give me more. Give me enough to save him, or I’ll use my own. She reached for the ache in her palm, the power nestled underneath her skin. But that resisted her call as well. No one was meant to hold this much magic.

  If another scrap were channeled through her, she would be nothing more than a charred pile of bones. But she couldn’t bring herself to care. Kostya was going to die. She had grieved his death once, but it was different to watch it happening right in front of her, to see the life slowly leave him.

  She wondered too long why everything was blurry, finally realizing she was sobbing and that was why air was only rattling through her lungs and she couldn’t see through her tears. She couldn’t lose Kostya again.

  “You’re here this time,” he said weakly. “I don’t want to die alone.”

  “No, don’t do this,” she said. “You’re going to be fine.”

  But he wasn’t going to be fine and they both knew it. Everyone had always treated her like a relic, like something to be tiptoed around and whispered about, but Kostya had accepted her for who she really was: a girl who messed up sometimes and was painfully human and had a destiny that was too big for her.

  Their paths had gotten muddled along the way, but he had never done anything but love her.

  She bit back a sob and cradled his head in her lap, tracing Veceslav’s symbol against the side of his head.

  “I’m sorry I failed,” he whispered.

  “No, Kostenka, no, never.”

  He took in a shaky breath. “There are older gods, worse ones, ones they feared to tell you of because…” He coughed, struggling past the blood dripping from the corners of his mouth. “Nadya, you’re dangerous. They’re frightened of you.”

  She didn’t understand why he was telling her this now. But she nodded through her tears, stroking a hand over his head.

  “Kostya, I don’t understand, I—”

  But a final, dreadful sigh passed his lips and he was gone. Something deep cracked within Nadya. She thought there was nothing left of her to break, she thought believing him to be dead before was enough to destroy her, but this was so much worse.

  She curled up against him and let herself shatter.

  29

  SEREFIN MELESKI

  Trickery, vengeance, a snake in the grass as Velyos watched and waited and moved to strike a blow against Marzenya and Peloyin that would topple the heavens. He failed and was cast into the ether.

  —The Books of Innokentiy

  “You can’t do what Velyos wants, that’s imperative,” Katya told Serefin as they left the small Kalyazi village behind.

  Serefin had to keep his eye closed permanently. He had borrowed a patch from Ostyia and that had helped, but sometimes his vision still blurred, the world taking on a cast of horror.

  “What direction are we going? Vaguely west?” he asked.

  She nodded with a slight frown.

  “Well, he wants me to go west, so we are failing at that part of the solution.”

  Katya groaned.

  “Surely there’s a way to break this off,” Serefin said.

  Katya waved a moth away from her face. It returned to Serefin’s orbit. He lifted a hand and it landed on his palm, large and black and white.

  “I have an idea, but it would mean going even farther west,” Katya said. Her decision to go off with the king of Tranavia had not been met with support from her soldiers. She had allowed one to come with her, Milomir, a dour looking boy, but no one else. She had sent the rest east, which Serefin had thoughts about—mostly that he was letting a group of well-trained soldiers refresh some inevitable war zone against Tranavia. This had all become far messier than he could have fathomed.

  It was too early and painfully cold. Serefin’s breath clouded out before his face. Snow had fallen in the night and they crunched through it toward a forest, dark and looming at the horizon. Katya tugged her fur hat down over her ears.

  “Everything I know is from apocryphal texts,” she said. “It’s a bad sign that Velyos was woken; it will be even worse if the rest are, too.”

  Oh good, the ones that are all waiting for me to come make a racket, Serefin thought grimly.

  Ostyia frowned. She was always hovering wherever the tsarevna was. Serefin wondered if he should discourage the healthy crush Ostyia obviously had on the Kalyazi girl. But no, let Ostyia have her fun, it wouldn’t harm anything.

  “There are stories,” Katya continued. “It’s hard to know what is true, especially about the fallen ones. Like I said, Velyos always wants chaos and to tear down Peloyin.” She waved a hand. “That in itself isn’t particularly apocalyptic. We’re always caught in the middle of any wars between the gods.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “Ah, you Tranavians are not immune,” Katya said.

  “We were, until your cleric came along and ruined that,” Serefin said. The veil separating Tranavia from the gods had been doing a whole lot more than providing simple protection. As soon as it had fallen, the winter had swept upon Tranavia, vicious and unforgiving. He wondered if he could get it put back up.

  Katya rolled her eyes. “Regardless. You’ve found yourself in the middle of an ageless battle between gods. You can’t even deny it.”

  “I can deny my feelings on the word god being ascribed to them.”

  “I’m not here to argue theology with you, Tranavian.”

  Serefin shrugged. “It’s not a topic I’m particularly well-read in anyway.”

  “Yet here you are.”

  “Here I am.”

  It was disquieting, though. He wanted it to stop. Even with the eye patch, his good eye swam with darkness. He was constantly jumping at things that weren’t there. He kept hearing whispers in the back of his head that did not sound like Velyos or the other voice. He only wanted silence and if he did not get it soon he was going to go insane.

  “What’s odd is that all this chaos is happening but Velyos isn’t a chaos god. We don’t have any of those; we did, but they died,” Katya mused.

  “They died?”

  “Chaos is so volatile. Those gods are usually killed by one of the others.”

  “I’m sorry, you have dead gods? Your gods are just constantly murdering each other?”

  “Are you willfully dense or is this a trait only I have to deal with?”

  “I am your problem now.”

  She snorted.

  “What’s your idea, then?” he asked.

  “There’s an old ruin up in the Valikhor Mountains. It’s where Praskovya Kapylyushna was stripped of her power. There’s precedent for the gods turning away from chosen mortals, forced away, even.”

  “And you think I can break myself free from Velyos if I go there?” Serefin asked skeptically. He didn’t like it. Each step west was one step closer to where Velyos wanted him to be.

  “It might be your only option,” she replied. “If you’re working with something ancient and forgotten, you have to go somewhere ancient and forgotten to deal with it. But first, we find the cleric because to get to that temple, I think we’ll need her.”

  Serefin glanced at Kacper, who lifted his eyebrows and shrugged. Too much divine nonsense for a former farm boy from Tranavia.

  It was connected, somehow, Velyos and Malachiasz, but Serefin wasn’t quite sure how. Malachiasz had wanted the power to kill the Kalyazi gods. No Kalyazi gods were dead by his hand—as far as Serefin was aware—but Malachiasz had been stealing relics from the Kalyazi, for what purpose?

  Would one thing lead in
to the next? Did he have to prepare for it all to just … implode? The other voice—other god, Serefin supposed—wanted Malachiasz dead as well. The meddler, he had said, but that was almost suspicious. It was what Serefin had wanted to hear. He didn’t tell Katya about the other one. Something about the way the carving in his chest ached whenever that terrible voice spoke and how it had crushed through Serefin’s defenses so quickly terrified him. So he kept that one to himself, let them think this was only the problem of Velyos, not this greater being who had no name.

  He had no idea where Velyos specifically needed him to go so going west was an unbelievable risk. But he had to do something.

  “Where, exactly, are we?” he asked Katya.

  “Just past Rosni-Ovorisk.”

  The name was familiar. That was where the war had supposedly turned back in Kalyazin’s favor. It was inexplicable, the renewed vigor from the enemy. His father had planned to tear them down with his wild plan but obviously that hadn’t happened. And when Serefin had taken the throne, the front had returned to its stagnant back and forth. But it was shifting out of its stagnation, and Tranavia might be losing.

  Serefin couldn’t tell, even from the whispers he heard passing through inns as they traveled. Katya never bothered to make herself appear any different when they passed through Kalyazi villages. The country was too big, she would say, no one had any idea who she was.

  “It’s certainly not my face on the money,” she would joke. Though there had been an evening where she’d suddenly disappeared underneath a table in an inn because a low prince had come through the door. Ostyia had wordlessly slipped her food down to her. She’d remained under the table for the rest of their meal, then climbed back up after the low prince left and went to bed like nothing had happened.

  They had passed out of the reach of the armies and now the villages they passed through were not ravaged by battle, but by the poverty that came from decades of war.

  But it was worse, somehow, as they passed out of civilization’s reach. The air was different and Serefin didn’t like it. The nights were cold and the feeling of being observed was constant, but he could never find anything watching, no matter how much magic he poured into the area. Katya had clearly noticed, and Serefin didn’t think she had any true magic to speak of. But maybe he was being paranoid.

  As strange as it was, Serefin and the tsarevna got along well. They both had the shared life experiences of growing up in courts that cared very little for their young heirs, shipping them off to the war as soon as they were old enough. However, there the stories diverged. Serefin was a high-ranking officer; Katya had joined a cultic sect of monster hunters.

  They passed the carcass of a village. The houses were only skeletons of wooden boards, mostly burned away.

  “What happened here?” Kacper asked.

  “Zhir’oten,” Katya said. “We’re nearing the forest of monsters. Villages here don’t survive long. This one fell a few years ago.”

  Wolf changers. Serefin shuddered. Did they have those to look forward to?

  Trailing the cleric’s steps was turning out to be an arduous process. Serefin couldn’t figure out how far behind they were and one day his tracking spell simply cut off. He had no idea where she would even be going.

  They camped in the decimated village, despite how eerie it was.

  “We might not be able to find her,” Serefin said, as he and Katya sat with a map before them.

  Milomir was arguing with Ostyia about their supplies and how much they could afford to use for dinner if they were going to reach the forest soon. Katya eventually stopped the argument by wearily ordering Milomir to backtrack and hunt for small game before it grew too dark. He left grumbling.

  “He’s a fabulous tracker,” Katya said, rolling her eyes. “We’ll be fine.” She returned to the map.

  “I lost her around here,” Serefin said, indicating a spot on the map that was relatively close, but she could have since moved on.

  “Valikhor is up here,” Katya said, pointing.

  Kacper, leaning over Serefin’s shoulder, made a tiny, distressed sound.

  It was very far away and it cut through a huge swath of forest that bisected Kalyazin in two.

  “There’s no easier way to this place?” Serefin asked, trying not to think about how very close Kacper was.

  Katya shrugged. “If you want to take the merchant roads it will take you about half a year to get there.”

  Kacper grimaced. Serefin had been away from Tranavia for too long already. For all he knew, his mother had been deposed by Ruminski and exiled to the lake country. He might not even have a throne to go back to. He needed this to be successful, not only for his own sake, but for Tranavia.

  “How much time will we save by taking the forest road?” Kacper reluctantly asked, shifting a little so his chin was tucked against Serefin’s shoulder.

  “A few months. It will still take time but the route is direct.” She paused, thoughtful. “And incredibly dangerous. Very few people survive the forest roads.”

  “Well,” Serefin said grimly, “we don’t have much choice.”

  “Not if we can’t track the cleric anymore, no.” She sounded disappointed. It would have been easier had they found her; divine nonsense was her wheelhouse, surely she could help. Serefin should have talked to her about it in the first place.

  “Don’t you lot have a way to track Vultures?” he asked.

  Katya shrugged. “If you have something of importance of his, I could do it.”

  Serefin’s stomach turned. “What if—what if you used blood?”

  “I don’t treat in heresy,” she snapped.

  “But what if that’s what you had to use?”

  She leaned back on her hands, chewing on her lower lip. “Do you just happen to have a vial of the Black Vulture’s blood on you?”

  Serefin shook his head. “He’s my brother.”

  Her dark green eyes went wide, jaw falling open.

  “A bastard, technically. It’s complicated. But, it would be a way to do it, I suppose, if however you use magic is anything like ours. I thought only clerics could cast magic?”

  “It’s complicated,” Katya said, voice hoarse. “The saints can bestow power. It’s significantly weaker than the gods and the training to hear the saints at all is incredibly rigorous. We can do very little, comparatively.”

  “But you could do it?”

  She blinked rapidly. “I think I could.”

  “Well,” Serefin said, tugging a blade from his belt and ignoring the way Kacper tensed. He offered Katya the blade. “Let’s find my brother.”

  30

  NADEZHDA LAPTEVA

  Ljubica’s tears filled all the lakes of Kalyazin and still her agony has not run its course.

  —The Letters of Włodzimierz

  Nadya stood in the monastery’s quiet cemetery and broke under the weight of her grief. She had done nothing but fail over and over and now Kostya was really truly gone and she had killed ten of her brothers and sisters because she had been reckless and couldn’t control her power. Her magic had obliterated them. And that magic had felt good, which made it all the more abhorrent.

  The aftermath was like living through a nightmare. She scrubbed at her tears but they fell unceasing. She had been allowed to help prepare Kostya’s body for burial, inscribing the headband and belt the dead were buried with in prayers to Veceslav. It was usually Marzenya who took the burial prayers, but Kostya would have wanted Veceslav. It was the least she could do. The dead were buried in unadorned white, no embroidery, to ease them across the mortal bounds.

  Nadya didn’t want to think about how she would fail to see to the proper days of mourning. The third, the ninth, and the fortieth days were to be set aside for remembrance and she couldn’t linger here that long.

  What was the point of her if she couldn’t keep people she cared about safe? All she ever did was make things worse. Her monastery never would have been attacked had she not been t
here—everyone would be alive. Kostya would be alive. So many people would still live if she had never existed.

  She touched the grave marker, running her fingers over Veceslav’s symbol carved into the stone, over the dips where Kostya’s name was set. Konstantin Ruslanovich. He was so far from where his brother died. So far from everything he had ever known.

  Nadya had spent so much time frustrated and scared that he wanted her to be something she wasn’t, that she had wasted the short time they’d had together since finding him.

  She was sitting out in the cold when Ivan found her. The old monk sat down on the frozen ground next to her.

  “Peace, sister,” he murmured when she tensed, prepared to flee.

  Her fingers glanced against the stone. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, but she didn’t know if she was speaking to Ivan or Kostya.

  Ivan sighed heavily. “Child, you have only ever done what was asked.”

  He looked so much older than when they had arrived, his dark eyes weary.

  “People died,” she said. “If I was better at this, if I had better control, no one would be dead. Kostya wouldn’t be dead.”

  “If the Vultures did not exist, Konstantin would not be dead,” Ivan said. “You cannot blame yourself for every tragedy that befalls those around you.”

  Oh, she very well could.

  “If Malachiasz wasn’t here, Kostya would be alive,” she whispered.

  She hadn’t spoken to him since the attack. Parijahan had told her that no one would see to his wounds, so Rashid had done his best with what was on hand. Nadya wasn’t really concerned—he was a Vulture and they could survive graver injuries than a broken jaw and crossbow wounds. The whole night was confusing and unreal in hindsight, like it had been a dream.

  But it wasn’t a dream, it was a nightmare, and the gravestone under her hand was very real and she could not wake up.