“Do you suppose we’ll meet the people who carved these?” Katya asked, moving up to the statue that Nadya somehow knew was Bozidarka. The figure had holes in her palms, her spine visible through a cavernous torso. The face had no eyes, only empty sockets, including one in her forehead. Nadya’s forehead itched. “Not the original people, but surely someone tends these?”
“There’s no one here,” Nadya said. This place was not made for mortals. There were stories of clerics who had made this journey, surviving in the Bolagvoy monastery for months in solitude before clawing their way free from the forest. Mere folklore. No one ever made it out.
Katya snorted. “Well, I suppose I get to tell my priest back in Komyazalov ‘I told you so.’”
Malachiasz tugged on a piece of bone in his hair. “Does this mean I’m right?”
“No.”
He waved erratically to the primordial twenty. Nadya eyed them, shivering as her palm ached and the sudden desire to move closer to them rushed through her. She turned back to him. He stared at something just past her, his face deathly pale.
“We’re not alone,” he said, voice low.
Katya’s head whipped around and she swore.
Malachiasz rolled his sleeves up, reaching for the knife at his belt. Mage, not Vulture. That made Nadya feel only marginally better. She tugged her bone voryen from her belt. Malachiasz nodded slowly.
“The relic will do you well here,” he said.
Katya’s eyes narrowed.
Nadya reached for her necklace. She had finished restringing it and her fingers found Marzenya’s bead. Despite everything, she still turned to her goddess first.
Just … please.
Nadya got no answers and no magic. Only silence. Just the expectancy of complete dedication. Nadya had to go this alone. She chewed on her lip, watching Malachiasz. She had no idea what she would find when she turned, but she didn’t like anything that made Malachiasz nervous.
“Litkiniczki,” he murmured.
Lichni’voda, her brain supplied in Kalyazi.
Bad luck. Dark omen.
Except not the concept. The creature.
“Move very slowly,” he said quietly. “Though it doesn’t matter. It sees us. I see it.”
There were regular Kalyazi portents, small ones, simple ones. Little creatures that spelled out small disasters when they were seen. But the big ones, the monsters, if you survived an encounter with Lichni’voda, you would have all the bad luck of the omen to follow you.
Blood trickled down Malachiasz’s forearms. Nadya heard Parijahan call out to them, but Malachiasz held a hand out.
“Don’t pass the threshold,” he said, his voice only just loud enough for them to hear.
If the Lichni’voda didn’t see them, the portent would not follow.
Only Nadya, Malachiasz, and Katya were caught by its eye.
Parijahan ducked out enough to see what Malachiasz was staring at. She moved back around the statue, eyes wide.
They were in trouble.
“All right,” Malachiasz said gently. “There’s no saving any of us from this, so we might as well kill it, yes?” He moved closer to Nadya, ducking his head and kissing her.
His hand was bloody and it smeared against her chin as he lifted her face to his. It was a desperate thing, messy and scared. She could feel his heart beating fast in his chest. He was panicking but trying to keep calm for her sake, but he didn’t need to, she understood the gravity of the situation.
Killing the thing wasn’t the problem.
There had been a part of her that thought all of this fear of the forest was unnecessary. That what they would be up against would be easily dealt with. Serefin was a powerful mage. Malachiasz was the Black Vulture, the king of monsters. And as much as she doubted it, Nadya had power of her own.
She hadn’t expected something so far out of myth and legend that there were no stories on how, exactly, it might be killed. Something that would have further consequences than whatever this encounter wrought.
They were doomed and it would be a very real and unavoidable thing.
“It’s fine,” she murmured, “where is it?”
His gaze flicked over her shoulder. “Just watching.”
“Do you think we can wait it out? The damage is done.”
“I’d rather not do that,” Katya said.
He winced. It wasn’t something Nadya wanted to consider, either, not when they were in a place so very dangerous, not when the scope of the bad luck could be incredibly deadly. And it was on both of them together. It was on the godsdamned tsarevna of Kalyazin.
“Why didn’t we let Serefin walk in here instead?” Malachiasz muttered.
Nadya laughed, panicked and grating. “You’re horrible.” She leaned up on her toes, kissing him once more. The alignment of her world shifted ever so slightly on its axis. The awareness that this spelled out a Before and an After. That Lichni’voda were things of myth and that myth had descended upon them.
“Maybe the Vulture, not the mage,” she offered.
A half smile caught at his mouth and it made Nadya ache. She took a step back, glancing at Katya.
“I’d keep back at first,” she said.
Malachiasz’s pale eyes flickered between her and where the thing was behind her. His pupils dilated, covering his colorless irises. His posture shifted almost imperceptibly, until the roiling chaos started to shudder through him. Claws extending out of his nail beds, iron spikes jutting from his skin, but more, worse because he was so much more and so much worse now. He glanced at one of the clearing’s statues.
His mask dropped and he moved too fast for her eyes to track as he swept past her.
Her own power was buried deep, but she could find it. If Marzenya would not speak to her—or could not—fine, fine. But she wasn’t going to die here, and they were dealing with something far older than Kalyazin’s normal monsters.
She pressed her fingers against the scar, feeling the sharp ache of power. Her power. Waiting to be claimed, the shape of it strange and unformed and so very old.
The Lichni’voda was almost human in figure but wrapped in shadows. A single, black, unblinking eye sat in the center of its face. The nose caved in like that of a skull. A mouthful of razor teeth.
And the sounds it made scraped at her ears. Nadya wanted to flee.
But she could feel the creature’s power. The tricks of luck, turning it sour, causing Malachiasz’s magic to not work the way he was used to.
Malachiasz’s frustration was rising as the thing circled him and his own magic never hit its mark. Nadya ran her fingers over her necklace.
There was a hierarchy to things. Clerics were high up on that hierarchy but it had been made very clear to her that she was not just a cleric. There was some other power that was waiting for Nadya to open the door. She had been knocking, she kept knocking, but she hadn’t been able to open it.
Nadya took in the clearing. She eyed each statue until something sharp went flying past her ear, pulling her attention back to the creature. But she had the time she needed. She knew what she had to do as she pulled Marzenya’s bead to the bottom of her necklace. What if the gods you worship aren’t gods at all?
What if that didn’t matter one single godsdamned bit?
What if that was never the question?
What if the question was: What if there was a girl who could call down the magic of the divine and dredge up the power of the dark, and sift through the magic of the forests?
What if it was all about magic, in its singular essence?
It wasn’t about how Nadya got to it. It was that she was able to touch it without being obliterated. That she was able to combine divinity and darkness to kill a king and maybe maybe stop something bigger. Old and eldritch and mad.
Divinity tastes like copper and ashes, she thought idly.
It was more than she had ever anticipated.
Nadya opened the door.
34
SEREFIN
MELESKI
Three crowns for the brows of Cvjetko, for the wolf, the bear, the fox. For his claws are sharp and his teeth are many and he chews and he gnaws and he howls.
—The Letters of Włodzimierz
As soon as the clearing had come within view, Serefin’s vision had been blinded. Nothing but a searing, agonizing white. He could feel blood trickling from his eyes. The patch on his left eye was suddenly painful—if he kept it on for a second longer it was going to scorch through his skull. He ripped the patch off and nearly dropped like a stone. He let out one strangled cry before Kacper pushed his face away and pulled him back, deeper into the forest.
What he had seen was being burned into his mind where it would live and form and take him over until it clawed out the core of him and left nothing behind.
They were dealing with powers so much more ancient and vast than they could comprehend. Serefin had always known, but it had been all too easy to ignore.
“Serefin,” Kacper murmured. He was careful as he took him by the shoulders and pushed him to the ground.
Serefin covered his eyes, whimpering when Kacper pulled his hands away.
“You’re going to hurt yourself,” he said gently. He sounded scared and confused.
Serefin blinked hard, granting himself a few seconds of vision. His hands were bloody, the red caked underneath his fingernails. He reached up to his face and found the gashes left by his nails.
He shut his eyes.
“He’s getting worse,” Ostyia said.
“You’ve stopped flirting with the enemy long enough to notice?” Kacper snapped back.
“Hey, hey,” Serefin said, holding out a hand. “Stop.” It was hard to speak; the pain in his head was piercing.
The clearing had not only been a forgotten collection of ancient statues. Souls had been slaughtered in that circle. Thousands of sacrifices made. It hadn’t been underbrush their boots had crunched over, but ancient bones scattered at the edges.
“We have to stop this,” Serefin said.
“We have to figure out how to get you out of this!” Ostyia replied. Her hands were on his face, gentle as she traced the gashes. “You just tried to take your own eyes out. You can’t tell me you’re all right, Serefin.”
“I’m not,” he snapped. “Clearly I’m not. Take my hands,” he said to Kacper, the urge to scratch at his eyes overwhelming him.
Kacper’s warm hands wrapped around his, calm and sure.
“All right,” Serefin said, his voice sounding strangely more even than he felt. “I need you to knock me unconscious.”
Kacper let out a strangled sound. An inhuman scream tore through the woods from the direction of the clearing. Ostyia started to get up.
“No. The others can handle it,” Serefin said through his teeth. “Malachiasz is in there, they’re fine.”
“I don’t think—”
“Both of you stop. Stop trying to figure this out. Stop trying to fix it yourselves, you’re never going to be able to and you’ll make things worse.”
Through the blood fogging his vision he saw Kacper’s face fall and his guilt was immediate. Of course they wanted to help. He was in pain and something was obviously wrong. But they were blood mages; they were Tranavian. They had no idea what was going on. He had no idea what was going on.
He hissed as something tugged on his chest, trying to pull him back into the clearing. He couldn’t put to words the things he had seen there. He had expected monsters. He had expected things like Velyos—terrifying, powerful, but forms he was able to rationalize, comprised of parts his brain knew how to handle.
But those statues. The human brain was not made to see those things; mortals weren’t meant to know. It was supposed to be about power. Beings of vast power. But what happened to something when they had that much power? How far would a person be mutated with that kind of magic churning in their blood?
Kacper’s grip on his hands tightened. Had he tried to move?
“So you see, finally, don’t you?” It was the voice. Serefin almost wished for Velyos. This voice with no name and Velyos, rattling in his brain, both clamoring for his attention. His nerves were frayed to a snapping point.
“You see what you are trying to fight. But you don’t have to. You don’t have to fight me. You don’t have to fight Velyos. It would be so easy, so quiet, to fall. It’s such an easy thing, to let yourself be taken under. Burial requires no action, merely acceptance.”
Serefin clenched his jaw, catching a piece of skin between his teeth. Blood flooded his mouth, dripped down his chin.
“Serefin?” Ostyia’s voice hitched with desperation. He didn’t know how to tell them that he was probably fine because these gods still needed him.
He didn’t know what would happen when he finally outlived his usefulness.
“You all fight. Those of you from that grain of sand you call a country. Those of you who spill your blood for a taste of what we could give you in full. You will give up soon.”
Serefin wheezed for a long, painful breath, and he almost agreed. Anything to make this stop.
But his hands were given a tight squeeze, and he became aware of Kacper’s hands still clutching his, keeping them from his face.
You haven’t broken me yet.
The voice laughed darkly. “If I had wanted to break you, I would never have given you the opportunity to fight back. You’re so close. I’m almost done with you. But if you don’t prove strong enough to look upon the faces of those who are so much better than you…” The voice trailed off.
Point made.
Serefin’s head pounded and the horrors in the clearing grew dim enough to shove away. He shuddered, his muscles going liquid in his body. He slumped forward, Kacper only barely catching him as he dropped out of consciousness.
* * *
“What happened to you?”
When Serefin woke up it was dark outside. He couldn’t feel the clearing nearby, which he hoped meant that they had moved far from it while he was unconscious.
He groaned, moving to press his hands against his aching eyes.
Nadya caught his arms. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
He went limp, letting her drop them back down. “How bad is it?”
“You look like you got into a fight with a very angry cat,” she said, cheerful in a way that implied she was trying to cover something of her own. She mimicked dragging both hands down her face.
He laughed even though it hurt.
“Have you ever thought that maybe we’re doing the wrong thing by being here?”
He worked himself up to a sitting position; it was mild agony to do so. “I don’t have any choice,” he murmured. He had no doubt that if he had ignored Velyos and the other one completely, he would be shredded and his pieces tossed aside.
She wrapped her arms around her knees. “I wish I’d never been given that pendant. None of this would be happening if not for me.”
“I would be dead, though, so I can’t really fault you for it,” Serefin pointed out.
“You’re probably the only one.” There was a moroseness to her voice that didn’t sit right. “Do you think anything will ever change?”
Nadya wanted assurance that they would be all right, and Serefin had to believe that from this chaos there might be a chance for peace. Plus, he and Katya hadn’t murdered each other yet, always a good sign.
But he didn’t know what was happening in Tranavia and it was eating him up inside. He wasn’t naive enough to think that his throne hadn’t been wrested away in his absence.
“I don’t know.”
She exhaled slowly. “Velyos wants you to wake up the other sleeping gods, is there anything else?”
There’s the nameless one who wants Malachiasz dead, and I don’t know what else he wants but it will ruin you. And he tried so hard to tell her, because he didn’t want to actively betray this girl, but just like before the words refused to pass his lips. The nameless one demanded his silence. If t
he sleeping gods woke, they were all lost. If Malachiasz managed to topple this divine empire, they were lost. Serefin had to at least try to save Tranavia.
He shook his head. Her eyes narrowed, but she relented with a nod.
“I want your gods to leave me alone,” he said.
“You don’t want the power they can give you?”
“If there was power at the end of this, maybe I could be convinced,” he said dryly. All he had were moths and stars and the knowledge that he was different than before. But he didn’t want to be. He wanted to be Serefin again—except Serefin kissing the beautiful Tranavian boy who wanted him, Serefin who knew what it was his country needed and how to keep his throne, Serefin who could be a good king—not Serefin with all this horrific stuff tacked on.
Nadya gently touched his head, oddly comforting, before she got up and walked over to where Parijahan was sitting. The Akolan girl had looked more and more bleak the longer they traveled. Serefin couldn’t really figure out what was going on there.
“Well, now that you aren’t trying to claw off your own face,” Ostyia said as she took the spot Nadya left behind, a knowing grin at her lips. “Kacper?”
“Stop.”
Her grin widened. “I knew it.”
He groaned, leaning his head against her shoulder.
“I have been waiting years for you to notice,” she said.
“Stop,” he pleaded.
“I thought you were getting somewhere when you promoted him but no, you were only being friendly! How was I ever supposed to say, ‘Hey, Serefin, that soldier you just promoted to your glamorous royal circle is head over heels in love with you but you’re too royal to notice.’”
He sighed.
“I’m glad you figured it out.” She waved Kacper over. He handed Serefin a tin mug of tea.
“What on earth…”
“We’re going to be here for a while,” Kacper said. “Malachiasz doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
“It’s complicated!” Malachiasz called from across the clearing. Nadya had somehow worked her way onto his lap and was studying his spell book with him, his head tucked against her shoulder. Regardless of what Serefin thought of Malachiasz he found that his chest ached as he watched them.
Ruthless Gods Page 34