Ruthless Gods

by Emily A Duncan

  The air felt wrong. Something fundamental had shattered and they would spiral ever faster toward chaos. The loss of the gods—of everything—a tangible weight, a tinge in the world’s colors. Everything felt wrong.

  The door opened. She heard Parijahan sigh. The bed shifted as the Akolan girl crawled in next to her.

  “I know you’re awake,” she said.

  Nadya said nothing. She curled the fingers of her corrupted hand into a fist, tucking it close to her chest.

  “And I know you’re going to want to stay here forever until you waste away into nothing. I don’t want to rush your grief.”

  “Then don’t,” Nadya said, finally turning over and sitting up. Parijahan’s dark hair was splayed out on the pillow, her eyes tired.

  Parijahan opened her mouth to speak, but Nadya held up a hand. “Don’t tell me what this has done. Don’t tell me how much worse it’s gotten, I can’t bear it. Where are we?”

  “A village outside Dozvlatovya, to the west. It turns out that Tachilvnik is actually a very small stretch of forest when it’s not trying to hold you there forever. Nadya, I can feel it, too. The—the breaking.”

  Nadya shook her head. “And Serefin?”

  “No one knows. We found Katya and Ostyia—Rashid is mostly fine, he broke his wrist—but not Kacper or Serefin.”

  Nadya couldn’t dredge up any worry for the Tranavian boys. Serefin had killed Malachiasz. Maybe he had died when the mountain crumbled. One less problem to solve.

  “Good.”

  “Nadya…”

  Nadya dropped her head into her hands. She had never been so totally alone before.

  “There’s a priest here who wants to speak to you,” Parijahan said carefully.

  “No.”

  Parijahan just nodded.

  “He died hating me,” she said, voice blank.

  He told you he loved you, she chided herself. But he had only said that because he had known he was dying. There was no healing her betrayal. She stared at a painting of flowers on the wall in front of her but barely saw them. “I did something very bad, Parj, and—”

  Parijahan shushed her. “Don’t, Nadya, it’s not worth it.”

  Nadya pulled her knees up to her chest and buried her face in her arms, a lump in her throat. She had lost her goddess—lost all of the gods—and the boy she loved, and she didn’t know which she was supposed to grieve first, which one was supposed to hurt her more, because right now everything hurt and she couldn’t see the point of anything. She had nothing left. How quickly had she lost her home, Kostya, Malachiasz, everything everything.

  “He was terrible, but he was also so very good,” Parijahan said. “And you and I both know he wouldn’t want you to fade away because he’s gone.”

  “You and I both know he would want to be mourned as dramatically as possible,” Nadya said, sniffling.

  Parijahan laughed, but it was a broken sound and Nadya couldn’t parse the rush of emotion that filled her. Anger, because she had lost so much and how dare anyone else be mourning as well. Regret, because Parijahan and Malachiasz were close and Parj had every right to be devastated.

  But it all got swept up into the empty blank of her shattered pieces. And Nadya was left with nothing. Memories that would fade but for now she could hold them close. The gentle, earnest way he had been during their journey to the forest—and as much as that had been a part of his game, she knew it had been real, too. His lies were his truths and that was what made him so frustrating. She had hated him and she had loved him and now he was gone.

  “What did the priest want?”

  “No,” Parijahan said. “No, you know what? You’re going to throw yourself into something to distract yourself and it’s going to kill you. Don’t look at me like that, I don’t care if that’s what you want. You and I are going to stay here and you’re going to grieve yourself into oblivion if you must, because I know, Nadya, I know how much you loved him and I’m sorry.”

  “I lost Marzenya, too,” Nadya whispered.

  Parijahan sat up very slowly. “What?”

  “Malachiasz killed her. He got his wish, he killed a god.” Nadya shook her head. “I don’t have anything left to fight for. The gods have turned their backs on us and it’s my fault. Can you feel it?”

  Parijahan shuddered. “I didn’t know what that meant.”

  Nadya closed her eyes, wanting to suffer the void. With a start, she realized she could feel something. It was far older. A spark of something she could reach for and talk to that was not her gods but like them. The fallen gods had been woken up, and what that meant, she didn’t know. But what about the darker creatures? What about her?

  Maybe it wasn’t over for her yet.

  Or maybe everything would fall apart around her no matter what she did.

  All she knew was that she wanted to stay here and disappear forever. No one would ever know the fate of the cleric who had doomed the world. The fate of the girl who had loved the wrong boy and had lost everything because of it.

  “You and I are going to be seeing a lot more of each other in the future,” Ljubica had said. Nadya let out a slow breath, knowing, with sudden piercing certainty, the grand game played by the gods had not yet ended.

  Nadya had thought the gods she knew were playing the game, but as she reached further, she found something else that had been unleashed, something that had been pushing its mortal pieces around for a very long time.

  That being was winning.

  That being was going to destroy everything.

  There was a knock on the door. The person on the other side did not wait for Nadya or Parijahan to respond.

  “The tsarevna demands your presence immediately.”

  44

  SEREFIN MELESKI

  Svoyatovy Maksim and Tsezar Belousov: Both chosen by the goddess Bozidarka, the brothers prophesied Tranavia’s ultimate downfall and Kalyazin’s victory over the heretics. Their prophesies were considered apocryphal and discounted when Maksim blinded, then murdered, Tsezar.

  —Vasiliev’s Book of Saints

  If the mountain had crumbled around him and swallowed him whole, Serefin would have been fine with that. He wasn’t entirely sure how he was supposed to live with what he had done.

  If he survived.

  If the searing pain in his head and the fever that was scrambling his brain didn’t kill him first, of course. As it happened, tearing your own eye out with bloody hands was not the most advisable of things to do.

  But Serefin couldn’t feel Velyos. The moths still fluttered around him, he would never escape being touched by a god. But the god was gone and could not control him anymore. Chyrnog was also gone, and that was … concerning, to say the least. He didn’t know where they were; he didn’t care. He had to get back to Tranavia. He had to go home.

  Because something had happened at the top of that mountain and Serefin didn’t know what it was, only that it terrified him. Only that he could feel something had changed and he couldn’t place just what it was. But there was an ominous dread that refused to let him go and he knew those two things were related.

  What had they done?

  The whole world felt wrong in a way that Serefin couldn’t put to words. Like something had been pulled away from reality; like all color had been dimmed. Maybe it was just him and his eyesight, now somehow better and worse than before, but he knew that wasn’t it. They had shifted something, broken something.

  He had lost Ostyia somewhere in that forest, but he had to hope—to trust—she would make it out all right. He couldn’t go back to find her. He couldn’t go back into that horrific playground of the divine.

  At least he had Kacper, but he was acting strange. There were gaps in his memory that kept showing themselves, and Serefin didn’t know what they meant.

  They kept moving, even as Serefin’s fever burned hotter and brighter and his steps grew less steady as he adjusted to officially having only one eye. It was, at least, the one that had always been
a little bit clearer. A small mercy.

  If he was going to die, he did not want to do it in Kalyazin. He wasn’t certain he would have that luxury.

  It got to the point where he was too weak to walk and Kacper had to drag him into a Kalyazi village to find a healer. The only place they could go was the church, where an old priestess was known to have healing powers granted by some saint or other.

  There was no time to hide that they were Tranavian. There was no way to mask who Serefin was.

  The priestess opened the door to the wooden, rickety church and took one look at the boys, bloodstained and exhausted, before nodding her head and beckoning them inside. Serefin was far past the point of caring about how if he never stepped into a Kalyazi church again it would be too soon, and he let Kacper pull him in.

  “What on earth did you do to your face, boy?” the priestess asked as her weathered hands touched his bloodied face, taking in the infected, empty eye socket. How it hadn’t killed Serefin yet very well should’ve been a miracle. “Those scratches on your face will scar, most likely. If you survive,” she added.

  “Please,” Kacper said softly, a plaintive entreaty in his voice.

  The woman didn’t blink at Kacper’s accent. She sighed and nodded and left the room, muttering about collecting instruments and praying the saints would wish to bother with a Tranavian heretic.

  Kacper sat down on the bench beside Serefin and tugged his head against his shoulder. Serefin was shivering violently and he had a terrible feeling this might be the end.

  “I didn’t mean to kill him,” he said. “My brother. I didn’t…”

  “Is this the fever talking, or is it you?” Kacper asked.

  “It’s me.”

  Kacper nodded. “You’re going to make it. And we’re going to go back to Tranavia and forget about all of this.”

  Serefin couldn’t do that. He couldn’t forget about any of it. Ostyia was still out there—somewhere, he hoped, because he couldn’t really consider that she might be dead. His brother’s blood was on his hands and he had ripped out his eye to sever a connection with some Kalyazi god that was going to wreak havoc on everything.

  And Kacper couldn’t remember how to use magic. Serefin didn’t know what that meant, either, but it chilled him to his core. Why could he remember and Kacper couldn’t?

  “You boys should get back to your country,” the priestess said as she returned. “Normally I would send you to the garrison to burn for your sins, but blood magic has stopped in Tranavia. Maybe your people have finally seen the error of your ways.”

  Kacper looked confused. Serefin tried to straighten, the blood draining from his face. This was a dream, this was a fever dream and he had lost coherence from the pain, that’s all this was.

  “What do you mean?” Serefin asked, trying to only sound a little curious, aware the pain was causing him to slur as if he were drunk. He wished he were drunk.

  “The front has had a standstill,” the woman said. “I suppose you’d not have heard all the way out here. What are you doing all the way out here?” she asked, suddenly suspicious.

  “If we told you we were spies would you kill us faster?” Kacper said wearily. “The truth is too long and makes little sense.”

  The priestess waved that away. She eyed them as she mixed a poultice in a small stone bowl. “You lot just stopped using blood magic.”

  Again, Serefin looked at Kacper for some kind of response, and Kacper only shrugged.

  “It’s like the Tranavians have finally seen the light,” she said contemplatively, “I wonder what changed. Maybe the war will finally end. Do you think your king finally saw the truth of matters?”

  Serefin flinched as a wet cloth touched his face. She cleaned his wound as best she could and it hurt more than the steady, aching pulse that had hammered in front of his brain for days now.

  “I doubt it,” he finally said. “The king has seen too many horrors to ever give up so easily.”

  The priestess made a disapproving sound but fell silent as she worked.

  Serefin’s mind raced. Whatever had happened to Kacper had happened to everyone.

  Tranavia would never survive without the blood magic that had built it up.

  His entire country was about to fall.

  epilogue

  THE BOY LOST IN THE DARK

  It was different, this time. Darkness was something he was intimately used to; darkness was nothing to him. He had lived and toiled and learned in darkness. This was both more than that and yet something else entirely.

  “I have waited a very long time for you, boy.”

  The voice was ageless and unending. It scraped at his insides, shredding him. But he had been torn to pieces before. This was no different. There was no further to fall.

  (So he thought, but truly, what was left for him?)

  But this was not how it was supposed to be. Because he still had a piece of himself, this time, and he held it close. He was unwilling to lose it again. He was unwilling to drop down into the swamp of pure hatred that was waiting for him, just over the edge.

  She had tried to take from him the only thing that had ever mattered, and hatred would burn so easily. So he waited at the edge, he waited to fall, he waited for this—whatever this was—to become the oblivion he knew it to be. Because that dagger in his chest had done the one thing no one could. But there had been something in that blade, and even while it had severed the threads of his life, it had also done … something else.

  That voice, that single voice that was not his and did not belong here but whispered whispered whispered relentlessly until he thought he would break the last piece of himself between his hands to make it stop.

  But he couldn’t do that, not yet, something was wrong.

  “Are you not ready to go yet, god killer?”

  He frowned. He had done that, hadn’t he? Too little too late.

  “I could keep you here…”

  His heart began to lift but he quashed it. That was not the way this worked. Death was death was death, and it was inevitable for him; he had always known it would come for him sooner rather than later. It was not for him to reject.

  “Of course, you have to do a few things for me…”

  He had so much more he wanted to do … There was so much he had not yet finished. He wasn’t ready. But, no, no, it was his time. It was his time.

  But there was a yearning amidst the hunger. There was want beside the acceptance. He didn’t want to go. He stepped back—death was not for him to turn away from.

  “Oh, boy, you don’t understand. I’m not giving you a choice.”

  Malachiasz woke up in the bloodstained snow.

  And entropy, the death knell of the world, woke with him.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I was warned about the second book, I was, but I truly don’t think there’s a way to be prepared for the singularly specific struggle that comes with it. Ruthless Gods tried its very hardest to break me, and 2018 became a bit of a black hole because of it. I’ll do my very best to thank everyone who helped me keep my head above water, but I’m certain I’ll be as forgetful as I ever am—so if you were around for the chaos that was this last year, thank you.

  Thank you to Vicki, who took all my weird ideas without so much as a pause and somehow managed to push me to get weirder.

  Thank you, as ever and always, to Thao, the greatest champion and cheerleader, and to the rest of the SDLA team.

  Thank you to DJ—sorry I did all that to Serefin, I know he’s your favorite. To Meghan, publicist extraordinaire: one day I’ll remember to put everything in my calendar. To Jennie, Olga, and the rest of the Wednesday Books team: I feel so honored every day that I get to do this whole book thing with you all. To the library marketing team, you guys rock. And thank you, once again, to Mark for the most metal art for the book covers. Thank you to Anna, who gave Wicked Saints the most gloriously striking packaging. Thank you to Melanie, who wrangled all my Polish Żs. And thank you to
the Creative Services team for continually leaning in to the Metal Goth Aesthetic—it means so much to this Metal Goth.

  My writing process for Ruthless Gods was far more solitary than for Wicked Saints, but I would have fallen apart if not for R. J. Anderson, R. M. Romero, and Jessica Cooper’s early advice. To the Slack group—you know who you are. To Stephanie Garber, Roshani Chokshi, Margaret Rogerson, Robin LaFevers, Adrienne Young, and Rosamund Hodge for your beautiful words and your early support. To Marina, Lane, Tatra, Diana, Dana, Ashely, and Hannah, y’all are still here!

  To the Spell Check gang, Margaret Owen, L. L. McKinney, Linsey Miller, Adib Khorram, and Laura Pohl, thanks for the reprieve from the real-life chaos and wild DnD shenanigans.

  To Christine, Rory, Claire, and Nicole, this wild journey would be so much dimmer without you four. (Also, Claire, finish your book.)

  To all the bloggers who showed Wicked Saints so much love, thank you for all you do. I was blown away by your enthusiasm and support, and it meant the absolute world to me. To the booksellers who yelled about it from the beginning—Allison, Sami, Shauna, Kiersten, Jordan, Meghan—you’re all wonderful. To the artists who keep taking these weird kids of mine and creating masterpieces, thank you.

  To my library family, thanks for suffering me. I know I can be a bit of a hot mess, but you all make the day job such fun. To Tim, Kara, Kyle, David, Sadie, and Matt, you guys keep me grounded.

  As always, to my family for their unwavering support.

  And to everyone else my goldfish brain has forgotten, thank you. Let’s keep making weird art.

  ALSO BY

  EMILY A. DUNCAN

  WICKED SAINTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  EMILY A. DUNCAN is the New York Times bestselling author of Wicked Saints. She works as a youth services librarian and received a master’s degree in library science from Kent State University, which mostly taught her how to find obscure Slavic folklore texts through interlibrary loan systems. When not reading or writing, she enjoys playing copious amounts of video games and Dungeons & Dragons. She lives in Ohio. You can sign up for email updates here.