Ruthless Gods (ARC)

by Emily A Duncan

  This is my fault. She had created something when she stole his power and bound it to hers. Of course it lingered, of course there were consequences. Gods, she could feel him. He was crumbling, eroding like a cliff face being rocked by an ocean’s waves.

  Then—as clear as if it were happening right in front of her—she heard the sound of an iron claw scraping against glass. A painful, caustic screech that drove needles into Nadya’s ears. Down, down, down. A hand slammed against the glass, slender fingers tipped with dripping iron claws.

  Nadya broke away.

  She stumbled back from the desk, her stomach churning. Nadya willed her last meal not to return. This couldn’t be happening. How was this happening?

  A few agonizing seconds passed without a rekindling of the twisted connection. The brush against the roiling chaos of his madness.

  But it had felt like Malachiasz. The monster was still Malachiasz.

  Would it be hope, then, that killed her in the end?

  Nadya looked up at Parijahan, who stared at her in horror.

  “Well,” Nadya rasped, “I guess he’s not dead.”

  interlude i

  The Black Vulture

  The hunger would not relent. The gnawing at the edges of his being was too much to bear yet never enough. He could only hunger, need, until finally he was released unto perfect oblivion and felt nothing. No hunger, no unceasing, unending, emptiness pulling at the core of him, the ever present threat of fully shattering.

  The darkness was a comfort. Torches were few and far between here and easily avoided. It was a welcome escape to remain far from the glimpses of light that reminded him of the missing. Of the thing that flickered outside his consciousness, just far enough away that he couldn’t grasp it. The relentlessly fluttering wings of a little bird that refused to be choked by darkness.

  It was an irritant sweet enough to drive his madness a little further, a little deeper. But ignorance was sweeter. He never moved beyond that initial grasp.

  There were glimmers that didn’t belong to him, didn’t belong to anyone, frustrating in their displacement. A girl with hair like snow, fiercely glaring, pale freckles dusting her skin. A girl arguing, rooted and stubborn and passionate. Beautiful, brilliant, torturously absent. He had no idea who she was and that made everything all the more frustrating.

  Eternal and instantaneous, time became extraneous. The glimmers—the distractions—faded. Only the hunger, always the hunger, remained. Only the feeling of being taken apart and put back together and ripped to pieces once more.

  (Being unmade was, apparently, an ongoing process.)

  There was a vague needling that something needed to be done. But nothing was something was everything and couldn’t it wait? Everything could wait. Until the darkness was less choking. The hunger less cloying. Until his thoughts were strung in a row on a line, instead of incoherent, scattered bits that jumped and fluttered and—

  Fluttered.

  Wings.

  Again.

  There.

  The little bird.

  He reached and missed. His hand slammed into something cold and he pulled his claws down it, slowly, carefully. The sound was calming, clear.

  His hands were bleeding. His hands were always bleeding.

  There was something there. The wings fluttered away again, too fast, too sharp, too soon, too real.

  There was

  something

  else.

  A memory, broken,

  scattered,

  fleeting.

  Gone.

  Three

  Serefin Meleski

  Svoyatova Elżbieta Pientka: a Tranavian who burned in the cleric Evdokiya Solodnikova’s place. Where her body was buried, the dead are said to speak with the living.

  —Vasiliev’s Book of Saints

  Serefin was halfway up the tower stairs to visit the witch before he realized what he was doing. He paused, hand gripping the rail, and wondered if he shouldn’t be going alone. But it was too late to turn back. Pelageya knew he was there the moment the door to her tower opened.

  He took the steps two at a time. Serefin wasn’t wholly pleased he was forced to turn to the witch, but it was strangely inevitable. She had set him on this path, hadn’t she? Surely she would have some horribly esoteric advice that he wouldn’t understand and would be terrifying in its broad foretelling of future doom.

  He reached the top of the tower and found the door ajar, swinging open under the light rap of his knuckles.

  Well, that’s less than ideal, he thought with a frown. A cloud of moths blew into the air. He waved them away.

  “Pelageya?” he called, pushing his way in.

  Serefin’s stomach dropped. The room was gutted.

  It was as though the witch had never been there at all. Cobwebs dusted every corner. The fireplace had remnants of ash but was mostly swept clean. A witch’s circle stood out in stark relief against the center of the floor. A sigh of relief escaped him—it was only charcoal, not blood.

  He moved around the circle, fingers tapping against the spine of his spell book.

  This was not what he’d hoped for.

  Kneeling down, he nicked the back of his finger on a razor in his sleeve and paged through his spell book. Pelageya wouldn’t leave this behind without reason, and while Serefin could not read the sigils scrawled within the circle, he could charge the spell.

  He hesitated. What he was doing was profoundly stupid. If Kacper or Ostyia were here, they would sooner put a blade to his throat than let him deal in uncertain magic.

  Except, his voices of reason weren’t here. Swiftly he pressed his bloody palm down. His focus pared down to a single point underneath his hand. It caught fire from there, like the powder that lit magic cannons, and slowly filled out the circle, sketching in every sigil until the floor burned with a strange, acrid, green fire.

  But that was all.

  He straightened away from the spell, faintly disappointed, yet relieved all the same. Just a blank spell the witch left behind to toy with Serefin. He nudged the circle with the toe of his boot, carefully breaking the flow of power, hopeful the spell wouldn’t explode in his face. The flames went out.

  “I made bets with myself, you know, on which of you would come to me first.”

  Serefin nearly jumped out of his skin.

  “The girl who is a cleric but not a cleric, a witch but not a witch.” Pelageya was sitting in the middle of the ruined circle, counting on her bony fingers. “The monster who sits on a throne of gilded bones and reaches for the heavens far past his understanding, or the princeling touched by a power he does not believe in.”

  Serefin rested his hand against his spell book and waited for his heart to stop rattling his body. “Did you win?”

  “Win what?” Pelageya asked, still counting.

  “The bet.”

  “No. Where’s the witch?”

  “She’s not a witch, she’s a cleric.”

  “Can’t be a cleric if the gods won’t talk to you,” Pelageya said, waving a hand. “Can’t be a witch with what she is, either. Tainted but holy. A puzzle. She’s a lot of things, including not here. Not what I expected. But you are. One half of my delightfully bloodthirsty and pathetically delusional blood mage pair.”

  Serefin’s eyes narrowed as he took in the empty room. “What happened here?”

  A blink. The room was no longer empty. The witch circle on the floor was now chalk instead of charcoal. The deer skulls hung from their antlers on the ceiling and Serefin found himself sitting in a black upholstered chair, moths fluttering nervously around his face, his head spinning.

  “What happened where?” Pelageya asked, suddenly no older than Serefin. Her curls were tied back from her face, black but for a shockingly white lock that disappeared into the mass of hair knotted at the back of her head. “You want something,” she chirped, picking up a skull from a side table—human—before sitting in the chair across from Serefin, the skull perched in her lap, fac
ing him.

  “I should really be going,” Serefin said, moving to stand.

  He remained trapped in his chair. A flicker of panic threaded through him.

  “Oh,” Pelageya said, tapping her chin. “Oh, no. I have the one and the other will come eventually. Meleski and Czechowicz but closer than you know, closer than those who have lied have said. He’ll come, soon enough, and then—finally—I can deal with the witch who is a cleric who is not a witch and not a cleric.”

  “What does Malachiasz have to do with this?”

  Pelageya leaned forward over the skull. “Everything, dear princeling.”

  “King,” Serefin murmured.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I’m the king now,” he said, fingers running across the hammered iron crown that rested over his hair. It still felt like a mistake had been made and he had been given something that did not belong to him. He supposed no one truly believed it did. All he wanted was to prove the throne was rightfully his—even if he had to prove it to himself along with his nobility.

  Pelageya nodded but he couldn’t shake the feeling that she was unconvinced, her gaze drawn to his left eye. He lifted a hand to it self-consciously.

  “She knows.”

  Serefin chewed on the inside of his mouth to keep from reacting to the reedy voice.

  “Black and gold and red and gray. Vultures and moths and blood, always blood. A boy born in a gilded hall and a boy born in darkness. Bred in bitterness and bred in lies. Change your place; change your name. Nothing for it, it’s a mirror, you see. The blood’s the same, the darkness more cloying on one, but a mirror, you look to find yourself and find the one you are terrified of becoming. Two thrones, two kings, two boys to plunge this world into darkness for the sake of saving it.”

  A shudder wracked Serefin’s body. He regretted coming here alone. He wished Kacper’s steadying hand was against his shoulder, pulling him away yet again from the incoherent ravings of the witch.

  “What are you talking about?” Serefin said, voice low.

  “Hide and forget. Hide and remember. You hide from the truth, basking in the lie of a family deceitful from the start. He hides under magic that has burned away remembrance of what he used to be. One day, both will remember, and what will happen then?”

  “Remember what?” Serefin’s nerves were fraying further.

  Pelageya stared off into the middle distance, pale fingers stroking the top of the skull.

  “Should I tell you a story, dear king of moths, king of blood, king of horrors?”

  “Yes.” The word escaped in a whisper before he could stop it and he flinched. He desperately wanted to flee whatever revelation was about to drop.

  “A story about two sisters from the lake country. A story about a girl who married a prince she disliked who became a king she hated. The girl became a woman who bore a son she did not understand but loved anyway. But it wasn’t enough. And she would seek oblivion far from the husband she detested. A second son, of the dark, hidden away and born of masked passion and lies.”

  “No . . .” he murmured, shaking his head. “No.” The walls began to close in around him, everything growing black at the edges.

  “Tranavians make it so easy!” Pelageya said, delighted. “Oh no, no, you see, this boy belongs to the sister, not the woman, they said! Hide him in a twisted truth and no one will suspect! Send him away to Tranavia’s high order and no one will remember he was anything other than a dispensable slavhka! Burn his bones and shatter his body and it won’t matter who he came from. Make a weapon; make a king.”

  She’s lying, Serefin thought frantically, yet he knew—somehow, deep down in his core, in that place that kept Malachiasz in his thoughts long after he was gone—she wasn’t. Maybe that was why it hurt so much when Malachiasz had opened the door to Pelageya’s tower and his sharp-toothed smile had no recognition in it.

  “Where is your brother, dear king? Where did the Black Vulture go?”

  The word brother hit Serefin like a punch to the chest. “How do you know?” Serefin asked, voice strained.

  Pelageya cackled. “You ask as if you have doubts. But you know, you know, the blood is the same.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Why now? When all he had was a simmering hatred that burned for the Black Vulture because he had died because of him. Because of Malachiasz. His brother.

  “Who else would tell you?” she asked. “Certainly not your mother.”

  Serefin shivered. How much did his mother know of Malachiasz’s fate? How is any of this even possible?

  Pelageya’s pitch dark eyes tracked the moths fluttering around Serefin’s head. “That,” she said, “is an interesting development. Has he spoken to you yet? I’m sure he has. Whispers, though, only whispers because you are Tranavian and thus so very difficult to break. You are not the one he wanted.”

  Pelageya tilted her head and stood, moving to the heavy curtains that cloaked everything in darkness. She drew them back, flooding the room with blinding light.

  “The creeping shadows slither from the dark; retribution falls from the sky,” she murmured. “You have time, but fast it slips. And slip away it will. Things are set into motion and you must see if you will stand or fall.”

  Serefin stumbled to his feet, his limbs finally free. This was more than he wanted. He didn’t care if there was more to be said. Pelageya turned from the window, giving him a wry smile.

  He fled.

  Serefin crashed into his mother’s rooms, ignoring the protests from her maidservant.

  “I’m her son,” he snapped as she bustled after him, muttering about decorum. He found his mother in her sitting room and slammed the door in the maid’s face. A glass vase near the door wobbled precariously.

  Klarysa looked up from her book, glancing pointedly at the door, and to the vase.

  “When were you going to tell me?” Serefin asked, surprised at his level voice.

  “You are going to have to be a great deal more specific, my dear,” she said, oblivious to his distress. She held out a hand, beckoning him closer, taking the cloth mask down from her face.

  He didn’t move. He wanted to take that damned vase and hurl it against the wall. He didn’t do that, either.

  “You knew what my father was doing,” he said, carefully, slowly. “You gave me a warning, you knew the whole time.”

  Her pale blue eyes narrowed and Serefin absently considered that he and Malachiasz had both inherited those eyes.

  “And you stopped him,” she said placidly, hooking her mask back over her face. “The crown is yours.”

  “You knew he was acting with the Vultures.”

  “I did.”

  “You knew the Vulture whose fault this is.”

  She frowned slightly. “It was the Black Vulture.”

  “How do you not know who he is?” Serefin asked, his voice finally cracking. He raked his hands through his hair. For months, he had been steadily tucking away information on Malachiasz as it came to him because eventually he would have to deal with the Black Vulture. He would have to make him stand for his treason.

  But now he didn’t know what he was supposed to do.

  “Serefin, what are you talking about?”

  “The witch had to tell me,” he said, raw panic tearing at his voice. “You didn’t even have the decency to tell me yourself. Did you know, when you sent him to the Vultures, what he would become?”

  Klarysa finally tensed. “What?”

  “You were never here. Of course you didn’t know. Of course you never saw him in passing. But you could have told me. He was here this whole time, so close, and I never knew.”

  The blood drained from her face.

  Serefin collapsed into a chair, dropping his head into his hands.

  “Pelageya told you?” Klarysa said bleakly, the thread of tension between them threatening to snap.

  He nodded, not lifting his head.

  “He was supposed to stay with Sylwia,” she whispe
red. “A bastard has no place at court and there were too many who were suspicious.”

  “He was never my cousin,” Serefin said. “And you let the Vultures have him.”

  “Don’t be sentimental, Serefin, it’s a terrible look on you. He was too powerful to go anywhere else.”

  “Well, now he’s the Black Vulture and conspired with my father to kill me, so congratulations, I suppose you’re right.”

  Klarysa looked dizzy, her skin very pale. “You’re mistaken.”

  “I assure you, mother, I am not. My little brother has committed treason and I can do nothing because he holds the one other high office in Tranavia. We have no official legislature in place for this because no Vulture has ever dared to overreach like this.”

  Some had ventured close; not every Black Vulture had been content to remain in their cathedral and their mines. But none so far as Malachiasz.

  Her hand went to her mouth and Serefin had the fleeting notion that she was going to descend into one of her frequent fits. To be frank he was surprised she had stayed this long in Grazyk; the magic residue in the air did not sit well with her.

  “The rumors . . .”

  “The rumors are wrong. What happened was worse.” Serefin sighed, leaning his head back against the chair. The ceiling of his mother’s sitting room was painted with bright flowers and magic symbols for health were scrawled across the plaster. No vultures in sight. “I thought he was dead for years. I almost wish he was.”

  Because his fate rests in my hands.

  “Serefin—”

  “I don’t want your excuses, mother, it was all for propriety’s sake, after all. How were you to know your bastard son would grow up depraved and soulless? Oh, right, wait, that is the fate of every Vulture, isn’t it?”

  She jerked back as if struck. Serefin wilted.

  It wouldn’t change anything, this revelation. Malachiasz had to answer for his actions.

  “Two thrones and a pair of ruined brothers to sit them,” he murmured. “Though, soon, I suppose not.” He slid the crown off his head and ran his thumb around the cool iron.

  His mother relaxed, relieved to grasp onto a topic of conversation that was not Malachiasz. She had tucked her shaking hands down into her lap in an attempt to still them.