Ruthless Gods (ARC)

by Emily A Duncan

He took in a sharp breath. “You’re bleeding,” he murmured, reaching for her against his better judgment.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “You’re not going to stop being mad at me because I pulled some stitches.”

  He wavered. “I’m not . . .” He stopped. “No, you’re right, I am. Nadya, I don’t understand.”

  “I can’t make you understand,” she said slowly. “Most of the time, I don’t, either.”

  “They killed Anton,” he said softly.

  Nadya’s heart wrenched. Kostya and his younger brother had arrived at the monastery together, Anton only a baby at the time. The boy was always running after Kostya and Nadya, getting underfoot, a generally obnoxious and lovable younger sibling to them both.

  “Kostenka . . .” she murmured, pulling his name into a closer diminutive.

  It was dim in the old barn, but she could see the bright film of tears shining in Kostya’s eyes.

  “He died while we were still at the monastery,” Kostya said. “The prince used him as bait while he tortured me.”

  Nadya squeezed her eyes shut, the emotions she had shoved aside threatening to crash down on her all at once.

  “Father Alexei died in the Salt Mines,” Kostya continued. “They had no use for him, too old, so the Vultures did away with him. No one really knows what that meant. Day by day they would take more of us away, until there were so few left. Until there was only me.”

  No amount of trying to fight it would keep the tears away. No pretending deep down inside that everyone had gotten away unscathed. Everyone she had loved. The only family she had: gone.

  “This is what Tranavians do, Nadya. All they know is destruction and chaos. This is how it has always been and always will be.”

  She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes to try to force the tears back. She couldn’t break here, not now, not yet. There was still so much further to go.

  “You can’t make excuses. Not for him,” Kostya said, but his voice was gentler.

  She felt his hand on her arm as he tugged her closer. She let him, burying her face against his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  And even after so much time in the Salt Mines, even in his decimated, broken state, he still smelled like incense. He smelled like home and she missed it. The world was cold and cruel and she wanted to be home.

  She needed Kostya to understand that she had done what she had to, that the failings of her heart were her own and she was trying to be better. But she had failed her people; it was as simple as that.

  “I couldn’t think about it,” she said, hollow. “I had to move forward and the only way to do that was to just . . . move past it.”

  “What’s going on, Nadya?”

  She leaned back and tugged out the pendant Kostya had tucked into her hands before the monastery had burned. “Where did you get this?”

  All the blood drained from his face. “You kept it,” he said, softly.

  She flipped the pendant around on its cord so it landed on her palm. “Do you know what it is?”

  He nodded.

  Things were potentially far worse than she had guessed. “Why did you give it to me?”

  “To keep it safe,” he said. “The Church—I mean—I was supposed to—”

  “Who gave this to you, Kostya?” His words made her cold. She wasn’t supposed to use the pendant. But of course she wasn’t. It had taken blood to free Velyos from the prison, and wasn’t she the great holy cleric who would never sully herself in such a way?

  What have I done?

  “A woman came to the monastery several years ago. She asked to speak to me. Father Alexei said she wanted the person who was closest to you, to keep an eye on you.”

  “Keep an eye on me,” Nadya repeated. What was that supposed to mean? What did the Church think she was going to do?

  Kostya frowned. “She gave me the pendant but she wasn’t very clear on what I was supposed to do with it, only that it was imperative it stayed safe and near the cleric because you’d keep the terrible inevitable from happening. Those were the words she used,” he said. “The terrible inevitable.”

  Nadya had allowed that to happen. Worse still, she had practically urged it on.

  “She said it was just as dangerous to have near you as it was necessary, but I never figured out what she meant.”

  I was never supposed to use Velyos’ power, Nadya thought, with sick realization. She started shaking. I was never supposed to set him free.

  “You never told me why the Black Vulture is here,” Kostya continued, voice cold once more.

  “I need to use his power. I need to go west.”

  Kostya was shaking his head. “There is nothing you need to do that would include such a monster.”

  “Kos—” she started, exasperated, but he pushed on.

  “No. You’re making excuses,” he replied. “We need to go. You’re well enough to travel. If we leave tonight it will only take a week or so to get to the monastery in Privbelinka. Come with me, Nadya, we’ll go back to Kalyazin together, find the army, everything will be like it was meant to be.”

  Like it was meant to be. But meant to be for whom? For the old Nadya, who knew nothing outside the monastery walls and was supposed to be shuffled around the country as a figurehead and a weapon? She couldn’t return to that.

  She didn’t respond, but Kostya wasn’t deterred. He took her hands, demeanor changing instantly.

  He thinks I’m going with him, Nadya thought, heart sinking. How she wished it would be that easy.

  “Kostya,” she said slowly, beseechingly. “I can’t.”

  Bewilderment passed over his features. “What? Of course you can. We’ll fix this, Nadya, together. Everything will be fine.” He kissed her forehead before she could stop him and got up, starting back toward the farmhouse.

  “Hells,” she whispered. She stood there for a long time, letting the cold burrow into her bones, before she finally followed.

  Malachiasz glanced up when she wandered into the house and gingerly took a seat at the table. A strange, wary look came into his eyes when he saw the blood on her tunic.

  “He went in there,” he said, pointing to the other room. “What happened to you?”

  “You, technically,” she replied dryly as Parijahan made a disapproving sound and went to fetch Rashid.

  “Right,” he said quietly.

  “You know, in the grand scheme of things, literally impaling me is not your worst offense.”

  Malachiasz rolled his eyes. She sighed. So that was how it was going to be. Fine. She didn’t need to be friends with him. She just needed to suffer him a little longer until she had fixed things, then this could end.

  Rashid came in, saw the blood on Nadya’s tunic and groaned, gesturing at Malachiasz.

  “I didn’t punch him,” Nadya said. “I still might, though.”

  Rashid slid down onto the bench beside Nadya. “May I?”

  “Only if he looks away,” she said. Malachiasz rolled his eyes again and dropped his head onto the table.

  Rashid chuckled and tugged her tunic up to peel the bandage away from her side and clean the sluggishly bleeding stab wound.

  “Ease up or these will never heal,” he said gently.

  She made a noncommittal noise. His hands were warm as he dressed her wounds with fresh bandages. “I don’t want to sit around any longer. We should figure out where Serefin went.”

  Malachiasz lifted his head.

  “No!” Nadya said.

  He dropped his head back down against the table with a soft thunk. “Why do you need him?”

  “You haven’t caught him up?” she asked Rashid.

  “He’s directly responsible for a portion of it. I assumed he knew.”

  “I don’t remember anything,” Malachiasz muttered dejectedly. He lifted his head cautiously. Rashid had finished so she decided to spare him. A cluster of painfully bloodshot eyes blinked open on his cheek, and he jolted—his actual visi
on must break every time—his expression fracturing, and she wondered if it was a lie.

  “You do see why I have a hard time believing you, right?”

  Malachiasz nodded petulantly.

  “It’s just terribly convenient.”

  He rested his chin in his hands, frowning. But she remembered the look in his eyes before he fled the sanctuary and his lack of memory wasn’t exactly far-fetched.

  She leaned her head against Rashid’s shoulder. Parijahan came in and slapped a map on the table. Kostya trailed in behind her, slid a mug of tea Nadya’s way, and, finding the only available seat was near Malachiasz, leaned against the doorway.

  “What are we doing?” Parijahan asked.

  Nadya took a sip of the tea. The way Malachiasz had prepared it had been better. She closed her eyes briefly, scolding herself inwardly before leaning forward. She tapped the Valihkor Mountains. “I need to be here.”

  “That’s on the other side of Kalyazin,” Parijahan said warily. “And what is it you need him for?” She nodded to Malachiasz.

  “I thought we needed him for his glowing personality,” Rashid said. “And because we missed him.”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere, Rashid,” Malachiasz replied.

  “Only for you, Malachiasz.”

  “There’s a temple at the base of the mountains. There are rumors it is a direct line to the gods.”

  “I thought that was something you had inherently,” Malachiasz said.

  For some reason the bite in his words was far better than sympathy she knew would be false. She was very aware of Kostya’s gaze burning into the side of her face.

  “It is very far away,” Parijahan said thoughtfully. “Far enough that no one would be able to find me.”

  Malachiasz shot Parijahan a curious look. She didn’t say more, but what passed between them certainly said she would tell him soon enough.

  Nadya frowned. She placed her hand on the table, face up. The spiral scar had blackened nearly her entire palm, twisting up to stain her fingertips. Kostya took in a horrified gasp, but his reaction was to be expected. There was something infinitely more terrifying about the way Malachiasz paled.

  “Regardless of the fact that my interactions with your power should, frankly, be impossible, right now I have nothing. Well, I have this, but I think it might be killing me.”

  He leaned over the table, shooting a tentative glance her way, and took her hand in his. The scar on his palm was pale and healed.

  His thumbnail was an iron claw and he touched the back against her palm. She hissed at the cold and the sudden feeling of something else. A magic she hadn’t felt in months. He frowned, concentrating, then a smile quirked at his mouth. He let the map roll up and climbed onto the table, folding up his lanky frame and sitting on the table cross-legged. He pulled her hand closer to his face.

  “It’s like it’s just being held there,” he said thoughtfully. “I did . . .” He hesitated. “You should have died from those wounds in the Salt Mines.”

  “Blood magic can’t heal,” Parijahan commented.

  “No—I didn’t. What I did was give you a touch of my power to keep you alive.” He looked up at her from under his cloud of tangled black hair. “But it shouldn’t have stayed like this.”

  “It was there before,” Nadya said. “It’s been there since I stole it in the cathedral.”

  “Have I mentioned how annoying that was?” he asked idly as he returned to inspecting her hand. The feel of his hands against hers was distracting. He isolated her index finger, skimming the pad of his over her fingernail. He made a thoughtful sound and showed her his finger.

  It was bleeding.

  A shiver of foreboding settled in the pit of her stomach.

  “Interesting,” Malachiasz murmured. “May I open it?”

  “Open it?”

  He poised an iron claw over her palm and raised both eyebrows expectantly.

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t take another step if I were you, Kalyazi,” Malachiasz said pleasantly. “This really isn’t your concern.”

  Nadya glanced at Kostya and shook her head. His expression was stormy as he returned to the doorway, folding his arms over his chest.

  Malachiasz sliced the edge of her palm. She bit her lip. It didn’t really hurt, but a weird feeling of dread horror rushed through her. She shuddered, and Malachiasz lifted his eyes to her face. Her fingers tried to curl closed and he gently pried them back open.

  “It’s not my magic,” he said, puzzled.

  She frowned. She could feel power that wasn’t her divine magic and had assumed it was his. What was it? And was this why she couldn’t talk to the gods? What if they weren’t ignoring her at all?

  Malachiasz pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped the blood off her palm.

  “I have no idea what this is,” he said.

  “I love hearing you say that.”

  He laughed. Her heart flipped painfully in her chest and she wanted to kick herself. She wasn’t supposed to be doing this. Not with him, not again. This was exactly what she needed to avoid.

  She didn’t pull her hand away from his.

  “There is no priest to go to for answers,” Nadya said, her voice low. “If I don’t get answers . . .” She shook her head. “Maybe nothing. Maybe I’m inflating my own importance and I’ve done all I was meant to. But nothing has changed for the better. Kalyazin and Tranavia are still at war. Serefin might lose his throne to a group of war-mongering nobles. You—” She paused, waiting for Malachiasz to acknowledge her words. His clear reluctance was telling. “—have shattered something in this world and it’s only a matter of time before we see how it manifests. I need to get to that temple. But it is surrounded by a forest only the divine can pass through.”

  Malachiasz screwed up his face, wrinkling his nose.

  “You’re the closest thing we’ve got. But it will be difficult.” More like impossible. It would require something of him that she wasn’t sure he would be truly willing to give up.

  Her hand was cradled in his, resting in his lap. He was lightly, absently, toying with her fingers in a way that was softly intimate.

  He had betrayed her. Why couldn’t she hate him for that? Why wasn’t the anger that simmered constantly under the surface spilling into anything more?

  Why did she want him to weave his fingers between hers and press his thumb against her palm?

  “Truce,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

  She closed her eyes, swallowing hard, and pulled her hand away. “That’s not enough.”

  When she opened her eyes, he had shuttered everything away. They stared at each other for a long time and, oh, she was very aware of the disgust pouring off Kostya, but she was caught again in this boy’s colorless gaze.

  “It’s. Not. Enough,” she said through clenched teeth.

  Something yanked in her chest as he tilted his head, the bones in his black pile of hair falling into her field of vision. A smiled pulled at his lips, feral and cruel, and he leaned closer to her. He took her chin in his hand and roughly pulled her face to his.

  “No, of course not,” he murmured, breath feathering her face. “But nothing ever will be, will it? A little peasant girl from a monastery would want nothing more than to see the monster self-flagellate at her feet. I won’t do it, Nadya. I’m not going to play that game.”

  He lifted his other hand. “Don’t you dare,” he spat out at Kostya, who had taken a step forward.

  “You’ll play,” Nadya said, ignoring Kostya, ignoring everything. She couldn’t drive him off before he got her through the forest. “You would have stayed in your hellish mines if you were not going to play. Did you expect to return and find everything exactly like it was before you burned it to the ground? There are only ever ashes after a fire, Malachiasz, and I’ll have you at my feet yet.”

  His eyes narrowed, the faint smile never quite dropping from his lips even as
the air around him turned dangerous. His tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear.

  “We’ll see, pet.”

  Nineteen

  Serefin Meleski

  Svoyatova Kseniya Pushnaya: Named Svoyatova of Thorns, Kseniya lived in the deep forests and granted gifts of power to those who sought her out and survived the trials that her god, Vaclav, set before them.

  —Vasiliev’s Book of Saints

  It was difficult to hear about the conquests of the Tranavian forces and not feel openly delighted. What Serefin hadn’t realized was just how dire the situation was for the Kalyazi, how close to the end they truly were. Yet the Kalyazi were turning things around, and Serefin had to stop them before it got any worse.

  The tsarevna wanted information about something that had happened at some military outpost, and Serefin had nothing to give her.

  “So you weren’t at Kartevka.”

  “I only have the vaguest notion of where that is.”

  Yekaterina was flipping through Serefin’s spell book and landed on a spell halfway through. Serefin couldn’t remember what it could possibly be, but it made her pause and consider him further. The magic he kept in his spell book was mostly offensive with a tidy collection of persuasive spells. He had little else that didn’t fit that category.

  “It was a massacre,” she said. “I’m shocked you Tranavians aren’t heralding it as a miracle, what with the monster that was there.”

  Serefin shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He knew where this was going. “When did this happen?”

  “Three months ago or so,” she said. “But this came after. The front has been consistently attacked by a creature who only comes under the cover of darkness. We’ve fought this damn war as fairly as you heretics deserve, but—”

  “War isn’t fair,” Serefin replied evenly. “It never has been. And it’s not our fault you have no magic to speak of.”

  Yekaterina inclined her head. “So little you know, Tranavian.”

  “Listen,” Serefin said quickly, before she could continue. “I’m not asking for trust. But it sounds like our goals align. How many Vultures have been seen at the front? Since when?”

  “A lot of questions, Tranavian.”