“Not only that, but it’s altogether likely he’s with your cleric.” He rubbed at his scarred eye. “Can you tell me about Velyos? What he wants? I can get nothing out of him except a cryptic pull to the West I’m struggling against.”
Katya was intrigued. This had just become far more interesting. She might even say there was potential for it to be exceedingly dramatic.
“Wait, do you know what he’s planning?”
“Who, Malachiasz?” Serefin shrugged. “He wants to kill a god.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “What does he think that will accomplish?”
“Feels fairly obvious to me. The gods won’t meddle with Tranavia if they’re dead.”
Katya swallowed hard, her mouth suddenly dry. “That will destroy your foolhardy little country if he succeeds.”
He paled. “What?”
“The gods work outside of time. A slow death, meticulous. Retribution is not swift, it’s little fatalities all in a row. If he were to incite that kind of war—topple that kind of empire—the retribution would not be quiet, it would be complete destruction.” Katya closed her eyes. It would bleed into Kalyazin. The whole world would crumble under the wrath of the gods.
“If we’re going to do this, I need some wine,” she murmured.
“Oh, blood and bone, me, too,” Serefin muttered.
Katya grinned, kicking her chair further back and opening the door. Milomir was going to kill her. “Be a dear?” she asked sweetly.
He sighed deeply.
When he had returned with an all suffering expression and a carafe of wine and cups for them, Katya was sufficiently prepared to begin.
“The world forgot, you see, they all forgot. Velyos was cast out a long, long time ago. The Codex was stripped of all reference to him and the others.”
“Others?” Serefin asked.
Katya had forgotten she was speaking to a Tranavian. “There were more, many more. The twenty we have now were not always the twenty that have been with us. Velyos, Cvjetko, Zlatana, Ljubica, and Zvezdan.” She paused, then allowed, “Chyrnog.” But she didn’t want to talk about an elder one. The fallen gods were enough.
Serefin frowned and leaned back on one hand. Katya was overly aware of how intently the Tranavian girl was watching her. She took a sip of wine to hide her blush.
“What happens to gods who have been cast out?” Ostyia asked.
Katya shrugged. “They’re known as the fallen. It’s said they were trapped by the clerics of the gods who remained.” But that was the wrong question to ask. “Why were they cast out, eh?”
Serefin rubbed his eye again, confused. The way he fiddled with his eye was starting to make her twitchy.
“What happens when gods decide to directly interact with the mortal realm? What happens when they fight amongst themselves to the point that it spills over into our world?”
“Disaster?”
Katya nodded. “Even so. The war would be the least of our concerns, because they would no longer be bound to treat carefully with mortals. They would burn us to pieces to get what they wanted.”
She studied the sheer disbelief on his face. If he was truly dealing with Velyos, how could he still be holding onto that?
“You don’t believe me.”
“It sounds ridiculous, you have to understand that.”
“Your eyes are the most inhuman things I have ever seen and there are moths in your hair. Do you know what moths symbolize to the Kalyazi?”
He shrugged.
“Twofold. They are of the gods and they are of death.”
He cringed.
“Also kashyvhes? Which is a little odd, and probably less relevant here. Threefold, then, I suppose.”
Serefin took a deep drink of his wine.
“The what?” Kacper asked.
“Striczki,” Serefin said flatly. Blood drinkers.
“Was that a joke?” Ostyia asked him quietly.
“I don’t know,” he muttered, shifting forward to rest his elbows on his knees. Serefin looked ready to collapse. “He told me he wanted revenge, but he refused to say more than that.”
Katya’s breath caught in her throat. “There are two gods that Velyos would want revenge on, and it does explain why he did not attempt to claim our cleric. One is Marzenya, the other Peloyin.”
Serefin’s eyes narrowed.
“The five who were condemned were constantly trying to usurp Peloyin’s power,” Katya continued. She had grown up on stories of petty battles between the gods, but mentions of Velyos’ tricks were few and far between until eventually he disappeared altogether. It took her a long time to put the pieces together. Really she had only done it out of sheer boredom and a desire to be as willfully difficult for her priest as possible.
She had never thought this esoteric knowledge would be useful. Especially not with regard to the king of Tranavia.
Especially not in . . . helping the king of Tranavia? Was that what she was doing? As much as her brain revolted against the idea, she wondered if this was what she was supposed to be doing. Something had led her to this specific spot in Kalyazin; something had kept her here waiting, as if some part of her had known the king would eventually show up.
She didn’t particularly want to think about the potentiality of the gods guiding her actions, though, because then she would have to confront all the many things she had done that would damn her in their eyes.
“Of the fallen, Velyos was the most vindictive. It was called an eternal war, that which raged between Velyos and Peloyin. Marzenya was the one who finally cast him out, she had him bound into a pendant of iron that was locked in a vault beneath the earth.”
“So, it’s not only revenge he wants,” he said slowly.
“Unlikely. He wants it to start again. War eternal. And not this holy atrocity we’re trapped in, but one between the gods. I’d wager he wants you to wake the others.”
Serefin blanched.
Katya didn’t like where her thoughts were leading her. If Velyos wanted this boy to wake the others, well, most were survivable.
But no one would survive the return of any of the elders.
Twenty-Three
Nadezhda Lapteva
Svoyatova Nedelya Ojdanic: As a young girl, Svoyatova Nedelya heard the voice of Vaclav and entered the dark woods near her village. She never returned, but when her village was attacked by Tranavian forces, a leshy moved the wood and consumed them. This is thought to be at her influence.
—Vasiliev’s Book of Saints.
The bathhouse was glorious for Nadya’s tired bones. After, she dressed in clean, plain clothes. She shoved her handful of prayer beads in her pocket, braided her hair and coiled it behind her head, and felt, for a moment, like everything was going to be perfectly fine. She was herself again.
The feeling ended as soon as she found Brother Ivan in the monastery’s nave. She slid onto the bench beside him and looked up at the iconostasis. Her heart wrenched, loss threatening to swallow her.
This was to be an act of confession, but still she hesitated. She didn’t know if she could trust Brother Ivan. She admonished herself at the thought; she shouldn’t be protecting a Tranavian at the expense of her own people.
But what about protecting herself?
“I don’t know where to start,” she finally said.
“The beginning is usually the best place,” Ivan replied amiably. “Nadezhda,” he sighed, “you were but a child when I saw you last. I know you do not remember me, I don’t expect you to. It’s all right. I would simply like to help you, if I can.”
Nadya let out a rush of breath. “I have made so many mistakes.”
Nadya was living with so many lies and half-truths and she could not maintain them all or she was going to crumble under their weight.
If only she could hide away and never let it slip that she had failed; that she had committed heresy; that there was a hole in the world because of her and it was only going to get worse. So much was her faul
t and she didn’t know if she could stop any of it. Marzenya demanded complete and utter dedication and she had failed her, she had failed everyone.
But he was right, she could start at the beginning. Her words grew halting as the story drew into the capital of Tranavia. As she charmed a prince she should have killed and fell for a boy who made terrible jokes and, in hindsight, was a little too willing to help.
Ivan listened in comfortable silence, asking no questions, letting Nadya pause and consider when the story got to places that were dark and hard to remember.
But she was careful; she did not say what Malachiasz truly was.
“What matters is this,” Nadya said, edging away from the heresy of falling for a monster—even if she had been burned for it—and toward a very different kind of heresy. “While I was in Tranavia, there was a veil over the kingdom that almost totally cut off my access to the gods. It was blood magic. A spell that had been on the country for decades, refined by the Black Vulture to be even stronger.”
She explained working past the magic. Explained the Rawalyk. Kidnapped by the Vultures. Siphoned for blood because the king of Tranavia was going to turn himself into a god.
This was where she got a reaction from Ivan. A pursing of his lips. Alarm.
“When I was in Tranavia, I saw . . . things . . .” Nadya didn’t know how to explain that part. The monsters Velyos had shown her and told her were truth. The nightmares that still plagued her every night that she ignored and tried to forget. The knowledge that something had broken, but she didn’t know what.
“I committed heresy and now the gods are silent. I do not know if they hear my prayers. The only magic I have is what I am able to draw from within and using it feels like poison. I thought I could stop the war. But . . .” She shook her head.
“And there’s this,” she said, clutching her hand. “I don’t know what I’ve done and I’m scared.”
And now the monsters of Kalyazin were stirring. Monsters that had slept far longer than those in Tranavia. Monsters kept at bay by faith alone. It meant a cataclysm.
Ivan contemplated her hand. Silence grew and stretched between them, and Nadya sunk further and further into despair. This was truly the end. This was the thing she would burn for.
He finally broke the silence. “There has been a disturbance in the heavens,” he said slowly “that the priests have not been able to discern. You have given us part of the answer.”
“Will I be excommunicated?” Nadya whispered.
Ivan’s cool fingers were underneath her chin, tilting her face up. The monk was unreadable and Nadya shivered with fear.
“You were always a curious child, Nadezhda. Full of questions. Full of trouble. But you are the only cleric walking Kalyazin today,” he said. “We do not know why the gods have not touched any others. We do not know why you have been touched the way you have. Perhaps this means a change is coming, one we are not prepared for. I do not wish to make you relive past hurts, and I do not see any sins worth dying for in your past.”
Nadya blinked, releasing a startled laugh even though she wanted to cry. “The gods might differ with you, and I feel like their opinions are more important.” His absolution gave her little comfort. And she didn’t understand how this old monk could know her so well. “Did you come to Baikkle often?”
“Often enough, but that was a long time ago. When poor Alexei—”
A pang in Nadya’s chest. Alexei was gone now.
“—had a godstouched child dropped on his doorstep and knew nothing of magic, he asked for my help.”
“But you knew—know?” Nadya straightened.
“I know as best as one can who does not experience it fully.”
She flexed her fingers. “I don’t think I understand magic,” she said quietly. And the only person she had to teach her was a wildly condescending Tranavian boy who saw it all as something to be controlled.
“Is it for us to understand divinity?” Ivan asked. He paused, peering at her face. “But you’re right, I see you have not grown any less curious.”
“Is the nature of divinity so fixed?” she asked.
“Seeing a man try to become a god and fail would draw up those questions, I would wager.”
“He didn’t fail.”
Ivan went very still.
“The king failed, yes, but someone else did the ritual and succeeded.”
“And?”
She shook her head, gazing at the iconostasis. It was ornamented with gold leaf and the impassive expressions of saints. “Maybe, if the gods spoke to me, I would have answers, but I don’t. And they don’t like talking about the nature of divinity anyway.”
“Magic and divinity are two very different things, intertwined into reality. Can you have divinity with no magic, as magic is bound in divinity?”
“But you can have magic without any touch of the gods,” Nadya said. “Are the Tranavians not proof of that?”
Ivan inclined his head. “And it is heresy. They are doomed for it.”
They most certainly are. But not, Nadya thought, in the way that the Kalyazi were expecting.
But what of Pelageya and her words that Nadya’s power wasn’t being drawn from within at all but from something else? Curiosity about Tranavian magic was one thing; she couldn’t very well ask this monk if he knew about witch magic.
“So, you think this is still some working of the gods?” she asked, flexing her fingers.
Something flickered on Ivan’s face. “What else could it be?” he asked kindly.
What else, indeed? It would be so easy to take his answer as truth and turn away from this, ignoring what was happening to her, even if it was to her own detriment. She didn’t want to uncover some dread magic, she wanted this to be simply another avenue of the gods’ punishment. That would be easily understood.
She wasn’t satisfied, but her weary heart didn’t want to fight.
“What of the Tranavian?” Ivan abruptly changed the subject.
Nadya sighed. “Malachiasz,” she whispered.
Ivan nodded. “It took convincing to get him inside. Are Tranavians so afraid of the truth?”
“I—I want to trust you the way Father Alexei did. The way I know I should. But if I am to tell you, I need you to swear to me that Malachiasz will not be harmed. I defied my goddess’ orders to keep him alive and I live with those consequences. But he must not be harmed. I need him. If I’m to fix anything, I need him.”
Ivan’s bushy eyebrows drew together.
“Please, Brother Ivan, please swear.”
Slowly Ivan nodded. “So long as he is under your protection, he shall not be harmed, I swear.”
She did not comment on the loophole he had included in his phrasing.
“Who is he, Nadezhda?”
She hesitated. She didn’t want to disappoint anyone else.
“Tranavia’s Black Vulture.”
Ivan’s face remained perfectly blank.
A war battled within Nadya as she fought with separate pulls. To find Malachiasz and run from this place, or to let Ivan kill him and end her problems right there. She almost bolted when Ivan stood up without a word and walked out the door.
Nadya rose to her feet so fast she nearly sent the bench flying. “You swore, Brother Ivan!”
Ivan flagged down one of the sisters. “Where’s the boy? The sickly looking one?”
She dogged Ivan’s heels as they followed the nun to one of the cells. Malachiasz was pacing the room when the door went flying open. He froze, eyes wide at the sight of the giant monk in the doorway. He saw Nadya and relaxed a fraction.
He had cleaned up. His hair was already drying in a thorny tangle. If the sisters had offered him clothes, he had refused them, instead wearing a black tunic embroidered with red blocking on the cuffs and leggings.
He stared at Ivan for a beat, and Nadya watched as his entire demeanor shifted. The anxious boy was closed away and the Black Vulture returned in his place. The cold and calculating and utt
erly cruel parts of Malachiasz that were the cult leader.
“That didn’t take long,” he said. The look he shot Nadya wasn’t betrayed, but it was fairly close.
She winced.
“What do you hope to gain by coming here?” Ivan asked. “What destruction do you plan to wreak?”
“Do you think I care for a monastery in the middle of nowhere in Kalyazin?” Malachiasz caged his heart with long, pale fingers. “I am here because she is here, nothing more, nothing less.”
“Come,” Ivan said gruffly to Malachiasz.
Malachiasz glanced at Nadya, gaze hooded. He had counseled kings. He could handle whatever Brother Ivan wanted. She touched the back of his hand as he passed. He jerked in surprise before catching her fingers as they slipped by.
Nadya watched him go, terrified of the way her heart started to mend at the hope in his eyes at that careful touch. This was a mess. And Brother Ivan hadn’t given her what she wanted. She wanted answers. When they disappeared from sight, she went back to the nave.
It was quiet as she knelt before the altar.
She nudged the dark thread of magic within her, white flame lighting at her fingertips. It was really all she could do. She lit a bowl of incense. The smell of sandalwood swept over her and she breathed in deeply, sighing. She carefully took her prayer beads out of her pocket and laid the ones that were on a string in front of her. She lined up the rest.
She chewed at her lip and eyed the iconostasis, searching until she found Marzenya’s icon.
I’m not sure why it feels right to try again here. Something about being out of that godsforsaken country? I don’t know. Wait. This isn’t how I wanted to start this. Her prayers sputtered to a stop. She scrubbed her hands over her face. Something that was once so natural to her now felt awkward.
I’m sorry. I know that’s not enough, but I don’t know what to do. She rubbed at the scar on her palm. Was Velyos telling me the truth?
“Oh, child . . .”
Nadya sucked in a sharp breath. Her fingers scrambled for Marzenya’s bead but she didn’t know where it was in the mess of beads in front of her. She bit back a sob.
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