Blessed Monsters

by Emily A Duncan

  Of course, that had been his driving philosophy for ages, and nothing had changed. Tranavia and Kalyazin would be locked in this war forever, because that was what they knew. It was comfortable, even. Both sides would make demands the other would be unwilling to concede. He didn’t see a way forward.

  Maybe once he would have considered Nadya a possibility. Someone who wanted to find a compromise. They believed in different things, but he was drawn to her, and she to him. Her company was a comfort he’d never had before. He liked being around her, liked arguing about theology and what that meant for the world. She made him consider things he never had, and as much as he might fight against that, he found it fascinating, he found her fascinating.

  And it had been sufficiently demolished. She would only make things worse, not better, not as she was—who she was.

  “Are you so confident in your knowledge of what that girl is?” the voice asked, sounding curious.

  Malachiasz winced, but ultimately ignored him. Him? Was that right? Was that even possible? Was it so easy and simple to ascribe human traits to this being?

  “No,” the voice said, amused. “But it doesn’t particularly matter either way to me.”

  He had woken up in a sanctuary at the church, one claimed by the forest. Thick, poisonous-looking grasses grew up and around the remains of benches. Bones rested amidst the growth, maggots crawling in the underbrush, as if dead things, too, were scattered in this place. Malachiasz got to his feet, shuddering and flicking maggots off his skin.

  He tugged a hand through his hair, fingers catching on beads and relics knotted in the strands, and he considered ripping the bones out—so much disaster from such small things—but he might have use of them yet, and it had cost him so much to get them.

  His chest tightened and he coughed, the pain in his lungs—in a dark part of him—heightening for a heartbeat until it eased. He spat out a mouthful of blood. There was a shiver of eyes and teeth and bone, and then everything settled. Temporary peace.

  All he wanted was to sleep and let the worms and maggots take him because that would be better than what he had left.

  He supposed getting out of the forest was the first step; figuring out how to take down the rest of the pantheon without destroying himself could wait until he was free of this wood that kept trying to pry him open.

  The last time he’d eaten or even had water was before he’d woken up on the mountain. He was constantly dizzy, light-headed. There wasn’t much he could do other than hope he came across a stream—when the sun went down and he was finally able to leave this damned place—that wasn’t poisoned and hope for the best. He wasn’t about to eat anything here. Everything was festering.

  He tried not to panic at the thought of not feeling sunlight ever again.

  Unsure what possessed him, he ventured down to the strange well in the basement. The pale flowers had wilted to withered grotesque husks. He found his jacket balled up in the corner and picked it up with a sigh, tugging it on. He didn’t want to think about when he’d first grabbed it in a panic the night he’d fled Tranavia.

  Malachiasz hadn’t been particularly well liked among the Vultures. They underestimated him, assumed because he was anxious that he was useless—but eventually he’d earned their respect. That was what truly mattered in the cult. Rozá had tried to undermine him at every step, like he’d undermined Łucja until the day he had challenged and killed her. Except Rozá never would have openly challenged him. She wasn’t like him. The moment he’d taken Łucja’s head from her shoulders had been so very sweet.

  Łucja, the last Black Vulture, had held the cult in her grip for a very long time, systematically destroying any Vulture who dared oppose her. She had been calculating and ruthless, but she had no ambition.

  Tranavia had come to know Malachiasz as the most ruthless and calculating Black Vulture the cult had ever known. They would remember him; they would never remember her.

  Hadn’t that been his goal? All those nights when he had planned, when he had stumbled in front of her, over and over, convincing her that he was weak and useless and only good for a punching bag. The more she saw him as a pathetic failure of a boy, barely a Vulture, the easier it would be to take her down. And he’d been correct.

  He hadn’t done it for notoriety—though that was nice. He had done it because he wanted to change things. Because he was frustrated with his order’s passivity, with Tranavia’s—with the world’s—and could not abide Łucja’s inaction any longer.

  He was surprised by his sudden yearning to be back on that damn throne and dealing with petty court matters. He hadn’t asked to become the monster that he was and for so long he had hated it. His fingers brushed the scars that lined his forearms. He didn’t know when his feelings had changed; when he’d embraced what he was.

  He found himself at the edge of the pool of blood, eyeing the uncomfortably still surface. Had Nadya known what would happen when she stepped into the well? He held his hand out over the surface, not daring to touch it. Could he reverse what she had done?

  It had to have been here. There were gaps. He didn’t know what had happened to her between the wall falling and arriving at the temple, but this was where something had been wrenched away.

  He reached for his spell book. A beat of panic, constricting his chest, tugging at his lungs so hard he started coughing when his fingers found nothing. There was no way to get used to it. That spell book was his entire life and it was gone. A chronicle of every spell he had written, every sketch he had drawn of Nadya and his friends, everything. If he had it, there was a chance he could reverse what Nadya had done, or at least have a starting point to understanding. All he needed was something to start with. Anything broken could be fixed, he had to believe that.

  If only for his own sake.

  8

  NADEZHDA LAPTEVA

  Lev returned last night. From Tachilvnik, supposedly. I don’t know. He won’t speak. Can’t. No one there but the gods, he scrawled it on a piece of paper, but then he showed me … They’d cut out his tongue.

  —Passage from the personal journals of Sofka Greshneva

  Nadya didn’t enjoy riding. She especially didn’t enjoy riding through forest roads with nothing to do but feel the shifting of the world around her. She tried blocking it out, but the trees looked different, in a way that she couldn’t put words to, and the air tasted strange. Everything was broken, wrong. She kept waiting for, what, the end of the world?

  “When we get to Komyazalov, we can regroup,” Katya said confidently, when Nadya inquired what she was planning, and it didn’t sound like false confidence this time.

  Nadya was quiet in response, gazing up at the trees. The last time she checked, they were doing their best to scrape free from the long harsh winter, a dull green that wanted so desperately to be brighter. Now they were blackened and dead and spiderwebs hung from them, with ribbons of shredded flesh caught in their branches.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, pressing her fists against them. She breathed out slowly, waiting for a voice that wasn’t hers, for anything. But there was only deafening silence.

  When she opened her eyes, the trees were green once more, but she knew that wasn’t true. This was only the beginning. That strange mold on the trees wasn’t an illusion, the spiderwebs weren’t illusions. She was seeing some other realm that existed woven into the edges of hers. And those edges had frayed.

  She didn’t want to wait until Komyazalov for answers. She didn’t think she would get answers in Komyazalov, where the Matriarch resided. The woman who’d almost certainly had a hand in keeping Nadya in the dark her whole life wouldn’t help her. Nor would she be safe in a place where what she was could condemn her to death.

  But maybe they would be right to sentence her thus. With each passing hour, she could feel herself edging closer to that dark water. Using it in the forest, on that wolf, was unlike anything she had ever known. Good, even. As terrifying as that was, it was inevitable. She was always go
ing to end up here; this was always going to happen.

  Maybe that was why the Church had lied to her. Why they had tried so hard to keep her in the dark. They suspected what she was. Something darker than a cleric, worse than a mage. Something else.

  The magic from that well of dark water felt, if not the same as the feeling she had around Ljubica, then worse. If that was even possible.

  There had been whispers of things worse than the fallen gods. Older beings. The clearing and the statues around it—that was how using this power made her feel. The same dread horror; the same terrible inevitability. She knew, now, who five of those other statues had been, but that left fifteen. Fifteen beings unaccounted for and unknown, and that didn’t sit well with her. Were they dead? Or were they biding their time?

  Would the fallen gods unleash something even older and darker?

  Was that what she was?

  The thought was too much, too far. But she couldn’t deny being connected to that clearing, not anymore.

  After a long day of travel, they set up camp for the evening, and Nadya wandered away, watching as the forest shifted around her vision. Growing darker, the normal sounds of the wood turning to screams. She shivered, glancing back at the others, but they didn’t notice. Except Rashid. He flinched every time something in the woods screamed. He caught her gaze and she tilted her head. He got up and followed her into the woods.

  “You can sense it, can’t you?” she asked.

  Rashid gazed up at the trees in silence before he spoke, the timbre of his voice rough. “It might be time to tell you the truth.”

  Her heart dropped. Not him, he couldn’t be lying to her, too. She couldn’t take another betrayal.

  Rashid caught the look on her face, something flickering over his that she couldn’t parse. It quickly morphed to careful reassurance. “No, no, don’t worry, those were the wrong words to use. I…” He trailed off, considering his hands, flexing his fingers. “I was taken into the Siroosi Travash when I showed signs of power. It runs in my family, magic, but we tend to ignore it because it’s always been easily ignored.”

  “What kind of magic?”

  “Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? You Northerners have it all laid out so carefully. Magic from the gods or magic from blood and while that’s mostly true—even the mages in Akola draw blood for their power, but you Kalyazi never realized because they don’t venture out from the deep deserts—it doesn’t work the way the north has decided. We knew to keep quiet when Kalyazin turned on Tranavia because any divergence in how our power worked would put a target on us as well.”

  Nadya winced.

  “But it’s easy to ignore the spark of power, let it grow dormant and disappear, and that’s what my family did. Because my grandfather made a mistake that would cost him my uncle and ultimately, me. And it meant we ended up in a Travash that has poisoned the country for years. Because that Travash wanted mages, as many as possible, before they were taken into the deserts and hidden away as is tradition.”

  “But magic is changing,” Nadya whispered, realizing what he was telling her.

  He nodded. “The roads have been broken. Katya has magic that doesn’t fit. You have magic that doesn’t fit. So much that has happened just…”

  “Doesn’t fit,” she said softly. It was something she was struggling to reconcile. If her entire world had been based on lies, how did magic—something that was supposed to be based in immutable truths that did not change—end up so different and wild and unpredictable? “Do you think it’s because those gods were set free?”

  Rashid shrugged. “I couldn’t feel it until now. My power had gone dormant because I forced it to, and that forest…” He shivered. “I was barely trained, and I don’t really know what would happen were I to use my magic. Parijahan knew—she’s always known—but when I was taken into her Travash, she convinced her grandmother that she needed a guard and who better than the fresh mage from Yanzin Zadar? I didn’t want to use my power—didn’t want it trained—and so I didn’t, and it wasn’t, and I think I have made a terrible mistake.”

  Nadya thought of the way Parijahan had been for the past year. Closed and anxious, constantly tugging Malachiasz away from the group like she was planning something.

  “They wanted mages but were fine with not training you?”

  “It’s not about the magic,” Rashid replied. “It’s about being able to claim to the other Travasha that they had an army of mages in their employ. If asked for proof there were enough that could do something flashy and be convincing, they never needed me.”

  “I never should have asked any of you to come with me into that forest,” Nadya murmured.

  “Probably not,” Rashid agreed. “Malachiasz would’ve followed you anyway.”

  “Not if I had told him the truth.”

  Rashid cast her a long look. “Even then.”

  “Don’t. Don’t try to make out like there was something between us more than constant betrayal now that he’s gone. This isn’t about him anymore. What’s going on with Parijahan?”

  Rashid sighed, and in it was far more than he was willing to say. “Her family is after her.”

  “I gathered that.”

  “I don’t know how much longer she can keep running without her family sparking something drastic.”

  “Right.”

  “The least of your concerns,” Rashid said wryly.

  “No, it’s not that, it’s just … another problem I don’t know how to solve.”

  “Nadya, have you ever considered that maybe you don’t have to fix the world all by yourself?”

  She groaned.

  “You’re, what, eighteen? Why should you be responsible for the entire world?”

  “Because I’m the one who broke it.”

  “No, you weren’t. It’s been broken and it will continue to be broken because people are broken, mad creatures who will always do terrible things.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “It’s not, you’re right, because people are infuriatingly complicated and capable of doing wonderful things all the same.”

  Tears flooded her eyes. “I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do,” she whispered. “I lost my goddess and I lost Malachiasz and I think the thing worse than being pulled in two different directions is having both suddenly vanish. There’s nothing left.” She rubbed furiously at her eyes. She wasn’t going to cry.

  Rashid’s hands circled her wrists. “You’re allowed to grieve,” he said. “I am.”

  “He doesn’t deserve it.” Marzenya didn’t, either, but that wasn’t really a conversation to be had with Rashid.

  “Maybe not. But I loved that boy so damn much and he didn’t deserve that, either. It’s not really about that, I don’t think. You can’t ever deserve love.”

  “Stop trying to make things better. Nothing is ever going to get better.”

  “That’s not true, Nadya.”

  She shot him a dry look, but she appreciated his relentless optimism here at the end of everything.

  Another scream tore through the forest and Rashid flinched, shuddering hard.

  “You get used to it,” Nadya said.

  “I’m not sure I want to.”

  “Did Malachiasz know?”

  He frowned, anger flickering over his features. “Parijahan says she never told him, but I think she was lying.” Rashid paused, smiling sadly. “I still don’t know a damned thing about what I can do and there’s not really anyone who can help me.”

  “What about Ostyia?”

  “Would she want to?”

  Nadya considered this. Ostyia had never been particularly hostile to her—or Parijahan from what she could recall—and she didn’t seem to mind Rashid’s company.

  “Hard to say, but I think so. It would mean Katya would find out, though.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “I don’t think anything has happened yet, but if you’re making bets on it with Parj, my money says Katya
would love nothing more than a scandal from involving herself with a Tranavian general.”

  “Listen—”

  “I will never let you live those bets down.” A thoughtful pause passed between them. “I’ll help if I can, but I doubt your magic works anything like mine.”

  “The girl I met on the mountains would have killed me for daring to have power different from hers.”

  “The girl on the mountains got everything wrong,” Nadya replied, trying to keep the acute melancholy out of her voice and failing. “And she died a long time ago.”

  * * *

  Nadya couldn’t sleep. She let one watch run into the next, not bothering to wake anyone. The forest was mostly calm except for the screams—but nothing seemed to be coming of those.

  Suddenly the taste of magic grew thick in the air, and she was slammed into the ground before she could get to her feet.

  “There you are.” Iron claws clamped around her neck, a heavy weight against her chest, and a voice hissed, chaotic and wrong, in her ear. “What have you done, little cleric?”

  A fall of black hair against pale skin and Nadya’s heart lurched even though she knew it was not him.

  “Żywia.”

  “Where is he?” Żywia perched on Nadya’s chest, her eyes pitch black, her teeth iron needles in her mouth.

  Nadya wheezed. “Get off me,” she whispered fiercely. “And shut up before you wake everyone.” Katya would kill her on sight.

  Żywia stilled, eyes returning to Nadya’s face. She tried not to think about how the Vulture looked like she could be Malachiasz’s sibling. Though that honor was, apparently, Serefin’s.

  And Nadya had said nothing. She had put the pieces together long before the forest picked Malachiasz apart. She could have told him; she should have told him. She knew it ate at him, not knowing who his family was. But he didn’t like Serefin and wouldn’t have reacted well to her suspicions. So, she kept it to herself until it became far too late.