Blessed Monsters

by Emily A Duncan

  Malachiasz closed his eyes, letting out a slow breath. “Grazyk.”

  A cold sweat prickled at Serefin’s skin. If the Vultures had swarmed the capital and taken it as their own, he wasn’t sure what he could do, even with Malachiasz. He didn’t trust him to help get his throne back from another Vulture. Malachiasz would take it for himself.

  “Fascinating, isn’t it, how things fall apart in your absence? Two boys so important to the turning of the world. And you have spent your days in enemy lands and what do you have to show for it?”

  “Do we go home?” Serefin asked Pelageya, desperately.

  “Do you? What a choice that lies before you. You won’t get out of this alive if you do not work together. And, yes, you have tasted death—it lies heavy on you both—but it is all too ready to take you again.”

  “What happened when I killed that goddess?” Malachiasz asked suddenly.

  “It was what Velyos wanted, for Marzenya to die,” Serefin said before Pelageya could answer.

  “It was, wasn’t it? How does it feel, to know that every one of your actions has been nudged forward by a being other than you? How little control over yourselves you have had, even when you thought you were acting in your interests.”

  “She had to die,” Malachiasz snapped.

  “Did she?”

  He opened his mouth and closed it. Slowly he said, “She was going to kill Nadya.”

  “Ah. We return to the girl.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Oh, you don’t escape so easily. Her role is…” Pelageya trailed off. She blinked fast, rattled. She did not finish her thought.

  Serefin didn’t like the idea of anything rattling Pelageya.

  “Oh,” Pelageya whispered. “Many spinning parts, fractured spines under the weight of terrible choices.” Her voice got louder and grew frantic. “Dead gods awake, live gods dead, magic and blood and a devouring so great it will consume the world and drown us all in shadows. Something has shifted. Someone has woken, agreed to something, decided a path, but darkness … eternal, still. Take in your mouth the ashes of divine consequence.”

  Malachiasz’s eyes were wide, his face deathly pale. “What?” His voice cracked.

  A frenetic energy built in the room. The flames in the fireplace started to glow with a sickly green light. “There was divine justice and divine providence and paths to walk and you—you children—tore them down. A curse, a doom, a blackened stain on each and every one of you who have touched the darkness and swallowed the light. This isn’t a matter of stopping anything,” she whispered. “You can’t stop it. What are you? A boy, a child, bovilgy, small and fragile under his thumb.”

  “I told you, he’s weakened,” Malachiasz said, sounding desperate.

  Serefin did not want to be here.

  “Weakened?” Pelageya cried. “Even weak he is still the doom of the world. Who set him free, who let him out?” Her eyes focused in on Serefin. “It was you. The eye. The eye! Where is it?”

  “Witch, it isn’t in my face, how should I know?”

  She turned to Malachiasz, who flinched suddenly, his fingers curling into a fist. “You have it,” she hissed.

  A dread horror began to pool at the pit of Serefin’s stomach.

  Malachiasz’s eyebrows tugged down, pulling at the tattoos on his forehead. He slowly uncurled the fingers of his left hand and embedded in the center of his palm was an eye, blue as midnight, with stars scattered through it. “Oh,” he said very softly, looking ill himself.

  “How is that possible?” Serefin asked.

  Malachiasz shook his head wordlessly.

  “A devouring,” Pelageya murmured. “Oh, no, oh, this is worse than I imagined. This is worse than I dreamed. What have you done? What have the both of you done?”

  “Do you…” Malachiasz poked at the eye with a finger.

  Serefin was dangerously close to losing the contents of his stomach.

  “Do you want it back?”

  Serefin stood, and without another word left the hut and promptly threw up.

  11

  NADEZHDA LAPTEVA

  Under the darkest water, the deepest water, are buried old things that Zvezdan has brought unto himself. A hoard of foul magic.

  —The Books of Innokentiy

  Nadya was used to isolation. She was used to Kalyazin’s mountains and forests and tiny, worn villages. But as they traveled farther west, they passed through entire cities, and her daily life became populated by prying eyes. She was instructed to keep her hand gloved at all times, even when the boyar pushed hospitality on Katya and shoved them into bathhouses.

  “Don’t take it off,” Katya would mutter. “You’ll be on a pyre in ten minutes.”

  So Nadya kept her hand carefully tucked away. Katya was shockingly cavalier about the whole situation, though Nadya had finally worked a plan out of the girl, vague as it might be. The world thought she was the cleric. And that was how it would stay. She wished she knew the truth. She almost wished she could speak to Pelageya about it. Instead she would hope whoever she found in Komyazalov could be trusted not to immediately set her on fire.

  They were in the city of Voczi Dovorik, nestled in a wide gap, a break in the woods. It was only a few more days of travel to Komyazalov, but Katya was reluctant to leave.

  It seemed they all had problems going home.

  The boyar had been more than willing to open their homes to the tsarevna during their journey, but Nadya had seen no shortage of uncomfortable looks leveled at Parijahan and Rashid, and outright hostility toward Ostyia.

  They were wandering aimlessly through the city. Nadya couldn’t take being cooped up in the boyar’s extravagant home. She needed to be outside. She was angling to the edge of the city, and Ostyia was content to follow. They had crossed through the marketplace, a sad state of affairs. The winter was choking the country, starving it. Voczi Dovorik was in a marginally better place—the marketplace was still functioning and Nadya had seen a few outlanders from the north selling their wares and their furs. The city lived, but for how long?

  “You know, I always wanted to see your cities, but I thought it was going to be at the other end of a torch.”

  They were speaking in Kalyazi, and Ostyia wasn’t the best at the language, but she managed. Her accent was terrible. She got side glances every time she spoke.

  “You genuinely thought Tranavia would get this far into Kalyazin?”

  Ostyia shrugged. “Hold to your idle dreams to survive at war.”

  “Ostyia, you’re going to make it home.”

  “You are distressingly optimistic for someone who can’t drag her head out of her own depression most days.”

  “Distressing optimism is all I have left.”

  Ostyia didn’t respond, perhaps to spare Nadya from her inevitable agreement. Nadya was just glad Ostyia had stopped threatening her. It wasn’t her fault Serefin had gone into that forest.

  Nadya tried her hardest to ignore that people moved out of her way as she passed. She ignored the reverent whispers. People talking about the gods and the girl who could speak to them. She missed the time when those words were true.

  The melt and freeze of the snow had muddied the roads into wide permanent ruts from the wheels of wagons. Old snow weighed heavy on the roofs of buildings. Most were made of wood in the sector they wandered through. Stone buildings were few and reserved for the very rich up the hill. People passed them, tired and cold, fur collars and hats tucked low. For Nadya, it was too many people and she ached to find some solitude.

  She was tempted by the nearby church, but she didn’t want to drag Ostyia into one against her will.

  “I don’t care where you go,” Ostyia said when she mentioned it offhand. “I wanted to be away from that boyar. He wouldn’t stop staring. If we don’t leave soon, I’m certain he’s going to murder me in my sleep. He doesn’t even know that I’m a blood mage! Only that I’m Tranavian.”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

&n
bsp; Ostyia shot Nadya an incredulous look as she veered their path south to where the church sat outside the city. She’d found that a little odd, but Katya had explained it was the last remnant of the village that the city had sprung from, and as the city had grown past the church, it had remained at the bottom of a hill with a graveyard to tend.

  “Ostyia, if you had known I was Kalyazi when I showed up in Grazyk, you would have killed me on the spot. No questions asked.”

  Ostyia looked thoughtful but didn’t argue; they knew their roots.

  The church was old, wooden, and underkept, with peeling paint and worm-eaten boards. It was smaller than she had expected, considering the size of the city. It spoke of old things, old times, forgotten and left in the dust. It made Nadya immeasurably sad; even with all she knew and had broken, the thought of the church being left behind as the world hurtled on was heartbreaking. A tear slipped down her cheek, and she roughly wiped it away.

  Ostyia let out a small huff as they went inside.

  “You’re not the only person who’s lost someone,” Ostyia said, her voice far gentler than Nadya deserved.

  “I’ve lost everything,” Nadya snapped.

  She pushed past Ostyia, through the tired nave and into the sanctuary. It was small and worn like the outside. No benches—one was expected to stand throughout a service and most churches had not yet decided to give their people respite. The sanctuary at the monastery where Nadya had taken Malachiasz had had benches, which, Nadya supposed, was rather modern of them.

  She stood in the silence, wishing she could relish it instead of hurting so much, before Ostyia followed after her.

  “You haven’t lost everything,” Ostyia continued. “You’re still here, more than can be said for many others. And, yes, it hurts, and, yes, you want to give up. But you can’t. You’re the only one of us left with magic—”

  “Katya—”

  “Is about as good as a hedgewitch. She has a lot going for her, but magic is not one of those things,” Ostyia replied.

  Nadya frowned. “You don’t understand—”

  “No, Nadya, you don’t understand. You’ve had it rough, I won’t deny that, but I’ve spent the past three years of my life on a battlefield losing everyone I love day after day after day. You don’t know what it’s like to be faced with a choice—save the friend you’ve grown to love or protect your prince. It’s not a choice. I always chose Serefin. I will always choose Serefin.”

  Nadya faltered. Ostyia had struck her as untouchable, but in the dim light of the church, the older girl’s haphazard haircut suddenly didn’t seem so cavalier and Nadya saw the desperation behind it. The exhaustion that cut her features looked bone deep.

  “He’s fine,” Nadya said quietly.

  “You don’t need to lie to me,” Ostyia replied. “But you also don’t get to tell yourself that as an excuse to do nothing because surely he’ll fix this problem.”

  “Serefin doesn’t have a reputation for fixing problems.”

  Ostyia laughed, making Nadya smile. It had been so long that the movement felt foreign on her face.

  “I suppose not,” Ostyia agreed. “He’ll get there one day. He has to, he’s the king.”

  Nadya made a noncommittal noise.

  “But…” Ostyia trailed off, staring up at the icons on the walls. “You’ve ruined us. He has no magic, either.”

  Nadya didn’t even flinch. It was the truth. She had broken the world.

  “I can’t have the weight of the entire world on my shoulders,” Nadya whispered.

  “You should have considered that before you shattered it,” Ostyia pointed out.

  Nadya did flinch at that.

  “I expected more from you after what you did in Grazyk.”

  If Nadya could go back to being the girl in Grazyk, full of righteous fury and untempered curiosity and the ability to hold them both instead of this unending, overwhelming grief, she would in a heartbeat. She would strip back all she had done and find another way to prove herself to Marzenya. Tell Malachiasz the truth instead of playing his game against him. But life was a series of bad choices made in desperation, and there was no going back.

  “I did what I had to,” Nadya said softly. “It wasn’t enough.”

  Ostyia considered that. “When I was young, my family presented me with a choice that wasn’t a choice, as was the way of noble families in Tranavia.”

  Nadya wondered if they should be talking so openly about Tranavia here, but Katya had been very loud and obvious about the “Tranavian prisoner” she had taken captive, so they would only have to yell for Katya to come crashing in with her title and protection if they needed it.

  “My parents only had me, which isn’t ideal when you need one child to go to war and one child for the court. They assumed I would choose court life, because why would I go to the front at only sixteen if they were telling me that I didn’t have to? But Serefin was being forced to the front, and my parents were working under the assumption that I hadn’t heard yet, and that if I had, he wouldn’t be enough to sway me to certain doom.” Ostyia smiled slightly. “I made my inclinations obvious very young.”

  Nadya snorted softly.

  “In the end, it wasn’t about loyalty, leaving. Said inclinations, as they are, frustrate my parents because they close doors that good Tranavian nobility want to remain open. If I wanted to live my life, then war it was, and I could only hope I’d last at least a few years.”

  Nadya frowned, not entirely sure why Ostyia was telling her this.

  “I don’t want anyone else to be presented with the same choice I was: stay home and pretend you’re something you’re not for the sake of an old Tranavian name, or go to war, and probably die quite terribly, because at least no one there will care that you’ve no interest in men.”

  “Would it have mattered if you weren’t a slavhka?” Nadya asked.

  “No. It’s old court ideals. Bloodlines and children and whatever.”

  Nadya made a thoughtful noise. The door to the sanctuary opened, and a young man approached the altar, but made no indication that he noticed the two girls in the room, so Nadya ignored him.

  “I don’t want to leave the world doomed to a very different kind of war,” Ostyia said. “And that’s the path we’re hurtling down.”

  “Because of me.”

  Ostyia did not disagree. And Nadya knew she was right and that she and Rashid could both be right. It wasn’t her duty to fix every problem in the world, but it was up to her to try to mend some of her mistakes.

  “Instead of contemplating the doom of the world by old gods, could we instead return to you talking about your childhood? That was much more palatable.”

  The young man stiffened slightly but didn’t turn. Soon the entire city would be whispering about the old gods.

  Ostyia laughed. “Absolutely not. War was awful. Court was worse. Except for that Rawalyk. I did quite like the drawing of every pretty, powerful girl into Grazyk, that was a very good idea.”

  “I was too scared out of my mind to truly appreciate it.”

  “Is your taste in girls as awful as your taste in boys?”

  Nadya wrinkled her nose. “Almost guaranteed.”

  The door opened, the young man almost fleeing the room when Katya sauntered inside.

  “Viktor!” she called, sounding delighted in a specific way that Nadya had come to learn meant the other person was about to be wildly uncomfortable and Katya was going to enjoy it immensely. “I didn’t know you had left Komyazalov!”

  “Yeah,” Ostyia said softly, watching Katya, “I have awful taste, too.”

  * * *

  “That’s … bad,” Ostyia said.

  It was a massive understatement.

  “Oh, is it? I wasn’t sure. I wanted you to confirm it for me,” Katya drawled.

  Nadya rolled her eyes.

  The tsarevna had led them outside to the graveyard. Half of the graves appeared fine, perfectly well tended. The other half were ravaged
. As if the bodies had been hastily dug up—or had clawed their way out.

  Nadya ran a finger along a grave marker. It came away black with mold. She glanced over her shoulder to where the swamps lurked in the distance. Katya followed her gaze.

  “The priest says it’s gotten closer,” she said.

  “The whole swamp?” Nadya couldn’t hide the skepticism from her voice.

  Katya only nodded.

  “How, pray tell, does that happen?”

  “Don’t be willfully dense, dear, it doesn’t suit you,” Katya replied absently.

  Nadya sighed.

  “You’re the one who had that Vulture break a wall that has been in place for centuries.”

  The last thing Nadya needed was a reminder of yet another thing that was her fault. She tightened her fist. Ostyia caught her eye and shook her head slightly.

  “He would have done that even if Nadya hadn’t asked,” Ostyia pointed out.

  “Even so,” Katya said with a frown.

  “Even so,” Ostyia agreed. “It did happen. So, where do we think the bodies are?”

  “And where is the priest?” Nadya asked.

  She moved closer to inspect one of the empty graves. Her first guess was proving to be spectacularly incorrect. Something had clearly clawed its way out of this.

  Serefin came back from the dead, now this? Death was Marzenya’s domain, what happened when the goddess who tended it was gone? Apparently, death did not hold so tight a grip.

  Nadya almost missed Katya shifting on her feet uncomfortably. She looked back over her shoulder at the tsarevna, who was avoiding her gaze.

  “The priest?” she repeated.

  “Did not wish to speak with you,” Katya replied.

  Nadya blinked. “What?”

  “Apparently since you got here, the icons have been weeping.” There were a few crumpled pieces of paper in Katya’s fist.

  A chill dragged down Nadya’s spine. She hadn’t noticed anything amiss in the sanctuary.

  Katya didn’t make eye contact, instead crouching to inspect another grave. “I’ve been gathering reports in each city and village we pass through and they’re all like this. Icons weeping—usually tears but not always. In Gazhden’viya the statues dedicated to Veceslav, Bozidarka, Myesta, and Alena were found to be crying tears of blood, which is novel. Marzenya’s statue has begun to erode.”