Ostyia swore.
“It could be simpler than that, but—” Serefin cut off as a choked scream broke through Nadya’s clenched teeth.
“Has this been happening to her?” he asked Ostyia, who knelt across from him.
She shook her head. “Everything has been weird, off. She’s been acting strange, but nothing like this.”
He didn’t know what being on that mountain would have done to someone like her. He glanced at Ostyia.
“Should I help her?”
Ostyia tilted her head. Anna let out a sharp breath. Serefin ignored the Kalyazi girl.
“You’ve been with them for months. I’m asking you.”
“Serefin, yes, obviously. What kind of question is that?”
It was the kind that needed to be asked. No, he wasn’t going to do something drastic while Katya wasn’t there, and yes, he had been relieved to see Nadya, but she had still stripped Tranavia of blood magic, made them weak—he couldn’t simply forget it.
But Ostyia had always been a little more bloodthirsty, and slower to forgive, than him. If Kacper was his voice of reason, Ostyia was the one who pushed him. That she didn’t think Nadya deserved this fate was a relief.
Serefin only had one idea and it wasn’t a very good one. He cast out a handful of stars, plucking one out of the air. In one swift movement he pressed the white-hot light between her lips and hoped he wasn’t making a mistake.
A crash sounded, terrifyingly close. Ostyia tensed, ready to fight.
“I’ll be back,” Kacper said, his lips brushing against Serefin’s cheek.
“Wait.” Serefin caught Kacper’s sleeve, tugging him back and kissing him hard. “Where are you going?”
“I’ll be useless against Vultures. I’m going to find Katya; I can help there.”
Serefin nodded. “Be careful.”
“Always am!” Kacper replied cheerfully before he took off.
Blood trickled from Nadya’s eyes, but she’d stopped shaking. Serefin couldn’t tell if that was a good sign. The fingers of her corrupted hand fluttered uselessly at her side.
Suddenly she coughed. Ostyia shot to her feet and away as Nadya rolled off Serefin’s lap and retched. She sat up and leaned back on her heels, wiping blood off her face.
“Welcome back,” Serefin said. “We’re about to be slaughtered by Vultures.”
Nadya laughed so hard she looked like she was going to have another fit. Ostyia exchanged a glance with Serefin. Nadya spat out a mouthful of blood and swore.
“There’s an old god underneath the church,” she said simply.
It took Serefin a moment to process that. “You, what—how do you know?”
The eye on her forehead had closed, but the strange, inky black was still swirled up her neck and jaw. “I spoke to her. Some things make sense now.”
Serefin waited. Anna cleared her throat.
“The darkness in the old gods is in me, too.”
32
NADEZHDA LAPTEVA
Without Alena there would be no warmth, there would be no light. There would only be Nyrokosha’s realm and the suffocating dark.
—Codex of the Divine 835:99
How much longer could she run from the truth? Ignore the pieces she had been given by Pelageya, Marzenya, Malachiasz, Ljubica? Everyone telling her the exact same thing that she was too damn stubborn to listen to because it was impossible. Except it wasn’t.
All she knew was that Nyrokosha, the elder goddess locked beneath Komyazalov’s cathedral, had pulled her under. To whisper and prod and remind Nadya how she was different. To tell her that Nadya should be helping her, helping Chyrnog, helping the ones who only wished to not be caged.
How were they caged, though? Nadya hadn’t had a chance to ask before Serefin yanked her back, but she’d left knowing one thing with certainty: she was made from the same stuff as the imprisoned old gods.
“Hold tight to your mortality, it’s the one thing you do not want to lose,” Ljubica reminded her brightly. The same words she’d spoken on top of the mountain and now Nadya understood why. Why it was so important, why so much could be lost if she fell.
“We don’t really have time for that world-shattering revelation,” Serefin said, staring at her. He picked up his szitelki from the ground and threaded it back onto his belt, standing. “Can you fight?”
She nodded. She had magic, if that’s what he was asking.
“Should we,” he paused, faltering, “keep this between us?”
Nadya glanced at Anna. “Katya definitely has suspicions, but I don’t think they go this far.”
Serefin pulled her to her feet. He rested a hand on her head, fingers pressing lightly into her hair. “Are you all right?” he asked carefully.
“Serefin, I don’t know.” She looked down at her hand, the skin fissured and wrong. She hated the not knowing.
The sky was unfathomably dark, and it was starting to rain blood. Of course it was blood. It was the end of the world and they had run out of time. Except … The end wouldn’t be loud but quiet. The sun’s soft death and a world embraced by darkness. That was what Chyrnog wanted. That was what Chyrnog would have. This wasn’t him.
The boy—what had Serefin so mockingly called him? Rusya? Ruslan, then—was staring at Nadya with a curiosity that made her uncomfortable.
Nyrokosha’s voice had been cool and gentle as it tore Nadya apart. Pulling her into pieces, discovering what they were, debating whether to put her back together. She had woken in front of a vast cathedral like the one that morning, but different, wrong. It was warped, like only some of it was there and other parts were somewhere else. Bodies were impaled on the points of domes, hanging from the edges, clinging to the grips of stone gargoyles. Something acrid grew between the stones.
She had been here before. Chyrnog’s stone temple. The thousand hands, reaching. So small, insignificant, yet there was a feeling of kinship she could not shake off before the unnamable horror that could crush her so easily. An ocean of black water. She walked up the steps and through the door and found total and all-consuming darkness.
So, she stopped, waited, until there was a point of light to walk toward. She didn’t want to know what she would find, but she pressed forward anyway. Until she found the churning well of blood and realized that all these pieces had meant something. Nothing worked in isolation. All the familiar, all the uncanny, it was connected. There was no stepping around it, and she knew better than to go into it, and so she waited some more, until the walls of the sanctuary melted around her, the icons turning into rivulets of blood that ran into the well, faster and deeper, until Nadya stood before a chasm with no end, lined with gold and splitting the sanctuary in two. Screams echoed from below, digging deep into her skull.
She stood at the edge of a prison for gods. After a heartbeat, she sat, kicking her feet out into the open air.
“There you are, daughter of death.” The voice swelled up from the darkness, lighter than Nadya had expected, softer. “You have been gone from me for so long.”
Nadya tilted her head.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Nyrokosha. You know me. You’ve always known me. I have a thousand names and a thousand faces even as I am chained. You have spent a long time with Marzenya’s hand shadowing your eyes, covering your mouth, your ears, so you would not see or hear or know. She was mine once, too. They were all mine, once. But she took another path and you hide from what you were born to be.”
There had always been a question mark hanging over her, but it had never been one she had thought much about. She was one of many orphans, so it had seemed silly before, to wonder about her parents. But she couldn’t help but think of them here. Where had she come from, really? Was this all random? Was she a product of chance and divinity, formed from pieces of different worlds, never fitting into any of them?
“You will let me out, child of darkness, daughter of death. You’re chained by mortality, but you could break free. Embrace
the divinity in your blood.”
Nadya rested her fingertips against the golden floor that cracked off into nothing. Something skittered past. She froze, drawing her legs up as spiders began to race up the edges of the chasm, spewing over the top and into the church. None of them touched her, dashing close only to veer off at the last second. She hurried to her feet when she heard something else, something bigger, coming up from that endless darkness.
“It’s what you were made for,” Nyrokosha screamed, her voice suddenly losing its softness. “Freeing me. Freeing all of us.”
Then Nadya was pulled back into the world where she stood beside the boy she had once planned to kill, the sky going black around them.
“Nadya?”
She realized Serefin had been trying to catch her attention for a while. He looked worried. Blood from the sky dripped down his face, matting in his hair.
Nadya tugged her voryens from her belt. She closed her eyes, calling on that well of dark water, the blackened core of her, the parts made to set old gods free. Could she resist them? How long did she have until they unmade her?
Flame shot down the edge of one blade, something black and poisonous dripped down the other. She opened her eyes and glanced at Anna.
“Go inside. Stay inside. Please, I can’t lose you.”
“I can fight,” Anna snapped.
“Not against these.” She lifted onto her toes and kissed Anna’s forehead.
The other girl looked torn, but swiftly disappeared into the palace.
Nadya grinned at Serefin. “What are you waiting for?” she asked, before she took off, out of the courtyard and into the city. He followed, swearing behind her.
She pushed past people huddled in panicked clusters, snapping at them to go inside, go anywhere, why were they standing in blood rain, didn’t they know what this meant?
Something pierced through her, a strike against her head, pain flared white hot behind her eyes. Oh. Not only the Vultures. There was a god.
She didn’t know which. One of the fallen, presumably. Who had she not spoken to? Cvjetko, in his strange, nebulous position. She had never been told what he held power over.
“Oh, you didn’t know?” Kazimiera chirped. “He’s the storm that comes in three. He’s horrors and teeth. He’s mortality’s worst nightmare.”
Kaz, I gotta be honest. This is not helping.
Kazimiera laughed.
Would the Vultures really ally themselves with a god if Malachiasz was not there to guide them?
“The beasts of Tranavia are wounded, bloodthirsty. Their world is crumbling, and they lash out. Their king has died, and they cannot crown a new one, and they know not why. Not all are so angry, though. They don’t all want this.”
Żywia. If she was here … If Nadya could find her, they might have a chance. She ducked through alleys, through muddy streets made worse by the mess from the sky, searching. She was at the gates to the lower city when a form landed in front of her, hunched and lanky.
An iron mask covered the Vulture’s entire face. Their claws were already out.
“You’re very fast for someone who was unconscious not that long ago,” Serefin said, sliding to a stop next to Nadya. Somewhere along the way he’d found a sword.
“I didn’t know you knew how to fight with one of those,” she returned, taking a step back as the Vulture advanced.
“Darling, I can fight with anything. I’m very good,” he replied.
The Vultures appeared more intent on Serefin than her. What was going on?
The Vulture struck as another slammed into Serefin. Nadya immediately lost track of him as her focus narrowed to herself and the Vulture. She caught its strike with her voryen, landing her foot against its chest and shoving. She sliced her voryens across each other and magic flared, bursting out in a strange, acrid mess that splashed onto the Vulture, searing into the light armor it wore. The smell of burning flesh met her nostrils. She tried her hardest to tune out the screams, turning on another Vulture.
There were … a lot of them. Too many, and Serefin and Ostyia had no blood magic. The Vultures weren’t using magic either, not like when Nadya had fought them in the past. They were relying on teeth and claws and some power that seemed to thread in between, whatever it was that had been tortured into them. Her back pressed against Serefin’s as the Vultures knocked her into him.
“I’m going to be so put out if I die in Komyazalov,” Serefin said.
Before Nadya could respond something tore through the lines that were threatening to overwhelm them. There were two, neither wearing masks. Nadya recognized Żywia, but it took longer for her brain to put together who the second was.
Żaneta.
Serefin stared at her, narrowly avoiding death by impalement.
She looked so much better than when Nadya had seen her last. A monster, but not shattered. She shot them a sharp-toothed smile, winked at Serefin, then turned on the other Vultures.
“What’s happening?” Serefin asked.
“Your old girlfriend is saving you.”
“That bodes badly for me, I think,” he said, sounding dazed.
Nadya snorted softly, shoving him toward a Vulture who was distracted by Żaneta.
It wasn’t quick work. It was messy and bloody. There were more Vultures than Nadya thought were in the order, and they didn’t have the magic that let them shift through physical blows. Hitting a Vulture in the throat with a voryen knocked them down like it would any mortal.
Nadya didn’t think any Vultures were dead, but their crumpled bodies soon littered the ground. There was a moment of silence, a fleeting calm. Żywia turned to grin at Nadya, her white teeth like knives.
“I told them not to, but no one listens to me! The Black Vulture’s Hand, still, but no one listens!” she said. Her tangles of black hair were tied back and coated with blood. Her onyx eyes slowly shifted to blue. She let out a breath, kneeling down next to an unconscious Vulture and checking their pulse. “Idiots. If Malachiasz were alive—”
“He is,” Serefin said shortly.
Żywia’s head shot up.
“How did you not know?” Serefin asked. “I thought you were connected?”
“That bastard,” Żywia snapped, straightening. “I’m going to kill him. Is he here? He shut off the connection himself, then.”
“No, he did die,” Serefin said. “He said the threads were too weak when he came back.”
Żywia shook her head in disbelief. “Liar. He didn’t want us to know.”
“He’s not here,” Serefin said. “But we have other problems to worry about.”
“What about the god?” Nadya asked.
Żywia frowned. “What? No, the Vultures came for him.” She nodded at Serefin.
Oh gods, she really didn’t know.
“Cvjetko, he’s here, somewhere.”
“You can’t fight a god,” Serefin began, stopping when Nadya stared at him. “Listen.”
“Serefin, really.”
He was avoiding making eye contact with Żaneta, who appeared like she could be convinced quite easily into strangling him. Her wiry cloud of dark curls was limp and heavy with blood. She stepped closer. He tensed.
“Czijow,” he said, very, very quietly.
Żaneta clasped his head between her hands. “Bloody idiot, that’s what you are.”
“Yes.”
She tilted his head back, wincing at the scar that ran along his throat. “I did that?”
“You shoved me down the stairs, actually, and then my throat was slit.”
“I guess you got your revenge.”
Serefin sighed. “That was not my choice, Żaneta.”
“Too late for apologies,” she said, but she tugged him closer and kissed his forehead. Her nose wrinkled. “Gross.”
“I am covered in blood, why would you do that?”
“Ugh.” She wiped at her mouth. “Nasty.”
“I’m glad you’re you again,” he said softly. “I am sorry.”
“This is wildly sentimental,” Żywia interrupted. “Very cute.”
Nadya turned to her. She pointed blankly to the road, which wound down over the vast bridge to the city beyond where a massive beast rampaged. A god in the flesh. She put her hand on Żywia’s arm when she started to move.
“You should get out of here. There are Voldah Gorovni around.”
Żywia shot her a grin. “And miss all the fun? Hardly.”
33
MALACHIASZ CZECHOWICZ
Every head of Cvjetko is at odds with the other.
—The Books of Innokentiy
Chyrnog held Malachiasz in a grip so tight it felt as if his ribs were being crushed. He wanted to close his eyes. But instead he was forced to quietly wait as the village stirred, as the torches burning in the distance grew closer, as they prepared to face a monster.
Don’t do this. Let him flee into the darkness and have that be the end of it.
“Every death gives me strength,” Chyrnog replied, sounding amused.
They’re nothing. You get nothing from them.
“Simple fool, I get everything.”
I’m only one person. I can still be overpowered.
Chyrnog did not deign to respond. Because it didn’t matter. However many they set after Malachiasz, it would never be enough. He was an army in and unto itself.
He was too dangerous to live.
This would destroy him. The blood and the rending and the devastation. But it didn’t take long. They were mere mortals and Malachiasz was something so much more and so much worse. He didn’t know how many he cut through in the darkness. For each that fell, there was another wielding a rusty scythe. They tried, valiantly, but they weren’t enough. They would never be enough.
It was over before it truly began. Chyrnog let him go like a bored dog dropping a toy. He wanted to die. He needed to be stopped and he didn’t know that he could stop himself. He wasn’t strong enough.
This was his fault. So many things would not be shattered if only he had … stopped. Stopped when Izak asked for the power of a god. Stopped when he had run—the single moment where he had made the right choice.
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