Ruthless Gods Read online

  He was close enough to see the shallow lift of her lungs, to feel the pulse fluttering at her throat like a drumbeat against his skin, pounding but weak, light, fading. Blood stained her pale hair, streaked over her face.

  His was not a power that could save. He was made for nothing but destruction, chaos, disaster, pain, pain, pain.

  But she was dying and he had her name. He remembered. There was snow on the ground and the fur of her hat was crusted with ice. The cold reddened her cheeks, covering the pale freckles that dusted her skin. She had rested her hands on the hilts of her voryens, watched him with a wary kind of curiosity that never simmered into the hatred he’d expected, that he’d wanted, because if she had hated him all of this would have been easy.

  Everything would have been perfect.

  She had not given it up easily. Held it close, kept it safe, but gave it to him nonetheless. (How was he here; what had he done?)

  Her voice, whispering his name. The only anchor he had. The only thing that had not been taken from him, that he had not cast aside himself.

  Until the monster had.

  He didn’t know how to reconcile the wanting and the revulsion. Knowing it was too late and yet yearning to look back. It was within his grasp. It hurt, it was too much, too far. He shied away from the pain.

  Her heartbeat was fading.

  He thought nothing would be more painful than the act of being unmade. But this was worse.

  The drumbeat growing quieter was all too loud. And while he was a fractured, shattered being, he could not let that pulse stop.

  She had whispered his name in his ear. An anchor to something human.

  Malachiasz woke up.

  “Hells,” he groaned, spitting out blood. His head pounded, a blinding pain behind his eyes. He took the last tremulous step toward the altar, chest seizing at the damage he’d wrought but didn’t remember.

  Less than ideal.

  He could still hear the flicker of Nadya’s fading pulse and there was nothing he could do. She couldn’t die here of all places, he wouldn’t allow that.

  Well, there’s one thing, I suppose. “She’s going to kill me,” he whispered. The sanctuary was empty but he recognized the bones strewn everywhere. Blood and bone, what was he doing here?

  His vision shattered—a kaleidoscope of fractured light—and he crashed down, gasping. It took a heartbeat to realign, he watched as an eye opened on the back of his hand, his vision splintered again, it closed, he saw clearly.

  “That’s … also less than ideal,” he said, pulling his aching body back up and spitting out another mouthful of blood.

  Blood magic couldn’t heal. He was effectively useless and she was dying. But it could do one thing.

  He used his thumbnail to slice down his forearm, noting absently the gashes not made by him that ran down his arms. The degradation at his skin ate down to his wrist like a corpse months into the grave and disappeared moments later, leaving his arm whole and him more rattled than before.

  “I would apologize for this, but you did steal my magic first,” he said. Talking was the only thing keeping him from panicking his way into uselessness. If he thought about how close he was to losing her he was going to fall apart.

  He touched his blackened fingertips to her lips, letting magic seep into her. Hearing her heartbeat strengthen as power darker than blood magic coursed through her.

  He squeezed his eyes shut as his vision splintered.

  “Taszni nem, Malachiasz Czechowicz,” he whispered, gritting his teeth as he started to slip. He was unmoored, unbalanced, and less human than ever.

  He couldn’t stay here. He didn’t want her to see him like this. Though, if she was here … she had seen worse.

  Malachiasz moved a lock of bloodstained hair away from her face and gently kissed her forehead.

  He left her on the altar and hoped he wouldn’t come to regret it.

  Żywia caught him in the hallway, and yanked him down a different passageway, ignoring his protests.

  “Shut up, shut up!” she snapped, gripping his arm. “Did you kill her?”

  “What? No.” He massaged his temples. His head hurt. Every time his body shifted pain seared through him. His knees started to give out again, decay rippling down his arm, eyes blinking open. He clapped a hand over a mouth that opened on his neck, whimpering softly.

  Żywia’s hand was all that kept him steady.

  “I didn’t feel this before,” he said through clenched teeth. The haze of power had been enough that the changes didn’t register. This was agony.

  “You need to kill the girl. Malachiasz, there’s something wrong about her.”

  Everything was fuzzy and he frowned at Żywia. “She’s a cleric,” he said, confused.

  “It’s not that. It’s something else.”

  He made a dismissive noise and started to tug away.

  “I threw bones, read entrails, did all the things I’m supposed to, and I swear to you, Malachiasz, you will regret the path she will lead you down. There’s a darkness in her waiting to come out.”

  “Żyw—”

  “Listen to me for once in your damned life, Malachiasz,” Żywia said. “The king has a tenuous hold on Tranavia and Kalyazin has—”

  “Relics,” Malachiasz murmured, unsure how he knew.

  “This is our chance to keep Tranavia on the brink of chaos while you fix the order from the inside. That’s what’s most important. Not some fantastical notion about the Kalyazi gods, but the Vultures. Your kind. Your order.”

  Żywia let him go and turned to leave. He grabbed her, wrenching her back around, his hand on her jaw.

  “Take her up to the surface. And don’t you dare harm her.” He invoked the magic that bound the Vultures to him and Żywia flinched.

  “You’re making a mistake,” she muttered.

  “Then I’ll deal with the consequences.”

  14

  NADEZHDA LAPTEVA

  Not every story is sweet. There was a cleric of Zlatek, Anastasiya Shelepova, who was discovered dabbling in blood magic. She was burned as a heretic after Zlatek stripped her of her magic and her voice, her miracles discounted and all references of her burned out of the texts because of her ultimate transgressions.

  —The Letters of Włodzimierz

  Nadya had no recollection of leaving the Salt Mines. She must have put one foot in front of the other; she must have staggered up hundreds of stairs. She must have, because she stumbled back into the campsite, freezing and incoherent from blood loss.

  Parijahan jumped to her feet to steady Nadya, and gave her a cold once-over before asking, “How long should I wait before I say, ‘I told you so’?”

  “At least a week,” Nadya said.

  Parijahan sighed. Her face paled as she took in Nadya’s bloody dress. “This is your blood.”

  “My blood? Yes. Mostly. Some of it’s his. A lot of it, frankly, I have no idea where it came from because there is so much blood down there. It’s—it’s everywhere, and I—”

  “Nadya, you’re in shock.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, that does keep happening to me.” And she collapsed.

  In the rare moments Nadya was conscious afterward, everything was a blurry haze, and each time she descended into unconsciousness she thought maybe this was finally the end. She didn’t really know what was worth coming back for. Dying would have meant not having to reconcile her failure. No more Tranavians, no more anything.

  When she finally awoke, Nadya was in a warm room in what appeared to be a farmhouse. An oven burned in the corner, and dried flowers and herbs hung from the rafters. Her sides were tightly wrapped with bandages and she was wearing a clean shift.

  And curled up asleep in a wooden chair, in a way that had to be terrifically uncomfortable, was Kostya.

  Nadya’s heart clenched. The fleeting thought that she had saved the wrong boy slithered through the back of her head and, though she could not take it back, she regretted it. That wasn’t
fair to Kostya. It wasn’t fair to the best friend she thought she had lost forever.

  But maybe that was why she was having trouble comprehending that Kostya was back. She had mourned him and moved on, she had become a person she wasn’t totally sure he would recognize, and she wasn’t ready for how that might affect their friendship.

  He woke when she shifted, blinking blearily in a way that suggested he was unsure of his surroundings, before his eyes cleared and he was at Nadya’s side in an instant.

  They stared at each other in weighty silence.

  “Hello, Kostya,” Nadya finally said.

  He grinned. He looked like he was about to hug her, so she rested her hand against his chest.

  “That would almost definitely hurt,” she said.

  He laughed a little. “Of course.” A shadow passed over his face. “I’ll kill him,” he said, deadly serious. “For what he’s done to our people, to you.”

  Oh, we’re getting right to it, are we? This wasn’t a conversation she could have. She had been so close. For a glimmering fraction of a second, she’d had Malachiasz—and lost him. She wasn’t particularly good at saving the people she cared about, she considered. But she had saved Kostya, hadn’t she?

  Except she had saved him at the expense of Serefin, someone who could help stop the war that was killing so many. And she didn’t know how she was going to deal with that guilt on top of everything else.

  She shushed Kostya and let him take her hand even though she remembered the look he gave her before the monastery attack, and she knew better, now, what that meant.

  “A different battle for another day,” she said.

  He nodded, clearly dissatisfied. Surely he wasn’t already seeing whoever it was Nadya had become? The girl who was so tired of war that she couldn’t build up the righteous indignation to hate Tranavians simply based on who they were. Simply because it was expected.

  The old Nadya would have agreed with him vehemently. The old Nadya would have ignored how her sides were only held together with some thread and bandages and raced back to kill the Black Vulture herself.

  But the old Nadya had the gods and power and fell for a monster anyway. And was left with nothing.

  She reached up, smoothing his dark hair back from his forehead. “I’ve never seen you with your hair this long.” He always kept it short, with Veceslav’s holy symbol shaved into the side.

  “There wasn’t much space for hygiene in the Salt Mines,” he said ruefully.

  His dark eyes were haunted, his time in the mines written across his haggard face. Her hand skimmed over her prayer beads, and she remembered the pendant. She still had it somewhere. The necklace that had trapped Velyos, and—from what Pelageya implied—set this madness into motion.

  “Nadya, what’s happened?”

  She shook her head wordlessly. She didn’t know where to start. She couldn’t tell him about Malachiasz. Or Serefin. She made an attempt to relay the events of the months since the monastery was destroyed. Dancing around the obvious hole her story created when Malachiasz was missing. She couldn’t explain how she’d become so fluent in Tranavian; she couldn’t explain how she had accessed the Salt Mines, why she had been so relaxed around the one person who was Kalyazin’s enemy among others.

  The enemy of my people is a ridiculous eighteen-year-old boy, she thought, not for the first time.

  It was obvious Kostya could sense her side steps. Nadya wasn’t doing a very good job masking her hesitation.

  “But the king is dead?” he asked, after she told him a watered down and, frankly, blatantly untrue version of that night in the cathedral.

  She nodded.

  “And the prince?”

  “Serefin?” she asked without thinking.

  His eyes narrowed.

  If Kostya was here with her, but hadn’t met Serefin … where was he?

  “Serefin lives,” she said quietly.

  “But…”

  “I know, Kostya,” she said, her voice cracking. “I know.” Serefin was the reason everyone she had ever known was dead. Gods, she had made so many terrible mistakes.

  Luckily she was saved by Parijahan coming into the room. “Blessed mother,” she murmured, relieved. “I wasn’t certain you were going to survive that. How did you get out?”

  Nadya shook her head slowly. “He didn’t…” She glanced at Kostya.

  Parijahan cast him a pointed look. Clearly he had been less than friendly with them.

  Nadya frowned, thinking hard. Those last seconds came back in hazy flashes. Someone’s hand, gentle against her face. A touch of magic filling her body.

  Though she vividly remembered him taking it back—she could feel Malachiasz’s magic still.

  Nadya flipped her hand over, where the blackened veins had spread out over her palm. Kostya moved, as if to take her hand, and she pulled it away.

  “I failed,” she said to Parijahan. “But I had him, for a moment.”

  Parijahan’s eyebrows tugged down. She nodded.

  “We lost the other one.”

  “What?”

  “Woke up one morning and he was just … gone.”

  “What about Kacper? Ostyia?” Nadya was highly aware of Kostya’s body language as he recognized the names as Tranavian. His broad shoulders grew rigid with tension.

  “They had already left. Those three had some falling out. There was a lot of yelling. Truly, I don’t think Serefin is well.”

  Kostya was growing impatient beside her.

  “What do you mean, they’re gone?”

  “Nadya,” Kostya said urgently.

  She ignored him, looking beseechingly at Parijahan.

  “I wish I had answers. Things deteriorated with Serefin very quickly and I didn’t think to have someone watching him. I thought his people would do that.”

  Nadya leaned back. A gift or a curse?

  “So what do we do?”

  “Unfortunately, as insufferable as those Tranavians were, they were incredibly useful. So, I’m not sure. For now, you should rest.” She threw Kostya a glare that he met in kind. “Come on, Kalyazi, get out.”

  Kostya didn’t respond. Nadya nudged his hand. “I’ll explain later, I promise. Just…” She bit back the urge to sigh. “You aren’t going to like it, so prepare yourself.”

  Confused and more than a little upset, he nodded and left the room without another word. Parijahan shot Nadya a knowing look.

  “Don’t give me that.”

  “And I thought you were a little zealot—”

  “I’m going back to sleep, Parj.”

  Parijahan laughed and sat at the edge of the bed before considering further and shifting so she was next to Nadya.

  Nadya rested her head on her shoulder.

  “I’m sorry it didn’t work.”

  “I was so close,” Nadya said, blinking back tears. “He’s there but he’s so thoroughly gone.”

  Parijahan was quiet before finally saying, “We’ll have to stay here a little longer. Rashid has no idea how you survived that, you lost a lot of blood. You need to heal.”

  “Where are we?”

  “A village a few days west of Kyętri. A farmer has very graciously let us stay in this empty house for the reasonable price of ten łowtek a night.”

  “Good grief.”

  Parijahan shrugged. “I can pay it, but I’m nearing the end of my funds. He said his son owns the house but he’s at the front and trade has all but stopped out here.”

  “Nothing changed,” Nadya said softly. “If anything, everything has gotten worse.”

  “Maybe,” Parijahan said. “Or maybe it was only a first step and there are merely more steps to come.”

  “I’m not sure how much more I can withstand.” She was bewildered and exhausted and couldn’t stop thinking about the stricken expression on Malachiasz’s face before it had all been wiped away.

  Parijahan pulled Nadya’s corrupted hand to her lap. “This feels like it should be a priority,” she
observed.

  Nadya flexed her fingers. “I’m not sure what to do about this, either.”

  “Rest,” Parijahan said. “That’s all you can do.”

  * * *

  Nadya was no longer in the farmhouse.

  “How do you keep doing this?”

  Pelageya looked up from a string of chicken feet in her hands. “Doing what?”

  Nadya gestured around her. They were in the sitting room where she had met Pelageya before, middling light flickering in through dusty windows. Bundles of dried flowers now hung from the ceiling alongside skulls strung up through their eye sockets. Nadya was tucked in a chair, her hands wrapped around a warm mug of tea. Her sides hurt, but it wasn’t unbearable.

  Pelageya ignored her. “Failed your noble quest, did you?”

  “All right, send me back,” Nadya said, struggling to get out of the chair.

  “So sensitive,” Pelageya said, clicking her tongue at Nadya. “You’ll stay where you are if you know what’s good for you.”

  “It’s been established that I do not know that, actually.”

  Pelageya barked out a laugh.

  Nadya winced as she settled back in the chair, worrying she had pulled a stitch. Pelageya eyed her.

  “You should be dead.”

  “Many times over, I’m sure,” Nadya said dryly. It was easier to be snappish with Pelageya when she appeared no older than herself.

  “The Vulture’s claws are poisoned. And I’m sure your boy’s are worse than any other of his kind.”

  Nadya frowned. Her hand strayed to her side. How had she survived?

  “But you live and you persist. I can’t give you answers, only advice.”

  “I never asked for advice,” Nadya said, ignoring the implication that Pelageya had answers for Nadya that she was withholding.

  “What are you going to do? You don’t have your pet monster to pull on a leash into the country of his enemies—”

  “And I have no magic,” Nadya muttered.

  “Haven’t you ever thought about why it is you exist?” Pelageya asked.

  That sounds deeply unpleasant, Nadya thought. She stuck her face back down into the warm steam coming off the tea.