Ruthless Gods Page 19

  “It was a massacre,” she said. “I’m shocked you Tranavians aren’t heralding it as a miracle, what with the monster that was there.”

  Serefin shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He knew where this was going. “When did this happen?”

  “Three months ago or so,” she said. “But this came after. The front has been consistently attacked by a creature who only comes under the cover of darkness. We’ve fought this damn war as fairly as you heretics deserve, but—”

  “War isn’t fair,” Serefin replied evenly. “It never has been. And it’s not our fault you have no magic to speak of.”

  Yekaterina inclined her head. “So little you know, Tranavian.”

  “Listen,” Serefin said quickly, before she could continue. “I’m not asking for trust. But it sounds like our goals align. How many Vultures have been seen at the front? Since when?”

  “A lot of questions.”

  “You’ve not yet killed me nor taken me as a prisoner of war, so clearly you think I’ll be useful.”

  “Useful might be an overstatement.”

  “But I want the Vultures taken down, if not for good—I am Tranavian, after all—at least a peg. I want the Black Vulture dead. If he lives, it won’t matter who wins this endless war.”

  Malachiasz wanted both thrones. Serefin couldn’t let him take his. And his plot to kill Kalyazin’s gods wouldn’t end anything.

  “Kartevka happened without warning. One moment, it was as peaceful a night as any can be on the front, the next, the skies split open and magic poured forth; a creature coming with it that ravaged the entire camp to ash.”

  “What about the location made it special?”

  Yekaterina frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “If it was the Black Vulture who did this—did anyone survive? Any witnesses? No? Well, he’s smart—it wasn’t without reason. He’s not one for mass destruction because he feels like it.”

  “Shocking,” she said dryly.

  “He’s exceedingly clever,” Serefin said absently as he considered. “Was there something there he might want?”

  “Vashnya Delich’niy…” the man at the door said, a warning.

  But the tsarevna only looked thoughtful. “Gods, what does it matter, you probably already know. We kept our most powerful relics and icons at Kartevka.”

  The relics again …

  “All this for some bones?” Serefin remarked.

  She smiled slightly. “Pray you never see those bones at work.”

  “Oh, I think something was lost in translation. I’m a heretic. I don’t pray.”

  Serefin thought about those spell books he’d found in a Kalyazi camp. They had to be related.

  “But regardless, those are now in the Black Vulture’s hands?” Serefin asked.

  “They weren’t retrieved from the wreckage, so the assumption is, yes.”

  Interesting. What could the Vultures possibly need with a handful of old bones?

  “You could get those back if you help me kill the Black Vulture,” he said.

  Yekaterina shook her head in disbelief. “I don’t understand the game you’re playing,” she said. She shoved her chair back and stood, picking up the string of iron teeth and draping it over her neck. “Bring him,” she said to the man, before sweeping out of the room.

  Serefin was led deeper underneath the church, into a wide room with wax candles dripping down sconces and strange stained-glass pieces embedded in the walls, lights flickering behind them scattering rainbows onto the polished stone floor. There were statues of strange creatures in each corner that at a glance unnerved him.

  “This is holy ground, take off your shoes,” Yekaterina said, sliding out of her boots.

  He frowned. “Holy ground for whom?” he muttered. She continued to stare at him. He sighed, untying his boots and stepping out of them and onto the cold floor.

  “I can’t imagine a Tranavian could hope to understand matters of divinity.”

  “You’d be surprised,” he replied, rubbing at his eye. His hand came away wet with blood. Hells, not now.

  Something scratched just underneath his skin, a foreboding that he couldn’t quite identify until Yekaterina crossed the room and opened a door. Serefin caught only the barest glimpse of the stone altar within before panic drowned him. The tsarevna gestured and the man clubbed him in the back of the head, dropping him like a stone.

  * * *

  A stone altar worn down by the threads of thousands of years. He had seen it before and he saw it now.

  Well, felt it, rather.

  His hands were bound to the altar. He tugged at the chains to see if there was any give. Nothing. The air was thick with the scent of incense, pungent and cloudy in the dim light of the flickering candles.

  “The gods have been quiet since your father died,” Yekaterina said from somewhere outside Serefin’s limited field of vision. Her voice was quietly contemplative.

  His left eye was showing him strange patterns in the hazy incense smoke above him. He started to chew at the inside of his mouth. He wouldn’t need a lot of blood, only a little, just a taste to catch his magic.

  “The old ways haven’t been practiced in a long time. Ever since the clerics started to disappear. Kalyazin forgot our magic is as fueled by blood as that of the heretics, only we spill it for divine purpose. We spill it in subjugation to our gods, and thus, it is deemed sanctified.”

  Serefin rested his head back. “And how is ritual sacrifice any different from what our Vultures do in their caverns below ground?”

  Yekaterina made a thoughtful noise. “I just told you.”

  He heard the click of her fingernails against the stone slab right beside his ear, felt a sharp pain across his chest as she dragged the point of a dagger horizontally just under his collarbone.

  A cloud of moths burst into the air. She reared back, making an odd sign with her fingers over her chest.

  Superstitious Kalyazi, Serefin thought.

  “What are you?” she hissed.

  He tasted blood from his shredded mouth, and shivered with power. Yekaterina frowned and cut another line into his chest, carving a symbol in flesh, sending more moths fluttering into the air.

  The tsarevna muttered in Kalyazi, words flying too fast for Serefin to keep up, but the drone of her voice lodged panic deep in Serefin’s core.

  He was going to die here. He struggled against the chains, but they held fast.

  There was a tension of power from the carving in his skin but it wasn’t his magic; it wasn’t power he could access, though it had been his blood that was spilled.

  His chest tightened; he was struggling for air. Yekaterina watched dispassionately.

  “What will this give you?” he rasped, face contorting at the sudden waves of fiery pain that licked at his skin. “Power?”

  “I want a message,” she said, wiping the blade clean and straightening from the altar. “I want the ear of my goddess turned toward me. I want to send a sign to Tranavia that we will not be cowed by your heretical magic and we will suffer this war no longer.” She smiled slightly. “I want to kill the king of Tranavia. And you’re right, the Black Vulture, too. This will help.”

  She lifted the dagger to plunge it into his heart.

  * * *

  The walls of the palace always made Serefin feel like he was walking in the home of giants. Everything was so tall and loud and he much preferred the seasons when his mother declared that the air in Grazyk was killing her and swept Serefin off to stay in their home by the lakes near her sister’s estate.

  “What are you doing?”

  He had been lying on the floor in one of the great halls, staring at the paintings on the ceiling. There were painters working on the far side of the hall who had only recently finished the portion Serefin was eyeing. More than once a servant had stepped over him instead of going around.

  His cousin leaned over him, before looking up to the ceiling. He sighed in his resigned way—as if the younger
boy constantly had better things to be doing, which Serefin always found amusing, because Malachiasz had also been absent from their lessons that morning and no one had been able to find him. He did that, just disappeared, sometimes. Ćáwtka Sylwia was never particularly concerned, though it drove Serefin’s mother senseless.

  He had dust on his clothes and in his mess of dark hair that Serefin knew Wiktoria, Sylwia’s maidservant, had valiantly spent half the morning trying to tame. There was dried blood on his hands, hardly an oddity, though neither boy was supposed to practice their magic without supervision, especially Malachiasz.

  Serefin had a knack for blood magic; Malachiasz had something entirely different and altogether more.

  Malachiasz finally unceremoniously flopped onto the floor next to Serefin.

  A servant huffed out an irritated breath and stepped over them, carrying a tray of silvers.

  “Nothing,” Serefin replied because he had, in fact, been doing absolutely nothing. “What’s going on in that corner?” He pointed to where the painters were working.

  Malachiasz was quiet, fighting with his desire to remain perfectly indifferent and his love of art. Malachiasz liked to trail behind the royal family’s portrait artist while Serefin carted around old Tranavian history books.

  “Vultures,” he said thoughtfully.

  The ceiling above them was covered with vultures, the birds painted as hulking and dark. Serefin shivered. He barely noticed the powerful blood mages that lurked in the palace halls and took their order name after the carrion birds. Malachiasz was both terrified and fascinated by them.

  “Where were you this morning?” Serefin asked.

  Malachiasz ignored him, pointing up at the ceiling. “It’s a battle.”

  “What?”

  “They’re painting a battle.”

  Serefin frowned, tilting his head to try and see what Malachiasz saw. It looked like a lot of animals to him, but there was something vicious to it.

  “The bears are Kalyazi. The white eagles and the vultures are Tranavian.”

  The bears were definitely losing this particular battle. Serefin could see it now.

  “Is it a specific one, do you think?” Malachiasz asked.

  Serefin did know entirely too much about the military history of Tranavia and the war they had been fighting against their neighbor for nearly a century. He squinted, trying to make out any defining features that might denote important Tranavian generals.

  “Kwiatosław Rzepka,” he finally said.

  The focal point of the piece was a white eagle with only one wing and golden talons, tearing out the heart of a bear with a flaming sword at its feet.

  Rzepka wasn’t some bygone Tranavian general; he was a figure out of Tranavia’s oldest myths. Even before the war with Kalyazin, Tranavia had never gotten along with its bigger neighbor to the west, and there were plenty of children’s tales about Rzepka and his magic. It wasn’t blood magic, this was before Tranavia, it was old magic, one that had long since been lost to Tranavia after Kalyazin did its very best to wipe it out entirely.

  “Why would your father have him painted on the ceiling?”

  Serefin wasn’t sure. His father far preferred cold military facts to the fanciful stories of an old mage missing a hand who had cut a mountain in half and killed dragons in the lowland hills. He shrugged. Malachiasz almost definitely knew more about Rzepka than Serefin. Malachiasz liked anything related to magic.

  His cousin tilted his head farther back, curious.

  “They’re not the best,” he said skeptically.

  “This is one of the little halls,” Serefin replied.

  “I guess that explains everything.”

  Serefin wished they weren’t lying down and he could throw something at Malachiasz. His cousin sat up and grinned at him.

  “I’m hungry,” he announced and got up. “Come on. You’re not doing anything better.”

  “If you hadn’t missed breakfast and lunch this wouldn’t be a problem,” Serefin said, but got to his feet and followed after Malachiasz. “Where were you, anyway?”

  “Around,” Malachiasz said.

  “My mother is going to kill you.”

  He was unconcerned on his quest to the palace kitchens. He wouldn’t get in trouble, he never did. It was frustrating. Everything Serefin did earned him a disapproving glare from his father, and a scolding from his mother.

  But he was a prince and Malachiasz was not.

  They darted around the legs of servants and slavhki until Malachiasz knocked into a tall figure wearing an iron mask. He stopped dead still as the figure slowly turned, the plain iron mask revealing nothing but the Vulture’s green eyes.

  “Careful,” she said, her voice laced with something that made Serefin immediately want to flee.

  Malachiasz took a step back, running into Serefin. He was going to run, but froze once more as the Vulture dropped into a crouch in front of him, her movements loose, and took his hand.

  “Practicing?” she asked. “You’re Czechowicz’s boy, yes?”

  Malachiasz nodded.

  “Show me what you can do.”

  His expression was terrified as he confirmed Serefin was still behind him. “I don’t have a spell book,” he said.

  “I do,” she said, unclipping a thick book bound in black leather from her hip.

  Malachiasz shook his head. “I’m not supposed to use magic.” A beseeching entreaty to Serefin, pleading for him to step in.

  But Malachiasz was very good at magic, and Serefin didn’t want to tell a Vulture no. He nodded encouragingly as the Vulture tore a page out of her spell book.

  “I don’t—”

  There were iron claws suddenly tipping her fingers and she slashed one down Malachiasz’s forearm. He jumped, eyes filling with tears, but his expression quickly went glassy and he reached for the spell book page.

  For a terrible second it was like time stopped. The air went white and hazy and Serefin was slammed back into the wall. The Vulture straightened, inscrutable behind her iron mask.

  “Interesting,” she said, voice soft, and without another word, she swept away.

  Malachiasz stood there, blood dripping from his fingers and tears running down his cheeks, before he noticed Serefin wasn’t beside him any longer.

  He whimpered, flinching back when Serefin stumbled to his feet.

  “I’m fine,” Serefin said, trying to be reassuring until blood dripped down his face. His head did hurt.

  “Don’t tell,” Malachiasz whispered.

  It wouldn’t matter if he told or not if someone saw. Serefin grabbed Malachiasz’s arm and dragged him into a servants’ hall.

  “You just overpowered a Vulture’s spell,” he said.

  Malachiasz nodded, eyes wide.

  “Where am I bleeding?”

  “It’s only a cut on your forehead. I’m sorry, Serefin. I could have killed you.” He was panicking.

  They needed to let Andrzej know what Malachiasz had done. The mage would know what to do about a boy who had blown so far past the spell a Vulture had given him that it had backfired. Usually the Vultures trained the royal children in magic, but they weren’t old enough yet. They were still learning from a mortal mage, and after that Serefin didn’t particularly ever want to train with a Vulture.

  But Malachiasz was trembling and trying bravely to rub away the tears streaking down his cheeks. Serefin sighed.

  “Let’s get cleaned up,” he said. “Then we’ll get something to eat.”

  “You won’t tell?”

  “No one has to know.”

  20

  NADEZHDA LAPTEVA

  Marzenya and Velyos have a bitter rivalry, one a goddess of death, the other a god of the dead.

  —The Letters of Włodzimierz

  Nadya sat cross-legged with her prayer beads in her lap, Parijahan asleep in the bed beside her. Prayer used to bring her comfort, but there had been a return on her prayers before. It was foolish of her to ever think o
f the gods as anything resembling her friends, but when Nadya was at her lowest they had always been there, her one constant.

  She pressed her thumb over Marzenya’s bead, flexing her corrupted hand. What if this was the root of all her problems? What if Marzenya could take this away and things could go back to the way they were supposed to be?

  A naive and foolish thought. There was no going back. And what if the answer was killing Malachiasz? Serefin? Destroying two strangely vibrant boys whom she found fascinating because they were so very very different from everything she had ever known? As much as she hated in her core the horrors that Tranavia had wrought, it didn’t feel right.

  She wished she had a Codex. She needed something to ground herself with. Kostya wasn’t enough, not with Malachiasz here. Not when all Kostya wanted to do was speak of tragedy.

  He would come for her that night and all she would do was disappoint him. She couldn’t run. She had to fix herself first, find her way again. The temple, the mountains, they were the only thing that felt like maybe maybe they would put her back where she belonged. Not the girl from the monastery but a cleric of Kalyazin—of the gods—who knew what she believed and was capable of. Someone who could shift this godsforsaken never-ending war for the better.

  It hadn’t worked before. But maybe she could have a second chance.

  Kostya slipped into the room, appearing puzzled that she was merely sitting on the bed. She held a finger to her lips, glancing at Parijahan, before slipping her prayer beads over her head and getting up. She pulled him into the main room.

  “What are you doing? Let’s go.” There was a threat in his tone that frightened her.

  “You’ve not been listening,” she said. “I’m not going, Kostya.”

  His whole demeanor darkened. “Who are you?”

  She stared at him sadly. She just wanted him to see what she was trying to accomplish, even with the compromises she had been forced to make, and she was afraid he would never look past her dealings with Tranavians.