Ruthless Gods Read online

  It was troubling how much more coherent the witch was than the last time Nadya had seen her. She didn’t know where Pelageya’s power came from; this force of wind and nature and strange magic. She didn’t know if it was a magic she could access herself. She had used power outside her gods’ will, but when she reached for it now, there was nothing there.

  “Things are waking up. Old things, dark things. The old ones who have slept for so very very long. You set it into motion. You and that Vulture.”

  Nadya opened her mouth to argue, but Pelageya clapped her hands in front of her face.

  “Your intentions do not matter. You and the boy—though something tells me he was not involved so willingly—freed Velyos from his prison. Velyos has found a new mortal to claim. He will wake those who were allied with him in his long fight against your pantheon’s leader.”

  Nadya frowned. Her pantheon didn’t have a leader. They didn’t have a single god above all others. It was more varied than that, wider than that. And what did she mean about Velyos claiming someone? Who?

  Pelageya cocked her head. “The little cleric does not know? Yes, a cleric, don’t shake your head at me, you may be an odd one—you may bathe in blood and be touched by darkness—but you cannot hide from your fate by denying your reality so easily. Sit, child, we have a lot to talk about.”

  Nadya sat tentatively.

  “Tea? I didn’t offer those boys tea. What a strange, brutal pair they are. They wanted information or magic and nothing more. So rude. Their mother clearly never taught them any manners.”

  Mother? She didn’t know what to do with that, so she tucked it away.

  Pelageya busied herself with a samovar. “Your Tranavians. The Vulture and the princeling, oh, king, I suppose. The boy cast from shadow and the boy cast from gold.”

  “You’ve seen him?” she whispered.

  Pelageya looked up.

  “Nevermind. Don’t answer. I don’t—”

  “You care, little Kalyazi, and that is your weakness. It could be your strength, in another time, another life. But here? In this world of monsters and war? You care too much.”

  Nadya chewed on her lower lip, trying to will the threatening tears away. She took the warm mug of tea Pelageya handed to her, and sipped it slowly.

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” she said.

  “You have little time, you see,” Pelageya said. “So little time before the heavens are ripped asunder and all that fire and damnation comes raining down. Do you think it will only flood Tranavia? Do you think your precious Kalyazin will be spared?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Nadya said wearily. She drew her legs up onto the chair.

  “Broken so easily by divine mischief.” Pelageya clucked her tongue at Nadya. “What a shame, what a shame. I had such hope for you, child. Salvation or destruction, capable of either, but giving up will dash all chances.”

  Nadya’s grip on her mug tightened. She wouldn’t sit here and be mocked.

  Pelageya took Nadya’s hand as she passed her chair. Nadya protested, trying to pull her hand away as Pelageya flipped it over.

  “You as well,” she said, “but yours is different.”

  “I stole his magic,” Nadya said.

  “Clever girl. I’m sure the Vulture didn’t like that.”

  Nadya shrugged.

  “An impossible thing. But I should have expected impossible things from you, all things considered.”

  What was that supposed to mean? “Maybe expect fewer of those now.”

  Pelageya’s finger traced the blackened scar on Nadya’s palm. She squirmed. “Untapped power that has festered, or something darker that has been waiting to surface?”

  Nadya jerked her hand away.

  “You didn’t get the hellfire you were promised. Now what?”

  “I didn’t want hellfire…”

  “Oh, lies. You tell yourself that your opinions were swayed because of a few pretty Tranavians, but I know the truth of your vicious soul.”

  Nadya shifted uncomfortably.

  “I know the truth of the darkness you harbor.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nadya snapped. Her words meant nothing. The woman was mad.

  “That will only get worse,” Pelageya said, motioning to her hand. “That, and the silence. Don’t give me that look, girl, you think I don’t know?”

  “Did you bring me here for a reason? Or did you just wish to taunt me?”

  Pelageya laughed. “Such a sharp tongue! If you want answers there is one place you can go. You’ll have to watch that hand, though.”

  “Where?”

  “You’re a smart girl, I’m sure you’ve heard of Bolagvoy.”

  The name sounded familiar but she couldn’t place it.

  “In the Valikhor Mountains?”

  Nadya scoffed. That she knew.

  “Such distrust! You forget we come from the same place. I know my codicies and verses. I know my saints. I know my stories about Valikhor.”

  Nadya groaned. “I can’t petition for forgiveness.” The seat of the gods was an old legend, and as much as Nadya thought it might have some truth to it, she would never survive the journey. It had come up often during her solitary studies in Grazyk, and she had eventually decided not to pin her hopes on myths.

  Pelageya tugged on a black curl. “Can’t you?”

  “Only the divine are able to reach the mountain. Bolagvoy is locked.”

  “Well, shame you don’t know anyone who has tasted divinity.”

  Her heart sped. “You can’t be serious. He can’t be saved.”

  “Saved? No. Returned? Mmm, well, also no. But do you possess the key to tearing through the armor of madness he has constructed around himself? Possibly.”

  “And what good would any of it do?” Nadya cried, standing up, sloshing the scalding tea against her hand. “I killed the damn king but I couldn’t stop the war. I can’t stop whatever Malachiasz is doing. I can’t do anything. I have nothing. What do you want from me?”

  Pelageya laughed, an odd pealing sound. “It’s not about what I want, child. What do you want? You who have lived at the whim of others your whole life. Is freedom truly so debilitating?”

  Yes. “I want…” Nadya licked her dry lips. She wanted to hear Marzenya’s voice. She wanted to see Malachiasz’s smile and hear him laugh at his bad jokes. She wanted, so dearly, to do the gods’ will. She wanted too much.

  She scrubbed the heels of her palms against her eyes. Pelageya was spinning a web around her.

  “I don’t know,” she whispered. She had become unmoored and couldn’t find her way back. “Would it work? Going to the mountains?” She hated how hopeful she sounded.

  Pelageya shrugged. “It could, it could not.”

  Enigmatic nonanswers weren’t going to get her anywhere.

  “The forest takes. Sacrifice, always sacrifice, and is it a sacrifice you are willing to give? It burns, it changes, it eats. It’s hungry, old things are so hungry. And the hunger, the gnawing, it will destroy and devour and eat you alive.”

  Nadya closed her eyes.

  “It will ravage the divine like it will ravage humanity.”

  “So even if I can get him to help me…”

  “It will shred his mind and twist his body even more. Annihilation for a being such as him. Is that worth it, do you think? Is his destruction worth your salvation? What a choice. Can you love someone and ask them to shatter themselves for you?”

  “I have to,” Nadya whispered.

  Pelageya smiled. “Would a boy from Tranavia know the stories? Would he know that the forest always hungers? That it would gaze upon him, divine and mad and broken, and want?”

  She would have to lie to him. Like he had lied to her.

  “Would a boy too much in love with his own country know of Nastasya Usoyeva and her golden heart and silver tongue, who suffered the trials of the forest and looked upon the faces of the gods?” Pelageya went on. “Who was
granted the speech of the gods by petition and will alone?”

  “No one can survive gazing upon the gods,” Nadya said wearily.

  “You have.”

  Nadya stilled. She hadn’t. She had seen visions of monsters. Horrors, nightmares, nothing more.

  “The taste of divinity is a sweet poison, but poison all the same. It infects, it leeches, it destroys, it … well, it consumes. Like the forest will consume. Like that hand of yours will consume.”

  Nadya curled her fingers closed. None of this made any sense.

  “Why are you helping me? Why now?” She hadn’t heard from the witch since before they killed the king.

  “Because something has changed,” Pelageya said. She tossed an item to Nadya.

  Nadya only barely caught it. A voryen, sheathed in black leather, with a pale, white handle. She tugged it out of the sheath. The blade was the same shade of ivory. Her breath caught. The voryen was carved of bone.

  Her palm ached. She frowned, feeling a strange pulse in the bone dagger as she curled her fingers around it.

  “That’ll eat you alive if you let it,” Pelageya said, nodding to Nadya’s hand.

  “What is it?”

  “What do you think? Power. Monsters have always slept at the edges of your world. Your Vulture created the veil cutting off your gods from the world, what do you think he’s done with his power now?”

  Nadya’s vision tunneled. “What?” she whispered.

  Pelageya’s head perked up. “Ah, our time runs out. Good luck, koshto dyzenbeek, koshto belsminik.”

  When Nadya blinked, she was sitting in front of a dead fire, the sun broaching the horizon, with the bone dagger in her lap.

  “Well, hells,” she swore.

  7

  SEREFIN MELESKI

  The waters sing. Omunitsa howls.

  —Codex of the Divine, 188:20

  “I’m concerned.”

  “You and literally everyone else.” Serefin looked up from where he sat. They had traded in their horses for what would be the first of many boats—all the better to evade assassins, he supposed—and his legs were kicked over the edge as they ferried across one of Tranavia’s hundreds of lakes. Kacper stood beside him, distress sketched in the hard lines of his body. As if ready to bolt. The others were below deck; it was early yet, the morning light still gray on the water and full of shadows. Only the boat’s captain and his skeleton crew were nearby.

  Kacper sighed and sat down next to Serefin, almost leaning into him against the cold. Serefin offered him his flask, surprised when Kacper accepted it. That wasn’t a good sign.

  “What if this was all a ploy to get you out of Grazyk? What if it has nothing to do with Żaneta? What if—”

  “Kacper.”

  “Your mother is made of steel but her nerves aren’t. And, what if—”

  “Kacper.”

  “You’re going to be defeatist again, I just know it,” Kacper whined.

  “I’m not. All your concerns are valid.”

  “Then why are we here?”

  Because Serefin was seeing things that weren’t there, and maybe if he was away from all that magic, it would stop. Because Serefin was losing his mind and had no better option before him than to flee and hope he could fetch Żaneta and fix things.

  “I’m … breaking,” he said, very quietly. “And maybe it’s nothing, but I think something happened to me when I died.”

  “Besides all the moths chewing through your clothes,” Kacper said, his voice strained.

  “Besides that.”

  “And your eye.”

  “The eye is definitely part of the problem.”

  And even as Serefin spoke, everything morphed around him.

  “Something is stirring. Something hungry.”

  It was worse this time. His whole body went rigid as it struck—a vision that was not a vision because it was more, real and right in front of him. He was not on this boat, not even in Tranavia. He was somewhere else, someplace that did not want him there and would destroy him if it got the chance. Blood dripped down the bark of trees so massive he could not see around them. The sudden snap of twigs was ominous, so full of a promise of oncoming terror that Serefin’s heart slammed into his throat.

  This place wanted something; his death, his life, he didn’t know.

  Something slunk through the trees, close to the ground, and Serefin saw only the flash of teeth dripping with blood, too many for the creature’s mouth to contain.

  “The closer you draw to me, the easier it will become. You cannot fight it, boy, you can only submit or be taken.”

  The vision winked out, and Serefin was left, breathing hard, on the deck of the boat. Kacper had dragged him away from the edge, his fingers gripping Serefin’s jacket so tightly he thought the fabric might tear.

  “You boys all right?” the ship’s captain called.

  “We’re fine,” Kacper called, something Serefin couldn’t quite place in his voice. It was fear.

  “Serefin,” Kacper murmured. He raked cool fingers back into Serefin’s hair, his palm resting against the side of Serefin’s face. “You nearly threw yourself off the side. What was that?”

  Serefin resisted the urge to lean into Kacper’s hand as he pulled away and scrambled to his feet. There was no use in Kacper worrying; there was nothing he could do to help.

  “That,” he said, voice brittle, “is why I had to leave.”

  But he was shaken by the notion that the opposite was true. What if the farther away he got from his home, the stronger this voice became?

  * * *

  “You have a plan, right?” Nadya asked, her frustration evident as she sidled up next to him.

  Serefin was at the railing of yet another boat—he had lost track after the scare he had given Kacper, largely thanks to the waking nightmare that was his life—massaging his bad eye after seeing someone impaled on the antlers of a monster he couldn’t identify. The visions had been slowly superimposing themselves over his sight more and more, until they grew unnervingly constant. He had come to dread being awake because he never knew when the visions might strike, but he dreaded sleep even more.

  “Plans are all I have,” he replied. “Whether this one will work remains to be seen.”

  She tugged the sleeves of her jacket down over her hands. It was a Tranavian military jacket, and much too big for her. Serefin had the faintest idea where she’d gotten it—only one branch of the military had silver epaulets and they technically never saw battle—but it wasn’t for him to ask.

  Nadya blinked up at the snow falling around them. She held her palm out, watching as the flakes melted against her skin.

  An eerie sound pitched up from the water followed by a thud against the side of the boat, a hit so hard that it tilted precariously to one side.

  Serefin and Nadya exchanged a wide-eyed glance. They leaned over the railing, ignoring Hanna, the boat’s captain, yelling at them to get away from the edge.

  The weather changed in a blink, the benign suddenly growing fierce. The water became choppy; the boat rocked so much that Serefin worried he was going to be thrown over.

  A strong hand gripped his shoulder and he was yanked away.

  “Get back, boy,” Hanna said sharply. “You fall in and they’ll pull you under and then there’s no saving you.”

  “They?” Nadya asked.

  “Rusałki,” the woman said. “They’re angry today.”

  The boat rocked, buckets of icy water sloshing onto the deck. Hanna swore. Serefin reached for his spell book, but Nadya grabbed his hand, shaking her head.

  “Wrong approach, I think,” she said.

  Kacper leaned over the railing as another vicious strike sounded. Hanna quickly hauled him away and ordered him below decks with a glare.

  Amidst the dark churning water, a flash of pale skin broke through.

  “Are we in danger?” Serefin asked.

  Hanna looked uncertain. “If there’s enough of them down there
and they want what’s on this ship bad enough, yes, but that shouldn’t be an issue. They usually leave us well enough alone.”

  Serefin couldn’t fathom what they could possibly want on the ship. Nadya’s face was deathly pale. She winced, rubbing the scar on the palm of her hand before reaching for the necklace around her neck.

  A hand slammed against the side of the boat, right above the water. The skin was sickly translucent, and long, blackened claws curled over the fingertips. The claws dug into the hull of the boat, splintering the wood. A piercing, single musical note rang out over the water, turning into a hauntingly strange melody.

  Serefin tentatively looked over the railing. A girl’s face appeared under the surface. Her eyes were pitch-black and a touch too large to be natural, just enough that something registered as wrong, but they were the most beautiful eyes Serefin had ever seen.

  Her head broke the surface and her face changed utterly. Stringy, black hair plastered to her forehead, her mouth split too far back into her cheeks, and when she smiled Serefin saw rows upon rows of tiny, sharp teeth.

  She lunged. He was wrenched back, her teeth snapping inches from his face.

  “Stupid boy,” Nadya muttered, shoving him away.

  Claws dug into the wood again as the rusałka began to climb her way up the side. Dozens of pale, gangly arms followed, latching on to all sides of the boat. They were surrounded.

  “I’ve been on the waters my whole life and I’ve never seen them act like this,” Hanna yelled, struggling to keep the boat steady.

  Serefin was back at the railing and he didn’t know how he’d ended up there. Claws swept inches from his skin. Dimly, he knew he would be pulled under and drowned, but he was unconcerned.

  “No!” Nadya yanked him away again, flinging out her bad hand at the rusałki.

  The rusałki froze.

  They turned, slowly, in one movement, and stared hard at Nadya. Her face was pale, mouth open. She met Serefin’s gaze, panic in her eyes.

  What kind of magic did this girl have?

  NADEZHDA LAPTEVA

  The scar hurt, darkness stabbing at its center. Her heart thudded against her chest. This should not be happening. Something was wrong.