“This has always been me. You don’t know the depths of what I have done. This? This is nothing. This is a drop of water in the ocean of my sins. I would let you all die if it meant turning back what has happened—what you did—and finally achieving peace.”
That wasn’t true, it couldn’t be true. She knew how much he cared.
“You’re lying,” she said.
He shook his head in disgust, turning away.
“You can’t act like none of us care about you. Serefin’s been carting you across the country trying his damnedest to keep you alive.”
“Don’t you dare—”
“Parijahan and Rashid remained in Grazyk after you abandoned them, hoping you would return. They could have gone home! Survived this whole mess! Instead they went to the Salt Mines. We went. For you. You can justify this however you want, but don’t you dare say it’s because none of us love you.”
He stilled. She took a step closer, cupping his face in her hands.
“Malachiasz, come back to me,” she whispered. “You don’t want us all to die for the sake of reversing something that cannot be reversed. If we stop Chyrnog, we can find a way to fix my mistake, together.”
Everything was quiet. Terrifying and unnatural, broken only by the sound of Malachiasz’s strained breath. His eyes were closed, long eyelashes dusting the tops of his pale cheeks. She couldn’t tell how much of him was left. Much less than he was telling her, she gathered. Because for all of Malachiasz’s thousands of faults, she knew he cared.
His hand reached up, fingers twining between hers. He gently kissed her corrupted palm.
“Your hands are warm,” he murmured against her skin. He pressed her palm to his cheek.
“Your face is freezing.”
He smiled slightly. Something loosened in her chest. This felt like him. She could bring him down again, keep him close a few hours more. She rubbed her thumb against his cheek. Gently, she took his hand, starting for the door, and was jerked back.
He pulled her farther into the darkness of the house, dropping her hand. “Death, then, I guess,” he said, his voice cold. He moved away from her and turned, leaving the house.
That was it? After everything, it ended here?
It should have ended on the mountain. It did end on the mountain.
She closed her eyes, straining to hear anyone nearby, but there was only the uncomfortable silence.
“Fine,” she muttered, trudging out. “Fine.” She would find his damn soul herself. And if he didn’t want it, she would at least keep it away from Chyrnog. “Could have stayed in Kalyazin and met someone nice, someone who goes to Liturgy and doesn’t try to kill you every other day but nooo, Nadya, no, it had to be Malachiasz Czechowicz, Tranavia’s greatest idiot. Gods, I hate him.” She kicked at a rock, sending it flying and hitting a tree near Serefin’s head.
“Tranavia’s greatest idiot has been my title for twenty years, actually, and I won’t be ceding it to Malachiasz,” he said. “I take it you found him.”
“Don’t talk to me.”
“So it went badly.”
“Serefin.” Nadya wavered on her feet, and in a mortifying rush, burst into tears.
“Ah, damn,” Serefin said. He crossed the space between them, leaning down so he was level with her, and took her face in his hands. “He’s possessed, Nadya. Whatever he said—”
“He’s going to let us die because he thinks he can use whatever Chyrnog gives him to fix everything,” she said, sobbing. The dam had broken, and everything she had been shoving aside was going to swallow her. “He wants me to help him and I’m terrified, Serefin, because I want to. I’ve ruined so much, and I’m going to make everything worse.”
He pulled her against him, which was wildly unexpected but so very needed.
“Are we friends like this?” she mumbled against his chest.
“Yes, Nadya, we are, and I’m going to say this as gently as I can … we really do not have time for you to have a meltdown.”
A loud scuffle could be heard in the trees, and Serefin quickly kissed the top of her head and let go, taking off. Nadya shuddered, wiping at her eyes before she followed.
Parijahan leaned against an impressively long stick, Malachiasz unconscious at her feet.
“Please, tell me you hit him,” Serefin said, delighted. “Please tell me you just stopped an elder god by hitting him with a stick.”
Parijahan looked up. She lifted a hand, spreading her fingers. “Well, the stick helped.”
43
SEREFIN MELESKI
There’s no way to stop this. The gods never cared for us, not truly, and I feel as if all I can do is watch as Innokentiy and Sofka descend further into madness looking for a solution that doesn’t exist. We’ve been left to our fate. Our gods are not stronger than the ones who have awoken.
—Passage from the personal journals of Milyena Shishova
They chained Malachiasz up. Serefin wasn’t sure that would hold him, but it was what they had. Nadya returned with Serefin to the village where they dealt with what little was left in silence. Serefin pretended not to notice the tears tracking down Nadya’s cheeks.
They returned to the stronghold to find Malachiasz awake and struggling. Katya eyed him dispassionately. She held out a hand when Parijahan tried to go calm him down.
“You cannot stop the inevitable,” Malachiasz said, a dark void in his voice. “It’s already begun. I’m going to kill every last one of you.”
Nadya took in a sharp breath. He noticed her, and his demeanor changed completely. Eyes, still murky but sharper, widening, his shoulders dropping. He struggled against the chains, but it was less about escaping and more about getting close to Nadya.
“Nadya? Nadezhda, towy dżimyka, my love, please, this isn’t the way to stop him.”
Serefin put a hand on her arm. She glanced at him before her gaze returned to Malachiasz.
“Cover his mouth,” she said.
For a split second, Serefin worried that this was another twisting of another knife. He eyed Nadya, trying to gauge what was happening, who he was supposed to be helping.
“Nadya?” Malachiasz’s voice was small and bleak.
Her eyes flickered closed. She waved a hand to Katya.
“N-Nadya, please, I’m not—this isn’t—Nadya, this is me.”
“Then you know why I’m doing this, Malachiasz,” she replied. Her eyes narrowed slightly, and she reared back, staring. “Gag him.”
“Nadya!”
Katya did so, with a little too much enthusiasm.
“We need to leave,” Nadya said.
They got Malachiasz on a horse, which did not appreciate having the Vulture dumped on his back. Malachiasz had simmered down from wide-eyed panic to a kind of cold fury that, frankly, Serefin found terrifying. Nadya seemed unconcerned.
“I need to know how you’re so confident about this,” Serefin said to her.
They left in a hurry. Malachiasz snapping was the sign that they were out of time. This had to end, and fast.
“When Malachiasz is himself, hearing his own name makes him twitch,” she said.
Serefin frowned. “What?”
“You’ve never noticed?”
He couldn’t say he had. “You might be a bit more observant of my brother’s finer quirks than I.”
“He heard his name without so much as blinking.”
Serefin couldn’t help but sigh. “I don’t understand.”
“He and Chyrnog are the same,” Nadya said softly, her words chilling Serefin to his core.
He glanced over his shoulder to where Malachiasz was along for the ride, Parijahan nearby and anxiously trying to calm his chaos.
Malachiasz stared at the back of Nadya’s head with murderous intent. For a bizarrely chivalrous heartbeat, Serefin wanted to protect Nadya, but quickly realized that if—or, perhaps, when—those two went after each other, he would want to be far away.
“How do we move forward?”
; “Go to this graveyard. Find his soul. Hope it’s enough to get him back so we can bind Chyrnog.”
He cast her a sidelong glance. “You don’t think it will be.”
She was quiet for a long time, clearly struggling. “I think that’s up to him.”
Serefin winced. They both knew what that meant. “If we survive this … he’s never going to be better, is he?”
“That’s up to him as well. I doubt it. But if we survive—gods, Serefin, what a horrifyingly big if—and he has us still … Maybe. I don’t know. I mean, he’ll always be an ass.”
Serefin laughed softly.
“But,” she continued, “I think it would be naive of us to act like he’s helping for any other reason than self-preservation.”
* * *
The handful of days spent in the safe house had been protecting them from more than Serefin had realized. The air outside felt … bad. He didn’t know how else to describe it. The horses they rode were consistently on edge, which made for a deeply unpleasant journey.
Nadya existed in a state of constantly looking like she was about to throw up. If anyone asked her if she was all right, she would wave them off. She had taken a headscarf from Anna and tied it around her hair, a band covering her forehead, temple rings swinging at the sides of her face.
The first day was rough. Snow fell the entire time and the roads were almost impossible to cross. At one point their only option was crossing a frozen river or tracking west to a bridge that would take them dangerously near Komyazalov. Nadya had simply dismounted, taken her horse’s reins, and begun the tense trek across the ice.
“I hate that girl, sometimes,” Kacper muttered, dismounting. “I hate Kalyazin. I hate all this snow.”
Serefin laughed. He dismounted, grabbed Kacper, and kissed him.
“What was that for?”
“We’re going to a divine graveyard where we will probably die and you’re complaining about the snow.”
“Yes, well, that all sounds impossible. I can’t complain about the impossible.”
“Think of the stories you can tell your siblings back home.”
Something flickered over Kacper’s face. “I don’t know if they would want to listen.”
Serefin frowned but Kacper grinned.
“If we die here, at least I’ll never need to have the wildly uncomfortable conversation that would be telling my family I got involved with the king!” he continued cheerfully.
Ah.
Sometimes it was easier to think of the small, inconsequential battles they could be fighting, instead of the ones they were about to face.
“I’ll take off my signet ring when I meet them, then I’m just Serefin,” he said.
Kacper laughed and shot him a sad smile. “I wish that was all that was needed.”
It was only a few more days of travel but moving through the snow was a struggle until the path cleared from the east. It was bewildering to see the tamped down snow, until Serefin realized what it meant.
“The army. We found our Tranavians,” he said, feeling profoundly miserable.
“What are they doing, Serefin?” Katya asked, her voice level and low.
“It’s Ruminski,” Serefin replied. “He’s not a strategist. This is … suicide.” He scanned the fields. They were moving toward Komyazalov. Blood and bone. Judging from the size of the cleared area, this wasn’t an army large enough to engage in a successful attack on Komyazalov.
Ruminski was desperate. Ruminski was a fool.
Ruminski, Serefin considered, had no blood magic. So, what else was he supposed to do?
Anything but this.
“What do we do?” Anna asked.
Serefin didn’t think they could do anything. They had a more important battle to win. “We keep going.”
44
MALACHIASZ CZECHOWICZ
We cannot kill him. We cannot send him back from whence he came. The gods have abandoned us to this horror that they unleashed.
—Fragment from the personal journals of Lev Milekhin
There was an awakened one nearby. It was a song he couldn’t resist. The taste of copper flooded his mouth as he worked at his chains, pulling on Chyrnog’s power. His hand burned, the chains falling away. He rolled his shoulders, glancing down. He was missing the tip of the little finger on his left hand. He stared, some far away, distressed piece of him going silent.
He had to go. He was hungry.
No one in the camp seemed to notice. Ostyia was on watch but facing the other direction. Something made him pause, hesitate, claws sliding out, teeth sharpening in his mouth.
No. He wasn’t going to hurt them, not if he didn’t have to.
He slipped into the night, veering east. He didn’t know how far he’d gone when he was ripped from the sky and went crashing to the ground. He was on his feet in an instant, whirling and pulling the threads that made his order listen because how dare she—
Something hit him hard in the head and he went down.
“Oh, that does work,” Żaneta said. “Where are you going, Malachiasz?”
Shit. He lay in the snow, feeling it bleed into his skin, the cold, the ice, as all those distant emotions slammed him at once.
His hand hurt a lot.
He hadn’t even realized Chyrnog was controlling him. The god had grown insidiously quiet, his threads wrapped so tight around Malachiasz that soon they’d choke him completely. There would be nothing left of him to fight.
He swore softly, choking back tears, sitting up and holding his head in his hands. He lifted one hand when Żaneta hefted the branch. “Don’t, please, blood and bone, you have an arm on you.”
Żaneta lifted an eyebrow. “Surprised because I’m only a slavhka? A mistake?”
Malachiasz winced. “You know what, have another go, I deserve it.”
Żaneta snorted softly. “You sure do.” She sat down in front of him.
They were in an empty field. Where had she even gotten that branch? There was nothing around except blinding white snow.
“Where were you going?” she asked again.
“I’m so hungry,” he whispered.
He sat there, letting it abide, just a little, when it returned full force, threatening to swallow him whole. He hunched over, covering his head as the pain tried to flay him to pieces.
“Stop fighting,” Chyrnog hissed. “Do what you’re meant to. You’re not strong enough to fight me, haven’t you learned? How many times do I have to teach you this lesson?” Something shifted, a reconsidering, and suddenly Żaneta looked very different to him in the dim light.
Alarm crossed her face. “Malachiasz?”
Malachiasz.
Taszni nem Malachiasz Czechowicz.
He let out a long, shuddering breath. No one with magic was safe around him. He was too far gone. Chyrnog was too close. His stomach churned, chaos starting to tear through his body.
Żaneta reared back. “Oh,” she whispered.
He knew what she was seeing. The shifts, the changes. Eyes and teeth and limbs and horror.
Malachiasz thought of Parijahan’s magic. The numbers.
It wasn’t enough, but it was something. He grasped the spell and molded it into a mantra. He struggled to his feet. He didn’t speak, afraid he would break the spell. Chyrnog battered against him, turmoil and rage and darkness darkness darkness and it was so much and his heart raced with fear.
Chyrnog had never been denied before.
Chyrnog was going to destroy him for his disobedience.
There was so little of Malachiasz left.
They walked. If Malachiasz did anything more, he was going to shatter. The awakened one passed into the distance, a faint memory. A poor soul who would be hunted by Kalyazin’s Church for something they had not asked for and likely had not wanted.
How much of the world would change because of the way magic had fractured?
A part of him was thrilled there would be so much to learn. So many avenues of magic that he had
never known before, ready to be discovered. How did Nadya’s power work? That vast ocean of dark water was as terrifying as it was thrilling. The taste she had given him was not enough.
And Parijahan? The numbers were new. He’d used calculations in spells before but unrelated to the actual application of his magic. For her that was all it was, and it resided entirely in her head. No outward manifestation. It was fascinating.
Chyrnog raged within him. He kept his mind trained solely on contemplations of magic, a distraction. He didn’t know how long he had before—
It came as a sudden grip. He choked, blood filling his mouth. It felt like his rib cage was being wrenched open, something clawing up his throat. He tripped, landing hard and jarring his bones, immediately throwing up blood. Żaneta’s hand touched his shoulder. He tried to shy away but his body was no longer listening.
No no no. He had to keep it together. He was so close and had fought for so long.
“You’re much too weak for that,” Chyrnog said. “With each day that passes you become more like me. There’s no getting free. I have you completely and there will be no more fighting. All will be quiet. Don’t you want peace?”
Malachiasz spat out another stream of blood. Żaneta made a soft, disgusted sound, which was rather silly, Malachiasz considered, because she was a damn Vulture, because of him, because all he did was corrupt and destroy and make good things terrible. Chyrnog was right, there wasn’t much left of Malachiasz that wasn’t entropy and destruction and darkness, but there had never been much of him that wasn’t that to begin with. He had been created for chaos. He had been made of pain, for pain, by pain. He couldn’t fight it because there was nothing to fight. It was his true nature and always had been. All that was left was to allow the inevitable.
Malachiasz collapsed, and everything shuttered dark around him.
45
NADEZHDA LAPTEVA
The god of war is known to deal with his clerics with a soft hand. A hand that turns hard against Kalyazin’s enemies.
—Codex of the Divine 38:76
Blessed Monsters Page 38
