“Żaneta and Katya killed Nyrokosha. She’s warmed up to the Vulture.”
“Where are we?”
“Somewhere on the outskirts of Komyazalov. Katya has been trying to talk to her father, but it hasn’t been going particularly well. It sounds like the tsar refuses to talk while your status is up in the air like it is, but … if we can get Żaneta home and Ruminski off the throne, there’s a chance, I think.”
Serefin couldn’t be hearing this. “What?” He turned his head, looking Kacper more fully in the face. “What?”
Kacper only nodded. “It might be over soon? I can’t hope. I know what those talks will be like and we have to deal with Tranavia first, but we might be nearly there.”
“Come here, please.”
Kacper climbed into the bed next to him. With some effort, Serefin turned, pressing his forehead against Kacper’s.
“You’re saying ridiculous things,” he murmured.
“I know.”
“I think I died in a field outside Komyazalov.”
“No one really knows what happened. You and the others have been unconscious for weeks.”
Serefin’s hand found Kacper’s. He felt strangely empty inside and it was terrifying. What had changed?
Where was Velyos?
If he called, there was no reedy voice to answer. What … what had they done?
Kacper leaned closer, kissing him gently. “Let’s go home, Serefin.”
* * *
The manor they were staying in was, Katya assured them, just out of the way enough that no one was going to come looking for them. Serefin was trying to plot his return to Grazyk and trying his very hardest not to panic.
Ostyia sat down next to him at a table in a dusty, underused study. She leaned her head against his shoulder.
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you,” he said. It wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have.
“I know.”
They both knew what needed to be addressed. They knew each other too well to continue dancing around it.
“You can stay here, with her, if that’s what you want.”
She took in a sharp breath. It wasn’t what she was expecting.
He glanced at her and she was staring at the mess of papers and maps in front of him, her blue eye glassy. “You’ve been by my side for so long. I can’t hold you there forever.”
“The thought of a country between me and you and Kacper is unbearable,” she said softly. “But, blood and bone, I like her so much.”
“Have you talked to her? About staying?”
Ostyia sighed. “She’s Katya, which means she told me to stay and to go in the same breath.”
Serefin nodded thoughtfully. “What if you stay? It doesn’t have to be forever.”
“You need help. You’re going to go depose Ruminski quite dramatically and I cannot miss the look on his face when it happens.”
Serefin laughed. Ostyia groaned, rubbing her hands over her face.
“This is the worst. What are Nadya and Malachiasz going to do?”
“Well, assuming they ever wake up, that’s a conversation they’re going to have, too. I don’t really know what they’ll decide.”
Ostyia frowned.
“I don’t want to push you to return with me, but what if you do until we get this peace treaty into something that’s real, and then you can come and go as you please?”
She considered that. “It doesn’t feel like we could possibly ever get to that point.”
“Well, I’m going to try.”
* * *
“He’s being stubborn.”
Katya poured them both overfull cups of wine and slid one to Serefin.
“My father is inclined to believe the claims Ruminski is making about your competency.”
“We kept his entire country from falling down around his ears.”
“Tranavia also brought an army here,” Katya pointed out. “And we haven’t even discovered how much damage Chyrnog did to the countryside yet. It’s not good, Serefin.”
He couldn’t really deny it. He sighed, pressing at his forehead. His head hurt.
“It’s not hopeless,” Katya said softly. “It’s just going to take time.”
“Time that will waste more lives at the front,” Serefin replied.
He appreciated that she was trying, he did. But he wanted to do something. He wanted to go home, frankly. Maybe that was the next step.
“I need some kind of assurance that if I go home and deal with Ruminski, your father won’t immediately forget that he ever entertained the idea of a peace treaty,” Serefin said.
“The entire country almost fell and we’re risking invasion from the north any day,” Katya said. “I’ve been trying to pull troops back from the front to head north for months and no one listens to me.”
Serefin frowned.
“The Aecii Empire hasn’t had a century of war to hold it back,” Katya said. “They’ve been eyeing us for years.” She went quiet for a long moment. “My father isn’t well, Serefin. He hasn’t been for a long time. I don’t know how much longer he has left. If we can come to an agreement soon, then I want that dearly, but if we need to wait until public opinion settles and I have the throne…”
“I cannot let the front continue as it is,” Serefin said.
She nodded. “Understood. So, we press on. There’s also the matter of your brother.”
“Leave him.”
“Serefin.”
“Katya, we would all be dead if not for him.”
“Thousands are dead because of him.”
“A moral quandary we’re going to have to accept. Tranavia is unstable. I need the security of knowing the Vultures are under control and I will not have that if he doesn’t return with me.”
“You and I, we get along, but if he ever makes another move like he has in the past year, I will send all the finest assassins in Kalyazin to take him down.”
“And ruin the blossoming friendship between our countries?” Serefin very much doubted Kalyazi assassins would so much as faze Malachiasz.
“Don’t fool yourself, Serefin. We’re in for long hard years of being hated for compromising.”
That they were.
“I’m willing to risk the tension to rid the world of someone like him if necessary,” Katya continued.
“I need some kind of assurance from you that your gods aren’t going to burn down Tranavia.”
“You don’t have blood magic anymore.”
Serefin didn’t respond to that. Malachiasz would put his mind to it the moment they were home. Maybe it would never come back, but Malachiasz would certainly try.
“That wasn’t an assurance.”
“Talk to Nadezhda about that. We’re about to deal with an upheaval in the Church, so I believe we’ll be too busy for our heretical neighbors.”
That would have to do. He didn’t know how much further this conversation could go, what with his authority not being recognized by Kalyazin and Katya having no true authority. They were in the same spot they had been in when they met in that Kalyazi village.
But there was hope. Sure, it would be a mess wrenching his throne back from Ruminski. Żaneta had agreed to go against her father in whatever capacity was necessary, and the man would not go down without a fight.
He would go down, though. Serefin was done running. Serefin had a country to rule.
57
NADEZHDA LAPTEVA
There will be peace, one day, I have to believe that, because I have nothing else left.
—Fragment from the personal journals of Milyena Shishova
The silence was profound.
Nadya wasn’t sure what it was they had done. Bound Chyrnog, perhaps, but the rest of the gods had gone silent with him. Nadya had woken up and promptly burst into tears. Anna had been at her bedside and crawled in next to her, tucking her head against Nadya’s shoulder.
“What did we do?” Nadya whispered.
Anna was quiet for a lo
ng time. “It was hard to watch. You all were shifting and changing and being … unraveled. The sun was gone, and then a horrible quiet, perfect stillness.”
“How am I alive, then?”
Anna took Nadya’s hand, lifting it up. Nadya jerked, not quite able to comprehend what she was seeing. The tips of two fingers on her left hand were gone, the littlest and the ring finger.
“Oh,” she whispered, not quite able to wrap her head around the missing pieces. Maybe the gods had helped after all.
Something in her chest shifted.
“Where’s Malachiasz?” she asked.
Anna didn’t immediately respond and panic gripped Nadya. He must have made it. If she did—and she was in the heart of the storm—he had to be all right.
“Come with me,” Anna finally said softly.
Dread filled Nadya. She got up slowly, her entire body aching, the silence in her head enough to give her a headache.
Nadya frowned. “I can’t, uh, look—”
“No. Only the hand. The rest was quite a lot, though.”
Nadya smiled. “Think of what Father Alexei would say.” She began rummaging in the trunk at the foot of the bed for something to wear.
Anna’s expression faltered and then she said, “I think he’d be proud of you.”
Nadya froze. She stared into the piles of fabric and had to swallow back her tears. She tugged a black dress, red embroidery at the cuffs, out of the trunk and pulled it on. She debated whether to braid her hair but left it down. She was no longer that girl.
Anna took her through a hallway. They appeared to be in a large house. Simple in style, though. Anna squeezed Nadya’s hand before knocking lightly on a door and shouldering it open.
Nadya didn’t know what she was expecting, but it was the worst. Malachiasz dead or someplace where she could not reach him. Gone from her forever. A monster. Eldritch chaos god that he was, all he was.
She didn’t expect Malachiasz alive and awake, arguing with Serefin while Parijahan listened wearily in the corner. He was leaning on crutches—why was he—?
Oh.
His left leg was gone just under the knee. Chyrnog taking his final dues. He glanced over Serefin’s shoulder, catching sight of her, his face breaking into the most exhausted but happy smile she had ever seen from him. It took everything in her not to slam into him.
His hair was clean and loose around his shoulders, parted on the side and threaded with beads, and there was a new ease to him. With a shiver, a cluster of eyes opened at his jaw. She crossed the room and maybe she did throw her arms around him a little too hard because he let out a soft oof and wobbled.
She clutched at him, burying her face in his chest. She was going to cry, and she didn’t want to keep crying but he was alive and he was whole and he was here.
“Nadezhda,” he murmured, his face in her hair. There was some awkwardness as they navigated the crutches, but she didn’t care.
She pulled back to take his face between her hands, trace the corners of his smile. “You survived,” she whispered.
“Mostly.”
“Me too!” She held up her hand.
He took it, rearranging the crutches underneath his arms, skimming his fingers over the aborted knuckles.
“We almost match,” she said, pressing her fingertips to his and lining up where his little finger cut off suddenly.
He let out a breathless, incredulous laugh.
“What happened?” Nadya asked.
“He thought consuming you would strengthen him; the opposite was true. Serefin made the prison—”
“I helped!” Serefin said cheerfully.
Malachiasz rolled his eyes, fondly. The rift between the brothers would take time to heal, but perhaps the healing had started.
“It nearly failed. But…” he trailed off, pain flickering on his face. “He molded himself to me, thus his power was mine to use.”
She tugged Malachiasz down and kissed him. Awkward and gentle and messy because he couldn’t stop smiling through the kiss and she couldn’t, either.
She stepped back and Malachiasz readjusted his crutches.
“Comfortable?” Serefin asked.
He nodded, taking a tentative step. It was ungainly, nothing like his usual grace, but he didn’t appear particularly bothered. She sensed that was a dam that would break eventually.
“We’ll figure out a more permanent false limb when we get back to Tranavia,” Serefin said.
Malachiasz shot him a grateful smile.
* * *
After rallying the armies, and with the Kalyazi king ill, Katya and a general in the Tranavian army had carefully arranged an armistice. It wasn’t peace, but it was something.
It was harder than she expected, living, after everything. It all felt strangely empty, and she wondered if it was her or if it was this strange silence.
She only told Malachiasz, much later. He took the news with a carefully neutral expression. “Is it like what happened before?” he asked. “When they stopped talking to you?”
They were in the manor’s small library. Malachiasz idly flipping through a book at a table, Nadya sitting on top of it next to him. Parijahan and Serefin had been talking about how they would get back to Tranavia—if they could find and convince Pelageya to let them use her strange magic to return—and Nadya, realizing she was about to lose them all, had panicked.
She hadn’t considered that Parijahan and Rashid would go back with the Tranavians. That was silly, of course they would. The moment Malachiasz was awake he had set to figuring out how it was the Akolans’ magic worked. Rashid was willing but wary; Parijahan couldn’t make up her mind.
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m not a cleric anymore.”
He cast her a sidelong glance. “You’re more than that.”
She knew, but the title had meant something to her. What was she without it? And did it mean there would never be more clerics? No clerics, no blood magic? She didn’t know. There was no one to go to anymore. She had to live with the not knowing.
He squeezed her hand. There was quiet between them, and she liked the quiet, but she couldn’t shake the fact that things were starting to move, and she didn’t know where that left her.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
He looked up, closing the book. “Well, if I don’t leave Kalyazin soon, Katya is going to push to have me hanged.”
“For your crimes.”
“For my crimes, yes.”
“And you’ll go back to Tranavia and retake your throne, execute the ones who wronged you, and spend the rest of your life on the cusp of godhood and trying to crack open the mysteries of the universe?”
“Dramatic. I would like to take a nap as well.” He peered closely at her. “You’re doing that thing where you don’t tell me what you’re actually trying to say. I can’t read your mind.”
“You can, actually.”
“It might be a bit rude of me to make it a habit.”
She smiled. He relaxed enough to make her aware of how tense he was.
“I guess I’m wondering what I should do now.”
“What do you want, Nadezhda?”
Had anyone ever asked her that before and meant it? Had she ever been allowed to want anything in her life? She was the cleric, she was a girl from a monastery, she was made to do the Church’s will, she was made to enact the will of the gods.
What did she want?
“I want to go home,” she whispered. She didn’t know what that meant. Her home was nothing but ashes.
He made a soft sound. “Kalyazin, then?” Two words and a ravine of a question.
Nadya reached out, sliding her fingers across Malachiasz’s cheek until she gently cupped his face, tilting it toward hers. “It’s you,” she said. She kissed the tattoos on his forehead. “You’re my home.”
In truth, it was him and Parijahan and Rashid and, gods, even Serefin and Kacper and Ostyia. It was Katya, though Katya would remain here.
; Katya had pulled her aside and explained very seriously that as much as she wanted Nadya at court—as much as Kalyazin needed Nadya at court—she could not promise that the Matriarch wouldn’t try for another pyre.
“I could desperately use you near,” Katya had said with a rueful shrug. “But I can’t put you in danger while Madgalena is still in charge. But I sense she won’t be for long. Time to root out the poison.”
And now, sitting in the library with Malachiasz, Nadya realized that was all right.
Malachiasz flushed at her words. He dropped his gaze down at the closed book. One of his hands nervously rubbed at the stump of his leg—while he’d told her it didn’t hurt too badly, it still felt like his leg was there sometimes, and it was jarring to suddenly realize it was gone. The echoes of what the god had done to him scarred deeper than could be seen. It would take a long time for him to heal—if he ever did.
“I want,” Nadya continued into his silence, “to figure out what my magic means—if it’s really so different or if there are similar accounts that we haven’t found yet.”
He perked up. She smiled slightly.
“I want to help Serefin draft a peace treaty, even if it takes years. I want … a lot, but I mostly want everything to be quiet, for a while. I want you.”
There was something vulnerable in his expression that she didn’t expect. “Would you go back to Tranavia with me?”
She tucked a lock of hair behind his ear. “I think so.”
“I’m still the Black Vulture.”
“I know.”
“I was lying about leaving the Vultures.”
She laughed. “I know. Would you? If I asked it of you?”
He only hesitated for a heartbeat. “If you asked, yes.”
Warmth flooded through her chest and it took everything in her not to yank his face closer so she could kiss him. She let her thumb brush over his cheek, skirting past an eye that blinked—there and gone—on his skin. “A shame, then, that I love each and every wretched part of you: Black Vulture, chaos god, and all. I won’t ask it of you.”
“All my parts are terrible, that’s true. It would also be impossible, so I’m glad you’re not asking it of me.”
Blessed Monsters Page 45
