“When his court finally turns on you, do you think you’ll have the protection of the king?” Żywia asked.
Nadya needed to get out.
Żywia smiled sweetly. “You’ve outstayed your purpose, dear, that’s all. You did what was required of you and brought our Black Vulture back where he belongs. It’s time to take your leave. Consider this me being altruistic.”
The air between them had chilled, and malice threaded through the Vulture’s voice. Nadya thumbed the bottom of her dinner knife. Żywia’s gaze dropped to Nadya’s hand and her smile widened.
“By my guess you have only days before the slavhki move to have you imprisoned at best, hanged at worst. I’d run, towy dżimyka.”
“Don’t call me that,” Nadya snapped, before she shoved her chair back from the table and stalked out of the room.
She yanked the lace from her eyes as she walked, wishing she could tear off the finery as well. Tear it all away and be somewhere else, anywhere else, home. But she didn’t know where home was anymore. She didn’t have the monastery to go back to. And there were no gods to guide her actions.
“It’s not fair,” she muttered. She reached into her pocket and removed her prayer beads, returned to her after months of reaching for them.
They had been resting on the side table by Malachiasz’s bed. Next to his iron mask and a thin book that Nadya had taken but not thought of since. Of course he had her prayer beads the whole time, it made it all the easier to convince her that he could be trusted—that the heretical way she had used magic was necessary.
She settled them around her neck, rubbing her hand over the beads, and continued to her newest hiding spot. Nadya had discovered a few of Tranavia’s secrets in her boredom while in Grazyk. Far past the eastern wing, where the floors became less polished and servants stopped appearing with regularity, there was an old door. Its aged, dusty wood was carved all the way down with symbols Nadya could not decipher.
She shoved the door open, overly aware of how the empty hall hollowed out, and her with it. She shivered. The room was dark and she killed the instinct to reach for her prayer beads for a light spell. She had a candle in her pocket from some midnight wanderings Serefin need never know about so she lit that.
Nadya stood in an old, forgotten chapel. She spun slowly, taking in the lines of painted icons on the walls, saints and symbols of gods she knew very well.
And a few she didn’t know at all.
She moved past pews covered in dust so thick it was like upholstery. The front of the chapel held an ornate altar, carved with more symbols Nadya didn’t recognize.
Nadya had spent a lot of time in this abandoned chapel and still had nothing to show for it, but that never stopped her. She would keep praying. She would try until she heard her goddess once more.
She wove her prayer beads around her hand, thumb working up and down the smooth wood, feeling the rough edges of the carved icons. I don’t know what comes next, she prayed, like she had a thousand times before. She kept her thumb over the icon of a skull. Marzenya’s icon.
Her goddess of ice and winter and magic.
And death. Always death.
Nadya had been chosen to be an instrument of those above all others.
And Nadya had ignored her goddess’s calls for death every time Marzenya ordered her to kill Malachiasz. She had strayed from her path and was bound to a monster. And the silence of her gods had followed.
It was the emptiness that scared her the most. The feeling that something which had always been warm and there was just gone.
What I did was wrong. I took the easy path when I should have struggled. I should have … Nadya faltered. She should have ended Malachiasz’s life. But even now, she wanted to bring the Tranavian boy back, not kill the monster. Heresy.
I know what I should have done. The mistakes I have made are unforgivable. Please don’t let this be the end.
She didn’t expect an answer. Yet the silence pricked at her heart. It wasn’t a door closing like before, this was a prayer sent out into the empty air where there was no one to hear it.
Marzenya wasn’t listening.
She pulled her prayer beads back over her head, wiping at her eyes. What she wanted was something vast enough to swallow her so she could no longer think, no longer feel, no longer spend her time circling around how not only had she failed, that this was it, this was the end. The magic she had known was gone. She was just a peasant girl who had killed a king and would hang for it.
What she did feel was anger.
“I have spent months,” she whispered harshly, “reading and praying that there might be something I can do. I’ve found nothing. I need your help! I don’t understand how I can be Kalyazin’s hope in one breath and thrown away like nothing the next.”
She had oblique references to a single cleric in history who had petitioned the gods for magic, physically, but that was impossible. And in the back of Nadya’s brain, constantly present, were the dreams she had of monsters that were more than just monsters.
She wanted answers and she might never get any.
There was nothing for her here.
There was—
She stopped. Head lifting. The air in the room had grown thick with his power.
None of those words were for you. She threw it out like a blade, in Tranavian. Her struggle was not one to be shared. Especially not with him.
A roiling, churning madness circled her like a predator, making her breath come too fast and her heart beat so rapidly in her chest she thought it might burst.
The candle flickered where it rested on the pew beside Nadya. The madness shifted. Perched on a pew, watching her intently, but when she turned her head there was nothing there. Only flickers in the corner of her eye.
She didn’t want this. It was too soon—it had been an eternity—she could not stand to have him so close. She could feel the monster’s mutating incoherence.
What she wanted was to feel horror, anger, disgust, anything, anything that would push him far away.
But Nadya was curious, more than anything else.
Can you speak? Maybe he was nothing but his madness.
There was an assembly of fragments before a glimmering spark of clarity.
“Tak,” he replied.
A single word—one quiet yes—but his voice was a shard of ice.
“You are always there, little bird,” he continued slowly. “Fluttering outside of everything, but you cannot be caught. I try to cast you out yet you remain, irritating, useless, constantly, constantly fluttering.”
His voice was low and soft and so very Malachiasz, yet threaded with chaos as it slipped quietly through the back of her head.
Of course when she was at her lowest he would be here to remind her of how else she had failed. How she hadn’t seen his plan even as he laid it out in front of her—had told her he was not to be trusted.
The cut on her palm itched and her heart squeezed painfully. None of this should be happening.
That flickering in his eyes as he had fled the chapel, the draining dregs of his last shreds of humanity. He didn’t know her. She didn’t know him.
Four months was a long time to live with oblivion. It had been a long time to live with the shadows of everything she had not seen and could not stop. It was a long time to live with silence.
Nadya sighed. And what solace would catching me bring? Do you enjoy so much your complete and utter solitude?