Serefin shivered.
“My goddess is death,” Nadya continued. “No one walks into her realm and returns.”
Blood and stars and moths. And that voice, that voice.
Serefin shoved it away before it spoke to him.
“And what does she think?”
Nadya shrugged listlessly, gazing blankly out over the library. “She doesn’t talk to me anymore.”
This was not the conversation Serefin had come here to have. But the desolation in Nadya’s voice struck even him.
“What will Tranavia think of a king who was brought back from death?” he said, after a long stretch of silence.
She looked over, one eyebrow raised. He remembered the halo that had shivered around her head, fractured and tainted. She lifted a hand, one of the pale gray moths that constantly fluttered around Serefin landing on her index finger.
“Serefin Meleski,” she said contemplatively. “There has been a mark on you growing darker with each day. I thought…” She trailed off, waving her hand at the piles of books. “I don’t know what I thought … that I could help? That I might want to? It doesn’t matter.”
“Help me? Or help him?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she repeated, an edge to her voice.
“If suspicion grows, neither of us will walk away unscathed,” he said.
She nodded. It was already treacherous here for her. If his court turned on her, he could do nothing. Though, he still wasn’t entirely sure why he wanted to protect her at all.
“I shouldn’t want to help. You destroyed my home,” she said.
Serefin had avoided bringing this up, but had wondered when she would. He closed the book and set it on her stack. Serefin had never had any intention of torching the monastery, and he couldn’t speak for what Teodore had done once he’d left. He’d found what he was looking for there: her. And the pressure from his father to capture the cleric to see how her power might augment a blood mage’s was gone. Serefin didn’t particularly care to discover the answer to that question. He wanted to end a war, and it would be easier with this girl for leverage.
“I did. I would be lying if I said I haven’t been waiting for some kind of vengeance.”
“I would be lying if I said I didn’t want it.”
“Look at us, being honest with each other!”
She rolled her eyes. “Do you regret it?”
“It’s war,” he said. She gave him a pointed look, and he sighed. “Nadya, if I let myself regret everything I’ve done, I wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning.”
She made a thoughtful sound.
“Is this you deciding ‘well, revenge it is, then’?”
“Not worth my time. Serefin, having watched your court, I can safely say any chaos that might ensue from your death would hardly be enough to deter anything out at the front.”
“Ah, saved by my own deeply dysfunctional court.”
Nadya glared at him. “What does all this have to do with Żaneta?”
“Her father is going to stage a coup if I don’t bring her forward soon.”
“You think that he won’t do it regardless of your actions?”
“Ah, ruined by my own deeply dysfunctional court.”
She was right. He wasn’t going to stop what was spinning into motion. The mysticism growing around him was making everything worse. How could Tranavia be ruled by someone touched by something no one understood?
And that voice. It whispered to him constantly, but if he didn’t answer, it wasn’t real. If he told no one, it wasn’t real.
Or maybe he was simply his father’s son and losing his mind as well.
They sat in silence. He didn’t know what to do, and she couldn’t really help—if he was overthrown, she would be hanged.
“We can’t get her without a Vulture,” Nadya said. Then, softer, “Have you heard anything…?”
He shook his head, cutting her off. Every few weeks she would ask after Malachiasz and he would always give the same answer.
It was a lie. But she wouldn’t want to hear the things he had heard. The rumors of deaths and dark magic that could only be caused by his cousin.
“You’ll figure something out,” she said. “You have to.”
Novel, that the we had become just him fixing things. That was the thing: he had no choice. Nothing would change if he didn’t stop this in its tracks.
2
NADEZHDA LAPTEVA
A goddess of winter knows the taste of bitter cold and broken bones, of frozen ground choking out life. A goddess of death knows vengeance and the burning hatred that fuels the wars of men. Marzenya is benevolent—when she wishes—but cruelty sits easier upon her shoulders.
—Codex of the Divine, 399:30
There were a surprising number of Tranavian holy texts for the last—maybe the last?—hopefully not the last because she had failed so utterly—cleric of Kalyazin to read as she bided her time, captive in the heart of Tranavia.
Not captive, technically, Serefin would chide, you just shouldn’t leave.
The definition of a captive, then, she would reply, but she understood. Nadya was in constant danger the longer she remained in Grazyk, but staying in the palace kept her within Serefin’s fragile sphere of protection. Granted, protection he seemed puzzled at extending to her. She had no magic and wouldn’t survive the journey through Tranavia to make it home. The well of power she had touched had either dried up or had never been truly hers. And as much as she hated it, she lingered, hoping for the return of the sad, broken boy who had brought her here. She was frustrated with how much hope she felt every time she asked Serefin if he had news and how quickly it crumbled when he told her no.
Why should she hope for the boy who had betrayed her so completely? Her fury had tempered to a numb ache as months of silence passed. She had no more anger left in her to fight Serefin, much less Malachiasz’s ghost.
So she skulked around the palace and dragged what religious texts she could find up into the little corner alcove. None of them were particularly helpful. Her gods were her gods, as it was, and there was little a book written centuries ago by a Tranavian priest could inform her that she didn’t already know.
But there were occasional glimmers among the pages of what she was missing, hints at why she had failed so fully. Why the gods no longer spoke to her, and how a boy twisted into the form of a monster was able to tear himself into pieces and reassemble in the shape of something potentially divine.
At times the books she found spoke of old religious sects and saints Nadya did not know. How many clerics had been abandoned like Nadya? Her heart would be broken, she thought, if there was anything left of it to break.
After Serefin wandered off, clearly no closer to a decision than before, she left the library—abandoning the pile of obscure, ultimately forbidden texts stacked in the alcove. She hid the ladder in a random part of the room every day. As yet no one had disturbed her ever-growing stacks, but she was caught in a silent war with the old librarian who perpetually acted like someone using the library was the worst thing that could possibly happen to him.
“There you are!” Parijahan tugged Nadya away from the direction of the kitchens where she had been planning on smuggling out some bread and cheese, and toward her chambers. “There is a court dinner tonight and you must attend.”