Nadya groaned. “Serefin didn’t mention that.”
“He said if he did you would do such a spectacular disappearing act that even I wouldn’t be able to find you. Clearly he was correct.”
“I’ll kill him,” Nadya muttered as she let Parijahan drag her back to the rooms they shared.
“You would have done that by now if you were going to,” Parijahan replied evenly.
The Akolan girl was wearing simple, loose trousers and a blouse in complementary shades of dark gold. Her black hair was tightly braided; the golden ring in her nose caught the light every time they passed a window. They had dropped the pretense of Parijahan acting as Nadya’s servant, though Parijahan continued to decline Serefin’s offers to have her own rooms and be treated as the noble she truly was. Too suspicious, she said, and Nadya had noticed there were a handful of slavhki that Parijahan always went out of her way to avoid.
Even with the king of Tranavia finally dead, Parijahan was more on edge than ever, her secrets held with a firm grip from Nadya.
Malachiasz’s betrayal was just as brutally unexpected to Parijahan, but questioning her about it got Nadya nothing but cryptic answers that meant little. Asking Rashid was worse. The Akolan boy was far too good at spinning his words, so he said absolutely nothing but took ten minutes to do so.
“Did Serefin tell you anything else?” Nadya asked.
Parijahan shook her head. “Is it me, or does he look like he hasn’t been sleeping?”
“Not just you.” There had been dark smudges underneath Serefin’s pale blue eyes and stubble dusting his pale jaw and cheeks. And he had reeked of alcohol. “Frankly, I don’t blame him.”
Nadya couldn’t say she had been sleeping well, either. The months since that night in the cathedral had been hard, and when she slept she saw things she didn’t particularly want to consider. But at least when she was asleep she didn’t have to confront the silence in her mind. She wasn’t used to being alone with her thoughts and found she hated it.
“Read anything interesting?” Parijahan asked. It was her standard inquiry after Nadya’s visits to the library.
Nadya always shrugged noncommittally. She didn’t even know what she was searching for. Mostly she was hiding. From herself, from Serefin, from Parijahan.
“There was a Tranavian saint named Maryna Cierzpieta whose head was cut off, but she picked it up and went on her way.”
Parijahan cast her a sidelong look. “I can’t tell if you’re making that up or not.”
Nadya pressed a hand over her heart. “This is my religion, Parj, would I lie?”
Parijahan snorted.
“I’m serious! She started a cult of personality and everything. It all died out about one hundred and thirty years before Tranavia broke from the gods.”
Parijahan made a contemplative noise as they reached their rooms. Nadya flopped onto a chaise in the sitting room.
“You’re not locking yourself in that library every day to read stories about saints you already know.”
Frustrated, Nadya’s fingers went to her prayer beads, the shock hitting her anew when she found her neck bare. It was a daily occurrence and she was still waiting for it to stop hurting. She gathered her hair back and began braiding it instead.
“How did he decide on the path he took?” she finally asked. “How did he get the idea that he should be the one to unseat the gods? He must have read it somewhere. Something started him down that road. I have to find it.”
Parijahan moved across the room, sitting next to Nadya. “Or, he’s simply an idealistic boy who found something to blame. You’re not going to find answers to that problem in old books.”
“I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do,” Nadya said softly.
Parijahan took her chin and angled her face toward hers. “Don’t you dare. He hurt you. You don’t get to fling yourself into trying to save him when he clearly did not want to be saved.”
“I know.” No one knew the gods did not speak to Nadya anymore. She was nothing but a Kalyazi peasant. Good for little, useful for less. She wasn’t trying to save him; she wanted to understand. It was her fatal flaw, her desire to understand. It was what he had used so willingly in the tapestry of lies he had woven around her.
“Besides…” Parijahan said, her voice shifting, calculating and sly, “if he got his grand ideas from a book, shouldn’t you be looking in the cathedral?”
Nadya shuddered. She had been avoiding that place for months. The thought of going back chilled her to her core … and yet …
Parijahan noticed her hesitation. “He’s not there,” she said. “You’re safe.”
An impossible position, the hating and the missing all at once.
“Are you scolding me, or encouraging me? It’s very unclear.”
Parijahan smiled ruefully. “Maybe a bit of both?”
“How long do we have until the dinner?”
Parijahan noted the sun’s position through the window with a shrug. “We have time.”
* * *
Nadya gazed up at the broken statues lining the entrance of the massive black cathedral, and wondered if she was more afraid now that she knew what lurked inside. If the terror settling in her limbs was because, this time, she was walking in unprotected.
Parijahan spared the crumbling face of the cathedral a passing glance, unfazed. Nadya had come to find that indifference a comforting aspect of the Akolan girl. Parijahan wrenched the huge wooden doors open.
It was deathly quiet. Nadya swallowed thickly. She didn’t want to remember the last time she was here, fingers tangled with Malachiasz’s, trusting him against all reason. And she certainly didn’t want to intrude on any Vultures in their home.
But it wasn’t their home once, she thought. She trailed a hand against the wall, wondering which god this church had belonged to when Tranavia still cared for such things. Panic began to claw at her chest from the silence in her head so she shoved the thoughts away, following after Parijahan, who was—unfortunately—intent on where she wanted to go.
“Oh, Parj, must we?”
“Where else?” Parijahan replied.
She had a point. There hadn’t been so much as a whisper as to what had happened to the Black Vulture. Though Nadya asked, the reality was she didn’t want to know.
To know would be to acknowledge the blackened scar on her palm each time it heated, a burning itch lasting for hours before it went away. To acknowledge the pull of her heart to something far away, as if linked to someone. She didn’t know what had happened the night she carved Velyos’ symbol into her palm, then Malachiasz’s. Something had happened when she had stolen his power to use with hers. When she had done the impossible.
It remained, still. The sludgy, inky darkness of Malachiasz’s magic slumbered somewhere deep within her.
Parijahan tried the door to Malachiasz’s chambers, a small smile flickering at the corners of her lips when she found it unlocked.
Nadya hesitated. Nothing had changed since she had been there last. Malachiasz’s patched-up military jacket hung off the back of the chair where he’d last tossed it. Paintings were stacked in every spare corner of the room and piles of books surrounded the bookshelves. Piles and piles of books.