Parijahan whistled low. “There you have it.” She picked up the jacket, frowning at it before she handed it to Nadya.
She waited until Parijahan turned away before she pulled the jacket on over her dress and tucked her face against the collar. It smelled like him still, iron and earth and boy in a way that was comforting and painful, and the pang in her chest was a vicious stab.
It was hard to parse her feelings about Malachiasz’s betrayal. With time she had hoped she might untangle her mess of emotions. She knew how she was supposed to feel and how everyone expected her to feel. But she couldn’t figure out if any of those things were true of her.
Yes, she was furious and hurt, but she also caught herself waiting for him to burst into her rooms, a whirlwind of dark hair and bad jokes and painfully brilliant smiles. She missed him.
But that wasn’t who he was anymore. Idealistic, but powerful and cruel, his body twisted and his mind shattered.
Nadya desperately wanted to stop thinking about him altogether. He had lied to her for months, making himself out to be an anxious boy who had made a mistake and needed help fixing it. Instead he had used her to gain a power so terrible it had driven out the last of his humanity.
The silly, condescending Tranavian boy with the sly smile, who chewed on his fingernails when he was nervous, was gone. Maybe forever. And she was so deeply sad that it had swallowed the heat of her anger. He didn’t deserve her sadness, but that didn’t make a difference to her heart.
“Did he plan this from the beginning, do you think?” Nadya spoke up quietly.
Parijahan looked up from where she was riffling through a stack of paintings. “Are you finally ready to talk about this?”
Nadya shrugged.
“I spent months with him and he never seemed remotely interested in finding you,” Parijahan said. “I had to convince him to come with us when we started following rumors about a cleric. In the end, something forced him to flee to Kalyazin, and later return here. He never said what.”
“Well, he’s a liar.”
“He is very good at lying,” Parijahan agreed. “If only because he’s actually telling the truth while he does it.”
The door to his study rested like a black stain in the wall. What did she hope to find here? The thing that set him on his reckless quest to destroy her gods? Something else?
She paged through the books mindlessly. They were eclectic piles: history, novels, magic theory. But she didn’t understand blood magic enough to comprehend the latter. She was wasting her time.
Parijahan opened the door to his study. She coughed as she stepped inside the room. Nadya didn’t immediately follow, though something tugged her toward the doorway. She heard Parijahan shift around papers on his desk, and she shivered, a chill suddenly pulling down her spine.
Magic.
Something she had not touched in quite some time.
“What do you have?” she called. Her stomach churned. There was something familiar and terrible yanking at her, a call that sent a deep wave of dread crashing over her.
“Some of his spells, I think,” Parijahan said, unaware of Nadya’s sudden anxiety.
Nadya flinched as she stepped into the study. The palm of her left hand ached, a dull pain steadily and sluggishly working its way up her arm. Sweat broke out on her temples. She was too hot and too cold and she could feel—she could feel—
She snatched the papers out of Parijahan’s hand, crumpling them in her tight grip. She was breathing hard and couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very wrong. There was something moving, something hungry that wanted with such a deep and powerful ache it was going to swallow everything if it wasn’t stopped.
“Nadya?”
She slammed a hand down onto the desk. “No,” she said flatly. “This isn’t how magic works.”
She spread the spells out in front of her. Her heart tripped at the sight of Malachiasz’s messy, borderline incomprehensible scrawl. She shouldn’t be able to feel his power, shouldn’t be able to feel him. Not now, not after so much time had passed.
She could read Tranavian, but the words blurred. Frantic, she riffled through more of the pages, digging out hastily scrawled notes and diagrams underneath the spells. Endless markings Nadya did not understand.
“I shouldn’t be here,” she whispered as horror continued to curl around her core. She lifted a page that had clearly been dipped in blood, the bottom stiff and dark. The top she could read, and she wished she couldn’t.
Notes on Kalyazi magic, on divine magic, on her magic. Notes on how her magic and blood magic might intersect, how they shouldn’t but could, how there is something else changing very slowly and it might be new or it might be a melding of both.
Serefin had mentioned, once, finding Tranavian spell books with Kalyazi prayers scrawled inside on the battlefield. It was an impossible combination. Why was Malachiasz studying it?
She froze; the something else on the other end of that thread of connection had grown nearly tangible. A gaze from far away turning on her where previously there had been none. It was a power so much greater than her own, infinitely dark. Magic that did not belong to her hummed underneath her veins with a painful tug toward the one who truly owned it.
She never should have stolen his power.
But surely he had known what she intended when she’d dragged that blade across his palm? It had been his idea once—a sly musing she would be stronger if she used his blood. Abhorrent, horrible, and yet, she had done exactly what he wanted in the end. Just another twisting of truth to push her to unwittingly aid his incomprehensible plans.
Nadya had fallen too far, sacrificing everything she believed for a chance to change the world, and she was punished with silence.
She gasped, burning hand curled against her heart. The sludgy power had altered. A tether, a line rapidly pulled taut.
I should not have come here.
The monster. Malachiasz. She backed away from the power that suddenly was too strong, too much, too evil.
Nadya took a few ragged breaths—the muddled sound of Parijahan calling her name glancing off her ears—and let her awareness press out, cautiously brushing her fingertips against the pane of black glass that separated Malachiasz from her, yet bound them together.
This is my fault. She had created something when she stole his power and bound it to hers. Of course it lingered, of course there were consequences. Gods, she could feel him. He was crumbling, eroding like a cliff face being rocked by an ocean’s waves.
Then—as clear as if it were happening right in front of her—she heard the sound of an iron claw scraping against glass. A painful, caustic screech that drove needles into Nadya’s ears. Down, down, down. A hand slammed against the glass, slender fingers tipped with dripping iron claws.
Nadya broke away.
She stumbled back from the desk. Nadya willed her last meal not to return. This couldn’t be happening. How was this happening?
A few agonizing seconds passed without a rekindling of the twisted connection. The brush against the roiling chaos of his madness.
But it had felt like Malachiasz. The monster was still Malachiasz.
Would it be hope, then, that killed her in the end?
Nadya looked up at Parijahan, who stared at her in horror.
“Well,” Nadya rasped, “I guess he’s not dead.”