interlude i
THE BLACK VULTURE
The hunger would not relent. The gnawing at the edges of his being was too much to bear yet never enough. He could only hunger, need, until finally he was released unto perfect oblivion and felt nothing. No hunger, no unceasing, unending emptiness pulling at the core of him, the ever-present threat of fully shattering.
The darkness was a comfort. Torches were few and far between here and easily avoided. It was a welcome escape to remain far from the glimpses of light that reminded him of the missing. Of the thing that flickered outside his consciousness, just far enough away that he couldn’t grasp it. The relentlessly fluttering wings of a little bird that refused to be choked by darkness.
It was an irritant sweet enough to drive his madness a little further, a little deeper. But ignorance was sweeter. He never moved beyond that initial grasp.
There were glimmers that didn’t belong to him, didn’t belong to anyone, frustrating in their displacement. A girl with hair like snow, fiercely glaring, pale freckles dusting her skin. A girl arguing, rooted and stubborn and passionate. Beautiful, brilliant, torturously absent. He had no idea who she was and that made everything all the more frustrating.
Eternal and instantaneous, time became extraneous. The glimmers—the distractions—faded. Only the hunger, always the hunger, remained. Only the feeling of being taken apart and put back together and ripped to pieces once more.
(Being unmade was, apparently, an ongoing process.)
There was a vague needling that something needed to be done. But nothing was something was everything and couldn’t it wait? Everything could wait. Until the darkness was less choking. The hunger less cloying. Until his thoughts were strung in a row on a line, instead of incoherent, scattered bits that jumped and fluttered and—
Fluttered.
Wings.
Again.
There.
The little bird.
He reached and missed. His hand slammed into something cold and he pulled his claws down it, slowly, carefully. The sound was calming, clear.
His hands were bleeding. His hands were always bleeding.
There was something there. The wings fluttered away again, too fast, too sharp, too soon, too real.
There was
something
else.
A memory, broken,
scattered,
fleeting.
Gone.
3
SEREFIN MELESKI
Svoyatova Elżbieta Pientka: a Tranavian who burned in the cleric Evdokiya Solodnikova’s place. Where her body was buried, the dead are said to speak with the living.
—Vasiliev’s Book of Saints
Serefin was halfway up the tower stairs to visit the witch before he realized what he was doing. He paused, hand gripping the rail, and wondered if he shouldn’t be going alone. But it was too late to turn back. Pelageya knew he was there the moment the door to her tower opened.
He took the steps two at a time. Serefin wasn’t wholly pleased he was forced to turn to the witch, but it was strangely inevitable. She had set him on this path, hadn’t she? Surely she would have some horribly esoteric advice that he wouldn’t understand and would be terrifying in its broad foretelling of future doom.
He reached the top of the tower and found the door ajar, swinging open under the light rap of his knuckles.
Well, that’s less than ideal, he thought with a frown. A cloud of moths blew into the air. He waved them away.
“Pelageya?” he called, pushing his way in.
Serefin’s stomach dropped. The room was gutted.
It was as though the witch had never been there at all. Cobwebs dusted every corner. The fireplace had remnants of ash but was mostly swept clean. A witch’s circle stood out in stark relief against the center of the floor. A sigh escaped him—it was only charcoal, not blood.
He moved around the circle, fingers tapping against the spine of his spell book.
This was not what he’d hoped for.
Kneeling down, he nicked the back of his finger on a razor in his sleeve and paged through his spell book. Pelageya wouldn’t leave this behind without reason, and while Serefin could not read the sigils scrawled within the circle—knowing sigils was Vulture business—he could charge the spell.
He hesitated. What he was doing was profoundly stupid. If Kacper or Ostyia were here, they would sooner put a blade to his throat than let him deal in uncertain magic.
Except, his voices of reason weren’t here. Swiftly he pressed his bloody palm down. His focus pared down to a single point underneath his hand. It caught fire from there, like the powder that lit magic cannons, and slowly filled out the circle, sketching in every sigil until the floor burned with a strange, acrid, green fire.
But that was all.
He straightened away from the spell, faintly disappointed, yet relieved all the same. Just a blank spell the witch left behind to toy with Serefin. He nudged the circle with the toe of his boot, carefully breaking the flow of power, hopeful the spell wouldn’t explode in his face. The flames went out.
“I made bets with myself, you know, on which of you would come to me first.”
Serefin nearly jumped out of his skin.
“The girl who is a cleric but not a cleric, a witch but not a witch.” Pelageya was sitting in the middle of the ruined circle, counting on her bony fingers. “The monster who sits on a throne of gilded bones and reaches for the heavens far past his understanding, or the princeling touched by a power he does not believe in.”
Serefin rested his hand against his spell book and waited for his heart to stop rattling his body. “Did you win?”
“Win what?” Pelageya asked, still counting.
“The bet.”
“No. Where’s the witch?”
“She’s not a witch, she’s a cleric.”
“Can’t be a cleric if the gods won’t talk to you,” Pelageya said, waving a hand. “Can’t be a witch with what she is, either. Tainted but holy. A puzzle. She’s a lot of things, including not here. Not what I expected. But you are. One half of my delightfully bloodthirsty and pathetically delusional blood mage pair.”
Serefin’s eyes narrowed as he took in the empty room. “What happened here?”
A blink. The room was no longer empty. The witch circle on the floor was now chalk instead of charcoal. The deer skulls hung from their antlers on the ceiling and Serefin found himself sitting in a black upholstered chair, moths fluttering nervously around his face, his head spinning.
“What happened where?” Pelageya asked, suddenly no older than Serefin. Her curls were tied back from her face, black but for a shockingly white lock that disappeared into the mass of hair knotted at the back of her head. “You want something,” she chirped, picking up a skull from a side table—human—before sitting in the chair across from Serefin, the skull perched in her lap, facing him.
“I should really be going,” Serefin said, moving to stand.
He remained trapped in his chair. A flicker of panic threaded through him.
“Oh,” Pelageya said, tapping her chin. “Oh, no. I have the one and the other will come eventually. Meleski and Czechowicz but closer than you know, closer than those who have lied have said. He’ll come, soon enough, and then—finally—I can deal with the witch who is a cleric who is not a witch and not a cleric.”