“It would be a risk to leave Grazyk,” Ostyia said. “You have to figure out how to do this without leaving the city.”
Serefin frowned.
“What if I can’t?” he mused quietly.
“They take everything.”
* * *
Serefin couldn’t walk a step without tripping over a new low slavhka who had arrived from somewhere in Tranavia, hoping to find favor with the young king.
It was exceedingly tiring.
The dinner was supposed to be a quieter affair than most, yet even this was still too many people for Serefin’s liking. If only he were the sort who thrived on social interactions. Instead they made him desperate to escape.
The room was dimly lit with too many dripping candles spread across the table. Torches burned against the wall, casting the lower hall in a flickering, erratic light. The paintings on the ceiling struck Serefin as being vaguely familiar in a different way than usual, as if he had seen them once in a dream, this vast battle between bears and eagles.
The slavhka he found sitting to his left was none other than Patryk Ruminski. Serefin stifled a sigh as he was announced. This was going to be a long evening.
Nadya caught his attention from where she sat farther down, tense and taut before tracking to the nobles seated near him. She shot him a sympathetic look before turning to the person at her right. Masks had not fallen out of fashion, to Serefin’s dismay, and Nadya wore the bare minimum with a strip of white lace tied over her eyes.
Serefin recognized the languid way the girl beside the cleric held herself, the pile of black hair and dark blue eyes that kept the room sharply in her attention from behind the iron mask that hid all but a quarter of her face.
A Vulture. The second-in-command that hadn’t been seen anywhere in months. Serefin scanned the room. No other Vultures in sight.
Nadya lifted her hand slightly, beckoning Serefin over.
Slight Ksęszi Ruminski by speaking with a girl who should be far beneath his attention and a Vulture first? Or suffer not knowing what the Vulture was doing here the whole dinner?
Serefin decided to compromise. It was only diplomatic.
He murmured his greetings to Ruminski and the boy seated on his other side, whom he did not recognize at all, before moving to where Nadya was seated, highly aware it should be the other way around. Nadya should be coming to him. He was the king. This was breaking all sorts of protocol.
“I’m going to have to suffer the most awkward conversation after this,” Serefin said, resting a hand on the back of Nadya’s chair and leaning down.
“I thought speaking with those who wanted to depose you was a mundanity,” Nadya murmured.
“It is, but—” He cut himself off. It was no use talking about these kinds of things with her.
Nadya gestured to the Vulture, but Serefin spoke before she could.
“We’ve met,” he said shortly. “Give my regards to Jen Eczkanję.”
The Vulture snorted. “Something tells me he won’t want those. My name is Żywia, and you’re right, we have met.”
Serefin went cold. The Vultures didn’t just hand out their names. Nadya was eyeing Żywia with cautious curiosity.
“What’s this about?” he asked. He glanced longingly at Nadya’s wine glass. He needed a drink. “Did he send you?”
“It took some time, you see, to put everything in order. And I don’t know what mess has happened here in our absence.”
Serefin’s stomach clenched at our. But there was no way he was here. Nadya, who had been toying with her dinner knife earlier, now held it in the practiced grip of someone who could make the dull blade kill without difficulty. She appeared calmly dismissive, like it was every day she dealt with the upper echelons of Tranavia’s bloodiest cult.
Well, Serefin considered, I suppose she has.
“Who has decided they lead the Vultures?” Żywia asked. “Not that it matters, let them playact at leadership.”
Serefin had met with a handful of Vultures since being crowned. Each one had claimed to be ruling in the Black Vulture’s absence, and each one had disappeared, never to be seen again.
“Is that the only reason you’re here?”
She shook her head. “We’ll speak later, Your Majesty. I am but a messenger.”
Serefin nodded, straightening and preparing to return to his seat. He caught a glimpse of Nadya’s expression as he moved away.
Her grip on the knife had tightened.
4
NADEZHDA LAPTEVA
Svoyatova Lizavieta Zhilova: When the Tranavian blood mage Pyotr Syslo burned her village to the ground when she was a child, Lizavieta—granted vengeance by the goddess Marzenya—hunted him down and fed his eyes to the wolf that haunted her steps.
—Vasiliev’s Book of Saints
“Your story is threadbare,” the Vulture said casually as she reached for her glass of wine.
Nadya tensed. She picked up her fork to stab a mushroom scattered with dill and waited until she had finished chewing to answer. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Żywia cast her a wry, sidelong glance before tugging the mask off her face. Nadya heard a few scandalized gasps from down the table.
The Vulture was unexpectedly lovely. Her skin was smooth and her features fine; a series of careful circles were tattooed in a line down her chin, stretching down her throat. “Malachiasz doesn’t keep secrets from me, dear.”
“That makes one of us,” Nadya muttered.
“I was impressed you made it so far initially without the slavhki poking holes in your first tale. It was a good story, if a touch macabre.”
“Malachiasz came up with it,” Nadya said. If the Vulture knew she was Kalyazi, there was no point in lying further. Except that they were at a court dinner and there were dozens of ears listening in.
“That boy never fails to surprise me. But your new story, well … and paired with such convenient timing…”
Nadya’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not here to give me warnings.”
Żywia shrugged. “No. Give Tranavia warnings? Yes. But you? No.” She reached up, curling a lock of black hair around her index finger. “You should worry, though. I’ve only been back a day and the slavhki talk. They talk a great deal about the slavhka with a suspicious story who is close to the king, yet no one knows who, exactly, her family is.”
Nadya swallowed hard.
“I know what happened,” she continued.
Because Malachiasz doesn’t keep secrets from her, Nadya thought bitterly. But he lied about everything to me.
“And?”
“And the rumors the slavhki are spreading venture dangerously close to a certain shade of truth.”
The blood drained from Nadya’s face. The only reason she had lasted this long was because the truth was so uncanny that it had been swallowed up in a swirl of even more mundane rumors.
Panic started to press down at her rib cage. She cast a glance down the table at Serefin. He looked miserable, sitting next to the man trying to take his throne away.
Her story had not been made to last this long. There were obvious holes, clear gaps where things did not make sense because she was here on some forged paperwork and a story constructed out of desperation when they were all too devastated to think clearly.