“I could always test them,” Malachiasz said.
“No!” Anna’s outburst made Nadya jump.
Malachiasz lifted an eyebrow. His pale eyes slid back to Nadya. A chill ran through her.
He knows it’s me.
It was a deeply uncomfortable thought.
Malachiasz pushed off the table, drawing a wicked looking curved knife from a sheath at the small of his back. He flipped it between his fingers as he walked over to where the girls stood.
Bloodletting to test for magic was a heretical act in itself, made worse by the fact a heretic blood mage would be doing the deed.
Malachiasz’s pale gaze locked on Nadya.
Fine. If he tries to kill me for my power, I’ll just have to kill him first.
He took her hand, fingers curling around her wrist. The heat of his touch made Nadya’s skin crawl. She saw the flash of silver as the blade lifted, felt the shift of fire to ice as the metal touched the top of her index finger.
“No,” she whispered. She tensed, pulling back, but his grip was firm, locked around her like a shackle.
Without breaking eye contact, she drew her voryen, using his hand around her wrist as leverage to yank him closer, snapping the dagger to his throat. He tensed, head forced back to keep her blade from cutting flesh. A slow smile tugged at his mouth.
“You already know it’s me,” she said, voice low. “Don’t think I’ll be complicit in your heresy.”
“Suspicion and confirmation are two different things. And heresy is such an ugly word.”
Nadya glanced at Anna. It looked as though the other girl had stopped breathing. Anna shook her head, alarmed.
“Well, I want proof,” Rashid said.
Malachiasz’s hand was still clenched over Nadya’s wrist and there was a thin trickle of blood trailing down his pale neck, damage from her less than steady nerves. He moved his other hand up, his movement cautious, and wiped the blood from his skin with his thumb.
“Complicit in heresy, indeed,” he murmured.
Nadya pulled her dagger back.
“The moons going out wasn’t enough for you?” Malachiasz asked Rashid, dropping Nadya’s wrist and sheathing his knife. She darted back to Anna’s side. “I am a bit curious about the long-term ramifications of a spell like that. What havoc will be wrought on the tides from canceling out the moons for that long?”
“We’re thousands of miles away from any oceans, Malachiasz,” Parijahan said wearily.
“It’s something to think about.”
“He’s Tranavian. They always have water on the brain,” Rashid said. “Their country is practically under water as it is.”
“A few lakes—” Malachiasz said.
“And swamps.”
“So many ponds!” Parijahan said.
“Bordered by an ocean on the north and the east,” Rashid continued. “Why do you really think your war has never moved into Tranavia? No one in Kalyazin can swim. Can you swim?” he asked Nadya.
She shook her head.
“When you put it that way, buried alive under snow does seem like an altogether more satisfying way to die,” Malachiasz mused.
“I can think of a hundred better ways for you to die,” Anna muttered.
He smiled, pressing a hand to his heart. “Surely all one hundred are deserved.”
Parijahan said, quite solemnly, “Tides are controlled by gravity. My people figured that out centuries ago.”
Malachiasz made an indignant sound and looked at Rashid, who nodded seriously.
Nadya wondered if their idle chatter meant her magic had been forgotten, but she found she wasn’t so lucky as Rashid pointed to her. “Magic.”
“What will you do with the proof?”
“Marvel at how a country who lost their mages and have been hanging on to a war against mages by the skin of their teeth may finally have a chance again.”
She glanced at Malachiasz, wondering what his reaction might be, but his face was impassive. “What will he do?”
“Oh, he’ll probably want to kill you for your power. Isn’t that how all your clerics died out in the first place?”
Malachiasz grinned.
Nadya shuddered. That had definitely had a hand in it.
“But,” Rashid continued, “he will not do that. Because he is not in the Kalyazi mage killing business.”
“I could be,” Malachiasz mused.
Parijahan rolled her eyes but a shock of terror ran through Nadya at his quiet contemplation of her death. The Akolans weren’t taking him seriously and she couldn’t understand it.
Nadya ran her hand down her necklace, fingers catching against the beads as she considered what spell she could use, until she reached Krsnik’s bead. Perhaps simple was the way to handle this. She had already done flashy.
Little help?
Krsnik, an old and grouchy god, grumbled something that was apparently an assent because Nadya was given the spell a heartbeat later. She blew smoky, glimmering symbols onto her palm and her hand lit into flames.
Parijahan exchanged a delighted glance with Rashid. Nadya moved over to the table and trailed a burning fingertip over what was clearly a discarded spell book page. She picked up the paper and it burst into flames. When only ashes were left in her hand, she tilted them into the blood mage’s palm. She brought her gaze up to meet his and was unsure of what she saw in his eyes.
Tension, curiosity, but underneath it all was something darker. Something that made a shiver jolt down her spine. It made her wonder why a heretic had been placed before her path. To kill him? What other reason could there possibly be?
A smile flashed on his lips, as if he could read her thoughts the way the gods did.
“So, what is the difference between you and our blood mage friend here?” Rashid asked. “Forgive a handsome young foreigner his ignorant questions.”
The blood mage in question flopped down on the pillows beside Rashid, opening his spell book in his lap. Nadya never saw him cut himself, but the back of his hand was bleeding. He used a quill to scratch the blood onto the pages of his book.
“I think your mage is making the differences fairly blatant,” she said. “Blood. Spell books. Heresy. That’s Tranavian magic.”
Malachiasz smiled without looking up from his work.
He smiles too much, she thought.
“My power is divine. I am not. There’s no blood. No spell books.”
“Just the requirement of constant approval from the gods,” Malachiasz said. “No pressure. One misstep and it’s all over.”
“Is it so hard to live by the will of the gods? They ask for so little. You give them no credit.”
He shook his head. “So little?” he asked incredulously. “They ask for far too much. Why do you think Tranavia broke with the gods? Who yearns for life yoked to another being’s whim? We wished to choose our own destiny.”
Nadya rolled her eyes. “And is your destiny worth the torture and mutilation of a century of innocents to reach the means for your magic? Hundreds upon thousands of people.”
His expression flickered but he recovered so quickly Nadya questioned if it happened at all.
“Sacrifices were made willingly. No one is forced into tests.”
“Except prisoners of war,” Nadya shot back.
He leaned forward. “Even prisoners of war are made to understand the greater good they’re serving in the end.”