His fingers twitched, just slightly, and whatever spell he had caught the soldier up in changed and the man crumpled to the ground, dead. He dropped the page and used the snow to wipe the blood off his hands.
It wasn’t the prince. Nadya wanted to be relieved—because maybe this meant she was safe—but she had felt the wave of power as the boy cast his magic. It was strong. Far stronger than the power she had felt from even the Tranavian prince during the attack.
“We could have gotten information out of him,” Parijahan pointed out, then simply moved away from Anna’s blade.
Anna shot Nadya a desperate look, but she just shrugged, equally bewildered. The only Tranavian she could now feel nearby was the mage, but he clearly knew the Akolans.
They needed to leave. This commotion was happening dangerously close to the monastery, to the prince. Nadya saw her chance when Rashid began picking through the soldiers’ belongings. But the Tranavian boy took a step closer and she froze, suddenly aware the situation had moved from benign to deadly in only a few short seconds.
The way he looked at her was too discerning, too focused. Even in the darkness, Nadya could see his eyes were such a pale shade of blue as to be nearly devoid of color. He was the second Tranavian with eyes like ice she had seen in as many days.
His gaze flicked to Anna, but then returned to her.
“Names?” he asked.
Parijahan shook her head.
“We very politely gave them our names, but I suppose Kalyazi don’t appreciate manners,” Rashid said.
A smile slid over the Tranavian’s face, slightly feral. His canine teeth were oddly sharp; everything about him was sharp in the most unnerving way. There were three vertical lines tattooed down his forehead in black ink, ending at the bridge of his straight nose.
“Wise of them.”
Nadya was beginning to see her mistake in not taking the opportunity to run. There were only three of them, and none of them could be much older than her, but there was something so off-putting about the Tranavian. She couldn’t put a name to it, but she knew—intrinsically—he would not hesitate to kill her if she made any indication of hostility.
Would he hand her right back to the prince? Or would he kill her here and take whatever power her blood might harbor for his own?
She might have failed to protect the monastery, but she would die before she let herself fall into the hands of a Tranavian.
He stepped closer. She froze, all cavalier thoughts of heroism escaping her. She didn’t know if she could actually fight off this boy if it came to it, and maybe waiting out the situation would get her to the other side alive. He took her string of prayer beads in one hand. A hiss of displeasure escaped her lips. No one touched her beads but her.
“You both came from the monastery, yes?” His Kalyazi was almost perfect but for the crackling Tranavian accent that hardened his words. Beating the consonants into submission.
The answer was too obvious to deny. She fought against the urge to step back because even the foot of space he was giving her was much too close. This boy was a heretic, he profaned the gods and cast blood magic. Around him the air snapped with wrongness.
“So which one of you is the one with magic?” His voice lowered.
“Kalyazi don’t have magic,” Anna said, a beat too quick.
The boy gave her a shrewd glance before returning to Nadya.
“It was you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, but her traitorous voice shook. Each moment they stood out in the open was another chance for the prince to come upon them. Maybe that was exactly what he wanted. Maybe he was just stalling.
He smiled, the expression dangerous and chilling and far too appraising. He reached down and took Nadya’s hand, pressing it to his lips as if he were a court nobleman and not a renegade blood mage out in the middle of enemy territory. “My name is Malachiasz Czechowicz,” he said, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that she had just been given something. Something she had not asked for and could not envision ever wanting.
She did not give him her name and he dropped her hand.
What was that?
Nadya elected to ignore it, clenching her teeth and fighting the urge to step away.
“We need to get out of here,” Anna said, moving closer to Nadya.
She nodded, and stooped down, carefully picking up her voryen and sheathing it, aware of the way Malachiasz tensed as she did so.
“The danger has passed, and we haven’t yet finished our introductions,” Rashid said pointedly.
Nadya couldn’t see any reason to lie. “There’s a prince on our trail and the longer we spend out here, the closer he gets. We thought the group you had your sights on was part of his company, but it looks like they were merely stragglers. We’ll be on our way now before he has the chance to catch up.”
Rashid’s eyes narrowed. Malachiasz’s head tilted to one side, his hand lifting to rest on the spell book at his hip.
“Prince? The Tranavians have as many princes as you Kalyazi. You’ll have to be more specific,” Rashid said lazily, but his expression creased with alarm.
“The High Prince,” Anna snapped.
Parijahan glanced at Malachiasz. “The High Prince is this far into Kalyazin?”
They don’t know, Nadya realized, an almost giddy sense of relief rushing through her. The Tranavian was a problem, but he wasn’t a part of the prince’s company.
“The monastery burned yesterday,” Nadya said, tripping over the words. It was too raw.
Parijahan pushed Malachiasz out of the way. “So you need somewhere safe to wait him out?”
Nadya blinked. “What?”
“Parj…” Malachiasz said, his voice a warning.
She ignored him. “Come with us,” she said earnestly. “We can keep you safe from the prince.”
Nadya’s gaze strayed to Malachiasz. Parijahan followed it.
“He won’t harm you.” It would have been more reassuring if she sounded confident.
“I make no promises,” he murmured.
“I won’t have anything to do with any Tranavian,” Nadya said. “Except to kill them.”
“Yes, I can see that,” Malachiasz said. He nudged one of the dead soldiers with the toe of his boot. “An admirable skill set. She’s not going to take you up on your offer, Parijahan. We should go.”
“The actual High Prince is near?” Rashid asked.
“Blood and bone, I should have left you both in those gutters,” Malachiasz snapped. He bent down and snatched a spell book off one of the dead soldiers, then stalked into the trees.
Rashid shrugged at Parijahan and took off after him. Parijahan watched the boys disappear.
“Technically,” she said conspiratorially to Nadya, “he would have been killed by the Kalyazi soldiers he was antagonizing had we not come along. But Rashid did end up unconscious in a gutter.”
Nadya felt like she was going to explode with nerves. The most she and Anna could do would be to hike a few more miles into the mountains and hope the High Prince didn’t already have their trail.
“Can you truly keep us safe?” she asked as Parijahan turned back to her. Nadya didn’t like the thought of being anywhere near that blood mage, but if there were straggling bands of Tranavian soldiers this deep into the mountains, they could happen upon another at any time and not be so lucky. Nadya didn’t want to think about what this could mean for the war effort.