She wanted Malachiasz and Marzenya to not be dead.
What she wanted did not matter.
She moved past Ljubica’s tree stump. After a beat, Ljubica let out an irritated huff and their footsteps crunched through the leaves after her.
Heavy footfalls for a god, Nadya thought absently. She had no idea what Ljubica was the god of. She also didn’t understand why she could see them. That’s not how this worked.
“You have a mortal form,” Nadya observed.
“It’s nice, isn’t it? I’m quite fond of it. It could be different. What will get you to truly talk to me, I wonder?” The figure in Nadya’s peripheral vision changed. Blond and freckled with full, red lips. “No?” Ljubica spun in front of Nadya, forcing her to stop.
Nadya gasped, her heart in her throat, because the figure was taller, lithe and pale, with a pile of long black hair and knife sharp features.
“Don’t you dare,” she whispered.
“He bled all over that divine mountain. We all know what he was.”
Heat prickled Nadya’s eyes. She wasn’t going to cry. Not here. Not ever again. Certainly not for him.
Ljubica grinned but they were wearing his face and a sob broke from deep in Nadya’s chest. She shoved past Ljubica.
“Your tears are exactly what I want,” Ljubica said with a blissful sigh. “Let’s make a deal, you and I, for you have so many tears to give and I have been thirsty for so very long.”
No more deals. No more listening to gods who only wanted Nadya for their petty games. No more trusting pretty Tranavian boys with sly smiles.
“No.”
“You can’t do this on your own,” Ljubica said.
Nadya risked turning back. The god didn’t look like him anymore. They were back to their normal form. She didn’t like the way her heart wrenched at the loss because she had wanted to see him one more time.
“No. I’m done being manipulated. You can all find some other mortal to torture.”
Silence fell on the wood. Not a complete silence—the birds were too loud in the treetops. Something rustled nearby and Nadya couldn’t help but think about the rumors of dragons Katya kept bringing to dinner. It would be quite a fate for her, to survive so much only to be killed in the woods by a mythical creature. Fitting, really.
“You are not wholly mortal, though. Isn’t that right?”
Nadya closed her eyes. Stars and oblivion and an ocean of dark water. “I don’t want answers.” She had thought that was all she wanted—to know what she was, why she was different, why it was so necessary for those she trusted to lie to her for eighteen years.
“I don’t think that’s true, either.”
And maybe it wasn’t. But answers might break her and she had so little strength left.
“I don’t want to be anything else,” Nadya said softly.
Ljubica nodded. “That Tranavian king set us free. You set us free. Velyos set us free.”
“How many of you?”
“Five of us retained our minds after being locked away.”
The implications of their words chilled Nadya. That meant there were others that did not.
“Who are they?”
“Myself, Cvjetko, Zlatana, Zvezdan, and Velyos, of course.”
“Of course,” Nadya murmured. “What happens now?” she asked pathetically.
Ljubica smiled serenely. “Chaos.”
Nadya was left standing alone in a clearing, her corrupted hand clutched to her chest. She closed her eyes. It was so quiet. She had grown mostly used to the quiet since that night in the cathedral in Grazyk, but there had been potential, then, for the quiet to cease. No more.
She could sense the wrong in the earth beneath her feet. The loosening of the ties that bound the world into its careful order. The witch had told her that the gods’ retributions on the mortal world were made in small movements. They needed people to push along their plans, and people could only do so much.
But Ljubica’s tangible presence meant these five weren’t so bound. And the others might not stay so bound.
So, Nadya’s theory, whatever it was worth, was accurate, though she wasn’t quite sure what to do with that information. She almost wanted to talk to Velyos. He had started this whole mess. Except she didn’t know how to reach these five like she had reached her gods. She didn’t have symbols to ascribe to them; she didn’t have a tether that she could grasp.
A tree branch snapped. Nadya whirled, reaching for—
What? What did she have? Her fingers closed over the hilt of one of her voryens, an almost blinding pain in her hollowed palm followed.
She was relieved it wasn’t a dragon that stepped out through the brush. Her relief was short lived as a starved wolf watched her with gold, hungry eyes.
It was huge. Nadya had seen plenty of wolves near the monastery while growing up, but none of them had been this big. It was unnatural. What primordial monstrosities walked the earth because of their recklessness?
Her recklessness.
She shifted her voryen in her grip, wincing as warm liquid slid down her palm. Malachiasz’s claws had punched clean through her hands and the wounds were slow to heal. She held out a hand, remembering how the rusalki had responded to her, the way her blood had hummed when they had fought the Lichni’voda. Could that work here, too?
A growl rippled through the clearing. The wolf’s fur was matted with dirt and dark with dried blood. Her fingers stretched toward it. The growl grew to a snarl. Nadya drew her hand back, fear icing her veins. One didn’t run from wolves; they were too fast. The trees surrounding her were impossible to climb—their branches too far out of reach. She had to fight.
All she had was one voryen, that was it.
That’s not remotely true. The voice was hers, yet not, and it jarred Nadya enough to focus, to dart away when the wolf lunged, jaws snapping a hair away from her arm. But she didn’t want to reach for the dark water. To use that power was to admit that even if she had been a cleric once, it was not all she was.
The palm of her corrupted hand, wounded and aching, grew warm as the wolf circled her, salivating at the anticipation of a meal. She sensed the coil in its muscles, the rippling of its fur before it struck again.
Nadya knelt at the edge of a churning ocean. Desperate, she plunged her hand under the icy water.
A wall of power, shimmering in the light, slammed up before her. The wolf crashed into it and yelped, rearing back. A wealth of pure magic, a drowning. The taste of iron and ashes. Time slowed around her, and she clenched a fist. The wolf let out another distressed yelp as its body went rigid.
It would be so easy to kill the beast. The thought was dispassionate. Nadya felt like she was watching herself from afar. Another inch of tension, tightening her fist a little more, and she could crush the beast’s bones as easily as if they were twigs. White flames licked up her corrupted hand, catching on her sleeve.
Her vision shifted and she could see far more than she should. The beast—not a beast, only a wolf, an ancient creature that had prowled the forests for hundreds of years—and its ravaging hunger covered up an old nobility. Nadya could not find the cruelty within herself to snuff it out. She dropped the magic with a gasp, considered further, and slammed a heavy blow of power down on the wolf to knock it unconscious.
Then she fled.