She muttered a curse under her breath in Tranavian, pulled her spell book from her hip and dropped it onto the table. Tense silence stretched throughout the room.
Fresh cuts were scattered across Ostyia’s forearms, haphazard and messy, sluggishly bleeding in a way she had chosen to ignore.
“It’s not working,” she hissed.
“Try,” Katya urged.
“Wait,” Nadya said, but she was silenced by a glare from Katya. She sat back in her chair.
Ostyia shook her head. She flipped her spell book open, frowning deeply. “I can’t even read it.” Her voice cracked.
“May I?” Nadya asked, reaching tentatively for the spell book.
Ostyia nodded. Nadya flipped it around and found pages upon pages of text she could read—it was definitely in Tranavian—but the words didn’t totally make sense, like some element was missing.
“It looks like nonsense to me,” Ostyia said.
“We’re leaving,” Katya announced. “You’ve all wallowed long enough. We’re going to Komyazalov. I need to speak with my father.”
Nadya swallowed hard, meeting Ostyia’s gaze from across the table. The Tranavian girl was clearly thinking the same thing: she did not want to meet the tsar.
3
SEREFIN MELESKI
There are no lies and no truths to Velyos. It’s all one and the same. Words are words are words, and words are meaningless.
—The Letters of Włodzimierz
Serefin Meleski should have succumbed to his wounds. As a fever burned through him, he contemplated more than once how nice it would be to simply give up.
He didn’t know where he was when he finally came out of it. He woke to darkness and cold. Someone was curled up next to him—which wasn’t like him at all—and his shattered world started to piece together when he realized it was Kacper. He touched the bandages over his left eye—or, eye socket, rather. It hurt, an ache like a thousand headaches at once, but he no longer felt like he was being stabbed in the brain.
He could still feel his brother’s blood on his hands, the god’s will smothering his own and shoving him down to use his body for its own ends. He hadn’t lost control since. And it had only taken tearing out his own eye.
A paltry trade, all things considered.
He nestled down and pressed his forehead against the back of Kacper’s neck, hoping to finish out the night with no more nightmares.
But he was back at the front and it was so loud. Screams and crying and so much blood. An arrow zipped past his face, grazing his cheek, and there was blood on his face. His friend Hanna was being cut into pieces by Kalyazi blades, moving too fast to be real.
Serefin shot awake as a blade was aimed for him. He shivered, raking a hand through his hair, trying to remind himself that he wasn’t at the front, and hadn’t been in some time. He was soaked with sweat. His gasps for air gave way to tremors and he buried his head against his knees and tried his hardest not to break.
“Oh, good morning,” Kacper mumbled, his voice scratchy with sleep in a way that sent a different kind of warmth rushing through Serefin, no less feverish. And, “It was only a bad dream.”
“That doesn’t really help when it actually happened,” Serefin muttered, before lifting his head.
Kacper squinted at the light filtering in through the hastily tied tent. “Ah, we overslept.” His brown skin was warm, his edges rumpled and soft, and his black curls were messy. “You look like you’re feeling better,” Kacper said, a hopeful note in his voice.
Not only had they overslept, they shouldn’t have both slept through the night without someone keeping watch—but it was growing harder and harder to care.
Serefin nodded, fingers fluttering near his bandage. “The fever broke. Maybe this thing won’t kill me.”
“Or lack thereof, of a thing,” Kacper said.
“Get out of my bed.”
Kacper laughed softly. He sat up and clambered over Serefin to dig through his pack. “Not a bed. Take that off,” he said.
Serefin hated this part, but he dutifully untied the cloth and carefully unwound it from his head, freeing the rest of the bandages covering the remnants of his left eye. Kacper returned with fresh bandages. He paused, taking Serefin’s face between his hands.
“How bad is it, really?” Serefin asked. He had been avoiding anything even remotely reflective.
“Charmingly rakish,” Kacper replied a little too easily.
Serefin lifted an eyebrow.
Kacper’s fingers traced the cuts on Serefin’s face where his fingernails had dug and dug. His touch was featherlight, and it was all Serefin could do not to pull him back down onto the bedrolls.
“They’ll scar,” Kacper murmured. He touched a cut that ended at the corner of Serefin’s mouth. It pulled at his lips as it healed. “This is going to be all some people see.”
Serefin closed his eye.
“Not me, though,” Kacper continued, his voice very low.
He gently pulled the last bandage away. He was quiet for a beat too long. Serefin opened his eye—the old healer had sewn his other eyelid shut until the socket healed.
“Kacper?”
Kacper blinked. He lowered his hands. “Sorry,” he said. “The swelling has gone down. Does it hurt?”
“Blood and bone, yes.” Constantly. A ceaseless headache that varied in levels of intensity.
Kacper hesitated before gingerly cupping Serefin’s cheek. “You made it out, that’s what matters.”
“Oh, so it’s very bad.”
Kacper’s continued silence was not reassuring.
“Kacper.”
“Your eye never went back to normal,” he finally said. “I guess I keep thinking it will.”
Serefin wasn’t so optimistic. Moths still clouded around him. Something was off. Like he had been taken apart and put back together in the wrong order. Being snapped across the continent by the whim of a god had not been kind to him.
Kacper cleaned the socket carefully before bandaging Serefin up. He kissed his forehead.
They had left the tiny Kalyazi village weeks ago, even though Serefin had been in no state to travel. The last thing he wanted was to be trapped in Kalyazin with no way home, but that appeared to be his terrifying new reality. He had no idea what was happening at the front or at court.
Kacper sat back on his heels and shoved extra bandages back into his pack. He tied his tunic and picked up his military jacket, frowning at it quizzically.
“Don’t wear it,” Serefin said. He gathered his tangled hair in his hands—when had it gotten so long?—and tied it back.
Kacper sat down next to him, pulling his boots on. Serefin pressed his face against Kacper’s shoulder. Kacper tensed for a heartbeat before he rested his head against Serefin’s. That was how it always was, a beat of hesitation where uncertainty flickered in Kacper. Serefin had grown deft at catching it.
He’d known Kacper for three years, but it was three years of chaos. The things a person learned about another during long days on a battlefield and long nights of excruciating routine watches were deeply specific. He knew Kacper had grown up in Zowecz, one of the southern Tranavian provinces. He was one of the youngest of five and nearly all his siblings had done time at the front before returning home to the farm. But Kacper hated getting dirty and didn’t really think farm work would suit him. He loved plants, but not the growing—rather, the effect they could have on a person. Poisons, specifically. The broad strokes of a person’s life were easy to paint in the quiet moments between brushes with death out at the front.