“They wouldn’t declare war,” Parijahan said. “Not over me.”
“I would not be so certain.”
“They wouldn’t declare war over me because it would mean moving resources that are necessary in case of an internal conflict,” Parijahan explained.
Katya’s eyebrows rose. Parijahan had never lied about why she was in Kalyazin, but she had also never told the entire truth. It was easy to talk of vengeance. It made sense to those like Malachiasz, or Nadya, whose worlds were born of violence. It was a perfectly reasonable explanation why an Akolan would willingly be in such unforgiving countries as theirs. But there was so much Parijahan was running from, and she wasn’t ready to stop running. Her grandmother was the real ruler of Akola, not her father, and Zohreh would do anything to keep that stranglehold on her family, on the country.
Parijahan had grown up thinking she was safe from her grandmother’s machinations. She’d never been expected to take over the Travash. She’d had her sister, Taraneh, and Arman, her older brother. But then Taraneh had been married to a Tranavian, effectively removing her from the line to rule, and Arman had gone to the desert mages and never returned. Parijahan was not so optimistic as to think he was still alive.
That left Parijahan with the weight of a fractured country on her shoulders. A weight she did not want. A weight no one wanted her to have, either.
She thought she’d been fixing things when she left. No one wanted her on the throne. Her grandmother had dismissed her as too headstrong to be of any use long ago. What had changed?
Rashid lifted his eyebrows at her after a pointed look at the tsarevna. She had never seen him so dimmed, his cheerfulness tempered in a way that was painful. She didn’t know what he had gone through in the forest—she was too scared to ask. That was the first time she had been separated from him in years, and it was a divide they couldn’t quite cross. But then, she had already planted the seeds of their rift by not telling him that her father was dying and what it meant for Akola.
He wanted to go home, and she couldn’t follow him. If he left her now it would break her heart, but she wouldn’t stop him.
“Give me something, anything,” Katya said. “I’m not the enemy. I’d simply like to avoid an international incident.”
“Akola knows what I’ve done and why I left. What they don’t know is why I chose to remain here. Akola isn’t going to turn on Kalyazin or Tranavia, trust me. We have our own issues. But if you want to give your court an excuse, tell them a portion of the truth. I’m here to help you fix your disastrous kingdoms.”
“But that’s only a portion?”
Parijahan could feel Rashid’s dark eyes focus on her face.
“It’s enough.”
Parijahan’s time in that damn forest had been strange and uncomfortable, and now she was marked like her friends and it wouldn’t be easy to escape. She knew what she had seen, what was required of her, though she wasn’t sure how anything would be possible without … she swallowed thickly. No matter.
7
MALACHIASZ CZECHOWICZ
A churning, unending horror, pulling back in on himself as he feeds on whatever he can find, even his own body.
—The Volokhtaznikon
He couldn’t stop shaking. Try as he might, he couldn’t get warm, couldn’t stop the anxious tremors that had molded alongside a shivering hard enough to rattle his bones.
Taszni nem Malachiasz Czechowicz. Not again. Please, no more. He would do what he had to—anything.
He couldn’t escape the fact that he wanted to live and to hold onto a scrap of himself as he did. It didn’t need to be much—only a piece—and that god had threatened to rip everything away, more than he ever thought he had to lose. Strip away all that was Malachiasz until he was nothing but a soulless vessel.
It wouldn’t do. Malachiasz was a god in his own right, and he wouldn’t be controlled like this. If it took cooperation, so be it. He would suffer; he would survive. If he was alive, he could change things.
Of course, that had been his driving philosophy for ages, and nothing had changed. Tranavia and Kalyazin would be locked in this war forever, because that was what they knew. It was comfortable, even. Both sides would make demands the other would be unwilling to concede. He didn’t see a way forward.
Maybe once he would have considered Nadya a possibility. Someone who wanted to find a compromise. They believed in different things, but he was drawn to her, and she to him. Her company was a comfort he’d never had before. He liked being around her, liked arguing about theology and what that meant for the world. She made him consider things he never had, and as much as he might fight against that, he found it fascinating, he found her fascinating.
And it had been sufficiently demolished. She would only make things worse, not better, not as she was—who she was.
“Are you so confident in your knowledge of what that girl is?” the voice asked, sounding curious.
Malachiasz winced, but ultimately ignored him. Him? Was that right? Was that even possible? Was it so easy and simple to ascribe human traits to this being?
“No,” the voice said, amused. “But it doesn’t particularly matter either way to me.”
He had woken up in a sanctuary at the church, one claimed by the forest. Thick, poisonous-looking grasses grew up and around the remains of benches. Bones rested amidst the growth, maggots crawling in the underbrush, as if dead things, too, were scattered in this place. Malachiasz got to his feet, shuddering and flicking maggots off his skin.
He tugged a hand through his hair, fingers catching on beads and relics knotted in the strands, and he considered ripping the bones out—so much disaster from such small things—but he might have use of them yet, and it had cost him so much to get them.
His chest tightened and he coughed, the pain in his lungs—in a dark part of him—heightening for a heartbeat until it eased. He spat out a mouthful of blood. There was a shiver of eyes and teeth and bone, and then everything settled. Temporary peace.
All he wanted was to sleep and let the worms and maggots take him because that would be better than what he had left.
He supposed getting out of the forest was the first step; figuring out how to take down the rest of the pantheon without destroying himself could wait until he was free of this wood that kept trying to pry him open.
The last time he’d eaten or even had water was before he’d woken up on the mountain. He was constantly dizzy, light-headed. There wasn’t much he could do other than hope he came across a stream—when the sun went down and he was finally able to leave this damned place—that wasn’t poisoned and hope for the best. He wasn’t about to eat anything here. Everything was festering.
He tried not to panic at the thought of not feeling sunlight ever again.
Unsure what possessed him, he ventured down to the strange well in the basement. The pale flowers had wilted to withered grotesque husks. He found his jacket balled up in the corner and picked it up with a sigh, tugging it on. He didn’t want to think about when he’d first grabbed it in a panic the night he’d fled Tranavia.
Malachiasz hadn’t been particularly well liked among the Vultures. They underestimated him, assumed because he was anxious that he was useless—but eventually he’d earned their respect. That was what truly mattered in the cult. Rozá had tried to undermine him at every step, like he’d undermined Łucja until the day he had challenged and killed her. Except Rozá never would have openly challenged him. She wasn’t like him. The moment he’d taken Łucja’s head from her shoulders had been so very sweet.