Łucja, the last Black Vulture, had held the cult in her grip for a very long time, systematically destroying any Vulture who dared oppose her. She had been calculating and ruthless, but she had no ambition.
Tranavia had come to know Malachiasz as the most ruthless and calculating Black Vulture the cult had ever known. They would remember him; they would never remember her.
Hadn’t that been his goal? All those nights when he had planned, when he had stumbled in front of her, over and over, convincing her that he was weak and useless and only good for a punching bag. The more she saw him as a pathetic failure of a boy, barely a Vulture, the easier it would be to take her down. And he’d been correct.
He hadn’t done it for notoriety—though that was nice. He had done it because he wanted to change things. Because he was frustrated with his order’s passivity, with Tranavia’s—with the world’s—and could not abide Łucja’s inaction any longer.
He was surprised by his sudden yearning to be back on that damn throne and dealing with petty court matters. He hadn’t asked to become the monster that he was and for so long he had hated it. His fingers brushed the scars that lined his forearms. He didn’t know when his feelings had changed; when he’d embraced what he was.
He found himself at the edge of the pool of blood, eyeing the uncomfortably still surface. Had Nadya known what would happen when she stepped into the well? He held his hand out over the surface, not daring to touch it. Could he reverse what she had done?
It had to have been here. There were gaps. He didn’t know what had happened to her between the wall falling and arriving at the temple, but this was where something had been wrenched away.
He reached for his spell book. A beat of panic, constricting his chest, tugging at his lungs so hard he started coughing when his fingers found nothing. There was no way to get used to it. That spell book was his entire life and it was gone. A chronicle of every spell he had written, every sketch he had drawn of Nadya and his friends, everything. If he had it, there was a chance he could reverse what Nadya had done, or at least have a starting point to understanding. All he needed was something to start with. Anything broken could be fixed, he had to believe that.
If only for his own sake.
8
NADEZHDA LAPTEVA
Lev returned last night. From Tachilvnik, supposedly. I don’t know. He won’t speak. Can’t. No one there but the gods, he scrawled it on a piece of paper, but then he showed me … They’d cut out his tongue.
—Passage from the personal journals of Sofka Greshneva
Nadya didn’t enjoy riding. She especially didn’t enjoy riding through forest roads with nothing to do but feel the shifting of the world around her. She tried blocking it out, but the trees looked different, in a way that she couldn’t put words to, and the air tasted strange. Everything was broken, wrong. She kept waiting for, what, the end of the world?
“When we get to Komyazalov, we can regroup,” Katya said confidently, when Nadya inquired what she was planning, and it didn’t sound like false confidence this time.
Nadya was quiet in response, gazing up at the trees. The last time she checked, they were doing their best to scrape free from the long harsh winter, a dull green that wanted so desperately to be brighter. Now they were blackened and dead and spiderwebs hung from them, with ribbons of shredded flesh caught in their branches.
She squeezed her eyes shut, pressing her fists against them. She breathed out slowly, waiting for a voice that wasn’t hers, for anything. But there was only deafening silence.
When she opened her eyes, the trees were green once more, but she knew that wasn’t true. This was only the beginning. That strange mold on the trees wasn’t an illusion, the spiderwebs weren’t illusions. She was seeing some other realm that existed woven into the edges of hers. And those edges had frayed.
She didn’t want to wait until Komyazalov for answers. She didn’t think she would get answers in Komyazalov, where the Matriarch resided. The woman who’d almost certainly had a hand in keeping Nadya in the dark her whole life wouldn’t help her. Nor would she be safe in a place where what she was could condemn her to death.
But maybe they would be right to sentence her thus. With each passing hour, she could feel herself edging closer to that dark water. Using it in the forest, on that wolf, was unlike anything she had ever known. Good, even. As terrifying as that was, it was inevitable. She was always going to end up here; this was always going to happen.
Maybe that was why the Church had lied to her. Why they had tried so hard to keep her in the dark. They suspected what she was. Something darker than a cleric, worse than a mage. Something else.
The magic from that well of dark water felt, if not the same as the feeling she had around Ljubica, then worse. If that was even possible.
There had been whispers of things worse than the fallen gods. Older beings. The clearing and the statues around it—that was how using this power made her feel. The same dread horror; the same terrible inevitability. She knew, now, who five of those other statues had been, but that left fifteen. Fifteen beings unaccounted for and unknown, and that didn’t sit well with her. Were they dead? Or were they biding their time?
Would the fallen gods unleash something even older and darker?
Was that what she was?
The thought was too much, too far. But she couldn’t deny being connected to that clearing, not anymore.
After a long day of travel, they set up camp for the evening, and Nadya wandered away, watching as the forest shifted around her vision. Growing darker, the normal sounds of the wood turning to screams. She shivered, glancing back at the others, but they didn’t notice. Except Rashid. He flinched every time something in the woods screamed. He caught her gaze and she tilted her head. He got up and followed her into the woods.
“You can sense it, can’t you?” she asked.
Rashid gazed up at the trees in silence before he spoke, the timbre of his voice rough. “It might be time to tell you the truth.”
Her heart dropped. Not him, he couldn’t be lying to her, too. She couldn’t take another betrayal.
Rashid caught the look on her face, something flickering over his that she couldn’t parse. It quickly morphed to careful reassurance. “No, no, don’t worry, those were the wrong words to use. I…” He trailed off, considering his hands, flexing his fingers. “I was taken into the Siroosi Travash when I showed signs of power. It runs in my family, magic, but we tend to ignore it because it’s always been easily ignored.”
“What kind of magic?”
“Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? You Northerners have it all laid out so carefully. Magic from the gods or magic from blood and while that’s mostly true—even the mages in Akola draw blood for their power, but you Kalyazi never realized because they don’t venture out from the deep deserts—it doesn’t work the way the north has decided. We knew to keep quiet when Kalyazin turned on Tranavia because any divergence in how our power worked would put a target on us as well.”
Nadya winced.
“But it’s easy to ignore the spark of power, let it grow dormant and disappear, and that’s what my family did. Because my grandfather made a mistake that would cost him my uncle and ultimately, me. And it meant we ended up in a Travash that has poisoned the country for years. Because that Travash wanted mages, as many as possible, before they were taken into the deserts and hidden away as is tradition.”