Thunder rippled through the sky. Katya lifted her head. “Can you still feel them?”
“The gods?”
Katya nodded.
“Yes and no. They’ve turned away. They won’t talk to me. I think they’re … preparing for something. It’s not like when my access to them was blocked off, this is willful. Are the fallen gods truly that deadly?”
“I wish I knew,” Katya said. “I wish we had more than some apocryphal texts that are vague at best and meaningless at worst. I don’t know, Nadya. I don’t know what’s to come.” A strange expression flickered over her face. “Were you talking to someone out here?”
“No.”
It was clear Katya didn’t believe her.
“What is the Matriarch like?” she asked.
Katya lifted an eyebrow. She eyed Nadya in silence, deciding whether she wanted to discuss this with her. Whether Nadya was worthy. It stung to know the tsarevna didn’t trust her, but she hadn’t exactly earned it.
“Is she why you’re asking for protection?” Katya finally asked.
Nadya hesitated, then gave a small nod.
“I see.” The tsarevna leaned back against the same tree Żywia had been hanging from. “She and I do not get along.”
A knot formed in the pit of Nadya’s stomach. This was not what she wanted to hear.
“She can be … draconic. She’s the high mouthpiece of the gods, her words are law within the Church.” Katya’s eyes studied Nadya’s face. “She has been quite gleeful in eradicating all magic not divinely appointed from Kalyazin.”
And there it was. The confirmation Nadya needed. Katya’s gaze strayed to Nadya’s hand.
“You think she’ll go after you,” she said.
“Katya … I don’t…” Nadya sighed. “Yes. I do.”
Katya took that with a carefully neutral expression. Nadya had no idea where she stood with her.
“Is it because of the Black Vulture?” she asked. “Is he why you’ve strayed so far that you think the Matriarch would hang you?”
“I think I’d be put on a pyre, actually,” Nadya said. “No. He helped. I’ll grant him that. He asked some very pointed questions that I had no answers for, but … I would have ended up here without him.”
Nadya had no idea if that was true but had to believe it. Otherwise it gave far too much power to a boy who had too much to begin with. But she would have posed those same questions for herself eventually. She was too damn curious, and it was her downfall.
“I’ll do my best, Nadya,” Katya said, after a long pause between them stretched out into the cold air.
Katya turned back toward camp as glimmers of dawn began to break through the trees, and Nadya touched the ink-stained skin of her left hand, fearing what was to come.
9
MALACHIASZ CZECHOWICZ
His fingers clawing, grasping, scraping at anything he can rake into his maw to sate his unending hunger.
—The Volokhtaznikon
Malachiasz wasn’t used to being alone. Even in the Salt Mines there were other Vultures—aside from the isolation of the mines themselves. Any other time he surrounded himself with people. It never eased the loneliness fully, but it was tempered: Vultures, Rashid and Parijahan and an odd group of Kalyazi renegades, Nadya …
He closed his eyes and abruptly collapsed amidst the acrid, rotting flowers, his knees going liquid. He didn’t dare prod at the magic that bound them, but he doubted his death had broken it. There was too much. Too much magic that was not his and not under his control. The thread of Nadya’s weird, dark power. Chyrnog’s touch heavy upon him. All of it the same and he didn’t understand why.
He raked his hands through his hair. He should be dead. He died. A part of him was still on that mountain and he wouldn’t ever get it back. And what was the cost of his return?
How old was the god that had Malachiasz? What had it seen? Done?
What had it consumed?
The thought struck him like a thunderclap. Consume. He thought of his hunger. Constant, gnawing, eternal. He thought of the darkness, absolute and complete.
Malachiasz considered what he had become.
Judging by the silence, the god wasn’t always paying attention. It wasn’t always listening. That was important. So what if he couldn’t fight it? It didn’t have him completely. He wondered if it had slept for so long it was left weak. Weak, maybe weak wasn’t the word, but it hadn’t yet obliterated Malachiasz.
He needed answers. He needed to—
“Start by getting out of here,” he asserted, standing.
Ignoring the shifting of his body, he made his way up the stairs. It was dark outside, blessedly so, and though he didn’t want to leave the church—he was safe here, protected from the forest—he knew he must.
How did I even get here? he thought. Dragged into divine nonsense. He should have stayed in Grazyk. He shouldn’t have left the mines. He shouldn’t have listened to Nadya.
He shouldn’t have loved her.
Well, that’s over.
He needed to stop thinking about her, the last thing he wanted was her knowing he was alive. Better she think him dead. Better she live with her righteous—so she thought—fury. He was so tired. Still so much farther to go.
Still so much farther to fall.
The gnawing hunger chewing at the core of him was more, somehow, than simply not having had food in a while. It was ancient and old and altogether too familiar. He had to ignore it or else it would drive him mad.
The forest didn’t bother him when he finally left the sanctuary of the church. It was too dark, the trees oppressive and too close together, the cold wind cutting straight through his jacket and down into his bones.
When he stumbled into a clearing with a squat hut in the center, he gave a heavy sigh of recognition. He considered turning right back around and going deeper into the forest, but with an exhausted sort of resignation he knew there was no avoiding it. This was why the forest had been so lenient.
The hut seemed to move as he approached, as if it were breathing. He passed a gate with skulls perched on the narrow fence. He paused and eyed them—some were far too fresh for his liking—before continuing through a small garden of what he was fairly certain were fingers embedded in the dirt—he didn’t really want to investigate that further—until he knocked on the door.
It swung open on its own into darkness. He closed his eyes, almost wishing he didn’t know what was coming. He shook his head. Better to face this with dignity.
“Czijow, Pelageya,” he called, stepping inside. “How are you always exactly where I don’t want you to be?”
“I was rather enjoying watching you turning in circles in the forest.”
He was in her sitting room—the one from the tower in Grazyk?—but different. The skulls weren’t all fleshless here, and something bubbled thickly in a cauldron on her fire. The witch looked old; her white curls tied back and her face lined with wrinkles. She glanced over her shoulder at Malachiasz before turning to the fire.
“Oh, you bring a vile taste in with you, shut the door.”
Was it too late to leave? The door shut before he could touch it. Well, that answered that.