She was tempted by the nearby church, but she didn’t want to drag Ostyia into one against her will.
“I don’t care where you go,” Ostyia said when she mentioned it offhand. “I wanted to be away from that boyar. He wouldn’t stop staring. If we don’t leave soon, I’m certain he’s going to murder me in my sleep. He doesn’t even know that I’m a blood mage! Only that I’m Tranavian.”
“Isn’t that enough?”
Ostyia shot Nadya an incredulous look as she veered their path south to where the church sat outside the city. She’d found that a little odd, but Katya had explained it was the last remnant of the village that the city had sprung from, and as the city had grown past the church, it had remained at the bottom of a hill with a graveyard to tend.
“Ostyia, if you had known I was Kalyazi when I showed up in Grazyk, you would have killed me on the spot. No questions asked.”
Ostyia looked thoughtful but didn’t argue; they knew their roots.
The church was old, wooden, and underkept, with peeling paint and worm-eaten boards. It was smaller than she had expected, considering the size of the city. It spoke of old things, old times, forgotten and left in the dust. It made Nadya immeasurably sad; even with all she knew and had broken, the thought of the church being left behind as the world hurtled on was heartbreaking. A tear slipped down her cheek, and she roughly wiped it away.
Ostyia let out a small huff as they went inside.
“You’re not the only person who’s lost someone,” Ostyia said, her voice far gentler than Nadya deserved.
“I’ve lost everything,” Nadya snapped.
She pushed past Ostyia, through the tired nave and into the sanctuary. It was small and worn like the outside. No benches—one was expected to stand throughout a service and most churches had not yet decided to give their people respite. The sanctuary at the monastery where Nadya had taken Malachiasz had had benches, which, Nadya supposed, was rather modern of them.
She stood in the silence, wishing she could relish it instead of hurting so much, before Ostyia followed after her.
“You haven’t lost everything,” Ostyia continued. “You’re still here, more than can be said for many others. And, yes, it hurts, and, yes, you want to give up. But you can’t. You’re the only one of us left with magic—”
“Katya—”
“Is about as good as a hedgewitch. She has a lot going for her, but magic is not one of those things,” Ostyia replied.
Nadya frowned. “You don’t understand—”
“No, Nadya, you don’t understand. You’ve had it rough, I won’t deny that, but I’ve spent the past three years of my life on a battlefield losing everyone I love day after day after day. You don’t know what it’s like to be faced with a choice—save the friend you’ve grown to love or protect your prince. It’s not a choice. I always chose Serefin. I will always choose Serefin.”
Nadya faltered. Ostyia had struck her as untouchable, but in the dim light of the church, the older girl’s haphazard haircut suddenly didn’t seem so cavalier and Nadya saw the desperation behind it. The exhaustion that cut her features looked bone deep.
“He’s fine,” Nadya said quietly.
“You don’t need to lie to me,” Ostyia replied. “But you also don’t get to tell yourself that as an excuse to do nothing because surely he’ll fix this problem.”
“Serefin doesn’t have a reputation for fixing problems.”
Ostyia laughed, making Nadya smile. It had been so long that the movement felt foreign on her face.
“I suppose not,” Ostyia agreed. “He’ll get there one day. He has to, he’s the king.”
Nadya made a noncommittal noise.
“But…” Ostyia trailed off, staring up at the icons on the walls. “You’ve ruined us. He has no magic, either.”
Nadya didn’t even flinch. It was the truth. She had broken the world.
“I can’t have the weight of the entire world on my shoulders,” Nadya whispered.
“You should have considered that before you shattered it,” Ostyia pointed out.
Nadya did flinch at that.
“I expected more from you after what you did in Grazyk.”
If Nadya could go back to being the girl in Grazyk, full of righteous fury and untempered curiosity and the ability to hold them both instead of this unending, overwhelming grief, she would in a heartbeat. She would strip back all she had done and find another way to prove herself to Marzenya. Tell Malachiasz the truth instead of playing his game against him. But life was a series of bad choices made in desperation, and there was no going back.
“I did what I had to,” Nadya said softly. “It wasn’t enough.”
Ostyia considered that. “When I was young, my family presented me with a choice that wasn’t a choice, as was the way of noble families in Tranavia.”
Nadya wondered if they should be talking so openly about Tranavia here, but Katya had been very loud and obvious about the “Tranavian prisoner” she had taken captive, so they would only have to yell for Katya to come crashing in with her title and protection if they needed it.
“My parents only had me, which isn’t ideal when you need one child to go to war and one child for the court. They assumed I would choose court life, because why would I go to the front at only sixteen if they were telling me that I didn’t have to? But Serefin was being forced to the front, and my parents were working under the assumption that I hadn’t heard yet, and that if I had, he wouldn’t be enough to sway me to certain doom.” Ostyia smiled slightly. “I made my inclinations obvious very young.”
Nadya snorted softly.
“In the end, it wasn’t about loyalty, leaving. Said inclinations, as they are, frustrate my parents because they close doors that good Tranavian nobility want to remain open. If I wanted to live my life, then war it was, and I could only hope I’d last at least a few years.”
Nadya frowned, not entirely sure why Ostyia was telling her this.
“I don’t want anyone else to be presented with the same choice I was: stay home and pretend you’re something you’re not for the sake of an old Tranavian name, or go to war, and probably die quite terribly, because at least no one there will care that you’ve no interest in men.”
“Would it have mattered if you weren’t a slavhka?” Nadya asked.
“No. It’s old court ideals. Bloodlines and children and whatever.”
Nadya made a thoughtful noise. The door to the sanctuary opened, and a young man approached the altar, but made no indication that he noticed the two girls in the room, so Nadya ignored him.
“I don’t want to leave the world doomed to a very different kind of war,” Ostyia said. “And that’s the path we’re hurtling down.”
“Because of me.”
Ostyia did not disagree. And Nadya knew she was right and that she and Rashid could both be right. It wasn’t her duty to fix every problem in the world, but it was up to her to try to mend some of her mistakes.
“Instead of contemplating the doom of the world by old gods, could we instead return to you talking about your childhood? That was much more palatable.”