“We’ve got to go,” Serefin said suddenly, grabbing Malachiasz’s arm.
Malachiasz flinched but didn’t fight as Serefin dragged him out of the clearing and into the woods.
“Wait, he’s coming with us?” Kacper cried.
“I can’t keep an eye on him if I let him go, can I?” Serefin called over his shoulder. There was a smile in his voice that baffled Malachiasz.
“We don’t even know who we’re running from,” Malachiasz said.
“Not something I intend to find out!” Serefin replied, before slamming face-first into someone, his grip on Malachiasz falling away. Malachiasz skidded to a stop, underbrush flying underneath his boots.
The tall figure was hooded, features hidden in shadow, uncannily familiar in a way that Malachiasz couldn’t place—until—
A spike of iron driven through a pale palm. Nadya’s. His claws punching clear through her hands because she was giving him power and it was so much darker than he ever could have guessed. Except no, not that instance, a different one. But that hadn’t been real, he had written it off as the forest toying with him when he was alone. He had been alone, hadn’t he?
Who are they?
“Did you think I had no disciples in this world?”
A tight circle of hooded figures had closed in around them. Malachiasz glanced at Serefin, who seemed to catch what Malachiasz was about to do, his eye widening.
“Wait, Malachiasz—”
The taste of copper bloomed in his mouth. His vision shifted, sharper, more, as dozens of eyes blinked open and closed on his skin. Iron claws grew out of bloody nail beds, his teeth sharpening in his mouth. He stopped there—he tried to stop there.
Taszni nem Malachiasz.
Don’t fall too far.
Don’t lose the fragments that make you human.
“Boy, you lost those long ago.”
Malachiasz struck.
He was infinitely faster than Chyrnog’s acolytes, infinitely more powerful. But he was tired. He was hungry. He was wrapped around the will of a being so much older than him and even as he moved, claws shredding through black robes and teeth tearing through flesh, it wasn’t enough.
Chyrnog did not want him to fight. Chyrnog wanted submission. Suddenly his body was no longer under his control. He was slammed to the ground hard enough to rattle his bones, sharp teeth cutting through his lower lip. He spat blood onto the boot of one of the acolytes.
“Now, now, none of that.” The voice was calm and smooth, lilting and deceptively gentle. “We don’t want to break you or your companions.” Someone knelt down in front of Malachiasz, tilting his chin up with a gloved hand. “What a creature.” They straightened.
He regretted wasting the blood in his mouth on a shoe. Everything was moving too fast and too slow and he couldn’t seem to form words.
“Knock them out. We have a long way to go and I don’t want them fighting.”
Malachiasz tried to struggle but his body wouldn’t listen. What is happening to me?
“You have made a great many assumptions about what I will allow, but it never occurred to you how this arrangement truly worked. You are nothing. Mere flesh, a worm, nothing but a vessel for me to enact my will, and my will is destruction, consumption. You can fight, or you can be compliant, none of it matters. I will win. I always win. And you need some nudging in the right direction. My acolytes have captured one who has awakened, and I need you to destroy it. Aren’t you hungry?”
He was starving.
13
NADEZHDA LAPTEVA
The rivers of Kalyazin were drawn by Ljubica’s fingernails as she raked them through the ground from her grief.
—The Books of Innokentiy
Nadya had spoken with many gods during her life. Other children at the monastery had their imaginary friends—imaginary siblings, imaginary family—but Nadya had the voices in her head that spoke to her of the world. It had been Marzenya over all the rest. A sheltering hand over a girl born at the heart of chaos. She whispered of magic, of war, and she whispered, again and again, how much she loved the girl that she had chosen. The girl whose hair had all the color leached out from the touch of the gods. The girl who sat and listened and held magic in her palms. The girl who dreamed of war.
Would love have smothered her so? Or asked the girl to tear out her heart and offer it, broken and bloody, for a possible fragment of forgiveness? To choose between her goddess and the friends she had made, the boy she had loved. Would love have asked that she lose everything to gain nothing?
Nadya did not understand love.
The sanctuary was empty, and no one would disturb her. No Tranavian, no Kalyazi boyar looking for gossip. It was here, in a place where the atmosphere was tainted and unholy, that she would make her next move. She went to the icons on the walls, touching the tears that tracked down Svoyatova Celestyna Samonova’s cheeks. She wasn’t surprised when her fingers came away covered in blood.
What is happening?
She didn’t know who she expected to answer her. No one, ultimately. Ljubica, perhaps. The only one who had spoken with her since the mountaintop. But Ljubica was a fallen god, and Nadya desperately wanted to speak to one of the gods she always had known.
I know you hear me. I know Marzenya was lying. What she didn’t understand was why? Nadya could have done so much more with the truth—was doing exactly what Marzenya wished as it was. Until the end.
Saving Malachiasz had been the only thing that mattered, even though she had known, absolutely, what he would do with her magic. She gave him the power to do what she could not. Marzenya’s fingers were poised at the back of her skull, prepared for destruction, and she would never have been able to step away from her goddesses’s touch. Marzenya had been ready to kill her. A lifetime of devotion, and for what? A lifetime of manipulation.
She took the icon off the wall and moved to the center of the sanctuary, sitting down and pulling the glove off her hand. Corrupted flesh and too sharp fingernails and there, in the center where a scar spiraled around her palm, an eye blinked open.
Nadya swallowed hard, flexing her hand, waiting for the eye in her palm to close and disappear, but it didn’t.
She had thought the eyes, the constant shifts in Malachiasz’s body, were because of what he had become during the ritual. A chaos god, slipping through the cracks of mortality. But this meant she hadn’t been totally right. Divinity twists mortality. That made sense; it explained the way her skin had cracked and fissured, stained and twisted. The scar on Malachiasz’s palm had healed because so much of him was already tainted by divinity. It didn’t need to react the same way. But what was happening to her was growing more pronounced. Would the corruption—blessing?—spread further, or had it stopped in its tracks? It hadn’t moved since she had torn herself into pieces and put herself back together. Obliteration and coherence. She tasted blood and spat, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
She touched the skin near the eye. It didn’t hurt anymore but it did feel strange. She carefully curled her fingers closed. Would this not have happened to her had she not shed her blood for power in Grazyk, or was this inevitable?
Nadya wet the tips of her fingers with blood from the icon.
“Ignore me, fine. I will force your attention upon me.” She pulled Malachiasz’s spell book out of her bag.