“Thank you, Serefin.”
His smile was crooked as he dropped her hand. “Good night.”
“Good night.”
He inclined his head to her before he loped down the hall. Nadya darted into her rooms, slamming the door shut. She leaned back against the door and slowly slid to the ground, her pale green skirts pooling around her.
Parijahan was grinning. “I think you charmed the prince.”
“I think I did.”
“Was it difficult?”
“I felt like throwing up the entire time.”
Parijahan laughed. Nadya dropped her head into her hands. “He isn’t what I expected.” She had been expecting someone more like how she’d first seen Malachiasz—intimidating and powerful—and wasn’t sure what to do with this charmingly awkward boy. That he was one of the most powerful blood mages in Tranavia—as well as a heretic—unfortunately caused her fingers to itch for the szitelka hidden in her sleeve. She had wavered too much already; she couldn’t allow herself to feel any more.
Nadya had spent a fair portion of the evening tracking the king’s movements, trying to decipher just how many guards he had around him at all times, just how difficult it would be to separate him and kill him.
Their odds weren’t good. “Do you think I’ll have to win this—whatever this Rawalyk is—to get us close enough?”
Parijahan considered, her gray eyes cast up at the painting on the ceiling. “I don’t know if we have that much time. Be careful around any Vultures you see lurking around the palace.”
Nadya pulled Kostya’s necklace out from under the neckline of her dress and flipped it between her fingers. She didn’t need to be warned about the Vultures.
“What’s your homeland like? Akola?” she asked. She didn’t want to talk about the Vultures with that painting hovering over them.
Parijahan smiled, her eyes closing dreamily. “Warm. Even in the winter, it’s not nearly so cold as it is in Kalyazin. The sands catch the sun and everything is golden.”
“How long have you been away?”
“A long time. Much too long but still not long enough.”
“Do you think you’ll go back?”
Parijahan laughed. “I don’t know.” She stood. “Mistakes were made. People died. Rashid and I both learned that sometimes the only thing left is to disappear.” She held out her hands to Nadya, offering to help her to her feet.
Nadya accepted. Parijahan was taller than her, and she rested her brown hands on Nadya’s shoulders.
“We’re asking too much of you, Nadya, I know that. We’re asking you to trust us, foreigners that we are, and Malachiasz, monster that he is, and put your entire being on the line for the sake of something that may be impossible.” She rested her forehead against Nadya’s. “Please do not think just because you fell into our lives at an opportune moment that the three of us do not care about you. I do, and Rashid and Malachiasz do as well.”
“I’m used to being used for my power,” Nadya said. “You three are my friends. I’m just tired of secrets.”
Parijahan nodded. “I understand.”
Nadya didn’t usually see this side of Parijahan. It relieved her to see there was a warm softness to Parijahan’s flinty gaze.
“Well, I survived the court of monsters this far,” Nadya said cheerfully. “Now it’s just a matter of finding a weakness in their system and exploiting it.”
* * *
Nadya tucked her prayer beads in her dress pocket. It was late, but not so late that it would be odd for her to be found wandering the palace halls. Besides, she was too nervous to sleep—and she hated feeling like she was alone in Tranavia. She needed the gods back. There had to be a way past the veil that was blocking Nadya’s access to them.
“Where are you going?” Parijahan poked her head out of her room.
“To find some answers, ideally. You stay here in case one of the boys shows up. I wouldn’t want them to worry their pretty heads about us.”
Parijahan frowned.
“I’ll be fine, Parj,” Nadya said, clipping Malachiasz’s spell book to her belt. “I have the prince’s attention. Malachiasz will take care of the Vultures surrounding the king, and I’ll use the prince to get close enough to strike.”
Parijahan reluctantly let her go.
The palace was eerily quiet as Nadya wandered through the halls. As if everyone was waiting—a bated breath before a plunge. The flickering candlelight cast ominous shadows on the paintings that stretched over the ceilings.
The royal wing was on the opposite side of the palace and she found it watched by a handful of king’s guards. No Vultures in sight.
One of them called her over to ask her business and believed her when she told him she got turned around looking for the library. A bored slavhka up too late wanting something as harmless as books. He pointed her in the right direction and then promptly ignored her.
She wasn’t expecting to find anything on her magic in the library, but surely someone had documented the blood magic causing the heavens to be blocked off from the earth. Tranavians were so terribly proud of it after all.
There were a few people in the stacks when Nadya entered, but evening was growing into night and they paid her no mind. Nadya didn’t have a firm sense of what she was searching for, but if growing up in a monastery had taught her anything, it was how to find exactly what she needed from a library.
She tucked her hand in her pocket as she wandered through the stacks—the library was large, and stairs spiraled up to multiple floors all filled with books. Her fingers rubbed over her prayer beads. The gods still felt too distant—but there was a faint nudge at the back of her head, pressing her to the back of the library.
Nadya had always thought she read Tranavian far better than she spoke it. Her fingers brushed over the spines of old, crumbling books, worn down with time and negligence. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was looking at—the titles she glanced at didn’t mean anything to her.
Am I supposed to be seeing something here?
No answer. She sighed, fingers twisting her prayer beads. This was probably a pointless endeavor. She wasn’t going to find anything that could help in a Tranavian library.
A sharper nudge came just as her hand froze over a thin volume wedged between two books, pushed so far back it wasn’t even visible. She carefully extricated it. The cover was blank, no title, no indication to suggest what the book was about. The cloth cover was ragged at the edges, and when Nadya cracked it the pages were yellowed—the hand that had written the text spidery and thin.
Nadya moved to a table. She was gentle when she opened the book fully. It felt as if it could crumble at the slightest touch.
The symbol on the first page was familiar. Uncomfortably familiar. She let go of her prayer beads, shoving them deep into her pocket, and reached for the necklace hanging around her neck.
The same spiral was etched into the round pendant.
She only had time to flip to the first page. Enough time to see the word god scrawled in that spiderweb hand. Enough time to realize she had stopped hearing the quiet sounds of other people in the room and to gather that someone was watching her.