A few of the Vultures struggled to their feet. Parijahan slid out of the shadows to deal with them herself. Serefin couldn’t hold off his father much longer.
“We both know we’re the only ones who can save our kingdoms,” he continued, voice soft.
Her blade slipped in her shaking hand, cutting a shallow line on his throat. Crimson trickled down the pale of his skin. He stilled, icy eyes never breaking from hers.
Nadya had been so terribly naïve. She had listened to her heart as it whispered that the boy with the charming smile and gentle hands didn’t mean any harm; he was dangerous, he was thrilling, but he meant well. Lies, lies, lies.
They had all had their eyes on the king of Tranavia; she wondered if they should have been watching Malachiasz the whole time.
“You’ll help me stop this,” she said.
He was silent a beat too long.
“I will destroy your carefully laid plans to accomplish my own.”
“No,” he finally said. “They align, you see.”
It didn’t make sense and she didn’t understand. Her heart but shredded bits of flesh, pounding between her ribs. He but a monster, darkness in the shape of a boy. She was numb.
She lifted her blade from his throat, reaching down and sliding her hand over his wrist. She pulled his hand up, dragging her blade into the same spiral she had cut into her own. He hissed as she pressed the pendant over the cut, closing his hand around it, interlacing her fingers with his.
“I could do a lot with blood like yours,” she whispered, her mouth at the shell of his ear. “And I want you to know that some gods require blood.”
His eyes flickered from onyx to pale, his chin tilting down as a smile pulled at his lips. “Complicit in heresy, indeed.”
She felt his power collide with hers, nightmarish and black. Aching and roiling like a poison and seeping inside her. She let it in, let it mix with her own well of light and divinity.
“Now you’ve tasted real power, towy dżimyka,” Malachiasz murmured, “what will you do with it?” He laughed softly and slipped the pendant back over her head, trailing his bloody fingertips down her cheek. “What will you do with freedom?”
She stared at him, at this broken boy who was a horror and a liar and had started this disaster. His power was intoxicating. She moved her face closer, her lips achingly near his. Her numb naïve heart screamed at her to forgive him again, one more chance, but he didn’t deserve more chances.
“I’m going to save this world from monsters like you.”
“Then here’s your chance.”
She pressed her lips to his temple and pulled away. Serefin was on his knees, hunched over in pain, blood oozing from his head, one hand white-knuckled on the ground holding him up. Dead moths littered the floor around him. The stars around his head began to flicker out.
Nadya punched another hole in the veil. She didn’t break it completely, not yet, just enough to feel Marzenya’s presence. Her rage, her ice, her anger. It was enough for Nadya to take the two halves of power she had within her—her own and that of a monster—and form them into something she could use. For a blinding, terrible moment holy speech flooded Nadya’s senses. She saw only light; she heard only the chimes of divinity; copper filled her mouth.
Izak Meleski turned toward her and Nadya was hit by a crushing, agonizing weight. The man’s power could send horrors into Nadya’s mind, but she had seen horrors. There was little left to frighten her.
She pulled her voryen up to use as a channel for her power, pushing flames down onto the floor and toward the king. They were tinged with darkness. The flames touched the king, but he backed away, forcing a new horror into Nadya’s mind.
She shook it off. Light tipped her fingers and she called a pillar of blinding power down from the sky—from the hole in the veil—to slam down upon the king.
For a heartbeat, she thought she had him. But a constricting power beat down upon her, forcing her still.
Blood vessels burst in her eyes from the strain weighing down heavy upon her. Blood dripped down from her nose, leaked from her eyes, she could feel it pooling in her ears.
She was dying.
SEREFIN
MELESKI
When his father turned away, it felt like Serefin was coming up for air after being drowned. He gasped, choking on blood, and forced himself to his feet.
The cleric stood, frozen. White light surrounded her head—almost a halo—but something about it was tainted and it shivered in erratic tremors. Blood drained out of her like water. Serefin took a step closer but his knees gave out. He had nothing left; a few moths that fluttered weakly around him, not enough blood left to cast. He was drained dry.
Like a shadow, the Akolan girl whom Serefin had seen trailing the cleric slipped into the center of the room. She snapped out with her wrist in a violent blur. It was a whip, Serefin realized dimly. The blunted leather struck Izak Meleski directly in the temple and he stumbled.
“Nadya!” the Akolan girl screamed as the king’s attention turned on her. Her limbs seized.
Serefin glanced at Malachiasz, who watched impassively from his throne, chin in his hand. All that power and yet he did nothing. Hatred burned in Serefin’s veins. He had known the Black Vulture was a danger, yet he had let himself believe with foolish hope that perhaps he had an ally, when he was just another monster.
35
NADEZHDA
LAPTEVA
Svoyatova Valentina Benediktova: A cleric of Marzenya whose path became clouded when it crossed that of the Tranavian blood mage, Urszula Klimkowska. All records of Valentina end there. No one knows whether Valentina killed Urszula, or vice versa. Her canonization was due to the miracle she performed when she was twelve of defending the city of Tolbirnya. There is no record of her death; her body was never found.
—Vasiliev’s Book of Saints
Nadya pushed her hands out and shattered the king’s hold. He stood with his attention on Parijahan, torturing her. Nadya gripped her blade in her bloody hand and tugged at her power, putting herself across the room in the space of a heartbeat. She slammed her blade into the king’s back.
Divine magic and blood magic and something else, something different. Power that should not be combined; power strong enough to take apart the one who wielded it. Magic that was so in opposition that in another circumstance, held by another person, it would destroy itself before being bound into a formidable spell.
But Nadya knew divine power, and she had touched Malachiasz’s power, knew the shape of it, dark as it was, and she knew her own well of magic.
She forced the torrent of magic through the blade and into the king. This would kill even a god.
He jerked, his body shuddering. Nadya pulled the blade out, staring at it in abject horror before she plunged it back in his body a second time. She stumbled to her knees. Parijahan crumpled, blood welling at the corners of her mouth.
There was silence.
Then the single, ringing sound of footsteps on the marble floor. Nadya lifted her head with some difficulty to watch as Malachiasz stepped down from his dais, the chalice he had been toying with back in his hand.
The expression on his face was strange. Eyes glassy, sweat beading at his temples. He swallowed hard, gaze flicking to Nadya in a glimmer so fast she wondered if she imagined it.