There will be peace, one day, I have to believe that, because I have nothing else left.
—Fragment from the personal journals of Milyena Shishova
The silence was profound.
Nadya wasn’t sure what it was they had done. Bound Chyrnog, perhaps, but the rest of the gods had gone silent with him. Nadya had woken up and promptly burst into tears. Anna had been at her bedside and crawled in next to her, tucking her head against Nadya’s shoulder.
“What did we do?” Nadya whispered.
Anna was quiet for a long time. “It was hard to watch. You all were shifting and changing and being … unraveled. The sun was gone, and then a horrible quiet, perfect stillness.”
“How am I alive, then?”
Anna took Nadya’s hand, lifting it up. Nadya jerked, not quite able to comprehend what she was seeing. The tips of two fingers on her left hand were gone, the littlest and the ring finger.
“Oh,” she whispered, not quite able to wrap her head around the missing pieces. Maybe the gods had helped after all.
Something in her chest shifted.
“Where’s Malachiasz?” she asked.
Anna didn’t immediately respond and panic gripped Nadya. He must have made it. If she did—and she was in the heart of the storm—he had to be all right.
“Come with me,” Anna finally said softly.
Dread filled Nadya. She got up slowly, her entire body aching, the silence in her head enough to give her a headache.
Nadya frowned. “I can’t, uh, look—”
“No. Only the hand. The rest was quite a lot, though.”
Nadya smiled. “Think of what Father Alexei would say.” She began rummaging in the trunk at the foot of the bed for something to wear.
Anna’s expression faltered and then she said, “I think he’d be proud of you.”
Nadya froze. She stared into the piles of fabric and had to swallow back her tears. She tugged a black dress, red embroidery at the cuffs, out of the trunk and pulled it on. She debated whether to braid her hair but left it down. She was no longer that girl.
Anna took her through a hallway. They appeared to be in a large house. Simple in style, though. Anna squeezed Nadya’s hand before knocking lightly on a door and shouldering it open.
Nadya didn’t know what she was expecting, but it was the worst. Malachiasz dead or someplace where she could not reach him. Gone from her forever. A monster. Eldritch chaos god that he was, all he was.
She didn’t expect Malachiasz alive and awake, arguing with Serefin while Parijahan listened wearily in the corner. He was leaning on crutches—why was he—?
Oh.
His left leg was gone just under the knee. Chyrnog taking his final dues. He glanced over Serefin’s shoulder, catching sight of her, his face breaking into the most exhausted but happy smile she had ever seen from him. It took everything in her not to slam into him.
His hair was clean and loose around his shoulders, parted on the side and threaded with beads, and there was a new ease to him. With a shiver, a cluster of eyes opened at his jaw. She crossed the room and maybe she did throw her arms around him a little too hard because he let out a soft oof and wobbled.
She clutched at him, burying her face in his chest. She was going to cry, and she didn’t want to keep crying but he was alive and he was whole and he was here.
“Nadezhda,” he murmured, his face in her hair. There was some awkwardness as they navigated the crutches, but she didn’t care.
She pulled back to take his face between her hands, trace the corners of his smile. “You survived,” she whispered.
“Mostly.”
“Me too!” She held up her hand.
He took it, rearranging the crutches underneath his arms, skimming his fingers over the aborted knuckles.
“We almost match,” she said, pressing her fingertips to his and lining up where his little finger cut off suddenly.
He let out a breathless, incredulous laugh.
“What happened?” Nadya asked.
“He thought consuming you would strengthen him; the opposite was true. Serefin made the prison—”
“I helped!” Serefin said cheerfully.
Malachiasz rolled his eyes, fondly. The rift between the brothers would take time to heal, but perhaps the healing had started.
“It nearly failed. But…” he trailed off, pain flickering on his face. “He molded himself to me, thus his power was mine to use.”
She tugged Malachiasz down and kissed him. Awkward and gentle and messy because he couldn’t stop smiling through the kiss and she couldn’t, either.
She stepped back and Malachiasz readjusted his crutches.
“Comfortable?” Serefin asked.
He nodded, taking a tentative step. It was ungainly, nothing like his usual grace, but he didn’t appear particularly bothered. She sensed that was a dam that would break eventually.
“We’ll figure out a more permanent false limb when we get back to Tranavia,” Serefin said.
Malachiasz shot him a grateful smile.
After rallying the armies, and with the Kalyazi king ill, Katya and a general in the Tranavian army had carefully arranged an armistice. It wasn’t peace, but it was something.
It was harder than she expected, living, after everything. It all felt strangely empty, and she wondered if it was her or if it was this strange silence.
She only told Malachiasz, much later. He took the news with a carefully neutral expression. “Is it like what happened before?” he asked. “When they stopped talking to you?”
They were in the manor’s small library. Malachiasz idly flipping through a book at a table, Nadya sitting on top of it next to him. Parijahan and Serefin had been talking about how they would get back to Tranavia—if they could find and convince Pelageya to let them use her strange magic to return—and Nadya, realizing she was about to lose them all, had panicked.
She hadn’t considered that Parijahan and Rashid would go back with the Tranavians. That was silly, of course they would. The moment Malachiasz was awake he had set to figuring out how it was the Akolans’ magic worked. Rashid was willing but wary; Parijahan couldn’t make up her mind.
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m not a cleric anymore.”
He cast her a sidelong glance. “You’re more than that.”
She knew, but the title had meant something to her. What was she without it? And did it mean there would never be more clerics? No clerics, no blood magic? She didn’t know. There was no one to go to anymore. She had to live with the not knowing.
He squeezed her hand. There was quiet between them, and she liked the quiet, but she couldn’t shake the fact that things were starting to move, and she didn’t know where that left her.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
He looked up, closing the book. “Well, if I don’t leave Kalyazin soon, Katya is going to push to have me hanged.”
“For your crimes.”
“For my crimes, yes.”
“And you’ll go back to Tranavia and retake your throne, execute the ones who wronged you, and spend the rest of your life on the cusp of godhood and trying to crack open the mysteries of the universe?”
“Dramatic. I would like to take a nap as well.” He peered closely at her. “You’re doing that thing where you don’t tell me what you’re actually trying to say. I can’t read your mind.”
“You can, actually.”
“It might be a bit rude of me to make it a habit.”
She smiled. He relaxed enough to make her aware of how tense he was.
“I guess I’m wondering what I should do now.”
“What do you want, Nadezhda?”
Had anyone ever asked her that before and meant it? Had she ever been allowed to want anything in her life? She was the cleric, she was a girl from a monastery, she was made to do the Church’s will, she was made to enact the will of the gods.
What did she want?
“I want to go home,” she whispered. She didn’t know what that meant. Her home was nothing but ashes.
He made a soft sound. “Kalyazin, then?” Two words and a ravine of a question.
Nadya reached out, sliding her fingers across Malachiasz’s cheek until she gently cupped his face, tilting it toward hers. “It’s you,” she said. She kissed the tattoos on his forehead. “You’re my home.”
In truth, it was him and Parijahan and Rashid and, gods, even Serefin and Kacper and Ostyia. It was Katya, though Katya would remain here.
Katya had pulled her aside and explained very seriously that as much as she wanted Nadya at court—as much as Kalyazin needed Nadya at court—she could not promise that the Matriarch wouldn’t try for another pyre.
“I could desperately use you near,” Katya had said with a rueful shrug. “But I can’t put you in danger while Madgalena is still in charge. But I sense she won’t be for long. Time to root out the poison.”
And now, sitting in the library with Malachiasz, Nadya realized that was all right.
Malachiasz flushed at her words. He dropped his gaze down at the closed book. One of his hands nervously rubbed at the stump of his leg—while he’d told her it didn’t hurt too badly, it still felt like his leg was there sometimes, and it was jarring to suddenly realize it was gone. The echoes of what the god had done to him scarred deeper than could be seen. It would take a long time for him to heal—if he ever did.
“I want,” Nadya continued into his silence, “to figure out what my magic means—if it’s really so different or if there are similar accounts that we haven’t found yet.”
He perked up. She smiled slightly.
“I want to help Serefin draft a peace treaty, even if it takes years. I want … a lot, but I mostly want everything to be quiet, for a while. I want you.”
There was something vulnerable in his expression that she didn’t expect. “Would you go back to Tranavia with me?”
She tucked a lock of hair behind his ear. “I think so.”
“I’m still the Black Vulture.”
“I know.”
“I was lying about leaving the Vultures.”
She laughed. “I know. Would you? If I asked it of you?”
He only hesitated for a heartbeat. “If you asked, yes.”
Warmth flooded through her chest and it took everything in her not to yank his face closer so she could kiss him. She let her thumb brush over his cheek, skirting past an eye that blinked—there and gone—on his skin. “A shame, then, that I love each and every wretched part of you: Black Vulture, chaos god, and all. I won’t ask it of you.”
“All my parts are terrible, that’s true. It would also be impossible, so I’m glad you’re not asking it of me.”
She did kiss him, then. Softly, because they had time now. Because she could kiss him whenever she wanted, and it was a thrilling feeling. To be able to tangle her hands in his hair and not have to prepare for him to be ripped away.
He sighed. “I never imagined you would leave Kalyazin.”
The thought hurt, she couldn’t deny that. But the thought of letting him go, even for a little while, hurt so much worse. And she was tired of hurting.
“There aren’t really churches in Tranavia anymore. Would you—is that a thing you would want?”
“I don’t know! I gave everything I was to this damn church. All for nothing.”
He took her hand, kissing her fingers. “Not for nothing. You stopped an old god.”
“We contained an old god,” she corrected.
“We killed Nyrokosha.”
“Oh, are you taking credit for that, too?”
“It was one of my Vultures,” he said, a little smugly.
She sighed. Nothing was going to be easy. She had to learn to live with what she was and what that meant. She had to live with all she had done.
“Come home with me,” he said, cradling her hands in his. “I will harass Pelageya mercilessly until she teaches me how to do that strange transportation magic. This won’t be the last time you’ll see Kalyazin.”
“She will never teach you that.”
“I will be so persuasive and charming and nice; she will not know how to refuse. Nadya, there’s so much magic we never knew about! I want to figure it out with you.”
A different place, a different Malachiasz, the same beseeching question. How long until the study of magic wasn’t enough for him?
“Someone needs to put a chain around your ankle to keep you on the ground,” Nadya said with a soft laugh. “You’re going to burn up again and start another apocalypse.”
A flicker in his expression. He thought she was refusing.
“You fought him off, in the end. I suppose I’m still surprised.”
“Veceslav took his place,” Malachiasz said in a rush.
What? She had asked Veceslav to help, but she hadn’t expected that.
“I accepted.”
“You?”
He laughed softly. “I think I’ve been wrong about some things, too. And there really wasn’t any other option.”
“Who are you and what did you do with Malachiasz Czechowicz?”
A shiver at the sound of his name. That would never stop. Eyes still flickered open on his skin; his hands still trembled. He might have broken free from Chyrnog, but he would never be free of the damage he had wrought upon himself.
“I don’t know how to be better. I don’t think I ever will, really, but … I’m tired of death.”
“You have to go home and literally execute people.”
“How do you always ruin it when I’m trying to be earnest?”
“It’s a very special talent of mine.”
But that they could be here, arguing like this, was a blessing Nadya hadn’t let herself dream of. He gave her a kiss on the cheek, mumbling something about tea, and left the room.
Maybe she would go to Tranavia with him. Parijahan was going. And with Parijahan would go Rashid. Nadya couldn’t watch as everyone in her life went a world away and left her alone.
But she wouldn’t be alone. No matter what, she would have Anna. When she’d brought up the possibility of leaving, the priestess had lifted an eyebrow and said, “Of course I’m coming with you.”
The last ones left from the monastery making their homes in the heart of Tranavia.
Ostyia was the most torn. Nadya never did find out what Katya said to convince her to go home with Serefin.
And Serefin, the boy who she had watched from across a courtyard as he burned her home. She watched him now across the room as he read a report by firelight, Kacper asleep beside him with his head on Serefin’s shoulder.
He glanced up from the report, meeting her eyes. He smiled slightly. May nothing ever put them across a battlefield from each other again.
The battle was hardly over. She had sat in on some of the meetings between Serefin and Katya—before they devolved into drinking games while Kacper exhaustedly discussed actual matters with Milomir—and they were a long way from peace. They were a long way from understanding.
She might never have it with her Church. Or understand why the Matriarch hated her so profoundly. If it was more than Nadya’s strange birth and her magic that was so difficult to explain. If she was just a scapegoat for all that was changing in the world.
Żaneta sat in the corner of the room with Anna. Nadya had noticed the two girls spending more time together, and perhaps it was nothing, but she was secretly delighted that the girl who had tried so hard to pull her away from Malachiasz was drawn to a Vulture.
Katya and Ostyia were playing some game with elaborate tiles that frequently ended in them yelling incredible insults at each other after every turn.
Malachiasz returned, using his crutches to almost elegantly lower himself down next to her where she had moved to a fur rug in front of the fire, a blanket tucked around her shoulders.
“You’ve adapted unnervingly fast,” she said.
“He’ll have to relearn to walk when we get him a false leg,” Serefin said before Malachiasz could respond.
Malachiasz shot him a dirty look and Nadya could almost see him contemplate launching one of the crutches at Serefin’s head. He glanced at her. “So, I was going to bring you tea, but…” He shrugged ruefully. “Haven’t really figured out a gait that won’t spill it everywhere.”
“He’s going to milk acting helpless for years if we let him,” Rashid said as he entered the room, carrying the abandoned cups of tea. He handed them to Nadya and Malachiasz, dropped a bottle of wine in Serefin’s hand, and gave a cup to Parijahan as she settled down at Nadya’s other side.
“Did you get tea from Akola?” Nadya asked, sniffing the air.
Parijahan made a happy sound as she stuck her face in the steam wafting from the cup. Rashid flopped down alongside them.
“What are you going to do about Akola?” Malachiasz asked.
“Stop running,” Parijahan replied. “We’ll see what they say when they finally come for me.”
They may not have achieved peace for their fragile countries yet, but they had achieved some kind of peace here, and for now, that was all Nadya needed.