hands, the iron cold. She didn’t mean it in an accusatory way, she was merely curious.
Malachiasz frowned; the expression tugged at the tattoos on his forehead. He took his time answering. “When we met I gave you my name,” he said, his quiet voice scratchy with sleep. “It’s the only truth I have left.”
“It’s a truth you’ve given others as well.”
He turned, groaning, and pressed his face against her hip. “What do you want from me, Nadya?” His voice was teasing.
“I’m just pointing out: I am not the only person to know your name.”
“You’re just being difficult.”
She laughed and looked down at him. His black hair spilled onto the white pillows like ink. She drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them; thought about how when they were sitting in front of Alena’s altar he had practically admitted to her he was evil. He closed his eyes and his face was pleasant, peaceful. A monster king, feral and beautiful.
Her chest ached in the oddest of ways as it struck her again just how much she cared for this broken boy and how it terrified her. It would never stop terrifying her.
She laid back next to him. “Is it part of you? I mean, has it always been with you?” She didn’t need to clarify.
He was silent—she was getting used to his long silences—she hoped he said yes. That he had been born with iron in his body instead of bone. It would mean a curse of blood instead of something done to him by man. If he hadn’t been born with it, then it had been tortured into him. Experiments more gruesome than Nadya was willing to contemplate.
“I was born with the potential for monstrosity, as all people are,” he said finally. “The Salt Mines made it a reality. All I have is what they made me.”
Nadya pressed her mouth to his bare shoulder, another fracture making its way down her heart. She didn’t know what would happen to them at the end of this. She couldn’t even think that far. Her future was bleak and she knew it.
What would he say, if he knew her end goal remained the same? That she was willing to bring the gods’ judgment down on Tranavia. That when this veil parted she would still be theirs.
At least, she thought she would.
As Malachiasz turned his head to look at her, lifting a hand and brushing the backs of his fingers against her cheek, her heart squeezed painfully. He wasn’t the only one lying. She was doing a perfectly good job lying to herself.
31
SEREFIN
MELESKI
Svoyatovi Dobromir Pirozhkov: When Svoyatovi Dobromir Pirozhkov was a child, his sister fell into a frozen river and he miraculously returned her to life. Hers was an odd life, full of strange mishaps until finally she was killed in a bizarre accident, trampled by her own horse. Dobromir, who was not a cleric, was also chased by terrible luck throughout his life until ultimately he drowned in the same frozen river he saved his sister from years prior.
—Vasiliev’s Book of Saints
Serefin was used to the concept of pain. It was a familiar friend. When he was forced into the dark, what waited for him was something that could not be described in such easy, small words. This was not his friend. It was more; it was bigger than anything human vocabulary could name. It obliterated him—pulled him out of conscious existence and threw him into a world where monsters walked and blood fell from the sky like rainwater.
He was losing his grasp of his own awareness, of the very essence that made him Serefin, the moody High Prince with far more blood magic talent than would ever do him good as a king. The High Prince who never thought he would be king because he would die first. It was slipping away from him. No, not slipping, being pulled. It was being taken. He was losing all that made him who he was and he would be left in this wasteland world of blood and monsters and magic.
This world, this world, this world.
This world that would become reality. That he knew, intrinsically, whoever he even was. It was an overwhelming sense of knowing, of horror, of the kind of foreboding that drove a man insane.
Something he was, once. Before. Before what? Was there a line, a point, a moment that divided him into the Before and the After? Or was there nothing but this blood raining from