paused, peering at her face. “But you’re right, I see you have not grown any less curious.”
“Is the nature of divinity so fixed?” she asked.
“Seeing a man try to become a god and fail would draw up those questions, I would wager.”
“He didn’t fail.”
Ivan went very still.
“The king failed, yes, but someone else did the ritual and succeeded.”
“And?”
She shook her head, gazing at the iconostasis. It was ornamented with gold leaf and the impassive expressions of saints. “Maybe, if the gods spoke to me, I would have answers, but I don’t. And they don’t like talking about the nature of divinity anyway.”
“Magic and divinity are two very different things, intertwined into reality. Can you have divinity with no magic, as magic is bound in divinity?”
“But you can have magic without any touch of the gods,” Nadya said. “Are the Tranavians not proof of that?”
Ivan inclined his head. “And it is heresy. They are doomed for it.”
They most certainly are. But not, Nadya thought, in the way that the Kalyazi were expecting.
But what of Pelageya and her words that Nadya’s power wasn’t being drawn from within at all but from something else? Curiosity about Tranavian magic was one thing; she couldn’t very well ask this monk if he knew about witch magic.
“So, you think this is still some working of the gods?” she asked, flexing her fingers.
Something flickered on Ivan’s face. “What else could it be?” he asked kindly.
What else, indeed? It would be so easy to take his answer as truth and turn away from this, ignoring what was happening to her, even if it was to her own detriment. She didn’t want to uncover some dread magic, she wanted this to be simply another avenue of the gods’ punishment. That would be easily understood.
She wasn’t satisfied, but her weary heart didn’t want to fight.
“What of the Tranavian?” Ivan abruptly changed the subject.
Nadya sighed. “Malachiasz,” she whispered.
Ivan nodded. “It took convincing to get him inside. Are Tranavians so afraid of the truth?”
“I-I want to trust you the way Father Alexei did. The way I know I should. But if I am to tell you, I need you to swear to me that Malachiasz will not be harmed. I defied my goddess’s orders to keep him alive and I live with those consequences. But he must not be harmed. I need him. If I’m to fix anything, I need him.”
Ivan’s bushy eyebrows drew together.
“Please, Brother Ivan, please swear.”
Slowly Ivan nodded. “So long as he is under your protection, he shall not be harmed, I swear.”
She did not comment on the loophole he had included in his phrasing.
“Who is he, Nadezhda?”
She hesitated. She didn’t want to disappoint anyone else.
“Tranavia’s Black Vulture.”
Ivan’s face remained perfectly blank.
A war battled within Nadya as she fought with separate pulls. To find Malachiasz and run from this place, or to let Ivan kill him and end her problems right there. She almost bolted when Ivan stood up without a word and walked out the door.
Nadya rose to her feet so fast she nearly sent the bench flying. “You swore, Brother Ivan!”
Ivan flagged down one of the sisters. “Where’s the boy? The sickly looking one?”
She dogged Ivan’s heels as they followed the nun to one of the cells. Malachiasz was pacing the room when the door went flying open. He froze, eyes wide at the sight of the giant monk in the doorway. He saw Nadya and relaxed a fraction.
He had cleaned up. His hair was already drying in a thorny tangle. If the sisters had offered him clothes, he had refused them, instead wearing a black tunic embroidered with red blocking on the cuffs and leggings.
He stared at Ivan for a beat, and Nadya watched as his entire demeanor shifted. The anxious boy was closed away and the Black Vulture returned in his place. The cold and calculating and utterly cruel parts of Malachiasz that were the cult leader.
“That didn’t take long,” he said. The look he shot Nadya wasn’t betrayed, but it was fairly close.
She winced.
“What do you hope to gain by coming here?” Ivan asked. “What destruction do you plan to wreak?”
“Do you think I care for a monastery in the middle of nowhere in Kalyazin?” Malachiasz caged his heart with long, pale fingers. “I am here because she is here, nothing more, nothing less.”
“Come,” Ivan said gruffly to Malachiasz.
Malachiasz glanced at Nadya, gaze hooded. He had counseled kings. He could handle whatever Brother Ivan wanted. She touched the back of his hand as he