Wicked Saints (Something Dark and Holy #1) - Emily A. Duncan

1

NADEZHDA

LAPTEVA

Death, magic, and winter. A bitter cycle that Marzenya spins with crimson threads around pale fingers. She is constant; she is unrelenting; she is eternal. She can grant any spell to those she has blessed, her reach is the fabric of magic itself.

—Codex of the Divine, 2:18

The calming echo of a holy chant filtered down from the sanctuary and into the cellars. It was late afternoon, just before Vespers, a time where psalms to the gods were given up in an effortless chorus.

Nadezhda Lapteva glared up at the mountain of potatoes threatening to avalanche down over the table. She twisted her knife hard against the one in her hand, narrowly missing skin as she curled the peel into a spiral.

“A cleric’s duty is important, Nadezhda,” she muttered, mimicking the dour tone of the monastery’s abbot. “You could change the tide of the war, Nadezhda. Now go wither in the cellars for the rest of your life, Nadezhda.”

The table was covered in potato peel spirals. She hadn’t anticipated losing her entire day to remedial labor, yet here she was.

“Did you hear that?” Konstantin acted like she hadn’t spoken. His paring knife hung limp in his fingers as he listened.

There was nothing but the service upstairs. If he was trying to distract her, it wasn’t going to work. “Is it our impending death by potato avalanche? I can’t hear it, but I’m certain it’s coming.”

She received a withering look in response. She waved her knife at him. “What could it possibly be? The Tranavians at our doorstep? They have seven thousand stairs to climb first. Perhaps it’s their High Prince and he’s finally decided to convert.”

She tried to be glib, but the idea of the High Prince anywhere near the monastery made her shiver. He was rumored to be an extremely powerful blood mage, one of the most terrifying in all of Tranavia, a land rife with heretics.

“Nadya,” Konstantin whispered, “I’m serious.”

Nadya stabbed her knife into yet another potato as she glanced at him. It was his fault they were down here. His pranks, conjured from a mixture of boredom and delirium after early morning prayers, had been innocent at first. Switching out the monastery’s incense with lemongrass, or snipping the sanctuary’s candlewicks. Minor offenses at best. Nothing to deserve death by potato.

Filling Father Alexei’s washing bowl with a red dye that looked like blood, though, that was what had done them in.

Blood wasn’t a thing to be made light of, not in these times.

Father Alexei’s rage didn’t end in the cellars. After they scaled Potato Mountain—if they scaled Potato Mountain—they still had hours’ worth of holy texts to copy in the scriptorium. Nadya’s hands were already cramping just thinking about it.

“Nadya.” Her knife slipped off course as Konstantin nudged her elbow.

“Damn it, Kostya.”

My perfect streak of fifty-four intact spirals, ruined, she thought mournfully. She wiped her hands on her tunic and glared at him.

His dark eyes were focused on the closed door that led upstairs. There was nothing but the—

Oh.

The potato slipped from her fingers, falling to the dusty floor. She hadn’t noticed when the service above had stopped. Kostya’s fingers dug into her sleeve but his touch felt distant.

This can’t be happening.

“Cannons,” she whispered, somehow making it more real by saying the word aloud. She shifted the grip on her knife, flipping it backward as if it were one of her thin-bladed voryens and not a half-dull kitchen blade.

Cannons were a sound every child of Kalyazin knew intimately. It was what they grew up with, their lullabies mixed with firing in the distance. War was their constant companion, and Kalyazi children knew to flee when they heard those cannons and tasted the iron tinge of magic in the air.

Cannons only meant one thing: blood magic. And blood magic meant Tranavians. For a century a holy war had raged between Kalyazin and Tranavia. Tranavians didn’t care that their blood magic profaned the gods. If they had their way, the gods’ touch would be eradicated from Kalyazin like it had been from Tranavia. But the war had never reached farther than the Kalyazin border. Until now. If Nadya could hear the cannons, that meant the war was slowly swallowing Kalyazin alive. Inch by bloody inch it was seeping into the heart of Nadya’s country and bringing death and destruction with it.

And there was only one reason why the Tranavians would attack a secluded monastery in the mountains.

The cellars shook and dirt rained down. Nadya looked at Kostya, whose gaze was flint-eyed but fearful.