not either.”
Ostyia took a gasping breath. She began to cough, shoulders shaking. “Serefin?” Her voice was scratchy.
“Didn’t we have this conversation already?” He tried to joke but it came out flat. He’d almost lost her. He had so little; he was unable to even consider what might have happened to Kacper. He couldn’t lose them.
“We have to find Kacper,” she said, straightening. Her eye grew wide as she reached up to touch the skin underneath his left eye. “Can you still see out of this?”
When he closed his good eye, his bad eye was still a blurry mess. “It’s the same, why?”
“It’s full of stars, Serefin.” Her voice was hushed, awed. “You’re surrounded by stars.”
He leaned back on his heels, unsure what to say. Yes, this is what happens now just didn’t seem to do it justice. He didn’t know what it meant.
Behind them, the cleric stirred.
NADEZHDA
LAPTEVA
Nadya’s head pounded. She stared up at the beautiful ceiling of the cathedral and contemplated giving up.
Maybe what they had done would change things. Maybe things would be better now. Or, maybe, they had just set into motion something far worse. Her hand ached with a dull, throbbing pain. The spiral would scar into her palm, a reminder.
Nadya sat up slowly, looking up to the window where Malachiasz had disappeared. He had lied to her, betrayed her, and now he was gone.
She felt hollow, utterly used up. The prince knelt down in front of her, obviously in pain.
Nadya smiled faintly. She stuck out a hand.
“I don’t think we’ve ever been introduced,” she said softly. The tight hold she had been keeping over the way she spoke Tranavian loosened, and her Kalyazi accent melted into her words. “My name is Nadezhda Lapteva, but you can call me Nadya.”
His scarred eye looked different. It was a deeper blue than his other pale eye, and stars glittered in constellations in its depths. He took her hand. His was warm as his fingers wrapped around hers.
“Serefin Meleski, and please, just call me Serefin,” he replied. A huge gray moth fluttered down from the ceiling and landed in his brown hair. “Did you know you have a halo?” he asked. The awkward, strangely charming boy was still there, underneath the exhaustion and the stars. Underneath the power that felt divine.
She raised an eyebrow. “Did you know you have a moth in your hair?”
He smiled and nodded.
A crash of lightning struck right outside the chapel doors, making them all jump.
The dead body of the Tranavian king was across the room. A chalice lay on the ground beside him. His blood had dried on Nadya’s hands, leaving them stiff.
Her gaze passed over the body, locking onto the chalice. She felt like she’d been punched in the chest as she looked at it.
So she had done what she set out to do; so she had killed the king, she had broken the veil. At what cost? A higher price than she had been prepared to pay and more questions than she had been willing to answer.
She cast a prayer up to Marzenya. She had no prayer beads, she had nothing.
Her prayer was met with cold, deliberate silence and it needled at Nadya’s heart, but she knew the goddess heard her. The veil was finally, truly, gone.
Nadya looked up at the shattered cathedral window once more, glass fragments dusting the ground around her. Malachiasz’s black power itched underneath her skin as it fought against her own divine magic.
She would release it if she thought she could; if it would do any good at all she would purge it, break off the last piece tying her to the Black Vulture.
Her palm ached and she shifted the fingers of her left hand, feeling the skin stretch and tighten around the spiral wound. She rose to her feet, movements slow. Lying on the ground some space away from the body of the dead king was an iron crown. She picked it up, returning to where Serefin sat looking vaguely confused.
“The king is dead, long live the king,” she said, handing it to him.
He looked up at her. His eyes were otherworldly now, ghostly and divine in the way stars swirled in the darkness of his left eye, a contrast to the icy pale of his right. Serefin laughed wearily. “Words I never thought I would hear.”
“Where are all the Vultures?” Ostyia asked.
“Most probably fled with their king,” Serefin said.
“I guess the next question would be, where are your nobility?” Parijahan asked.
Serefin shook his head. “Waiting to