have ever reached higher than what they are?”
Malachiasz pointed to himself.
“So you’re like a god?” she said dryly.
He grimaced. “Obviously not. You see the problem?”
“I think your entire argument is based on semantics.”
“Isn’t that what everything is, though? Concepts that we give unnecessary weight. For all you know, you’re merely communicating with incredibly powerful beings, but they are only that. Not beings that had any hand in this world’s creation, or beings that determine the course of your life. Our kingdoms are falling apart, have been at war for a century, and it’s because of these things.”
Nadya straightened, shooting him an incredulous look.
He noted her reaction with a shrug. “There’s no other blame to place for a holy war that’s gone on this long. For just a moment, let yourself consider without your current religious hang-ups,” he said. “What if the gods were unseated from their thrones?”
“Impos—”
He held up a hand, lifting an eyebrow.
She ground her teeth. “Who would remove the beings of power, then?”
“Another being of equal or more power, clearly.”
“And what will that fix? Remove a foundation for how thousands of people structure their lives—for what?—the chance for blood mages to stop having their feelings hurt when we call them what they are?”
“Kalyazin is dying,” Malachiasz said, and Nadya shivered as their hypothetical conversation stepped too close to reality. “Tranavia is, too. And you expect me to believe that removing the forces that have toyed with us for thousands of years wouldn’t save us all from the ashes of what our kingdoms will soon become?”
She swallowed. “It’s moot,” she said, her voice too soft because she didn’t want to even consider what he was implying.
He smiled cheerfully. “Impossible, of course. Musings, nothing more. Regardless, your power is only that. It’s not like your people have been limited to only this so-called divine magic in the past,” he continued.
He was referring to witches—apostate magic users outside the gods’ approval—but there had been no witches in Kalyazin for decades. Their route of magic was considered just as heretical as blood magic and they had all but been eradicated by the old clerics during the time of the Witch Hunts. How did he even know about that? The chill of discomfort was gone and now she was righteously heated again. He was talking circles around her and she couldn’t keep him still for long enough to show him how he was wrong.
“You’re using heretics as an example,” she said. Witches and blood mages, it was all the same. “It’s not particularly compelling.”
“It’s proof that your holier-than-thou attitude about magic isn’t all there is!”
“I don’t have an attitude about magic.”
“You keep calling me a heretic.”
“You are a heretic. You just laid out sheer heresy in front of me. And my power is divine; calling me ‘holier than thou’ is just trite.”
He sat down beside her and she stiffened, suddenly acutely aware of … him. The way he folded up his lanky frame to sit, one knee glancing against her leg because he was so close. She swallowed. He took her wrist, his touch unbearably gentle, and pushed her sleeve back, exposing the still visible cut his claw had dragged down her forearm. There was a beat of silence, the road suddenly eerily quiet as they both stared down at the culmination of Nadya’s own heresy.
“Well,” he breathed out softly, a flicker of something feral at his lips, “perhaps you’re right. Maybe not so holy, after all.”
This should not be happening. She should not be leaning close to this boy, his touch warm against her skin. Her gaze caught against the shape of his mouth; her brain slowly coming to register what he said.
She yanked her arm away and continued scrubbing at the altar, trying not to seethe and failing. Trying not to think about the way it felt when his fingers curled around her wrist, the way his leg was still pressed against hers, and failing at that, too.
Malachiasz was quiet for a long time before he spoke again. “You never feel trapped?”
“Trapped by what?”
“The path you have to follow for your magic. That it could be denied at another being’s whim. You have so little say in the direction of your own life. Isn’t that stifling?”
“When you frame it that way, yes. Except my life isn’t like that. My magic isn’t like that either.” But … for a flickering instant, she let herself consider just how carefully she had to tread with the gods, how a decision to survive had already