Prince and the Throne (Fedosian Wars #2)

16. Illuminate

sixteen

Illuminate

The sun glittered on the snow, incredibly bright for a breath before dipping behind the storm clouds. Blizzard tonight, Lev knew that. For two days he’d been singing, and he’d been walking since he lost his horse. He didn’t know where the tracks were and that was all right. He was no longer in the trees and saw a church. It was Day Solis after all, and he tipped his face up at the silent saints.

Semyon held on for as long as he could, but he just slept now. Awake among the saints perhaps but he wouldn’t wake up in this world again. Something, though Lev had a pretty good guess what, was scaring all the creatures out of the forest, and he’d run into wolves last night. They got his workhorse. It was just Star and him now. Semyon draped over the saddle, Lev walked beside him with the lead in his hand. Beside and not in front because he didn’t know where he was going and let the horse decide.

“You found a church, Star.” Lev petted his muzzle. “I hope you have coins for the collection plate because I got nothing.”

The horse snorted. He gave him a bit of sugar, the last of what he had. He had nothing in his world now. No fortress, no parents, no house, no lover. Just his cock, his hand, and this one horse which he’d stolen.

Laughing at me now, aren’t you, Syoma?

Life down here must be pretty stupid once you’re in the sky, eternal peace among your beloveds.

It was a typical country church made of wood after having blown the entire budget on the gilded dome. The wooden gate was open, and Lev tied Star to the hitching post. The snow was trampled and melted around it. They’d had a crowd earlier, the tracks leading away to where he assumed the illusory town was, but the nave was empty when he entered.

“Parson!” Lev called, and after some moments, an old man in a brown robe holding a piece of bread appeared from behind the vestry. Brown cassock signified clergy without alchemy. “Is there a mage?” Lev asked.

The old man finished chewing his bread, swallowed it dry without water, then answered, “There was a great tragedy in Murmia a season ago. The archmage and his synod gather with the saints now. How may I help you, my boy?”

“Surely, they are not all dead,” Lev said.

“Some remain, yes.” The parson nodded. “But Luminary Matvey has called them to Murmia. He’s to bring order to the church in these dark times, and now we wait. What brings you to Bone Country, young man? You’re not in my congregation.”

“Well, my friend is outside. Will you read the rite for him proper? I need to do the last thing he asked, then burn him before dark.”

“I see.” The parson wiped crumbs from his beard. “Let me get the codex.” He turned and hobbled away. “What was his last wish?” He stopped and twisted back because Lev hadn’t answered. “I must know because it’s part of the rite, so his soul may be at rest.”

“I’m going to cut his heart out.”

The parson grimaced in distaste. “We’re not heathens. You may not do that here, and if that is the intent, you may also leave.” Gesturing at the door, he marched back toward Lev.

“I need it, Parson. I’m going to kill a necromancer.”

“Nonsense, boy. No one can kill a necromancer. You must be a Guard for it.”

“So what if I am?”

The parson pointed at the painted ceiling. “Saints hear you, boy. Don’t blaspheme in the hall of prayers.”

“They hear nothing for a necromancer walks these lands and they do nothing. But I am Lev of White Guard.”

The man with a tall nose squinted at him, studying him, then unconvinced, his grimace returned. He was going send Lev out, so Lev closed his fist with the cuff glowing and opened his hand holding an orb of sunlight. Once, he didn’t like playing with light because too much of it would turn him impotent like the archmage, but what did he care now? His lover was gone, he had no need for a cock.

The parson dropped to his knees with his hands in prayer. “Guardian of light!”

“Get up, old man. I’m not God, but a brat with a lot of hate in his heart.”

The sky threw down some snow, a handful of flakes before it unleashed the storm. A large fluffy snowflake caught on Semyon’s lashes—they were always so long and curved up naturally. Women had been jealous.

The country church didn’t have an incinerator, so Lev built his lover a pyre and ran his hand through the soft blond locks one last time. He’d cut out his heart and put it in a glass jar which he held now. Semyon may have left his heart but had taken Lev’s with him. Equivalent exchange, that was fair.

“Bye for now, Syoma.” Lev kissed his forehead. “I’ll see you again someday.” But not before he killed the necromancer.

Dragon’s Breath, my love. Let your light rise with the flames and sit amongst the stars where the saints live.

The vestry room was small with a single bed and a single writing desk. It also had a coffin the parson was keeping for himself, which he offered to remove when he gave his room to Lev. ‘The warm bed is enough, thank you, Parson,’ Lev had said. ‘But the rites need to be the old way now. Burn the dead, at least for a while.’

Then, as they sat in the church kitchen around a modest table, Lev told him about the necromancer and the soulless, so the parson didn’t get blindsided. The necromancer didn’t have a name because Lev wasn’t certain yet. Grigori was his best guess, but if he was wrong, he didn’t want to confuse the parson.

Lev had been holding a hot cup of tea with both hands and enjoying it much when he heard hooves and sprung up, thinking the Apraksin had come, but the party turned out to be Lady Pulyazin and her young children along with some druzhina. With carrot colored hair, the lady was actually someone he knew—kind of.

“You’re Erik Vietinghoff’s cousin,” Lev said because he’d forgotten her name.

“Lev Guard!” She greeted him, kissing him on the cheeks though his name made the druzhina uneasy.

The children knew the parson and wanted some type of oat biscuits he made so they disappeared into the kitchen. The druzhina pretended to secure the tiny church while eyeing Lev with their hands on their hilts.

The lady was carrying, so Lev pulled up a chair for her and they sat together in the nave, facing the altar of saints. Lev had put the jar with Semyon’s heart in the hemp satchel the parson gave him. He wore the strap across his body, and he kept the satchel on his lap, clutching, afraid to set it down lest he lose it.

“What are you doing out here? I heard you were in Usolya.” The lady stroked her swollen belly as she spoke.

“I could ask you the same,” Lev said. “What the fuck did you marry a Pulyazin for? Do you enjoy snow that much?”

“Language, Lev!” She flicked him. “Lord Fedya is a good man.”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so! Where are Semyon and Vasily? I thought you were with them.”

“It’s complicated,” was Lev’s answer. “If your lord is such a fine man, what are you doing sleeping in a shi—” Lev swallowed his word when one of the children came running to give him a biscuit. “Thank you.” He smiled at the little one. They had Pulyazin silver hair and didn’t look anything like their mother.

The child dashed back into the kitchen, laughing. One of them had probably dared the other to touch the stranger because the boy had also poked him. He didn’t love children but didn’t dislike them either.

“What am I doing in a church and not in my lord’s bed? Was that your question?” The lady had a dimple when she smiled. “It’s complicated.”

“Fair,” Lev said.

“What happened to Erik? Who killed him? You boys could never get along.”

“Syoma.”

“What for?” she asked.

“Erik betrayed us then tried to kill me in my own house, in front of my father, nonetheless.”

“Fair.” She nodded.

The winds battered the wooden shutters over the windows and a druzhina came to tell the lady a couple of them would be stepping out to keep watch, and then, Lev remembered her name because the druzhina had addressed her by it—Anfisa.

“Your lord got his grain from the Shields, Anfisa?” Lev asked.

“You know what occurs to me, Lev?” Anfisa tapped her chin. “It’s none of your darn business.”

“Of course it’s my business if your husband is going to be sucking Shield cock.”

“Language!”

“None of those are bad words. Sucking. Shield. Cock. Well, I suppose one could argue saying Shield in church is blasphemous.”

“You haven’t changed a bit. You’re still nine years old.”

“Say, Anfisa, those train machines, they bring grain to Bone, but they must return to Seniya, right?”

“What is it to you?”

“Seems they are a lot faster than horses and don’t die in the frost. I would like to ride it to Seniya. Can you ask your benevolent lord?”

“They are run by Durnov. Why would they let you live?” she asked. “And have you lost your mind? Seniya is a Shield city.”

That, he knew, but if Grigori was the necromancer, his work in the Bone Country was done because Usolya was no longer, so the dog might be returning to his master.

“What did I do? They attacked us,” said Lev about the Durnov, recalling how their Crawlers chewed through the living wall his father had erected with his life.

“Haven’t you heard? Lord Durnov and a slew of puppeteers are dead. Pyotr Guard killed them, people say.”

“From beyond the grave? My father is dead.”

“I heard. My condolences. But Lord Durnov turned into a mummy. Pyotr Guard’s curse, they said.”

Lev laughed till he fell off his chair, then some more while his cackles echoed through the church.

“It’s not funny, Lev. I heard it was terrible, dehydrating alive. Also, Elyena died because you cheated in a steeplechase. It’s Lady Durnov in charge now, and she’s a Shield, just so you know. So, there’s no chance of you boarding a train.”

“We’ll see.”

They talked about being children, about Lev’s miniature pony everyone had been jealous of. About the archmage, about Semyon who would visit every summer. Wanted to see the pony he would say, and Lev wondered why he didn’t just get his own, but it wasn’t the horse he’d wanted to see.

Lord Skuratov had disowned Semyon for supporting Lev, but he was a father nonetheless and deserved to know his son had gone to the stars.

“Semyon passed,” Lev said. “Perhaps you can let the Skuratov know. I don’t suppose I’ll be returning from Seniya.”

“Oh… So much death.” She caressed her belly. “I hope it ends soon. What are you going to Seniya for?”

The more he gnawed on it, the more certain he grew Grigori was the necromancer. In that case, this was all Shield’s doing. They were mad, that whole house had redlined bringing darkness into Fedosia. Lev would do one good thing with his life and end the Shield reign. Seniya wasn’t the final stop, Krakova was. He was going to kill Prince Nikolas.

But he wouldn’t say that to Anfisa, though, and smiled. “Sightseeing. I’ve never been to Seniya.”

“Oh, never you mind.”

Anfisa pursed her lips and furrowed her orange brows. She was having an internal debate, probably about Lev. She put her hand over his, and took a long inhale, perhaps to tell him something, but a druzhina announced, “Vasily Apraksin, my lady.”

Lev turned and saw Vasily was at the door. Because Lev had been sitting, Vasily hadn’t seen him and his blue eyes widened, meeting his. The soulless couldn’t enter a church without permission, so Lev could have just stayed inside and told the druzhina not to let him in, but fury blinded him.

A small voice at the back of his mind reminded him there were children here, but not nearly loud enough. The only reason he took the fight outside rather than unleash the dragon in the wooden church was he didn’t want the druzhina to misinterpret his intent and get in his way. He’d never seen Pulyazin alchemy and didn’t wish to learn it just then.

Not caring about the poisoned blade, Lev was out in the blizzard bashing Vasily’s face in, his teeth lodged into knuckles, when he realized it wasn’t Vasily but some plain villager. A soulless, though, and he tried biting Lev with his naked gums. Lev put a dragger in his skull, and it twitched still, trying to get up, so he twisted the neck till the head came off. That did it.

In a snowstorm, Dragon’s Breath wouldn’t catch. He really should have let Vasily in and burned him in the church. Now he couldn’t see shit with the weather lashing at his eyes and screaming in his ears.

“What happened!” Anfisa screamed when Lev barged back in.

“Parson!” Lev yelled. “Soulless are at your door, don’t let them in!”

“What?” Anfisa was afraid. Her children ran to her, and the druzhina couldn’t decide who the threat was. Vasily was an eastern boy, but Lev was what they called zapadnik around here, an outsider. Perhaps it was the parson coming out from the vestry with a torch and a blade, but Anfisa finally said, “Don’t let the Apraksin in unless your lord comes and says so.”

The druzhina would obey their lady.

Lev had left the door open when he charged at Vasily, and the church was so small the gust had blown out the candles at the altar. Shadows moved on the wall from the torches the druzhina lit, and the parson had turned to attend to his altar, when Vasily appeared at the door again and his shadow cast long into the nave.

His sword drawn, Lev marched toward him, sneering, when Vasily’s shadow turned and stabbed the shadow of a druzhina. The soldier had been inside the church, Vasily was still outside and hadn’t produced a sword or turned, but blood sprayed from the druzhina, halting Lev dead in his tracks. Because this thing was so novel, Lev couldn’t calculate for it.

The only thing he could think of was to disrupt the shadow, and blasted light directly at Vasily, casting his shadow behind him and outside the church, not but before Vasily had cut another man’s head off.

A druzhina used the bright flash from Lev to kick the Apraksin and push the door closed. His head jerked back, and a spear slid out through the back of his skull, smooth steel slick with blood. The druzhina fell against the door, managing to close it as he died.

The parson ran with a gilded icon of a saint, probably the only relic the tiny church had, and placed it against the door, mumbling prayers to ward off evil.

The two remaining druzhina huddled with their lady and the children, trying to protect them while scared shitless themselves. They were hardened warriors, no doubt, but they were superstitious out here, and the shadow alchemy was tripping them, clearly, because they were praying instead of drawing their blades or doing whatever it was the Pulyazin did. Water alchemy, Lev knew, but he could never understand why anyone would spend gold freezing water in the Bone Country where everything was frozen anyway.

The stained glass window shattered, and a slew of vials like red crystals were thrown in and rolled on the wooden floor.

“Wrath!” Lev shoved the parson out the door and both fell on the snow while the church behind them erupted into a towering flame.

The old man got pulled from Lev and was dragged away by the soulless into the night as Lev tried to grab him. If the man screamed, the storm ate it, and Lev was left holding a torn scrap of brown cloak. He got up, wiping the snow off, and saw in the light of the burning church the blank faces staring at him.

A baker with his apron, a brothel girl with a feather in hair, the stableboy, the farmhand, the reaper, an old woman, a little boy… Here was the missing town, and yes, he was surrounded by the soulless as far as the light could see.

Then he caught a familiar face, not a soulless, but a necromancer in a blood drenched robe, a broad smile on his bony face.

“And here I’ve seen the end of the White Guard,” Grigori said in Elfurian.

“That’s what you are, then,” Lev answered in Elfurian. “Your alchemy is shit, old man. The soulless you made are simple beasts.”

“Sadly, the artistry gets sacrificed when you’re dealing with so many.” He gestured around. “So falls the mighty White Guards of Fedosia. Any last words, boy?”

“Run, I suppose.”

Lev would have gone for the necromancer, maybe he would have succeeded, more likely he would have failed, but he resisted the urge to scratch the flaming itch of vengeance because Anfisa and her three small children had escaped the fire and were crying behind him. No druzhina left, it was just Lev now, and letting a pregnant woman and little kids die so he could grieve seemed like the wrong thing to do. It was just an inkling.

Anyway, he reached into the hemp satchel. The glass jar had broken from his falling on it, and Lev cut his hand on the shard, but Semyon’s heart was still there. For a thing that fit the whole world, the flesh hardly weighed anything sitting on Lev’s palm.

Grigori frowned, he didn’t know what it was, but he guessed at Lev’s intent and the soulless charged like a rush of black floodwater. In the back, Lev could faintly hear Anfisa screaming, but his gaze was on his lover’s heart as he shorthanded three thousand four hundred and one symbols, each signifying a separate step of alchemy, into a single word: Illuminate.

The sun rose at midnight over a wooden church in Bone Country, and it was so grand it could have only come from Semyon. That was why a lover’s heart, Lev thought, because nothing else could bear the cost of such an inordinate amount of magic—not enough gold in the world.

In his mind, Lev ran through the trees behind White Palace, thirteen years old, and singing about the spring maidens. It was going to rain, and mist had rolled in from the hills, blanketing the forest floor like soft cotton.

‘Lev,’ Semyon had called.

Lev turned and was kissed. It wasn’t like the time he’d kissed Zoya, and in his memory, this would stay as his first, where they would remain forever young.