The Bleeding Crown

Chapter 1: The Grandmother's Keeper

The god smelled of pine resin and dying stars.

Katya Obukhova pressed the damp cloth against the wound beneath the Grandmother's jaw, where the skin had split again during the night. Golden ichor welled up slow as sap, pooling in the creases of ancient flesh before trickling down the god's throat and dripping onto the cave floor. Each drop hit stone with a sound like a whispered word in a language Katya almost understood.

"Easy," Katya murmured. "Easy now."

The Grandmother did not respond. She hadn't spoken in three months—not since the frost moon, when she'd thrashed in her sleep and caught Katya across the shoulder with one of her massive antler tines. The scar still pulled when Katya raised her arm above her head. She tried not to think about it.

The cave was vast, carved into the heart of Mount Kozel by the god's own body over centuries of slow settling. The Grandmother lay curled like some impossible deer, her flanks rising and falling with breaths that came too far apart. She was the size of a cathedral, her antlers scraping the vaulted ceiling, her hide mottled with patches of moss and lichen that had taken root in the folds of her skin. Once, the elders said, she had walked the ridgeline above Starimost, and the villagers would come out to watch her silhouette against the sunset, crowned in bone and wreathed in cloud. Now she could barely lift her head.

Katya wrung the cloth into a clay bowl and watched the ichor settle. Pure gold, luminous even in the cave's dim light. She'd been collecting it since she was eight years old, when her mother first brought her here and placed her small hands against the Grandmother's flank and said, "This is what we are for."

Her mother had been the keeper before her. And her grandmother before that. Three generations of Obukhova women, tending a god that the rest of the world wanted dead.

Katya corked the bowl and set it on the shelf she'd carved into the cave wall, beside a dozen others. The ichor would go to the village healer, old Rozha, who mixed it with rendered fat and birch ash to make a salve that could close wounds, ease fevers, draw poison from snakebites. It was the only medicine Starimost had. The nearest apothecary was in Verenka, four days south by mule, and the Flame taxed any village caught trading in "heretical substances" so heavily that most couldn't afford salt, let alone proper physic.

So they bled their god, drop by golden drop, and called it devotion.

Katya climbed the rough-hewn steps to the cave mouth and stepped into the cold. The morning hit her like a fist—Korosvar cold, the kind that turned breath to crystal and made your teeth ache in their sockets. Below, Starimost clung to the mountainside like a barnacle: forty-three houses of dark timber and stone, a communal hall with a sagging roof, goat pens, a smokehouse, the tiny shrine to the old gods that they kept hidden behind a false wall in the cellar of the hall. A hundred and sixty-one people, if you counted the Milović twins born last week.

Smoke rose from chimneys in thin gray threads. Someone was splitting wood—the rhythmic crack carried up the slope, sharp in the still air. It looked peaceful. It looked like it had looked every morning of Katya's twenty-three years.

But this morning, there were horses in the village square.

Katya's stomach dropped. She pressed herself against the rock face and squinted down. Six horses, dark and well-fed, the kind the Flame bred for mountain work. Their riders were already dismounted, moving between the houses. She could see the red cloaks even at this distance—vivid as fresh blood against the snow.

Flame soldiers. A full detachment.

Her hands began to shake, and she pressed them flat against the stone. Think. She had to think.

They came every few years, the Flame patrols. Usually it was two or three men on tired horses, asking questions nobody answered, poking through cellars and barns, finding nothing because the villagers of Starimost had been hiding their faith for a hundred years and had gotten very good at it. The shrine came apart in minutes. The ichor bowls fit into a false bottom in the grain store. The path to the Grandmother's cave was concealed behind a rockfall that looked natural unless you knew exactly which stone to move.

But six soldiers was not a patrol. Six soldiers was a purpose.

Katya scrambled back into the cave. The Grandmother's eye—the one that still opened—tracked her movement. It was the size of a wagon wheel, amber and shot through with veins of gold, and there was something in it that Katya had learned to read over the years. Not thought, exactly. Not anymore. But awareness. A dim, guttering recognition.

"They're here," Katya whispered. "They've come."

The eye blinked, slow as sunset.

Katya pressed her forehead against the god's cheek. The skin was fever-hot, dry as old paper. Beneath it, she could feel the slow thunder of a heartbeat that had been keeping time since before humans built their first fire.

"I won't let them," she said. "I swear it."

She took the back passage out of the cave—a narrow crack in the rock that led to a goat trail on the mountain's eastern face. It was a twenty-minute scramble down to the village, and by the time she reached the tree line behind the communal hall, her lungs were burning and her fingers were numb.

She found her uncle Borys in the smokehouse, which meant he'd already seen the soldiers and was avoiding them. Borys Obukhov was a large man with a beard like a frozen waterfall and hands that could crack walnuts without effort, but his eyes, when he looked at Katya, were afraid.

"Six of them," he said before she could speak. "Led by a captain. They have a writ from the Prelate's office."

"A writ for what?"

"Execution." Borys's voice was barely a whisper. "They know about the Grandmother, Katya. Someone told them."

The cold that went through her then had nothing to do with the weather.

"Who?"

"Does it matter? They know the cave. They know the path. The captain said they'll go up at dawn tomorrow—they want to rest their horses first, and they've demanded lodging and food." He paused. "He said if anyone interferes, the village forfeits its charter. Every house burned. Every person relocated to the labor camps at Drezhna."

Katya leaned against the smokehouse wall. The smell of cured meat surrounded her, familiar and suddenly nauseating.

"We can't let them," she said.

"Katya—"

"She's dying anyway, I know that. But if the Flame takes her—" She stopped. She didn't know how to finish the sentence. If the Flame takes her, what? They'd hack the body apart, burn what they couldn't use, parade the antlers through the streets of some southern city as proof that the old gods were nothing but beasts. And the ichor—the ichor they'd take for themselves, because despite all their talk of heresy and corruption, the Church had never been above using what the gods bled.

"There's something else," Borys said. He reached into his coat and pulled out a folded piece of leather. "I took this from the captain's saddlebag while he was pissing. He'll notice it's gone by morning."

Katya unfolded it. A map, hand-drawn on calfskin, marked with symbols she recognized from the old texts—Votive cartography, the kind the Church had supposedly destroyed. Two locations were circled in red ink. One was Starimost. The other was far to the south, on the edge of the Amber Steppe, with a notation in Church script: SECONDARY TARGET. THE HOUND. CONFIRMED SIGHTING. PRIORITY ELIMINATION.

The Hound. The second god.

"There's a third mark," Borys said, pointing to a spot in the eastern marshlands. "But it's been crossed out and re-marked. Like they're not sure."

Katya stared at the map. Three gods had survived the Church's century-long purge. The Grandmother, sheltered by Starimost. The Hound, roaming the southern grasslands. And the Stag, rumored to haunt the marshes of Czernoval, though no one had confirmed a sighting in decades.

Three gods. The last three.

And the Church had a map to all of them.

"I have to go," Katya said.

"Go where?"

"South. If they know where the Hound is, they'll send soldiers there too. Someone has to warn the Votive who shelter it. Someone has to—"

"You can't warn anyone if you're dead, girl." Borys gripped her arm. "And you can't save the Grandmother either. I've made peace with that. You need to as well."

Katya looked at her uncle—this man who had taught her to set snares and read weather and sing the old songs when no one was listening. He was right. She knew he was right. The Grandmother was dying. Had been dying for years. The scar on Katya's shoulder throbbed as if in confirmation.

But the Hound might still be saved. And the Stag.

"I can't make peace with all of them dying," she said. "Not while I can still walk."

Borys looked at her for a long time. Then he released her arm.

"The soldiers want a feast tonight. Roast goat, bread, whatever wine we have. They think we're terrified peasants eager to please." He paused. "Your mother's garden still grows monkshood, doesn't it?"

Katya felt the words settle in her chest like stones dropped into deep water.

"Yes," she said.

"Then I suppose we should give them a feast worth remembering."

The preparations took the rest of the day. Katya moved through them in a state of focused calm that frightened her a little—she'd never poisoned anyone before, had never even considered it, and yet her hands were steady as she stripped the monkshood roots and ground them into a paste. She'd used the plant before in tiny doses, mixed into the Grandmother's feed to ease the god's joint pain. She knew exactly how much would make a human heart stutter and stop.

Borys handled the food. He roasted two goats on the spit in the communal hall, basted them in garlic and rendered fat, and served them with black bread and pickled cabbage and the last of the autumn wine. The soldiers ate like men who believed they were among conquered people—loudly, greedily, without caution. The captain, a thick-necked man named Hadžić, told jokes about Votive women and laughed at his own wit.

Katya served the wine. She smiled when they spoke to her. She refilled their cups.

The monkshood was in the wine.

By midnight, all six soldiers were dead.

Katya stood in the communal hall and looked at the bodies and felt nothing she could name. The other villagers filed in—Rozha the healer, the Milović parents, old Tadej who'd lost three fingers to frostbite and still played the fiddle, all of them. They looked at the dead men with expressions that ranged from grim satisfaction to naked terror.

"They'll send more," Rozha said. "When these don't report back."

"I know," Katya said.

"Then what?"

Katya held up the map. "I'm leaving tonight. South. If the Flame finds me gone and the soldiers dead, they'll assume I acted alone. A fanatic. A lone heretic. They'll come after me, not the village."

"You don't know that," Borys said.

"No. But it's the best chance Starimost has."

She packed in the dark: fur-lined coat, dried meat, a water skin, her mother's knife, the map, a small clay pot of the Grandmother's ichor wrapped in wool. She went back to the cave one last time. The Grandmother's eye was closed. Her breathing was so slow that Katya had to press her ear to the god's chest to hear it.

"I'm sorry," Katya whispered. "I'm sorry I can't stay."

She kissed the rough hide, tasting dust and something sweet, like honeycomb left too long in the sun. Then she walked out of the cave and into the night.

The mountains swallowed her.