Six Scorched Roses (Crowns of Nyaxia)

Vitarus was beautiful.

All gods were beautiful, and all mortals knew this in theory. But when people say the gods are beautiful, you imagine it as the beauty of a human—perhaps even the beauty of a vampire, ageless and perfect.

No. No, that wasn’t right at all. Vitarus’s beauty was that of a mountain range or lightning storm, the beauty of the sun reflecting off the horizon of a rolling plain, the beauty of a fierce summer storm that kills half the town’s livestock, the tragic beauty of a stag’s body rotting and returning to the earth.

Vitarus was beautiful the way death was surely beautiful moments before it took you.

He lowered himself to the ground, though his feet didn’t quite touch, hovering just above the tips of the sparse grass. He was tall and foreboding. His hair and eyes were the ever-shifting gold of sunshine and wheat fields, his skin gleaming bronze. He wore loose trousers of silk and a long, sleeveless robe that looked as if it could be either green or gold with every blink, which he left open, exposing a lean torso covered with the silhouettes of flowers and leaves. His hands and forearms were darker than the rest of him, all the way up to the elbow—they looked different from each other, though I couldn’t place why, not when I was so preoccupied with my own overwhelming fear.

A shimmering white mist surrounded him. Water vapor, I realized, when he ventured closer and the damp of it clung to my skin. The grass rustled, greened, withered beneath his feet.

For a moment, the presence of him paralyzed me.

Then his world-shattering gaze, disinterested and cruel, fell to my sister. Mina cowered like a deer cornered by a wolf, and that sight awoke every wild protective instinct in me.

I didn’t even remember running to the field.

“Go,” I bit out, shoving Mina aside as I fell to my knees before Vitarus. “Go, Mina.”

I didn’t look back long enough to see if she’d listened—where was there to run, anyway?

And I couldn’t, even if I’d wanted to, when Vitarus’s eyes locked to mine. They were a million colors of the sky and earth, every shade of radiant sun and coarse dirt.

“It wasn’t her,” I said. “She’s innocent. She did nothing to offend you.”

His gaze was so entrancing that it took me too long to remember to bow my head. I lowered my chin, but a firm grip tilted it back up. Vitarus’s skin against mine ripped a gasp from my throat.

A dizzy spell passed over me—a wave of fever, weakness. Death’s breath over my skin, a too-familiar sensation I hadn’t felt quite this strongly in a very long time. My eyes fell to the darkened skin of Vitarus’s forearm, and the nature of his hands, the thing I hadn’t been able to place moments ago, hit me: this hand was decay, his skin mottled and purpling, crawling with insects. The other was dark with the rich hue of soil, roots winding up his muscled forearms like veins, hints of green sprouting at his fingertips.

Decay and abundance. Plague and vitality.

He held my chin tight, not allowing me to look away.

And then, after a long moment, he smiled.

“I remember you. My, how easy it is to forget how time moves for you. Fifteen years. A blink, and yet an age. How quickly you grow and wither.”

His thumb stroked my cheek, and the flush of fever flared. My lashes fluttered, and for a moment I saw my father kneeling in these very fields, just as I kneeled now.

“You were just a pitiful ailing lamb then. Death walking in a little girl,” Vitarus crooned. “And now, look at you. Time is so kind to humans. And so cruel.”

He released his hold on me, the fever falling from the surface of my skin. I let out a ragged breath.

“No one offended you here,” I said.

Vitarus’s smile withered.

“One of my acolytes has been slaughtered. And you… you both stink of my traitorous cousin Nyaxia’s stench.” His eyes lifted beyond me—to the skyline of Adcova. “This whole town reeks of it.”

“They had nothing to do with any of it,” I choked. “They’ve suffered enough. Please.”

I couldn’t think of what to do, so I’d beg.

It was the wrong thing.

“Enough?” Vitarus said, incredulous. “Enough? What is it to suffer enough? The mouse suffers at the fangs of a snake. The snake suffers at the claws of a badger. The badger suffers at the teeth of a wolf. The wolf suffers at the spear of a hunter. There is no such thing as enough suffering.”

His words were vicious, and yet his tone, somehow, was not. He seemed genuinely perplexed by my statement, as if the idea that suffering could be cruel was foreign to him.

A hysterical wave of sympathy passed over me—because he, like me, struggled to understand human nature. Maybe we were both so bad at it that my entire town would perish because of it.

“Is that all we are to you?” I said. “Animals? Would you waste the lives of animals the way you have wasted the lives of the people you have killed here?”

Vitarus’s face went cold.

“You speak to me of waste,” he sneered. “The blood of one of my acolytes has spilled here. You stink of the bitch who betrayed me. I have fed your people for millennia. Sheltered you. Given you purpose. And yet you spurn me. Disrespect me.” He looked around, lip curled in disgust. “I never understood the others’ fondness for your kind. What would spring from this soil if this miserable assemblage of stone and wood wasn’t here? Perhaps I should prefer to see that.” He let out a low laugh. It sounded like the wind through the trees. “That is the mistake of my kin. Assuming that humans are more interesting than any of the other millions of forms of life in this world. No. You are no more interesting. Simply more trouble.”

His gaze fell back to me, and whatever he saw in my face made him laugh again, mockingly.

“You should see your face, little girl. Such hatred.” He plucked one of the roses from one of the bushes and twirled it between his fingers. The petals rustled and flourished, multiplying until they fell gently to the soil, the vine of the stem wrapping around his arm. “A flower doesn’t hate. It fulfills its function, and then returns to the earth without a fuss.”

I did hate him. I wanted to spit in his face and curse at him and strike him. If only killing a god was as easy as killing his acolyte.

But the thought of Mina flashed through my mind. Farrow, and the wild risks he had taken for me. My people, and the illness that would devour them all. And then the thought of Vale, and I prayed that he was far away by now from the grasp of gods that resented him.

I hated Vitarus. But what I felt for them was stronger than my hatred.

No, I couldn’t kill a god. I couldn’t appease him with empty apologies. I certainly couldn’t move his heart to compassion.

But…

“I’ll make a deal with you,” I blurted out.

Vitarus paused, his interest piqued.

Gods weren’t compassionate or logical. But they were bored. They liked games, liked bargains.

I didn’t let my hope show as his head tilted, a slow smile spreading over his lips.

“Ah, just like your father,” he said. “You know, he made a deal with me a long time ago, too.”