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DARKDAWN
THE NEVERNIGHT CHRONICLE
BOOK III
Jay Kristoff
Copyright
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Neverafter PTY LTD 2019
Trinity logo by James Orr
Maps by Virginia Allyn
Cover illustration © Kerby Rosanes
Other cover images © Shutterstock.com (sun textures)
Cover design by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Jay Kristoff asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008180089
Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780008180102
Version: 2019-08-02
Dedication
for my readers
I couldn’t have done it without you, either
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Maps
Well, here we are again …
Dramatis Personae
Epigraph
Book 1: The Dark Within
Chapter 1. Brother
Chapter 2. Boneyards
Chapter 3. Ember
Chapter 4. Gift
Chapter 5. Epiphanies
Chapter 6. Imperator
Chapter 7. Be
Chapter 8. Scoundrel
Chapter 9. Slumber
Book 2: Dying Light
Chapter 10. Infidelity
Chapter 11. Incendiary
Chapter 12. Veritas
Chapter 13. Conspiracy
Chapter 14. Reunions
Chapter 15. Finesse
Chapter 16. Tempest
Chapter 17. Departures
Chapter 18. Tales
Chapter 19. Quiet
Book 3: A House of Wolves
Chapter 20. Sunder
Chapter 21. Amai
Chapter 22. Vipers
Chapter 23. War
Chapter 24. Majesty
Chapter 25. Heritance
Chapter 26. Promises
Chapter 27. Feed
Chapter 28. Hatred
Chapter 29. Standing
Book 4: The Ashes of Empires
Chapter 30. Could
Chapter 31. Was
Chapter 32. Is
Chapter 33. Wellspring
Chapter 34. Ribbons
Chapter 35. Ashes
Chapter 36. Baptism
Chapter 37. Away
Chapter 38. Momentum
Chapter 39. Fathomless
Book 5: She Wore the Night
Chapter 40. Fate
Chapter 41. Anything
Chapter 42. Carnivalé
Chapter 43. Crimson
Chapter 44. Daughter
Chapter 45. Lover
Chapter 46. Father
Chapter 47. All
Chapter 48. Tithe
Chapter 49. Silence
Chapter 50. Silver
Dicta Ultima
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
Also by Jay Kristoff
About the Publisher
Maps
Well, here we are again, gentlefriend.
I think perhaps an apology is in order. Both for the conclusion of the second part of Mia’s tale, and for the g I left you in afterward. You seemed quite upset. Be assured there will be no cliff-hangers in this, our final dance together. As promised, her birth you’ve witnessed, her life you’ve lived. All that remains is her death.
But before the smut and butchery begin in earnest, allow me one final refresher for those with memories as reliable as your narrator. And then we can get on with killing our murderous little bitch, yes?
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Mia Corvere—assassin of the Red Church, gladiatii of the Falcons of Remus, and now the most infamous murderer in the Itreyan Republic. The child of a failed rebellion, Mia has spent the last eight years of her life pursuing a murderous vendetta against the men who destroyed her familia.
After discovering the Red Church had a hand in her father’s murder, Mia broke ranks with the assassins and sold herself to a gladiatii stable. Upon winning the grand games of Godsgrave, Mia made several stunning discoveries in quick succession:
Her baby brother, Jonnen, whom she presumed dead, had been stolen by her mortal enemy, Consul Julius Scaeva, and raised as his son.
Jonnen actually is Scaeva’s son. Meaning Mia’s mother, Alinne, was sleeping with the man who would eventually oversee her husband’s murder and her own death in the Philosopher’s Stone.
Like Mia, Jonnen is darkin, possessed of the ability to control shadows.
At the conclusion of the grand games, Mia assassinated Grand Cardinal Francesco Duomo. She also apparently murdered Scaeva and stole back her brother before falling to her almost-certain death in a flooded arena full of stormdrakes.
… Maw’s teeth, that really was a thrilling finale, wasn’t it?
Mister Kindly—Mia’s companion since childhood, Mister Kindly is—depending on who you ask—a daemon, passenger, or familiar, with the ability to eat people’s fear. He is made of shadows and sarcasm. Despite his acerbic wit, he obviously has a deep and abiding fondness for Mia. Just don’t let him hear you say that.
He wears the shape of a cat, though like most things about him, his appearance is not entirely genuine.
Eclipse—another shadow daemon, Eclipse was passenger to Cassius, former Lord of Blades in the Red Church. She bound herself to Mia when Cassius died.
Eclipse wears the shape of a wolf, and she and Mister Kindly get along about as well as most cats and dogs do.
Ashlinn Järnheim—a former Red Church acolyte of Vaanian blood. Ashlinn betrayed the Ministry to avenge her father, Torvar, and almost brought the Red Church to its knees. After Mia foiled her plot, Ashlinn fell into the service of Cardinal Duomo, who tasked her to retrieve a map to an undisclosed location in Old Ashkah—a map of some vital import to the Red Church. Fearing betrayal, Ashlinn had the map scribed on her back with arkemical ink, which will fade in the event of her death.
Ashlinn assisted Mia with her plot to win the grand games, and the pair eventually became lovers.[1] After the conclusion of the games, Ashlinn was accosted by the Church Ministry and Consul Scaeva—still very much alive—who revealed Mia had only killed a doppelgänger crafted by the Flesh Weaver, Marielle, and that Scaeva had been working with the Red Church to see his rival, Cardinal Duomo, killed.
For an encore, Scaeva revealed he was also Mia’s father.
Ashlinn was then attacked by Red Church assassins, but rescued by a familiar shadowy figure …
Tric—an acolyte of the Red Church of mixed Itreyan/Dweymeri blood, also Mia’s former lover. He was murdered by Ashlinn Järnheim as part of her plot to capture the Red Church Ministry, and his corpse was pushed off the side of the Quiet Mountain.
Tric has apparently returned to life, albeit in a darker, magikal form. He accosted Mia in the necropolis of Galante and gave her several cryptic warnings without revealing his identity. He later rescued Ashlinn from Red Church assailants.
How he returned from the realm of the Black Mother or why he saved the girl who murdered him is anyone’s guess.
Old Mercurio—Mia’s confidant and mentor before she joined the Red Church. Mercurio was a Church Blade himself for many years and was serving as bishop of Godsgrave. Despite being a terminally grumpy old prick, he assisted Mia with her plot to kill Duomo and Scaeva, fully aware his actions would incur the Ministry’s wrath.
During the finale of the grand games, he was captured by the Church and taken back to the Quiet Mountain by order of …
Julius Scaeva—thrice-elected consul of the Itreyan Republic, known as the “People’s Senator.” The position of consul is usually shared, but Scaeva has maintained sole leadership of the Senate since the Kingmaker Rebellion eight years ago.
Using the rebellion as an excuse to extend his tenure, Scaeva has been working with the Red Church with the goal of claiming the title of imperator and perpetual emergency powers over the Republic. He presided over the execution of Mia’s father, sentenced his lover, Mia’s mother, to die in the Philosopher’s Stone, stole Mia’s baby brother, and ordered Mia drowned in a canal, despite knowing she was his daughter.
The word “cunt” doesn’t really seem to do him justice.
But speaking of …
Drusilla—Lady of Blades in the Red Church and, despite her apparent age, one of the deadliest assassins in the Republic. Though she claims devotion to the Black Mother, Niah, Drusilla has been working in league with Consul Scaeva to ensure his ambition of seizing control of the Itreyan Republic.
The Lady of Blades has disliked Mia ever since the girl failed her trials as a Red Church acolyte. Presumably Mia’s recent betrayals have not elevated her in Drusilla’s opinions.
Solis—Revered Father and Shahiid of Songs, master in the art of steel, and surliest man alive. He is apparently blind, though he displays little impediment when wielding a sword. Solis was once a prisoner in the Philosopher’s Stone and was the only survivor of a bloody cull known as “the Descent,” in which the prisoners were encouraged to murder each other en masse in exchange for freedom. Solis’s victory earned him his name, which in the tongue of Old Ashkah means “the Last One.”
Mia cut his face during their first sparring session in the Quiet Mountain. He cut off her arm in retaliation. Solis chose to keep the scar, along with his grudge for the girl who bested him.
Spiderkiller—Shahiid of the Hall of Truth and mistress of poisons. Mia was one of Spiderkiller’s most promising acolytes, but the Shahiid’s fondness for the girl had all but disappeared—even before Mia chose to betray the Church’s teachings.
If she ever offers you a glass of goldwine, I’d advise you to refuse.
Mouser—master of thievery and Shahiid of Pockets. A charming fellow with a young man’s face, an old man’s eyes, and a penchant for wearing ladies’ underthings.
The Mouser had no enmity toward Mia before her betrayal, though presumably she’s been struck off his Great Tithe gift list thanks to her recent fuckarsery.
Aalea—mistress of secrets and Shahiid of Masks. Seductive and beautiful, Aalea’s tally of murders is seconded only by the notches on her bedpost.
She was actually quite fond of Mia before the girl’s betrayal, but no member of the Church Ministry attained their position by being sentimental.
Marielle—one of two albino sorcerii who serve the Red Church. Marielle is a master of Flesh Weaving, a form of ancient magik practiced in the fallen Empire of Ashkah. She can sculpt skin and muscle as easily as clay, but the toll she pays for her power is terrible—her own flesh is hideously deformed, and she has no power to alter it.
In keeping with her unsettling appearance, Marielle also seems overly fond of her brother, Adonai.
Adonai—the second sorcerii who serves the Quiet Mountain. Adonai is a blood speaker who works with human vitus—he can pass messages in blood, manipulate it with but a thought, and transport people and once-living objects through the blood pools in Red Church chapels. Thanks to Marielle’s arts, he is handsome beyond compare.
He murdered Ashlinn’s brother, Osrik, during the Luminatii assault on the Mountain, and he owes a debt to Mia for saving his life, yet to be called in.
“Blood is owed thee, little Crow. And blood shall be repaid.”
Aelius—chronicler of the Quiet Mountain. Aelius is master of the Red Church’s great Athenaeum—a vast and ever-growing library of books that were destroyed, lost to time, or never even written in the first place. He also wrangles the enormous carnivorous “bookworms” that roam the dark between the shelves, and his tasks are made ever more difficult by the fact that, like everything else in the Black Mother’s library, Aelius himself is dead.
Still, it’s a living …
Naev—a Hand of the Red Church who manages supply runs in the Whisperwastes of Ashkah. After some initial difficulties, she and Mia became friends and confidants.
Naev was disfigured by Weaver Marielle out of jealousy over an affair with her brother, Adonai. But after Mia foiled the assault on the Quiet Mountain, Marielle restored Naev’s beauty as a favor to her savior.
Naev keeps her face veiled, and her feelings beside.
Hush—an accomplished Blade of the Red Church. Apparently mute, Hush communicates through a form of sign language known as Tongueless.
Though he and Mia were acolytes together and he assisted her in her trials, he remains loyal to the Ministry. He attempted to capture Ashlinn at the Ministry’s behest, though the girl escaped with Tric’s help.
Francesco Duomo—Grand Cardinal of the Church of the Light and the most powerful member of the Everseeing’s ministry. Though apparently allied with Julius Scaeva, the cardinal and the consul were in fact bitter rivals. Along with Scaeva and Justicus Marcus Remus, Duomo passed sentence on the failed Kingmaker rebels, including Mia’s father, Darius.
It’s safe to say Mia took the cardinal’s actions personally—she trimmed his beard all the way to the bone in front of a hundred thousand screaming people.
Alinne Corvere—Mia’s mother, and a fearsome politician who almost succeeded in bringing down the Itreyan Republic. Her marriage to Justicus Darius turned out to be one of friendship and political expedience—she was, in fact, lover to Julius Scaeva and bore him two children: Mia and Jonnen.
Despite her relationship with Scaeva, the consul showed no compunction in casting her aside after her husband’s failed rebellion. Alinne was imprisoned in the Philosopher’s Stone, where she died in madness and misery.
Mia has only recently learned her mother was not the paragon she once believed.
Darius “the Kingmaker” Corvere—the man Mia called “Father.” Former justicus of the Luminatii Legion, Darius forged an alliance with his lover, General Gaius Maxinius Antonius, which would have seen Antonius crowned as king of Itreya.
However, with the assistance of the Red Church, both men were captured on the eve of battle, and Darius was hanged with his would-be king, Antonius, beside him.
To say Mia took his death badly would be something of an understatement.
Jonnen Corvere—Mia’s baby brother. Thought to be dead along with his mother, Mia has recently learned the boy was raised as Scaeva’s legitimate son under the name “Lucius”—Scaeva’s wife, Liviana, is apparently unable to bear him children.
Jonnen has no idea about his true parentage, and was taken too young to remember his true name or sister at all.
Furian—the Unfallen, and champion of the Remus Collegium. Furian was darkin like Mia, able to bend the shadows to his will. However, he had no passenger and refused to explore his gift, believing it an abomination.
Mia killed Furian during the climax of the grand games. At the moment of his death, she was shown a brief vision of a night sky, set with a large, glowing orb, and heard the words “The many were one. And will be again.”
After seeing this phantasm, Mia realized her shadow was dark enough for four.
Sidonius—a former member of the Luminatii who served under Darius Corvere. Sid was drummed out of the legion after he refused to participate in General Antonius’s planned rebellion against the Senate. Sold into slavery, he was eventually purchased by the House of Remus and fought as gladiatii in the Venatus Magni.
When Mia was sold to the same collegium, Sidonius learned of her identity and took the girl under his wing, acting as a surrogate older brother to the young Blade.
He has the manners of a goat and the heart of a lion.
The Falcons of Remus—Bladesinger, Bryn, Wavewaker, Butcher, Felix, and Albanus—gladiatii of the Remus Collegium all, and Mia’s friends and allies throughout the games. Though she apparently betrayed and murdered them all, Mia actually orchestrated their escape from Godsgrave.
They are currently at large somewhere in Itreya, and presumably quite drunk.
Aa—head of the Itreyan pantheon, Father of Light, also known as the Everseeing. The three suns, known as Saan (the Seer), Saai (the Knower), and Shiih (the Watcher), are said to be his eyes, and one or more is usually present in the heavens, with the result that actual nighttime, or truedark, in the Republic occurs only for one week every two and a half years. At the time of this tale, truelight—the moment all three suns shine in the heavens—has come and mostly gone.
Truedark approaches, gentlefriends.
Tsana—Lady of Fire, She Who Burns Our Sin, The Pure, Patron of Women and Warriors, and firstborn daughter of Aa and Niah.
Keph—Lady of Earth, She Who Ever Slumbers, The Hearth, Patron of Dreamers and Fools, secondborn of Aa and Niah.
Trelene—Lady of Oceans, She Who Will Drink the World, The Fate, Patron of Sailors and Scoundrels, thirdborn daughter of Aa and Niah, and twin to Nalipse.
Nalipse—Lady of Storms, She Who Remembers, The Merciful, Patron of Healers and Leaders, fourthborn of Aa and Niah, and twin to Trelene.
Niah—the Maw, the Mother of Night, and Our Lady of Blessed Murder. Sisterwife of Aa, Niah rules a lightless region of the hereafter known as the Abyss. She and Aa initially shared the rule of the sky equally, but, commanded to bear her husband only daughters, Niah disobeyed Aa’s edict and bore him a son.
In punishment, Niah was banished from the skies by her beloved, allowed to return only for a brief spell every few years.
And as for what became of their son?
Well, gentlefriend, I believe it’s time for some answers.
Epigraph
When all is blood,
blood is all.
—MOTTO OF THE FAMILIA CORVERE
BOOK 1
CHAPTER 1
BROTHER
Eight years of poison and murder and shit.
Eight years of blood and sweat and death.
Eight years.
She’d fallen so far, her little brother in her arms, fingers still sticky and red. The light of the three suns above, burning and blinding. The waters of the flooded arena below, crimson with blood. The mob howling, bewildered and outraged at the murders of their grand cardinal, their beloved consul, both at the hands of their revered champion. The greatest games in Godsgrave’s history had ended with the most audacious murders in the history of the entire Republic. The arena was in chaos. But through it all, the screams, the roars, the rage, Mia Corvere had known only triumph.
After eight years.
Eight fucking years.
Mother.
Father.
I did it.
I killed them for you.
She’d hit the water hard, the sights and sounds of Godsgrave Arena swallowed up as she plunged beneath the surface. Salt burning in her eyes. Breath burning in her lungs. Crowd still roaring in her ears. Her little brother, Jonnen, was struggling, punching, wriggling in her arms like a landed fish. She could sense the serpentine shadows of stormdrakes, cruising toward her through the murk. Razor smiles and dead eyes.
Truelight was so bright, even here beneath the surface. But even with those three awful suns in the sky, even with all the outrage of the Everseeing pouring down, her own shadows were with her. Dark enough for four now. And Mia reached toward the outflow in the arena floor—the wide spout from which all that salt and water flowed and she
It left her dizzied and sick—she could still feel that blinding sunslight in the sky above. Mia sank like a stone in her armor, weighed down by black iron and sodden falcon’s wings. Pulling Jonnen down with her, she hit the bottom of the outflow pipe with a dull clunk. She had only moments, only the breath she’d brought with her. And she’d not planned to have a struggling child in her arms when she did this.
Dragging herself and the boy along the pipe, she found a pocket of air inside the pressure valve, just as Ashlinn had promised. Surfacing with a ragged gasp, she pulled her brother up beside her. The boy sputtered in her arms, wailing, struggling, flailing at her face.
“Unhand me, wench!” he cried.
“Stop it!” Mia gasped.
“Let me go!”
“Jonnen, stop it, please!”
She wrapped the boy up, pinning his arms so he couldn’t punch anymore. His cries echoed on the pipe above her head. Struggling with her armor’s clasps and straps with her free hand, she dragged the pieces away, one by one. Shedding the skin of the gladiatii, the assassin, the daughter of vengeance, sloughing those eight years off her bones. It’d been worth it. All of it. Duomo dead. Scaeva dead. And Jonnen, her blood, the babe she’d thought long buried in his grave …
My little brother lives.
The boy kicked, thrashed, bit. There were no tears for his murdered da, only fury, rippling and red. Mia had thought the boy dead years ago—swallowed up inside the Philosopher’s Stone with her mother and the last of her hope. But if she’d had any lingering doubts he could be a Corvere, that he could be her mother’s son, the boy’s bloody rage put them all to the sword.
“Jonnen, listen to me!”
“My name is Lucius!” he shrieked, his voice echoing on the iron.
“Lucius, then, listen!”
“I won’t!” he shouted. “You k-killed my father! You killed him!”
Pity swelled inside Mia, but she clenched her jaw, hardened her heart against it.
“I’m sorry, Jonnen. But your father …” She shook her head, breathed deep. “Listen, we need to get out of this pipe before they start draining the arena. The stormdrakes will come back this way, do you understand?”[1]
“Let them come, I hope they eat you!”
“… O, I LIKE HIM …”
“… why does that not surprise me …”
The boy turned to the dark shapes coalescing on the wall beside them, the air around them growing chill. A cat made of shadows and a wolf of the same, staring at him with their not-eyes. Mister Kindly’s tail twitched side to side as he studied the child. Eclipse simply tilted her head, shivering slightly. Jonnen fell silent for a moment, wide, dark eyes looking first to Mia’s passengers, then to the girl who held him.
“You hear them, too …,” he breathed.
“I’m like you,” Mia nodded. “We’re the same.”
The boy stared at her, perhaps feeling the same sickness, hunger, longing she did. Mia looked him over, tears welling in her eyes. All the miles, all the years …
“You don’t remember me,” she whispered, her voice shaking. “You were only a baby when they t-took you away from us. But I remember you.”
She was almost overcome for a moment. Tears in her lashes and a sob caught in her throat. Recalling the baby boy wrapped in swaddling on her mother’s bed the turn her father died. Staring up at her with his big, dark eyes. Envying him that he was too young to know their father had ended, and all their world besides.
But he wasn’t Jonnen’s father at all, was he?
Mia shook her head, blinked back those hateful tears.
O, Mother, how could you …
Looking at the boy now, she could barely speak. Barely force her jaw to move, her lungs to breathe, her lips to form the words burning in her chest. He had the same flint-black eyes as she, the same ink-black hair. She could see their mother in him so clearly, it was like peering into a looking glass. But beyond the her in him, something in the shape of Jonnen’s little nose, the line of his puppy-fat cheeks …
She could see him.
Scaeva.
“My name is Mia,” she finally managed. “I’m your sister.”
“I have no sister,” the boy spat.
“Jonn—” Mia caught herself. Licked her lips and tasted salt. “Lucius, we have to go. I’ll explain everything, I swear it. But it’s dangerous here.”
“… ALL WILL BE WELL, CHILD …”
“… breathe easy …”
Mia watched as her daemons slipped into the boy’s shadow, eating away at his fear as they’d always done for her. But though the panic in his eyes lessened, the rage only swelled, the bunched muscles in his little arms suddenly flexing against hers. He wriggled and bucked again, slipping a hand free and clawing at her face.
“Let me go!” he cried.
Mia hissed as his thumb found her eye, whipping her head away with a snarl.
“Stop it!” she snapped, temper flaring.
“Let go!”
“If you’ll not be still, I’ll hold you still!”
Mia pushed the boy hard against the pipe, pressing him in place as he kicked and spat. She could understand his rage, but in truth, she had no time to spend on hurt feelings right now. Working at the remaining buckles on her armor with her free hand, she slipped off the long leather straps that held her breastplate and spaulders in place, dropping the armor to the floor of the valve. She kept her boots, her studded leather skirt, the threadbare, bloodstained tunic beneath. And using the straps, one each for his wrists and ankles, she bound up her brother like a hog to slaughter.
“Unhand m—ffll-ggmm!”
Jonnen’s protests were muted as Mia tied another thong about his mouth. And gathering the boy into her arms, she held him tight, looked him hard in the eyes.
“We have to swim,” she said. “I’d not waste my breath on shouting if I were you.”
Dark eyes locked on hers, glittering with hate. But the boy seemed sensible enough to comply, finally dragging a deep draft into his lungs.
Mia pulled them below and swam for their lives.
They surfaced in sapphire water a half hour later to the sound of pealing bells.
With Jonnen in her arms, Mia had swum through the vast storage tanks below the arena, through the echoing dark of the mekwerk outflow pipes, catching her breath where she could and spilling finally out into the sea a few hundred feet north of Sword Arm harbor. Her brother had glared at her all the while, bound hand and foot and mouth.
Mia felt wretched at having to tie her own kin up like a spring lamb, but she had no idea what else to do with him. She couldn’t possibly have left him up there on the victor’s plinth with the cooling corpses of his da and Duomo. Couldn’t ever have left him behind. But in all her planning with Ashlinn and Mercurio, she’d not bargained on having to wrangle a nine-year-old boy after having murdered his father right in front of him.
His father.
The thought swam behind her eyes, too dark and heavy to look at for long. She pushed it aside, focusing on getting them into shallower waters. Ash and Mercurio were waiting for her aboard a swift galley named the Siren’s Song, berthed at the Sword Arm. The sooner they were out of Godsgrave, the better. Word would be spreading across the metropolis about Scaeva’s assassination, and if they didn’t know already, the Red Church would soon learn their richest and most powerful patron was dead. A storm of knives and shit was about to start raining down on Mia’s head.
As she swam toward the Sword Arm docks, she saw the streets of the metropolis beyond were in chaos. Cathedrals were ringing a death knell across the City of Bridges and Bones. Folk were emerging from taverna and tenements, bewildered, outraged, terrified as rumor of Scaeva’s murder uncoiled through the city like blood in the water. Legionaries were everywhere, armor glinting under that awful sunslight.
With all the fuss and bother, precious few folk noticed the bedraggled and bleeding slavegirl paddling slowly toward the shore with a boy trussed up in her arms. Picking her way carefully through the gondolas and dinghies bobbing about the Sword Arm jetties, Mia reached the shadows beneath a long timber boardwalk.
“I’m going to hide us for a moment,” she murmured to her brother. “You won’t be able to see for a while, but I need you to be brave.”
The boy only glared, dark curls hanging in his eyes. Stretching out her fingers, Mia dragged her mantle of shadows about her and Jonnen’s shoulders. It took real effort with truelight blazing above her—the sunslight scorching and bright. But even with her passengers now riding with her brother, the shadow beneath Mia was twice as dark as it had been before Furian’s death. Her grip on the dark felt stronger. Tighter. Closer.
She remembered the vision she’d seen as she slew the Unfallen before the adoring crowd. The sky above her, not bright and blinding, but pitch-black and flooded with stars. And shining high above her head, a pale and perfect orb.
Like a sun, but somehow … not.
“THE MANY WERE ONE. AND WILL BE AGAIN.”
Or so the voice she’d heard had said. Echoing the message from that Hearthless wraith with the gravebone blades who’d saved her skin in the Galante necropolis.
Mia didn’t know what it meant. She’d never had a mentor to show her what it was to be darkin. Never found an answer to the riddle of what she was. She didn’t know. Couldn’t know. But she knew this, sure as she knew her own name: since the moment Furian had died at her hands, a newfound strength was flowing in her veins.
Somehow, she was … more.
The world fell into muzzy blackness as she pulled on her shadowcloak, and she and her brother became faint smudges on the watercolors of the world. Jonnen squinted in the gloom beneath her mantle, watching her with suspicious eyes, but at least his struggles had ceased for now. Mia followed Mister Kindly’s and Eclipse’s whispered directions, slowly climbing a barnacle-encrusted ladder and up to the jetty proper with Jonnen under one arm. And there, in the shadow of a shallow-bottomed trawler, she curled down to wait, cross-legged, dripping wet, arms around her brother.
Mister Kindly coalesced in the shadow at Jonnen’s feet, licking at a translucent paw. Eclipse melted from the boy’s shadow, outlined black against the trawler’s hull.
“… I WILL RETURN …,” the not-wolf growled.
“… you will be missed …,” the not-cat yawned.
“… WILL YOU MISS YOUR TONGUE AS MUCH, WHEN I TEAR IT FROM YOUR HEAD …?”
“Enough, the pair of you,” Mia hissed. “Be swift, Eclipse.”
“… AS IT PLEASE YOU …”
The shadowwolf shivered and was gone, flitting along the cracks in the jetty’s boards and off along the harbor wall.
“… i hate that mongrel …,” Mister Kindly sighed.
“Aye, so you’ve said,” Mia muttered. “About a thousand times now.”
“… more than that, surely …?”
Despite her fatigue, Mia’s lips twisted in a smile.
Mister Kindly continued with his pointless ablutions and Mia sat cradling her brother for long minutes, muscles aching, salt water stinging in her cuts as the suns blazed overhead. She was tired, beaten, bleeding from a dozen wounds after her ordeals in the arena. The adrenaline of her victory was wearing off, leaving a bone-deep fatigue in its wake. She’d fought two major battles earlier in the turn, helped her fellow gladiatii from the Remus Collegium escape their bondage, slaughtered dozens, including Duomo and Scaeva, won the greatest contest in the history of the Republic, seen all her plans come to fruition.
An emptiness was slowly creeping in to replace her elation. An exhaustion that left her hands shaking. She wanted a soft bed and a cigarillo and to savor the taste of some Albari goldwine on Ashlinn’s lips. To feel their bones collide, then sleep for a thousand years. But more, beneath it all, beneath the longing and the fatigue and the pain, looking down at her brother, she realized she felt …
Hungry.
It was similar to what she’d felt in the presence of Lord Cassius. Of Furian. She’d felt it when she first saw the boy on his father’s shoulders at the victor’s plinth. She felt it as she glanced at him now—the longing of a puzzle, searching for a piece of itself.
But what does it mean? she wondered.
And does Jonnen feel the same?
“… i have an ill feeling, mia …”
Mister Kindly’s whisper dragged her eyes from the back of her brother’s head. The shadowcat had stopped pretending to clean his paw, instead staring out at the City of Bridges and Bones from within Jonnen’s shadow.
“What’s to fear?” she murmured. “The deed is done. And all things considered, nothing went too badly tits up.”
“… what difference does it make, the direction your breasts are pointing …?”
“Spoken like someone who’s never owned a pair.”
Mister Kindly glanced at the boy he was riding.
“… we seem to have some unexpected luggage …”
Jonnen mumbled something unintelligible beneath his gag. Mia had no doubts his sentiments were less than flattering, but she kept her eyes on the shadowcat.
“You worry too much,” she told him.
“… and you not enough …”
“And whose fault is that? You’re the one who eats my fears.”
The daemon tilted his head, but he gave no reply. Mia waited in silence, staring out at the city beyond her veil of shadows. The sounds of the capital were muted beneath her cloak, the colors naught but dull white and terra-cotta blurs. But she could still hear tolling bells, running feet, panicked shouts in the distance.
“The consul and cardinal slain!”
“Assassin!” came the cry. “Assassin!”
Mia glanced down to Jonnen, saw he was staring at her with unveiled malice. She knew his thoughts then, as surely as if he’d spoken aloud.
You killed my father.
“He imprisoned our mother, Jonnen,” Mia told the boy. “Left her to die in agony inside the Philosopher’s Stone. He killed my father, and hundreds more besides. Do you not remember him on the victor’s plinth, throwing you at me to save his own wretched skin?” She shook her head and sighed. “I’m sorry. I know it’s hard to understand. But Julius Scaeva was a monster.”
The boy bucked suddenly, violently, smacking his forehead into her chin. Mia bit her tongue, cursing, grabbing her brother and squeezing him tight as he launched into another bout of struggling. He tugged against his waterlogged straps, bruising his skin as he strained to free himself. But for all his fury, he was only a nine-year-old boy. Mia simply held him until his strength ran out, until his muted cries died, until he finally went limp with a soft sob of rage.
Swallowing the blood in her mouth, she wrapped him in her arms.
“You’ll understand one turn,” she murmured. “I love you, Jonnen.”
He flailed once more, then fell still. In the awkward quiet afterward, Mia felt a cool shiver down her spine. Goosebumps prickled on her skin, and her shadow grew darker as she heard a low growl from the boards beneath her feet.
“… THEY ARE NOT THERE …,” Eclipse declared.
Mia blinked, her belly lurching a little to the left. Squinting in the glare, she peered at the murky blur of the Siren’s Song, rocking gently at berth a few jetties down.
“You’re certain?” she asked.
“… I SEARCHED FROM BOW TO STERN. MERCURIO AND ASHLINN ARE NOT ABOARD …”
Mia swallowed hard, her tongue thick with salt. The plan had been for Ash and her old teacher to meet each other at the Godsgrave chapel, gather their belongings, then make their way to the harbor and await Mia aboard the Song. With the time it took for her to swim from the arena to the ocean and out again …
“They should be here by now,” she whispered.
“… shhhh …,” came a murmur at her feet. “… do you hear that …?”
“… Hear what?”
“… it appears to be the sound of … breasts tilting skyward …?”
Mia scowled at the jest, dragging her sopping hair over her shoulder. Her heart was beating faster, her thoughts racing. There was simply no way Mercurio or Ash would have been late—not with all their lives at stake.
“Something’s happened to them …”
“… I CAN SEARCH THE CHAPEL, REPORT BACK …?”
“No. If she … If they …” Mia chewed her lip, dragged herself to her feet despite her fatigue. “We go together.”
“… even our new luggage …?”
“We can’t just leave him here, Mister Kindly,” Mia snapped.
The not-cat sighed.
“… and the tits continue to rise …”
Mia looked down at her brother. The boy seemed temporarily defeated, sullen, shivering, silent. He was soaking wet, dark eyes clouded with anger. But with Mister Kindly riding his shadow, he was unafraid at least. So Mia stood, pulling Jonnen up afterward and slinging him over her shoulder with a wince. He was heavy as a bag of bricks, bony elbows and knees jabbing her in all the wrong places. But Mia was hard as nails after the months she’d spent training in the Remus Collegium, and wounded as she was, she knew she could manage him for a time. Moving slowly beneath Mia’s shadowcloak, the unlikely quartet groped their way down the jetty and onto the crowded boardwalk, gentle water lapping beneath them.
Following her passenger’s whispered directions, stealing past the patrols of legionaries and Luminatii, Mia slipped out into the streets beyond the harbor. Her brother’s weight on her shoulders made her muscles groan in protest as she made her way through the warren of Godsgrave’s back alleys. Her pulse was thumping in her veins, her belly turning slow, cold somersaults. Eclipse was prowling out ahead. Mister Kindly was still riding Jonnen. And without her passengers, Mia was left trying to fight off fearful thoughts about what might’ve delayed Mercurio and Ash.
Luminatii?
The Ministry?
What could have gone wrong?
Goddess, if anything has happened to them because of me …
Creeping through squeezeways and over little bridges and canals, the group finally reached the wrought-iron fences surrounding the city’s necropolis. Mia’s boots were near soundless on the gravel, one hand stretched out before her, groping blind. Almost inaudible beneath the peal of cathedral bells, Eclipse’s whispers guided her through the twisted gates to the houses of the city’s dead, along rows of grand mausoleums and moldy tombs. In a weed-choked corner of the necropolis’s old quarter, she stepped through a door carved with a relief of human skulls. A passageway leading down to the boneyards waited beyond.
It was sweet bliss, being out of the light of those awful suns. Her sweat was burning in her wounds. Throwing aside her shadow mantle, Mia slipped Jonnen off her shoulder. He was little, but Goddess, he wasn’t light, and her legs and spine practically wept with relief as she placed him onto the chapel floor.
“I’m going to free your feet,” she warned. “You try to run, I’ll tie you tighter.”
The boy made no sound behind his gag, watching silently as she knelt and loosened the strap about his ankles. She could see the mistrust swimming in those black eyes, the unabated anger, but he made no immediate break for freedom. Looping the strap through the bonds at his wrists, Mia stood and walked on, tugging the little boy along behind her like a sullen hound on a soggy leash.
She made her way quietly through twisted tunnels of femurs and ribs—remains of the city’s destitute and nameless, too poor to afford tombs of their own. Pulling on a hidden lever, she opened a secret door in a stack of dusty bones, and finally slipped into the Red Church chapel hidden beyond.
Mia crept down the twisting hallways, lined with the skeletons of those long perished. Shuffling behind her, Jonnen was wide-eyed, gazing at the bones all around them. But surrounded by the dead as he was, Mister Kindly stayed coiled in his shadow, keeping the worst of his fear at bay as they moved farther into the chapel.
The corridors were dark.
Silent.
Empty.
Wrong.
Mia felt it almost immediately. Smelled it in the air. The faint scent of blood wasn’t out of place in a chapel to Our Lady of Blessed Murder, but the lingering aroma of a tombstone bomb and burned parchment certainly was.
The chapel was far too quiet, the air far too still.
Suspicion ever her watchword, Mia pulled Jonnen closer and werked her mantle of shadows back about their shoulders. Creeping onward in near blindness. Jonnen’s breathing seemed far too loud in the silence, her grip on his leash damp with sweat. Her ears strained for the slightest sound, but the place seemed deserted.
Mia stopped in a bone-lined hallway, the hair on the back of her neck prickling. She knew, even before she heard Eclipse’s warning growl.
“… BEHIND …”
The dagger flashed from out of the darkness, gleaming silver, poison-dark. Mia twisted, damp hair whipping in a long black ribbon behind her, spine bent in a perfect arch. The blade sailed over her chin, missing her by a breath. Her free hand touched the ground, pushed her back up to standing, heart hammering.
Her mind was racing, brow creased in confusion. Beneath her cloak of shadows, she was almost blind, aye—but the world should have been just as blind to her.
Blind.
O, Goddess.
He stepped out from the dark, silent despite his bulk. His gray leathers were stretched taut across the barn-broad span of his shoulders. His ever-empty scabbard hung at his waist, dark leather embossed with a pattern of concentric circles, much like a pattern of eyes. Thirty-six small scars were etched into his forearm—one for every life he’d taken in the Red Church’s name. His eyes were milky white, but Mia saw his eyebrows were gone entirely. The once-blond stubble on his head was crisped black as if burned, and the four sharp spikes of his beard were charred nubs.
“Solis.”
His face was swathed in shadows, blind eyes fixed on the ceiling. He drew two short double-edged blades from his back, both darkened by poison. And, hidden as Mia was beneath her mantle, he still spoke directly to her.
“Treacherous fucking quim,” he growled.
Mia reached for her gravebone dagger with her free hand. Heart sinking as she realized she’d left it buried in Consul Scaeva’s chest.
“O, shit,” she whispered.
CHAPTER 2
BONEYARDS
The Revered Father of the Red Church strode forward, blades raised.
“I wondered if you’d be fool enough to return here,” he snarled.
Mia tightened her sweating grip on her brother’s leash. Sensing movement, she glanced over her shoulder and saw a slender boy with shocking blue eyes stepping from the necropolis shadows. He was death-pale, dressed in a charred black doublet. Two wicked knives gleamed in his hands, their blades black with toxin.
Hush.
“Well?” Solis sneered. “Nothing to say, pup?”
Mia stayed silent, wondering how Solis could sense her under her shadowcloak at all. Sound, perhaps? The scent of her blood and sweat? Regardless, she was exhausted, unarmed, wounded—in no shape to fight. Sensing her fear, the spreading cold in her gut, Mister Kindly slipped from the boy’s shadow into her own to quell it. And as the daemon flitted away from the dark about his feet, little Jonnen kicked Mia hard in the shins and snatched his hands from her sweating grip.
“Jonnen!” she cried.
The boy turned and bolted. Mia reached for him, hand outstretched and trying to catch him up. And Solis simply hefted his blades, lowered his head, and charged.
Mia swayed aside, the Shahiid’s blade whistling past her cheek as Hush closed in behind her. Spinning swift, she threw aside her shadowcloak, werking the shadows and tangling up the boy’s feet instead. He stumbled, fell, Mia slipping under another one of Solis’s sweeping strikes. Glancing to the cool dark in the corridor behind the Shahiid, she saw Jonnen fleeing back the way they’d come. And clenching her jaw tight she
and bolted down the corridor after her fleeing brother.
“Jonnen, stop!”
Eclipse growled warning, and Mia twisted aside as one of Solis’s short swords came whistling at her out of the black. It struck the bone wall in front of her as she reached a sharp corner, remained quivering inside some long-dead skull. Mia grabbed it as she rushed past, twisting it loose and clutching it in her left hand as she ran on.
Dashing on his little legs, Jonnen found himself overtaken quickly. As Mia pounded up the corridor behind him, he glanced over his shoulder, put on a new spurt of speed. His hands were still bound, but he’d managed to drag the gag free from his mouth, shouting as she picked him up and slung him under her arm.
“Unhand me, wench!” he cried, wriggling in fury.
“Jonnen, be still!” Mia hissed.
“Let me go!”
“… still like him, do you …?” Mister Kindly whispered from Mia’s shadow.
“… LESS AND LESS WITH EACH PASSING MOMENT …,” Eclipse replied, flitting out ahead.
“… well, now you appreciate how i feel about you …”
“Shut it, the pair of you!” Mia gasped.
She bounced off a bone wall and stumbled around another corner, Solis and Hush close on her heels. Kicking through the tomb’s doorway, Mia dashed up the crumbling stairs and back into the awful glare of those three burning suns. Despite Mister Kindly feasting on her fear, her heart was threatening to burst from her ribs.
She’d spent the entire turn fighting for her life already—she was in no shape to tackle a fully armed Blade of the Red Church, let alone the former Shahiid of Songs. Charred eyebrows aside, Solis was one of the deadliest men alive with a blade. The last time they’d tangled, he’d hacked her arm clean off at the elbow. Hush was no slouch, either, and whatever kinship Mia and the boy might have had in their turns as acolytes seemed long evaporated. She was a traitor to the Red Church in his eyes, worthy only of a slow and very painful murder.
She was outnumbered. And in her current state, outclassed.
But how the ’byss could Solis see me?
Mia Stepped through the shadows to give herself some kind of lead, but with the three suns blazing overhead and her exhaustion from the great games thickening her blood, she only managed to travel a few dozen feet. She clipped her shin on a tombstone, staggered, and almost fell. She might’ve pulled on her mantle again, but Solis seemed able to sense her anyway. And truth told, she was too tired to manage it all—the wriggling boy in her arms, the desperate chase, werking the dark. Wild eyes searching now for any way of escape.
She skipped up onto a low marble tomb and vaulted the wrought-iron fence of the necropolis. Hitting the ground hard, she gasped, almost falling again. She was in the grounds of a grand chapel to Aa now, built beside the houses of the dead. She could see a broad cobbled road scattered with citizens beyond the churchyard, tall tenements lining the street, flowers in the window boxes. The chapel itself was limestone and glass, the three suns on its belfry mirroring the three suns above.
Black Mother, they were so bright, so hot, so—
“… MIA, BEWARE …!”
A dagger sailed from Hush’s outstretched hand, whistling toward her back. She twisted with a cry, the blade slicing through a lock of her long, dark hair and sailing past her scarred cheek, close enough for her to smell the toxin on the blade. It was Rictus—a fast-working paralytic. One good scratch and she’d be helpless as a newborn babe.
They want me alive, she realized.
“Release me, villain!” her brother shouted, thrashing again.
“Jonnen, please—”
“My name is Lucius!”
The boy bucked and kicked under Mia’s arm, still trying to free himself from her grip. He managed to drag his hand loose from the sodden leather bonds about his wrists, and with a gasp, he threw it up into Mia’s face. And as if the suns were suddenly extinguished in the sky, all the world went black.
She stumbled in the sudden dark. Her boot clipped a broken flagstone, and her legs went out from under her. Mia gritted her teeth as she hit the ground, hissing in pain as she tore her knees and palms bloody. Her brother also fell, crying out as he tumbled across the gravel to a graceless halt.
The boy rose from the dirt. The boy she’d thought long dead. The boy she’d just snatched from the clutches of a man he should have hated.
“Assassin!” he roared. “The assassin is here!”
And fast as he could, he dashed out into the street.
Mia blinked hard, shook her head—she could hear Jonnen yelling as he ran, but she could see nothing at all. In a rush, she realized her brother had somehow werked the shadows over her eyes, completely blinding her. It was a trick she’d never learned, never tried, and she’d have admired the boy’s creativity if he wasn’t turning out to be such a troublesome little prick.
But the shadows were hers to werk just as much as Jonnen’s, and death was running right on her heels. Mia curled her fingers into claws, tore the darkness away from her eyes just as the Revered Father and his silent companion vaulted the iron fence and dropped into the churchyard behind her.
Mia hauled herself to her feet, blinking hard as her sight returned. Her arms felt like putty. Her legs were shaking. Turning to face Solis and Hush, she was barely able to raise her stolen sword. Her shadow writhed around her long leather boots as the two killers fanned out to flank her.
“Call the guards!” Jonnen cried from the street beyond. “Assassin!”
The citizens turned to stare, wondering at the ruckus. A priest of Aa stepped out from the chapel doors, clad in his holy vestments. A cadre of Itreyan legionaries down the block turned their heads at the sound of the boy’s cries. But Mia could pay heed to none of it.
Solis lunged at her throat, his blade a blur. Desperate, drawing on the dark new strength in her veins, she reached out, tangled up the Shahiid’s feet in his own shadow before he could reach her. Solis snarled in frustration, his strike falling short. Hush hurled another knife and Mia cried out, smashing it from the air with her stolen sword in a hail of bright sparks. And then she charged the silent boy, desperate to even the scales before Solis could break loose of her shadow werking.
Hush drew a rapier from his belt, met her charge, steel on steel. Mia knew the boy from the brief comradeship they’d shared as acolytes in the halls of the Quiet Mountain. She knew where he’d come from, what he’d been before he joined the Church, why he never spoke. It wasn’t because he lacked a tongue, no—it was because the owners of the pleasure house he’d been enslaved to as a child had knocked out all his teeth so he could better service their clientele.
Mia had been training in the art of the sword since she was ten years old. Hush had still been on his hands and knees on silken sheets. They’d both trained under Solis, true, and the boy had proved himself no novice with a blade. But in the last nine months, Mia had trained under the whip of Arkades, the Red Lion of Itreya—schooled in the arts of the gladiatii by one of the greatest swordsmen alive. And though she was exhausted, bleeding, bruised, her muscles were still hardened, her grip still callused, her form drilled into her hour upon hour beneath the burning sunslight.
“Guards!” came Jonnen’s call. “She’s here!”
Mia struck low, forcing Hush aside, her backswing whistling through the air. The boy stepped away like a dancer, blue eyes glittering. Mia raised her blade, telegraphing another strike. But with a deft flick of her boot, she scooped up a toeful of grit from the earth beneath them—an old gladiatii trick—and kicked it right at Hush’s face.
The boy reeled back and Mia’s blade sliced him across the chest, just a few inches short of splitting his ribs clean open. His doublet and the flesh beyond parted like water, but still the boy made no sound. He staggered back, one hand pressed to his wound as Mia raised her blade for the deathblow.
“… MIA …!”
She turned with a gasp, barely deflecting the strike that would have split her head apart. Solis had hacked his boots away, left them wrapped in tendrils of his own shadow, and charged Mia barefoot. The big man collided with her, sent her flying, her backside and thighs shredded on the stone as she hit the ground. She tumbled back up onto her feet with a black curse, fending off the flurry of strikes Solis aimed at her head, neck, chest. She struck back, sweat-soaked and desperate, long black hair stuck to her skin, Mister Kindly and Eclipse working hard to eat her fear.
“Guards!”
This was no fresh Blade of the Church she faced now, no. This was the deadliest swordsman in the congregation. And no cheap tricks learned in the arena would avail Mia here. Only skill. And steel. And sheer, bloody will.
She struck back at Solis, their blades ringing bright beneath the burning suns. His white eyes were narrowed, fixed somewhere in the empty over her left shoulder. And yet the blind man moved as if he saw her every strike coming from a mile away. Forcing her back. Beating her down. Wearing her out.
The crowd in the street had gathered outside the chapel gates now, drawn like flies to a corpse by Jonnen’s cries. The boy stood in the middle of the thoroughfare, waving at the cadre of legionaries, who were even now tromptromptromping toward them. Mia was tired, weak, outnumbered—she had only moments before this situation dissolved into a puddle of shite.
“Where’s Ashlinn and Mercurio?” she demanded.
Solis’s blade streaked past her chin as he smiled. “If you’ve a wish to see your old master alive again, girl, you’d best drop your steel and come with me.”
Mia’s eyes narrowed as she struck at the big man’s knees.
“You don’t call me girl, bastard. Not as if the word were kin for ‘shit.’”
Solis laughed and launched a riposte that almost took Mia’s head off. She twisted aside, sweat-soaked fringe hanging in her eyes.
“Perhaps you only hear what you want to hear, girl.”
“Aye, laugh now,” she wheezed. “But what will you do without your beloved Scaeva? When your other patrons learn the savior of the fucking Republic died at the hands of one of your own Blades?”
Solis tilted his head and smiled wider, stilling the heart in Mia’s chest.
“Did he?”
“Halt! In the name of the Light!”
The legionaries burst through the chapel gates, all glittering armor and blood-red plumes on their helms. Hush was on his knees, the Rictus from Mia’s stolen blade rendering him numb and lethargic. Mia and Solis hung still, swords poised as the legionaries spread out into the courtyard. The centurion leading them was burly as a pile of bricks, heavy brows and a thick beard bristling beneath his glittering helm.
“Put down your weapons, citizens!” he barked.
Mia glanced at the centurion, the troops around them, the crossbows aimed square at her heaving chest. Jonnen forced his way through the soldiers, pointing right at her and shouting at the top of his lungs.
“That’s her! Kill her now!”
“Get back, boy!” the captain snapped.
Jonnen scowled at the man, drew himself up to his full height.[1]
“I am Lucius Atticus Scaeva,” he spat. “Firstborn son of Consul Julius Maximillianus Scaeva. This slave murdered my father, and I order you to kill her!”
Solis tilted his head slightly, as if taking note of the lad for the first time. The centurion raised an eyebrow, looking the little lordling up and down. Despite his disheveled appearance, the grime on his face and sopping robes, it could hardly be missed that he was clad in brilliant purple—the color of Itreyan nobility. Nor that he wore the triple-sun crest of the Luminatii legion upon his chest.
“Kill her!” the boy roared, stamping his foot.
The crossbowmen tightened their fingers on their triggers. The centurion looked at Mia, drew breath to shout.
“Lo—”
A chill stole over the scene—the legionaries, the assassins, the crowd gathered in the street beyond. Despite the blazing heat, goosebumps shivered on Mia’s bare skin. A familiar shape rose up behind the soldiers, hooded and cloaked, twin gravebone swords clutched in its ink-black hands. Mia recognized it immediately—the same figure that had saved her life in the Galante necropolis. The same one who’d given her that cryptic message.
“SEEK THE CROWN OF THE MOON.”
Its face was hidden in the depths of its cloak. Mia’s breath hung in white clouds before her lips, and despite the heat, she found herself shivering in its chill.
Without a word, the figure struck the closest soldier, its gravebone blade splitting his breastplate asunder. The other legionaries cried out in alarm, turning their crossbows upon their assailant. As the figure wove among them, blades flashing, they fired. The crossbow bolts struck home, thudding into the figure’s chest and belly. But it seemed not to slow at all. The crowd in the street beyond fell to panicking as the figure wheeled and spun among the soldiers, cutting them to bloody chunks, raining red.
Mia moved swift despite her fatigue, grabbing her wriggling brother by the scruff of his neck. Solis charged across the broken flagstones toward her, and Mia brought up her blade to block his onslaught. The Shahiid’s strikes were deathly quick, sheer perfection. And hard as she tried, swift as she was, she felt a blow sail past her guard and slice into her shoulder.
Mia spun aside, dropping her stolen blade as she cried out. Within seconds she could feel the Rictus in her veins, a numbing chill spreading out from the wound, flowing down her arm. With a grunt of effort, she threw up her hand, wrapped up Solis’s feet in his shadow again as she tumbled onto her backside, her brother clutched tight to her chest. The Shahiid stumbled, cursed, trying to rip his bare feet free from her grip. Mister Kindly and Eclipse coalesced on the stone between them, the shadowcat hissing and puffing up, the shadowwolf’s growl coming from beneath the earth.
“… back, bastard …”
“… YOU WILL NOT TOUCH HER …”
Behind Mia, the strange figure finished its grim work. The churchyard looked like the floor of an abattoir, pieces of legionaries scattered all across it, the bystanders fleeing in panic. The figure’s gravebone blades dripped with gore as it stepped across the flagstones, stood above the fallen girl, leveling a sword at Solis’s throat. The Revered Father of the Red Church seemed unperturbed despite the trio of shadowthings arrayed against him, lips pulled back over his teeth, white breath hanging in the air between them.
The figure spoke, its voice tinged with a strange reverberation.
“THE MOTHER IS DISAPPOINTED IN YOU, SOLIS.”
“Who are you, daemon?” he demanded.
“YOU TRULY ARE BLIND,” it replied. “BUT WHEN DARK DAWNS, YOU WILL SEE.”
The figure knelt beside Mia. Her right arm was numb, she was barely able to keep her head up. But she still clung to her brother like grim death—after all the blood and miles and years, she’d be damned to come all this way and discover he lived, only to lose him again. For his part, between the presence of this strange wraith and the bloody murder it had just unleashed, Jonnen seemed frozen with fear.
The figure reached out one hand. It was black and gleaming, as if dipped in fresh paint. As it touched her wounded shoulder, Mia felt a stab of pain, ice-cold and black, all the way to her heart. She hissed as the earth surged beneath her, a frozen vertigo setting all the world awhirl.
She felt sorrow. Pain. An endless, lonely chill.
She felt she was falling.
And then she felt nothing at all.
CHAPTER 3
EMBER
Mercurio awoke in darkness.
The pain in his head felt like the kind earned after a three-turn bender, and yet he could recall no recent debauchery. His jaw ached, and he could taste blood on his tongue. Groaning, he slowly sat upright in a bed lined with soft gray fur, hand to his brow. He had no idea where he might be, but something … the scent in the air perhaps, dragged him back to younger years.
“Hello, Mercurio.”
He turned to his left, saw an old woman seated beside his bed. She looked to be around his age, her long gray hair bound in neat braids. She was dressed in dark gray robes, cool blue eyes pouched in deep wrinkles. At first glance, a bystander might’ve expected to find her in a rocking chair beside a merry hearth, a handful of grandsprogs around her, an old moggy on her knee. But Mercurio knew better.
“Hello, you murderous old cunt,” he replied.
Drusilla, Lady of Blades, smiled in reply.
“You always did have a silver tongue, my dear.”
The old woman lifted a cup of steaming tea from the saucer in her lap, sipped slowly. Her eyes were fixed on Mercurio as he peered around the bedchamber, breathed deep, finally understanding where he was. The song of a choir hung in the cool, dark air. He smelled candles and incense, steel and smoke. He remembered the Ministry accosting him in the Godsgrave chapel. The scratch from the poisoned blade in Spiderkiller’s hand. The old man realized the blood he could taste belonged to pigs.
They’ve brought me back to the Mountain.
“You haven’t changed your decor much,” he sighed.
“You know me, love. I was never one for extravagance.”
“The last time I was in this bed, I told you it really was the last time,” Mercurio said. “But if I knew you were this hungry for a return performance …”
“O, please,” the old woman sighed. “You’d need a block and tackle to get it up at your age. And your heart could barely stand it when we were twenty.”
Mercurio smiled despite himself.
“It’s good to see you, ’Silla.”
“Would that I could say the same.” The Lady of Blades shook her head and sighed. “You addle-minded old fool.”
“Did you really drag me all the way to the Quiet Mountain for a rebuke?” Mercurio reached to his coat for his smokes and found both smokes and coat missing. “You could’ve just chewed my cods off back in the ’Grave.”
“What were you thinking?” Drusilla demanded, setting aside her tea. “Helping that idiot girl in her idiot schemes? Do you realize what you’ve done?”
“I’m not fresh fallen from the last rains, ’Silla.”
“No, you’re the bishop of Godsgrave!” Drusilla stood, prowling around the bed, eyes flashing. “Years of faithful service. Sworn to the Dark Mother. And yet you helped a Blade of the Church break the Red Promise and murder one of our own patrons!”[1]
“O, Goddess, don’t play the wounded devotee with me,” Mercurio growled. “It’s as obvious as a beagle’s bollocks that you and your nest of snakes wanted Cardinal Duomo dead. You’ve all been in bed with Scaeva for years. Did Lord Cassius know? Or was this something you and the others conspired to behind his back?”
“You’re a fine one to speak of conspiracies, love.”
“How do you think the rest of the congregation would react if they knew, ’Silla? That the Ministry was content to bend over and spread cheek for our beloved People’s Senator? The hands of Niah upon this earth, become lapdogs of a fucking tyrant?”
“I should have you killed for your betrayal,” Drusilla snarled.
“And yet I can’t help notice I’m not dead.” The old man peered under the sheets. “Or that I’m sans trousers. You certain I’m not here for an encore? I’ve learned a few tricks since—”
Drusilla hurled a gray robe at the old man’s head.
“You are here to serve as the worm you are.”
“… As bait?” Mercurio shook his head. “You really think she’s stupid enough to come after me? After all she’s been through, after all she’s—”
“I know who Mia Corvere is,” Drusilla snapped. “This is a girl who gave up any chance at a normal life or happiness to see her parents avenged. She sold herself into slavery on a gambit that even a lunatic would consider insanity, for a single chance to strike down the men who destroyed her house. She is fearless. Reckless beyond reckoning. So if there is one thing I’ve learned about your little Crow, it is this: there is nothing that girl will not do for her familia. Nothing.”
The old woman leaned over the bed, stared into the old man’s eyes.
“And you, dear Mercurio, are more a father to her than her father ever was.”
The old man stared back, saying nothing. Swallowing the bile flooding his mouth. The Lady of Blades only smiled, leaning a little closer. He could still see her beauty beneath the scars of time. Remember the last nevernight they’d been in this bedchamber together, all those years ago. Sweat and blood and sweet, sweet poison.
“You may wander in the Mountain if you wish,” Drusilla said. “I’m certain you remember where everything is. The congregation has been informed of your betrayal, but you are not to be touched. We need you breathing for now. But please, don’t push the friendship by being more the fool than you’ve already been.”
Drusilla reached under the sheet between his legs, squeezed tight as he gasped.
“A man can still breathe without these, after all.”
The old woman held on a moment longer, then released her icy grip. Lips still curled in her matronly smile, the Lady of Blades took her saucer and cup back up, turned, and stalked toward the bedchamber door.
“Drusilla.”
The Lady of Blades glanced over her shoulder. “Aye?”
“You really are a cunt, you know that?”
“Ever the flatterer.” The old woman turned back to him, her smile vanished. “But a man like you should know exactly where flattery gets you with a woman like me.”
Mercurio sat in the gloom after she left, wrinkled brow creased with worry.
“Aye,” he muttered. “In deep shit.”
He’d lurked in the bedchamber a few hours more, nursing his aching head and wounded ego. But boredom eventually bid him pull on the gray robe Drusilla had given him, tie the thin strip of leather about his waist. He didn’t bother trying to arm himself—Mercurio knew the only ways out of the Quiet Mountain were a two-week trek across the Ashkahi Whisperwastes, out through Speaker Adonai’s blood pool, or by leaping off the railings of the Sky Altar and into the shapeless night beyond.
Escape from here without help or wings was all but impossible.
He stepped from the bedchamber, leaning on the cane they’d (rather thoughtfully) left him, out into the gloom of the Quiet Mountain. Ice-blue eyes that seemed born to scowl surveyed the dark around him. The disembodied choir sung faintly, nowhere and everywhere at once. The halls were black stone, lit by windows of stained glass and false sunslight, decorated with grotesque statuary of bone and skin. Spiral patterns covered every inch of wall, intricate and maddening.
As soon as Mercurio’s feet touched the flagstones outside Drusilla’s room, he felt the presence of a robed figure, watching from the gloom. One of Drusilla’s Hands, no doubt, tasked to be his shadow for the duration of his stay.[2] He ignored the figure, wandered about his way, listening to it following behind. His old knees creaked as he descended the stairs, down the wending paths and through the labyrinthine dark, until he finally stepped into the Hall of Eulogies.
He looked around the vast space, forced to admire the grandeur even after all these years. Enormous stone pillars were arranged in a circle, stone gables carved from the Mountain itself soaring above. The names of the Church’s countless victims were scribed on the granite at his feet. Unmarked tombs of the faithful lined the walls.
The space was dominated by a colossal statue of Niah herself. Her black eyes seemed to follow Mercurio as he stepped closer, squinting in the false light. She held a scale and a wicked sword in her hands, her face beautiful and serene and cold. Jewels glittered on her ebony robe like stars in the truedark sky.
She who is All and Nothing.
Mother, Maid, and Matriarch.
Mercurio touched his eyes, his lips, his heart, looking up at his Goddess with clouded eyes. As he stood there in the hall, a knot of young folk entered from the steps below. They regarded the old bishop with wary stares as they passed, meeting his gaze only briefly. Smooth skin and bright eyes and clean hands, teenagers all. New acolytes by the look, just beginning their training.
He stared after them wistfully as they left. Remembering his own tutelage within these walls, his devotion to the Mother of Night. How long ago it all seemed now, how cold he’d grown inside. Once he’d been fire. Breathed it. Bled it. Spat it. But now, the only ember that remained was the one he kept burning for her—that snot-nosed, stuck-up little lordling’s bitch who’d wandered into his shop all those years ago, a silver brooch shaped like a crow in her hand.
He’d never made time for familia. To live as a Blade of the Mother was to live with death—with the knowledge that every turn could be your last. It hadn’t seemed fair to take a wife when she’d likely end a widow, nor make a child who’d probably be raised an orphan. Mercurio never thought he’d a need for children. If you’d asked him why he’d taken that raven-haired waif in all those years ago, he’d have muttered something about her gift, her grit, her guile. He’d have laughed if you’d told him he needed her as much as she needed him. He’d have cut your throat and buried you deep if you’d told him that one turn, he’d love her like the daughter he’d never had.
But in his bones, even as he ended you, he’d have known it true.
And now, here he was. A worm on Drusilla’s hook. For all his bluff, he knew the Lady of Blades spoke truth—Mia loved him like blood. She’d never let him die in here, not if she thought she had a chance to save him. And with those wretched daemons riding her shadow and eating her fear, in Mia’s head there was always a chance.
The old man peered at the granite colossus above him. The sword and scales in her hands. Those pitiless black eyes, boring into his own.
“Where the fuck are you?” he whispered.
He left the hall, Drusilla’s Hand lurking at a respectful distance behind as the old bishop shuffled on his way through the Mountain’s maze, his cane beating crisp on the black stone. His knees were aching by the time he reached his destination—he didn’t remember there being quite so many stairs in this place. Two dark wooden doors loomed before him, carved with the same spiral motif as decorated the walls. Each must have weighed a ton, but the old man reached out with one gnarled hand and pushed them open with ease.
Mercurio found himself on a mezzanine overlooking a forest of ornate shelves, laid out like a garden maze. They stretched off into a space too dark and vast to see the edges. On each shelf were piled books of every shape and size and description. Dusty tomes and vellum scrolls and famished notebooks and everything in between. The grand Athenaeum of the Goddess of Death, peopled with the memoirs of kings and conquerors, theorems of heretics, masterpieces of madmen. Dead books and lost books and books that never were—some burned on the pyres of the faithful, some simply swallowed by time, and others simply too dangerous to write at all.
An endless heaven for any reader, and a living hell for any librarian.
“Well, well,” said a croaking, hollow voice. “Look what the scabdogs dragged in.”
Mercurio turned to see an old Liisian man in a scruffy waistcoat, leaning on a trolley piled with books. Two shocks of white hair sprung from either side of his scalp, and a pair of finger-thick spectacles adorned his hooked nose. His back was so bent, he looked like a walking question mark. A fine cigarillo smoldered on his bloodless lips.
“Hello, Chronicler,” Mercurio said.
“You’re a long way from Godsgrave, Bishop,” Aelius growled.
The chronicler stepped closer, squared up against Mercurio, and glowered. As they stood there, face-to-face, Aelius seemed to stand taller, his shadow growing longer. The air rippled with some dark current, and Mercurio heard the shapes of colossi moving out between the shelves. Coming closer.
Aelius’s dark eyes burned as he considered Mercurio’s, his voice growing harder and colder with every word.
“If I can still call you ‘Bishop’ at all, that is,” he spat. “I thought you’d be ashamed to show your face outside your bedchamber after what you pulled. Let alone drag yourself down here. What brings your traitorous hide to the Black Mother’s library?”
Mercurio pointed to the ever-present spare behind the chronicler’s ear.
“Smoke?”
Chronicler Aelius hung still for a moment, eyes burning with dark flame. Then, with a small chuckle, he unfolded his arms, clapped Mercurio on his thin shoulder. Lighting the cigarillo on his own, he handed it over.
“All right, whippersnapper?”
“Do I look all right, old man?” Mercurio asked.
“You look like shite. But it’s always polite to ask.”
Mercurio leaned against the wall and gazed out over the library, dragging a sweet gray draft into his lungs. The smoke tasted of strawberries, the sugared paper setting his tongue dancing.
“They don’t make them like this anymore,” Mercurio sighed.
“Same might be said of everything in this room,” Aelius replied.
“How’ve you been, you old bastard?”
“Dead.”[3]
The chronicler settled in beside him.
“You?”
“Much the same.”
Aelius scoffed, breathed a plume of gray. “Still got a pulse in you from what I can see. What the ’byss you sulking about down here for, lad?”
Mercurio drew on his cigarillo. “It’s a long story, old man.”
“A story about your Mia, I take it?”
“… How’d you guess?”
Aelius shrugged his bone-thin shoulders, his eyes twinkling behind his improbable spectacles. “She always struck me as a girl with one to tell.”
“We might be nearing the final page, I fear.”
“You’re too young to be such a pessimist.”
“I’m sixty-fucking-two,” Mercurio growled.
“As I say, far too young.”
Mercurio found himself chuckling, warm gray spilling from his lips. He leaned back against the wall, feeling the smoke buzz in his blood.
“How long have you been down here, Aelius?”
“O, a while,” the chronicler sighed. “Never saw much sense in counting the years, though. It’s not as though I really have a choice about when I leave.”
“The Mother keeps only what she needs,” Mercurio murmured.
“Aye.” Aelius nodded. “She does at that.”
Mercurio tilted his head back, looked out on all those dead books with heavy-lidded eyes. “Do you hate her for it?”
“Blasphemy,” the old ghost scolded.
“Is it?” Mercurio asked. “If she doesn’t care what we say or do?”
“And what makes you say that?”
“Well, look at what this place has become,” Mercurio growled, waving his cane at the dark. “Once, it was a house of wolves. Each murder, an offering to Our Lady of Blessed Murder. Feeding her hunger. Making her stronger. Hastening her return. And now?” He spat on the flagstones. “It’s a whorehouse. The Ministry feed their own coffers, not the Maw. Their hands drip with gold, not red.”
Mercurio shook his head, breathing smoke as he continued.
“O, we say all the words, make all the gestures, aye. ‘This flesh your feast, this blood your wine.’ But still, when all the praying is done, we drop to our knees for the likes of Julius fucking Scaeva. How can you say Niah cares, if she allows this poison to fester in her own halls?”
“Maw’s teeth.” Aelius raised one snow-white brow. “Someone woke up on the wrong side of bed this morn.”
“Fuck off,” the old man spat.
“What do you want her to do?” the chronicler demanded. “She’s been banished from the sky for millennia, boy. Allowed to rule for a handful of turns every two and a half years. How much say over all this do you think she has? How much influence do you think she can exert in the prison her husband made for her?”
“If she’s so powerless, why call her a goddess at all?”
Aelius’s frown deepened into a scowl. “I never said she was powerless.”
“Because you were never one to state the fucking obvious.”
The chronicler looked at Mercurio hard. “I remember when you first arrived here, boy. Green as grass, you were. Soft as baby shite. But you believed. In her. In this. The brighter the light, the deeper the shadow.”
Mercurio scowled. “I’ve as much need for old Ashkahi proverbs as I have for a second ballsack, old man.”
“You might have more need than you know, with young Drusilla on the prowl,” Aelius smirked. “Point is, you had faith, boy. Where’d it go?”
Mercurio pressed the cigarillo to his lips, thinking long and hard.
“I still believe,” he replied. “The God of Light and Goddess of Night and their Four fucking Daughters. I mean, this place exists. You exist. The Dark Mother obviously still has some small sway.” Mercurio shrugged. “But this is a world ruled by men, not divinities. And for all the blood, all the death, all the lives we’ve taken in her name, she’s still so fucking far away.”
“She’s closer than you think,” Aelius said.
“I swear by all that’s holy, if you tell me she dwells in the temple of my heart, we’re going to find out if folk can return from the dead twice.”
“They can’t, actually,” the chronicler shrugged. “Not even the Mother has that power. You die once, you might make it back with her blessing. But cross back over to the Abyss once more? You’re gone forever.”
“That threat was supposed to be rhetorical, old man.”
Aelius grinned, smudged his cigarillo out against the wall, and dropped the butt into the pocket of his waistcoat. “Come with me.”
The chronicler leaned on his RETURNS trolley, began wheeling it down the long ramp from the mezzanine to the Athenaeum floor below. Mercurio watched the old man shuffling away, dragging on his own smoke.
“Come on, whippersnapper!” Aelius barked.
The bishop of Godsgrave sighed and, pushing himself off the wall, followed the chronicler down the ramp into the library proper. Side by side, the pair wandered through the maze of shelves, mahogany and parchment and vellum all around. Every now and then, Aelius would stop and place one of his returned tomes back into its allotted place, almost reverently. The shelves were too tall to see over, and each aisle looked much the same. Mercurio was soon hopelessly lost, and a part of him wondered how in the Mother’s name Aelius made sense of this place.
“Where the ’byss are we going?” he grumbled, rubbing his aching knees.
“New section,” Aelius replied. “They pop up all the time in this place. When they want to be found, that is. I stumbled onto this one almost two years ago. Right before your girl arrived here for the first time.”
Out in the dark, Mercurio could hear bookworms shifting their massive bulks among the shelves. Leathery hides scraping along the stone, deep, rumbling growls reverberating through the floor. The air was dry and cool, echoing with the faint song of that beautiful choir. There was a peace to this place, no doubt. But Mercurio wondered if he’d manage an eternity in it with quite as much calm as Aelius.
They turned down a long shelf, twisting off in a gentle curve. As they walked the rows of dusty tomes wrapped in old skins and polished wood, Mercurio realized the curve was slowly tightening—that the shelf was turning in an eversmaller spiral. And somewhere near the heart of it, out in all that dark, Aelius came to a stop.
The chronicler reached up to the top shelf, pulled down a thick book, and placed it in Mercurio’s hands.
“The Mother keeps only what she needs,” he said. “And she does what she can. In the small ways that she can.”
Mercurio raised an eyebrow, cigarillo still smoldering at his lips as he examined the tome. It was bound in leather, black as a truedark sky. The edges of the pages were stained blood-red, and a crow in flight was embossed in glossy black on the cover.
He opened the book, looked down to the first page.
“Nevernight,” he muttered. “Stupid name for a book.”
“Makes for interesting reading,” Aelius said.
Mercurio opened the book to the prologue, rheumy eyes scanning the text.
CAVEAT EMPTOR
People often shit themselves when they die.
Their muscles slack and their souls flutter free and everything else just … slips out. For all their audience’s love of death, the playwrights seldom—
Mercurio flipped through a few more pages, softly scoffing.
“It has footnotes? What kind of wanker writes a novel with footnotes?”
“It’s not a novel,” Aelius replied, sounding wounded. “It’s a biography.”
“About who?”
The chronicler simply nodded back to the book. Mercurio flicked through a few pages more, scanning the beginning of chapter three.
… dropped him into the path of an oncoming maidservant, who fell with a shriek. Dona Corvere turned on her daughter, regal and furious.
“Mia Corvere, keep that wretched animal out from underfoot or we’ll leave it behind!”
And as simple as that, we have her name.
Mia.
Mercurio faltered. Cigarillo hanging from suddenly bone-dry lips. His blood ran cold as he finally understood what he held in his hands. Glancing up at the shelves around him. The dead books and lost books and books that never were—some burned on the pyres of the faithful, some swallowed by time, and others …
Simply too dangerous to write at all.
Aelius had wandered off down the twisted row, hands in his pockets and muttering to himself, a trail of thin gray smoke left behind him. But Mercurio was rooted to the spot. Utterly mesmerized. He began flipping faster through the pages, eyes scanning the flowing script, snatching only fragments in his haste.
“The books we love, they love us back.”
“I will give your brother your regards.”
“Who or what is the Moon?” she asked.
Mercurio reached the end, turning the book over and over in his hands. Wondering why there were no more pages and looking around the library of the dead in mute wonder and fear.
“I found another one, too,” Aelius said, returning from farther down the row. “About three months back. Wasn’t there one turn, next turn, there it was.”
The chronicler handed Mercurio another heavy tome. It was similar to the one he already held, but the pages were edged in sky blue rather than blood-red. A wolf was embossed on the black cover instead of a crow. Juggling the first book into the crook of his elbow, he opened the second’s cover and peered at the title.
“Godsgrave,” he muttered.
“Follows on from the first,” Aelius nodded. “I think I liked this one better, actually. Less fucking about at the start.”
The choir sang in the ghostly dark around them, echoing through the great Athenaeum. Mercurio’s hands were shaking, cigarillo falling from his mouth as he fumbled with the first tome, opening it finally to the title page.
And there it was.
NEVERNIGHT
BOOK 1 OF THE NEVERNIGHT CHRONICLE
by Mercurio of Liis
The old man closed the book, looked at Niah’s chronicler with wondering eyes.
“Holy shit,” he breathed.
CHAPTER 4
GIFT
Arkemical globes twinkled in the arched ceilings and the music swelled in Mia’s chest and all around her was pale bone and glittering gold. She stood between her father and mother, little hands clutching theirs, staring down at the dance floor in wide-eyed wonder. Elegant donas in dazzling gowns of red and pearl and black, swaying and twirling in the arms of smooth dons in long frock coats. Delicious food arrayed on silver trays and singing crystal glasses filled with sparkling liqueurs.
“Well, my dove?” her father asked. “What do you think?”
“It’s so beautiful.” Mia sighed.
The little girl could sense people’s eyes on them as they stood there at the top of the winding stairs. The doorman had announced their arrival at the grand palazzo, and all had turned to stare. The dashing justicus of the Luminatii Legion, Darius Corvere. His lovely and formidable wife, Alinne. Her parents made their way through the marrowborn crowd, the pretty smiles, the polite nods, the faces hidden by exquisite Carnivalé masks. The palazzo’s ballroom was filled to bursting, and all of Godsgrave’s finest had been invited to the affair—the election of a new consul always brought out the most beautiful of people.
“Will you dance, my dear?” her father asked.
Alinne Corvere softly scoffed, one hand pressed to her swollen belly. Mia knew the baby would come soon. She hoped it would be a boy.
“Not unless you’ve a barrow stowed under that doublet, husband,” she replied.
“Alas,” Darius replied, reaching beneath the folds of his costume. “I’ve only this.”
Mia’s father presented her mother a blood-red rose, bowing low for the benefit of the onlookers around them. Alinne smiled and took the bloom, inhaling deeply as she regarded her husband. But again, she ran a hand over her belly, demurring with a glance from those dark, knowing eyes.
Mia’s father turned and knelt before her.
“What about you, my dove? Will you dance?”
Mia had been feeling strange all week, truth told. Since truedark had fallen, her belly had been all aflutter, and nothing quite felt the way it should. But still, as her father offered his hand, she couldn’t help but smile, caught up in the warmth of his eyes.
“Yes, Father,” she lisped.
“We should give our congratulations to our new consul,” her mother warned.
“Soon enough,” her father nodded, offering his arm to Mia. “Mi Dona?”
The pair of them swept out onto the dance floor, the other marrowborn revelers parting to let them through. Mia was only nine years old, not yet tall or old enough to dance properly. But Darius Corvere propped her little feet upon his and led her gently to the rush and pull of the music. Mia saw the couples around them smiling, charmed as ever by the handsome justicus and his precocious daughter. She looked about her in wonder, caught up in the song and the dresses and the glittering lights above.
The three suns had sunk below the horizon over a week ago, and the Mother of Night was nearing the end of another brief reign of the sky. Mia could hear the popopopopop of the fireworks in the city beyond, meant to frighten the Night back to the Abyss. All over Godsgrave, folk were huddled about their hearths, waiting for Aa to open his eyes again. But here, in her father’s arms, Mia found she wasn’t afraid at all. Instead of being frightened, she felt safe.
Strong.
Loved.
She knew her father was a handsome man, and she was old enough to note the longing stares of the marrowborn ladies as they watched him sweep past across the ballroom floor. But despite the finest of Godsgrave’s donas (and no few dons) staring after him wistfully, Mia’s father had eyes only for her.
“I love you, Mia.”
“I love you, too.”
“Promise you’ ll remember. No matter what comes.”
She gave him a puzzled smile. “I promise, Father.”
They danced on, twirling across the polished boards to the magikal song. Mia looked to the ceilings high above her, pale and gleaming. The consul’s extravagant palazzo sat at the base of the first Rib, right near the Senate House and Godsgrave’s Spine. The dance floor was a revolving mosaic of the three suns, circling each other just as the dancers did. The building was carved from the gravebone of the Rib itself, same as the longsword at her father’s waist, the armor he wore when he rode to war. The heart of the Itreyan Republic, chiseled from the bones of some long-fallen titan.
Mia peered through the crowd and saw her mother, speaking with a man upon a dais at the end of the room. He was resplendent in robes of brilliant purple, a golden laurel around his brow and golden rings upon his fingers. His hair was thick and dark, his eyes were darker still, and he was—though Mia would never have admitted it—perhaps a little more handsome than her father.
Mia saw her mother bow to the handsome man. An elegant woman seated on the dais looked displeased as the man kissed Alinne Corvere’s hand in turn.
“Who is that, Father?” Mia asked.
“Our new consul,” he replied, his eyeline following hers. “Julius Scaeva.”
“Is he a friend of Mother’s?”
“Of a sort.”
Mia watched as the handsome man placed one hand on Alinne Corvere’s swollen belly. A brief touch, light as feathers. A glance between them, quick as silver.
“I do not like him,” the girl declared.
“No fear, my dove,” the justicus replied. “Your mother likes him well enough for both of you. She always has.”
Mia blinked, looking up at her father with black, narrowed eyes. There was a length of rope about his neck in place of his cravat now, tied in a perfect noose.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“O, wake up, Mia,” he sighed.
“Father, I—”
“Wake up.”
Wake up.”
Mia felt a hard kick in her belly. A child’s voice, somewhere distant. “Wake up, curse you!”
Another kick, this time into the fresh wound at her shoulder. Mia gasped with pain and opened her eyes, seeing a silhouette leaning over her in the gloom. Without thinking, she lashed out with her good hand, seizing the figure’s throat. It squeaked and thrashed, little fingers digging into her forearm. Only then, through the pain and retreating toxic haze did she recognize …
“… Jonnen?”
She released the boy’s neck as if his skin were scalding metal. Utterly aghast, she reached out to smooth his filthy purple toga.
“O, Jonnen, I’m sor—”
“My name is Lucius!” the boy spat, slapping her hands away.
Mia caught her breath, tried to still her thundering heart. She was horrified at herself—she’d almost hurt him without thinking. Her mind was swimming with pictures of a glittering ballroom and a truedark sky and Scaeva’s hand on her mother’s belly. Of an arena full of people, screaming as she buried her gravebone dagger in Scaeva’s chest. Of Jonnen’s face, pale and horrified as she laid his father low before him.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
The boy simply scowled, his eyes as dark and bottomless as Mia’s. She glanced around them, wondering where they might be. A vast black space surrounded them, lit by the glow of a single lantern on the ground beside her. The ghostly light extended only a handful of feet, and beyond that lay a darkness too deep to fathom.
The floor was uneven beneath her, and Mia realized it was made entirely of human faces and hands—stone reliefs, carved from the snow-pale bedrock itself. The faces were all female—all the same woman, in fact—her features beautiful, her tresses long and gently curled. But her expressions were all of anguish, of terror, her stone mouths open wide and silently screaming. The multitude of hands were upturned to the hidden ceiling, as if it were about to collapse.
Mia blinked hard, trying to remember how she got here. She recalled her confrontation with Solis and Hush. That spectral figure who’d rescued her in the Galante necropolis, once more saving her skin among the houses of Godsgrave’s dead. She could still feel Solis’s poison in her veins, though she noted the wound at her shoulder had been bound with a scrap of dark cloth. She still felt sluggish from the toxin, cold from the brittle chill around her. She felt the ache of her wounds and the tug of dried blood crusting on her skin, and somewhere distant, a nameless, shapeless anger. And looking around at that sea of frozen, terrified faces, like the sensation of sound for a man long since deafened, Mia suddenly realized she felt …
Afraid.
She searched the dark about her. Seeking her passengers among those stone hands and open mouths and realizing she couldn’t feel them anywhere. Her skin prickled, her belly rolled, and with a hiss of pain, she forced herself to her feet.
“Mister Kindly?” she called. “Eclipse?”
No answer. Nothing but the thud of her pulse in her veins, the dreadful empty of their absence. Eclipse had walked beside her since Lord Cassius had died, Mister Kindly since her father had been hanged. She’d not been without them save by request for an age. But now, to find herself alone …
“Where are we?” she whispered, studying the sea of faces and hands.
“I do not know,” Jonnen said, a small tremble in his voice.
Her heart softened, and she reached out to him in the dark. “It’s all right, Jonnen, I’m here with—”
“My name is Lucius!” he shouted, stamping his little foot. “Lucius Atticus Scaeva! I am firstborn son of Consul Julius Maximillianus Scaeva, and I am honorbound to kill you!” He pointed an accusing finger, cheeks pink with fury. “You murdered my father!”
Mia withdrew her hand, studying the boy’s face. The bared teeth and quivering lip. Those dark, brooding eyes, so like her own. So like his.
“I used to sing to you,” she said. “When you were little and it stormed. You hated the thunder.” She found herself smiling at the memory. “A squalling, pink-faced screamer with a pair of lungs on him that might wake the dead, you were. The nursemaids couldn’t do anything to still you. I was the only one who could give you calm. Do you remember?”
She cleared her throat, croaking a rusty tune.
“In bleakest times, in darkest climes,
When wind blows cold—”
“You sound like a harpy shrieking for supper,” the boy snarled.
Mia bit her lip, struggling to keep her infamous temper in check. She’d spent almost eight years plotting the deaths of the men who’d killed her kin. Six years training under the most dangerous killers in the Republic, another year in service to the Red Church, almost another year fighting for her life on the sands of Itreya’s arenas, up to her armpits in blood. Never once in all that time did she learn how to deal with a spoiled marrowborn brat grieving the loss of his bastard father. But still, she tried to imagine what the boy must think. How he must feel looking at the girl who’d murdered his da.
In truth, it wasn’t that hard to see his side. She remembered her own version of this moment, years past. Watching the men who hanged her own da in the forum. Her vow of vengeance ringing in her head, the hatred like whitehot acid in her veins.
Did Jonnen now feel the same way about her?
Am I his Scaeva?
“Jonnen, I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this is hard. I know you’re frightened and angry, that there’s things you—”
“Do not speak to me, slave,” he growled.
Her hand went to the arkemical brand on her cheek. The twin circles that marked her as the property of the Remus Collegium. She could feel the scar on the other side of her face. The gash cutting down through her brow, curling in a cruel hook along her left cheek—a memento from her ordeals on the sands. She thought briefly of Sidonius. Bladesinger and the other Falcons. Wondering if they’d made it to safety.
“I am no slave,” she said, iron creeping into her voice. “I’m your sister.”
“I have no sister,” Jonnen snarled.
“Half sister, then,” Mia said. “We’ve the same mother.”
“You’re a liar!” he cried, stamping his feet again. “Liar!”
“I’m not lying,” Mia insisted, pinching the bridge of her nose to stop the ache. “Jonnen, listen to me, please … you were too young to remember. But you were taken from our mother as a babe. Her name was Alinne. Alinne Corvere.”
“Corvere?” he scoffed, his dark eyes narrowed. “The Kingmaker’s wife?”
Mia blinked. “… You know of the rebellion?”
“I am no gutter urchin, slave,” Jonnen said, straightening his filthy robes. “I’ve a memory sharp as swords, all my tutors swear it. I know of the Kingmaker. My father sent that traitor to the hangman, and his harlot to the Philosopher’s Stone.”
“Mind your tongue,” Mia warned, her finger rising along with her temper. “That’s your mother you’re talking about.”
“I am the son of a consul!” the boy stormed.
“Aye,” Mia nodded. “But Liviana Scaeva is not your mother.”
“You dare?” Jonnen pulled his little hands into fists. “You may be the daughter of some traitor’s whore, but I am no bas—”
Her slap sent him stumbling, dropping onto his backside like a brick. Mia could feel rage in her veins, swelling and rolling, threatening to swallow her whole. Jonnen blinked up at her, wide eyes brimming with tears, one hand raised to his burning cheek. He was a marrowborn lordling, heir to a vast estate, child of a noble house. Mia imagined no one had ever laid hands on him before. Especially no one with a slave brand. But still …
“Brother or no,” Mia warned, “you don’t talk about her that way.”
Beneath her anger, Mia was horrified at herself. Exhausted and frightened and aching all the way to her bones. She’d thought Jonnen dead all these years, else she’d never have left him in Scaeva’s keeping. She should have been throwing her arms about him for joy, not knocking him onto his pompous little arse.
Especially not for telling the truth.
Mia had learned from Sidonius that her parents’ marriage was one of expedience, not passion. Darius Corvere was in love with General Antonius, the man who’d sought to become king of Itreya. The Kingmaker’s arrangement with his wife was a political alliance, not a grand love affair. And it was no strange thing—such was life in many marrowborn houses of the Republic.
But of all the men Alinne Corvere could have taken as a lover, borne a child to, of all the men in all the world, how could she have chosen Julius fucking Scaeva?
Jonnen pawed at his eyes, at the handprint Mia had etched on his cheek. She could see he wanted to cry. But he stomped the tears down instead, clenching his teeth and turning his hurt to hate.
Maw’s teeth, he really is my brother.
“I’m sorry,” Mia said, softening her voice. “These are sharp truths I’m speaking. But your father was an evil man, brother. A tyrant who wanted to carve himself a throne out of the Republic’s bones.”
“Like the Kingmaker did?” Jonnen spat.
Mia swallowed hard, feeling the boy’s words like a punch to the stomach. Though she tried to keep a grip on it, she could feel herself growing angry again. As if Jonnen’s rage were somehow stoking her own.
“You’re just a boy. You’re too young to understand.”
“You’re a liar!” The boy climbed to his feet, his temper and volume rising along with him. “My father beat yours, and you’re just mad about it!”
“Of course I’m mad about it!”
“You tricked him!” the boy shouted. “On the victor’s stage! You hid that knife in your armor and you never would have touched him otherwise!”
“I did what needed to be done,” she snapped. “Julius Scaeva deserved to die!”
“You don’t fight fair!”
“Fair?” she cried. “He killed our mother!”
“You have no honor, no …”
The boy’s voice died, the twisted snarl on his face slackening into silent wonder. Mia followed his eyeline to the floor, that tableau of wailing faces and open hands, lit by the spectral glow of their single lantern. There, on the graven stone, she could see their shadows, dark and tenebrous in the ghostly light. And they were moving.
Jonnen’s shadow was slithering back, like a viper coiling to strike. Her own shadow was reaching toward his, hair flowing as if in a gentle breeze. In a blinking, Jonnen’s shade lashed out at hers, wrapping its hands around its opponent’s throat. Mia’s shadow surged and rippled as the smaller shadow slipped hands about its neck. The shades lashed and slashed at each other, sudden violence painted in rippling black, though Mia and Jonnen both stood still and unharmed.
Mia could see the perfect fury in her brother’s eyes, reflecting the war in the dark between them. It seemed as if their shadows were playing out their innermost feelings: his hatred, her affection scorned. And she knew it then, sure as she knew her own name—this boy would kill her if he could. Cut her throat and leave her for the rats. She watched those ribbons of darkness, recalling that her shadow had reacted the same in Furian’s presence. Looking at her brother, she felt the same sickness and longing she’d felt near other darkin. As if she’d fallen asleep with someone beside her and woken to find herself alone. The sense of something … missing.
She forced calm into her voice. Willed her shadow to still itself.
“I am your sister, Jonnen,” she said. “We’re the same, you and I.”
The boy made no reply, hateful stare still fixed on her. But the enmity between their shadows slowly calmed, the shades returning to their normal shapes, only faint ripples to mark anything was odd about them at all. The darkness around them was deathly silent. The wide eyes of a thousand stone faces watching them.
“How long has it spoken to you?” Mia asked softly. “The dark?”
Jonnen remained silent. Little hands curled into little fists.
“I wasn’t much older than you, the turn it first spoke to me.” Mia sighed, tired in her soul. “The turn your father hanged mine, ordered me drowned, ripped you from our mother’s arms. The turn he destroyed everything.”
The boy looked at their shadows, his dark eyes clouded.
“Eight long years it took me,” she continued. “All those miles and all that blood. But it’s over now. For good or ill, Julius Scaeva is dead. And we’re a familia again.”
“Lost,” he spat, “is what we are, Kingmaker.”
Mia looked about them, peering into the blackness beyond the circle of their lantern’s light. From the chill in the air, the silence engulfing them, she’d guess they were far underground. In some hidden part of the necropolis, perhaps.
Why had that Hearthless one saved her life, only to abandon her down here?
Where were Mister Kindly and Eclipse?
Mercurio?
Ashlinn?
Why was she still standing here like some frightened maid?
Mia picked up the lantern. Its surface was pale and smooth as raven’s claws, carved with reliefs of an odd crescent shape.
Gravebone, she realized.[1]
She could still feel that longing inside her. Looking at the boy, at their shadows on the floor. But there was something more, she realized. Something tugging at her out there in all that dark and all that cold. As she shifted the lantern in her hand, she realized their shadows weren’t moving in response to the light. Instead, they remained fixed in one direction, like iron being pulled toward a lodestone.
Mia was tired beyond sleeping. Bruised and bleeding and afraid. But the will that had kept her moving when all seemed lost, when the whole world seemed against her, when her task seemed all but impossible, bid her keep walking. She didn’t know where they were, but she knew they couldn’t stay. And so she held out her hand to her brother.
“Come.”
“Where?”
She nodded to their shadows on the floor. “They know the way.”
The boy looked at her, rage and mistrust in his eyes.
“Our familia had a saying,” Mia said. “Before your father destroyed it. Neh diis lus’a, lus diis’a. Do you know what that means?”
“I do not speak Liisian,” the boy growled.
“When all is blood, blood is all.”
She held out her hand again.
“Blood is all, little brother,” she repeated.
Jonnen looked up at her. In the dark, among those beautiful howling faces and open hands and the ghostly gravebone light, Mia could see the reflection of his father in those bottomless black eyes.
But in the end, he took her hand.
Do you feel that?”
Mia’s voice echoed in the gloom, far too loud for comfort. They’d been walking for what seemed like miles, through a twisting labyrinth of tunnels. The walls and floor were all made of those stone hands and faces, uneven under her feet.
It felt singularly disconcerting to be walking on a surface of silent screams. Mia felt sure this was part of the Godsgrave necropolis, but nothing looked familiar, and she’d no idea why anyone would have spent years carving the walls and floors like this. The farther they walked, the more ill at ease she felt. She’d occasionally catch movement from the corner of her eye, swearing that one of the stone hands had moved, or a face had turned to follow her as she passed. But when she looked at them direct, they were motionless.
The darkness was oppressive, the air heavy, sweat burning in the cuts and gouges on her skin. That nameless, shapeless anger was budding in her chest, and she had no idea why. With every step, the feeling that had been dogging Mia since she woke in this place grew more pronounced. The pull of moth to flame.
For the time being, Jonnen’s fear of the dark seemed to have overcome his hatred for her, and though he’d refused to keep hold of Mia’s hand for long, he stayed close on her heels. As she led him on through the tunnels, gravebone lantern held high, she’d sometimes glance back and find him staring at her with unveiled hatred.
In complete defiance of the lantern’s ghostly light, their shadows were still stretching away down the corridor, now far longer than they should have been.
With every step, the pull seemed to grow stronger.
The anger burning brighter in her breast.
“I do not like it here,” Jonnen whispered.
“Nor I,” Mia replied.
They walked on, pressing closer together. Mia could feel a fury, thrumming in the air around her. A sense of deep and abiding rage. Of pain and need and hunger all entwined. It was the same sensation she’d felt during the truedark massacre. The same as she’d felt during her victory in the arena.
The sense of malice in this city’s very bones.
The air felt oily and thick, and Mia swore she could smell blood. The faces on the walls were definitely moving now, the ground shifting under their feet as stone hands reached toward them, stone lips mouthed silent words. Mia’s heart almost leapt from her throat as she felt fingers touch hers. Looking down, she saw Jonnen taking hold of her hand again and gripping it tight, eyes wide with fear.
Hunger.
Anger.
Hate.
The tunnel opened into another chamber, too vast to see the walls. The anguished faces beneath their feet sloped downward to form a large basin, barely visible in the lantern’s pale glow. The shore was all open hands and mouths, and Mia saw the basin was filled with liquid—black and velvety and still, spilling over the eyes and into the mouths of those faces closest to the edge. It looked like tar, but the reek was unmistakable. Salty and copperish and tinged with rot.
Blood.
Black blood.
And there, on that silently screaming shoreline, Mia saw two familiar shapes. Staring out at the pool of black with their not-eyes.
“Mister Kindly!” she cried. “Eclipse!”
Her passengers remained motionless as she stumbled across the faces and palms, sinking to her knees beside them. Sighing with relief, she ran her hands over their bodies, their shapes shifting and rippling like black smoke in a breeze. But neither one broke their stare from that pool of velvet darkness.
Mister Kindly tilted his head, speaking as if in a daze.
“… do you feel it …?”
“… I FEEL IT …,” Eclipse replied.
“Mia?”
She turned at the voice, heart leaping in her chest. And there in the gloom, among the stone eyes and empty screams, Mia saw a sight more beautiful than any she could recall. A tall girl dressed in the bloodstained garb of an arena guard, another gravebone lantern in her hand, a gravebone sword at her waist. Blond hair dyed henna-red, tanned cheeks smattered with freckles, eyes the blue of sunsburned skies.
“Ashlinn …,” Mia breathed.
She ran. So light and fast it felt like she was flying. All the hurt and exhaustion became distant memory, even the sight of that black pool was forgotten. Stumbling over the stone faces, heart bursting in her chest, Mia flung her arms open and crashed into Ashlinn’s embrace. She hit so hard, she almost knocked the taller girl off her feet. Overcome with maddening joy at seeing her again, Mia wove her fingers into Ashlinn’s hair, touched her face to see if she was real, and breathless, she finally dragged the girl in for a hungry kiss.
“O, Goddess,” she whispered.
Ashlinn tried to speak, her words smothered by Mia’s mouth. Mia could taste blood from the reopened split in her lip, heedless of the pain, pressing her body tight against Ash’s.
“I’m never letting you go again.” She seized Ash’s cheeks in both hands and crushed their lips together again. “Never, do you hear me? Ever.”
“Mia,” Ashlinn protested, placing a hand on her chest.
“What?” Mia whispered.
Overcome, she lunged at the girl’s mouth again, but Ashlinn turned aside, looked deep into her eyes, and pushed her gently away. Mia stared hard into that sunsburned blue, blinking in confusion.
“… Ash, what is it?”
“HELLO, MIA.”
Mia’s blood ran cold as she heard the voice behind her. The temperature around them grew chill as she turned, her skin prickling. She saw a familiar figure, twin gravebone blades upon its back. Its robes were dark and frayed at the hems, its hands black, shadows writhing like tentacles at the edge of its hood.
Mia glanced at Ashlinn, saw fear swimming plain in her blue stare. She pulled herself from her lover’s arms, turned to face the strange figure. Pale wisps of breath spilled from her bloody lips.
“Well,” she said. “My mysterious savior.”
The figure bowed low, robes rippling in some phantom breeze. Its voice was hollow, sibilant, reverberating somewhere in the pit of her belly.
“MI DONA.”
“I suppose thanks are in order.” Mia folded her arms, tossed her hair over her shoulder. “But they can come after introductions. Who the ’byss are you?”
“A GUIDE,” the figure replied. “A GIFT.”
“Speak plainly,” Mia snarled, temper rising. “Who are you?”
“Mia …,” Ashlinn murmured, placing a gentle hand on her shoulder.
“Speak!” Mia demanded, stepping forward with clenched fists.
The figure raised those ink-black hands, drew back its hood. In the ghostly light, Mia saw pitch-black eyes and flawless alabaster skin. Dark, thick saltlocks, swaying as if they were alive. He was still achingly handsome—strong jaw and high cheekbones, once scrawled with hateful ink stains, then made perfect by the weaver’s hands.
Lips she’d once kissed.
Eyes she’d once drowned in.
A face she’d once adored.
Mia looked into Ashlinn’s frightened blue eyes. Back to the pools of bottomless black that passed for his.
“Black fucking Mother,” she breathed.
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