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Fingernails digging into her palms.
White spots swelling before her eyes.
The room rolling beneath her like a ship in a storm.
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The anticipation was the worst of it. The moment between one sequence and the next. That tiny respite that seemed an eternity, waiting for the pain to begin again. Adonai’s scourging, Marielle’s weaving … nothing she’d ever felt in her life had come close, made all the worse by the bitter thought that in this moment, to the world outside this cell, her life was no longer her own.
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If not for Mister Kindly, she thought she might have broken.
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But at the end
after all the pain
all the praying
cheek bleeding
legs trembling
Mia still stood.
“A good thing,” Dona Leona declared, “that you are not a betting man, sir.”
The administratii packed up his gear without a word. Aiming a poison glance at Mia, he gave a curt bow to the dona, and with his novice trailing behind, swept from the cell with a rustle of black cloth. Leona turned to her executus with a triumphant smile.
“You ask for clay to work with, Executus? I give you steel.”
The big man looked at Mia with narrowed eyes. “Steel breaks before it bends.”
“Four Daughters, you’re never happy are you?” Leona sighed. “Come. We should let her rest. She will need her strength in turns to come.”
The dona cupped Mia’s face, wiping her wounded cheek with a gentle thumb. Sapphire-blue eyes burning into her own.
“We will bleed the sands red, you and I,” she said. “Sanguii e Gloria.”
Gifting her a final smile, Leona swept from the room in a flurry of blue silk. The executus limped after her, locked the door behind him. The clank of his iron leg faded with his dona down the corridor.
Mia sank to her knees. Her cheek was swollen, throbbing with pain. Her palms were bleeding from the press of her nails. She ran her fingertips over her skin, feeling the raised ridges of the two interlocking circles branded just below her right eye. But beneath the remembered agony, her mind was racing, the dona’s words tumbling inside her skull with the echoes of the hammer blows.
They’re taking me to—
“… crow’s nest …?”
She glanced up at the not-cat, once more cleaning his not-paw with his nottongue. Licking at parched lips, she tried to find her voice.
“It was the home of the Familia Corvere. My familia. Consul Scaeva gave it to Justicus Remus as reward for ending my father’s rebellion against the Senate.”
“… and now leona owns it …?”
Mia shrugged mutely. The not-cat tilted his head.
“… are you well …?”
Her father, holding her hand as they walked in fields of tall sunsbell flowers. Her mother standing atop battlements of ochre stone, cool wind playing in her long dark hair. Mia had grown up in Godsgrave—her father’s role as justicus meant he could never stay away from the City of Bridges and Bones for long. But every few summersdeeps, they’d traveled to Crow’s Nest for a week or two, just to be with one another. Those had been the happiest turns of Mia’s life. Away from Godsgrave’s crush, its poison politics. Her parents seemed happier there. Closer somehow. Her brother Jonnen had been born there. She remembered visits from General Antonius, the would-be king who’d hanged beside her father. He and her parents would stay up late into the night, drinking and laughing and O, so alive.
All of them gone now.
“… i should go. find a ship bound for whitekeep. tell the viper to seek you in crow’s nest …”
“… Aye,” she nodded.
“… will you be all right while i am gone …?”
The thought should have terrified her. She knew if Mister Kindly weren’t there, it would have. For seven years, ever since her father died, the shadowcat had been beside her. She knew he had to leave, that she couldn’t do this all by herself. But the thought of being alone, of living with the fear he usually drank to nothing …
“I’ll be well enough,” she replied. “Just don’t dawdle.”
“… i will be swift. never fear …”
She sighed. Pressed her hand to the brand on her throbbing cheek.
“And never, ever forget.”
CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_e6e47b76-3cfb-58dc-be5d-bc7b4a36f294)
MORTALITY (#ulink_e6e47b76-3cfb-58dc-be5d-bc7b4a36f294)
The athenaeum opened at the touch of Mia’s finger, the colossal stone doors swinging wide as if they were carved of feathers. And taking a deep breath, clutching her tome to her breast, she limped out into her favorite place in the entire world.
Looking out over the mezzanine to the endless shelves below, the girl couldn’t help but smile. She’d grown up inside books. No matter how dark life became, shutting out the hurt was as easy as opening a cover. A child of murdered parents and a failed rebellion, she’d still walked in the boots of scholars and warriors, queens and conquerors.
The heavens grant us only one life, but through books, we live a thousand.
“A girl with a story to tell,” came a voice from behind her.
Smiling, Mia turned to see an old man standing beside a trolley piled high with books. He wore a scruffy waistcoat, two shocks of white hair trying to flee his balding scalp. Thick spectacles sat on a hooked nose, his back bent like a sickle. The word “ancient” did him as much justice as the word “beautiful” did Shahiid Aalea.
“Good turn to you, Chronicler,” Mia bowed.
Without asking, Chronicler Aelius plucked his ever-present spare cigarillo from behind his ear, lit it on his own and offered it to Mia. Leaning against the wall with a wince as her stitches pulled, she puffed and sighed a shade of contented gray.
Aelius leaned beside her, his own cigarillo bobbing on his lips as he spoke.
“All right?”
“All right,” she nodded.
“How was Galante?”
Mia winced again, the pain of her sutures twinging in her backside.
“A pain in the arse,” she muttered.
The old man grinned around his smoke. “So what brings you down here?”
Mia held up the tome she’ d brought with her across the blood walk. It was bound in stained leather, tattered and beaten. The strange symbols embossed in the cover hurt her eyes to look at and its pages were yellowed with age.
“I supposed I should return this. I’ve had it eight months.”
“I was starting to think I’ d have to send out a search party.”
“That’d be unpleasant for all concerned, I’ d bet.”
The old man smiled. “The late fees are rather exorbitant in a library like this.”
The chronicler had left the book in Mia’s room, right before she was posted to Galante. In the intervening months, she’ d pored over the pages more times than she could count. The pity of it was, she still didn’t understand the half of it, and truth told, in recent turns, she’ d become more than a little disillusioned about it. But her encounter in the Galante necropolis had renewed her interest tenfold.
The book was written by a woman named Cleo—a darkin like Mia, who spoke to the shadows just as she did. Cleo lived in a time before the Republic, and the book was a diary of sorts, detailing her journey through Itreya and beyond. It spoke of meetings between her and other darkin—meetings that ended with Cleo apparently eating her fellows. The strange thing was, from Cleo’s writing, she’ d encountered dozens of other darkin in her travels. And from the look of the woman’s scribbled self-portraits, she was accompanied by dozens of passengers, wearing a multitude of different shapes—foxes, birds, serpents, and the like. An entire shadow menagerie at her command.
In all her life, the only darkin Mia had met was Lord Cassius. And the only two daemons were Mister Kindly and Eclipse.
So where the ’byss were the rest of them?
Amid nonsense scrawl and pictograms that spoke of her ever-growing madness, the latter half of the book concerned Cleo’s search for something she called “the Crown of the Moon”—just as that shadowthing in the Galante necropolis had told Mia to do. And flipping through the illustrations after her encounter, Mia had seen several that bore an uncanny resemblance to the figure that had saved her life.
Sadly, Cleo made no mention of who or what this “Moon” might be.
The book was written in an arcane language Mia had never seen, but Mister Kindly and Eclipse were both able to read it. Strangest of all, it contained a map of the world in the time before the Republic, but the bay of Godsgrave was missing entirely. Instead, a landmass filled the sea where the Itreyan capital now stood. This peninsula was marked with an X, and an unsettling declaration:
Here he fell.
“Did you read this before you gave it to me?” Mia asked.
The old man shook his head. “Couldn’t make out a bloody word. Only thing that made me think of you was the pictures. Make any sense to you?”
“… Not half as much as I’ d like.”
Aelius shrugged. “You asked me to look for books on darkin, and so I did. Didn’t promise you’d be any more enlightened when you were done.”
“No need to rub it in, good Chronicler.”
Aelius smirked. “I’m always on the lookout for more. If I find anything else of interest down here, I’ ll send it to your chambers. But I’ d not hold my breath.”
Mia nodded, dragging on her smoke. Niah’s athenaeum was actually a library of the dead. It contained a copy of every book that had ever been destroyed in the history of the written language. Moreover, it also held other tomes that had never been written in the first place. Memoirs of murdered tyrants. Theorems of crucified heretics. Masterpieces of geniuses who ended before their time.
Chronicler Aelius had told her new books were appearing constantly, that the shelves were always shifting. And though Niah’s athenaeum was a wondrous place as a result, the downside was plain: finding a particular book in here was like trying to find a particular louse in a dockside sweetboy’s crotch.
“Chronicler, have you heard of the Moon? Or any crowns said Moon might be partial to?”
Aelius’s stare turned wary.
“Why?”
“You answer questions with questions an awful lot,” Mia sighed. “Why is that?”
“Do you remember what I said that turn you first came down here?”
“See, there you go again.”
“Do you remember?”
“You said I was a girl with a story to tell.”
“And what else?”
Smoke drifted from the girl’s lips as the old man stared her down.
“You said maybe here’s not where I’m supposed to be,” she finally replied. “Which stank like horseshit at the time, and smells even worse now. I proved myself. The Ministry would all be nailed to crosses in the ’Grave if not for me. And I’m sick and bloody tired of everybody around here seeming to forget that.”
“You don’t find any irony in earning your place in a cult of assassins by saving half a dozen lives?”
“I killed almost a hundred men in the process, Aelius.”
“And how do you feel about that?”
“What are you, my nursemaid?” Mia snapped. “A killer is what I am. The wolf doesn’t pity the lamb. And the—”
“Aye, aye, I know the tune.”
“And you know why I’m here. My father was executed as a traitor to entertain a mob. My mother died in a prison, and my baby brother beside her. And the men responsible need a fucking killing. That’s how I feel about it.”
The old man hooked his thumbs into his waistcoat. “Problem with being a librarian is there’s some lessons you just can’t learn from books. And the problem with being an assassin is there’s some mysteries you just can’t solve by stabbing fuck out of them.”
“Always riddles with you,” Mia growled. “Do you know about this Moon or no?”
The old man sucked on his cigarillo, looked her up and down. “I know this much. Some answers are learned. But the important ones are earned.”
“O, Black Goddess, now you’re a poet, too?”
