by Jay Kristoff
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?”*
“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.
