“No fear, little one,” she said. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
The boy sighed and slowly shook his head.
“No, it won’t.”
* * *
“’Byss and blood, they’re keen, aren’t they?”
Mercurio stood on the mezzanine overlooking the great Athenaeum, cigarillo smoke curling on his tongue.
The Hand made no reply.
She looked to be twenty-one, twenty-two perhaps—from a crop a few years before Mia’s time, at any rate. She was clad as they all were—black robes, head to foot, silent as the grave. After Drusilla’s discovery and subsequent examination of the first two Nevernight Chronicles, the Lady of Blades had ordered the Hands following Mercurio to abandon all subtlety. He had three constantly behind him now—this young lass, never more than a few feet away, an older Itreyan woman perhaps in her thirties, and a Dweymeri lad, tall and silent, who usually kept the greatest distance.
They never spoke. Never responded when he asked questions. They simply followed, like voiceless, soulless shadows. He’d not heard a peep from Adonai or Marielle since Drusilla found the chronicles—the siblings had obviously decided discretion was the better part of valor with the Lady of Blades on the warpath.
He and Aelius were once more alone.
Which basically means Mia is, too …
“How long have they been at it now?” Mercurio asked.
Aelius called out from his office, “Almost three weeks.”
“How many dead?”
“Only the two,” the chronicler replied, wandering out onto the mezzanine, thumbs hooked in his waistcoat pockets. “Not sure what happened there, to be honest. Poor bastards just disappeared. Took by a bookworm, I’m guessing, though they’d have to have been fools to hurt the pages wandering about out there.”
Mercurio nudged the Hand beside him with one bony elbow. “Bet you’re glad Drusilla’s got you dogging me instead of fucking about there in the dark, neh?”
The Hand made no reply.
Mercurio sighed smoke, watched Aelius fish another ’rillo out from behind his ear with ink-stained fingers and light it with a burnished flintbox. The chronicler’s rheumy eyes were fixed out on the forest of shelves and tomes. The little pinpricks of arkemical glow moving out in the gloom. The silhouettes of Hands holding them aloft.
Their search was methodical, marking each examined aisle with a piece of red chalk, expanding out in an ever-broadening swathe. But rather than being arranged in a neat grid, the shelves of the dead library were a twisted labyrinth, more complex and nonsensical than the most fiendish of garden mazes. Where once they’d been tightly packed, the hundred or so Hands Drusilla had tasked to find the third chronicle were now spread thin—tiny lights twinkling in an endless, silent gloom. Only the Mother knew how much ground they’d covered in the last three weeks, but red chalk was certainly in short supply these turns.
“Bugger that for a job,” Mercurio growled.
“Waste of time,” Aelius sighed. “Nothing in this place gets found that doesn’t want to be found. And why the ’byss would the Mother want…”
The chronicler’s voice trailed off, a small frown forming between his snow-white and studiously unkempt eyebrows. Mercurio followed his eyeline out to the library, saw a point of arkemical light bouncing wildly, as if the person carrying it were running.
“What do you make of that?” he wondered.
Sure enough, in a few minutes, a Hand came into view, hood blown back from his head, cheeks flushed from his sprint, breathless. He rounded the shelves and dashed up the ramp to the mezzanine at a full run. Mercurio saw he was carrying a book in his hand. Bound in black leather. Pages edged in black, spattered in white, like stars across a truedark sky.
“’Byss and blood,” Aelius breathed.
“You don’t think that’s…?”
The Hand dashed through the Athenaeum doors without stopping, but Mercurio caught enough of a glimpse to see a shape embossed on the black leather cover.
A cat.
He exchanged glances with Aelius, ice-blue eyes locked with milky-gray ones.
The third chronicle.
“Shit.”
The old man turned to the Hand beside him, smacked the tip of his cane on the floor. “Let’s be off, shall we?”
The Hand made no reply.
Mercurio walked out of the library. Aelius watched him go, hovering on the threshold he could never cross. The old man’s footsteps were swift, pulse pumping hard in his veins. Following the running Hand up the spiral of stairs, his own Hands trailing close behind, one, two, three, Mercurio hurried up into the singing dark. The ghostly choir sounded a little softer, though perhaps that was the blood now pounding in his ears, his heart struggling against his ribs. He was soon out of breath, cursing the countless cigarillos he’d smoked in his life and wondering if he couldn’t have found a less-debilitating way to thumb his nose at society, propriety, and mortality in general.
Still, he followed, knees creaking, left arm aching (more often, lately), sweat rising on his liver-spotted skin. He lost sight of the running Hand in short order, but he knew exactly where the lad would be headed. Stained-glass light spilled down the stairwells, his breath rasping as he entered the Hall of Eulogies, touching brow, then eyes, then lips as he hobbled past the looming statue of the Mother.
Hope you know what you’re playing at …
His young female Hand eventually took pity as Mercurio’s struggles worsened, as his knees cried mercy, as his lungs burst into black moldering flame inside his withered chest. She slipped an arm about his waist, propped him up a little as he climbed, higher and higher, dry-mouthed, breath burning, heart afire. There were never this many stairs when he was younger, he was sure of it. The air was never this thick. But finally he stood, bent double and wheezing, outside the chambers of the Revered Father.
“Fuck me, I’ve got to quit smoking,” he rasped.
He entered without knocking, found Solis seated at his desk, the breathless Hand who’d made the discovery standing before him. Spiderkiller was stood beside the Revered Father, clad all in emerald green and gleaming gold. The dour Shahiid of Truths was bent over the open tome and reading aloud.
“‘It struggled to hold itself together, more and more washed away in the downpour, thinned near to worthlessness. But before it lost cohesion entirely, bleeding out into the puddle of Hush’s pretty ruin, the blood managed to form itself into simple shapes. Four letters that formed a single word. A name.’”
Spiderkiller straightened, stabbed the page with one poison-stained finger.
“‘NAEV.’”
Solis turned his blind eyes to the Hand before him.
“Have Adonai send word to the Lady of Blades immediately.”
The Hand bowed low. “What word, Revered Father?”
Solis’s smile glittered in his milk-white eyes.
“We have her.”
* * *
The tea was a touch too hot.
Drusilla sat on a rocking chair in a rolling garden green, breathing its perfume. The sunsbells were in bloom, the lavender and candlewick wearing their dresses, too. The light of two suns was bright on the palazzo’s walls, warm on her bones, banishing the Quiet Mountain’s lingering chill. She could hear little Cyprian and Magnus playing nearby, their laughter like sweetest music to her ears.
But her tea was a touch too hot.
She snapped her fingers, and a tall Liisian slave in a pristine white toga stepped forward, tipping a splash of goat’s milk into her cup. The old woman sipped—much better—and dismissed the girl back to the shadows with a wordless glance. She leaned back in her chair, closed her pale blue eyes, and breathed a soft, contented sigh.
She heard a shout. A distressed cry following.
“Cyprian, be nice to your brother!” she called. “Or no treats after supper.”
“… Yes, Grandmother,” came the chastened reply.
“Mother?”
> Drusilla opened her eyes, saw Julia standing before her, draped in red silk. A Dweymeri jeweler stood behind her daughter, carrying a velvet board studded with expensive wares. Julia held an ornate chain dripping with rubies up to her throat, then swapped it for a more austere gold circlet, studded with a single, larger stone.
“First?” Julia asked. “Or second?”
“The occasion?”
“The Imperator’s Ball, of course,” Julia replied.
“My dear, truedark isn’t for weeks…”
“One can’t be too prepared,” her daughter replied, her tone prim. “If Valerius is to pursue his seat in the Liisian quarter, we must seek to impress.”
“I hardly think your husband’s senatorial ambitions will be thwarted by your choice of jewelry, my dear. The imperator tells me the seat is assured.”
Julia sighed, examined each necklet in turn. “Perhaps I’ll just get both.”
“Have you heard news from your brother? Is he coming to dinner?”
“Aye, he’ll be here. He’s bringing that frightful Cicerii woman.” Julia’s lips turned down in distaste. “I’m afraid he’ll announce their engagement soon.”
“Good,” Drusilla nodded. “He should be thinking toward his future at his age. Familia is the most important thing in the world, my dear. If your father and I taught you one thing, it’s that.”
Julia looked to the palatial gardens around them. Sighed soft.
“I miss him.”
“I miss him, too. But life is for living, my love.”
Julia smiled, leaned down, and kissed Drusilla’s brow, then wandered back into the palazzo. Godsgrave’s cathedrals began to ring in fivebells, their dulcet tones echoing through the marrowborn quarter. The old woman looked up to the third Rib towering overhead, wondering if she should purchase her son an apartment in there for a wedding gift, just as the silver phial about her neck began to tremble.
She put her hand to it, hoping she was mistaken, praying for just a few more hours’ peace … but no, there it went again, shivering under her palm. The old woman sighed, placed her cup and saucer aside. Lifting the phial from around her neck, she broke the black wax seal, tipped the contents onto the small table beside her rocking chair. The blood welled, thick and red on the polished teak.
And of its own accord, it began to form itself into shapes.
Letters.
Drusilla pieced the letters into words. Then the words into a missive. Her old, worn pulse ran just the slightest bit quicker.
Cyprian ran up to her, breathless, his eyes alight with his smile.
“Come play with us, Grandmother.”
“Another turn, my dove,” she sighed.
The Lady of Blades stood slowly, leaned down to kiss his brow.
“Grandmother has work to do.”
CHAPTER 27
FEED
It turned out being queen of pirates wasn’t quite the job Mia imagined.
Perhaps she’d read too many tawdry ha’-beggar tales as a child in her tiny room above Mercurio’s Curios, but in the thirty or forty seconds Mia had considered the role before she stabbed Einar Valdyr to death, she’d imagined being a pirate queen might involve a fair bit of … well, piracy. Buckling of swashes and wenches most buxom and swinging from chandeliers with a knife between her teeth. But by the second turn of her reign, Queen Mia Corvere had come to a disappointing realization.
“I’m bored shitless,” she sighed.
“I did warn you,” Ulfr Sigursson said. “Valdyr was half-mad with it.”
“Valdyr wore a greatcoat made of human faces, Ulfr,” Mia said, putting her boots up on her desk. “I don’t think half-mad quite covers it.”
“Speaking of,” her first mate said, eyeing her up and down, “do you want me to find you something that fits a touch better?”
Mia glanced at her reflection in the window. She’d washed Valdyr’s blood from her skin and hair, but she still wore the former monarch’s greatcoat, which hung on her slender frame like a shroud. Black leathers hugged her legs and hips, wolfskin boots on her feet, her gravebone longblade sitting within easy reach. She’d bathed and combed her long black hair, trimmed her fringe into a line sharp as razors. The twin circles of her slave brand on her right cheek and the vicious scar curling across her left lent her pale features a dark cruelty. Her stare was black as coal, hard as iron. She didn’t look a queen many would love.
But she did look a queen most would fear.
“No, I’m fine wearing this,” she told Ulfr. “It makes people nervous.”
“Would you like an undershirt, at least?” the man asked. “When you move about, you tend to show off your—”
“No,” Mia said, lighting a cigarillo. “My tits make people nervous, too.”
“As it please you.” Her first mate sniffed. “I confess I never saw much appeal in them myself.”
They were sat in the upper level of a tall limestone tower within the Scoundrel’s Hall. Leadlight windows looked out across the Sea of Sorrows, and a broad, char-stained fireplace was stocked with logs of cherry-oak, burning merrily and filling the room with a perfumed warmth. The floors were covered in wolf furs, the walls with charts of the surrounding seas, the long oaken desk with parchment and scrolls and missives. Since she was abdicating her role in a handful of turns, Mia hadn’t bothered acquainting herself with any of it, but from the look of things, being the Scoundrel King had involved rather more paperwork than she’d expected.
She glanced at her first mate in his black leathers and wolfskin pelt. His expression was somewhere between wary and cavalier.
“And how are my loyal subjects?” Mia asked, breathing gray.
“Well, Obelisk and the Cinnamon Girl are fermenting a rebellion against you,” Ulfr sighed. “Though Marcella and Quintus hate each other like poison, so I can’t imagine that coalition will last long. Goliath, Imperium, and Gravedigger all spoke out against you in the Hall of Scoundrels earlier in the turn, but they’re little fish. The bigger crews are waiting to see what you do next. Valdyr scared the shit right out of them. So being the bitch who hacked his head off lends you a certain … gravitas.”
“And the wulfguard?” Mia asked, dragging on her smoke. “How fare my crew?”
“They follow my lead for now. And I follow you. Although I’m sure you know that as well as I.” Sigursson stroked his blond, plaited beard. “Or did you think I’d not notice?”
Mia raised an eyebrow. “Notice?”
“My shadow, Majesty,” the man said, glancing down at his boots. “It seems a touch blacker of late. I’d heard all manner of myths about darkin in my travels. Glad to see that not all of them turned out to be horseshit.”
Mia leaned back in her chair and smiled.
“He’s a clever one, Eclipse.”
“… YES…,” came the reply from the man’s shadow. “… I LIKE THAT ABOUT HIM…”
“I like it, too.” She looked the handsome Vaanian over. “I like you, Ulfr.”
“Would that I could say the same, Majesty,” he said with a handsome scowl.
“Well, you need only tolerate me a few more turns, and then you can be rid of me once and for all.” Mia smiled wider, breathed smoke into the air between them. “But should you consider getting rid of me earlier than that, I can think of a few other myths about darkin to confirm for you.”
By way of demonstration, she
Stepped
over to
the window
and watched the waves roll into the shore, crashing upon t
he rocks as the gulls circled in pale gray skies above. Putting her cigarillo to her lips, she breathed deep, let the shadows around the room have their head, writhing and reaching out toward her, gentle as old lovers.
“You can go,” she told her first mate, not looking at him. “I’ll let Eclipse know if I need you. Inform the captains of the Obelisk and Cinnamon Girl you plan to murder me at sea if you think it will quiet them. If it doesn’t, I can fashion another way to silence their tongues. It’s rather more permanent, though.”
Sigursson turned to face her, green eyes sparkling. “Aye, aye, Majesty.”
“Blue above and below, Ulfr.”
The brigand gave a small, curt bow and stalked from the room. Eclipse followed without a sound. Mia remained by the window, forehead pressed against the glass and staring out at the sea. Thinking about Ashlinn’s lips. Jonnen’s eyes. Mercurio’s scowl. Feeling the cat-shaped hole like a bleeding wound in her chest.
I wonder where he is?
If he’s all right?
… Goddess, I miss him.
“I’m cold,” she sighed.
“YOU COULD ALWAYS PUT A SHIRT ON,” Tric said.
She turned to smile at the pale Dweymeri boy standing quiet by the fire.
“It’d ruin my Murderous Bitch aesthetic.” She winced and adjusted herself beneath the coat. “But aye, perhaps. This old leather is like sandpaper on my donas.”
A smile twisted the boy’s lips, and he glanced at the door Sigursson had left by. “DO YOU TRUST HIM?”
“Not as far as I could carry him. But Eclipse is keeping watch on him. And he seems to be keeping a leash on the wulfguard. He only needs to hold things together for a handful of turns, and then he gets a free ship and a free throne. I think we can count on his greed to see us through. And if not that, his fear.”
“YOU ARE A LITTLE FRIGHTENING SOMETIMES, PALE DAUGHTER,” Tric said, sharing their old joke. “AND OTHER TIMES, YOU’RE JUST PLAIN TERRIFYING.”
The small smile fell from his face.
“I’M SORRY,” he said. “I KNOW YOU DON’T LIKE IT WHEN I CALL YOU THAT.”
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