by Jay Kristoff
The girl smiled with bloody lips.
And she winked.
“Point!” Solis bellowed. “Match to Acolyte Tric!”
The boy hung a moment longer. Rage still burning in that smooth hazel stare. Mia wondered just how much of him wanted her dead at that moment. But finally, he lowered the steel. Tossed it aside and sank to his knees, coughing blood, hand pressed to the new holes she’d gifted him. The acolytes were on their feet, cheering, bloodlust shining in their eyes.
The weaver and speaker strode into the ring, set to healing the hurts Mia and Tric had inflicted on the other with their steel.
But what about their words?
Looking into Tric’s eyes, the girl realized she didn’t know the answer.
The acolytes were given the rest of the turn to themselves. With her wounds mended by the weaver, but her jaw still aching, Mia found herself back in her room, hands on hips.
Diamo and Jessamine had done a good job of covering their tracks; there were only a few signs anyone had been in her chambers. But as she’d suspected, her notes were gone from the hiding spot beneath her desk, no doubt stolen somewhere in the early morn while she’d been in Tric’s bed. Five hours, she’d calculated, give or take, from the time Diamo took Spiderkiller’s poison to the moment of his ending. His sweat had been the real giveaway, but still, her timing had been close to perfect.
“… feeling pleased with yourself…?”
Mister Kindly peered at her from atop the cupboard.
“I am, rather.”
“… jessamine will most definitely try to kill you now…”
“Operative word being ‘try.’”
“… and despite your sky altar theatrics, you still haven’t solved spiderkiller’s quandary…”
“I’m almost there.”
“… diamo stole your notes…”
“I remember most of it. I’m close, Mister Kindly.”
“… spiderkiller’s contest ends in six turns, mia…”
“I’m glad you’re here to tell me these things.”
“… you should have just won solis’s edge and been done with it…”
“Then Tric wouldn’t have become a Blade.”
“… better him than you…?”
Mia flopped down on the bed, eyes on the ceiling. Saying nothing. Thoughts racing in her head. Everything Mister Kindly said was true. There were bigger things at stake here than she and Tric. Scaeva. Duomo. Remus. All she’d worked for. Only a trained assassin of the Red Church was ending any of those bastards—her attack last truedark was proof enough of that. If she didn’t finish top of hall, who knew if she’d become a Blade at all? Why in the Daughters’ names hadn’t she just—
“… you are letting your feelings for the boy cloud your judgment…”
“I don’t have any feelings for the boy.”
“… o, really…?”
“Yes, really.”
“… then why spend months training in secret with naev only to—”
A knock sounded at her door. Mia rose from her bed, padded across the room. Tric was waiting on the other side, saltlocks tumbled about his face. Mia’s heart beat a little quicker to see him. Those damned butterflies back in her belly. She grit her teeth, caught them with her fingers and plucked their wings away. Killing them one by one.
“Good turn to you, Don Tric.”
“And you, Pale Daughter.”
She looked down to the boy’s shirt. He wore a simple pin at his breast—a musical clef carved of polished ironwood. He’d been presented with the brooch at tourney’s end by Solis himself; proof that he’d finished top of the Shahiid’s hall.
“Congratulations,” Mia said.
The boy nodded. Chewed his lip. “Can I come in?”
Mia looked up and down the hallway, and seeing no other acolytes, stepped aside. For insects with no wings, those butterflies still seemed to be making an awful commotion.
“Drink?” she asked, turning to her stolen goldwine.
“No. I won’t be here long.”
She heard the odd note in his voice. Turned to stare up at him, those hazel eyes hard as stone. His shoulders were set, like a man preparing to charge.
“You let me win,” he said.
“No.” Mia shook her head. “I fought hard as I could.”
“But you made me fight harder.”
She shrugged. “I knew you’d fight soft, otherwise.”
“Know me so well, do you?”
“I know how you feel about me.”
“O, really. And how’s that?”
Mia dropped her gaze, ran a hand through her hair. Searching the shadows at her feet. The truth was lying plain there for her to see. She lifted her eyes to Tric’s, unable to speak it. Hoping he heard it anyway.
The boy shook his head. His gaze still hard. Voice harder. “You knew what saying that word would do to me. You know what it means.”
“I’m sorry,” she sighed. “You know me well enough to know I didn’t mean it. But I had to make you angry. I knew you’d let me win, otherwise. I can still finish top of Truths. I didn’t need to top Songs.”
“I don’t need your fucking pity, Mia.”
“Maw’s teeth, it’s not about pity! There’s room enough for both of us on the roster. You’ve finished top of hall, now you’re practically guaranteed to become a Blade. One step closer to standing on your grandfather’s grave. We made a promise we’d see each other have our vengeance, remember? I want what what’s best for you, don’t you see that?”
“And so you play me like a lyre, neh? Twist me up inside and send me blind.” Tric shook his head. “Aalea teach you that, did she? Little Mia Corvere. Wolf in crow’s feathers. You’ve got us all fooled. Me, Diamo, Jessamine. Who else is dancing to your tune and doesn’t even know it? Who else are you going to kill to get your way?”
“Four Daughters, Tric, this isn’t a bloody—”
“A bloody nursery! I know! You’ve told me a thousand fucking times, Mia.”
“And how many times do I have to say it before it sinks in?”
“Never again.”
The words hit her like a buckler to the jaw. Though she’d deny it to herself afterward, she actually flinched to hear them.
“We were fools to let it get this far. You hear me, Mia?” Tric pointed to her. To himself. “You and me? Never. Again.”
“Tric, I—”
He slammed the door as he left.
Mia stared down at her empty palms. Tric’s accusations echoing in her skull.
She pictured Diamo’s face. The agony in his eyes as he begged for his life. But he’d deserved it, hadn’t he? For Lotti?
His cries were echoing inside her head, intertwined with those of the men she’d slaughtered on the steps of the Basilica Grande. Scattered like torn and sodden rags through the belly of the Philosopher’s Stone. An orchestra of screams, and she, the scarlet maestro. Bloody hands swaying in the air.
Tric’s footsteps faded in the hall.
Mia stood there in the dark.
Shoulders slumped.
Head bowed.
Alone.
“… it is for the best, mia…”
And never alone.
“… it is for the best…”
CHAPTER 30
FAVORS
Five turns until it was too late solve Spiderkiller’s riddle.
Until her best chance at initiation dissolved like smoke.
Until everything she’d worked for crumbled to dust.
Just.
Five.
Turns.
Mia had barely slept and hardly eaten since the trial in Songs. Burying her nose in tome after tome, feeling the answer close enough to touch, only to watch it slip away like sand as her fingers closed around it.
A no-holds-barred thievery war had broken out as acolytes scrambled to topple Ash from the lead on Mouser’s ladder. The tally of marks was now kept in the Sky Altar instead of the Hall of Pockets, so that all could
know the score.
Hush was placed second, still a good eighty marks off the pace. Jessamine trailed twenty marks behind that. Ash’s lead seemed virtually unassailable—a fact the girl loudly reminded everyone of at mealtimes, just in case they’d gotten airs. Bedrooms were broken into, pockets ransacked, and every seemingly harmless collision in the halls resulted in four or five different objects trading owners. Chronicler Aelius registered a formal complaint with the Revered Mother after Ashlinn stole the spectacles right off his head while he was dozing at his desk,1 and item #5 on Shahiid Mouser’s list:
A book from the athenaeum (stolen, not borrowed, smartarse) —6 marks
was removed under protest from the Shahiid himself. Pip had apparently staged an early-morn raid on the athenaeum to snaffle a few tomes from the RETURNS trolley, and got himself devoured by one of the surlier bookworms.2
“And now all the others are pissed they didn’t get a feed!” Aelius had yelled. “Who’s going to clean up the bloody mess is what I want to know!”
With official lessons ended, the acolytes were permitted to travel to Godsgrave whenever they chose. Speaker Adonai sat by his pool, sending fledgling killers out into the City of Bridges and Bones, morn and nevernight. Shahiid Aalea kept her counsel about who was leading in her contest, but with the amount of secrets flooding back from the ’Grave, Mia figured the woman must be more in the know by now than the princeps of the damned Obfuscatii.3
Alone in her room, or hunched over a desk in the Hall of Truths (always facing the door), Mia worked on Spiderkiller’s formula. She’d abandoned the notion of heading back to the ’Grave seeking whispers. Aalea’s contest was too much a shot in the dark for her liking. Better to work on something she could actually see. Touch. Taste.
She’d set up a series of glassware labs; beakers and bowls, cylinders and flasks and endless spirals of pipes and tubes. Solutions bubbled or dissolved or congealed inside the elaborate structures, and more than a hundred black rats shuffled off this mortal coil as Mia continued her search. Spiderkiller would visit often, working at her desk or her own experiments, but Mia knew better than to hope she’d offer a clue. If she was to finish top of Truths, she’d have to earn it. In fact, the Shahiid hardly spoke at all, save once, the very turn after Solis’s contest.
“A shame about Diamo…”
Mia had looked up from her work. Spiderkiller walked slowly along Mia’s latest sculpture, trailing a long fingernail along the glass. Her hands were stained black with toxins. Her lips stained black with paint. Her stare, blackest of all.
“A shame he didn’t test his antidote before he used it, you mean?” the girl asked.
“Ah, but that’s the rub, you see,” Spiderkiller had said. “While it didn’t counter my toxin entirely, Diamo’s solution did delay its effects. So any rats he tested it on the eve before would have still been alive when he brought the solution to me the next morn.”
“Mmm,” Mia said, returning to her work. “This is a shame.”
The Shahiid had patted Mia on the shoulder and left the hall without another word. Diamo had been interred in an unmarked tomb in the Hall of Eulogies that afternoon. Spiderkiller never mentioned him again.
The countless hours working on the quandary made it easier to avoid Tric, at least. Mia kept her mind on task, sparing as little thought for him as possible. Eating at odd times to avoid him. And if her dreams were visited by the boy in the few hours she actually slept, Mister Kindly devoured them before they had a chance to bother her.
With two turns until contest’s end, Mia was bent over a boiling flask in the Hall of Truths. Ninebells had been struck, but she’d received dispensation to be out after curfew from Spiderkiller again. The perfume of burned sweetness and dead rat hung in the air. Entwined in her hair. Blurring her eyes.
Mia heard the doors open.
She looked up expecting to see Spiderkiller, but instead, Mia saw bright blue eyes. Pale skin and sharp cheekbones. A boy more beautiful than handsome.
The huge double doors closed silently behind him.
Mia’s hand went to the stiletto in her sleeve.
“Hello, Hush,” she said.
The boy, of course, said nothing. Walking quietly across the hall to stand in front of Mia. He watched her through the glassware, lips pressed together.
His hands were behind his back.
Mia was tense as a mekwerk spring. This was the room Lotti had been killed in, after all. Mister Kindly had warned her Jessamine and Diamo might not be the culprits. Hush had been caught wandering after ninebells, but no one had ever explained exactly what he’d been doing when he was discovered, and here he was, out of his chambers after ninebells again. And nobody had ever found out what happened to Floodcaller …
The boy’s silence was utter; not just his lips, but his entire person. He made no sound as he walked. As he breathed. When he moved, even the fabric of his clothes was voiceless. And his damned hands were still behind his back.
“You shouldn’t be out after curfew,” Mia said.
Hush simply smiled.
“… Can I help you with something?”
The boy slowly shook his head.
Mister Kindly coalesced behind Hush, watching. Every muscle in Mia’s body was wound tight. The shadows around her rippling as her fingers twitched. Her own shadow began to bend, snaking across the floor, longer and darker than it should have been. And Hush took his hands out from behind his back and showed them empty.
Mia sighed. Released her knife. Hush began to speak in Tongueless, his fingers moving so rapidly Mia had trouble following.
help you
Mia signed back, a little clumsier than the boy.
help me with what?
The boy motioned to the bubbling mixtures, the phials and condensers and jars. Mia recalled the sight of him at the scourging. Those toothless gums exposed as he silently screamed. Her hands moved quickly, eyes never leaving his.
why?
Hush paused at that. A faint frown marring that perfect brow.
i’ve been watching
you don’t belong here
It was Mia’s turn to frown now. Confused. Insulted.
what does that mean?
The boy’s hands swayed, deft fingers crafting words from the silence.
after the scourging
you were the only one
to ask if i was all right
no one else cared
Hush shook his head.
you don’t belong here
Mia scowled.
and you do?
The boy nodded.
ugly like the rest of them
Mia found herself confounded. She walked around the spires of bubbling glass, the sweet smell of death. Stood before the boy and took his hands, whispering.
“Hush, what are you talking about? You’re nothing close to ugly.”
The boy actually laughed at that. His vocal chords were atrophied from disuse, the guffaw emerging as little more than a squeak. He clapped his hands to his mouth and convulsed, but she still caught a glimpse of the toothless gums behind those bow-shaped lips. The cracks behind his eyes.
“What happened to you?” she breathed.
The boy’s gaze was intense. Eyes like a sunsburned sky.
slaved
“But you’ve got no slavemark.”
The boy shook his head.
they kept us pretty
“… They?”
pleasure house
Mia’s stomach ran cold as she watched him sign the words. She knew immediately what the boy meant. Where he’d come from. Who had owned him before this, and why they’d knocked out every one of his teeth.
“O, Goddess,” she breathed. “I’m so sorry, Hush.”
you see?
The boy’s lips twisted in what might have been a smile.
you don’t belong here
He looked around the room, the boiling liquid and dead rats, rot and rust in the air.
but kindne
ss should reap kindness
even in a field like this
The boy reached into his britches, and for a moment Mia found her hand straying to her sleeve again. The dark about them trembling. But rather than some hidden shiv, the boy produced a notebook, bound in black leather. He opened to a random page. Mia saw notes in code—a variant of the Elberti sequence mixed with some homebrew. Recognizing the handwriting. The cipher itself.
“That’s Carlotta’s notebook,” she breathed.
The boy nodded.
“Where did you get it?”
The boy tilted his head.
told you
i’ve been watching
Mia’s heart beat faster. She flipped through the pages, saw more than a few were spattered with dried blood. A page near the back had been torn out completely. Slow rage boiled beneath her skin, but she found herself pulling it into check. No sense going off without cause. Hush was offering to help her. He could’ve got Carlotta’s notes without having killed her—he’d been skulking about the Church since he arrived. But still, the simple answer was often the right one …
“Hush,” she whispered, slow and careful. “… Did you murder Lotti?”
The boy looked down at her shadow. Up into her eyes.
what does it matter?
Hands to fists. Red in her eyes.
“It matters because she was my friend!”
The boy shook his head. Looked almost sad.
you have one friend inside these walls
not carlotta
not tric or ashlinn
and not me
Hush stared at her, unblinking. He was no ally, she realized. This was no mark of respect or token of grudging friendship from this O, so strange boy. A debt repaid, was all. Kindness for kindness. Even in a field such as this. And though Hush’s fingers moved not at all, his words swum plain in his eyes.
Take it or leave it.
Mia lifted the book from the boy’s hands. Hush inclined his head in a bow, ever so slight, fringe tumbling over haunted blue eyes. Then he turned on his heel and walked from the room, soundless as a sunsbeam. He reached the double doors, pushed them open with one hand, Mia’s voice stopping him in his tracks.
“Hush.”
The boy turned. Waited.
“Why not use these notes yourself? Don’t you want to finish top of hall?”
