by Jay Kristoff
The Revered Mother had spoken the eulogy, honoring those fallen in the Mountain’s defense, praising those who saved the Red Church from calamity. The Ministry were gathered about her, solemn and silent. The few Hands who had survived the slaughter sang the refrain, their song thinner than in turns past.
Mia had stared at one of the new tombs the entire while. Just another slab set in the wall, no different from the rest. Its face was unmarked and its innards were empty—his body was never recovered after all. But when the mass had ended and the remnants of the congregation shuffled off into the dark, she’d knelt by his stone and taken out her gravebone dagger and scratched four letters into the rock.
TRIC.
She pressed her fingers to her lips, then her fingers to the stone.
The speaker had been true to his word, returning to the Mountain once he knew it was safe. Adonai had resurfaced, Marielle beside him, the weaver’s broken fingers bound in splints. It took months for the digits to mend and Marielle to recover her skills. But when she did, her first task was to repay the debt she owed Mia for saving her and Adonai’s life.
She had given Naev her face back.
The woman was waiting outside the speaker’s chambers for Mia’s return from her visit with the Bara of the Threedrake clan. After the girl had washed away the red in the bathhouse, Naev embraced her warmly, kissed either cheek. And without a glance to the chamber or the speaker therein, the woman had escorted Mia back to her room. Naev still wore her veil—perhaps accustomed to it after years of hiding her face, perhaps knowing like Mia did that in the end, it hadn’t mattered what they’d looked like, but what they’d done that counted.
Perhaps because she simply liked veils.
The pair stopped outside Mia’s bedchamber, Naev opening the door with a smile. The rooms in the Blades’ corner of the Mountain were bigger, more private, shrouded in evernight. Mia’s bed was big enough for her to get lost in. She hated sleeping in it, truth be told. Too easy to feel alone. But she’d been anointed by Cassius before the entire Ministry—no matter Drusilla or Solis’s misgivings, she was a Blade now. Here was where she’d stay until the Ministry assigned her to a Chapel. She’d requested Godsgrave, of course, but where she might end up was anyone’s guess.
“Before I forget…”
Naev nodded to her bedside table. A tome wrapped in black leather sat on the wood, bound with a silver clasp.
“The chronicler sent it for you. He said you would know what it meant.”
Mia’s heart surged in her chest. She thanked Naev again, shut the door behind her and flopped onto her mattress. Mister Kindly faded into view on the bedhead, Eclipse at the bed’s foot. The two shadows stared at each other with their not-eyes, mistrust crackling in the air. Mister Kindly had counseled Mia long and hard that Eclipse had no place at her side. But the shadowwolf had seemed utterly bereft with Lord Cassius dead. She’d spent turns wandering the Mountain’s belly, howling her grief. Mia had finally hunted her down at Drusilla’s request, asked Eclipse to walk with her, since she had no other to walk with. The shadowwolf had stared at her long and mute, and Mia had thought she’d refuse. But as the girl had looked down at the darkness beneath her feet, it had grown darker still.
Dark enough for three.
Mia picked up the book from her nightstand, stared at the cover. Strange symbols were embossed in the leather, hurting her eyes to look at. Flipping open the clasp, she saw a note, written in the chronicler’s spidery hand. Seven words.
“Another girl with a story to tell.”
Mia thumbed through the pages, creaking and cracked with age, studying the beautiful illustrations within. Human forms, with the shadows of different beasts at their feet. Wolves and birds. Vipers and spiders. Other things, monstrous and obscene. She frowned at the strange sigils, twisting and shifting before her eyes.
“I don’t know this script.”
“… i doubt there are many in this world that can read it…”
“But you can?”
Mister Kindly nodded.
“… i do not know how. but the letters … speak to me…”
Eclipse climbed to her feet, prowled up the mattress to sit beside Mia. Mister Kindly spat and the wolf growled in return, peering at the pages in Mia’s hands.
“… I CAN READ IT ALSO…”
“What’s it called?”
The not-cat dropped onto Mia’s shoulder, peered at the strange, shifting symbols.
“… the hungry dark…”
Mia ran her fingers down the pages. The shadows inked in black, the shifting, crawling text. This might be it. The answer to all her questions. Who she was. What she was. Or it might be simple nonsense. A book that died because it never should’ve been; just one more lifeless husk from Niah’s library of the dead.
“Will you two read it for me?”
“… do you really wish to know…?”
“How can you ask that? We need to understand what we are, Mister Kindly.”
“… i like things the way they are now…”
“… I WILL READ FOR YOU…”
“… BACK IN YOUR KENNEL, MONGREL…”
“… HAVE A CARE, LITTLE GRIMALKIN. ONLY REAL CATS HAVE NINE LIVES…”
“… she was mine before she was yours…”
“… IF SHE IS ANYONE’S, SHE IS HER OWN…”
Mia thumped her hand on the pages. Stared at the shadows around her.
“Read.”
The not-cat sighed. Settled on her shoulder and peered at the shifting text. The ink was blacker than black, blurring and swirling before her Mia’s eyes. She was overcome with a strange sense of vertigo if she stared at the writing too long, so instead she focused on the illustrations, beautiful and monstrous. She flipped through page after page, the not-cat’s tail switching side to side, the not-wolf utterly motionless.
“… it is mostly nonsense. the babble of the broken…”
“There must be something.”
“… THE AUTHOR’S NAME WAS CLEO. SHE LIVED IN THE TIME BEFORE THE REPUBLIC. SHE SPEAKS OF CHILDHOOD. MARRIED TO A CRUEL MAN BEFORE SHE HAD YET BLOOMED. THE SHADOWS HER ONLY FRIENDS…”
“… when truedark fell the year she first bled, she choked her husband with the darkness when he came to take her. she fled, traveled through liis searching for … i think this word is ‘truth’…?”
“… TRUTH, YES…”
“… i did not ask you, mongrel…”
Eclipse growled and Mia smiled, running her hand over the shadowwolf’s neck.
The next sections of the tome were mostly illustrative; shifting patterns of black, a female form with a multitude of different shadows. Entire pages covered in impenetrable black scrawl, like a truedark sky with the stars all picked out in patches of bare white.
“… THIS IS UNCLEAR. SHE SPEAKS OF THE MOTHER’S LOVE. THE FATHER’S SINS. THE CHILD INSIDE HER…”
“She was pregnant?”
“… she was quite clearly mad…”
“Did she find the truth she sought?”
Mister Kindly shifted to Mia’s other shoulder, peered closer at the page.
“… she speaks of feeling others like her. drawn to them like spider to fly…”
A picture of a woman, swathed in black. Shadows uncurling from her fingertips.
“… she writes of hunger…”
A black page, covered in hundreds of mouths, filled with sharp teeth.
“… ENDLESS HUNGER…”
Broad brush strokes, black and violent.
“… o, dear…”
“What?”
“… she speaks of meeting others like her. those who spoke to the dark. meeting them and…”
“… And?”
Eclipse growled softly in the back of her throat.
“… EATING THEM…”
“’Byss and blood…”
“… the many were one…,” Mister Kindly read. “… and will be again; one beneath the three, to raise the four, free the firs
t, blind the second and the third. o, mother, blackest mother, what have i become…”
“Maw’s teeth.”
“… indeed…”
“Does any of this look or sound familiar to you, Eclipse? These drawings? This story? Did you or Cassius ever see anything like this?”
“… WE NEVER LOOKED…”
“Ever?”
“… CASSIUS DID NOT QUESTION HIS NATURE. HE DID NOT CARE WHAT HE WAS, ONLY THAT HE WAS…”
Mia sighed. Shook her head.
“What became of her? Cleo?”
“… read on…”
The shadows fell silent as Mia turned the page. There on the parchment was a map, outlining the known world. The countries of Itreya and Liis, Vaan and old Ashkah. Far out in the middle of the Ashkahi Whisperwastes, surrounded by the shifting forms of what could only be sand kraken, there was an X marked in red ink.
“… she speaks of a journey…”
“… ‘SEARCHING FOR THE CROWN OF THE MOON’…”
Mia blinked. “The Moon?”
“… that is what she says…”
Mia chewed her lip. Turning the page, her breath caught in her throat.
“Look at that…”
The page was another map of the known world, drawn by the same hand. But on the west coast of Itreya, the bay that harbored the city of Godsgrave was gone. A landmass sat there instead; a peninsula jutting out into the Sea of Silence. And in the heart of the peninsula, where the great metropolis now stood, another X was marked, a shifting scrawl in red ink beside it.
“What does it say?”
Mister Kindly looked at the page.
“… ‘here he fell’…”
“The Moon?”
“… presumably…”
Mia stared at the map.
The place where the City of Bridges and Bones should have been.
Godsgrave …
“Who or what is the Moon?” she asked.
But the shadows made no reply.
DICTA ULTIMA
I suppose now you think you know her.
The girl some called Pale Daughter. Or Kingmaker. Or Crow. The girl who was to murder as maestros are to music. Who did to happy ever afters what a sawblade does to skin.
Look now upon the ruins in her wake. As pale light glitters on the waters that drank a city of bridges and bones. As the ashes of the Republic dance in the dark above your head. Stare mute at the broken sky and taste the iron on your tongue and listen as lonely winds whisper her name as if they knew her too.
Do you think she would laugh or weep to see the world her hand has wrought?
Do you think she knew it would come to this?
Do you really know her at all?
Not yet, little mortal. Not yet by half.
But after all, this tale is only one of three.
Birth and life and death.
So take my hand now.
Close your eyes.
And walk with me.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks as deep as the Dark to the following:
Amanda, Peter, Emma, Paul, Justin, Allison, Nancy, Kim, Young, Mike, Melissa, and all at Thomas Dunne/SMP, Emma, Kate, and all at Harper Voyager UK, Mia, Matt, Lindsay, Josh, Tracey, Samantha, Stefanie, Steven, Steve, Jason, Megasaurus, Kat, Stef, Wendy, Marc, Vilma, Molly, Tovo, Orrsome, Tsana, Lewis, Shaheen, Soraya, Amie, Jessie, Caitie, Louise, Marc, Tina, Maxim, Zara, Ben, Clare, Jim, Weez, Sam, Eli, Rafe, AmberLouise, Caro, Melanie, Barbara, Judith, Rose, Tracy, Aline, Louise, Anna, Adele, Jordi, Ineke, Kylie, Julius, Antony, Antonio, Emily, Robin, Drew, William, China, David, Aaron, Terry (RIP), Douglas (RIP), George, Margaret, Tracy, Ian, Steve, Gary, Mark, Tim, Matt, George, Ludovico, Philip, Randy, Oli, Corey, Maynard, Zack, Pete (RIP), Robb, Ian, Marcus, Trent, Winston, Tony, Kath, Kylie, Nicole, Kurt, Jack, Max, and Poppy.
The people and city of Rome.
The people and city of Venice.
And you.
