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. He killed my father, and hundreds more besides. “Left her to die in agony inside the Philosopher’s Stone. “He imprisoned our mother, Jonnen,” Mia told the boy. She knew his thoughts then, as surely as if he’d spoken aloud. Mia glanced down to Jonnen, saw he was staring at her with unveiled malice.
But she could still hear tolling bells, running feet, panicked shouts in the distance. The sounds of the capital were muted beneath her cloak, the colors naught but dull white and terra-cotta blurs. Mia waited in silence, staring out at the city beyond her veil of shadows. The daemon tilted his head, but he gave no reply.
“And whose fault is that? You’re the one who eats my fears.” Mia had no doubts his sentiments were less than flattering, but she kept her eyes on the shadowcat. Jonnen mumbled something unintelligible beneath his gag. “… we seem to have some unexpected luggage …” Mister Kindly glanced at the boy he was riding. “Spoken like someone who’s never owned a pair.” “… what difference does it make, the direction your breasts are pointing …?” And all things considered, nothing went too badly tits up.” The shadowcat had stopped pretending to clean his paw, instead staring out at the City of Bridges and Bones from within Jonnen’s shadow. Mister Kindly’s whisper dragged her eyes from the back of her brother’s head. She felt it as she glanced at him now-the longing of a puzzle, searching for a piece of itself. She’d felt it when she first saw the boy on his father’s shoulders at the victor’s plinth. It was similar to what she’d felt in the presence of Lord Cassius. But more, beneath it all, beneath the longing and the fatigue and the pain, looking down at her brother, she realized she felt … To feel their bones collide, then sleep for a thousand years. She wanted a soft bed and a cigarillo and to savor the taste of some Albari goldwine on Ashlinn’s lips. An exhaustion that left her hands shaking. 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.Īn emptiness was slowly creeping in to replace her elation. The adrenaline of her victory was wearing off, leaving a bone-deep fatigue in its wake. She was tired, beaten, bleeding from a dozen wounds after her ordeals in the arena. 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. “About a thousand times now.”ĭespite her fatigue, Mia’s lips twisted in a smile. “… i hate that mongrel …,” Mister Kindly sighed. The shadowwolf shivered and was gone, flitting along the cracks in the jetty’s boards and off along the harbor wall. “… WILL YOU MISS YOUR TONGUE AS MUCH, WHEN I TEAR IT FROM YOUR HEAD …?” “… you will be missed …,” the not-cat yawned. “… I WILL RETURN …,” the not-wolf growled. Eclipse melted from the boy’s shadow, outlined black against the trawler’s hull. Mister Kindly coalesced in the shadow at Jonnen’s feet, licking at a translucent paw. And there, in the shadow of a shallow-bottomed trawler, she curled down to wait, cross-legged, dripping wet, arms around her brother. 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. Jonnen squinted in the gloom beneath her mantle, watching her with suspicious eyes, but at least his struggles had ceased for now. 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. 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. Never found an answer to the riddle of what she was.
She’d never had a mentor to show her what it was to be darkin.
Echoing the message from that Hearthless wraith with the gravebone blades who’d saved her skin in the Galante necropolis.