Darkdawn

Maw’s teeth, he really is my brother.

“I’m sorry,” Mia said, softening her voice. “These are sharp truths I’m speaking. But your father was an evil man, brother. A tyrant who wanted to carve himself a throne out of the Republic’s bones.”

“Like the Kingmaker did?” Jonnen spat.

Mia swallowed hard, feeling the boy’s words like a punch to the stomach. Though she tried to keep a grip on it, she could feel herself growing angry again. As if Jonnen’s rage were somehow stoking her own.

“You’re just a boy. You’re too young to understand.”

“You’re a liar!” The boy climbed to his feet, his temper and volume rising along with him. “My father beat yours, and you’re just mad about it!”

“Of course I’m mad about it!”

“You tricked him!” the boy shouted. “On the victor’s stage! You hid that knife in your armor and you never would have touched him otherwise!”

“I did what needed to be done,” she snapped. “Julius Scaeva deserved to die!”

“You don’t fight fair!”

“Fair?” she cried. “He killed our mother!”

“You have no honor, no …”

The boy’s voice died, the twisted snarl on his face slackening into silent wonder. Mia followed his eyeline to the floor, that tableau of wailing faces and open hands, lit by the spectral glow of their single lantern. There, on the graven stone, she could see their shadows, dark and tenebrous in the ghostly light. And they were moving.

Jonnen’s shadow was slithering back, like a viper coiling to strike. Her own shadow was reaching toward his, hair flowing as if in a gentle breeze. In a blinking, Jonnen’s shade lashed out at hers, wrapping its hands around its opponent’s throat. Mia’s shadow surged and rippled as the smaller shadow slipped hands about its neck. The shades lashed and slashed at each other, sudden violence painted in rippling black, though Mia and Jonnen both stood still and unharmed.

Mia could see the perfect fury in her brother’s eyes, reflecting the war in the dark between them. It seemed as if their shadows were playing out their innermost feelings: his hatred, her affection scorned. And she knew it then, sure as she knew her own name—this boy would kill her if he could. Cut her throat and leave her for the rats. She watched those ribbons of darkness, recalling that her shadow had reacted the same in Furian’s presence. Looking at her brother, she felt the same sickness and longing she’d felt near other darkin. As if she’d fallen asleep with someone beside her and woken to find herself alone. The sense of something … missing.

She forced calm into her voice. Willed her shadow to still itself.

“I am your sister, Jonnen,” she said. “We’re the same, you and I.”

The boy made no reply, hateful stare still fixed on her. But the enmity between their shadows slowly calmed, the shades returning to their normal shapes, only faint ripples to mark anything was odd about them at all. The darkness around them was deathly silent. The wide eyes of a thousand stone faces watching them.

“How long has it spoken to you?” Mia asked softly. “The dark?”

Jonnen remained silent. Little hands curled into little fists.

“I wasn’t much older than you, the turn it first spoke to me.” Mia sighed, tired in her soul. “The turn your father hanged mine, ordered me drowned, ripped you from our mother’s arms. The turn he destroyed everything.”

The boy looked at their shadows, his dark eyes clouded.

“Eight long years it took me,” she continued. “All those miles and all that blood. But it’s over now. For good or ill, Julius Scaeva is dead. And we’re a familia again.”

“Lost,” he spat, “is what we are, Kingmaker.”

Mia looked about them, peering into the blackness beyond the circle of their lantern’s light. From the chill in the air, the silence engulfing them, she’d guess they were far underground. In some hidden part of the necropolis, perhaps.

Why had that Hearthless one saved her life, only to abandon her down here?

Where were Mister Kindly and Eclipse?

Mercurio?

Ashlinn?

Why was she still standing here like some frightened maid?

Mia picked up the lantern. Its surface was pale and smooth as raven’s claws, carved with reliefs of an odd crescent shape.

Gravebone, she realized.

She could still feel that longing inside her. Looking at the boy, at their shadows on the floor. But there was something more, she realized. Something tugging at her out there in all that dark and all that cold. As she shifted the lantern in her hand, she realized their shadows weren’t moving in response to the light. Instead, they remained fixed in one direction, like iron being pulled toward a lodestone.

Mia was tired beyond sleeping. Bruised and bleeding and afraid. But the will that had kept her moving when all seemed lost, when the whole world seemed against her, when her task seemed all but impossible, bid her keep walking. She didn’t know where they were, but she knew they couldn’t stay. And so she held out her hand to her brother.

“Come.”

“Where?”

She nodded to their shadows on the floor. “They know the way.”

The boy looked at her, rage and mistrust in his eyes.

“Our familia had a saying,” Mia said. “Before your father destroyed it. Neh diis lus’a, lus diis’a. Do you know what that means?”

“I do not speak Liisian,” the boy growled.

“When all is blood, blood is all.”

She held out her hand again.

“Blood is all, little brother,” she repeated.

Jonnen looked up at her. In the dark, among those beautiful howling faces and open hands and the ghostly gravebone light, Mia could see the reflection of his father in those bottomless black eyes.

But in the end, he took her hand.

Do you feel that?”

Mia’s voice echoed in the gloom, far too loud for comfort. They’d been walking for what seemed like miles, through a twisting labyrinth of tunnels. The walls and floor were all made of those stone hands and faces, uneven under her feet.

It felt singularly disconcerting to be walking on a surface of silent screams. Mia felt sure this was part of the Godsgrave necropolis, but nothing looked familiar, and she’d no idea why anyone would have spent years carving the walls and floors like this. The farther they walked, the more ill at ease she felt. She’d occasionally catch movement from the corner of her eye, swearing that one of the stone hands had moved, or a face had turned to follow her as she passed. But when she looked at them direct, they were motionless.

The darkness was oppressive, the air heavy, sweat burning in the cuts and gouges on her skin. That nameless, shapeless anger was budding in her chest, and she had no idea why. With every step, the feeling that had been dogging Mia since she woke in this place grew more pronounced. The pull of moth to flame.

For the time being, Jonnen’s fear of the dark seemed to have overcome his hatred for her, and though he’d refused to keep hold of Mia’s hand for long, he stayed close on her heels. As she led him on through the tunnels, gravebone lantern held high, she’d sometimes glance back and find him staring at her with unveiled hatred.