Darkdawn

Her mother’s gown was black as sin as night as death, strung with a billion tiny points of light. They shone from within, out through the shroud of her gown, like pinpricks in a curtain drawn against the sun. She was beautiful. Terrible. Her eyes were as black as her dress, deeper than oceans. Her skin was pale and bright as stars.

She had Alinne Corvere’s face. But Mia knew, in that dreaming, knowing kind of way, that this wasn’t her real face. Because the Night had no face at all.

And across the infinite gray, he waited for them.

Her father.

He was clad all in white, so bright and sharp it hurt Mia’s eyes to look at him. But she looked all the same. He stared back as she and her mother approached, three eyes fixed on her, red and yellow and blue. He was handsome, she had to admit—almost painfully so. Black curls dusted with just the faintest hints of gray at his temples. Shoulders broad, bronze skin contrasting sharply with the snow white of his robes.

He had Julius Scaeva’s face. But Mia knew, in that dreaming, knowing kind of way, that this wasn’t his real face, either.

Four young women stood about him. One wreathed in flame and another shrouded in waves and the third wearing only the wind. The fourth was sleeping on the floor, clad in autumn leaves. The wakeful trio stared at Mia with bitter, unveiled malice.

“Husband,” her mother said.

“Wife,” her father replied.

They stood there in silence, the six of them, and Mia could have heard her heart thumping in her chest, if only she’ d had one.

“I missed you,” her mother finally sighed.

The silence grew so complete, it was deafening.

“This is he?” her father asked.

“You know it is,” her mother replied.

And Mia wanted to speak then, to say she wasn’t a he but a she. But looking down, the child saw the strangest thing reflected in the mirrored stone/glass/ice at her feet.

She saw herself, as she saw herself—pale skin and long dark hair draped over thin shoulders and eyes of burning white. But looming at her back, she saw a figure cut from the darkness, black as her mother’s gown.

It peered at her with its not-eyes, its form shivering and shifting like lightless flame. Tongues of dark fire rippled from its shoulders, the top of its crown, as if it were a candle burning. On its forehead, a silver circle was scribed. And like a looking glass, that circle caught the light from her father’s robes and reflected it back, the radiance as pale and bright as Mia’s eyes.

And looking into that single, perfect circle, Mia understood what moonlight was.

“I will never forgive you for this,” her father said.

“I will never ask you to,” her mother replied.

“I will suffer no rival.”

“And I no threats.”

“I am greater.”

“But I was first. And I trust your hollow victory will keep you warm in the night.”

Her father looked down at her, his smile dark as bruises.

“Would you like to know what keeps me warm in the night, little one?”

Mia looked down at her reflection again. Watched the pale circle at her brow shatter into a thousand glittering shards. The shadow at her feet splintered, splayed in every direction, maddening patterns surging, seething, the night-thing shapes of cats and wolves and serpents and crows and the shapes of nothing at all. Ink-black tendrils sprouted from her back like wings, razors of darkness from every fingertip. She could hear screaming, growing louder and louder.

Realizing at last that the voice was her own.

“The many were one,” her mother said. “And will be again.”

But her father shook his head.

“In every possible sense, you are my daughter.”

He held up a black pawn on his burning palm.

“And you are going to die.”

BOOK 2 (#ulink_5e43715b-e2a1-5140-80a3-eb40d98317e3)

CHAPTER 10 (#ulink_ac305bbc-7434-5b17-9fbf-8339832261c1)

INFIDELITY (#ulink_ac305bbc-7434-5b17-9fbf-8339832261c1)

Mia woke with a gasp, almost falling from her hammock.

The portholes were shuttered as they’d been for the past two turns. The cabin was shrouded in the same gloom that had filled it since they put out from the Nethers, rocking to the gentle motion of the open sea. Almost three turns after the magni, Mia was still aching in places she never knew she had, and still in need of about seven more nevernights’ worth of sleep.

Genuine sleep, that is.

Dreams. Dreams of blood and fire. Dreams of endless gray. Dreams of her mother and her father, or things wearing their faces. Dreams of Furian, dead at her hand. Dreams of her shadow, growing darker and darker at her feet until she slipped down into it and felt it flow up and over her lips and down into her lungs. Dreams of laying on her back and staring into a blinding sky, her ribs flayed apart, tiny people crawling through her entrails like maggots on a corpse.

“MORE NIGHTMARES?”

The voice made her shiver, then feel guilty for doing so. She cast a furtive glance at Ashlinn, asleep in the hammock beside hers. Then back to the deadboy, sitting in that corner as he’d done since they put out to the Sea of Silence. Tric’s hood was drawn back and he sat with legs crossed, gravebone swords in his lap, black hands resting flat upon the blades.

Goddess, but he was still beautiful. Not the rugged, earthen beauty he’d been before, no. There was a dark beauty to him now. Carved of alabaster and ebony. Black eyes and pale skin and a voice so deep she could feel it between her legs when he spoke. A princely beauty, wrapped in a robe of night and serpents. A crown of darkling stars on his brow.

“Apologies, did I wake you?”

“I DON’T SLEEP, MIA.”

She blinked. “Ever?”

“NEVER.”

Mia dragged her hair back from her face, swinging her legs off the side of her hammock quiet as she could. As she sat up straight, her wounds pulled and her bandages tugged at her scabs and she couldn’t help but wince with the pain of it all. Conscious of those pitch-black eyes following her every move.

She was dying for a cigarillo. For fresh air. For a fucking bath. They’d been stuck in here together for two turns straight now, and the strain was wearing on all of them.

Jonnen was a knot of fury and indignity, kept in check only by Eclipse’s constant presence in his shadow. He sat for hours, pouting and sullen, ripping up tendrils of his own shadow and throwing it at the far wall, just as he’d done at Mia’s eyes in the necropolis. Eclipse would pounce upon the ball of shadowstuff like a puppy and Jonnen would smile, but the smile would disappear as soon as he caught Mia looking at him.