Darkdawn

With all the fuss and bother, precious few folk noticed the bedraggled and bleeding slavegirl paddling slowly toward the shore with a boy trussed up in her arms. Picking her way carefully through the gondolas and dinghies bobbing about the Sword Arm jetties, Mia reached the shadows beneath a long timber boardwalk.

“I’m going to hide us for a moment,” she murmured to her brother. “You won’t be able to see for a while, but I need you to be brave.”

The boy only glared, dark curls hanging in his eyes. Stretching out her fingers, Mia dragged her mantle of shadows about her and Jonnen’s shoulders. It took real effort with truelight blazing above her—the sunslight scorching and bright. But even with her passengers now riding with her brother, the shadow beneath Mia was twice as dark as it had been before Furian’s death. Her grip on the dark felt stronger. Tighter. Closer.

She remembered the vision she’d seen as she slew the Unfallen before the adoring crowd. The sky above her, not bright and blinding, but pitch-black and flooded with stars. And shining high above her head, a pale and perfect orb.

Like a sun, but somehow … not.

“THE MANY WERE ONE. AND WILL BE AGAIN.”

Or so the voice she’d heard had said. Echoing the message from that Hearthless wraith with the gravebone blades who’d saved her skin in the Galante necropolis.

Mia didn’t know what it meant. She’d never had a mentor to show her what it was to be darkin. Never found an answer to the riddle of what she was. She didn’t know. Couldn’t know. 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.

Somehow, she was … more.

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. Jonnen squinted in the gloom beneath her mantle, watching her with suspicious eyes, but at least his struggles had ceased for now. 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. And there, in the shadow of a shallow-bottomed trawler, she curled down to wait, cross-legged, dripping wet, arms around her brother.

Mister Kindly coalesced in the shadow at Jonnen’s feet, licking at a translucent paw. Eclipse melted from the boy’s shadow, outlined black against the trawler’s hull.

“… I WILL RETURN …,” the not-wolf growled.

“… you will be missed …,” the not-cat yawned.

“… WILL YOU MISS YOUR TONGUE AS MUCH, WHEN I TEAR IT FROM YOUR HEAD …?”

“Enough, the pair of you,” Mia hissed. “Be swift, Eclipse.”

“… AS IT PLEASE YOU …”

The shadowwolf shivered and was gone, flitting along the cracks in the jetty’s boards and off along the harbor wall.

“… i hate that mongrel …,” Mister Kindly sighed.

“Aye, so you’ve said,” Mia muttered. “About a thousand times now.”

“… more than that, surely …?”

Despite her fatigue, Mia’s lips twisted in a smile.

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. She was tired, beaten, bleeding from a dozen wounds after her ordeals in the arena. The adrenaline of her victory was wearing off, leaving a bone-deep fatigue in its wake. 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.

An emptiness was slowly creeping in to replace her elation. An exhaustion that left her hands shaking. She wanted a soft bed and a cigarillo and to savor the taste of some Albari goldwine on Ashlinn’s lips. To feel their bones collide, then sleep for a thousand years. But more, beneath it all, beneath the longing and the fatigue and the pain, looking down at her brother, she realized she felt …

Hungry.

It was similar to what she’d felt in the presence of Lord Cassius. Of Furian. She’d felt it when she first saw the boy on his father’s shoulders at the victor’s plinth. She felt it as she glanced at him now—the longing of a puzzle, searching for a piece of itself.

But what does it mean? she wondered.

And does Jonnen feel the same?

“… i have an ill feeling, mia …”

Mister Kindly’s whisper dragged her eyes from the back of her brother’s head. The shadowcat had stopped pretending to clean his paw, instead staring out at the City of Bridges and Bones from within Jonnen’s shadow.

“What’s to fear?” she murmured. “The deed is done. And all things considered, nothing went too badly tits up.”

“… what difference does it make, the direction your breasts are pointing …?”

“Spoken like someone who’s never owned a pair.”

Mister Kindly glanced at the boy he was riding.

“… we seem to have some unexpected luggage …”

Jonnen mumbled something unintelligible beneath his gag. Mia had no doubts his sentiments were less than flattering, but she kept her eyes on the shadowcat.

“You worry too much,” she told him.

“… and you not enough …”

“And whose fault is that? You’re the one who eats my fears.”

The daemon tilted his head, but he gave no reply. Mia waited in silence, staring out at the city beyond her veil of shadows. The sounds of the capital were muted beneath her cloak, the colors naught but dull white and terra-cotta blurs. But she could still hear tolling bells, running feet, panicked shouts in the distance.

“The consul and cardinal slain!”

“Assassin!” came the cry. “Assassin!”

Mia glanced down to Jonnen, saw he was staring at her with unveiled malice. She knew his thoughts then, as surely as if he’d spoken aloud.

You killed my father.

“He imprisoned our mother, Jonnen,” Mia told the boy. “Left her to die in agony inside the Philosopher’s Stone. He killed my father, and hundreds more besides. 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. “I’m sorry. I know it’s hard to understand. But Julius Scaeva was a monster.”

The boy bucked suddenly, violently, smacking his forehead into her chin. Mia bit her tongue, cursing, grabbing her brother and squeezing him tight as he launched into another bout of struggling. He tugged against his waterlogged straps, bruising his skin as he strained to free himself. But for all his fury, he was only a nine-year-old boy. Mia simply held him until his strength ran out, until his muted cries died, until he finally went limp with a soft sob of rage.

Swallowing the blood in her mouth, she wrapped him in her arms.

“You’ll understand one turn,” she murmured. “I love you, Jonnen.”

He flailed once more, then fell still. In the awkward quiet afterward, Mia felt a cool shiver down her spine. Goosebumps prickled on her skin, and her shadow grew darker as she heard a low growl from the boards beneath her feet.

“… THEY ARE NOT THERE …,” Eclipse declared.

Mia blinked, her belly lurching a little to the left. Squinting in the glare, she peered at the murky blur of the Siren’s Song, rocking gently at berth a few jetties down.