Darkdawn

Mia tightened her sweating grip on her brother’s leash. Sensing movement, she glanced over her shoulder and saw a slender boy with shocking blue eyes stepping from the necropolis shadows. He was death-pale, dressed in a charred black doublet. Two wicked knives gleamed in his hands, their blades black with toxin.

Hush.

“Well?” Solis sneered. “Nothing to say, pup?”

Mia stayed silent, wondering how Solis could sense her under her shadowcloak at all. Sound, perhaps? The scent of her blood and sweat? Regardless, she was exhausted, unarmed, wounded—in no shape to fight. Sensing her fear, the spreading cold in her gut, Mister Kindly slipped from the boy’s shadow into her own to quell it. And as the daemon flitted away from the dark about his feet, little Jonnen kicked Mia hard in the shins and snatched his hands from her sweating grip.

“Jonnen!” she cried.

The boy turned and bolted. Mia reached for him, hand outstretched and trying to catch him up. And Solis simply hefted his blades, lowered his head, and charged.

Mia swayed aside, the Shahiid’s blade whistling past her cheek as Hush closed in behind her. Spinning swift, she threw aside her shadowcloak, werking the shadows and tangling up the boy’s feet instead. He stumbled, fell, Mia slipping under another one of Solis’s sweeping strikes. Glancing to the cool dark in the corridor behind the Shahiid, she saw Jonnen fleeing back the way they’d come. And clenching her jaw tight she

and bolted down the corridor after her fleeing brother.

“Jonnen, stop!”

Eclipse growled warning, and Mia twisted aside as one of Solis’s short swords came whistling at her out of the black. It struck the bone wall in front of her as she reached a sharp corner, remained quivering inside some long-dead skull. Mia grabbed it as she rushed past, twisting it loose and clutching it in her left hand as she ran on.

Dashing on his little legs, Jonnen found himself overtaken quickly. As Mia pounded up the corridor behind him, he glanced over his shoulder, put on a new spurt of speed. His hands were still bound, but he’d managed to drag the gag free from his mouth, shouting as she picked him up and slung him under her arm.

“Unhand me, wench!” he cried, wriggling in fury.

“Jonnen, be still!” Mia hissed.

“Let me go!”

“… still like him, do you …?” Mister Kindly whispered from Mia’s shadow.

“… LESS AND LESS WITH EACH PASSING MOMENT …,” Eclipse replied, flitting out ahead.

“… well, now you appreciate how i feel about you …”

“Shut it, the pair of you!” Mia gasped.

She bounced off a bone wall and stumbled around another corner, Solis and Hush close on her heels. Kicking through the tomb’s doorway, Mia dashed up the crumbling stairs and back into the awful glare of those three burning suns. Despite Mister Kindly feasting on her fear, her heart was threatening to burst from her ribs.

She’d spent the entire turn fighting for her life already—she was in no shape to tackle a fully armed Blade of the Red Church, let alone the former Shahiid of Songs. Charred eyebrows aside, Solis was one of the deadliest men alive with a blade. The last time they’d tangled, he’d hacked her arm clean off at the elbow. Hush was no slouch, either, and whatever kinship Mia and the boy might have had in their turns as acolytes seemed long evaporated. She was a traitor to the Red Church in his eyes, worthy only of a slow and very painful murder.

She was outnumbered. And in her current state, outclassed.

But how the ’byss could Solis see me?

Mia Stepped through the shadows to give herself some kind of lead, but with the three suns blazing overhead and her exhaustion from the great games thickening her blood, she only managed to travel a few dozen feet. She clipped her shin on a tombstone, staggered, and almost fell. She might’ve pulled on her mantle again, but Solis seemed able to sense her anyway. And truth told, she was too tired to manage it all—the wriggling boy in her arms, the desperate chase, werking the dark. Wild eyes searching now for any way of escape.

She skipped up onto a low marble tomb and vaulted the wrought-iron fence of the necropolis. Hitting the ground hard, she gasped, almost falling again. She was in the grounds of a grand chapel to Aa now, built beside the houses of the dead. She could see a broad cobbled road scattered with citizens beyond the churchyard, tall tenements lining the street, flowers in the window boxes. The chapel itself was limestone and glass, the three suns on its belfry mirroring the three suns above.

Black Mother, they were so bright, so hot, so—

“… MIA, BEWARE …!”

A dagger sailed from Hush’s outstretched hand, whistling toward her back. She twisted with a cry, the blade slicing through a lock of her long, dark hair and sailing past her scarred cheek, close enough for her to smell the toxin on the blade. It was Rictus—a fast-working paralytic. One good scratch and she’d be helpless as a newborn babe.

They want me alive, she realized.

“Release me, villain!” her brother shouted, thrashing again.

“Jonnen, please—”

“My name is Lucius!”

The boy bucked and kicked under Mia’s arm, still trying to free himself from her grip. He managed to drag his hand loose from the sodden leather bonds about his wrists, and with a gasp, he threw it up into Mia’s face. And as if the suns were suddenly extinguished in the sky, all the world went black.

She stumbled in the sudden dark. Her boot clipped a broken flagstone, and her legs went out from under her. Mia gritted her teeth as she hit the ground, hissing in pain as she tore her knees and palms bloody. Her brother also fell, crying out as he tumbled across the gravel to a graceless halt.

The boy rose from the dirt. The boy she’d thought long dead. The boy she’d just snatched from the clutches of a man he should have hated.

“Assassin!” he roared. “The assassin is here!”

And fast as he could, he dashed out into the street.

Mia blinked hard, shook her head—she could hear Jonnen yelling as he ran, but she could see nothing at all. In a rush, she realized her brother had somehow werked the shadows over her eyes, completely blinding her. It was a trick she’d never learned, never tried, and she’d have admired the boy’s creativity if he wasn’t turning out to be such a troublesome little prick.

But the shadows were hers to werk just as much as Jonnen’s, and death was running right on her heels. Mia curled her fingers into claws, tore the darkness away from her eyes just as the Revered Father and his silent companion vaulted the iron fence and dropped into the churchyard behind her.

Mia hauled herself to her feet, blinking hard as her sight returned. Her arms felt like putty. Her legs were shaking. Turning to face Solis and Hush, she was barely able to raise her stolen sword. Her shadow writhed around her long leather boots as the two killers fanned out to flank her.

“Call the guards!” Jonnen cried from the street beyond. “Assassin!”

The citizens turned to stare, wondering at the ruckus. A priest of Aa stepped out from the chapel doors, clad in his holy vestments. A cadre of Itreyan legionaries down the block turned their heads at the sound of the boy’s cries. But Mia could pay heed to none of it.

Solis lunged at her throat, his blade a blur. Desperate, drawing on the dark new strength in her veins, she reached out, tangled up the Shahiid’s feet in his own shadow before he could reach her. Solis snarled in frustration, his strike falling short. Hush hurled another knife and Mia cried out, smashing it from the air with her stolen sword in a hail of bright sparks. And then she charged the silent boy, desperate to even the scales before Solis could break loose of her shadow werking.

Hush drew a rapier from his belt, met her charge, steel on steel. Mia knew the boy from the brief comradeship they’d shared as acolytes in the halls of the Quiet Mountain. She knew where he’d come from, what he’d been before he joined the Church, why he never spoke. It wasn’t because he lacked a tongue, no—it was because the owners of the pleasure house he’d been enslaved to as a child had knocked out all his teeth so he could better service their clientele.

Mia had been training in the art of the sword since she was ten years old. Hush had still been on his hands and knees on silken sheets. They’d both trained under Solis, true, and the boy had proved himself no novice with a blade. But in the last nine months, Mia had trained under the whip of Arkades, the Red Lion of Itreya—schooled in the arts of the gladiatii by one of the greatest swordsmen alive. And though she was exhausted, bleeding, bruised, her muscles were still hardened, her grip still callused, her form drilled into her hour upon hour beneath the burning sunslight.

“Guards!” came Jonnen’s call. “She’s here!”

Mia struck low, forcing Hush aside, her backswing whistling through the air. The boy stepped away like a dancer, blue eyes glittering. Mia raised her blade, telegraphing another strike. But with a deft flick of her boot, she scooped up a toeful of grit from the earth beneath them—an old gladiatii trick—and kicked it right at Hush’s face.

The boy reeled back and Mia’s blade sliced him across the chest, just a few inches short of splitting his ribs clean open. His doublet and the flesh beyond parted like water, but still the boy made no sound. He staggered back, one hand pressed to his wound as Mia raised her blade for the deathblow.

“… MIA …!”

She turned with a gasp, barely deflecting the strike that would have split her head apart. Solis had hacked his boots away, left them wrapped in tendrils of his own shadow, and charged Mia barefoot. The big man collided with her, sent her flying, her backside and thighs shredded on the stone as she hit the ground. She tumbled back up onto her feet with a black curse, fending off the flurry of strikes Solis aimed at her head, neck, chest. She struck back, sweat-soaked and desperate, long black hair stuck to her skin, Mister Kindly and Eclipse working hard to eat her fear.

“Guards!”