offered a dimpled smile. ‘You stink of cigarillo smoke. Cloves, I think.’
‘That’s impossible. I’m upwind from you.’
The boy glanced at the shadows moving like snakes around his feet.
‘Seems to be raining impossible in these parts.’
She stared at him. Hard and sharp and lean and quick. A rapier in a world of broadswords. Mercurio was better at reading folk than any person she’d known, and he’d taught her to sum others up in a blinking. Whoever this boy was, whatever his reasons for seeking the Church, he was no psychopath. Not one who killed for killing’s sake.
Interesting.
‘You seek the Red Church,’ she said.
‘The fat man wouldn’t take my tithe.’
‘Nor mine. We’re being tested, I think.’
‘I thought the same.’
‘It’s possible they’re no longer here. I was heading into the wastes to look.’
‘If it’s death you seek, there are easier ways to find it.’ The boy gestured beyond Last Hope’s walls. ‘Where would you even start?’
‘I was planning on following my nose,’ Mia smiled. ‘But something tells me I’d do better following yours.’
The boy stared long and hard. Hazel eyes roaming her body, cool and narrowed. The blade in her hand. The shadows at his feet. The whispering wastes behind him.
‘My name is Tric,’ he said, sheathing the scimitar at his back.
‘… Tric? Are you certain?’
‘Certain about my own name? Aye, that I am.’
‘I mean no disrespect, sir,’ Mia said. ‘But if we’re to travell the Whisperwastes together, we should at least be honest enough to use our own names. And your name can’t be Tric.’
‘… Do you call me liar, girl?’
‘I called you nothing, sir. And I’ll thank you not to call me “girl” again, as if the word were kin to something you found on the bottom of your boot.’
‘You have a strange way of making friends, Pale Daughter.’
Mia sighed. Took her temper by the earlobe and pulled it to heel.
‘I’ve read the Dweymeri cleave to ritualised naming rites. Your names follow a set pattern. Noun then verb. Dweymeri have names like “Spinesmasher”. “Wolfeater”. “Pigfiddler”.’
‘… Pigfiddler?’
Mia blinked. ‘Pigfiddler was one of the most infamous Dweymeri pirates who ever lived. Surely you’ve heard of him?’
‘I was never one for history. What was he infamous for?’
‘Fiddling with pigs.fn7 He terrorised farmers from Stormwatch to Dawnspear for almost ten years. Had a three-hundred-iron bounty on him in the end. No hog was safe.’
‘… What happened to him?’
‘The Luminatii. Their swords did to his face what he did to the pigs.’
‘Ah.’
‘So. Your name cannot be Tric.’
The boy stared her up and down, expression clouded. But when he spoke, there was iron in his voice. Indignity. A well-nursed and lifelong anger.
‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Tric.’
The girl looked him over, dark eyes narrowed. A puzzle, this one. And sure and certain, our girl had ever the weakness for puzzles.
‘Mia,’ she finally said.
The boy walked slow and steady across the tiles, paying no attention to the black beneath him. Extending one hand. Calloused fingers, one silver ring – the long, serpentine forms of three seadrakes, intertwined – on his index finger. Mia looked the boy over, the scars and ugly facial tattoos, olive skin, lean and broad-shouldered. She licked her lips, tasted sweat.
The shadows rippled at her feet.
‘A pleasure to meet you, Dona Mia,’ he said.
‘And you, Don Tric.’
And with a smile, she shook his hand.
The little girl had dashed through narrow streets, over bridge and under stair, red crusting on her hands. The something had followed her, puddled in the dark at her feet as they beat hard on the cracking flagstones. She’d no idea what it might be or want – only that it had helped her, and without that help, she’d be as dead as her father was.
eyes open
legs kicking
guh-guh-guh
Mia willed the tears away, curled her hands into fists, and ran. She could hear the puppy-choker and his friend behind her, shouting, cursing. But she was nimble and quick and desperately afraid, fear giving her wings. Running down dogleg squeezeways and over choked canals until finally, she slithered down an alley wall, clutching the stitch in her side.
Safe. For now.
Slumped with legs folded beneath her, she tried to push the tears down like her mother had taught her. But they were so much bigger than her, shoving back until she could stave them off no more. Hiccupping and shaking, snotty face pushed into red, red hands.
Her father was hanged as a traitor beneath the gaze of the high cardinal himself. Her mother in chains. The Familia Corvere estates given to that awful Justicus Remus who’d broken Captain Puddles’s neck. And Julius Scaeva, consul of the Itreyan Senate, had ordered her drowned in the canals like some unwanted kitten.
Her whole world undone in a single turn.
‘Daughters save me …’ she breathed.
Mia saw the shadow beneath her move. Ripple, as if it were water, and she a stone dropped into it. She was strangely unafraid, the fear in her draining away as if through punctures in the soles of her feet. She felt no sense of menace, no childish fears of unspeakables under the bed left to make her shiver. But she felt that presence again – or closer, a lack of any presence at all – coiled in her shadow on the stone beneath her.
‘Hello again,’ she whispered.
She felt the thing that was nothing. In her head. In her chest. She knew it was smiling at her – a friendly smile that might have reached all the way to its eyes, if only it had some. She reached into her sleeve, found the bloodstained stiletto it had given her.
The gift that had saved her life.
‘What are you?’ she whispered to the black at her feet.
No answer.
‘Do you have a name?’
It shivered.
Waiting.
Wait
ing.
‘You’re nice,’ she declared. ‘Your name should be nice too.’
Another smile. Black and eager.