like a thunderclap in her head.
tapTAPTAP
tapTAPTAP
Fingernails digging into her palms.
White spots swelling before her eyes.
The room rolling beneath her like a ship in a storm.
tapTAPTAP
tapTAPTAP
The anticipation was the worst of it. The moment between one sequence and the next. That tiny respite that seemed an eternity, waiting for the pain to begin again. Adonai’s scourging, Marielle’s weaving … nothing she’d ever felt in her life had come close, made all the worse by the bitter thought that in this moment, to the world outside this cell, her life was no longer her own.
tapTAPTAP
If not for Mister Kindly, she thought she might have broken.
tapTAPTAP
But at the end
after all the pain
all the praying
cheek bleeding
legs trembling
Mia still stood.
“A good thing,” Dona Leona declared, “that you are not a betting man, sir.”
The administratii packed up his gear without a word. Aiming a poison glance at Mia, he gave a curt bow to the dona, and with his novice trailing behind, swept from the cell with a rustle of black cloth. Leona turned to her executus with a triumphant smile.
“You ask for clay to work with, Executus? I give you steel.”
The big man looked at Mia with narrowed eyes. “Steel breaks before it bends.”
“Four Daughters, you’re never happy are you?” Leona sighed. “Come. We should let her rest. She will need her strength in turns to come.”
The dona cupped Mia’s face, wiping her wounded cheek with a gentle thumb. Sapphire-blue eyes burning into her own.
“We will bleed the sands red, you and I,” she said. “Sanguii e Gloria.”
Gifting her a final smile, Leona swept from the room in a flurry of blue silk. The executus limped after her, locked the door behind him. The clank of his iron leg faded with his dona down the corridor.
Mia sank to her knees. Her cheek was swollen, throbbing with pain. Her palms were bleeding from the press of her nails. She ran her fingertips over her skin, feeling the raised ridges of the two interlocking circles branded just below her right eye. But beneath the remembered agony, her mind was racing, the dona’s words tumbling inside her skull with the echoes of the hammer blows.
They’re taking me to—
“… crow’s nest …?”
She glanced up at the not-cat, once more cleaning his not-paw with his nottongue. Licking at parched lips, she tried to find her voice.
“It was the home of the Familia Corvere. My familia. Consul Scaeva gave it to Justicus Remus as reward for ending my father’s rebellion against the Senate.”
“… and now leona owns it …?”
Mia shrugged mutely. The not-cat tilted his head.
“… are you well …?”
Her father, holding her hand as they walked in fields of tall sunsbell flowers. Her mother standing atop battlements of ochre stone, cool wind playing in her long dark hair. Mia had grown up in Godsgrave—her father’s role as justicus meant he could never stay away from the City of Bridges and Bones for long. But every few summersdeeps, they’d traveled to Crow’s Nest for a week or two, just to be with one another. Those had been the happiest turns of Mia’s life. Away from Godsgrave’s crush, its poison politics. Her parents seemed happier there. Closer somehow. Her brother Jonnen had been born there. She remembered visits from General Antonius, the would-be king who’d hanged beside her father. He and her parents would stay up late into the night, drinking and laughing and O, so alive.
All of them gone now.
“… i should go. find a ship bound for whitekeep. tell the viper to seek you in crow’s nest …”
“… Aye,” she nodded.
“… will you be all right while i am gone …?”
The thought should have terrified her. She knew if Mister Kindly weren’t there, it would have. For seven years, ever since her father died, the shadowcat had been beside her. She knew he had to leave, that she couldn’t do this all by herself. But the thought of being alone, of living with the fear he usually drank to nothing …
“I’ll be well enough,” she replied. “Just don’t dawdle.”
“… i will be swift. never fear …”
She sighed. Pressed her hand to the brand on her throbbing cheek.
“And never, ever forget.”
The athenaeum opened at the touch of Mia’s finger, the colossal stone doors swinging wide as if they were carved of feathers. And taking a deep breath, clutching her tome to her breast, she limped out into her favorite place in the entire world.
Looking out over the mezzanine to the endless shelves below, the girl couldn’t help but smile. She’d grown up inside books. No matter how dark life became, shutting out the hurt was as easy as opening a cover. A child of murdered parents and a failed rebellion, she’d still walked in the boots of scholars and warriors, queens and conquerors.
The heavens grant us only one life, but through books, we live a thousand.
“A girl with a story to tell,” came a voice from behind her.
Smiling, Mia turned to see an old man standing beside a trolley piled high with books. He wore a scruffy waistcoat, two shocks of white hair trying to flee his balding scalp. Thick spectacles sat on a hooked nose, his back bent like a sickle. The word “ancient” did him as much justice as the word “beautiful” did Shahiid Aalea.
“Good turn to you, Chronicler,” Mia bowed.
Without asking, Chronicler Aelius plucked his ever-present spare cigarillo from behind his ear, lit it on his own and offered it to Mia. Leaning against the wall with a wince as her stitches pulled, she puffed and sighed a shade of contented gray.
Aelius leaned beside her, his own cigarillo bobbing on his lips as he spoke.
“All right?”
“All right,” she nodded.
“How was Galante?”
Mia winced again, the pain of her sutures twinging in her backside.
“A pain in the arse,” she muttered.
The old man grinned around his smoke. “So what brings you down here?”
Mia held up the tome she’ d brought with her across the blood walk. It was bound in stained leather, tattered and beaten. The strange symbols embossed in the cover hurt her eyes to look at and its pages were yellowed with age.