by Jay Kristoff
… no, not her father.
O, Mother, how could you?
She stalked the shadows like a wolf on the scent of fresh blood, Eclipse scouting ahead, just a black shape on the walls. Dodging slaves and serving staff and soldiers, only a breeze on the backs of their necks, a shiver down their spines as she passed them over. All of Mercurio’s and Mouser’s lessons ringing in her head, her muscles taut, her blade poised, not a single movement wasted, not a whisper to her steps. Her old teacher would have swelled with pride to see her. All of it, the lectures, the practice, the pain—she could feel all of it perfectly distilled in her veins. Every choice she’d made had brought her to this moment. Every road she’d walked had led her inexorably here. Where it was always going to end.
Eclipse’s whispers finally led them to a grand study. A vast oaken desk was set at the room’s far end, bookshelves lining the wall, overflowing with tomes and scrolls. The floor was carved with a shallow relief and stained by some work of arkemy—a rumored hobby of Scaeva’s, and one he apparently excelled at. It was a great map of the entire Republic, from the Sea of Silence to the Sea of Stars.
Mia’s heart was pounding thumpathump against her ribs as she tossed aside her shadow mantle. Hair stuck to the sweat and dried blood on her skin. Muscles aching, wounds burning, adrenaline and rage battling exhaustion and sorrow.
And there, near the balcony, he stood.
Staring out into the dazzling sunslight as if nothing in the world were amiss.
He was just a silhouette against the glare as she stole across the room toward him, her mouth dry as dirt, her grip on her sword damp with sweat. Despite the passenger in her shadow, she’d feared he might’ve already been gone, that Ashlinn’s words might’ve proved true, that the man who spoke to the adoring mob might’ve been just another actor wearing his face.
But as soon as she drew close, she knew.
A cool sickness in the pit of her belly. A slow horror that gave way to a sinking feeling of inevitability. The final pieces in the riddle of her life, who she was, what she was, why she was, at last clicking into place.
That feeling …
That O, so familiar feeling.
Mister Kindly materialized on the floor of the Philosopher’s Stone beside her, his whisper cutting in the gloom. The dona Corvere took one look at the shadowcat and hissed like she’d been burned. Shrinking back from the bars of her cell, into the far corner, teeth bared in a snarl.
“He’s in you,” the dona had whispered. “O, Daughters, he’s in you.”
“Hello, Mia,” Scaeva said.
He didn’t turn to look at her. Eyes still fixed on the sunslight outside. He’d changed from his torn and bloodied costume into a long toga of pristine white. Shadow on the wall. Fingers entwined behind his back. Defenseless.
But not alone.
She saw his shadow move. Shivering as the sickness and hunger inside her swelled to bursting. And from the smudge of darkness across the study wall—dark enough for two—Mia heard a faint and deadly hiss.
A ribbon of blackness uncurled from under the imperator’s feet. Slithering across the floor and rising up, thin as paper, licking the air with its not-tongue.
A serpent made of shadows.
“… She has your eyes, Julius…,” it said.
The rage flared then, bright as those three suns in the cursed heavens outside. The blood in her veins, the blood that they shared, set to boiling. She didn’t care in that moment, not about any of it. Mercurio or Jonnen. Ashlinn or Tric. The Red Church and the Black Mother and the poor, broken Moon. She’d have opened her wrists for the chance to drown him in her blood right then. She’d have smashed herself to pieces just to cut his throat upon the shards.
She didn’t realize she was running until she was almost upon him, her blade raised high, her lips peeled back, eyes narrowed.
The serpent hissed warning.
Pulse rushing in her ears.
And, turning toward her, Julius Scaeva held up his hand.
A flash of light. A stab of pain. A blinding flare like a punch to her face, sending her sprawling backward, yowling like a scalded cat. A golden chain hung between Scaeva’s fingers, and at the end of it dangled three brilliant suns—platinum, rose, and yellow gold. The Trinity of Aa, repeated on every chapel spire and church window from here to Ashkah. But this one had been blessed by a servant of true faith.
Eclipse whimpered, the serpent at Scaeva’s feet twisted and writhed in agony. Mia was on her back, fingernails clawing the graven floor as Scaeva raised the sigil into the few feet and thousand miles between them. The light was white fire and rusty blades, lancing into the cool dark behind her eyes. Her belly roiled and her vision burned and her mouth filled with bile, that blinding, blistering, burning light reducing her to a ball of helpless agony.
“It’s g-good to see you, daughter,” Scaeva said.
How?
Beyond the pain, she could still feel it—the same longing she’d felt in the presence of every other like her. Scaeva was darkin, she was sure of it. But that Trinity, Black Mother, those three spheres of incandescent flame …
“H-How?” she managed.
“How d-do I … endure it?”
Julius Scaeva’s voice trembled as he spoke, and through her own tears, Mia could see them welling in his eyes also. But still, the imperator of the Itreyan Republic held those awful suns up between them. His hand was shaking. His passenger coiling into knots of agony at his feet. Faint wisps of smoke snaked from between his fingers.
But still, he held on.
“The same way I just laid c-claim to a throne.” Scaeva twisted the Trinity this way and that, veins standing taut in his neck, hissing through gritted teeth. “A matter of will, daughter m-mine. To claim true power, you need not soldiers … n-nor senators, nor servants of the holy. All you need is the will to do what others will n-not.”
The nausea swelled in her throat, the pain of the Everseeing’s flame almost blinding. But still, Mia managed to reply, her voice dripping hatred.
“I’m n-not … your f-fucking daughter.”
Scaeva tilted his head, looked at her with something close to pity.
“O, Mia…”
He knelt in front of her, bringing the Trinity ever closer. Mia scrambled farther away, scuttling backward on arse and elbows like some crippled crab. Pressed back against the wall, she found herself gasping for breath, tears streaming unchecked down her scarred cheeks, hand raised against the conflagration of those three blessed circles. She could see tendons corded in Scaeva’s arm, sweat glistening on his shaking fist, dripping onto the polished gravebone floor between them.
But still, he held on.
“M-May I put this away?” he asked. “Do you think … we have it in us to s-speak like civilized people? For a … m-moment at least?”
Fire inside her skull. Hatred like acid in her veins. But ever so slowly, pain-wracked and sickened, Mia nodded.
Scaeva stood at once, slipped the Trinity back out of sight in his robes. The relief was immediate, dizzying, a sob slipping up and over her lips. As Mia struggled to catch her breath, Scaeva walked away across the room, leather sandals whispering on the vast map carved into the floor. With shaking hands, he filled a small glass of water from a singing crystal carafe.
“May I offer you a drink?” he asked, his voice once more smooth and sweet as toffee. “Goldwine is your favorite poison, neh?”
Mia said nothing, glaring at Scaeva as her pulse slowed to a gallop. Watching him like a bloodhawk. Mercurio had always taught her to study her prey. And though she’d dreamed about Julius Scaeva almost every nevernight for the past eight years, this was the first time she’d seen him up close since she was ten.
The imperator was handsome, she had to admit—almost painfully so. Black curls dusted with the faintest hints of gray at his temples. Shoulders broad, bronze skin contrasting sharply with the snow-white of his robes. A wisdom earned from decades in the halls of power glittering
in dark eyes.
Mercurio had taught her to sum folk up in a blinking, and Mia had ever been an apt pupil. But looking Scaeva over—this man who’d bent the Itreyan Senate to his will, who’d carved himself a kingdom in a Republic that murdered its kings centuries ago—she found herself blank. Almost all about him beyond the superficial was hidden. He was a killer. A cold-blooded bastard. But beyond that … he was an enigma.
With the Trinity gone, Eclipse retreated from the shelter of Mia’s shadow, rippling with indignity. Scaeva’s own passenger slipped free and slithered across the floor, watching the not-wolf with something close to hunger. Mia could see the imperator’s shadow was moving on the wall, its robes rippling, its hands reaching out toward hers, gentle as lambs.
“Well.” Scaeva turned to face her, sipping from his crystal glass. “Reunited at last. This is all rather exciting, neh?”
“Not as exciting as it’s g-going to be,” she said, chest still heaving.
“It is good to see you, Mia. You’ve grown into quite an astonishing young lady.”
“Go fuck yourself, you unspeakable cunt.”
Scaeva smiled faintly. “An astonishing young woman, then.”
He poured a splash of top-shelf goldwine into a singing crystal tumbler. Padding softly toward her, he placed the glass on the floor a good safe distance away, then retired to the other side of the study. She saw a square table there, low to the ground, flanked by two divan lounges. A chessboard was embossed into the table’s surface, a game in full swing. Even at a glance she could tell the white side was winning.
“Do you play?” Scaeva asked, eyebrow raised toward her. “My opponent was our good friend Cardinal Duomo. We sent runners back and forth with our moves—he didn’t trust me enough to meet face-to-face in the end.” The imperator motioned to the board, the golden rings on his fingers glinting. “He was close to winning this one. Poor Francesco was always better at chess than the true game.”
Scaeva chuckled to himself, which served only to inflame the rage in Mia’s breast. She had no knives, nothing to throw, but she still clutched her gravebone sword. Her mind was awash with all the ways she might bury it in his chest. Unperturbed, Scaeva took a seat near the chessboard, resting his glass upon the divan’s crushed-velvet arm. Reaching into his robe, he pulled out a familiar gravebone dagger, a crow carved on the hilt—the dagger she’d murdered his double with just hours before. It was still bloodstained, its amber eyes sparkling as he placed it upon the table.
“What can I do for you, Mia?”
“You can die for me,” she replied.
“You still wish me dead?” The imperator raised one dark eyebrow. “What in the Everseeing’s name for?”
“Is this a jest?” she scoffed. “You killed my father!”
Scaeva looked at her with pity. “My love, Darius Corvere was—”
“He raised me!” she snapped. “I may not have been daughter of his blood, but he loved me all the same! And you murdered him!”
“Of course I did,” Scaeva frowned. “He tried to destroy the Republic.”
“You hypocritical shitstain, what the ’byss did you just do in the forum?”
“I succeeded at destroying the Republic.”
Scaeva looked her in the eye with genuine amusement.
“Mia, if Darius Corvere’s rebellion had triumphed, his beloved General Antonius would now be king of Itreya. The Senate House would be a ruin and the constitution in ashes. And I don’t blame the man for trying. Darius gave his best. The only difference between he and I is that his best wasn’t good enough to win the game.”
Mia hauled herself to her feet, fingernails cutting into her palms. On the wall, her shadow seethed and flared, reaching toward Scaeva’s, hands twisting to claws.
“This isn’t a game, bastard.”
“Of course it is,” Scaeva scowled, glancing at the chessboard. “And the rules are simple: win the crown or lose your head. Darius understood the price of failure full well, and still he chose to play. So please, before you speak again of how much he loved you, consider he was willing to risk your life for the sake of his lover’s throne.”
“He was a good man,” she said. “He did what he thought was right.”
“As do I. As do most men, all things considered. But where Darius was set to take Antonius’s throne by marching an army on his own capital, I took it with simple words…” He gave a small shrug. “… Well, perhaps a murder or three. But you cannot seriously consider me a tyrant and Darius Corvere a paragon when he was prepared to slaughter thousands and I killed only a handful. I raised you better than that.”
Mia’s breath was trembling in her chest.
“You never raised me! You ordered me drowned in a fucking canal!”
“And witness what you became.” Scaeva breathed the words like a spell, looking her over with a kind of wonder. “When last we met, you were a snot-nosed marrowborn whelp. You had servants and pretty dresses and all you ever wanted handed to you on silver platters. Have you considered for a moment what your life would have been without me?”
Scaeva picked up the black king, moved it across the board, and knocked the white king on its side.
“Think on it a moment, Mia,” he said. “Pretend that Antonius claimed his throne. That Darius stood at his right hand. And watered with the blood of a thousand innocents, all their dreams flowered to reality instead of turning to ashes on the wind.”
Scaeva picked up a black pawn, held it out upon his palm.
“What would have become of you?”
The imperator let the question hang unanswered a moment. A maestro before the crescendo.
“You’d have been married off to some marrowborn fool for the sake of political alliance,” he finally said. “Squeezing out pups, tending the home fires, and feeling the fire inside your own breast slowly die. Naught but a cow in a silken dress.” He held the pawn up between his fingers, turned it this way and that. “Because of me, you are solid steel. A blade sharp enough to cut the sunslight in six. And still you find it within yourself to hate me.”
Scaeva gave a soft, bitter chuckle as he looked her in the eye.
“All you are? All you have become? I gave you. Mine is the seed that planted you. Mine are the hands that forged you. Mine is the blood that flows, cold as ice and black as pitch, in those veins of yours.”
He leaned back on the divan, black eyes burning into her own.
“In every possible sense, you are my daughter.”
Julius Scaeva extended his hand, gold glinting upon his fingers. Upon the wall, his shadow did the same.
“Join me.”
Mia’s laughter bubbled in her throat, threatening to choke her.
“Are you fucking mad?”
“Some might say,” Scaeva replied. “But what possible reason do you have left to want me dead? I killed a man who claimed to be your father. But he was a liar, Mia. A would-be usurper. A man perfectly willing to risk his familia for the sake of his own failed ambition. I killed your mother, aye. Another deceiver. Willing to share my bed and cut my throat before the sweat had even cooled. Alinne Corvere knew the stakes she wagered supporting … nay, encouraging Darius’s gambit. Her life. Her son’s. And yours besides. And she weighed them all lighter than a throne.”
The shadowviper slithered across the ground toward Mia, licking the air. Scaeva spun the gravebone stiletto upon the table, his eyes boring into hers.
“I have never lied to you, daughter,” he said. “Not once, throughout it all. When I ordered you drowned, you were worthless to me. Jonnen was young enough to claim as my own. You were too old. But now you’ve proved yourself my daughter true. Possessed of the same will as I: not only to survive, but to prosper. To carve your name with bloody fingernails into this earth. Darius sought to become a kingmaker? You can truly be one. The blade in my right hand. Whatever you desire will be yours. Wealth. Power. Pleasure. I can do away with those gold-grubbing whores in the Red Church and have you at my side instea
d. My daughter. My blood. As dark and beautiful and deadly as the night. And together, we can sculpt a dynasty that will live for a thousand years.”
On the wall, his shadow reached out farther toward her own.
“You and your brother are my legacy to this world,” he said. “When I am gone, all this can be yours. Our name will be eternal. Immortal. So aye. I ask you to join me.”
Scaeva’s words rang in the hollow spaces in her head, heavy with truth. Her shadow hung like a crooked portrait upon the wall. But though Mia herself remained perfectly still, slowly,
ever so slowly,
it raised one dark hand toward his.
All her life, she’d thought of her parents as flawless. Godlike. Her mother, sharp and wise and beautiful as the finest rapier of Liisian steel. Her father, brave and noble and bright as the suns. Even as she’d learned more about who they were from Sidonius in the cells beneath Crow’s Nest, it never seemed to dim their reflection in her mind’s eye. It hurt too much to admit they might be imperfect. Selfish. Driven by greed or lust or pride and willing to risk everything for the sake of it. And so she kept them unstained. Untarnished. Locked in a box forever inside her head.
Father is another name for God in a child’s eyes.
And Mother is the very earth beneath her feet.
But now, Mia remembered that turn in the forum—the turn Darius Corvere was hanged. A girl of ten, standing with her mother above the mob, looking down on that horrid scaffold, the line of nooses swinging in the wintersdeep wind. She could still feel the rain upon her face and Alinne’s arm across her breast, another hand at her neck, holding her pinned so she must look outward as they tied the noose around the Kingmaker’s neck. The words Alinne Corvere whispered ringing in Mia’s ears now as clear as the turn she’d first uttered them.
“Never flinch. Never fear. And never, ever forget.”
Alinne must have known what she was making. Knew the seeds of hatred she was planting in her daughter. The vengeance that must grow from it. The blood that must flow. And all over the death of a man who—though he may well have loved her—wasn’t Mia’s father at all. And if she must be furious—and O, Goddess, she was—at Scaeva’s claim that he’d made her all she was, how could she be less angry at the woman who’d stood behind her there on that windblown parapet? Forcing her to watch? Speaking the words that had shaped her, ruled her, ruined her?