Darkdawn--Book Three of the Nevernight Chronicle

by Jay Kristoff

  “… Mia?” Ash asked.

  “… MIA…?”

  In a blinking, the shadows turned sharp and pointed like knives, lashing out at her throat. Mia scowled, jaw clenched, wresting the dark from her brother’s grip with but a thought. He was furious, aye. But she was older. Stronger. Far, far deeper. Seizing control over them was literally akin to wrestling them from a child. And with a toss of her head and a whip of her will, the shadows snapped back into their usual shapes.

  “I shall smile when they hang you, Kingmaker,” he hissed.

  “Take a number and queue up, little brother,” she replied. “In the meantime, get your arse back to your cabin before I kick it.”

  The boy’s lip wobbled as he admitted defeat. Cheeks pinking with fury. And without another word, he stormed from the room, slamming the door behind.

  “Eclipse, could you keep an eye on him?” Mia murmured.

  “… AS ONLY THE EYELESS CAN…”

  The shadowwolf rose from beneath Mia’s chair and faded from sight. Mia sank back down into her seat, elbows to table, head in her hands.

  “Littleman?” BigJon said into the silence following.

  “Apologies.” Mia waved one hand. “If that offends.”

  BigJon leaned forward and batted his eyes. “Will you marry me, dona?”

  “Get in line, littleman,” Ashlinn smiled, squeezing Mia’s hand.

  “JUST DO NOT TURN YOUR BACK,” Tric said. “ASHLINN DISLIKES COMPETITION.”

  “Black fucking Mother.” Ash thumped her fork down, three turns’ worth of tension finally getting the best of her. “Must you take every opportunity to have a stab at me?”

  “AN INTERESTING CHOICE OF WORDS, GIVEN WHAT YOU DID TO ME.”

  “It’s called irony, Tricky,” Ashlinn snarled. “Old playwright’s technique. I’d have thought you an expert on drama, the way you’re laying it on.”

  “LAYING IT ON?”

  “Aye, a little thick, don’t you think?”

  “YOU MURDERED ME!” Tric cried, rising from his seat.

  “I did what had to be done!” Ashlinn shouted, rising along with him. “You said yourself the Red Church has lost its way! Well, I’ve been trying to take it down longer than any of you! I’m sorry you had to go, but that’s just how it is! And I stabbed you friendways, in case you’ve forgot. In the front, not the damned back. I can’t undo it, so what the fuck do you want from me?”

  “A HINT OF REGRET? SOME SHRED OF REMORSE? FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND SOME SMALL PART OF WHAT YOU TOOK FROM ME?”

  “Remorse is for the weak, Tricky,” Ash said. “And regret is for cowards.”

  “YOU’VE GOT NOTHING INSIDE YOU, DO YOU? NOT A SHRED OF CONSCIENCE OR A—”

  “Ah, to the ’byss with this…”

  Ash shoved aside her plate, turned toward the door.

  “Ashlinn…,” Mia said.

  “No, fuck it,” the girl spat. “Fuck this and fuck him. I’m not going to sit and eat shit for something all of us have done. We’re all liars. All killers. ’Byss and blood, you were a sworn Blade of the Red Church, Tric. Unlike Mia, you passed your initiation. So don’t sit there and play the fucking victim when your own victims are in the ground, too!”

  The door slammed for the second time as Ashlinn left.

  The room fell silent. Mia toyed with her wineglass, running her finger around the lip. Ash’s words echoing in her head, along with the memory of her final Red Church trial. Called before Revered Mother Drusilla. One simple task between her and initiation.

  Mia heard scuffing footsteps in the shadows. She saw two Hands swathed in black, dragging a struggling figure between them. A boy. Barely in his teens. Wide eyes. Cheeks stained with tears. Bound and gagged. The Hands dragged him to the center of the light, forced him to his knees in front of Mia.

  The girl looked at the Revered Mother. That sweet matronly smile. Those old, gentle eyes, creased at the edges.

  “Kill this boy,” the old woman said.

  For all her bravado, Mia had failed that trial. Refused to take the life of an innocent. Clinging to the few shreds of morality she had left. But Tric had been at the initiation feast when Ashlinn betrayed the Church.

  Which of course meant he hadn’t failed.

  She looked up at the Hearthless Dweymeri boy. Into those bottomless eyes. Seeing his victims swimming in the dark. His hands not black, but red.

  “I THINK I’LL TAKE SOME AIR,” he said.

  “You don’t have to breathe,” Mia replied.

  “I’LL TAKE SOME ALL THE SAME.”

  “Tric…”

  The door closed quietly as he left.

  BigJon and Corleone glanced at each other sidelong.

  “… More wine?” the captain offered.

  Mia breathed deep and sighed. “Fuck it, why not…”

  Snatching up the bottle, she leaned back in her chair and put her feet up on the edge of the captain’s polished table, taking a long, slow pull right from the neck.

  “You have … interesting traveling companions, Crow,” Corleone said.

  “Mia,” she replied, wiping her lips. “My name’s Mia.”

  “Cloud,” he replied.

  “Is that your real name?” She squinted, suspicious.

  “No,” he smiled. “You don’t get to know my real name.”

  “What’ll you give me if I can guess it?”

  He took in his ship with a sweep of his arm. “All you can see, Dona Mia.”

  The girl ran her hand across her eyes, down her face, sighing again. Her head felt too heavy for her neck. Her tongue felt too big for her mouth.

  “You can drop us off at Whitekeep,” she said. “Any of the two hundred silver you can refund would be appreciated. Whatever you think fair.”

  “You mean kick you off the Maid?” The privateer frowned. “Why would I do that?”

  “Well, let’s see,” Mia sighed, counting on her fingers. “I’ve brought two daemons and a deadboy aboard your ship. My brother and I are both darkin, and he’s also the abducted son of the imperator with what’s likely the whole Itreyan Legion chasing his arse. I implicated you and your crew in the murder of a handful of Luminatii, their crew, and the destruction of their ship.” She tipped her head back, guzzled the last of the bottle, and dropped it on the deck. “And I’ve drunk all your fucking wine.”

  She hiccupped. Licked her lips.

  “Good wine, though…”

  “My brother’s name was Niccolino,” Corleone said.

  “S’a nice name,” Mia said.

  As if at some hidden signal, BigJon slipped down off his chair and quietly exited the room. Mia found herself alone with the brigand, save for the cat made of shadows still draped about her shoulders.

  Corleone stood slowly, walked across to an oaken cabinet, and fetched another bottle of very fine red. Cutting the wax seal away with a sharp knife, he refilled Mia’s glass, then retired back to his chair, nursing the booze.

  “Nicco was two years older than me,” he said, taking a swig. “We grew up in the ’Grave. Little Liis. Him, me, and Ma. Da got sent to the Philosopher’s Stone when we were small. Died in the Descent.”

  Mia’s eyes sharpened a little at that. “My mother died in the Stone, too.”

  “Small world.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” she said, swallowing deep from her glass and trying not to think about the night Alinne Corvere died.

  “Ma was devout,” Corleone continued after matching her swallow. “A god-fearing daughter of Aa. We went to church every turn. ‘Boys,’ she’d say, ‘If you don’t believe in him, why would he believe in you?’”

  Corleone took another long, slow pull from the bottle.

  “He could sing, my brother. Voice that could shame a lyrebird. So the bishop at our parish recruited him into the choir. This was twenty years ago now, mind you. I was twelve. Nicco fourteen. My brother practiced every turn.” Cloud chuckled and shook his head. “His singing around the house drove me mad. But I rem
ember my ma was so proud, she cried all through his first mass. Cried like a fucking babe.

  “And then Nicco stopped singing. Like his voice just got … stolen. He told Ma he didn’t want to be in the choir anymore. Didn’t want to go to church. But she said it’d be a shame on him to waste the gift Aa gave him. ‘If you don’t believe in him, why would he believe in you, Nicco,’ she told him. And she made him go back.”

  The brigand took another swig, put his boots on the table.

  “One nevernight, he came home from practice and he was shaking. Crying. I asked him what was wrong. He wouldn’t say. But there was blood. Blood on his bedding. I ran and got Ma. Said, ‘Nicco’s bleeding, Nicco’s bleeding,’ and she came running, asked what was wrong.

  “And he said the bishop hurt him. Made him…”

  Corleone shook his head, his eyes lost focus.

  “She didn’t believe him. Asked him why he’d lie like that. And then she hit him.”

  “Black Mother…,” Mia whispered.

  “She couldn’t grasp it, aye? Something like that … the shape of it just didn’t fit into her world. But it’s a terrible thing, Dona Mia, when the ones who should love you best leave you for the wolves.”

  Mia hung her head. “Aye.”

  “Nicco jumped off the Bridge of Broken Promises four turns later. Bricks in his shirt. He’d been in the water a week when they found him. The bishop came to his funeral. Said the mass over his stone. Embraced my mother and told her everything would be all right. That the Everseeing loved her. That he had a plan. And then he turned to me, and put his hand on my shoulder, and asked if I liked to sing.”

  Mia tried to speak. Couldn’t find her voice.

  Corleone looked her in her eyes.

  “That bishop’s name was Francesco Duomo.”

  Mia’s belly dropped into the soles of her boots. Her mouth full of bile, lashes dewed with tears. She’d known Duomo deserved the murder she’d gifted him in the arena, but Goddess, she’d never guessed just how deeply.

  Corleone stood slow, walked around the table, and, still looking into her eyes, he placed a familiar bag of coin on the table in front her.

  “You stay on this ship as long as you fucking please.”

  CHAPTER 13

  CONSPIRACY

  Mercurio sat in the office of Chronicler Aelius, nose deep in “THE BOOKS.”

  That’s how he thought of them in his head now. “THE BOOKS.” Capital letters. A bold, no-nonsense script. Quotation marks, perhaps underscored—he wasn’t quite sure yet. But what he was certain of was this: to think of these things as “some books,” or “Some Books,” or even “SOME BOOKS” was to deny, in every true and real sense, what they actually were.

  Incredible books.

  Impossible books.

  Brain-breaking, mon-fucking-strosities of books.

  “THE BOOKS.”

  The old man’s scowl had become so permanent a fixture on his face over the past few turns, it actually hurt to change expressions now. His pale blue eyes carefully scanned his current page, every paragraph, every sentence, every word, his gnarled, toxin-stained forefinger tracking the movement of his eyes across the lines.

  He was just nearing the end of the second volume, heart beating quick.

  And with a final gasp, the Unfallen fell.

  A hammerblow to Mia’s spine. A rush of blood in her veins, skin crawling, every nerve ending on fire. She fell to her knees, hair billowing about her as if in some phantom breeze, her shadow scrawled in maddened, jagged lines beneath her, Mister Kindly and Eclipse and a thousand other forms scribbled among the shapes it drew upon the stone. The hunger inside her sated, the longing gone, the emptiness suddenly, violently filled. A severing. An awakening. A communion, painted in red and black. And face upturned to the sky, for a moment, just for a breath, she saw it. Not an endless field of blinding blue, but of bottomless black. Black and whole and perfect.

  Filled with tiny stars.

  Hanging above her in the heavens, Mia saw a globe of pale light shining. Like a sun almost, but not red or blue or gold or burning with furious heat. The sphere was ghostly white, shedding a pale luminance and casting a long shadow at her feet.

  “THE MANY WERE ONE.”

  “Crow! Crow! Crow! Crow!”

  “AND WILL BE AGAIN.”

  Mercurio leaned back in his chair, dragging on his cigarillo.

  “This is doing my bloody head in,” he growled.

  “Requires some mental contortions, doesn’t it?”

  Chronicler Aelius was hard at work, rebinding a few of the library’s more beaten and worn tomes with new covers of hand-tooled leather. Occasionally pausing to take a drag on his own cigarillo and breathe a plume of strawberry-scented gray into the air, he worked with deft fingers and a needle made of gleaming gravebone. Between the pair of them smoking, the air in the office was closer to soup, the ashtray on the chronicler’s graven mahogany desk piled high with lifeless butts.

  “Contortions?” Mercurio scoffed. “Contortions are for circus performers and high-priced courtesans, Aelius. This is something else entirely.”

  “Known many high-priced courtesans, have you?” Aelius asked.

  Mercurio shrugged. “In my youth.”

  “Got any good stories? It’s been a while for me…”

  “If it’s cheap smut you’re after,” Mercurio sighed, tapping the first of “THE BOOKS,” “the tawdriness starts in volume one, page two hundred and forty-nine.”

  “O, I know,” the chronicler chuckled. “Chapter twenty-two.”

  Mercurio turned his deepening scowl on Aelius. “You read those pages?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “Maw’s fucking teeth, no!” Mercurio almost choked on his smoke, utterly horrified. “She’s like my … I don’t want to think of her getting up to … that.”

  The old man slumped in his chair, took a savage drag off his cigarillo. The past few turns, he’d been doing his best to come to grips with the existence of “THE BOOKS,” but he was having a time of it. In order to avoid suspicion from Drusilla and the Hands she had constantly shadowing him through the Quiet Mountain, he had to keep his visits to the library of Our Lady of Blessed Murder short—enough for a few cigarillos with the old chronicler, a chin-wag, then out again. He didn’t dare remove “THE BOOKS” from the Athenaeum in case they tossed his room, and so he’d been reduced to reading them in snippets. He was only just finishing the second.

  It felt ghastly strange to be reading about Mia’s exploits, her private thoughts, and oddest of all, his own role in her tale. Reading those pages was like watching himself in a black mirror, but the glass was propped over his shoulder instead of looking at him face-to-face. And as he read about himself, he could almost feel eyes peering over his own shoulder in kind.

  “Look, how the ’byss is this even possible?” he asked, turning in his chair to face Aelius. “How can these books exist? They’re telling a story that hasn’t finished yet. And my name’s on them, but I never wrote the fucking things.”

  “Exactly,” Aelius replied, nodded to the Athenaeum beyond the black stone walls of his office. “That’s what this place is. A library of the dead. Books that were burned. Or forgotten ages past. Or never got a chance to live at all. These books don’t exist. That’s why they’re here.”

  The chronicler shrugged his thin shoulders, puffed on his smoke.

  “Funny old place, this.”

  Silence descended in the Black Mother’s library, punctuated by the distant roar of a single angry bookworm out in the gloom.

  “You read the introduction again?” Aelius asked softly. “Carefully?”

  “Aye,” Mercurio muttered in reply.

  “Mmm,” the dead man said.

  “Look, it doesn’t mean a fucking thing.”

  Aelius tilted his head, pity in his milky blue eyes. He flipped back through the red-edged pages to the beginning of the first “BOOK” and started reading aloud.

  “
‘Be advised now that the pages in your hands speak of a girl who was to murder as maestros are to music. Who did to happy ever afters what a sawblade does to skin. She’s dead herself, now—words both the wicked and the just would give an eyeteeth smile to hear. A republic in ashes behind her. A city of bridges and bones laid at the bottom of the—’”

  “I’ve read all that,” Mercurio growled. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “This is her story,” Aelius replied softly. “And that’s how it ends. ‘A republic in ashes.’ That’s a good ending, Mercurio. Better than most get.”

  “She’s eighteen years old. She doesn’t deserve any ending yet.”

  “Since when did ‘deserve’ have anything to do with it?”

  The old man lit a cigarillo with gnarled fingers, adding to the thickening fog of gray in the office. “All right, so where’s the fucking third one, then?”

  “Eh?” Aelius asked.

  “I’m almost done with the second,” Mercurio said, tapping on the black wolf cover. “And they both mention a third. Birth. Life. And death. So where is it?”

  Aelius shrugged. “Buggered if I know.”

  “Haven’t you looked for it?”

  Aelius blinked. “What for?”

  “So we can learn how it ends! How she dies!”

  “What good will that do?” the chronicler frowned.

  Mercurio stood with a dramatic sigh and, leaning on his walking stick, began pacing the room. “Because if we know what’s coming, maybe we can help her so things don’t turn out the way this”—his cane came down on the first “BOOK” with a dull thwack—“tells us they do.”

  “Who says you can change anything?”

  “Well, who says we can’t?” the old man snarled.

  “You really want to see the future?” Aelius asked. “Sounds a curse to me. Better to weep for what might’ve been than for what you know is to come.”

  “We don’t know anything,” Mercurio growled.

  “We know all stories end, whippersnapper. Including hers.”

  “Not yet.” Mercurio shook his head. “I won’t let it.”

  Aelius leaned back on the desk, exhaled a plume of strawberry-gray into the miasma above. Mercurio dragged his shaking hand through his hair.