Nevernight

by Jay Kristoff

  Just as she’d done outside Augustus’s window, Mia reached out and took hold of the shadows about her. Thread by thread, she drew the darkness to her with clever fingers, like a seamstress weaving a cloak—a cloak over which unwary eyes might lose their way.

  A cloak of shadows.

  Call it what you will, gentlefriends. Thaumaturgy. Arkemy. Werking. Magik. Like all power, it comes with a tithe. As Mia pulled her shadows about her, the light grew dimmer in her eyes. As ever, it became harder for her to see past her veil of darkness, just as she was harder to see inside it. The world beyond was blurred, muddied, shrouded in black—she had to walk slow, lest she trip or stumble. But wrapped inside her shadows, she crept on, on through the nevernight glare, just a watercolor impression on the canvas of the world.

  Up to the stable’s flank, climbing the downspout by feel. Crawling onto the roof, she squinted in her gloom, spotted the Dweymeri in the chimney’s shadow, watching her bedroom window. Mia padded across the tiles, imagining she was back in Old Mercurio’s warehouse; dead leaves scattered across the floor, a three-turn thirst burning in her throat, four wild dogs asleep around a decanter of crystal-clear water.

  Motivation had been the old man’s watchword, sure and true.

  Closer now. Uncertain whether to speak or act, begin or end. Perhaps twenty paces away, she saw the boy tense, turn his head. And then she was rolling beneath the fistful of knives he hurled, three in quick succession, gleaming in the light of that cursed sun. If this were truedark she would’ve had him. If this were truedark—

  Don’t look.

  She snapped to her feet, stiletto drawn, her shadow writhing across the tiles toward him. The Dweymeri boy had drawn his scimitar, two more throwing knives poised in his other hand. Dark saltlocks of matted hair swayed over his eyes. The tattoos on his face were the ugliest Mia had ever seen, looking like they’d been scrawled by a blind man in the midst of a seizure. Yet the face beneath …

  The pair stood watching each other, still as statues, moments ticking by like hours as the gale howled about them.

  “You have very good ears, sir,” she finally said.

  “You have better feet, Pale Daughter. I heard nothing.”

  “Then how?”

  The boy offered a dimpled smile. “You stink of cigarillo smoke. Cloves, I think.”

  “That’s impossible. I’m downwind 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 travel 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 ritualized 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.7 He terrorized 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.

  1. When residing in Godsgrave, the Republic’s nobility dwell within the graven hollows of the aforementioned Ribs, and conduct their business in the cavernous innards of the Spine—hence the term “marrowborn.” Status is conveyed by one’s proximity to the first Rib, wherein dwell the Itreyan Senate and the consuls elected to lead them. North of the first Rib lies the Forum, constructed in the place the Skull might’ve been.

  I say “might,” gentlefriend, because the Skull itself is missing.

  2. The motto of the Luminatii Legion, gentlefriend. “Light shall conquer.”

  3. “O, you mean the Mawwwwww.”

  4. The priests of the Itreyan College of Iron are inducted into their order after their second truedark, and tested for aptitude in the Ars Machina. The boys are never taught to read, nor to write. On the eve of their fifth truedark, those found worthy to serve are taken to a brightly lit room in the heart of the Collegium. Here, amid the scent of burning tar and the breathless beauty of the college choir, they recite their vows, and are then relieved of their tongues via a set of red-hot iron snips. The secrets of constructing and maintaining war walkers are the most tightly guarded in the Republic—taught by doing, not speaking—and the priesthood take their vows of silence rather seriously.

  It may give comfort to the gentle-hearted among you that the priesthood don’t take vows of celibacy. They’re free to partake in all pleasures of the flesh, though their lack of tongues can prove a hindrance in their search for wives.

  Though it does make them excellent dinner companions.

  5. Though sadly lacking in darkness, most citizens of the Republic still require sleep, and regardless of season, the change from waking hours is marked by a turn in Itreya’s weather. As nevernight approaches, winds pick up from the westward oceans and howl across the Republic, bringing a merciful temperature drop in their wake. As it’s easier to sleep in cooler times, this turn is taken by most as the signal to h
it the pillow, hay, or flagstones depending on their state of inebriation. The winds die slowly, rising again perhaps twenty-four hours later. It is said they are a gift from Nalipse, the Lady of Storms, who takes mercy upon a land and people scorched by her Father’s almost constant light.

  The “turn,” therefore, is the term Itreyans use to mark a cycle of sleep and waking. There are seven turns to a week, three and one half hundred turns in a seasonal year. An oddity of language, to be sure, but a necessary one in a land where actual days last two and a half years at a time, and birthday parties are an indulgence that only the wealthiest might afford.

  6. Every now and then, and often to her chagrin, the girl’s lingering marrowborn pride would slip through her carefully cultivated facade of not-give-a-fuckery. You can take the girl from the gutter, but not the gutter from the girl. Sadly, the same can be said of the glitter.

  7. O, stop giggling and grow up.

  CHAPTER 5

  COMPLIMENTS

  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 hung 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 blood-stained 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.

  Mia smiled also.

  Decided.

  “Mister Kindly,” she said.

  According to the plaque above his stable, the stallion’s name was “Chivalry,” but Mia would come to know him simply as “Bastard.”

  To say she wasn’t fond of horses is to say geldings aren’t fond of knives. Growing up in Godsgrave, she’d had little need for the beasts, and truthfully, they’re an unpleasant way to travel despite what your poets might say. The smell is akin to a solid right hook into an already broken nose, the toll on the rider’s tenders is measured more often in blisters than bruises, and traveling by hoof isn’t much quicker than traveling by foot. And all these issues are compounded if a horse has a sense of its own importance. Which, sadly, poor Chivalry did.

  The stallion belonged to the garrison centurion, a marrowborn member of the Luminatii legion named Vincenzo Garibaldi. He was a thoroughbred, black as a chimneysweep’s lungs.1 Treated (and fed) better than most of Garibaldi’s men, Chivalry was tolerant of none but his master’s hand. And so, confronted with a strange girl in his stable as the watch sounded, he neighed in irritation and set about voiding his bladder over as many square feet as possible.

  Having spent years living near the Rose River, the stench of stallion piss came as no real shock to Mia, who promptly slapped a bit into the horse’s mouth to shut him up. Hateful as she found the beasts, she’d endured a three-week stint on a mainland horse farm at Old Mercurio’s “request,” and at least knew enough not to place the bridle on the beast’s arse-end.2 However, when Mia hoisted the saddle blanket, Chivalry began thrashing in his pen, and it was only through a hasty leap onto the doorframe that the girl avoided growing considerably thinner.

  “Trelene’s heaving funbags, keep him quiet!” Tric hissed from the stable door.

  “… Did you honestly just swear by a goddess’s ‘funbags’?”

  “Forget that, shut him up!”

  “I told you horses don’t like me! And blaspheming about the Lady of the Ocean’s baps isn’t going to help matters any. In fact, it’ll probably get you drowned, you nonce.”

  “I’ll no doubt have long years locked in whatever stinking outhouse passes for the jail in this cesspool to repent my sins.”

  “Keep your underskirts on,” Mia whispered. “The outhouse will be occupied for a while.”

  Tric wondered what the girl was on about. But as she slipped into Chivalry’s pen for another saddling attempt, he heard wails within the garrison tower, pleas to the Everseeing, and a burst of profanity so colorful you could fling it into the air and call it a rainbow. A stench was rising on the wind, harsh enough to make his eyes water. And so, as Mia rained whispered curses down on Chivalry’s head, the boy decided to see what all the fuss was about.

  Mister Kindly sat on the stable roof, trying his best to copy the curiosity found in real cats. He watched as the boy moved quietly to the tower, scaled the wall. Tric peered through the sandblasted window into the room beyond, his face turning greenish beneath his artless tattoos. Without a sound, he dropped to the ground, creeping back to the stable in time to see Mia wrangle the saddle onto Chivalry’s back with the aid of several stolen sugar cubes.

  The boy helped Mia handle the snorting stallion through the stable doors. She was short, and the thoroughbred twenty hands high, so it took her a running leap to make the saddle. As she struggled up, she noticed the green pallor on Tric’s face.

  “Something wrong?” she asked.

  “What the ’byss is going on in that tower?” Tric whispered.

  “Mishap,” Mia replied.

  “… What?”

  “Three dried buds of Liisian loganberry, a third of a cup of molasses essence, and a pinch of dried cordwood root.” She shrugged. “Mishap. You might know it as ‘Plumber’s Bane.’”

  Tric blinked. “You poisoned the entire garrison?”

  “Well, technically Fat Daniio poisoned them. He served the evemeal. I just added the spice.” Mia smiled. “It’s not lethal. They’re just suffering a touch of … intestinal distress.”

  “A touch?” The boy cast one haunted look back to the tower, the smeared and groaning horrors therein. “Look, don’t be offended if I do all the cooking out there, aye?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  Mia set her sights on the wastes beyond Last Hope, and with a doffed hat toward the watchtower, kicked Chivalry’s flanks. Sadly, instead of a dashing gallop off toward the horizon, the girl found herself bucked into
the air, her brief flight ending in a crumpled heap on the road. She rolled in the dirt, rubbing her rump, glaring at the now whinnying stallion.

  “Bastard…,” she hissed.

  She looked to Mister Kindly, sitting on the road beside her.

  “Not. A. Fucking. Word.”

  “… meow…,” he said.

  With a sharp bang, the watchtower door burst open. A befouled Centurion Vincenzo Garibaldi staggered into the street, one hand clutching his unbuckled britches.

  “Thieves!” he moaned.

  With a half-hearted flourish, the Luminatii centurion drew his longsword. The steel flared brighter than the suns overhead. At a word, tongues of fire uncurled along the edge of the blade and the man stumbled forward, face twisted with righteous fury.

  “Stop in the name of the Light!”

  “Trelene’s sugarplums, come on!”

  Tric leaped into Chivalry’s saddle, dragging Mia over the pommel like a sack of cursing potatoes. And with another sharp boot to the stallion’s flanks, the pair galloped off in the direction of their certain doom.3

  The pair stopped off long enough to retrieve Tric’s own stallion—a looming chestnut inexplicably named “Flowers”—before fleeing into the wastes. The Plumber’s Bane had done its work, however, and pursuit by Last Hope’s garrison was short-lived and largely messy. Mia and Tric soon found themselves slowing to a brisk canter, no pursuers in sight.

  The Whisperwastes, as they were called, were a desolation grimmer than any Mia had seen. The horizon was crusted like a beggar’s lips, scoured by winds laden with voices just beyond hearing. The second sun kissing the horizon was usually the sign for Itreya’s brutal winters to begin, but out here, the heat was still blistering. Mister Kindly was coiled in Mia’s shadow, just as miserable as she. Propping a (stolen and paid-for) tricorn upon her head, Mia surveyed the horizon.

  “I’d guess the churchmen nest on high,” Tric ventured. “I suggest we start with those mountains to the north, then swing east. After that, we’ll probably have been drained lifeless by dustwraiths or eaten by sand kraken, so our bones won’t mind where they get shit out.”