Darkdawn. Jay Kristoff
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darkness, black as her mother’s gown.
It peered at her with its not-eyes, its form shivering and shifting like lightless flame. Tongues of dark fire rippled from its shoulders, the top of its crown, as if it were a candle burning. On its forehead, a silver circle was scribed. And like a look ing glass, that circle caught the light from her father’s robes and reflected it back, the radiance as pale and bright as Mia’s eyes.
And looking into that single, perfect circle, Mia understood what moonlight was.
‘I will never forgive you for this,’ her father said.
‘I will never ask you to,’ her mother replied.
‘I will suffer no rival.’
‘And I no threats.’
‘I am greater.’
‘But I was first. And I trust your hollow victory will keep you warm in the night.’
Her father looked down at her, his smile dark as bruises.
‘Would you like to know what keeps me warm in the night, little one?’
Mia looked down at her reflection again. Watched the pale circle at her brow shatter into a thousand glittering shards. The shadow at her feet splintered, splayed in every direction, maddening patterns surging, seething, the night-thing shapes of cats and wolves and serpents and crows and the shapes of nothing at all. Ink-black tendrils sprouted from her back like wings, razors of darkness from every fingertip. She could hear screaming, growing louder and louder.
Realizing at last that the voice was her own.
‘The many were one,’ her mother said. ‘And will be again.’
But her father shook his head.
‘In every possible sense, you are my daughter.’
He held up a black pawn on his burning palm.
‘And you are going to die.’
Mia woke with a gasp, almost falling from her hammock.
The portholes were shuttered as they’d been for the past two turns. The cabin was shrouded in the same gloom that had filled it since they put out from the Nethers, rocking to the gentle motion of the open sea. Almost three turns after the magni, Mia was still aching in places she never knew she had, and still in need of about seven more nevernights’ worth of sleep.
Genuine sleep, that is.
Dreams. Dreams of blood and fire. Dreams of endless grey. Dreams of her mother and her father, or things wearing their faces. Dreams of Furian, dead at her hand. Dreams of her shadow, growing darker and darker at her feet until she slipped down into it and felt it flow up and over her lips and down into her lungs. Dreams of laying on her back and staring into a blinding sky, her ribs flayed apart, tiny people crawling through her entrails like maggots on a corpse.
‘MORE NIGHTMARES?’
The voice made her shiver, then feel guilty for doing so. She cast a furtive glance at Ashlinn, asleep in the hammock beside hers. Then back to the deadboy, sitting in that corner as he’d done since they put out to the Sea of Silence. Tric’s hood was drawn back and he sat with legs crossed, gravebone swords in his lap, black hands resting flat upon the blades.
Goddess, but he was still beautiful. Not the rugged, earthen beauty he’d been before, no. There was a dark beauty to him now. Carved of alabaster and ebony. Black eyes and pale skin and a voice so deep she could feel it between her legs when he spoke. A princely beauty, wrapped in a robe of night and serpents. A crown of darkling stars on his brow.
‘Apologies, did I wake you?’
‘I DON’T SLEEP, MIA.’
She blinked. ‘Ever?’
‘NEVER.’
Mia dragged her hair back from her face, swinging her legs off the side of her hammock quiet as she could. As she sat up straight, her wounds pulled and her bandages tugged at her scabs and she couldn’t help but wince with the pain of it all. Conscious of those pitch-black eyes following her every move.
She was dying for a cigarillo. For fresh air. For a fucking bath. They’d been stuck in here together for two turns straight now, and the strain was wearing on all of them.
Jonnen was a knot of fury and indignity, kept in check only by Eclipse’s constant presence in his shadow. He sat for hours, pouting and sullen, ripping up tendrils of his own shadow and throwing it at the far wall, just as he’d done at Mia’s eyes in the necropolis. Eclipse would pounce upon the ball of shadowstuff like a puppy and Jonnen would smile, but the smile would disappear as soon as he caught Mia looking at him.
She could feel his anger at her. His hate and his confusion.
She couldn’t blame him for any of it.
Ashlinn and Tric were another source of concern – the tension between them thick enough to slice up and serve with the alleged ‘stew’ they ate each evemeal. Mia could feel the storm clouds building to a thunderhead that would black out the suns. And truth told, she had no idea what to do. She might’ve spoken to Tric about it once, you see. But he wasn’t the same.
She hadn’t known what to feel when she’d first laid eyes on him. The joy and guilt, the bliss and sorrow. Yet after a few turns in his company, she could see he was drawn with the same outline, but not filled in with entirely the same colours. She could feel a darkness to him, now – the same darkness she felt inside her own skin. Beckoning. And aye, even with Mister Kindly in her shadow, perhaps frightening.
Mia bowed her head, rivers of long black hair draping either side of her face. Silence between them thick as fog.
‘I’m sorry,’ she finally murmured.
The deadboy tilted his head, saltlocks moving like dreaming snakes.
‘FOR WHAT?’
Mia sucked her lip, searching for the pale and feeble words that would somehow make this all right. But people were the puzzle she’d never managed to solve. She’d always been better at cutting things apart than putting them back together.
‘I thought you were dead.’
‘I TOLD YOU,’ he replied. ‘I AM.’
‘But … I thought I’d not see you again. I thought you were gone forever.’
‘NOT THE MOST FOOLISH OF ASSUMPTIONS. SHE STABBED ME THREE TIMES IN THE HEART AND PUSHED ME OFF THE SIDE OF A MOUNTAIN, AFTER ALL.’
Mia looked over her shoulder at Ashlinn. Freckled cheek resting upon her hands, knees curled up, long lashes fluttering as she dreamed.
Lover.
Liar.
Murderer.
‘I kept my promise to you,’ she told him. ‘Your grandfather died screaming.’
Tric inclined his head. ‘MY THANKS, PALE DAUGHTER.’
‘Don’t …’
She shook her head, her voice failing as the lump rose in her