‘No fear, my dove,’ the justicus replied. ‘Your mother likes him well enough for both of you. She always has.’
Mia blinked, looking up at her father with black, narrowed eyes. There was a length of rope about his neck in place of his cravat now, tied in a perfect noose.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘O, wake up, Mia,’ he sighed.
‘Father, I—’
‘Wake up.’
‘Wake up.’
Mia felt a hard kick in her belly. A child’s voice, somewhere distant.
‘Wake up, curse you!’
Another kick, this time into the fresh wound at her shoulder. Mia gasped with pain and opened her eyes, seeing a silhouette leaning over her in the gloom. Without thinking, she lashed out with her good hand, seizing the figure’s throat. It squeaked and thrashed, little fingers digging into her forearm. Only then, through the pain and retreating toxic haze did she recognize …
‘… Jonnen?’
She released the boy’s neck as if his skin were scalding metal. Utterly aghast, she reached out to smooth his filthy purple toga.
‘O, Jonnen, I’m sor—’
‘My name is Lucius!’ the boy spat, slapping her hands away.
Mia caught her breath, tried to still her thundering heart. She was horrified at herself – she’d almost hurt him without thinking. Her mind was swimming with pictures of a glittering ballroom and a truedark sky and Scaeva’s hand on her mother’s belly. Of an arena full of people, screaming as she buried her gravebone dagger in Scaeva’s chest. Of Jonnen’s face, pale and horrified as she laid his father low before him.
‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated. ‘I didn’t hurt you, did I?’
The boy simply scowled, his eyes as dark and bottomless as Mia’s. She glanced around them, wondering where they might be. A vast black space surrounded them, lit by the glow of a single lantern on the ground beside her. The ghostly light extended only a handful of feet, and beyond that lay a darkness too deep to fathom.
The floor was uneven beneath her, and Mia realized it was made entirely of human faces and hands – stone reliefs, carved from the snow-pale bedrock itself. The faces were all female – all the same woman, in fact – her features beautiful, her tresses long and gently curled. But her expressions were all of anguish, of terror, her stone mouths open wide and silently screaming. The multitude of hands were upturned to the hidden ceiling, as if it were about to collapse.
Mia blinked hard, trying to remember how she got here. She recalled her confrontation with Solis and Hush. That spectral figure who’d rescued her in the Galante necropolis, once more saving her skin among the houses of Godsgrave’s dead. She could still feel Solis’s poison in her veins, though she noted the wound at her shoulder had been bound with a scrap of dark cloth. She still felt sluggish from the toxin, cold from the brittle chill around her. She felt the ache of her wounds and the tug of dried blood crusting on her skin, and somewhere distant, a nameless, shapeless anger. And looking around at that sea of frozen, terrified faces, like the sensation of sound for a man long since deafened, Mia suddenly realized she felt …
Afraid.
She searched the dark about her. Seeking her passengers among those stone hands and open mouths and realizing she couldn’t feel them anywhere. Her skin prickled, her belly rolled, and with a hiss of pain, she forced herself to her feet.
‘Mister Kindly?’ she called. ‘Eclipse?’
No answer. Nothing but the thud of her pulse in her veins, the dreadful empty of their absence. Eclipse had walked beside her since Lord Cassius had died, Mister Kindly since her father had been hanged. She’d not been without them save by request for an age. But now, to find herself alone …
‘Where are we?’ she whispered, studying the sea of faces and hands.
‘I do not know,’ Jonnen said, a small tremble in his voice.
Her heart softened, and she reached out to him in the dark. ‘It’s all right, Jonnen, I’m here with—’
‘My name is Lucius!’ he shouted, stamping his little foot. ‘Lucius Atticus Scaeva! I am firstborn son of Consul Julius Maximillianus Scaeva, and I am honourbound to kill you!’ He pointed an accusing finger, cheeks pink with fury. ‘You murdered my father!’
Mia withdrew her hand, studying the boy’s face. The bared teeth and quivering lip. Those dark, brooding eyes, so like her own. So like his.
‘I used to sing to you,’ she said. ‘When you were little and it stormed. You hated the thunder.’ She found herself smiling at the memory. ‘A squalling, pink-faced screamer with a pair of lungs on him that might wake the dead, you were. The nursemaids couldn’t do anything to still you. I was the only one who could give you calm. Do you remember?’
She cleared her throat, croaking a rusty tune.
‘In bleakest times, in darkest climes,
When wind blows cold—’
‘You sound like a harpy shrieking for supper,’ the boy snarled.
Mia bit her lip, struggling to keep her infamous temper in check. She’d spent almost eight years plotting the deaths of the men who’d killed her kin. Six years training under the most dangerous killers in the Republic, another year in service to the Red Church, almost another year fighting for her life on the sands of Itreya’s arenas, up to her armpits in blood. Never once in all that time did she learn how to deal with a spoiled marrowborn brat grieving the loss of his bastard father. But still, she tried to imagine what the boy must think. How he must feel looking at the girl who’d murdered his da.
In truth, it wasn’t that hard to see his side. She remembered her own version of this moment, years past. Watching the men who hanged her own da in the forum. Her vow of vengeance ringing in her head, the hatred like white-hot acid in her veins.
Did Jonnen now feel the same way about her?
Am I his Scaeva?
‘Jonnen, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know this is hard. I know you’re frightened and angry, that there’s things you—’
‘Do not speak to me, slave,’ he growled.
Her hand went to the arkemical brand on her cheek. The twin circles that marked her as the property of the Remus Collegium. She could feel the scar on the other side of her face. The gash cutting down through her brow, curling in a cruel hook along her left cheek – a memento from her ordeals on the sands. She thought briefly of Sidonius. Bladesinger and the other Falcons. Wondering if they’d made it to safety.
‘I am no slave,’ she said, iron creeping into her voice. ‘I’m your sister.’
‘I have no sister,’ Jonnen snarled.
‘Half sister, then,’ Mia said. ‘We’ve the same mother.’
‘You’re a liar!’ he cried, stamping his feet again. ‘Liar!’
‘I’m not lying,’ Mia insisted, pinching the bridge of her nose to stop the ache. ‘Jonnen, listen to me, please … you were too young to remember. But you were taken from our mother as a babe. Her name was Alinne. Alinne Corvere.’
‘Corvere?’ he scoffed, his dark eyes narrowed. ‘The Kingmaker’s wife?’
Mia blinked. ‘… You know of the rebellion?’
‘I am no gutter urchin, slave,’ Jonnen said, straightening his filthy robes. ‘I’ve a memory sharp as swords, all my tutors