Mia cried out as she was sent sprawling, her dress powdered white. The boy was likewise knocked onto his backside, pastries strewn in the filth.
‘Why don’t you watch where you’re going?’ Mia demanded.
‘O, Daughters, a thousand pardons, miss. Please forgive me …’
The boy climbed to his feet, offered a hand, and helped Mia up. He brushed the white powder off her dress as best he could, mumbling apologies all the while. Then, leaning down to the fallen pastries, he stuffed them back into his basket. With an apologetic smile, he plucked one of the less dirty tarts off the pile and offered it to Mia with a bow.
‘Please accept this by way of apology, Mi Dona.’
Mia’s anger slowed to a simmer as her belly growled, and, with a pout, she took the pastry from the boy’s grubby hand.
‘Thank you, Mi Don.’
‘I’d best be off. The good father gets in a frightful mood if I’m late to almsgiving.’ He smiled again at Mia, doffed an imaginary hat. ‘Apologies again, miss.’
Mia gave a curtsey, and scowled a little less. ‘Aa bless and keep you.’
The boy hurried off into the crowd. Mia watched him go, anger slowly dissipating. She looked at the sweet tart in her hand, and smiled at her fortune. Free mornmeal!
She found an alley away from the press, lifted the tart and took a big bite. Her smile curdled at the edges, eyes growing wide. With a curse, she spat her mouthful into the muck, throwing the rest of the tart with it. The pastry was hard as wood, the filling utterly rancid. She grimaced, wiping her lips on her sleeve.
‘Four Daughters,’ she spat. ‘Why would—’
Mia blinked. Looked down at her dress, still faintly powdered with sugar. Remembering the boy’s hands patting her down, cursing herself a fool and realizing, at last, what his game had been.
Her brooch was missing.
The ironsong did eventually scare off the krakens.
Or so Tric insisted, at any rate. He’d spent four hours beating the xylophone as if it owed him coin, and Mia supposed he needed some kind of vindication. As the pursuers dropped off one by one, Mister Kindly suggested the ground was growing harder as the caravan galloped closer to the mountains. Mia was reasonably certain the beasts simply grew bored and pissed off to eat someone easier. Naev ventured no opinion at all, instead lying in a pool of coagulating blood and doing her best not to die.
Truthfully, Mia wasn’t certain she’d pull it off.
Tric took the reins at her insistence. In the merciful quiet after the boy abandoned his percussionist duties, Mia knelt beside the unconscious woman and wondered where to begin.
Naev’s guts had been minced by kraken hooks, and the reek of bowel and vomit hung in the air – Four Daughters only knew how Tric was handling it with that knife-keen nose of his. Knowing the smell of shit and death well enough, Mia simply tried to make the woman comfortable. There was nothing she could really do; sepsis would finish the job if blood loss didn’t. Knowing the end awaiting Naev, Mia realised it’d be a mercy to end her.
Peeling the cloth back from Naev’s ravaged belly, Mia looked for something to bind the wounds with, settling at last on the fabric about the woman’s face. And as she peeled the veil from Naev’s head, she felt Mister Kindly swell and sigh, drinking the surge of sickening terror that would’ve otherwise made her scream.
Even still, it was a close thing.
‘’Byss and blood …’ she breathed.
‘What?’ Tric glanced over his shoulder, almost falling off the driver’s seat. ‘Black Mother of Night … her face …’
Daughters, such a face …
To call her disfigured would be to call a knife to the heart ‘mildly inconvenient’. Naev’s flesh was stretched and twisted into a knot in the place her nose might have been. Her bottom lip sagged like a beaten stepchild, top lip snarled back from her teeth. Five deep runnels were carved into her flesh – as if her face were clay, and someone had grabbed a fistful and squeezed. And yet the hideousness was framed by beautiful curls of strawberry blonde.
‘What could have done that?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Love,’ the woman whispered, spit dribbling over mangled lips. ‘Only love.’
‘Naev …’ Mia began. ‘Your wounds …’
‘Bad.’
‘It’s a far cry from good.’
‘Get Naev to the Church. She has much to do before she meets her Blessed Lady.’
‘We’re two turns from the mountains,’ Tric said. ‘Maybe more. Even if we get there, you’re in no condition to climb.’
The woman slurped, coughed blood. Reaching to her neck, she snapped a leather cord, drew out a silver phial. She tried sitting up, groaned in agony. Mia pushed her back down.
‘You mustn’t—’
‘Get off her!’ Naev snarled. ‘Help her up. Drag her.’ She waved to the back of the wagon. ‘Out of this blood, where the wood is clean.’
Mia had no idea what the woman was about, but she obeyed, hauling Naev through the congealing puddle to the wagon’s rear. And there the woman pulled out the phial’s stopper with her teeth and upended the contents onto the unfinished boards.
More blood.
Bright red, as if from a fresh-cut wound. Mia frowned as Mister Kindly coiled up on her shoulder, peering through her curtain of hair. And as Naev dragged her fingers through the puddle, the cat who was shadows did his best to purr, sending a shiver down Mia’s spine.
‘… interesting …’
Naev was writing, Mia realised. As if the puddle were a tablet and her finger the brush. The letters were Ashkahi – she recognised them from her studies, but the ritual itself …
‘That’s blood sorcery,’ she breathed.
But that was impossible. The magik of the Ashkahi had been extinguished when the empire fell. Nobody had seen real bloodwerking in …
‘How do you know how to do that? Those arts have been dead for a hundred years.’
‘Not all the dead truly die,’ Naev rasped. ‘The Mother keeps … only what she needs.’
The woman rolled onto her back, clutching her butchered belly.
‘Ride for the mountains … the simplest of them all.’ Mia swore she could see tears in the woman’s eyes. ‘Do not end her, girl. Set mercy aside. If the Blessed Lady … takes her, so be it. But do not help Naev on her way. Does she hear?’
‘… I hear you.’
Naev clutched her hand. Squeezed. And then she slipped back into darkness.
Mia bound the wounds as best she could, wrist-deep in gore, fetching her cloak from Bastard’s saddlebag (he tried to bite her) and rolling it beneath Naev’s head. Joining Tric on the driver’s seat, she peered at the mountains ahead. A range of great black spurs stretched north and south, a few high enough to be tipped with snow. One looked almost like a scowling face, just as Naev described. Another long range might’ve been the broken wall she mentioned. And nestled beside a spur resembling a sad old man, Mia saw a peak that fitted the bill.
It was entirely average, as far as mighty spires of prehistoric granite went. Not quite high enough