Jay Kristoff - Darkdawn

‘You still wish me dead?’ The imperator raised one dark eyebrow. ‘What in the Everseeing’s name for?’

‘Is this a jest?’ she scoffed. ‘You killed my father !’

Scaeva looked at her with pity. ‘My love, Darius Corvere was—’

‘He raised me!’ she snapped. ‘I may not have been daughter of his blood, but he loved me all the same! And you murdered him!’

‘Of course I did.’ Scaeva frowned. ‘He tried to destroy the Republic.’

‘You hypocritical shitstain, what the ’byss did you just do in the forum?’

‘I succeeded at destroying the Republic.’

Scaeva looked her in the eye with genuine amusement.

‘Mia, if Darius Corvere’s rebellion had triumphed, his beloved General Antonius would now be king of Itreya. The Senate House would be a ruin and the constitution in ashes. And I don’t blame the man for trying. Darius gave his best. The only difference between he and I is that his best wasn’t good enough to win the game.’

Mia hauled herself to her feet, fingernails cutting into her palms. On the wall, her shadow seethed and flared, reaching towards Scaeva’s, hands twisting to claws.

‘This isn’t a game, bastard.’

‘Of course it is,’ Scaeva scowled, glancing at the chessboard. ‘And the rules are simple: win the crown or lose your head. Darius understood the price of failure full well, and still he chose to play. So please, before you speak again of how much he loved you, consider he was willing to risk your life for the sake of his lover’s throne.’

‘He was a good man,’ she said. ‘He did what he thought was right.’

‘As do I. As do most men, all things considered. But where Darius was set to take Antonius’s throne by marching an army on his own capital, I took it with simple words …’ He gave a small shrug. ‘… Well, perhaps a murder or three. But you cannot seriously consider me a tyrant and Darius Corvere a paragon when he was prepared to slaughter thousands and I killed only a handful. I raised you better than that.’

Mia’s breath was trembling in her chest.

‘You never raised me! You ordered me drowned in a fucking canal!’

‘And witness what you became.’ Scaeva breathed the words like a spell, looking her over with a kind of wonder. ‘When last we met, you were a snot-nosed marrowborn whelp. You had servants and pretty dresses and all you ever wanted handed to you on silver platters. Have you considered for a moment what your life would have been without me?’

Scaeva picked up the black king, moved it across the board, and knocked the white king on its side.

‘Think on it a moment, Mia,’ he said. ‘Pretend that Antonius claimed his throne. That Darius stood at his right hand. And watered with the blood of a thousand innocents, all their dreams flowered to reality instead of turning to ashes on the wind.’

Scaeva picked up a black pawn, held it out upon his palm.

‘What would have become of you?’

The imperator let the question hang unanswered a moment. A maestro before the crescendo.

‘You’d have been married off to some marrowborn fool for the sake of political alliance,’ he finally said. ‘Squeezing out pups, tending the home fires, and feeling the fire inside your own breast slowly die. Naught but a cow in a silken dress.’ He held the pawn up between his fingers, turned it this way and that. ‘Because of me, you are solid steel. A blade sharp enough to cut the sunslight in six. And still you find it within yourself to hate me.’

Scaeva gave a soft, bitter chuckle as he looked her in the eye.

‘All you are? All you have become? I gave you. Mine is the seed that planted you. Mine are the hands that forged you. Mine is the blood that flows, cold as ice and black as pitch, in those veins of yours.’

He leaned back on the divan, black eyes burning into her own.

‘In every possible sense, you are my daughter.’

Julius Scaeva extended his hand, gold glinting upon his fingers. Upon the wall, his shadow did the same.

‘Join me.’

Mia’s laughter bubbled in her throat, threatening to choke her.

‘Are you fucking mad?’

‘Some might say,’ Scaeva replied. ‘But what possible reason do you have left to want me dead? I killed a man who claimed to be your father. But he was a liar, Mia. A would-be usurper. A man perfectly willing to risk his familia for the sake of his own failed ambition. I killed your mother, aye. Another deceiver. Willing to share my bed and cut my throat before the sweat had even cooled. Alinne Corvere knew the stakes she wagered supporting … nay, encouraging Darius’s gambit. Her life. Her son’s. And yours besides. And she weighed them all lighter than a throne.’

The shadowviper slithered across the ground towards Mia, licking the air. Scaeva spun the gravebone stiletto upon the table, his eyes boring into hers.

‘I have never lied to you, daughter,’ he said. ‘Not once, throughout it all. When I ordered you drowned, you were worthless to me. Jonnen was young enough to claim as my own. You were too old. But now you’ve proved yourself my daughter true. Possessed of the same will as I: not only to survive, but to prosper . To carve your name with bloody fingernails into this earth. Darius sought to become a kingmaker? You can truly be one. The blade in my right hand. Whatever you desire will be yours. Wealth. Power. Pleasure. I can do away with those gold-grubbing whores in the Red Church and have you at my side instead. My daughter. My blood . As dark and beautiful and deadly as the night. And together, we can sculpt a dynasty that will live for a thousand years.’

On the wall, his shadow reached out farther towards her own.

‘You and your brother are my legacy to this world,’ he said. ‘When I am gone, all this can be yours. Our name will be eternal. Immortal. So aye. I ask you to join me.’

Scaeva’s words rang in the hollow spaces in her head, heavy with truth. Her shadow hung like a crooked portrait upon the wall. But though Mia herself remained perfectly still, slowly,

ever so slowly,

it raised one dark hand towards his.

All her life, she’d thought of her parents as flawless. Godlike. Her mother, sharp and wise and beautiful as the finest rapier of Liisian steel. Her father, brave and noble and bright as the suns. Even as she’d learned more about who they were from Sidonius in the cells beneath Crow’s Nest, it never seemed to dim their reflection in her mind’s eye. It hurt too much to admit they might be imperfect. Selfish. Driven by greed or lust or pride and willing to risk everything for the sake of it. And so she kept them unstained. Untarnished. Locked in a box forever inside her head.

Father is another name for God in a child’s eyes.

And Mother is the very earth beneath her feet.

But now, Mia remembered that turn in the forum – the turn Darius Corvere was hanged. A girl of ten, standing with her mother above the mob, looking down on that horrid scaffold, the line of nooses swinging in the wintersdeep wind. She could still feel the rain upon her face and Alinne’s arm across her breast, another hand at her neck, holding her pinned so she must look outward as they tied the noose around the Kingmaker’s neck. The words Alinne Corvere whispered ringing in Mia’s ears now as clear as the turn she’d first uttered them.

‘Never flinch. Never fear. And never, ever forget.’

Alinne must have known what she was making. Knew the seeds of hatred she was planting in her daughter. The vengeance that must grow from it. The blood that must flow. And all over the death of a man who – though he may well have loved her – wasn’t Mia’s father at all. And if she must be furious – and O, Goddess, she was – at Scaeva’s claim that he’d made her all she was, how could she be less angry at the woman who’d stood behind her there on that windblown parapet? Forcing her to watch? Speaking the words that had shaped her, ruled her, ruined her?