Jay Kristoff - Darkdawn

‘WHAT HAPPENED TO OSRIK, BY THE BY?’

‘Adonai killed him,’ Mia replied. ‘Drowned him in the blood pool.’

‘DID HE SCREAM, TOO?’

Mia pictured Ashlinn’s brother as he disappeared beneath that flood of red the turn the Luminatii invaded the Mountain. Eyes wide with terror. Mouth filling with crimson.

‘He tried to,’ she finally said.

Tric nodded.

‘You must think me a heartless cunt,’ she sighed.

‘YOU’D ONLY CONSIDER IT A COMPLIMENT.’

Mia looked up at that, thinking him angry. But she found his lips curled in a thin, pale smile, the shadow of a dimple creasing his cheek. For a moment it reminded her so much of what he’d been. So much of what they’d had together. She looked into his bloodless face and ink-black eyes and saw the beautiful, broken boy he’d been beneath, and her heart was like lead in her chest.

‘DO YOU LOVE HER?’ he asked.

Mia looked to Ashlinn again. Remembering the feel of her, the smell of her, the taste of her. The face she showed the world, vicious and hard, the tenderness she showed only to Mia, alone in her arms. Melting in her mouth. Poetry on her tongue. Each a dark reflection of the other, both of them driven by vengeance to be and do and want things most wouldn’t dare dream.

Wonderful things.

Awful things.

‘It’s …’

‘… COMPLICATED?’

She nodded slow. ‘But life always is, neh?’

A mirthless chuckle slipped over his lips. ‘TRY DYING.’

‘I’d rather not, if I can help it.’

‘DEATH IS THE PROMISE WE ALL MUST KEEP. SOONER OR LATER.’

‘I’ll take later, if it please you.’

He met her eyes then. Black to black.

‘IT WOULD.’

The clanging of heavy bells cut their conversation off at the knees, and both Tric and Mia looked to the Maid ’s decks above. She heard muffled shouts, running boots upon the timbers, notes of vague alarm. Ashlinn woke from her slumber with a jolt, sitting up and dragging her forearm across her face. ‘Wassat?’

Mia was standing now, narrowed eyes on the boards above their heads.

‘Doesn’t sound good, whatever it is.’

A second burst of bells. A rolling string of faint and shockingly imaginative curses. Mia stepped lightly over to the porthole and opened the wooden shutter, letting in a blinding shear of truelight. Jonnen lifted his head from his hammock, squinted around the cabin with bleary eyes. Mister Kindly cursed from his spot atop the door.

Mia blinked hard in the painful glare, joined by Ashlinn at the porthole once their eyes adjusted. Over the rolling waves beyond the glass, Mia could see sails on the distant horizon, stitched with golden thread.

‘That’s an Itreyan warship …’ Ashlinn muttered.

Mia glanced upwards. ‘Our hosts don’t seem too excited about seeing it.’

‘… ON THE CONTRARY, THEY SOUND VERY EXCITED TO ME …’

‘… o, bravo, been practising our banter, have we … ?’

‘… SOME OF US HAVE NO NEED OF PRACTICE, MOGGY. WE ARE SERVED BY WIT INSTEAD …’

Ashlinn dunked her face in their barrel of washwater to clear away the sleep, tied her hair back in a loose braid.

‘I’ll head topside for a chat.’

‘You’d best go with her, Brother Tric,’ Mia said. ‘I’ll stay here with Jonnen.’

The deadboy stood slowly. Looking at Ashlinn with bottomless eyes as he sheathed his gravebone blades beneath his robes and drew his hood up over his face.

‘AFTER YOU, SISTER.’

Ash dragged on the boots she’d been wearing since infiltrating the Godsgrave Arena, strapped her shortsword to her leg. Hauling her sorority habit over her head and pulling on her coif, she headed for the door.

‘Be careful, neh?’ Mia warned.

Ash smiled lopsided, leaned over, and kissed Mia’s lips.

‘You know what they say. What doesn’t kill me had better fucking run.’

The Vaanian girl slipped out the cabin door in a flurry of white robes.

Mia avoided Tric’s eyes as he followed.

‘Well,’ Cloud Corleone sighed. ‘As my dear old tutor Dona Elyse said the year I turned sixteen, “Fuck me very gently, then fuck me very hard.”’

Kael Three Eyes leaned out from the Crow’s Nest. ‘They’re signalling, Cap’n!’

‘Aye, I can see that!’ he called, waving his spyglass. ‘Thank you!’

‘Arse-grubbing shit queens are gaining on us, too,’ BigJon grunted from the railing beside him.

The captain waved his spyglass in BigJon’s face. ‘This thing works, you know.’

‘Captain?’ came a voice.

Cloud glanced over his shoulder, saw Her Not-So-Holiness on the deck behind him, and her six-foot attack dog looming behind her. The truelight air felt a little colder, and an involuntary shiver tickled his skin.

‘Best get back down below, Sister,’ he said. ‘Safer there.’

‘Meaning it’s not safe up here?’

‘I wouldn’t—’

The sister reached out and snatched Cloud’s spyglass from his hand, pressed it to her eye and turned to the horizon.

‘That’s not regular Itreyan navy,’ she said. ‘It’s a Luminatii ship.’

‘Well spotted, Sister.’

‘And it looks like they’re armed with arkemical cannons.’

‘Again, aye, my spyglass works, thank you.’

The sister lowered the glass, met his eye. ‘What do they want?’

Cloud pointed to the red flare the ship had sent sizzling into the sky.

‘They want us to stop.’

‘WHY?’ the big bodyguard asked.

The good captain blinked. ‘… Look, how are you doing that with your voice?’

The sister handed back his glass. ‘Do the Luminatii usually stop random ships in the middle of the ocean for no apparent reason?’

‘Well.’ Cloud scuffed the deck with his bootheel. ‘Not usually, no.’

The sister and her bodyguard exchanged uneasy glances.

BigJon whispered from the side of his mouth, ‘Antolini tipped them off, maybe?’

‘He wouldn’t do that to me, would he?’ Cloud muttered.

‘You ploughed his wife, Cap’n.’

‘Only because she asked me nicely.’

‘That kidfiddler Flavius promised to kill you if he saw you again,’ the littleman mused, sucking on the stem of his drakebone pipe. ‘Maybe he got creative?’

‘So I owe him a little coin. That’s no reason to sing about me to the Luminatii.’

‘You owe him a little fortune . And you ploughed his wife, too.’

Cloud Corleone raised an eyebrow. ‘Do you not have things to do?’

The littleman looked around the hive of activity that were the main and foredecks, the masts above. He shrugged and showed his silvered grin.

‘Not particularly.’

‘Still gaining, Cap’n!’ Kael called above.

Cloud held his spyglass aloft. ‘Four Daughters, this thing fucking works!’

‘Captain,’ the sister began. ‘I’m afraid I have to insist—’

‘I’m sorry, Sister,’ the privateer sighed. ‘But we’re not stopping.’

‘… We aren’t?’

‘That’s a Luminatii warship, Cap’n,’ BigJon pointed out. ‘Not sure the Maid has it in her to outrun it.’

‘O, ye of little faith,’ Cloud said. ‘Give the order.’

‘Aye, aye,’ the littleman sighed.

BigJon turned from the rails, roared at the crew. ‘Right, you jizz-gargling fuckbuckets! We’re doing a runner! Hoist every inch of sail we’ve got! If you own a shitrag or a spunk-stained kerchief, I want it lashed to a mast somewhere, go, go !’

‘Captain …’ the sister began.

‘Rest easy, Sister,’ Cloud smiled. ‘I know my oceans, and I know my ship. We’re sitting in the swift stream, and the nevernight winds are about to start kissing our sails the way I kissed Don Antolini’s wife.’