Jay Kristoff - Godsgrave

He’s fast …

Mia felt a brutish hand in her hair, dragging back her head as she gasped in pain.

“You forget your place, girl,” the big man said. “If ever again you speak in presence of your domina without being spoken to, I’ll set my blade to your tongue and feed it to my fucking dog. Do you hear me?”

Patience …

“Yes, Executus,” she whispered.

The man grunted, released his hold. Mia glanced up at Leona, saw the woman regarding her with a cool, imperious gaze. Whatever her opinion of Mia’s martial skills, it was clear her new domina had no issue with her man’s brutal methods.

After a moment’s tense silence, Dona Leona turned to the administratii, still waiting patiently in the corridor.

“Come, then, be about your work.”

The administratii shuffled into the cell, his novice beside him. The boy plonked the tall chair down beside Mia, opened the mahogany box he carried and proffered it to the administratii. Inside Mia saw a collection of iron needles. Powders in stoppered phials, small bottles of ink. Her shadow surged, fear swelling in her belly. She knew this was coming. It was all part of the game. But still …

“Sit,” the administratii said.

Mia dragged herself up from the floor, glanced at the buckles and straps on the chair’s armrests. They obviously intended to bind her for what came next. She knew if she spoke again, she’d only earn herself another blow. And so she fixed her stare on the small barred window, the blue sky beyond. And she remained standing.

The executus growled deep, raised his hand to strike.

“Do as you’re—”

“No,” Dona Leona said, watching Mia with curious eyes. “Let her stand.”

“All respect, Dona Leona,” said the administratii, “but this is no simple inkwerk. The process is arkemical. The pain immense. She is likely to swoon.”

Mia thought back to her scourging at Weaver Marielle’s hands and almost laughed at the word. That same laughter twinkled in the Dona Leona’s eyes.

“A hundred silver says she does nothing of the sort.”

The executus groaned softly. The administratii looked taken aback.

“I am not a gambling man, Mi Dona.”

“But you are a man who insists on telling me what I already know?” Leona’s tone turned razor-sharp. “I grew up in the finest gladiatii collegium in all the Itreyan Republic. I know how a damned slave brand works. Now proceed.”

The administratii almost succeeded in stifling his sigh. He turned to the box, set about unstopping phials, mixing components into a shallow glass bowl. The poisoncrafter in Mia watched with interest, noting the way the arkemical concoction came together, bubbling and hissing and spitting black. fn2

The administratii dipped his needle, raised it to Mia’s face. The novice stood behind her, held her head steady. The girl forced herself to be still, grit her teeth. Lining up the steel against Mia’s cheek, the administratii hefted a thin jeweler’s hammer. The girl held her breath. And without further foreplay, the administratii smacked the needle through Mia’s cheek and straight into the bone beyond.

Black fire. Burning agony. Mia’s eyes grew wide, pupils dilated, the pain lancing through her skull and stealing her breath away. Her knees buckled, black stars bursting in her eyes. The administratii stepped back, obviously expecting her to fall. But with her shadow swelling, chest heaving, the girl remained on her feet.

Mia looked at Leona. The dona was watching her with a growing smile.

“Well?” the woman asked the administratii. “Proceed!”

The man shrugged, and with no more pause for drama, began hammering the needle into Mia’s cheek, over and over again. Small series of three tiny blows, each like a thunderclap in her head.

tapTAPTAP

tapTAPTAP

Fingernails digging into her palms.

White spots swelling before her eyes.

The room rolling beneath her like a ship in a storm.

tapTAPTAP

tapTAPTAP

The anticipation was the worst of it. The moment between one sequence and the next. That tiny respite that seemed an eternity, waiting for the pain to begin again. Adonai’s scourging, Marielle’s weaving … nothing she’d ever felt in her life had come close, made all the worse by the bitter thought that in this moment, to the world outside this cell, her life was no longer her own.

tapTAPTAP

If not for Mister Kindly, she thought she might have broken.

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But at the end

after all the pain

all the praying

cheek bleeding

legs trembling

Mia still stood.

“A good thing,” Dona Leona declared, “that you are not a betting man, sir.”

The administratii packed up his gear without a word. Aiming a poison glance at Mia, he gave a curt bow to the dona, and with his novice trailing behind, swept from the cell with a rustle of black cloth. Leona turned to her executus with a triumphant smile.

“You ask for clay to work with, Executus? I give you steel.”

The big man looked at Mia with narrowed eyes. “Steel breaks before it bends.”

“Four Daughters, you’re never happy are you?” Leona sighed. “Come. We should let her rest. She will need her strength in turns to come.”

The dona cupped Mia’s face, wiping her wounded cheek with a gentle thumb. Sapphire-blue eyes burning into her own.

“We will bleed the sands red, you and I,” she said. “Sanguii e Gloria.”

Gifting her a final smile, Leona swept from the room in a flurry of blue silk. The executus limped after her, locked the door behind him. The clank of his iron leg faded with his dona down the corridor.

Mia sank to her knees. Her cheek was swollen, throbbing with pain. Her palms were bleeding from the press of her nails. She ran her fingertips over her skin, feeling the raised ridges of the two interlocking circles branded just below her right eye. But beneath the remembered agony, her mind was racing, the dona’s words tumbling inside her skull with the echoes of the hammer blows.

They’re taking me to —

“… crow’s nest …?”

She glanced up at the not-cat, once more cleaning his not-paw with his nottongue. Licking at parched lips, she tried to find her voice.

“It was the home of the Familia Corvere. My familia. Consul Scaeva gave it to Justicus Remus as reward for ending my father’s rebellion against the Senate.”

“… and now leona owns it …?”

Mia shrugged mutely. The not-cat tilted his head.

“… are you well …?”

Her father, holding her hand as they walked in fields of tall sunsbell flowers. Her mother standing atop battlements of ochre stone, cool wind playing in her long dark hair. Mia had grown up in Godsgrave—her father’s role as justicus meant he could never stay away from the City of Bridges and Bones for long. But every few summersdeeps, they’d traveled to Crow’s Nest for a week or two, just to be with one another. Those had been the happiest turns of Mia’s life. Away from Godsgrave’s crush, its poison politics. Her parents seemed happier there. Closer somehow. Her brother Jonnen had been born there. She remembered visits from General Antonius, the would-be king who’d hanged beside her father. He and her parents would stay up late into the night, drinking and laughing and O, so alive.

All of them gone now.

“… i should go. find a ship bound for whitekeep. tell the viper to seek you in crow’s nest …”

“… Aye,” she nodded.

“… will you be all right while i am gone …?”

The thought should have terrified her. She knew if Mister Kindly weren’t there, it would have. For seven years, ever since her father died, the shadowcat had been beside her. She knew he had to leave, that she couldn’t do this all by herself. But the thought of being alone, of living with the fear he usually drank to nothing …