Nevernight Read online

  She rolled away, crumpled sheets around her. Touching her face, she found wetness, warmth. Smeared on her hands and lips.

  Blood.

  “Hear me, Niah,” she whispered. “Hear me, Mother. This flesh your feast. This blood your wine. This life, this end, my gift to you. Hold him close.”

  The cat who was shadows watched from its perch on the bedhead. Watched her the way only the eyeless can. It said not a word.

  It didn’t need to.

  Muted sunslight on her skin. Raven hair, damp with sweat and hanging in her eyes. She pulled up leather britches, tossed a mortar-gray shirt over her head, tugging on wolfskin boots. Sore. Stained. But glad in it, somehow. Somewhere near content.

  “The room is paid up for the nevernight,” she’d said. “If you want it.”

  The sweetboy had watched from the other side of the bed, head on his elbow.

  “And my coin?”

  She motioned to a purse beside the looking glass.

  “You’re younger than my usuals,” he’d said. “I don’t get many firsts.”

  She looked at herself in the mirror then—pale skin and dark eyes. Younger than her years. And though evidence to the contrary lay drying on her skin, for a moment, she still found it hard to think of herself as anything more than a girl. Something weak and shivering, something sixteen years in this city had never managed to temper.

  She’d pushed her shirt back into her britches. Checked the harlequin mask in her cloak. The stiletto at her belt. Gleaming and sharp.

  The hangman would be leaving the taverna soon.

  “I have to go,” she’d said.

  “May I ask you something, Mi Dona?”

  “… Ask then.”

  “Why me? Why now?”

  “Why not?”

  “That’s no kind of answer.”

  “You think I should have saved myself, is that it? That I’m some gift to be given? Now forever spoiled?”

  The boy said nothing, watching her with those fathom-deep eyes. Pretty as a picture. The girl drew a cigarillo from a silver case. Lit it on one of the candles. Breathing deep.

  “I just wanted to know what it was like,” she finally said. “In case I die.”

  She shrugged, exhaled gray.

  “Now I know.”

  And into the shadows, she walked.

  Muted sunslight on her skin. Mortar-gray cloak flowing down her shoulders, rendering her a shadow in the sullen light. She stood beneath a marble arch in the Beggar King’s Piazza, the third sun hanging faceless in the sky. Memories of the hangman’s end drying in the bloodstains on her hands. Memories of the sweetboy’s lips drying with the stains on her britches. Sore. Sighing. But still glad in it, somehow. Still somewhere near content.

  “Didn’t die, I see.”

  Old Mercurio watched her from the other side of the arch, tricorn pulled low, cigarillo at his lips. He seemed smaller somehow. Thinner. Older.

  “Not for lack of trying,” the girl replied.

  She looked at him then—stained hands and fading eyes. Old beyond his years. And though evidence to the contrary was crusting on her skin, for a moment, she found it hard to think of herself as anything more than a girl. Something weak and shivering, something six years in his tutelage had never managed to temper.

  “I won’t see you for a long time, will I?” she asked. “I might never see you again.”

  “You knew this,” he said. “You chose this.”

  “I’m not sure there was ever a choice,” she said.

  She opened her fist, a sheepskin purse in her palm. The old man took the offering, counting the contents with one ink-stained finger. Clinking. Bloodstained. Twenty-seven teeth.

  “Seems the hangman lost a few before I got to him,” she explained.

  “They’ll understand.” Mercurio tossed the teeth back to the girl. “Be at the seventeenth pier by six bells. A Dweymeri brigantine called Trelene’s Beau. She’s a freeship, not flying under Itreyan colors. She’ll bear you hence.”

  “Nowhere you can follow.”

  “I’ve trained you well. This is for you alone. Cross the Red Church threshold before the first turn of Septimus, or you’ll never cross it at all.”

  “… I understand.”

  Affection gleamed in rheumy eyes. “You’re the greatest pupil I’ve ever sent into the Mother’s service. You’ll spread your wings in that place and fly. And you will see me again.”

  She drew the stiletto from her belt. Proffered it on her forearm, head bowed. The blade was crafted of gravebone, gleaming white and hard as steel, its hilt carved like a crow in flight. Red amber eyes gleamed in the scarlet sunslight.

  “Keep it.” The old man sniffed. “It’s yours again. You earned it. At last.”

  She looked the knife over, this way and that.

  “Should I give it a name?”

  “You could, I suppose. But what’s the point?”

  “It’s this bit.” She touched the blade’s tip. “The part you stick them with.”

  “O, bravo. Mind you don’t cut yourself on a wit that sharp.”

  “All great blades have names. It’s just how it’s done.”

  “Bollocks.” Mercurio took back the dagger, held it up between them. “Naming your blade is the sort of faff reserved for heroes, girl. Men who have songs sung about them, histories spun for them, brats named after them. It’s the shadow road for you and me. And you dance it right, no one will ever know your name, let alone the pig-sticker in your belt.

  “You’ll be a rumor. A whisper. The thought that wakes the bastards of this world sweating in the nevernight. The last thing you will ever be in this world, girl, is someone’s hero.”

  Mercurio handed back the blade.

  “But you will be a girl heroes fear.”

  She smiled. Suddenly and terribly sad. She hovered a moment. Leaned in close. Gifted sandpaper cheeks with a gentle kiss.

  “I’ll miss you,” she said.

  And into the shadows, she walked.

  CHAPTER 2

  MUSIC

  The sky was crying.

  Or so it had seemed to her. The little girl knew the water tumbling from the charcoal-colored smudge above was called rain—she’d been barely ten years old, but she was old enough to know that. Yet she’d still fancied tears falling from that gray sugar-floss face. So cold compared to her own. No salt or sting inside them. But yes, the sky was certainly crying.

  What else could it have done at a moment like this?

  She’d stood on the Spine above the forum, gleaming gravebone at her feet, cold wind in her hair. People were gathered in the piazza below, all open mouths and closed fists. They’d seethed against the scaffold in the forum’s heart, and the girl wondered if they pushed it over, would the prisoners standing atop it be allowed to go home again?

  O, wouldn’t that be wonderful?

  She’d never seen so many people. Men and women of different shapes and sizes, children not much older than she. They wore ugly clothes and their howls had made her frightened, and she’d reached up and took her mother’s hand, squeezing tight.

  Her mother didn’t seem to notice. Her eyes had been fixed on the scaffold, just like the rest. But Mother didn’t spit at the men standing before the nooses, didn’t throw rotten food or hiss “traitor” through clenched teeth. The Dona Corvere had simply stood, black gown sodden with the sky’s tears, like a statue above a tomb not yet filled.

  Not yet. But soon.

  The girl had wanted to ask why her mother didn’t weep. She didn’t know what “traitor” meant, and wanted to ask that, too. And yet, somehow she knew this was a place where words had no place. And so she’d stood in silence.

  Watching instead.

  Six men stood on the scaffold below. One in a hangman’s hood, black as truedark. Another in a priest’s gown, white as a dove’s feathers. The four others wore ropes at their wrists and rebellion in their eyes. But as the hooded man had slipped a noose around each neck, the girl s
aw the defiance draining from their cheeks along with the blood. In years to follow, she’d be told time and again how brave her father was. But looking down on him then, at the end of the row of four, she knew he was afraid.

  Only a child of ten, and already she knew the color of fear.

  The priest had stepped forward, beating his staff on the boards. He had a beard like a hedgerow and shoulders like an ox, looking more like a brigand who’d murdered a holy man and stolen his clothes than a holy man himself. The three suns hanging on a chain about his throat tried to gleam, but the clouds in the crying sky told them no.

  His voice was thick as toffee, sweet and dark. But it spoke of crimes against the Itreyan Republic. Of treachery and treason. The holy brigand called upon the Light to bear witness (she wondered if It had a choice), naming each man in time.

  “Senator Claudius Valente.”

  “Senator Marconius Albari.”

  “General Gaius Maxinius Antonius.”

  “Justicus Darius Corvere.”

  Her father’s name, like the last note in the saddest song she’d ever heard. Tears welled in her eyes, blurring the world shapeless. How small and pale he’d looked down there in that howling sea. How alone. She remembered him as he’d been, not so long ago; tall and proud and O, so very strong. His gravebone armor white as wintersdeep, his cloak spilling like crimson rivers over his shoulders. His eyes, blue and bright, creased at the corners when he smiled.

  Armor and cloak were gone now, replaced by rags of dirty hessian and bruises like fat, purpling berries all over his face. His right eye was swollen shut, his other fixed at his feet. She’d wanted him to look at her so badly. She wanted him to come home.

  “Traitor!” the mob called. “Make him dance!”

  The girl didn’t know what they’d meant. She could hear no music.1

  The holy brigand had looked to the battlements, to the marrowborn and politicos gathered above. The entire Senate seemed to have turned out for the show, near a hundred men gathered in their purple-trimmed robes, staring down at the scaffold with pitiless eyes.

  To the Senate’s right stood a cluster of men in white armor. Blood-red cloaks. Swords wreathed in rippling flame unsheathed in their hands. Luminatii, they were called, the girl knew that well. They’d been her father’s brothers in arms before the traitoring—such was, she’d presumed, what traitors did.

  It’d all been so noisy.

  In the midst of the senators stood a beautiful dark-haired man, with eyes of piercing black. He wore fine robes dyed with deepest purple—consul’s garb. And the girl who knew O, so little knew at least here was a man of station. Far above priests or soldiers or the mob bellowing for dancing when there was no tune. If he were to speak it, the crowd would let her father go. If he were to speak it, the Spine would shatter and the Ribs shiver into dust, and Aa, the God of Light himself, would close his three eyes and bring blessed dark to this awful parade.

  The consul had stepped forward. The mob below fell silent. And as the beautiful man spoke, the girl squeezed her mother’s hand with the kind of hope only children know.

  “Here in the city of Godsgrave, in the Light of Aa the Everseeing and by unanimous word of the Itreyan Senate, I, Consul Julius Scaeva, proclaim these accused guilty of insurrection against our glorious Republic. There can be but one sentence for those who betray the citizenry of Itreya. One sentence for those who would once more shackle this great nation beneath the yoke of kings.”

  Her breath had stilled.

  Heart fluttered.

  “… Death.”

  A roar. Washing over the girl like the rain. And she’d looked wide-eyed from the beautiful consul to the holy brigand to her mother—dearest Mother, make them stop—but Mother’s eyes were affixed on the man below. Only the tremor in her bottom lip betraying her agony. And the little girl could stand no more, and the scream roared up inside her and spilled over her lips

  nonono

  and the shadows all across the forum shivered at her fury. The black at every man’s feet, every maid and every child, the darkness cast by the light of the hidden suns, pale and thin though it was—make no mistake, O, gentlefriend. Those shadows trembled.

  But not one person noticed. Not one person cared.2

  The Dona Corvere’s eyes didn’t leave her husband as she took hold of the little girl, hugged her close. One arm across her breast. One hand at her neck. So tight the girl couldn’t move. Couldn’t turn. Couldn’t breathe.

  You picture her now; a mother with her daughter’s face pressed to her skirts. The she-wolf with hackles raised, shielding her cub from the murder unfolding below. You’d be forgiven for imagining it so. Forgiven and mistaken. Because the dona held her daughter pinned looking outward. Outward so she could taste it all. Every morsel of this bitter meal. Every crumb.

  The girl had watched as the hangman tested each noose, one by one by one. He’d limped to a lever at the scaffold’s edge and lifted his hood to spit. The girl glimpsed his face—yellow teeth gray stubble harelip gone. Something inside her screamed Don’t look, don’t look, and she’d closed her eyes. And her mother’s grip had tightened, her whisper sharp as razors.

  “Never flinch,” she breathed. “Never fear.”

  The girl felt the words in her chest. In the deepest, darkest place, where the hope children breathe and adults mourn withered and fell away, floating like ashes on the wind.

  And she’d opened her eyes.

  He’d looked up then. Her father. Just a glance through the rain. She’d often wonder what he was thinking at that moment, in nevernights to come. But there were no words to cross that hissing veil. Only tears. Only the crying sky. And the hangman pulled his lever, and the floor fell away. And to her horror, she finally understood. Finally heard it.

  Music.

  The dirge of the jeering crowd. The whip-crack of taut rope. The guh-guh-guh of throttled men cut through with the applause of the holy brigand and the beautiful consul and the world gone wrong and rotten. And to the swell of that horrid tune, legs kicking, face purpling, her father had begun dancing.

  Daddy …

  “Never flinch.” A cold whisper in her ear. “Never fear. And never, ever forget.”

  The girl nodded slow.

  Exhaled the hope inside.

  And she’d watched her father die.

  She stood on the deck of Trelene’s Beau, watching the city of Godsgrave growing smaller and smaller still. The capital’s bridges and cathedrals faded until only the Ribs remained; sixteen bone arches jutting hundreds of feet into the air. But as she watched, minutes melting into hours, even those titanic spires sank below the horizon’s lip and vanished in the haze.3

  Her hands were pressed to salt-bleached railing, dry blood crusted under her nails. A gravebone stiletto at her belt, a hangman’s teeth in her purse. Dark eyes reflecting the moody red sun overhead, the echo of its smaller, bluer sibling still rippling in western skies.

  The cat who was shadows was there with her. Puddled in the dark at her feet while it wasn’t needed. Cooler there, you see. A clever fellow might’ve noticed the girl’s shadow was a touch darker than others. A clever fellow might’ve noticed it was dark enough for two.

  Fortunately, clever fellows were in short supply aboard the Beau.

  She wasn’t a pretty thing. O, the tales you’ve heard about the assassin who destroyed the Itreyan Republic no doubt described her beauty as otherworldly; all milk-white skin and slender curves and bow-shaped lips. And she was possessed of these qualities, true, but the composition seemed … a little off. “Milk-white” is just pretty talk for “pasty,” after all. “Slender” is a poet’s way of saying “starved.”

  Her skin was pale and her cheeks hollow, lending her a hungry, wasted look. Crow-black hair reached to her ribs, save for a self-inflicted and crooked fringe. Her lips and the flesh beneath her eyes seemed perpetually bruised, and her nose had been broken at least once.

  If her face were a puzzle, most would put it
back in the box, unfinished.

  Moreover, she was short. Stick-thin. Barely enough arse for her britches to cling to. Not a beauty that lovers would die for, armies would march for, heroes might slay a god or daemon for. All in contrast to what you’ve been told by your poets, I’m sure. But she wasn’t without her charm, gentlefriends. And all your poets are full of shit.

  Trelene’s Beau was a two-mast brigantine crewed by mariners from the isles of Dweym, their throats adorned with draketooth necklaces in homage to their goddess, Trelene.4 Conquered by the Itreyan Republic a century previous, the Dweymeri were dark of skin, most standing head and shoulders above the average Itreyan. Legend had it they were descended from daughters of giants who lay with silver-tongued men, but the logistics of the legend fail under any real scrutiny.5 Simply said, as a people, they were big as bulls and hard as coffin nails, and tendencies to adorn their faces with leviathan-ink tattoos didn’t help with first impressions.

  Fearsome appearances aside, Dweymeri treat their passengers less as guests and more as sacred charges. And so, despite the presence of a sixteen-year-old girl aboard—traveling alone and armed with only a sliver of sharpened gravebone—making trouble for her couldn’t have been further from most of the sailors’ minds. Sadly, there were several recruits aboard the Beau not born of Dweym. And to one among them, this lonely girl seemed worthy of sport.

  It’s truth to say in all save solitude—and in some sad cases, even then—you can always count on the company of fools.

  He was a rakish sort. A smooth-chested Itreyan buck with a smile handsome enough to earn a few bedpost notches, his felt cap adorned with a peacock’s quill. It’d be seven weeks before the Beau set ashore in Ashkah, and for some, seven weeks is a long wait with only a hand for company. And so he leaned against the railing beside her and offered a feather-down smile.

  “You’re a pretty thing,” he said.6

  She glanced long enough to measure, then turned those coal-black eyes back to the sea.

  “I’ve no business with you, sir.”

  “O, come now, don’t be like that, pretty. I’m only being friendly.”