“… if i do not return by the morrow, tell mother i love her…”
The girl snorted as the not-cat slipped beneath her door. She waited hours, reading by candlelight rather than open her shutters to the sun. If she was leaving this turn, she’d need do it at twelve bells, when the watchtower changed shifts. Easier to steal the stallion then. The knowledge she could have just bought some old nag raised its hand at the back of the lesson hall, and was shushed by the thought she shouldn’t be heading out into the wastes on anything but the finest horse this town had to offer.6
She felt a rippling chill, a sense of loss, and the cat who was shadows hopped up onto the bed beside her. Blinked with eyes that weren’t there. Tried to purr and failed.
“Well?”
“… he ate a sparing meal, watched the ones who insulted him between mouthfuls, and followed them home when they left…”
“Did he kill them?”
“… pissed in their water barrel…”
“Not too bloodthirsty, then. And afterward?”
“… climbed up on the stable roof. he has been watching your window ever since…”
A nod. “I thought he marked me when he first entered.”
“… a clever one…”
“Let’s see how clever.”
Mia packed her things, books bound in a small oilskin satchel on her back. She’d hoped she might slip out unnoticed, but now this Dweymeri boy watched her, it was no longer a question of if she’d deal with him. Only how.
She snuck out from her room, across the squeaky floorboards, making no squeak at all. Sliding up to an empty room opposite, she slipped two lockpicks from a thin wallet, setting to work and hearing a small click a few minutes later. Slipping from the window, flitting across the roof, she felt sunslight burning the wind-blown sky, adrenaline tingling her fingertips. It was good to be moving again. Tested again.
Dashing across the alley between the Imperial and the bakery next door, boots less than a whisper on the road. The not-cat prowled in front, watching with his not-eyes.
Just as she’d done outside Augustus’s window, Mia reached out and took hold of the shadows about her. Thread by thread, she drew the darkness to her with clever fingers, like a seamstress weaving a cloak—a cloak over which unwary eyes might lose their way.
A cloak of shadows.
Call it what you will, gentlefriends. Thaumaturgy. Arkemy. Werking. Magik. Like all power, it comes with a tithe. As Mia pulled her shadows about her, the light grew dimmer in her eyes. As ever, it became harder for her to see past her veil of darkness, just as she was harder to see inside it. The world beyond was blurred, muddied, shrouded in black—she had to walk slow, lest she trip or stumble. But wrapped inside her shadows, she crept on, on through the nevernight glare, just a watercolor impression on the canvas of the world.
Up to the stable’s flank, climbing the downspout by feel. Crawling onto the roof, she squinted in her gloom, spotted the Dweymeri in the chimney’s shadow, watching her bedroom window. Mia padded across the tiles, imagining she was back in Old Mercurio’s warehouse; dead leaves scattered across the floor, a three-turn thirst burning in her throat, four wild dogs asleep around a decanter of crystal-clear water.
Motivation had been the old man’s watchword, sure and true.
Closer now. Uncertain whether to speak or act, begin or end. Perhaps twenty paces away, she saw the boy tense, turn his head. And then she was rolling beneath the fistful of knives he hurled, three in quick succession, gleaming in the light of that cursed sun. If this were truedark she would’ve had him. If this were truedark—
Don’t look.
She snapped to her feet, stiletto drawn, her shadow writhing across the tiles toward him. The Dweymeri boy had drawn his scimitar, two more throwing knives poised in his other hand. Dark saltlocks of matted hair swayed over his eyes. The tattoos on his face were the ugliest Mia had ever seen, looking like they’d been scrawled by a blind man in the midst of a seizure. Yet the face beneath …
The pair stood watching each other, still as statues, moments ticking by like hours as the gale howled about them.
“You have very good ears, sir,” she finally said.
“You have better feet, Pale Daughter. I heard nothing.”
“Then how?”
The boy offered a dimpled smile. “You stink of cigarillo smoke. Cloves, I think.”
“That’s impossible. I’m downwind from you.”
The boy glanced at the shadows moving like snakes around his feet.
“Seems to be raining impossible in these parts.”
She stared at him. Hard and sharp and lean and quick. A rapier in a world of broadswords. Mercurio was better at reading folk than any person she’d known, and he’d taught her to sum others up in a blinking. Whoever this boy was, whatever his reasons for seeking the Church, he was no psychopath. Not one who killed for killing’s sake.
Interesting.
“You seek the Red Church,” she said.
“The fat man wouldn’t take my tithe.”
“Nor mine. We’re being tested, I think.”
“I thought the same.”
“It’s possible they’re no longer here. I was heading into the wastes to look.”
“If it’s death you seek, there are easier ways to find it.” The boy gestured beyond Last Hope’s walls. “Where would you even start?”
“I was planning on following my nose,” Mia smiled. “But something tells me I’d do better following yours.”
The boy stared long and hard. Hazel eyes roaming her body, cool and narrowed. The blade in her hand. The shadows at his feet. The whispering wastes behind him.
“My name is Tric,” he said, sheathing the scimitar at his back.
“… Tric? Are you certain?”
“Certain about my own name? Aye, that I am.”
“I mean no disrespect, sir,” Mia said. “But if we’re to travel the Whisperwastes together, we should at least be honest enough to use our own names. And your name can’t be Tric.”
“… Do you call me liar, girl?”
“I called you nothing, sir. And I’ll thank you not to call me ‘girl’ again, as if the word were kin to something you found on the bottom of your boot.”
“… You have a strange way of making friends, Pale Daughter.”
Mia sighed. Took her temper by the earlobe and pulled it to heel.
“I’ve read the Dweymeri cleave to ritualized naming rites. Your names follow a set pattern. Noun then verb. Dweymeri have names like ‘Spinesmasher.’ ‘Wolfeater.’ ‘Pigfiddler.’”
“… Pigfiddler?”
Mia blinked. “Pigfiddler was one of the most infamous Dweymeri pirates who ever lived. Surely you’ve heard of him?”
“I was never one for history. What was he infamous for?”
“Fiddling with pigs.7 He terrorized farmers from Stormwatch to Dawnspear for almost ten years. Had a three-hundred-iron bounty on him in the end. No hog was safe.”
“… What happened to him?”
“The Luminatii. Their swords did to his face what he did to the pigs.”
“Ah.”
“So. Your name cannot be Tric.”
The boy stared her up and down, expression clouded. But when he spoke, there was iron in his voice. Indignity. A well-nursed and lifelong anger.
“My name,” he said, “is Tric.”
The girl looked him over, dark eyes narrowed. A puzzle, this one. And sure and certain, our girl had ever the weakness for puzzles.
“Mia,” she finally said.
The boy walked slow and steady across the tiles, paying no attention to the black beneath him. Extending one hand. Calloused fingers, one silver ring—the long, serpentine forms of three seadrakes, intertwined—on his index finger. Mia looked the boy over, the scars and ugly facial tattoos, olive skin, lean and broad shouldered. She licked her lips, tasted sweat.