“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 saw 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.”