It was the first time he’d ever called her sister. The first time he’d ever acknowledged they were familia. And even there, with death peering over her shoulder and breathing cold on her neck, Mia smiled. Blinking the burn from her eyes and feeling her love for the little bastard swelling with the lump in her throat. She hugged him, kissed his cheeks, heart melting as his arms slipped up around her neck and he hugged her back.
Turning, she drew a deep breath, took the blade from Sigursson’s hands.
“Eclipse?” she said.
Sigursson’s eyes grew a little wider as the daemon slipped from Jonnen’s shadow. The wolf prowled once about Mia’s legs, black as truedark, then vanished into the shadow at Mia’s feet. Dark enough for three.
“Just who the fuck are you?” he asked.
But Mia was closing her eyes. Breathing deep. Feeling the fear melt off her bones as her passenger devoured it whole. In the space of a heartbeat, she was no longer a frightened girl dancing on razors. She was a destroyer. Shadow-forged. The blood of the night flowing in her veins, and the splinter of a fallen god burning dark inside her chest.
Unbreakable.
“Eclipse, you move where I point you, aye?”
“… AS IT PLEASE YOU…”
She marched across to the edge of the pool as Sigursson turned to the assembly. His voice rang out over the throng.
“Affray is called! Hangman has challenged, Bloody Maid has answered! Fight to the fall, and may the Daughters have mercy on your souls!”
Mia looked down into the water, to the dark shadow of the leviathan, coiled in the depths below the wire grid. It was thirty feet long if it was an inch—a hunter of the deep, grown fat and baleful on the blood of the men and women Valdyr threw to it.
Mia’s opponent dragged off his boots and shirt. His torso rippled with muscle, every inch covered with tattoos—women and fish, mostly, though some appeared to be a combination of both. Not to be outdone, Mia stripped off her own shirt, tossed it carelessly to one side. There was some scattered applause as the audience realized she wore nothing underneath.
Eyes on my chest, bastards, not on my hands.
She pulled her boots off next, twisting the left heel as she did so, palming her punching dagger. Mia hopped up onto the cables, wrapping her bare toes around the wire for grip. The steel hummed under her feet, like the strings of some grand and terrible instrument, the first notes in a song of blood and ruin. The Dweymeri jumped up onto the cables, too, the impact of his landing running along the steel and shaking Mia where she stood. The man smiled, stomped the cable again to throw Mia off-balance, then raised himself up on one foot, arms spread, in a demonstration of perfect poise.
Mia made her way across the wires cautiously. Glancing down to the cool blue water six feet below, she saw that colossal shadow, circling, impatient. The brigands around them were baying and stomping, and she was in mind of her time in the arena. The silkling. The retchwyrm. The chaos of the Venatus Magni. The adoration of the mob, when their applause sang in her veins in time with her pulse, and fear … well, fear was something only her opponent had to worry about.
But those turns were behind her now. She didn’t fight for the mob anymore.
She fought for herself. And the few she loved.
“What is your name, sir?” she called out.
“Ironbender,” he replied.
Mia held out her wooden sword, dropped it into the water below them.
“Excuse me for a moment, Ironbender.”
She raised her punching dagger, gleaming between her knuckles.
“Eclipse?”
She pointed to the balcony above. And the wolf who was shadows surged and vanished, and Mia
Stepped
off the wire
and up into
the shadowwolf
now coalescing in the
dark at Valdyr’s feet, leaping up and straddling the big man’s lap and plunging her dagger into his throat. The King of Scoundrels gasped, knife-green eyes going wide. But by the time he’d raised his hand to fend her off, the dagger had already punched through his neck three more times,
chunk
chunk
chunk,
sluices of blood arcing off Mia’s blade and scything through the air as the crowd blinked in confusion at her disappearance and then realized where she was, sitting astride their sovereign, fist wrapped in his braids and hacking at his mangled throat,
chunk
chunk
chunk,
cries of terror and outrage as she worked, face twisted, teeth bared, red