Drusilla felt the robes torn from her shoulders. The press of the statue’s cold stone against her bare skin. Terror piercing her heart. She looked over her shoulder, saw pity in Mercurio’s gaze. The deadboy’s black stare. The poisoned knife she’d thrown, rising up from the floor in the grip of cold, black ribbons.
“No…,” the old woman gasped, pulling against her bonds. “No! I have a familia, I have a—”
“This is for Bryn and Wavewaker,” Mia said.
Drusilla screamed as she felt the knife cut into her back. Thirteen letters, gouged with poisoned steel, deep into her flesh. Blood spilling down her skin, hot and thick. Agony seared between her shoulder blades.
“Mercurio!” she cried. “Help me!”
“This is for Naev and Butcher and Eclipse.”
Drusilla wailed again, long and shrill, her throat cracking as she bucked against the stone. She could feel the toxin on her blade at work, worming its way toward her withered heart. But above it, she could still feel the white-hot pain of the knife carving the names of the dead into her back.
“This is for Alinne and Darius Corvere.”
Warm wetness. Razored agony. Deep as years. But it was receding quickly now. A thudding ebb, slowing along with her pulse. The Lady of Blades sagged in her irons, her legs too weak to hold her any longer. The poison dragging her toward blessed blackness. She tried to think of her daughter then. Her son. Tried to remember the sound of her grandchildren’s laughter as they played in the sunslight. Eyes rolling up in her head as sleep beckoned with open arms.
“Stay with me, Drusilla,” came a voice. “I saved the worst for last.”
A lance of burning pain, right at the base of her spine. Dragging her back up into the hateful light for one last hateful moment. Mia stood close beside her now. A black chill spilling from the dark around her. A final caress gracing her cheek.
“This is for me,” Mia whispered. “The me who never was. The me who lived in peace and married someone beautiful and perhaps held a daughter in her arms. The me who never knew the taste of blood or the smell of poison or the kiss of steel. The me you killed, Drusilla. Just as surely as you killed the rest of them.”
The Lady of Blades felt a twisting stab of pain, right through her rotten heart.
A whisper, soft and black as night.
“Remember her,” the girl breathed.
And then, she felt nothing at all.
* * *
The choir had stopped singing.
Mia hadn’t noticed it at first. She wasn’t exactly sure when the song had ceased. But trekking through the Mountain’s belly, her own belly in her boots, she noticed how deathly quiet things had become. The acolytes and Hands who’d surrendered to her had been sealed inside their quarters, or locked down in the apothecarium (Mercurio had only killed two of the apothecaries during his ruse—there were still enough left to tend the others’ wounds). But with no voices or footfalls or the traditional hustle and bustle in the halls, the Mountain was quiet as death.
The Athenaeum was quieter still.
The great double doors opened with the soft press of Mia’s bloody fingertips. The dark that waited beyond—perfumed with parchment and ink and leather and dust—seemed more welcoming than any she’d ever felt. She walked into the library of the dead, her companions all in tow, her father’s gravebone longblade and Mouser’s blacksteel sword sheathed at her waist. And there, leaning against the railing of the mezzanine beside his faithful RETURNS trolley, stood the chronicler of her tale.
“Aelius,” Mia said.
“Ah,” the old wraith smiled. “A girl with a story to tell.”
He was dressed like he always was: britches and a scruffy waistcoat. His improbably thick spectacles were balanced on his hooked nose, two shocks of white hair protruding from his balding scalp. His back was bent like a sickle’s blade, a lit cigarillo dangling from his mouth. He looked about a thousand years old.
Which might not be all that far from the truth.
His smile was welcoming. Smug, even. And as Sidonius and Bladesinger looked about the Black Mother’s Athenaeum in wonder, as Tric and Ash and Mercurio watched with curious eyes, Aelius reached up behind his ear, plucked his ever-present spare cigarillo free, lit it on his own, and offered it to Mia.
The girl took the smoke, placed it on her lips, and dragged deep.
“You’ve got some fucking explaining to do,” she said, exhaling gray.