Aelius nodded, blowing a large smoke ring into the air. Mia blew a smaller one, sent it sailing through the chronicler’s. Meeting his pale blue eyes with her dark ones.
“I’m waiting,” she said.
“Simply put, I knew you’d charge in here half-cocked,” Aelius replied. “Thinking you were good enough to gut the Quiet Mountain all on your lonesome. Say what you will about being fearless, but there’s only the finest line between bravery and idiocy. And those passengers of yours tend to lead you closer to the latter than the former.”
“Once, perhaps,” Mia murmured. “No longer.”
“Aye.” The chronicler sighed a plume of smoke. “Apologies for your loss.”
Mia’s voice was hard as iron. Blood and tears dry on her cheeks.
“You were saying?”
The chronicler shrugged. “Given the way you were bound to burst in here, we needed a way to even the scales. Put Drusilla on the back foot, and enough Blades on the chopping block that you could gut what was left of the Church with one stroke. I figured the old bitch would come poking about the library, eventually. Find the first two parts of the chronicle. Especially with Mercurio spending all his free time down here.”
Aelius patted the RETURNS trolley, the three books atop it. One had pages edged in blood-red, a crow embossed on the cover. The second was edged in blue, embossed with a wolf. The last, trimmed black and spattered white, with a cat gracing the front.
She thought of Mister Kindly then. Heart aching in her chest. Wishing she had some way to call him back, wishing she could undo what she’d—
“So I let Drusilla find the books,” Aelius said. “The first two parts chronicling the story that is your life. And in the weeks that the Lady of Blades had her lackeys trawling through the dark down here for the third part … well, I wrote one.”
The chronicler drew deep on his cigarillo, exhaled a plume of smoke.
“I had to make some of it up, of course. But among other things, it outlined your ‘plan’ for entering the Quiet Mountain. After Drusilla’s lackeys ‘found’ it, all I needed to do was have Adonai warn you through Naev of the way you should actually approach the Church and get the drop on Drusilla’s welcoming party.” He squinted in the pall as he dragged on his cigarillo again. “Nice stroke with the arkemist’s salt, by the way. I’d not have thought of that.”
“And that’s it?” Mia asked.
“It?” Aelius scoffed. “Lass, that plan was so cunning you could’ve painted it orange and set it loose in a bloody henhouse.”
“My friends are dead,” she said. “My brother is stolen by my bastard father.”
“And you, my dear, are Lady of Blades. Who’s going to refute your claim now? With the Ministry and their sharpest knives dead at your hand? The Red Church is shattered. Your nemesis is fled back to Godsgrave, licking his wounds and scooping the shite from his britches. Which means you’re free to pursue the destiny you’ve been avoiding like the plague since I set you on this path three fucking years ago.”
Mia glanced at Tric. Those black eyes, burning with a million tiny stars.
“Cleo’s journal,” she murmured.
“Clever lass,” the chronicler nodded.
“You knew,” she said, narrowing her eyes as she dragged on her smoke. “The Moon’s murder at the hands of the Sun. The fragments of Anais’s soul. The black blood beneath Godsgrave. Darkin. All of it.”
Aelius shrugged. “Aye.”
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?” she demanded.
“What did I say when you came snooping about in here last year?”
Mia sighed, remembering the last time the two of them had spoken, here in this very library. “‘Some answers are learned. But the important ones are earned.’”
“I had to be sure about you,” Aelius said. “I had to know what you were made of. Cassius didn’t have it. The other darkin I’ve found over the years never came close. But we have to get it right this time, Mia. Because uniting the shards of Anais has been attempted once before, and that was so disastrous this world was almost consigned to an eternity of sunslight.”
“Cleo,” Mia said.
“Aye. Cleo.”
Mia looked to Ashlinn. The fear she felt in her breast was reflected in her girl’s eyes. Ash could feel it, sure as Mia could—the mekwerk gears of a plan countless years, perhaps centuries in the making, spinning all around them. For a moment, she wanted to run. To take Ash’s hand and turn her back on all this