wraith. Both of them could Step where they wished, so many shadows, so dark and deep. But Cleo was simply more. The air was filled with her daemons, a multitude she could vanish into and out of at will. Her shadowblades seemed to be everywhere at once, hair streaming out in impossible lengths, Mia barely able to keep ahead of their edge. The whispers were deafening inside her head, the thud of her pulse drowned beneath. Her teeth were bared, eyes narrowed, face damp with sweat. And all the while, born aloft on wings of black, Cleo simply smiled.
She’s playing with me …
A half-dozen shadowblades sliced the place Mia had stood a second before. She Stepped forward, her longblade cleaving toward Cleo’s throat, only to watch the woman flicker away again. Again. Again. It was like chasing ghostlights. Like killing smoke. The woman moved too swift, more at home with the shadows than Mia could ever dream. All her training, all her will, all her desperate rage was less than worthless in the face of such impossible power.
She Stepped to the shelf beside Mister Kindly, stumbling as she landed, her blade as heavy as lead in her shaking hands. Cleo turned toward her, long black hair whipping about her. But she didn’t press her attack, simply hovering in the air. Mia was drenched with sweat, smoke burning in her lungs.
Enough? Cleo asked inside her mind.
Mister Kindly appeared on the woman’s shoulder, not-eyes fixed on Mia.
“… look around you, mia…,” he pleaded. “… you can’t beat her like this…”
“… RELENT…,” came the whisper from the daemons around her.
“… Yield…”
“… LOOK AROUND YOU…!” the shadowcat demanded.
Cleo floated across the space between them, radiating a dark and bottomless majesty. She alighted on the bone before Mia, smiling with black lips.
You cannot defeat me, blackheart. You cannot even touch me.
Mia pawed at her burning eyes, searching for the words. Some plea or prayer, something she might say. She felt a bumbling child before the strength of untold centuries. Standing an insect high in the presence of an almost-god. The power of a fallen divinity boiled below this woman’s skin. A legacy wrought of untold murders, the pieces of a shattered soul ripped from broken chests and reassembled, piece by bloody piece, inside Cleo’s own.
Niah’s first chosen.
What was Mia beside her?
You are nothing, the woman told her.
“I am Mia Corvere,” she hissed. “Champion of the Venatus Magni. Queen of Scoundrels and Lady of Blades.”
You are no one.
“I am a daughter of the dark between the stars. I am the thought that wakes the bastards of this world sweating in the nevernight. I am the war you—”
No, dearheart, sweetheart, blackheart.
Cleo smiled, one slender hand outstretched as if to bestow a gift.
You are afraid.
It took Mia a moment to feel the weight of it. To recognize the shape of it. Mister Kindly had walked in her shadow since she was ten years old, tearing her fears to ribbons. With Eclipse and him both inside her, she’d been indomitable. Fear had been a blurred memory, a forgotten taste, something that only happened to others. But after all those years, at Cleo’s smiling behest, it had finally, truly found her. Rising on an ice-cold tide in her belly and setting her legs to buckling.
You never know what can break you until you’re falling apart.
You never miss your shadow until you’re lost in the dark.
Mia’s sword fell from nerveless fingers.
She stumbled to her knees.
She’d been alone before, but never like this. Her brief moments without her daemons had always been tempered by the knowledge that they’d return. But now there was nothing to stand between Mia and a foe she’d never really faced. An enemy she’d never truly conquered. Her tongue was ashes and her body was lead, wide eyes searching the gloom as her breath rattled through clacking teeth.
Why had she come here? What was she doing? Who was she to script herself into prophecy, to take her place on a stage peopled with imperators and gods? One weak and frail and feeble girl, who’d only dragged herself this far with the help of the things that rode her shadow. And now, now without them …
You are nothing, Cleo smiled.
You are no one.
She was ten years old again. Standing in the rain on the walls of the forum. Watching her world crashing down before a howling mob. Her mother stood behind her, one arm across her breast, the other at her neck. Mia could feel her, almost see her,