was dead. A storm of knives and shit was about to start raining down on Mia’s head.
As she swam toward the Sword Arm docks, she saw the streets of the metropolis beyond were in chaos. Cathedrals were ringing a death knell across the City of Bridges and Bones. Folk were emerging from taverna and tenements, bewildered, outraged, terrified as rumor of Scaeva’s murder uncoiled through the city like blood in the water. Legionaries were everywhere, armor glinting under that awful sunslight.
With all the fuss and bother, precious few folk noticed the bedraggled and bleeding slavegirl paddling slowly toward the shore with a boy trussed up in her arms. Picking her way carefully through the gondolas and dinghies bobbing about the Sword Arm jetties, Mia reached the shadows beneath a long timber boardwalk.
“I’m going to hide us for a moment,” she murmured to her brother. “You won’t be able to see for a while, but I need you to be brave.”
The boy only glared, dark curls hanging in his eyes. Stretching out her fingers, Mia dragged her mantle of shadows about her and Jonnen’s shoulders. It took real effort with truelight blazing above her—the sunslight scorching and bright. But even with her passengers now riding with her brother, the shadow beneath Mia was twice as dark as it had been before Furian’s death. Her grip on the dark felt stronger. Tighter. Closer.
She remembered the vision she’d seen as she slew the Unfallen before the adoring crowd. The sky above her, not bright and blinding, but pitch-black and flooded with stars. And shining high above her head, a pale and perfect orb.
Like a sun, but somehow … not.
“THE MANY WERE ONE. AND WILL BE AGAIN.”
Or so the voice she’d heard had said. Echoing the message from that Hearthless wraith with the gravebone blades who’d saved her skin in the Galante necropolis.
Mia didn’t know what it meant. She’d never had a mentor to show her what it was to be darkin. Never found an answer to the riddle of what she was. She didn’t know. Couldn’t know. But she knew this, sure as she knew her own name: since the moment Furian had died at her hands, a newfound strength was flowing in her veins.
Somehow, she was … more.
The world fell into muzzy blackness as she pulled on her shadowcloak, and she and her brother became faint smudges on the watercolors of the world. Jonnen squinted in the gloom beneath her mantle, watching her with suspicious eyes, but at least his struggles had ceased for now. Mia followed Mister Kindly’s and Eclipse’s whispered directions, slowly climbing a barnacle-encrusted ladder and up to the jetty proper with Jonnen under one arm. And there, in the shadow of a shallow-bottomed trawler, she curled down to wait, cross-legged, dripping wet, arms around her brother.
Mister Kindly coalesced in the shadow at Jonnen’s feet, licking at a translucent paw. Eclipse melted from the boy’s shadow, outlined black against the trawler’s hull.
“… I WILL RETURN…,” the not-wolf growled.
“… you will be missed…,” the not-cat yawned.
“… WILL YOU MISS YOUR TONGUE AS MUCH, WHEN I TEAR IT FROM YOUR HEAD…?”
“Enough, the pair of you,” Mia hissed. “Be swift, Eclipse.”
“… AS IT PLEASE YOU…”
The shadowwolf shivered and was gone, flitting along the cracks in the jetty’s boards and off along the harbor wall.
“… i hate that mongrel…,” Mister Kindly sighed.
“Aye, so you’ve said,” Mia muttered. “About a thousand times now.”
“… more than that, surely…?”
Despite her fatigue, Mia’s lips twisted in a smile.
Mister Kindly continued with his pointless ablutions and Mia sat cradling her brother for long minutes, muscles aching, salt water stinging in her cuts as the suns blazed overhead. She was tired, beaten, bleeding from a dozen wounds after her ordeals in the arena. The adrenaline of her victory was wearing off, leaving a bone-deep fatigue in its wake. She’d fought two major battles earlier in the turn, helped her fellow gladiatii from the Remus Collegium escape their bondage, slaughtered dozens, including Duomo and Scaeva, won the greatest contest in the history of the Republic, seen all her plans come to fruition.
An emptiness was slowly creeping in to replace her elation. An exhaustion that left her hands shaking. She wanted a soft bed and a cigarillo and to savor the taste of some Albari goldwine on Ashlinn’s lips. To feel their bones collide, then sleep for a thousand years. But more, beneath it all, beneath the longing and the fatigue and the pain, looking down at her brother, she realized