seem awfully concerned about Jonnen, Father,” she said. “And I can’t bring myself to believe it’s out of sentimentality. Could it be your dear wife Liviana isn’t the one who can’t have any more children?”
Dark eyes glanced below his waist.
“Getting soft in your old age?”
Scaeva took a step toward her, hand snaking beneath his robes. In a flash, their shadows struck each other, tangled and twisting and curling like smoke. Twice as dark as they should have been alone. Scaeva’s serpent reared up as if to strike, and Eclipse bared her fangs with a black growl. Mia felt her clothes and hair moving, as if a breeze were blowing behind her. As if the world were moving beneath her feet.
“You cannot know the stakes you toy with,” Scaeva said. “Do not make yourself my enemy, Mia. Not when I offer you peace. All who have stood against me now rot in the ground. All of them. Bring me your brother, and take your place at my side.”
“You are afraid,” she realized.
“Fear has its uses,” he replied. “Fear is what keeps the dark from devouring you. Fear is what stops you joining a game you cannot hope to win.”
He tossed the pawn toward her, and she caught it in her fist.
“If you start down this road, daughter mine, you are going to die.”
She knew she couldn’t touch him. Couldn’t even get close. Not with that Trinity about his throat. Not with Mercurio’s neck on the block. She could hear tromping feet, soft shouts in the distance—she guessed someone had found the bodies in her wake.
No more time to chat.
And so, she began to back away from him.
A single step. Then another. Farther and farther from the throat she’d sought for almost eight years. Their shadows were still entwined on the wall, strangling and seething, a knot of black rage. With effort, Mia dragged her shade back, Scaeva’s clinging on.
“Bring me my son, Mia,” he said, his voice soft and deadly.
She tore her shadow free, the dark about her shivering.
“I’ll consider it,” she said. “Father.”
A rippling in the darkness.
The whispered song of running feet.
And she was gone.
* * *
He stood there for long moments afterward, still as stone and just as silent. The shadowserpent wove its way across the vast map of the Republic he now ruled, coiled in a black ribbon about his ankles.
“… Do you think she will listen…?” Whisper asked.
The imperator looked to the burning light outside.
“I think she is as much her mother’s daughter as mine,” he replied.
The serpent sighed. “… A pity…”
Scaeva walked to the chessboard. He stood above the frozen battleground, the pieces arrayed in fractured rows, looking down with those cool black eyes. In one swift motion, he sat, sweeping aside the pieces with his hand. Reaching to his throat, he grasped a leather thong, snapped it free. A silver phial hung upon it, stoppered with dark wax and engraved with runes in the tongue of Old Ashkah.
Scaeva broke the seal, pouring the contents upon the board, thick and ruby red.
And, using his fingertip like a brush, he began writing in the blood.
CHAPTER 8
SCOUNDREL
If the entry under “scoundrel” in Don Fiorlini’s bestselling Itreyan Diction: The Definitive Guide had an illustration, it probably would have looked a lot like Cloud Corleone.* But Cloud himself preferred the term “entrepreneur.”
The Liisian was clad all in black: a leather vest over a finely cut shirt (unlaced perhaps a touch too far) and a pair of what could only be described as conspicuously tight pants. Emerald-green eyes gleamed beneath the brim of his feathered tricorn hat, and a perpetual three-turn growth of beard dusted a jaw you could break a shovel on. He was stood in the harbormaster’s office in the Nethers docks. And he was haggling with a nun.
It had been a strange turn all told, really. It had begun eight hours earlier, when Cloud had placed a sizable and very drunken wager on the outcome of the Venatus Magni. In hindsight, the bet proved a less-than-sound investment of his meager funds.
O, he’d picked the winner, all right. Even the bookman who took the bet had told him he was thinking with his cock, but watching the gladiatii known as the Crow slice her former collegium mates to bloody chunks, Cloud had found himself admiring her form along with her legs. So confident had he been of the lass’s abilities, he’d wagered every coin he’d won over the previous five turns of bloodsport on her victory, along with a