ate each evemeal. Mia could feel the storm clouds building to a thunderhead that would black out the suns. And truth told, she had no idea what to do. She might’ve spoken to Tric about it once, you see. But he wasn’t the same.
She hadn’t known what to feel when she’d first laid eyes on him. The joy and guilt, the bliss and sorrow. Yet after a few turns in his company, she could see he was drawn with the same outline, but not filled in with entirely the same colors. She could feel a darkness to him, now—the same darkness she felt inside her own skin. Beckoning. And aye, even with Mister Kindly in her shadow, perhaps frightening.
Mia bowed her head, rivers of long black hair draping either side of her face. Silence between them thick as fog.
“I’m sorry,” she finally murmured.
The deadboy tilted his head, saltlocks moving like dreaming snakes.
“FOR WHAT?”
Mia sucked her lip, searching for the pale and feeble words that would somehow make this all right. But people were the puzzle she’d never managed to solve. She’d always been better at cutting things apart than putting them back together.
“I thought you were dead.”
“I TOLD YOU,” he replied. “I AM.”
“But … I thought I’d not see you again. I thought you were gone forever.”
“NOT THE MOST FOOLISH OF ASSUMPTIONS. SHE STABBED ME THREE TIMES IN THE HEART AND PUSHED ME OFF THE SIDE OF A MOUNTAIN, AFTER ALL.”
Mia looked over her shoulder at Ashlinn. Freckled cheek resting upon her hands, knees curled up, long lashes fluttering as she dreamed.
Lover.
Liar.
Murderer.
“I kept my promise to you,” she told him. “Your grandfather died screaming.”
Tric inclined his head. “MY THANKS, PALE DAUGHTER.”
“Don’t…”
She shook her head, her voice failing as the lump rose in her throat.
“… Please don’t call me that.”
He turned his eyes to Ashlinn. Putting one black, night-stained hand to his chest and pawing there, as if remembering the feel of her blade.
“WHAT HAPPENED TO OSRIK, BY THE BY?”
“Adonai killed him,” Mia replied. “Drowned him in the blood pool.”
“DID HE SCREAM, TOO?”
Mia pictured Ashlinn’s brother as he disappeared beneath that flood of red the turn the Luminatii invaded the Mountain. Eyes wide with terror. Mouth filling with crimson.
“He tried to,” she finally said.
Tric nodded.
“You must think me a heartless cunt,” she sighed.
“YOU’D ONLY CONSIDER IT A COMPLIMENT.”
Mia looked up at that, thinking him angry. But she found his lips curled in a thin, pale smile, the shadow of a dimple creasing his cheek. It reminded her so much of what he’d been for a moment. So much of what they’d had together. She looked into his bloodless face and ink-black eyes and saw the beautiful, broken boy he’d been beneath, and her heart was like lead in her chest.
“DO YOU LOVE HER?” he asked.
Mia looked to Ashlinn again. Remembering the feel of her, the smell of her, the taste of her. The face she showed the world, vicious and hard, the tenderness she showed only to Mia, alone in her arms. Melting in her mouth. Poetry on her tongue. Each a dark reflection of the other, both of them driven by vengeance to be and do and want things most wouldn’t dare dream.
Wonderful things.
Awful things.
“It’s…”
“… COMPLICATED?”
She nodded slow. “But life always is, neh?”
A mirthless chuckle slipped over his lips. “TRY DYING.”
“I’d rather not, if I can help it.”
“DEATH IS THE PROMISE WE ALL MUST KEEP. SOONER OR LATER.”
“I’ll take later, if it please you.”
He met her eyes then. Black to black.
“IT WOULD.”
The clanging of heavy bells cut their conversation off at the knees, and both Tric and Mia looked to the Maid’s decks above. She heard muffled shouts, running boots upon the timbers, notes of vague alarm. Ashlinn woke from her slumber with a jolt, sitting up and dragging her forearm across her face. “Wassat?”
Mia was standing now, narrowed eyes on the boards above their heads.
“Doesn’t sound good, whatever it is.”
A second burst of bells. A rolling string of faint and shockingly imaginative curses. Mia stepped lightly over to the porthole and opened the wooden shutter, letting in a blinding shear of truelight. Jonnen lifted his head from his hammock, squinted around the cabin with bleary eyes. Mister Kindly cursed from his spot atop the door.
Mia blinked hard in the painful glare, joined by Ashlinn at the porthole once their eyes adjusted. Over the rolling waves beyond the glass, Mia could see sails on the distant horizon, stitched with golden thread.