She drank sparingly and sucked on the shitty cigarillos they sold over the bar, listening rather than talking. Wavewaker spoke of his plans for the theater, and Bryn spoke of the magni and Butcher spoke about each and every sweetgirl he’d plowed since he arrived in Whitekeep. Mia laughed aloud and ached inside, and over the next few hours came to slow grips with the fact that she should never have come here. That after this eve, she’d never see any of them again.
They’d fought and given enough. She couldn’t ask any more of them—let alone to follow her to the Quiet Mountain to rescue a man they’d barely met. It’d been selfish for her to even think it. So she stopped thinking it at all, simply enjoying their company instead. And when ninebells struck, she got up to use the privy, promising she’d return.
Slipping out the taverna’s back door a few moments later, she pulled her hood lower against that accursed sunslight and trudged off down the alley, back toward the docks. Mister Kindly flitted along the wall beside her, quiet as dead mice.
“… where are we going…?” he finally asked.
“Back to the Maid. She puts out at tenbells, remember?”
“… we seem to be missing our army…”
“We’ll have to manage without them.”
“… mia, i know you care f—”
“I won’t do it, Mister Kindly,” she said. “I thought I could, but I can’t. So leave it.”
“… you cannot do this alone…”
“I said leave it.”
The shadowcat coalesced on the cobbles in front of her, stopping her short.
“… if you wish a dog who simply rolls over when you growl, bring eclipse with you. but i’ll speak my mind, if it please you…”
“And if it doesn’t please me?”
“… i’ll speak it anyway…”
Mia sighed, pinched the bridge of her nose. “Out with it, then.”
“… i am afraid for you…”
Mia almost laughed, until the words sank into her skull. Ringing like cathedral bells. And then she stood there in the smell of garbage and salt, wind off the bay whipping the cloak about her shoulders, suddenly and terribly cold.
“… i spoke to eclipse about it, but eclipse never questions, like the one she rode before you never questioned. but you have always questioned, mia, and thus, so have i…”
The not-cat looked back toward the harbor, the ship waiting for them.
“… and i question what it is you want from all this, and why. i watch the part of you that made you seek sidonius and the others—full in the knowledge that you will die if you fight the mountain shorthanded—at war with the part of you that does not fear death at all. and i question if the thing we take from you is not something you need, now more than ever. because you should be afraid…”
“This isn’t about me being afraid, it’s about right and wrong,” she snapped. “I’m not broken. Don’t try to fix me.”
Though the daemon had no eyes, she could almost feel them narrowing.
“You saw them, Mister Kindly. How happy they were. Black Mother, ’Waker was like a child at fucking Great Tithe. And did you see the way Bryn looked at him? They have a life now. They have a chance. Who am I to demand they give that up?”
“… you do not demand. you ask. that is what friends do…”
“No,” she said flatly. “We shouldn’t have come here. We find another way.”
“… mia—”
“I said no!”
Stepping right through the shadowcat, she trudged to the mouth of the alleyway, toward the harbor’s tolling bells and the smell of the sea. She dragged the last breath out of her shitty cigarillo, breathed a plume of gray into the sky and crushed it under her boot. And reaching out to the shadows with clever fingers …
“Leaving without saying farewell?” Sidonius asked.
She turned and there he was, leaning against the wall. Bright blue eyes, hair shaved back to stubble, skin like cast bronze. She could see the brand they’d given him when they tossed him out of the Luminatii Legion. The word COWARD burned into his chest. She couldn’t recall seeing a grander lie in all her life.
Bladesinger stood behind him, her saltlocks reaching to the ground, the intricate tattoos that covered every inch of her body gleaming in the sunslight. Wavewaker loomed beside her, chest broad as a barrel, plaited beard and dark saltlocks and artful ink on his face. Bryn stood near him, tying her blond topknot and watching Mia with clever blue eyes.