the corridor. And beside them, a folded sheaf of parchment, slipped beneath her door.
Mia rose from her bed, peered out into the hall. No one in sight. She picked up the parchment, unfolded it and read the words scribed thereon.
I want you.
T.
Mia’s heart beat quicker at the words, wretched butterflies rearing their wings in her belly again. She looked up at Mister Kindly, cigarillo hanging from her lips. The not-cat sat on the bed, surrounded by her sea of notes. Saying not a word.
“I’d have to be a complete idiot to sneak out after ninebells again.”
“… especially the very eve before solis’s contest…”
“I should be getting my sleep.”
“… love makes fools of us all…”
“I’m not in love with him, Mister Kindly.”
“… a good thing it appears that way to everyone around you, then…”
Gathering up the loose pages scattered across her bed, Mia tucked them into her notebook and bound it tight, then hid it beneath her desk’s bottom drawer.
“Watch my back?”
“… always…”
Mister Kindly slipped beneath her door, checking the hallway was clear. Mia pulled the shadows to her and faded into the gloom. Stealing out after the not-cat, feeling her way down the long corridor, soft boots making not even a whisper on the stone. The blurred figure of a Hand walked across a passageway ahead and she froze, pressed against the wall. Mia waited until he was well out of sight before moving again, finally stopping outside Tric’s door.
She tried the handle, found it locked. Crouching low, she peered through the keyhole, saw Tric on his bed reading by the light of an arkemical lamp. The globe threw long shadows across the floor, and she reached out toward them. Remembering what it was to be that fourteen-year-old girl again. The power of the night at her fingertips. Not afraid of it anymore. Of who she was. What she was.
And closing her eyes, she
stepped
into the shadow
at her feet
and out of the shadows
inside his room.
Tric started as she appeared from the darkness, hair moving as if in some hidden breeze. A knife slipped from up his sleeve, stilling in his hand as he recognized her. The boy glanced toward the locked door with questions swimming in his eyes.
Mia kicked her boots off her feet.
“Mia?”
Dragged her shirt off over her head.
“Shhh,” she whispered.
And the questions in Tric’s eyes died.
1. Mia managed to study the many faces adorning the weaver’s chamber during these ministrations, and she often found herself visiting Marielle with little more than a scratch to be mended, just so she could get another peek at the collection. The masks were wonders, collected from all corners of the Republic.
Mia recognized the voltos and dominos and punchinellos from Itreyan Carnivalé, obviously. The fearsome warmasks from the Isles of Dweym, carved of ironwood into the likenesses of horrors of the deep. The flawless, bone-white visage of a Liisian Leper Priest, and a eunuch’s blinding cowl from the harem of some long-dead Magus King. But the weaver seemed obsessed with faces in all their shapes and sizes, and it seemed she’d collected no end of strangeness to feed that obsession.
Among the weaver’s collection, Mia saw golden wonders fashioned in the likenesses of lions’ heads, similar to the cat-headed statues out in the Ashkahi Whisperwastes, and the figures on Mouser’s blacksteel blade. She spied a rotting hangman’s hood, a blindfold crusted with what looked like dried blood, the death masks of a dozen children, some no more than babes. Faces made of wood and metal. Bone and desiccated skin. Ornate and banal. Beautiful and hideous. The weaver collected them all.
Mia sometimes found herself close to pitying Marielle. It must be an awful thing, she supposed, to have power over the flesh of others and no power over her own. But then she’d remember the horror Marielle had made of Naev’s face. And much as she tried to hold on to it, as important as she knew it to be, her pity would slowly die.
Only ashes in its wake.
2. Eighteen was the minimum age for One Who Shone, a tradition that extended back to the legion’s formation. The Luminatii’s founding doctrine was astonishingly detailed, and its entry requirements exceedingly strict. Interestingly enough, the codices did not prohibit women joining their ranks, though no woman in history had actually done it.
Yet.
3. Mia had heard tell of magikal weapons, of course. Lucius the Omnipotent, last Magus King of Liis, supposedly had a blade that sang as he slew his foes. The legendary hero Maximian wielded a sword known