Nevernight (The Nevernight Chronicle #1) - Jay Kristoff Page 0,28

“the knuckles,” the gesture involves the raising of a fist with fore and babyfinger extended as far as the first knuckle.

The gesture has origins at the Battle of the Scarlet Sands, where King Francisco I of Itreya, also known as “The Great Unifier,” defeated the last Liisian Magus King, Lucius the Omnipotent.

After this defeat, it was presumed that Liisian resistance to Itreyan rule would falter. Itreyan occupation of its conquests was as ingenious as it was insidious—a small group of marrowborn Administratii would move into the power vacuum created by the destruction of the ruling class, and through coercion and bribery, establish a new local elite with ties to Itreya. Local sons would be sent to Godsgrave to be educated, Itreyan daughters would marry local men, wealth would flow into all the right pockets, and within a generation, the conquered would be wondering why they resisted in the first place.

Not so in Liis, gentlefriends.

After Lucius’s death, a garrison of Luminatii was stationed in the Liisian capital, Elai, to oversee “assimilation.” Things went well until a cadre of elite troops still loyal to Lucius’s memory raided a banquet in the former Magus King’s palace. The Itreyan elite and Luminatii garrison were captured, lined up by the loyalists, and, one by one, castrated with a red-hot blade.

The captives were then released, the elite forces barricading themselves inside the palace and awaiting inevitable retaliation. Lasting more than six months, the Siege of Elai became legend. It was said the loyalists roamed the palace battlements, holding aloft their fists with fore and babyfinger extended as far as the first knuckle—a taunting gesture meant to remind the attacking Itreyans the rebels were still possessed of their … equipment, while the Itreyan’s jewels had been fed to the rebels’ dogs. Though the loyalists were eventually defeated, “the knuckles” has entered common use by many of the Republic’s citizens: a taunting gesture intended to flaunt superiority over an unmanned opponent.

CHAPTER 6

DUST

Mia’s mother had given her a puzzle box when she was five years old—a wooden cube with shifting faces that, when correctly aligned, would reveal the true gift inside. It was the best Great Tithe gift she could ever remember receiving.1

Mia had thought it cruel at the time. When all the other marrowborn children were playing with new dolls or wooden swords, she was stuck with this wretched box that simply refused to open. She bashed it against the wall, to no avail. She cried to her father it wasn’t fair, and he simply smiled. And when Mia stomped before the Dona Corvere and demanded to know why she hadn’t simply given her a pretty ribbon for her hair or a new dress instead of this wretched thing, her mother had knelt, and looked her daughter in the eye.

“Your mind will serve you better than any trinket under the suns,” she’d said. “It is a weapon, Mia. And like any weapon, you need practice to be any good at wielding it.”

“But mother—”

“No, Mia Corvere. Beauty you’re born with, but brains you earn.”

So Mia had taken the box and sat with it. Scowled at it. Stared at it until she dreamed about it. Twisting and turning and cursing it by all the swears she’d heard her father ever use. But after two months of frustration, she twisted a final piece and heard a wonderful sound.

Click.

The lid opened, and inside, she’d found a brooch—a crow with tiny amber eyes. The sigil of her Familia. The crow of Corvere. She wore it to mornmeal the next turn. Her mother had smiled and never said a word. She’d kept the box; in all the Great Tithes since, all the puzzles her parents had given her thereafter, it remained her favorite. After her father’s execution and mother’s arrest, she’d left the box and something of the little girl who loved it behind.

But the brooch itself, she’d brought with her. That, and her gift for puzzles.

She’d woken beneath a pile of refuse in a lonely alley, somewhere in the Godsgrave backstreets. As she pawed the sleep from her eyes, her stomach had growled. She knew the consul’s men might still be chasing her—that he might send more if he knew they’d failed to drown her. She had nowhere to stay. No friends. No money. No food.

She was aching and alone and afraid. She missed her mother. Little Jonnen, her baby brother. Her soft bed and her warm clothes and her cat. The memory of him lying broken on the floor flooded her eyes