Nevernight (The Nevernight Chronicle #1) - Jay Kristoff Page 0,51

because of him. My mother dead of grief in Godsgrave Asylum. All of them, unavenged.” The girl stepped closer, eyes narrowed. “But not much longer. You’d best grow some eyes in back of your head, Corvere. You’d best start sleeping light.”

Mia stared the girl down, unblinking, Mister Kindly swelling beneath her feet. Naev drifted closer to the redheaded girl, lisping in her ear.

“She will step away. Or she will be stepped upon.”

Jessamine glanced at the woman, jaw clenched. After a staring contest that stretched for miles, the girl spun on her heel and stalked off, the big Itreyan boy trailing behind. Mia realized her nails were cutting her palms.

“You surely do know how to make friends, Pale Daughter.”

Mia turned to Tric, found him smiling, though his hand was also up his sleeve. She relaxed a touch, allowed herself a smile too. Bad as she was at making them, at least she had one friend within these walls.

“Come on,” the boy said. “We going to evemeal or not?”

Mia looked after the retreating Jessamine. Glanced around at the other acolytes. The reality of where she was sank home deeper. A school of killers. Surrounded by novices or masters in the art of murder. She was here. This was it.

Time to get to work.

“Evemeal sounds good,” she nodded. “I can’t think of a better place to start scouting.”

“Scouting? For what?”

“You’ve heard the saying the quickest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach?”

“I always wondered about that,” Tric frowned. “Ribcage seems much quicker to me.”

“True enough. But still, you can learn a lot about animals. Watching them eat.”

“… You’re a little frightening sometimes, Pale Daughter.”

She gave him a wry smile. “Only a little?”

“Well, most times, you’re just plain terrifying.”

“Come on,” she said, slapping his arm. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

1. More balls than brains, gentlefriends. More balls than brains.

2. It refused, though sadly, they danced all the same.

3. The Rose River is possessed of the greatest misnomer in all the Itreyan Republic, and perhaps, all creation. Its stench is so awful that, when offered the choice between drowning in the Rose or being castrated and crucified, the Niahan heretic Don Anton Bosconi was famously quoted as asking his confessors, “Would you like to borrow a knife, gentlefriends?”

4. Goldwine is an Itreyan whiskey, so named for the vast fields of corn in the midlands from which it is distilled. Several familia are renowned for their recipes, most notably the Valente and Albari.

The rivalry between the two families has boiled from bad blood to outright bloodshed on more than one occasion, the most famous of which, the War of Twelve Casks, lasted four truedarks and claimed no less than thirty-two lives. Declared an official Vendetta—that is, a bloodfeud sanctioned by the Holy Church of Aa—the conflict was so named because, amid the slaughter and arson that embodied it, only twelve casks of Albari whiskey survived to see distribution throughout the Republic.

Bottles of “Twelve Cask” are thus exceedingly rare and astonishingly expensive—a single bottle has been known to fetch over forty thousand golden tossers at auction. When the summer villa of Senator Ari Giancarli was set alight by two clumsy servants, Giancarli reportedly charged back into the blazing home no less than three times—to save his wife, his son, and his two bottles of Twelve Cask.

Rumors that he saved the bottles first are, of course, gross character slurs concocted by political rivals, and have absolutely no basis in fact.

(He saved them second.)

5. One of the old man’s favorite tests early in Mia’s apprenticeship was a game he called “Ironpriest,” in which he and the girl would see who could last the longest without speaking. Though Mia at first thought it a game to test her patience and resolve, in later years, Mercurio confessed he only invented the game to get some peace and quiet around the store.

His most infamous test, however, came about in Mia’s twelfth year. During a particularly freezing wintersdeep, the old man instructed the girl to wait on the rooftops opposite the Grand Chapel of Tsana for a messenger wearing red gloves, and follow the lad wherever he went. The matter, he told her, was of “dire import.”

The messenger, of course, was one of Mercurio’s many agents in the city. He was traveling nowhere of import—dire or otherwise—merely meant to lead Mia on a merry chase in the freezing cold and eventually back to the curio store. However, unbeknownst to Mercurio, the boy was hit by a runaway horse on his way