Nevernight (The Nevernight Chronicle #1) - Jay Kristoff Page 0,26

not about to regale me with some wisdom on the futility of revenge, are you, Don Tric? Because I was just starting to like you.”

“O, no,” Tric smiled. “Vengeance I understand. But given the wrong you’re set on righting, I’m fancying your targets are going to be tricky to hit?”

“One mark is already in the ledger.” She patted her purse of teeth. “Three more to come.”

“These walking corpses have names?”

“The first is Francesco Duomo.”

“… The Francesco Duomo? Grand cardinal of the Church of the Light?”

“That’d be him.”

“’Byss and blood…”

“The second is Marcus Remus. Justicus of the Luminatii Legion.”

“… And the third?”

Saan’s light gleamed in Mia’s eyes, wisps of long black hair caught at the edges of her mouth. The shadows around her swayed like oceans, rippling near Tric’s toes. Twice as dark as they should have been. Almost as dark as her mood had become.

“Consul Julius Scaeva.”

“Four Daughters,” Tric breathed. “That’s why you seek training at the Church.”

Mia nodded. “A sharp knife might clip Duomo or Remus with a lot of luck. But’s not going to be some guttersnipe with a shiv that ends Scaeva. Not after the Massacre. He doesn’t climb into bed without a cadre of Luminatii there to check between the sheets first.”

“Thrice-elected consul of the Itreyan Senate,” Tric sighed. “Master arkemist. The most powerful man in the entire Republic.” The boy shook his head. “You know how to make it hard on yourself, Pale Daughter.”

“O, aye. He’s as dangerous as a sack of blackmark vipers,” Mia nodded. “A right cunt and no mistake.”

The boy raised his eyebrows, mouth slightly agape.

Mia met his stare, scowling. “What?”

“… My mother said that’s a filthy word,” Tric frowned. “The filthiest. She told me never to say it. Especially in front of dona.”

“O, really.” The girl took another pull on her cigarillo, eyes narrowed. “And why’s that?”

“I don’t know.” Tric found himself mumbling. “It’s just what she said.”

Mia shook her head, crooked bangs swaying before her eyes.

“You know, I’ve never understood that. How being named for a woman’s nethers is somehow more grievous than any other insult. Seems to me calling someone after a man’s privates is worse. I mean, what do you picture when you hear a fellow called a cock?”

Tric shrugged, befuddled at the strange turn in conversation.

“You imagine an oaf, don’t you?” Mia continued. “Someone so full of wank there’s no room for wits. A slow-minded bastard who struts about full of spunk and piss, completely ignorant of how he looks to others.”

An exhalation of clove-sweet gray into the air between them.

“Cock is just another word for ‘fool.’ But you call someone a cunt, well…” The girl smiled. “You’re implying a sense of malice there. An intent. Malevolent and self-aware. Don’t think I name Consul Scaeva a cunt to gift him insult. Cunts have brains, Don Tric. Cunts have teeth. Someone calls you a cunt, you take it as a compliment. As a sign that folk believe you’re not to be lightly fucked with.” A shrug. “I think they call that irony.”

Mia sniffed, staring at the wastes laid out below them.

“Truth is, there’s no difference between your nethers and mine. Aside from the obvious, of course. But one doesn’t carry any more weight than the other. Why should what’s between my legs be considered any smarter or stupider, any worse or better? It’s all just meat, Don Tric. In the end, it’s all just food for worms. Just like Duomo, Remus, and Scaeva will be.”

One last drag, long and deep, as if drawing the very life from her smoke.

“But I’d still rather be called a cunt than a cock any turn.”

The girl sighed gray, crushed her cigarillo out with her boot heel.

Spat into the wind.

And just like that, young Tric was in love.

1. The horse, not the captain.

2. She was bitten by three different horses over the course of her stay on the farm, bucked off seven times (twice into manure), and stepped on once. She was also pinched on the behind by a particularly daring stable boy named Romero (sadly, on the same turn she was first bucked into shit), who’d been misinformed by a traveling minstrel that city women “enjoy that kind of thing.”

The boy’s nose never quite healed properly, though he managed to recover three of his teeth. Last I heard, he’d been sentenced to four years in the Philosopher’s Stone for a brutal, and many said unprovoked, assault on a traveling minstrel.

3. The Empire of Ashkah ruled the known world for approximately seven centuries;