The little girl had dashed through narrow streets, over bridge and under stair, red crusting on her hands. The something had followed her, puddled in the dark at her feet as they beat hard on the cracking flagstones. She’d no idea what it might be or want—only that it had helped her, and without that help, she’d be as dead as her father was.
eyes open
legs kicking
guh-guh-guh
Mia willed the tears away, curled her hands into fists, and ran. She could hear the puppy-choker and his friend behind her, shouting, cursing. But she was nimble and quick and desperately afraid, fear giving her wings. Running down dogleg squeezeways and over choked canals until finally, she slithered down an alley wall, clutching the stitch in her side.
Safe. For now.
Slumped with legs folded beneath her, she tried to push the tears down like her mother had taught her. But they were so much bigger than her, shoving back until she could stave them off no more. Hiccupping and shaking, snotty face pushed into red, red hands.
Her father was hung a traitor beneath the gaze of the high cardinal himself. Her mother in chains. The Familia Corvere estates given to that awful Justicus Remus who’d broken Captain Puddles’s neck. And Julius Scaeva, consul of the Itreyan Senate, had ordered her drowned in the canals like some unwanted kitten.
Her whole world undone in a single turn.
“Daughters save me …,” she breathed.
Mia saw the shadow beneath her move. Ripple, as if it were water, and she a stone dropped into it. She was strangely unafraid, the fear in her draining away as if through punctures in the soles of her feet. She felt no sense of menace, no childish fears of unspeakables under the bed left to make her shiver. But she felt that presence again—or closer, a lack of any presence at all—coiled in her shadow on the stone beneath her.
“Hello again,” she whispered.
She felt the thing that was nothing. In her head. In her chest. She knew it was smiling at her—a friendly smile that might have reached all the way to its eyes, if only it had some. She reached into her sleeve, found the bloodstained stiletto it had given her.
The gift that had saved her life.
“What are you?” she whispered to the black at her feet.
No answer.
“Do you have a name?”
It shivered.
Waiting.
Wait
ing.
“You’re nice,” she declared. “Your name should be nice too.”
Another smile. Black and eager.
Mia smiled also.
Decided.
“Mister Kindly,” she said.
According to the plaque above his stable, the stallion’s name was “Chivalry,” but Mia would come to know him simply as “Bastard.”
To say she wasn’t fond of horses is to say geldings aren’t fond of knives. Growing up in Godsgrave, she’d had little need for the beasts, and truthfully, they’re an unpleasant way to travel despite what your poets might say. The smell is akin to a solid right hook into an already broken nose, the toll on the rider’s tenders is measured more often in blisters than bruises, and traveling by hoof isn’t much quicker than traveling by foot. And all these issues are compounded if a horse has a sense of its own importance. Which, sadly, poor Chivalry did.
The stallion belonged to the garrison centurion, a marrowborn member of the Luminatii legion named Vincenzo Garibaldi. He was a thoroughbred, black as a chimney sweep’s lungs.1 Treated (and fed) better than most of Garibaldi’s men, Chivalry was tolerant of none but his master’s hand. And so, confronted with a strange girl in his stable as the watch sounded, he neighed in irritation and set about voiding his bladder over as many square feet as possible.
Having spent years living near the Rose River, the stench of stallion piss came as no real shock to Mia, who promptly slapped a bit into the horse’s mouth to shut him up. Hateful as she found the beasts, she’d endured a three-week stint on a mainland horse farm at Old Mercurio’s “request,” and at least knew enough not to place the bridle on the beast’s arse-end.2 However, when Mia hoisted the saddle blanket, Chivalry began thrashing in his pen, and it was only through a hasty leap onto the doorframe that the girl avoided growing considerably thinner.
“Trelene’s heaving funbags, keep him quiet!” Tric hissed from the stable door.
“… Did you honestly just swear by a goddess’s ‘funbags’?”
“Forget that, shut him up!”
“I told you horses don’t like me! And blaspheming about the Lady of the Ocean’s baps isn’t going to help matters any. In fact, it’ll probably get you drowned, you nonce.”
“I’ll no doubt have long years locked in whatever stinking outhouse passes for the jail in this cesspool to repent my sins.”
“Keep your underskirts on,” Mia whispered. “The outhouse will be occupied for a while.”
Tric wondered what the girl was on about. But as she slipped into Chivalry’s pen for another saddling attempt, he heard wails within the garrison tower, pleas to the Everseeing, and a burst of profanity so colorful you could fling it into the air and call it a rainbow. A stench was rising on the wind, harsh enough to make his eyes water. And so, as Mia rained whispered curses down on Chivalry’s head, the boy decided to see what all the fuss was about.
Mister Kindly sat on the stable roof, trying his best to copy the curiosity found in real cats. He watched as the boy moved quietly to the tower, scaled the wall. Tric peered through the sandblasted window into the room beyond, his face turning greenish beneath his artless tattoos. Without a sound, he dropped to the ground, creeping back to the stable in time to see Mia wrangle the saddle onto Chivalry’s back with the aid of several stolen sugar cubes.
The boy helped Mia handle the snorting stallion through the stable doors. She was short, and the thoroughbred twenty hands high, so it took her a running leap to make the saddle. As she struggled up, she noticed the green pallor on Tric’s face.
“Something wrong?” she asked.
“What the ’byss is going on in that tower?” Tric whispered.
“Mishap,” Mia replied.
“… What?”
“Three dried buds of Liisian loganberry, a third of a cup of molasses essence, and a pinch of dried cordwood root.” She shrugged. “Mishap. You might know it as ‘Plumber’s Bane.’”
Tric blinked. “You poisoned the entire garrison?”
“Well, technically Fat Daniio poisoned them. He served the evemeal. I just added the spice.” Mia smiled. “It’s not lethal. They’re just suffering a touch of … intestinal distress.”
“A touch?” The boy cast one haunted look back to the tower, the smeared and groaning horrors therein. “Look, don’t be offended if I do all the cooking out there, aye?”
“Suit yourself.”
Mia set her sights on the wastes beyond Last Hope, and with a doffed hat toward the watchtower, kicked Chivalry’s flanks. Sadly, instead of a dashing gallop off toward the horizon, the girl found herself bucked into the air, her brief flight ending in a crumpled heap on the road. She rolled in the dirt, rubbing her rump, glaring at the now whinnying stallion.
“Bastard …,” she hissed.
She looked to Mister Kindly, sitting on the road beside her.
“Not. A. Fucking. Word.”
“… meow …,” he said.
With a sharp bang, the watchtower door burst open. A befouled Centurion Vincenzo Garibaldi staggered into the street, one hand clutching his unbuckled britches.
“Thieves!” he moaned.
With a halfhearted flourish, the Luminatii centurion drew his longsword. The steel flared brighter than the suns overhead. At a word, tongues of fire uncurled along the edge of the blade and the man stumbled forward, face twisted with righteous fury.
“Stop in the name of the Light!”
“Trelene’s sugarplums, come on!”