The horse bucked again, Mia clinging on with thighs and fingernails and sheer bloody-mindedness. Reaching into the saddlebags, she seized a heavy jar of bright red powder within. And with a sigh, she hauled it back and flung it into the kraken’s mouth.
The jar shattered on the creature’s beak, broken glass and fine red powder spraying deep into the horror’s gullet. Mia rolled off Bastard’s back to avoid another blow, scrabbling across the dust as an agonized shriek split the air. The kraken released the stallion, pawing, scratching, scraping at its mouth. Tric gave another halfhearted stab, but the beast had forgotten its quarry entirely, great eyes rolling as it flipped over and over, dragging its bulk back below the sand, howling like a dog who’s just returned home from a hard turn’s work to find another hound in his kennel, smoking his cigarillos and in bed with his wife.
Mia dragged herself to her feet, sand churning as the kraken burrowed away. Flipping the sweat-soaked bangs from her eyes, she grinned like a madwoman. Tric stood slack-jawed, bloody scimitar dangling from his hand, face caked in dust.
“What was that?” he breathed.
“Well, technically they’re not cephalopods—”
“I mean what did you throw in its mouth?”
Mia shrugged. “A jar of Fat Daniio’s widowmaker.”
Tric blinked. Several times.
“… You just thrashed a horror of the Whisperwastes with a jar of chili powder?”
Mia nodded. “Shame, really. It’s good stuff. I only stole the one jar.”
A moment of incredulous silence rang across the wastes, filled with the off-key song of maddening winds. And then the boy began laughing, a dimpled, bone-white grin gleaming in a filthy face. Wiping at his eyes, he flicked a sluice of dark blood from his blade and wandered off to fetch Flowers. Mia turned to her stolen stallion, pulling himself up from the sands, bloodied at his throat and forelegs. She spoke in calming tones, tongue caked in dust, hoping to still him.
“You all in one piece, boy?”
Mia approached slow, hand outstretched. The beast was shaken, but with a few turns’ rest at their lookout, he’d be mending, and hopefully more kindly disposed to her now she’d saved his life. Mia smoothed his flanks with steady hands, reached into the saddlebags for her— “Ow, fuck!”
Mia shrieked as the stallion bit her arm, hard enough to leave a bloody bruise. The horse threw back his head with what sounded an awful lot like snickering.7 And tossing his mane, he began a limping canter back toward Last Hope, bloody hoofprints in his wake.
“Wait!” Mia cried. “Wait!”
“He really doesn’t like you,” Tric said.
“My thanks, Don Tric. When you’re done singing your Ode to the Obvious, perhaps you’ll do me the honor of riding down the horse escaping with all my bloody gear on his back?”
Tric grinned, vaulted onto Flowers’s saddle, and galloped off in pursuit. Mia clutched her bruised arm, listening to the faint laughter of a cat who was not a cat echoing on the wind.
She spat into the dust, eyes on the fleeing stallion.
“Bastard …,” she hissed.
Tric returned a half-hour later, a limping Bastard in tow. Reunited, he and Mia trekked overland to the thin spur of rock that’d serve as their lookout. They were on constant watch for disturbances beneath the sand, Tric sniffing the air like a bloodhound, but no more horrors reared any tentacles (or other appendages) to impede progress.
Bastard and Flowers were allowed to graze on the thin grass surrounding the spire—Flowers partook happily, while Bastard fixed Mia in the withering stare of a beast used to fresh oats for every meal, refusing to eat a thing. He tried to bite Mia twice more as she tied him up, so the girl made a show of patting Flowers (despite not really liking him much either) and gifted the chestnut with some sugar cubes from her saddlebags. The stolen stallion’s only gift was the rudest hand gesture Mia could conjure.8
“Why do you call your horse Flowers?” Mia asked, as she and Tric prepared to climb.
“… What’s wrong with Flowers?”
“Well, most men name their horses something a little more … manly, is all.”
“Legend or Prince or suchlike.”
“I met a horse named Thunderhoof once.” She raised a hand. “Light’s truth.”
“Seems a silly thing to me,” the boy sniffed. “Giving out that kind of knowing for free.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you call your horse Legend, you’re letting people know you think you’re some hero in a storybook. You call your horse Thunderhoof … Daughters, you might as well hang a sign about your neck saying, ‘I have a peanut for a penis.’”
Mia smiled. “I’ll take your word on that.”
“It’s like these fellows who name their swords ‘Skullbane’ or ‘Souldrinker’ or somesuch.” Tric tied his saltlocks into a matted knot atop his head. “Tossers, all.”
“If I were going to name my blade,” Mia said thoughtfully, “I’d call it ‘Fluffy.’”
Tric snorted with laughter. “Fluffy?”
“’Byss, yes,” the girl nodded. “Think of the terror you’d instill. Being bested by a foe wielding a sword called Souldrinker …that you could live with. Imagine the shame of having the piss smacked out of you by a blade called Fluffy.”
“Well, that’s my point. Names speak to the namer as much as the named. Maybe I don’t want folks knowing who I am. Maybe I like being underestimated.”
The boy shrugged.
“Or maybe I just like flowers …”
Mia found herself smiling as the pair scaled the broken cliff face. Both climbed without pitons or rope—the kind of foolishness common among the young and seemingly immortal. Their lookout loomed a hundred feet high, and the pair were breathless when they reached the top. But, as Mia predicted, the spur offered a magnificent vantage; all the wastes spread out before them. Saan’s red glare was merciless, and Mia wondered how brutal the heat would be during truelight, when all three suns burned the sky white.
“Good view,” Tric nodded. “Anything sneezes in Last Hope, we’ll ken it for certain.”
Mia kicked a pebble off the cliff, watched it tumble into the void. She sat on a boulder, boot propped on the stone opposite in a pose the Dona Corvere would have shuddered to see. From her belt, she withdrew a thin silver box engraved with the crow and crossed swords of the Familia Corvere. Propping a cigarillo on her lips, she offered the box to Tric. The boy took it as he sat opposite, wrinkling his nose and squinting at the inscription on the back.
“Neh diis lus’a, lus diis’a,” he muttered. “My Liisian is woeful. Something about blood?”
“When all is blood, blood is all.” Mia lit her cigarillo with her flintbox, breathed a contented sigh. “Familia saying.”
“This is familia?” Tric thumbed the crest. “I’d have bet you’d stolen it.”
“I don’t strike you as the marrowborn type?”
“I’m not sure what type you strike me. But some snotty spine-hugger’s child? Not at all.”
“You need to work on your compliments, Don Tric.”
The boy prodded her shadow with his boot, eyes unreadable. He glanced at the not-cat lurking near her shoulder. Mister Kindly stared back without a sound. When Tric spoke, it was with obvious trepidation.
“I’ve heard tell of your kind. Never met one before, though. Never thought to.”
“My kind?”
“Darkin.”
Mia exhaled gray, eyes narrowed. She reached out to Mister Kindly as if to pet him, fingers passing through him as if he were smoke. In all truth, there were few who’d seen her work her gift and lived to tell the tale. Folk of the Republic feared what they didn’t understand, and hated what they feared. And yet this boy seemed more intrigued than afraid. Looking him up and down—this half-pint Dweymeri with his islander tattoos and mainlander’s name—she realized he was an outsider too. And it briefly dawned on her, how glad she was to find herself in his company on this strange and dusty road.
“And what do you know about the darkin, Don Tric?”
“Folklore. Bullshit. You steal babies from their cribs and deflower virgins where you walk and other rot.” The boy shrugged. “I heard tell darkin attacked the Basilica Grande a few years back. Killed a whole mess of Luminatii legionaries.”