“I can kiss that better if you like,” Tric smiled.
“O, fuck off!” Mia spat, rolling into the wagon and flopping about on the floor. There was blood on her fingers where she touched the bite, the skin already bruising as she glanced inside her shirt. Thanking the Daughters she wasn’t a bigger girl for the first time in her life, she hissed under her breath as Mister Kindly laughed from her shadow.
“He was such a bastard …”
Naev was fading swift, and they could afford no more stops—Mia feared the woman wouldn’t last another turn, and the First of Septimus was the morrow. If they didn’t find the Church soon, there’d be no point finding it at all. They were in the foothills now, mountains curving about them like a lover’s arms. She’d read dustwraiths often made their home where the winds howled worst, and her ears strained for telltale laughter over the whispering breeze.
Blood had thickened over the wagon floor, crusted in flies. She did her best to keep them off Naev’s belly, despite knowing she was already a dead woman. Naev’s resolve had broken—when unconscious, she moaned constantly, and when awake, she simply screamed until she passed out again. She was in the midst of a howling fit as Tric brought the wagon to a halt. Mia looked up at the absence of motion after turns of riding, fatigue thick in her voice.
“Why’ve we stopped?”
“Unless you can fix these spit-machines’ wings”—Tric pointed to the snarling camels—“we’ve gone as far as we’re going to.”
The simplest mountain rose up before the camel train in sheer cliffs, broken and tumbled all about. Mia looked around, saw nothing and no one out of the ordinary. She leaned down and clutched Naev’s shoulder, shouting above her cries.
“Where do we go from here?”
The woman curled over and babbled nonsense, clawing at her rancid belly. Tric climbed down from the reins and stood beside Mia, face grim. The reek of human waste and rotten blood was overpowering. The agony on display too much to bear.
“Mia …”
“I need a smoke,” the girl growled.
She rolled out of the wagon, Tric hopping down beside her as she lit a cigarillo. The wind snatched at her fringe as she sucked down a lungful. Her fingers were crusted with blood. Naev was laughing, bashing the back of her head against the wagon floor.
“We should end it,” Tric said. “It’s a mercy.”
“She told us not to.”
“She’s in agony, Mia. Black Mother, listen to her.”
“I know! I’d have done it yesterturn but she asked me not to.”
“So you’re happy to just let her die screaming?”
“Do I look fucking happy to you?”
“Well, what do we do now? This is the simplest mountain for miles, far as I can see. I don’t see any steeple, do you? We just ride around until we drop of thirst?”
“I don’t know any more than you do. But Naev told us to ride in this direction. That blood werking wasn’t just for shits and giggles. Someone knows we’re here.”
“Aye, the fucking dustwraiths! They’ll hear her screaming miles away!”
“So is it mercy or fear ruling you, Don Tric?”
“I fear nothing,” he growled.
“Mister Kindly can smell it on you. And so can I.”
“Maw take you,” he hissed, drawing his knife. “I’m ending this now.”
“Stop.” Mia clutched his arm. “Don’t.”
“Get off me!” Tric slapped her fingers away.
Mia’s hand went to her stiletto, Tric’s hand to his scimitar. The shadows about her flared, long tendrils reaching out from the stones and swaying as if to music only they could hear.
“She’s our only way to find the Church,” Mia said. “It’s my fault those kraken got her in the first place. And she asked me not to kill her.”
“She couldn’t find her britches for a piss, the state she’s in. And I didn’t promise her a thing.”
“Don’t draw that sword, Don Tric. Things will end badly for both of us.”
“I picked you for a cold one, Mia Corvere.” He shook his head. “I just never knew how much. Where do you keep the heart that’s supposed to be inside your chest?”
“Keep it up and I’ll feed you yours, bastard.”
“Bastard I might be,” Tric spat. “But you’re the one who decides to be a cunt every turn of your life.”
Mia had her knife out, smiling.
“That’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
Tric drew his scimitar, those pretty hazel eyes locked on hers. Confusion and rage boiling behind her stare. A soup of it, thick in her head, silencing the common sense shouting at the back of the room. She wanted to kill this boy, she realized. Cut him belly to throat and wash her hands inside him. Soak herself to the elbows and paint her lips and breasts with his blood. Her thighs ached at the thought. Breath coming faster as she pressed one hand between her legs, murder and lust all a-tumble in her head as Mister Kindly whispered from her shadow.
“… this is not you …”
“Away,” she hissed. “To the Maw with you, daemon.”
“… these thoughts are not your own …”
Tric was advancing, eyes narrowed to knife-cuts, veins standing taut in his throat. He was breathing heavy, pupils dilated. Mia glanced below his waist and realized he was hard, britches bulging, the thought making her breath quicken. She blinked sweat from her eyes and pictured her blade slipping in and out of his chest, his into hers, tasting copper on his tongue …
“This isn’t right …,” she breathed.
Tric lunged, a sweeping blow passing over her head as she swayed. She aimed a kick for his groin, blocked by his knee and tempted for a second to simply drop to her own. She stabbed at his exposed belly, knowing this was wrong, this was wrong, pulling the blow at the last moment and rolling aside as he swung again at her head. He was grinning like a lunatic, and the thought struck her funny as well. Trying not to laugh, trying to think beyond her desire to kill him, fuck him, both at once, lying with him inside her as they stabbed and bit and bled to their endings on the sand.
“Tric, stop it,” she gasped.
“Come here …”
Chest heaving, hand outstretched even as she moved closer. Panting. Wanting.
“Something is wrong. This is wrong.”
“Come here,” he said, stalking her across the sand, swords raised.
“… this is not real …”
She shook her head, blinking the sting from her eyes.
“… you are mia corvere …,” said Mister Kindly. “… remember …”
She held out her hand and her shadow trembled, stretching out from her feet and engulfing the boy’s. He stuck fast in the sand and she backed away, arms up as if to ward off a blow. The knife was heavy in her grip, drawing her back, mind flooded with the thought of plunging it inside him as he plunged inside her but no, NO, that wasn’t her (this isn’t me) and with a desperate cry, she hurled her blade away.
She fell to her knees, flopped onto her belly, eyes screwed shut. Sand in her teeth as she shook her head, pushed the lust and the murder down, focused on the thought Mister Kindly had gifted her, clinging to it like a drowning man at straw.
“I am Mia Corvere,” she breathed. “I am Mia Corvere …”
Slow clapping.
Mia lifted her head at the somber sound, echoing inside her head. She saw figures around her, clad in desert red, faces covered. A dozen, gathered about a slight man with a curved sword at his waist. The hilt was fashioned in the likeness of human figures with feline heads—male and female, naked and intertwined. The blade was Ashkahi blacksteel.2
“Mia?” Tric said, his voice now his own.
Mia looked the clapping man over from her cradle in the dust. He was well built, handsome as a fistful of devils. His hair was curled, dark, peppered with gray. His face was of a man in his early thirties, but deep, cocoa-brown eyes spoke of years far deeper. A half-smile loitered at the corners of his lips like it was planning to steal the silverware.