“Drink?” she asked, turning to her stolen goldwine.
“No. I won’t be here long.”
She heard the odd note in his voice. Turned to stare up at him, those hazel eyes hard as stone. His shoulders were set, like a man preparing to charge.
“You let me win,” he said.
“No.” Mia shook her head. “I fought hard as I could.”
“But you made me fight harder.”
She shrugged. “I knew you’d fight soft, otherwise.”
“Know me so well, do you?”
“I know how you feel about me.”
“O, really. And how’s that?”
Mia dropped her gaze, ran a hand through her hair. Searching the shadows at her feet. The truth was lying plain there for her to see. She lifted her eyes to Tric’s, unable to speak it. Hoping he heard it anyway.
The boy shook his head. His gaze still hard. Voice harder. “You knew what saying that word would do to me. You know what it means.”
“I’m sorry,” she sighed. “You know me well enough to know I didn’t mean it. But I had to make you angry. I knew you’d let me win, otherwise. I can still finish top of Truths. I didn’t need to top Songs.”
“I don’t need your fucking pity, Mia.”
“Maw’s teeth, it’s not about pity! There’s room enough for both of us on the roster. You’ve finished top of hall, now you’re practically guaranteed to become a Blade. One step closer to standing on your grandfather’s grave. We made a promise we’d see each other have our vengeance, remember? I want what’s best for you, don’t you see that?”
“And so you play me like a lyre, neh? Twist me up inside and send me blind.” Tric shook his head. “Aalea teach you that, did she? Little Mia Corvere. Wolf in crow’s feathers. You’ve got us all fooled. Me, Diamo, Jessamine. Who else is dancing to your tune and doesn’t even know it? Who else are you going to kill to get your way?”
“Four Daughters, Tric, this isn’t a bloody—”
“A bloody nursery! I know! You’ve told me a thousand fucking times, Mia.”
“And how many times do I have to say it before it sinks in?”
“Never again.”
The words hit her like a buckler to the jaw. Though she’d deny it to herself afterward, she actually flinched to hear them.
“We were fools to let it get this far. You hear me, Mia?” Tric pointed to her. To himself. “You and me? Never. Again.”
“Tric, I—”
He slammed the door as he left.
Mia stared down at her empty palms. Tric’s accusations echoing in her skull.
She pictured Diamo’s face. The agony in his eyes as he begged for his life. But he’d deserved it, hadn’t he? For Lotti?
His cries were echoing inside her head, intertwined with those of the men she’d slaughtered on the steps of the Basilica Grande. Scattered like torn and sodden rags through the belly of the Philosopher’s Stone. An orchestra of screams, and she, the scarlet maestro. Bloody hands swaying in the air.
Tric’s footsteps faded in the hall.
Mia stood there in the dark.
Shoulders slumped.
Head bowed.
Alone.
“… it is for the best, mia …”
And never alone.
“… it is for the best …”
CHAPTER 30
FAVORS
Five turns until it was too late to solve Spiderkiller’s riddle.
Until her best chance at initiation dissolved like smoke.
Until everything she’d worked for crumbled to dust.
Just.
Five.
Turns.
Mia had barely slept and hardly eaten since the trial in Songs. Burying her nose in tome after tome, feeling the answer close enough to touch, only to watch it slip away like sand as her fingers closed around it.
A no-holds-barred thievery war had broken out as acolytes scrambled to topple Ash from the lead on Mouser’s ladder. The tally of marks was now kept in the Sky Altar instead of the Hall of Pockets, so that all could know the score.
Hush was placed second, still a good eighty marks off the pace. Jessamine trailed twenty marks behind that. Ash’s lead seemed virtually unassailable—a fact the girl loudly reminded everyone of at mealtimes, just in case they’d gotten airs. Bedrooms were broken into, pockets ransacked, and every seemingly harmless collision in the halls resulted in four or five different objects trading owners. Chronicler Aelius registered a formal complaint with the Revered Mother after Ashlinn stole the spectacles right off his head while he was dozing at his desk,1 and item #5 on Shahiid Mouser’s list: A book from the athenaeum (stolen, not borrowed, smart-arse) —6 marks
was removed under protest from the Shahiid himself. Pip had apparently staged an early-morn raid on the athenaeum to snaffle a few tomes from the RETURNS trolley, and got himself devoured by one of the surlier bookworms.2
“And now all the others are pissed they didn’t get a feed!” Aelius had yelled. “Who’s going to clean up the bloody mess is what I want to know!”
With official lessons ended, the acolytes were permitted to travel to Godsgrave whenever they chose. Speaker Adonai sat by his pool, sending fledgling killers out into the City of Bridges and Bones, morn and nevernight. Shahiid Aalea kept her counsel about who was leading in her contest, but with the amount of secrets flooding back from the ’Grave, Mia figured the woman must be more in the know by now than the princeps of the damned Obfuscatii.3
Alone in her room, or hunched over a desk in the Hall of Truths (always facing the door), Mia worked on Spiderkiller’s formula. She’d abandoned the notion of heading back to the ’Grave seeking whispers. Aalea’s contest was too much a shot in the dark for her liking. Better to work on something she could actually see. Touch. Taste.
She’d set up a series of glassware labs; beakers and bowls, cylinders and flasks, and endless spirals of pipes and tubes. Solutions bubbled or dissolved or congealed inside the elaborate structures, and more than a hundred black rats shuffled off this mortal coil as Mia continued her search. Spiderkiller would visit often, working at her desk or her own experiments, but Mia knew better than to hope she’d offer a clue. If she was to finish top of Truths, she’d have to earn it. In fact, the Shahiid hardly spoke at all, save once, the very turn after Solis’s contest.
“A shame about Diamo …”
Mia had looked up from her work. Spiderkiller walked slowly along Mia’s latest sculpture, trailing a long fingernail along the glass. Her hands were stained black with toxins. Her lips stained black with paint. Her stare, blackest of all.
“A shame he didn’t test his antidote before he used it, you mean?” the girl asked.
“Ah, but that’s the rub, you see,” Spiderkiller had said. “While it didn’t counter my toxin entirely, Diamo’s solution did delay its effects. So any rats he tested it on the eve before would have still been alive when he brought the solution to me the next morn.”
“Mmm,” Mia said, returning to her work. “This is a shame.”
The Shahiid had patted Mia on the shoulder and left the hall without another word. Diamo had been interred in an unmarked tomb in the Hall of Eulogies that afternoon. Spiderkiller never mentioned him again.
The countless hours working on the quandary made it easier to avoid Tric, at least. Mia kept her mind on task, sparing as little thought for him as possible. Eating at odd times to avoid him. And if her dreams were visited by the boy in the few hours she actually slept, Mister Kindly devoured them before they had a chance to bother her.
With two turns until contest’s end, Mia was bent over a boiling flask in the Hall of Truths. Ninebells had been struck, but she’d received dispensation to be out after curfew from Spiderkiller again. The perfume of burned sweetness and dead rat hung in the air. Entwined in her hair. Blurring her eyes.
Mia heard the doors open.
She looked up expecting to see Spiderkiller, but instead, Mia saw bright blue eyes. Pale skin and sharp cheekbones. A boy more beautiful than handsome.
The huge double doors closed silently behind him.
Mia’s hand went to the stiletto in her sleeve.