Darkdawn. Jay Kristoff

mother you’re talking about.’

      ‘I am the son of a consul!’ the boy stormed.

      ‘Aye,’ Mia nodded. ‘But Liviana Scaeva is not your mother.’

      ‘You dare?’ Jonnen pulled his little hands into fists. ‘You may be the daughter of some traitor’s whore, but I am no bas—’

      Her slap sent him stumbling, dropping onto his backside like a brick. Mia could feel rage in her veins, swelling and rolling, threatening to swallow her whole. Jonnen blinked up at her, wide eyes brimming with tears, one hand raised to his burning cheek. He was a marrowborn lordling, heir to a vast estate, child of a noble house. Mia imagined no one had ever laid hands on him before. Especially no one with a slave brand. But still …

      ‘Brother or no,’ Mia warned, ‘you don’t talk about her that way.’

      Beneath her anger, Mia was horrified at herself. Exhausted and frightened and aching all the way to her bones. She’d thought Jonnenw dead all these years, else she’d never have left him in Scaeva’s keeping. She should have been throwing her arms about him for joy, not knocking him onto his pompous little arse.

      Especially not for telling the truth.

      Mia had learned from Sidonius that her parents’ marriage was one of expedience, not passion. Darius Corvere was in love with General Antonius, the man who’d sought to become king of Itreya. The Kingmaker’s arrangement with his wife was a political alliance, not a grand love affair. And it was no strange thing – such was life in many marrowborn houses of the Republic.

      But of all the men Alinne Corvere could have taken as a lover, borne a child to, of all the men in all the world, how could she have chosen Julius fucking Scaeva?

      Jonnen pawed at his eyes, at the handprint Mia had etched on his cheek. She could see he wanted to cry. But he stomped the tears down instead, clenching his teeth and turning his hurt to hate.

      Maw’s teeth, he really is my brother.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ Mia said, softening her voice. ‘These are sharp truths I’m speaking. But your father was an evil man, brother. A tyrant who wanted to carve himself a throne out of the Republic’s bones.’

      ‘Like the Kingmaker did?’ Jonnen spat.

      Mia swallowed hard, feeling the boy’s words like a punch to the stomach. Though she tried to keep a grip on it, she could feel herself growing angry again. As if Jonnen’s rage were somehow stoking her own.

      ‘You’re just a boy. You’re too young to understand.’

      ‘You’re a liar!’ The boy climbed to his feet, his temper and volume rising along with him. ‘My father beat yours, and you’re just mad about it!’

      ‘Of course I’m mad about it!’

      ‘You tricked him!’ the boy shouted. ‘On the victor’s stage! You hid that knife in your armour and you never would have touched him otherwise!’

      ‘I did what needed to be done,’ she snapped. ‘Julius Scaeva deserved to die!’

      ‘You don’t fight fair!’

      ‘Fair?’ she cried. ‘He killed our mother!’

      ‘You have no honour, no …’

      The boy’s voice died, the twisted snarl on his face slackening into silent wonder. Mia followed his eyeline to the floor, that tableau of wailing faces and open hands, lit by the spectral glow of their single lantern. There, on the graven stone, she could see their shadows, dark and tenebrous in the ghostly light. And they were moving.

      Jonnen’s shadow was slithering back, like a viper coiling to strike. Her own shadow was reaching towards his, hair flowing as if in a gentle breeze. In a blinking, Jonnen’s shade lashed out at hers, wrapping its hands around its opponent’s throat. Mia’s shadow surged and rippled as the smaller shadow slipped hands about its neck. The shades lashed and slashed at each other, sudden violence painted in rippling black, though Mia and Jonnen both stood still and unharmed.

      Mia could see the perfect fury in her brother’s eyes, reflecting the war in the dark between them. It seemed as if their shadows were playing out their innermost feelings: his hatred, her affection scorned. And she knew it then, sure as she knew her own name – this boy would kill her if he could. Cut her throat and leave her for the rats. She watched those ribbons of darkness, recalling that her shadow had reacted the same in Furian’s presence. Looking at her brother, she felt the same sickness and longing she’d felt near other darkin. As if she’d fallen asleep with someone beside her and woken to find herself alone. The sense of something … missing.

      She forced calm into her voice. Willed her shadow to still itself.

      ‘I am your sister, Jonnen,’ she said. ‘We’re the same, you and I.’

      The boy made no reply, hateful stare still fixed on her. But the enmity between their shadows slowly calmed, the shades returning to their normal shapes, only faint ripples to mark anything was odd about them at all. The darkness around them was deathly silent. The wide eyes of a thousand stone faces watching them.

      ‘How long has it spoken to you?’ Mia asked softly. ‘The dark?’

      Jonnen remained silent. Little hands curled into little fists.

      ‘I wasn’t much older than you, the turn it first spoke to me.’ Mia sighed, tired in her soul. ‘The turn your father hanged mine, ordered me drowned, ripped you from our mother’s arms. The turn he destroyed everything.’

      The boy looked at their shadows, his dark eyes clouded.

      ‘Eight long years it took me,’ she continued. ‘All those miles and all that blood. But it’s over now. For good or ill, Julius Scaeva is dead. And we’re a familia again.’

      ‘Lost,’ he spat, ‘is what we are, Kingmaker.’

      Mia looked about them, peering into the blackness beyond the circle of their lantern’s light. From the chill in the air, the silence engulfing them, she’d guess they were far underground. In some hidden part of the necropolis, perhaps.

      Why had that Hearthless one saved her life, only to abandon her down here?

      Where were Mister Kindly and Eclipse?

      Mercurio?

      Ashlinn?

      Why was she still standing here like some frightened maid?

      Mia picked up the lantern. Its surface was pale and smooth as raven’s claws, carved with reliefs of an odd crescent shape.

      Gravebone, she realized.[fn1]

      She could still feel that longing inside her. Looking at the boy, at their shadows on the floor. But there was something more, she realized. Something tugging at her out there in all that dark and all that cold. As she shifted the lantern in her hand, she realized their shadows weren’t moving in response to the light. Instead, they remained fixed in one direction, like iron being pulled towards a lodestone.

      Mia was tired beyond sleeping. Bruised and bleeding and afraid. But the will that had kept her moving when all seemed lost, when the whole world seemed against her, when her task seemed all but impossible, bid her keep walking. She didn’t know where they were, but she knew they couldn’t stay. And so she held out her hand to her brother.

      ‘Come.’

      ‘Where?’

      She nodded to their shadows on the floor. ‘They know the way.’

      The boy looked at her, rage and mistrust in his eyes.

      ‘Our familia had a saying,’ Mia said. ‘Before your father destroyed it. Neh diis lus’a, lus diis’a. Do you know what that means?’

      ‘I do not speak Liisian,’ the boy growled.

      ‘When