Tric’s toes. Twice as dark as they should have been. Almost as dark as her mood had become.
‘Consul Julius Scaeva.’
‘Four Daughters,’ Tric breathed. ‘That’s why you seek training at the Church.’
Mia nodded. ‘A sharp knife might clip Duomo or Remus with a lot of luck. But it’s not going to be some guttersnipe with a shiv that ends Scaeva. Not after the Massacre. He doesn’t climb into bed without a cadre of Luminatii there to check between the sheets first.’
‘Thrice-elected consul of the Itreyan Senate,’ Tric sighed. ‘Master arkemist. The most powerful man in the entire Republic.’ The boy shook his head. ‘You know how to make it hard on yourself, Pale Daughter.’
‘O, aye. He’s as dangerous as a sack of blackmark vipers,’ Mia nodded. ‘A right cunt and no mistake.’
The boy raised his eyebrows, mouth slightly agape.
Mia met his stare, scowling. ‘What?’
‘… My mother said that’s a filthy word,’ Tric frowned. ‘The filthiest. She told me never to say it. Especially in front of a dona.’
‘O, really.’ The girl took another pull on her cigarillo, eyes narrowed. ‘And why’s that?’
‘I don’t know.’ Tric found himself mumbling. ‘It’s just what she said.’
Mia shook her head, crooked bangs swaying before her eyes.
‘You know, I’ve never understood that. How being named for a woman’s nethers is somehow more grievous than any other insult. Seems to me calling someone after a man’s privates is worse. I mean, what do you picture when you hear a fellow called a cock?’
Tric shrugged, befuddled at the strange turn in conversation.
‘You imagine an oaf, don’t you?’ Mia continued. ‘Someone so full of wank there’s no room for wits. A slow-minded bastard who struts about full of spunk and piss, completely ignorant of how he looks to others.’
An exhalation of clove-sweet grey into the air between them.
‘Cock is just another word for “fool”. But you call someone a cunt, well …’ The girl smiled. ‘You’re implying a sense of malice there. An intent. Malevolent and self-aware. Don’t think I name Consul Scaeva a cunt to gift him insult. Cunts have brains, Don Tric. Cunts have teeth. Someone calls you a cunt, you take it as a compliment. As a sign that folk believe you’re not to be lightly fucked with.’ A shrug. ‘I think they call that irony.’
Mia sniffed, staring at the wastes laid out below them.
‘Truth is, there’s no difference between your nethers and mine. Aside from the obvious, of course. But one doesn’t carry any more weight than the other. Why should what’s between my legs be considered any smarter or stupider, any worse or better? It’s all just meat, Don Tric. In the end, it’s all just food for worms. Just like Duomo, Remus, and Scaeva will be.’
One last drag, long and deep, as if drawing the very life from her smoke.
‘But I’d still rather be called a cunt than a cock any turn.’
The girl sighed grey, crushed her cigarillo out with her boot heel.
Spat into the wind.
And just like that, young Tric was in love.
Mia’s mother had given her a puzzle box when she was five years old – a wooden cube with shifting faces that, when correctly aligned, would reveal the true gift inside. It was the best Great Tithe gift she could ever remember receiving. fn1
Mia had thought it cruel at the time. When all the other marrowborn children were playing with new dolls or wooden swords, she was stuck with this wretched box that simply refused to open. She bashed it against the wall, to no avail. She cried to her father it wasn’t fair, and he simply smiled. And when Mia stomped before the Dona Corvere and demanded to know why she hadn’t simply given her a pretty ribbon for her hair or a new dress instead of this wretched thing, her mother had knelt and looked her daughter in the eye.
‘Your mind will serve you better than any trinket under the suns,’ she’d said. ‘It is a weapon, Mia. And like any weapon, you need practise to be any good at wielding it.’
‘But, mother—’
‘No, Mia Corvere. Beauty you’re born with, but brains you earn.’
So Mia had taken the box and sat with it. Scowled at it. Stared at it until she dreamed about it. Twisting and turning and cursing it by all the swears she’d heard her father ever use. But after two months of frustration, she twisted a final piece and heard a wonderful sound.
Click.
The lid opened, and inside, she’d found a brooch – a crow with tiny amber eyes. The sigil of her Familia. The crow of Corvere. She wore it to mornmeal the next turn. Her mother had smiled and never said a word. She’d kept the box; in all the Great Tithes since, all the puzzles her parents had given her thereafter, it remained her favourite. After her father’s execution and mother’s arrest, she’d left the box and something of the little girl who loved it behind.
But the brooch itself, she’d brought with her. That, and her gift for puzzles.
She’d woken beneath a pile of refuse in a lonely alley, somewhere in the Godsgrave backstreets. As she pawed the sleep from her eyes, her stomach had growled. She knew the consul’s men might still be chasing her – that he might send more if he knew they’d failed to drown her. She had nowhere to stay. No friends. No money. No food.
She was aching and alone and afraid. She missed her mother. Little Jonnen, her baby brother. Her soft bed and her warm clothes and her cat. The memory of him lying broken on the floor flooded her eyes with tears, the thought of the man who’d killed him filled her heart with hate.
‘Poor Captain Puddles …’
‘… meow …’ said a voice.
The little girl glanced up at the sound, dragging dark hair from damp lashes. And there on the cobbles, amid the weeds and the rot and the filth, she saw a cat.
Not her cat, to be sure. O, it was black as truedark, just like the good captain had been. But it was thin as paper and translucent, as if someone had cut a cat’s shape out of shadowstuff itself. And despite the fact that he now wore a shape instead of no shape at all, she still recognised her friend. The one who’d helped her when no one else in the world could.
‘Mister Kindly?’ she asked.
‘…
