Читать книгу Darkdawn - Jay Kristoff - Страница 19

She dreamed.

She was a child, beneath a sky as grey as goodbye. Walking on water so still it was like polished stone, like glass, like ice beneath her bare feet. It stretched as far as she could see, flawless and endless. A meniscus over the flood of forever.

Her mother walked to her left. In one hand, she held a lopsided scale. The other was wrapped in Mia’s own. She wore gloves of black silk, long and glimmering with a secret sheen, all the way up to her elbows. But when Mia looked closer, she saw they weren’t gloves at all, that they dripped

dripdrip

dripdrip

on the stone/glass/ice at their feet, like blood from an open wrist.

Her mother’s gown was black as sin as night as death, strung with a billion tiny points of light. They shone from within, out through the shroud of her gown, like pinpricks in a curtain drawn against the sun. She was beautiful. Terrible. Her eyes were as black as her dress, deeper than oceans. Her skin was pale and bright as stars.

She had Alinne Corvere’s face. But Mia knew, in that dreaming, knowing kind of way, that this wasn’t her real face. Because the Night had no face at all.

And across the infinite grey, he waited for them.

Her father.

He was clad all in white, so bright and sharp it hurt Mia’s eyes to look at him. But she looked all the same. He stared back as she and her mother approached, three eyes fixed on her, red and yellow and blue. He was handsome, she had to admit – almost painfully so. Black curls dusted with just the faintest hints of grey at his temples. Shoulders broad, bronze skin contrasting sharply with the snow white of his robes.

He had Julius Scaeva’s face. But Mia knew, in that dreaming, knowing kind of way, that this wasn’t his real face, either.

Four young women stood about him. One wreathed in flame and another shrouded in waves and the third wearing only the wind. The fourth was sleeping on the floor, clad in autumn leaves. The wakeful trio stared at Mia with bitter, unveiled malice.

‘Husband,’ her mother said.

‘Wife,’ her father replied.

They stood there in silence, the six of them, and Mia could have heard her heart thumping in her chest, if only she’d had one.

‘I missed you,’ her mother finally sighed.

The silence grew so complete, it was deafening.

‘This is he?’ her father asked.

‘You know it is,’ her mother replied.

And Mia wanted to speak then, to say she wasn’t a he but a she. But looking down, the child saw the strangest thing reflected in the mirrored stone/glass/ice at her feet.

She saw herself, as she saw herself – pale skin and long dark hair draped over thin shoulders and eyes of burning white. But looming at her back, she saw a figure cut from the darkness, black as her mother’s gown.

It peered at her with its not-eyes, its form shivering and shifting like lightless flame. Tongues of dark fire rippled from its shoulders, the top of its crown, as if it were a candle burning. On its forehead, a silver circle was scribed. And like a look ing glass, that circle caught the light from her father’s robes and reflected it back, the radiance as pale and bright as Mia’s eyes.

And looking into that single, perfect circle, Mia understood what moonlight was.

‘I will never forgive you for this,’ her father said.

‘I will never ask you to,’ her mother replied.

‘I will suffer no rival.’

‘And I no threats.’

‘I am greater.’

‘But I was first. And I trust your hollow victory will keep you warm in the night.’

Her father looked down at her, his smile dark as bruises.

‘Would you like to know what keeps me warm in the night, little one?’

Mia looked down at her reflection again. Watched the pale circle at her brow shatter into a thousand glittering shards. The shadow at her feet splintered, splayed in every direction, maddening patterns surging, seething, the night-thing shapes of cats and wolves and serpents and crows and the shapes of nothing at all. Ink-black tendrils sprouted from her back like wings, razors of darkness from every fingertip. She could hear screaming, growing louder and louder.

Realizing at last that the voice was her own.

‘The many were one,’ her mother said. ‘And will be again.’

But her father shook his head.

‘In every possible sense, you are my daughter.’

He held up a black pawn on his burning palm.

‘And you are going to die.’