Nevernight (The Nevernight Chronicle, #1)

by Jay Kristoff

If her face were a puzzle, most would put it back in the box, unfinished.

It’s truth to say in all save solitude—and in some sad cases, even then—you can always count on the company of fools.

But here is truth, gentlefriends, no matter the number of suns in your sky. At the heart of it, two kinds of people live in this world or any other: those who flee and those who fight. Your kind has many terms for the latter sort. Berserker. Killer instinct. More balls than brains.

“Well, you call your horse Legend, you’re letting people know you think you’re some hero in a storybook. You call your horse Thunderhoof … Daughters, you might as well hang a sign about your neck saying, ‘I have a peanut for a penis.’”

“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?”

“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.

“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 practice to be any good at wielding it.”

Beauty you’re born with, but brains you earn.”

“The Light is full of lies, Acolyte. The Suns serve only to blind us.”

“Nothing is where you start. Own nothing. Know nothing. Be nothing.” “Why would I want to do that?” The old man crushed out his cigarillo on the boards between them. His smile made her smile in return.

He was the kind of beautiful that dimmed all the world beside him. But cold. Bloodless. His was the beauty of a fresh suicide, laid out in a new pine box. The kind of beautiful you know will spoil after an hour or two in the ground.

If you can’t hurt the ones who hurt you, sometimes hurting anyone will do.

“They don’t tell stories about Red Church disciples, Chronicler,” Mia said. “No songs sung for us. No ballads or poems. People live and die in the shadows, here.” “Well, maybe here’s not where you’re supposed to be.”

A few thought her some thing from the abyss, some daemonic servant of Niah set on their trail. Others mistook her for a horror from the Whisperwastes, a monstrosity spat into being by twisted magiks. But as she wove and swayed among them, blades whistling, breath hissing, the swiftest among them realized she wasn’t a daemon. Nor a horror. But a girl. Just a girl. And that thought terrified them more than any daemon or horror they could name.