Chapter 1 The Better Bride

The night they came for my sister, I cut my own palm and offered the Devil a better bride.

I did it in front of the whole city. The great bell in the Drowned Cathedral had already tolled twelve times, once for every decade since the last bride vanished into the fog, and on the final stroke the magisters unrolled the lottery and read the name aloud so that all of Blackwater could hear who would die for them this century.

Sera Vane.

My sister made a sound I had never heard her make. Small. Like something stepped on.

She is twenty and she still cannot lie without going pink at the throat, and when the guards turned toward her she reached for my sleeve the way she did when she was six and the canals froze and the dead pressed their faces up under the ice.

I did not let them take her hand. I took it first.

The square was packed shoulder to shoulder, every window above the water gold with candlelight, every face turned to watch and not one of them moving to stop it. Our neighbors. Our cousins. The baker who gave Sera the burned ends of the loaves because he liked her. They had wrapped this in so much ceremony that they had forgotten it was a murder. To them it was tradition. A lottery. A civic duty, paid in someone else's girl.

My uncle stood at the front in his good grey coat, hands folded, head bowed, and he did not look at me. Aldric never looks at the thing he has set in motion. That should have told me something. It did not, not yet.

"Mara," Sera breathed. "No. Mara, do not."

The altar sat on the black stone landing where the canal ran out into the open fog, and it was wet, and it was old, and the runnels carved into it had been carved for one purpose. I had walked past it my whole life and pretended it was only a slab. Up close I could see the rust that was not rust.

A magister stepped into my path. "The bride is chosen," he said. "The fog will not take a substitute."

"Then it can refuse me," I said.

I climbed the steps before anyone decided to be brave. I took the ceremonial knife from its cloth, the one meant for Sera's hand, and I turned my own palm up to the crowd so they would all have to see it, and I dragged the blade across the skin.

It did not hurt the way I expected. It hurt afterward.

I pressed my fist over the carved channel and let my blood run down into the stone, into the old grooves, down toward the water, and I said the words I was not supposed to know, the words my mother taught me before she vanished, back when I thought they were only a rhyme.

"Blood for the seal. A bride for the dark. Take me instead and let her go."

The fog came up off the canal like something breathing in.

It rolled over the landing in one long grey breath and the candles in the square guttered low all at once, hundreds of them, and the crowd went silent in the way a room goes silent when a coffin is carried in. The cold that came with it was not weather. It went into my teeth. It went into the cut on my hand and pulled, gently, the way a current pulls at your ankles before it decides to take the rest of you.

I heard Sera screaming my name. It sounded very far away, on the other side of all that white.

Then the fog parted, and he was standing in it.

He had not come up the steps. He had not come from anywhere. He was simply there, between one heartbeat and the next, tall and still and dressed in black that drank the little light there was. The city calls him the Devil. The city is mostly wrong about everything, but standing that close to him, with the cold reaching into my chest, I understood why they needed a word that frightened.

His eyes found me. Pale. Tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

He breathed in once, slow, the way you taste the air before a storm, and something in his face changed. Not softened. Sharpened. He took a step toward me across the wet stone and I made myself hold still, because I had decided on the long walk here that whatever happened, I would not let this thing see me flinch.

"You are not the one they chose," he said. His voice was quiet and it carried anyway, into every corner of that frozen square. "Why do you smell like the inside of my own house."

I did not know what that meant. I lifted my chin. "Because I am the one who came. Send my sister home and you can have me."

He reached out and closed his cold hand around my bleeding wrist, and I felt the whole crowd flinch with me.

He turned my hand toward the dying light. The cut was there, dark and slick. And under it, where my pulse beat, the old silver mark I had carried since birth, the one my mother used to cover with her thumb whenever a stranger looked too long. A thin curl of pale metal under the skin. A birthmark, she always said. Nothing. Show no one.

He went still.

Not the stillness of a man choosing his next move. The stillness of a man who has just heard a sound he buried a hundred years ago and prayed never to hear again.

His thumb pressed once against the mark. It answered him. It warmed under his touch, a low silver light blooming up through my skin, brightening the fog between us, and the cold rushed out of the air all at once like a held breath let go.

Somewhere behind me a magister whispered a word I did not know. Behind him, my uncle finally looked up, and he was smiling.

The Devil lifted his eyes from my wrist to my face, and whatever he saw there had stopped being a sacrifice and become something far worse for both of us.

"You were never meant to be mine," he said softly. "And now I cannot give you back."