By L. K. Steven

Silvercloak

Turncloak

For Young Adults

(As Laura Steven)

Our Infinite Fates

Every Exquisite Thing

The Society for Soulless Girls

Del Rey

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Copyright © 2026 by Laura Steven

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Steven, L. K. author

Title: Turncloak / L.K. Steven.

Description: New York : Del Rey, 2026. | Series: The Silvercloak saga ; 2

Identifiers: LCCN 2026012124 (print) | LCCN 2026012125 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593974025 hardcover | ISBN 9780593974032 ebook

Subjects: LCGFT: Fantasy fiction | Romance fiction | Novels

Classification: LCC PR6119.T475 T87 2026 (print) | LCC PR6119.T475 (ebook)

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2026012124

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2026012125

Ebook ISBN 9780593974032

Book Team: Production editor: Bridget Sweet • Managing editor: Paul Gilbert • Production manager: Erin Korenko • Copy editor: Pam Feinstein • Proofreaders: Cyrus Chin, Anya Getschel, and Robin Slutzky

Title page illustration by Francesca Baerald

Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook by Kyle Madigan

Cover design: Sarah Horgan

Cover image: Elliot Lang

ep_prh_7.5a_157638587_c0_r0

For my brother, Jack, who shares my love of all things fantasy.

Nothing will ever top the feeling of

a new Pokémon game,

but I hope this series comes close.

Part One

Aftermath

1

• • • •

Twenty-One Years Ago

A baby was nestled at the foot of a gnarled wyrmwood, swaddled in a navy cloak and bound at the ankles with manacles of deminite. He did not cry, but rather emanated a kind of bone-deep despair, a frequency that rendered surrounding wildlife meek, melancholic. A waxen red moon hung proudly in the sky, like the mother of all things, but even she could not save him.

There was something badly wrong with the baby, but the baby did not yet understand this. He thought only of the gnawing hunger in his tiny belly, and of the two sorrowful faces who’d abandoned him in the Havenwood mere hours ago. He did not yet possess the words for these people—mama, papa—but associated them with safety, with comfort. His heart beat with a visceral longing for the familiar sounds of their voices.

He was also very, very cold.

Winter sharpened its talons, mere moments from sinking into flesh.

Two gaunt figures emerged into the glade, arguing fiercely about matters beyond the baby’s ken. He tried to cry out, but his throat was so dry that no sound emerged. Scarlet cloaks swept along the forest floor, the figures already almost gone. They had not noticed the silent, starving bundle.

Fear darted through the baby like an arrow, sharp enough to loose a pale, rheumy wail.

The figures in red turned on their heels.

The male mage made a strangled noise, then strode over to the baby, urgent and afraid. A kind hand laid against the baby’s head, checking for heat, two fingers fumbling at the baby’s once-chubby wrists. The female mage hung back, wary, as though sensing a trap, and when the man went to undo the deminite cuffs, she muttered a low warning.

The male mage waved her off, and the cruel deminite fell away from the baby’s ankles. The man scooped up the swaddled threat and pressed him against a broad, safe chest. Some feeling washed back through the baby, warmth and pain and despair and the animal need to be loved.

Save me, the baby thought, not in words, as such, but a sort of primal plea.

And so, because the baby had commanded it, the scarlet-cloaked mages saved him.

2

• • • •

His Heart an Open Grave

The kingpin’s corpse hovered in midair beside his ruined son.

Darkness hung like a funeral shroud over the Havenwood, skeins of smoke ribboning through treetops, stars shining pale silver-gold like flakes of firelit ash. Twigs snapped beneath hurried boots as the surviving Bloodmoons fled toward the portari gate. Rasso, the pale-furred fallowwolf, pattered spectrally alongside his master.

Levan Celadon kept his dead father aloft with a levitation spell, maneuvering the body around narrow wyrmwood trunks and over snarled rabbit warrens. The dense forest rippled and echoed with the sound of frantic breaths, of unspoken words. It felt like walking through the belly of some ancient beast, dark and pulsating and strange.

Saffron strode next to Levan, panting raggedly, saying nothing, nothing at all, because what could she say?

She was a turncloak.

A silver in scarlet.

Yes, she had chosen him when it mattered. But his father had died anyway—because of her treachery, because she had led the Bloodmoons to this ambush, hoping to bring them to their knees.

And then, at the eleventh hour…

She had rewritten time itself. He would know the signs anywhere.

His lungs were clenched fists, his heart an open grave.

Silver had betrayed him, and his father was dead.

Levan’s life rolled away from him in all directions, the aching canvas of his past, the unfathomable expanse of his future as an orphan. The only thought tethering his mind to the present, to the next few steps in front of him, was the ascenite crypt holding his mother. He needed to get Lyrian to that crypt. Preserve him, in perpetuity, until Levan found another necromancer to raise them both from the dead.

That Levan felt so obliterated by his father’s death was a curious thing. The two had clashed for so long, steel against stone. And yet, after all the dead kingpin had wrought upon his son, tortured him and branded him and turned him from boy to monster—

—don’t think. Don’t grieve. Just act.

It took both a palmful of seconds and a sprawling eternity to reach the portari gate. The structure shimmered in the glade, sculpted axelmares hewn from marble-like ascenite into four arches, the lambent internal magic eddying like moonlight over whorls of fog. This particular gate was the site of Levan’s worst childhood memories; the gate through which his mother’s corpse had returned to the Havenwood, the gate where his life had become a before and after.

Levan ushered his surviving mages through one by one, until only the turncloak remained.

“Levan,” Saffron whispered, the name cracking like a bone.

Hands shaking, Levan gritted his teeth and averted his gaze.

“Later.”

Back at Bloodmoon Mansion, something was wrong.

The scarlets cloistered in the creamstone room where their unregistered portari gate was housed, wands and faces drawn. There was a charge to the air, a crackle, a thrum, like the aftermath of a thousand overlapping spells. A stink of smoke and ash and something honey-sweet. Rasso’s hackles were raised, white fur standing on end as he growled low and coarse.

Levan’s jaw was set like granite as he stepped from beneath the arches, one palm on his wand handle, the other on his dead father’s floating shoulder. “What is it?”

“We don’t know,” muttered Castian, whose veins ran black from loxlure. “We’re awaiting your command.”

Your command.

It hit Levan for the first time, then, that he was the new kingpin.

The heir to the empire. A title he never wanted to inherit. His life had been dedicated to installing his late mother on the throne of her birthright—not taking any sort of rule for himself. But now she was gone, and his father too, and the legacy had been passed on to him like a cursed family heirloom.

The transition would be far from seamless. In theory, the scarlets would obey Levan’s word without question, thanks to the loyalty brand—an ugly charred crust across every heart, sealed with magic that would kill them the moment they betrayed the scarlets.

Except Saffron. The one mage in the world immune to magic entirely.

All magic…but his.

Levan tightened his grip on his elm wand, then lowered his father’s corpse to the flagstones, dropping the levitation spell. “Segal, wait here with the body.” The kingpin’s right-hand mage had been robbed of his magic when he’d been Risen from the dead by a necromancer, thus he wouldn’t be altogether useful in a wand fight. “The rest of you, on your guard. We move as one.”

Crimson cloak rippling around his ankles, Levan climbed the creamstone stairs, swallowed his bilious fear, and pulled the door open.

In the hallway, the charge to the air was a thousand times stronger, the burnt-honey smell thick enough to coat his tongue. Rasso’s growling intensified. Levan strode down the dark red carpet runner, henchmages trailing behind him like a virile shadow.

They hurried toward the main atrium of the mansion, down curved black marble staircases and past creamstone walls hung with dragon battle murals, through corridors both deserted and silent. The microbial sensation from the Havenwood—of walking through the belly of an ancient beast—only grew more potent.

Soon they found the source of the charged thrum, the sense of wrongness.

In the atrium, gilt chandeliers lay shattered on the black marble floor, crystal teardrops turned to shaved ice. Lyrian’s favorite tapestry—a lavish depiction of the Saints at the First Feast—had been burned to ash, as had most other paintings and murals in the cavernous room. The coffered ceiling was choked with black soot. A row of elemental slot machines from the very first gamehouse was smashed and stooped, old enchantments leaking out like oil from a lantern.

But that was not the worst of it.

Nor were the scattered bodies, dreadful though they were. Dozens of them, all in scarlet cloaks. Mostly servants, many of them wandless—Ludders turned addicts, willingly branded by the old kingpin in exchange for access to loxlure.

No, the worst was the set of white wings carved into the center of the dark floor. The sigil of their rival gang, who had been making violent moves against the scarlets for months.

The surviving scarlets descended into chaos. Rasso stalked the atrium with a hungry prowl, on account of his dietary preference for fresh hearts. Castian sank to her knees in despair, while others moaned, muttered, sobbed. Clutched one another with fear, their sense of safety and sanctuary decimated in an instant. The violation of it.

Failure—and disbelief—bludgeoned Levan’s chest.

The Whitewings had historically been a nuisance, a neighborhood pest, but never a real threat. This attack should have been impossible on so many levels. The wards of the scarlet compound were famously impenetrable, since only mages with a Bloodmoon brand were able to pass through the protections. The sole loophole was a Crown-issued search warrant.

Unless, of course, the wards had dropped entirely.

To Levan’s knowledge, there were half a dozen henchmages dedicated to maintaining the defenses. Racking his brain, he realized with a sickening lurch that he had not laid eyes on any of them in weeks. Had the Whitewings picked off the wardholders prior to this grand finale? Levan thought of the ambush on Dubias Row a few weeks prior, how random it had seemed. He’d slain the three white-cloaked mages without questioning their assault in any real sense. Perhaps those whites had attacked him because they believed he was a wardholder.

Anger was a far easier emotion to feel than grief, and Levan surrendered to his rage. Rage toward the Whitewings, who had sent Alucia to break his heart three years ago, who toyed with him still. Who would not stop, it seemed, until they destroyed everything he held dear.

“Lindelan, Castian, Benvornan—search the mansion for any stragglers.” Levan was surprised how steady his voice sounded. There was none of his father’s brittle fury, his spitting impatience. “The white scum have deserted the scene, but before we recast the wards, ensure we don’t trap any inside with us.”

The three mages nodded grimly, Castian climbing unsteadily to her feet.

Levan felt Saffron’s stare upon him.

Did she do this? asked an ugly part of his mind, forged through decades of torture and betrayal. Is she in league not just with the silvers, but the whites too? It didn’t make sense, of course, but paranoia flowed through him like poison, cold and dark and taunting.

“Our first order of business must be reestablishing the wards. Long-term we’ll find a slew of addicts to donate their wells for access to the black, but for the foreseeable future, none of us leave the compound. Not with the Whitewings lying in wait. Six of you will surrender your magic in the interim. If none volunteer, I’ll choose names out of a hellsdamned hat.”

More muttering, a disgruntled undertone to it now, a nascent ire.

“When you say you don’t want us leaving the compound…?” asked Benvornan, a lank, hook-nosed mage Levan had never liked. His face was perpetually fixed in a rotten sneer.

“We need to regroup, fortify. Bury our dead, then retaliate.” Levan looked at the nearest corpse—a young, pretty servant with creamy Bellandrian skin and dark veins spidering her slender throat. A juvenile horror jumped up inside him. “But for now, yes, I’m placing everyone under curfew.”

At this, the simmering displeasure blew wide open, like a flame catching spilled bivkar. Everything in Levan clenched at the sound, at the feeling of control slipping away.

What would his father do at a moment like this?

Well, his father was demented, so he’d probably kill one of them to bring the rest into line. But their numbers were already diminished, and Levan needed as many mages as possible to rebuild the wards.

“You have your orders, like them or not.” He rose his voice over the din without allowing any heat into it. “To breach them will be a breach of the brand, and a breach of the brand will mean certain death.” He swept his golden hand around the room. “Clear this mess. We sleep only when all trace of the Whitewing assault has been wiped clean and the wards have been reestablished.”

Saffron looked at him questioningly, as if to say: What about me?

It angered him, that look of disbelief, that assumption she was above the rest of them because she’d tricked her way into his bed. She was right, in many ways. She was something other. And she had to be dealt with differently.

“Killoran. With me.”

He strode up the sweeping ascenite staircase, not bothering to look behind him. He knew Saffron would follow; she had to keep cover with the rest of the scarlets, and cover meant pretending the brand worked on her the same way it did on them.

Rasso pattered after her, tense and alert. It rankled Levan to see the beast fall into step by the traitor instead of him. The fallowwolf had always doted on her, and Levan finally understood why: because the creatures were historic allies of the Timeweavers.

As they walked in charged silence, Levan’s highly trained body thrummed with paranoia, the sense that she would plunge a dagger into his chest and run, the fear that lingering Whitewings were waiting around every corner. The cloying scents clung to his cloak: burnt honey, acrid smoke, the airborne weapon deployed by the Silvercloaks in the forest. He felt dirty, violated, almost insane with the desire to wash it all away.

But first he had to take care of her.

Saffron Killoran was a cancer to the scarlets, a malignant black tumor with roots spreading deeper and broader by the minute.

Time to cut her out.

“Where are we going?” she asked at last.

He said nothing.

Those eyes, a shining hazel, large and doe-like, pleaded with him.

They rounded a final familiar corner, toward the cell where Levan himself had been locked less than a week earlier.

“No,” Saffron whispered.

Rasso loosed a strange growl-whimper, a sound of confusion and protectiveness, as he glanced between the two mages he loved most.

Saff turned to flee, managed several steps. Levan’s hand twitched as though to grab her by the wrist, his thighs lurching as though to tackle her to the ground, but he didn’t need to do that. Had never needed to.

Follow me, he thought.

And so, because the kingpin had commanded it, she followed him.

3

• • • •

Mercy to Be Found

“Levan.” The scarlet cloak hung wrinkled and false from Saffron’s shoulders. “Levan, I’m so sorry.”

A laughably small word, given the situation.

“Yes, I was undercover.” She spoke calmly, taking a step toward him as though to prove she was not afraid. Her white-blond curls spiraled in all directions, and she still reeked of smoke and ash and burnt honey. “I confessed as much. But I chose you in the Havenwood. You watched me choose you, choose the Bloodmoons.”

In the version of reality that stuck, yes.

But what of the version she had rewritten?

At first, the great reshuffling of wands had eluded Levan, like the street entertainer’s game in which a player had to figure out where the prize hid after all the cups had been rearranged. But as his brain retroactively parsed it, he realized that Saffron had repossessed his father’s weaverwick wand between one timeline and the next.

Had Lyrian not been without that wand, he would have been able to defend himself. The death curse might not have found him. He could have parried, blocked, shielded. Not only had Saffron leaked their location to the Silvercloaks, but she’d actively killed his father with her actions in the Havenwood.

Grief flared into anger once more, a safer emotion, easier to thrust outward. He thought then, with a child’s simplicity, that he might hate her.

“That choice was too late.” On the other side of the door, Rasso scrabbled and sniffed at the frame, whining intermittently. “Your betrayal cost my father his life.”

He should lay the Timeweaving accusations bare at her feet. Tell her he knew the truth of her power, the way she had wielded it against him and his kin. Yet some naïve, spiteful part of him wanted her to confess it of her own accord.

“Levan, I—”

“There is mercy to be found,” he said slowly. “If you’re honest with me. About everything.”

The air around them seemed to sharpen, to hold its breath. Her baleful fawn eyes studied his, narrowed slightly, as though searching for just how much he knew. There was something, then, a flint, a clash of internal swords, that made Levan think she understood, all at once, the depths of his terrible knowing.

He did not know what he would do if she confessed. Whether he would spare her, or whether it would give him more reason to destroy her.

In the end, it was a redundant calculation.

“I have been honest,” she said at last. “About everything.”

There it was. A palm reached out across a crevasse and not taken. A card kept pressed to her chest, even when death raised its sickle over her head.

“Then I think you know,” he replied, voice low, desolate, “that I have to kill you.”

Saffron did not flinch. Despite it all, respect swelled inside him. That brazen nihilism, that unfaltering fearlessness, all of it underpinned by a ruthless intelligence. This was a chess line she had already calculated.

“No, you don’t,” she said plainly. “Because you’re a Compeller.”

Some ancient, self-loathing instinct reared inside him. “Why should that matter?” Then, as an afterthought, “I meant what I said in the Havenwood. I’ve never compelled you. Not until I ordered you to follow me into this cell.”

Saffron’s eyes blazed. “Maybe not consciously. But in the week or two after we first met, I kept…slipping. Revealing information about my former cohort. At the time, I thought maybe it was because…Saints, because I was attracted to you. But I can keep a polderdash face against the fiercest of opponents, can withstand torture and prison and the death of those I love without uttering the wrong thing. So I think there was something more at play. A coaxing hand in my mind. A gentle push of encouragement.”

Dread simmered in his belly, black and noxious as loxlure. “I did not consciously compel you. I’d have discovered the truth about your assignment a lot sooner if I had.”

“But unconsciously…Perhaps your power is so great that it spills over.”

“Or you were just sloppy.”

“I’m a lot of things. Sloppy is rarely one of them.” Saffron lifted her chin, pale curls spilling like the silver cloak she was born to wear. “But your compelling…it’s your best weapon against me. You can compel me to obey you. Compel me to reveal everything you think I’m still hiding.”

Some part of him soared at the thought.

Maybe he did not have to kill her. Maybe there was another way.

He could allow Saffron Killoran back into the scarlet ranks under his absolute command. The other Bloodmoons did not know the extent of her treachery—as far as they understood, the brand would’ve felled her for leaking the Havenwood operation to the Silvercloaks.

He could compel her into obeying, into revealing the crawling underbelly of whatever rocks remained unturned. Treat her like a henchmage, a foot solider, nothing more and nothing less. She could do his bidding inside the Silvercloaks if necessary, could keep the scarlets one step ahead, one street ahead when it mattered.

Yet Saffron was a Timeweaver, able to rewrite all of reality.

How could he let such a cataclysmic thing walk free?

For now, compelling worked on her. But for now was not a great comfort. This was a slippery mage, riddled with strange magical quirks and immunities. If anyone could chart a path around his commands, it was her.

Then there was the obvious problem that, as a living Timeweaver, Saffron Killoran could hold a greater claim to the Vallish throne than his own mother.

There had been an era in Vallish history when every Timeweaver wore a Highcloak. Saffron was, in some distant past, nobleborn. Perhaps even an ancestor of the Nivezans, the aristocratic rivals of the Rezarans all those centuries ago. The Nivezans should have been slain upon the Palace steps following the Dreadreign, but then again, so should the Rezarans. The Fourth Augur, Emalin, even predicted, in his world-shaping prophecy, that multiple lines of Timeweavers would slip through the cracks.

Perhaps the real reason Saffron would not confess the truth of her power was because she knew how far Levan would go to protect his mother’s claim. Because if it came down to a young, powerful mage in full possession of her weaving, or a Risen, empty-welled queenpin of a cruel criminal empire, one contender for the crown would be infinitely stronger.

All things considered, Levan knew he should do the safest thing. He should kill her. Yet the very thought was a clawed fist grabbing the pulsing pink organ of his heart.

For several long moments, he stood at a dreadful impasse.

Anger warred with hope and despair and loss. Feelings of naïveté, idiocy, of being a hellsdamned fool who never learned, a little boy in a too-big cloak, stepping into boots he did not have the strength nor desire to fill. Crests of fury raised his wand, and then that calculating strategic mind, like Saffron’s very own, stayed his hand, searched for a better move, a better line.

At some point, Saffron sank to the floor, weak from overcasting. The pail of water she’d used to clean his impaled body still stood in the corner of the cell, still carried the faint scent of citrus soap oil.

Only days had passed.

The irony of the situation struck Levan with all the force of a physical blow. Less than a week prior, his father, who had believed Levan to be a traitor, pinned his son in place with deminite because he could not bring himself to do what needed to be done. Some pale vestige of love kept him from dealing the killing blow, from cutting the tumor out of the organ.

All Levan’s life he had railed against his father’s monstrosity, and now he faced the very same dilemma.

How could he kill Saffron? How could he not?

The decision was too permanent, and he could not make it yet.

When he left the cell and bolted it from the outside, she did not call after him, did not plea or beg, and he grudgingly respected her composure. Little wonder she was such a menace in the polderdash hall. Little wonder she had hidden her true colors for so long.

Rasso looked up at him with wide, betrayed eyes, then nuzzled at the door, jabbing the wood pointedly with the tip of his snoot. Levan couldn’t help but think that the fallowwolf had performed no such sorrow when it was Levan locked inside.

He rolled his aching wrist and thought of his severed hand hitting the cell floor. How much effort it had cost him to hold back the scream, and how the roar had trembled the very walls when he finally loosed it. If he listened very carefully, he thought perhaps he could still hear its echo.

4

• • • •

The Pale Crypt

Levan became an animal of action and action alone.

In the hours after the attack on the compound, he oversaw the scouring of the building, searching every nook and cranny until he was certain no Whitewings lurked.

When this was done, he recast the wards with the help of Lindelan, Penzar, and Naron, three of their best Enchanters sacrificing the entirety of their magic wells to hold down the spellwork. Levan had no idea whether said spellwork had been properly executed—it was an odd, conditional sort of enchantment, permitting entry to certain subsets of mage while remaining compliant with Vallish law—but for the time being, it would do. As long as the wards kept Whitewings out, the rest could be fine-tuned.

Whenever Levan thought of the rival gang, he felt a hot, humiliated anger. Anger not just at the way the Whitewings snapped at scarlet ankles like disobedient pups, but at himself. He had not taken their threat seriously—distracted, perhaps, by Silver’s seduction, or by his own messy history with one of their number—and had missed how deadly they were becoming.

No more. He would learn everything about this city, the way Lyrian had. He would be the ruler the Bloodmoons needed in a time of open war.

By the time he returned to the dragon statue on the third floor, dawn streaked rose-gold light through stained glass windows. Exhaustion burned his eyes like salt, but there was still one pressing matter to attend to.

In the room housing the portari gate, Segal slumped against a creamstone wall, staring despondently at Lyrian’s corpse. The sight of the empty body cut Levan to the bone, the pain of it bright and shocking, but he could not let that show.

“Kingpin,” Segal muttered without rising, his eyes raw with exhaustion and perhaps, Levan thought, grief. He had been loyal to Lyrian Celadon for decades, and now, in the span of weeks, he had lost both his magic and his oldest friend. “What happened?”

“Whitewing assault. The wards fell, and the white bastards pounced. Killed twenty-odd servants, carved their sigil into the floor. Wards are back in place now, the carnage cleared.”

“Saints.” Segal stabbed his thumb toward the corpse. “What is your order?”

The gravity of it all threatening to fell Levan, to choke the voice from his throat, he uttered the only words he was able to.

“Take him to the crypt.”

Lorissa Rezaran died at twenty-nine years old. Her son was now thirty years old, which meant that when he looked at his mother—preserved on a raised platform of purest ascenite—he saw a woman younger than he was.

Thin hands were clasped over a brittle chest, a chestnut brown braid plaited down the heart-side of her rib cage. Thick black lashes, lilac lips. The scent of roses and earth, mingled with something cool and metallic. Her scarlet cloak was stark against the white surroundings—a domed atrium of raw ascenite, smooth and glowing like the inside of a pearl. The floor tiles were seven-pointed stars spiraling in concentric circles, and silver sconces flickered blueish light over the entire chamber.

When Levan looked at his mother, he saw not a ruthless, power-hungry monster, nor a jilted queen. He saw the woman who used to sneak into his bedroom at night, while he was pretending to sleep, and perch on the edge of his bed. She would stroke his cheek, his hair, warm tears slipping onto his bare arm. She would climb under his covers, wrapping her long body around his tiny back, and whisper into his fluttering throat, “You are the light of my days, and I will stop at nothing to give you the life you deserve.”

She had never wanted power for power’s sake. She just didn’t want her family to have to hide in the woods forever, in exile, as something dirty and damned. And she believed the only way to do that was to take the throne and pass laws to pardon and protect Timeweavers.

Yes, she also held grand aspirations for Vallin as a country, once that crown was hers. Levan had been too young to properly understand her manifestos when she was alive, but his father had spoken of her ideologies many times since her passing.

She wanted to eradicate Augurism—for obvious reasons, since the prophecies of old had justified the genocide of Timeweavers—and reestablish the patron saints as the true national religion. Through faith, she wanted to bring order back to a decadent population. There would be emphasis on community, on piety, on abnegation and togetherness. The Saints represented a purity of magic, of spirit, of being. It always galled her that they had fallen out of vogue over the past century or so, because without them, magekind would not exist.

There were other tenets of her vision, Levan knew, but this was the facet that stuck with him—because he himself had not prayed to the Saints in over a decade. They’d abandoned him the night his childhood torture began, and he wanted nothing more to do with them.

He wondered what his mother would think when she finally returned. Whether she would shun his faithlessness, or understand his faltering as a product of unimaginable grief.

A memory came back to Levan, crisp and clean as a teardrop of rain.

Late one night, when he was a young boy, he had not been able to sleep. Elsewhere in their rotten cabin, he heard a low muttering, a soft litany, an almost elegiac chant. He slipped out of the bedroom he shared with his brother and sought the source of the sound.

His mother sat cross-legged on the floor of the kitchen, alone, humming a prayer over her ancient collection of Saints stones, each of the Sixteen painted a different color to represent their corresponding deity. Levan watched for several moments before her eyes peeled open, and she smiled so softly he realized she’d known he was watching.

“Do they ever answer?” he asked, sitting down beside her. The slatted wooden floor was so cold beneath his pajamas that it felt damp.

“It’s not about being spoken to.” Another gentle smile. “It’s about being heard.”

“I don’t understand.”

She ruffled his already messy hair. “No, of course not. But you will, I hope. If I do my job as mother right—and as queen.”

As it always did, her mention of regency sent a pang of juvenile dread through him. He did not want to share his mother with a whole nation; he wanted her all to himself. Eyes blurring, he looked down at the stones. “You want everyone to worship the Saints like you do.”

A nod. Her dark hair fell around her shoulders in waves, and her face was shadowed in the light. “The world would be better if they did—like it was a thousand years ago. The Saints represent magic as a pure force, a healing force, as potent and rich as love itself. It is where we spring from when we’re born, and where we return when we pass. None of us can truly die, you see. We’re simply made new. That’s why it’s so important to use magic for good, because inside it is the soul of everyone we’ve ever loved.”

This seemed quite abstract to Levan, who had not known death yet, and therefore didn’t care too much for its various theologies. Instead, he focused on her wrist, which was striped with a nasty cut, the flesh around the scab red and angry. “You’re hurt.”

His mother glanced at the wound as though she’d forgotten its existence. “A little. But it’s not your job to worry about that.”

Levan’s brow furrowed. He pulled out his recently acquired wand, which was yet to cast anything—children in exile were hardly able to attend mage school, and the elders on the encampment always seemed too preoccupied to teach him. “I can fix it, I think.”

“You’re too young,” Lorissa replied, laughing sweetly.

But there was a tugging, gnawing feeling just behind his breastbone, something primal, instinctive. He knew what to do. “Please let me try?”

After a tentative beat, his mother shrugged and offered her arm. Levan uttered the words he’d heard so often from the camp Healer, tugged on that instinct in his chest like a loose thread, harnessed all his worldly want and hope into this single action, drew from some internal well he had never noticed until now. The wand felt too big in his hand.

“Ans mederan.”

The words sounded wrong from his mouth, young and clumsy, fraudulent somehow. But they worked. The scab melted into nothing, and the inflamed skin faded to pale cream, and the flesh knitted together with an almost cosmic sigh.

Staring at his work in wonder, Levan felt at once utterly drained and completely alive, both empty and alight, properly awake for the first time, as though he had passed over some critical precipice, one far more significant than child into man.

To his immense surprise, his mother’s eyes shone and then spilled. Shaking her head in reverence, she beheld him like the first mage witnessing some divine miracle. She kneeled forward, cupped his small jaw in her palms, kissed his forehead, folded her arms around him so that he was warm and safe and loved. Then she whispered into the crown of his head:

“My boy, you are everything I want this world to be.”

Now the memory cleaved through Levan like a rapier. It was not his lack of faith that would devastate his mother, but rather who he had become in her absence. How far he had strayed from the little boy who only ever wanted to heal.

He had suffered through a childhood of torture just so he might revive her with his deep, dark, corrupted power, had become an adult so single-minded about her resurrection that it had scorched him from the inside out. Sometimes it occurred to him, in perfect and fleeting clarity, that he wanted her back not to install her on the throne, but to return to the version of himself she had once known and adored.

His mother had never wanted the ruinous empire built on loxlure and pain, the drive for wealth, wealth, always more wealth. No, that had come after her death, once her late husband realized just how much ascenite was required to keep her corpse viable. Twenty years they had been searching for a necromancer, and still Lorissa was a corpse.

Now her late husband had joined her, and the crypt needed more ascenite still.

Next to the queenpin, Lyrian Celadon’s lifeless form was crooked, frail, marred with wrinkles and liver spots and spidery red blood vessels. White hair, pale brown skin, the brooch of his cloak pinned in the hollow of a papery throat. Levan could barely look at him.

He sank shakily to the tiled ground of the crypt, leaning back against the ascenite wall. Letting his exhausted eyes flutter closed, he thought again of those final moments in the Havenwood. The glitch in time as Saffron flickered from calm and wandless to fraught, gasping, tearful—and holding both wands. The yawning pit in his belly as he realized what she’d done.

And then older memories, silver-blond curls spilling over his bare, branded chest, how it felt to have her sleeping against him, feeling some young and hopeful part of him swell back to life.

Stult. You’re a naïve, hopeless stult.

Nobody could love you for real.

“It happened again,” he whispered. “I fell for someone who was only ever using me. I know I should kill the rat and be done with it—it’s the cleanest option. The safest. But perhaps there’s a better play here.” A rueful, self-loathing laugh. “Then again, perhaps I’m just weak.”

He hadn’t planned to tell his mother this, but the words spilled regardless, like a jar whose contents had thus far been contained through the centripetal force of constant spinning. This was why he could rarely abide stasis. Everything poured out.

Lorissa, of course, did not respond, although Levan imagined how she might. His mother was a noble mage, a just one, opposing gratuitous violence and never killing unnecessarily, but Saints save any mage who harmed her son. After what Saffron had done to her family, Lorissa would not show the turncloak mercy. Especially not when said turncloak could steal the throne from beneath Rezaran feet.

Levan knew in his bones what he had to do, but he was not quite ready to do it. Yet the greater cruelty would be to keep Saffron alive and suffering in limbo, as he had been while pinned to that table. Better to put the trapped animal out of its misery.

As he climbed to his feet, an incongruous image snagged his gaze—a dark shape beyond one of the vault arches, a slice of black where there should be none.

A boot heel.

Cold washed through him as he found the source.

The body of Tiernan Flane, the Silvercloak he’d turned, the meek detective he’d compelled into taking his own life the moment he was discovered. Saffron must have stashed the corpse in the crypt, driven by the same fevered hope that kept Levan upright. She could find a necromancer. She could bring her friend back.

Levan’s hollow pity sharpened into a calculated blade. He would not allow himself to feel sympathy or kinship with the mage who killed his father. And he certainly would not allow the Silvercloaks to believe they held any power over him.

They had sent Saffron to destroy him. She would be the last.

He lifted his wand tip to his lips. “Et vocos, Sando Segal.”

“Yes?” came Segal’s gruff response.

“There’s a silver body in the crypt. Dump it outside the precinct. And leave a note.”

Levan usually strode—with purpose, with a straight back and a high jaw, crimson cloak billowing and snapping around his ankles. But as he made his way to the cell holding Saffron Killoran, he ambled, pace slow and dragging, reluctance stooping his spine and tucking his chin down to his clavicle, cloak neither billowing nor snapping but rather drifting despondently.

He wished with every fiber of his being that it had not come to this, that Saffron had been true and genuine, that his father had not died and the loxlure retrieval had gone without a hitch and he was spending this evening with wild pale curls spilling over his bare, branded chest. He ached with the sheer force of that wish, and with the reality of what he now must do.

The cell block arrived too soon.

Because his chin was tucked low, because he was lost in the shadowy corridors of his mind, it took his several beats to register that the door was already ajar, the deminite bolt slid free.

Horror staked through his belly as he entered the vacant cell.

Spinning wildly on his heel, all casual gait vanished now, his breath hitched between his collarbones, and he tried to make sense of it, to figure out how this could have happened, who would dare to free her.

Because someone had freed her.

The deminite bolt had been opened from the outside.

Yet nobody in this place was loyal to her—hells, nobody even knew she was here in the first place. Even if they did, none of them would risk the brand’s deadly retribution to free a rat.

Then he saw the unmistakable dusty prints on the floor, illuminated by a single sconce.

Paw prints.

Levan went to the door, studied the outside. Matching prints were stamped halfway up, as though the beast had climbed onto his hindquarters to coax the bolt loose.

Rasso.

His mother’s own fallowwolf had freed Saffron Killoran.

5

• • • •

From Sacred to Sacrosanct

Saffron pulled the plain black cloak tighter around her body, strolling toward the crooked wandmakery at the end of the street. Rasso pattered at her heel, panting happily, like the very best of boys.

Thanks to the fallowwolf, she’d been free for four days now.

Four days, and the Bloodmoons had not followed—or perhaps they had tried, and her expert warping and wefting of a tangled trail made the hunt impossible. Four days spent plotting her next moves, scheming in response to dead kingpins and dead captains, trying to quell the ludicrous tenderness of her heart, the feeling of grief whenever she thought of Levan Celadon.

There had been the temptation to embrace the escape, at first. To disappear into Hamren or Välgard or Kintaso, a sprawling city in a new land where neither the scarlet nor the silver tendrils could reach. A fresh start was faintly appealing, but she had sacrificed so much, endured so much. She could hardly walk away now, not after she’d finally found a way to fix her world: by unmaking the last twenty years to save both her parents and Levan’s.

For this, she would need three things.

First, a weaverwick wand of her own. Not just to return to childhood and prevent her parents’ deaths, but for her safety in the meantime. If things went south with Levan again, if he moved to kill or compel her, she had to be able to undermine it.

Second, her father’s long-lost letter—the letter Captain Elodora Aspar had described in her final moments, mouth leaking blood, eyes filled with regret. Some deep gut instinct told Saffron this letter was key to everything. Since Timeweaving ran through ancestral lines, she wanted to know everything about her heritage, whether her ancestors had been allies or rivals of the Rezaran throne, whether there was a birthright weaverwick hidden in some forgotten vault.

Third, an unsaintly amount of ascenite to bolster her Timeweaving—enough to wind back such a perilous number of years. More ascenite than she could ever hope to accrue on her own, which meant she had to stay aligned with the Bloodmoons, whose looted wealth rivaled King Quintan’s own reserves. And for that, she had to win back Levan’s favor.

The opportunity had come to tell Levan the truth from the outset, when he’d offered leniency in exchange for honesty. Yet everything had been so fraught, fractious, balanced on a blade edge between mercy and murder. This monumental revelation would have given him one more reason to kill her, because as a legacy Timeweaver, she represented a possible threat to his mother’s claim. Surely, he could not abide such a thing in his ranks. She would tell him eventually, but only once everything had stabilized, only once he trusted her again.

And for that, she had a plan.

Saffron took in the unfamiliar locale. Carduban was in the throes of wind season, and a warm desert gale threaded through the twisty streets, grains of sand scrubbing her face raw.

The border city was a wealthy place, notched in the Mountains of Promise—home to the continent’s biggest ascenite mines. Communal spaces were adorned with the precious, magic-bolstering material, grand fountains carved into sandserpents and sunhawks, cobbled walkways inset with star-shaped tiles, ornate windowsills where flowers and herbs flourished with unnatural speed and color.

The wandmakery’s maroon awnings snapped like the wings of a great wyrm. The sign hanging over the black-and-burgundy shop front read Mizad’s Emporium, and inside the window, the proprietor had dutifully slapped dozens of Crown decrees:

Following King Quintan Arollan’s 14th Amendment to the Public Safety Act of 1074PV, the sale of weaverwicks is prohibited by Vallish wandmakers. Those found in breach are punishable by a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

Ordering Rasso to wait around the corner, Saff pushed inside the shop, a bell tinkling over the doorway.

Oak cabinetry lined all four walls, the shelves inset with ascenite and rubies, the wands displayed proudly on black velvet cushions—the shop specialized in currantpalm, a type of Eqoran wood favored by Wielders. Between each wand cabinet stood bookshelves topped with antique tomes, their leather-bound spines cracked, gold foil lettering peeling away.

Siran Mizad stood behind a curved counter at the back of the shop, carving letters into a palm-size wooden plaque with a deeply furrowed brow. The edges of his black moustache were waxed into swirls, and his bald brown head gleamed under an ascenite chandelier. He wore a gold-framed monocle and a wandmaker’s cloak the color of red wine.

“Help you?” he asked shortly, northern Eqoran accent gritty with sand and wind.

“I’m looking for a weaverwick wand.”

Words she’d uttered countless times over the past four days, as she’d traipsed all over Vallin in search of one. A haughty merchant in Novarin, the scholar’s city, had recommended Mizad—an old business associate and “all-round scoundrel.”

Mizad laid down his engraving tool, raking his gaze over his customer like a jeweler measuring a gemstone’s worth. “Allow me to search my storeroom. Bear with.”

As he disappeared through a back door, Saffron studied the old, rare books on the shelves, pulling out particularly interesting titles and studying their descriptions. Minutes rolled into a quarter hour, and Mizad still did not return. Eventually, the bell above the front door tinkled and three shadow-draped figures stepped over the threshold.

The first was a very familiar Silvercloak.

Gaian Villar had pale skin and long, ashy hair the same hue as the silver cloak pinned at his throat. His family was quietly wealthy—they owned a creamstone quarry in the Royal Riverlands—and implausibly well-adjusted. Saffron had trained with him and four other cadets at the Silvercloak Academy, and until this very moment, she’d believed him to be undercover over the border in Pons Aelii.

At the sight of Saff, Gaian’s mouth fell open. “Killoran?”

He was flanked by two female soldiers, each wearing the gold-trimmed plum cloaks of the Vallish infantry, who exchanged perturbed glances.

“I’m sorry, Meza’am.” The wandmaker reentered the shopfront with his chin tucked to his chest, muttering remorsefully (and perhaps overly politely) to Saffron. “I evaded a prison sentence by promising to turn in any mage who came in search of a weaverwick.”

Gaian stepped farther into the room, the heels of his black polished boots clacking like gavels. “Killoran, what are you doing here?”

“Oh, you know.” She shrugged wryly. “Trying to rewrite old mistakes.”

Gaian eyed her shabby black cloak. “Aren’t you just a Mage Practer?”

There was a whole lifetime of shame on the word just. An old frustration flared, but she kept it contained. “There’s no way to know whether you can Timeweave until you try, and no way to try without a weaverwick.”

“You’d really do that?” Gaian seemed aghast. “Turn back years and years just to unmake—what? What would you unmake, exactly?”

“Doesn’t matter, does it? I’m just a Mage Practer. What are you doing here? Why aren’t you…on your other assignment?” She tried to be discreet—the two soldiers would not be privy to Gaian’s undercover intelligence work.

A muscle twitched on his squared-off jaw. “Cover was blown, situation grew hostile. Aspar reassigned me.”

Saffron kept her face neutral. Gaian likely knew by now that Captain Aspar died in the Havenwood, but word had not yet reached him that Saffron had been there too—in a scarlet cloak, no less. “Sebran’s posted in Carduban too, no? Is border tension simmering so high we need two silvers on the watchtower?”

Something dark passed over Gaian’s face. “Sebran was reported missing in action weeks ago.”

She gaped at him. “Sebran? A deserter? There’s no way. Something awful must have—”

“It’s being taken care of.” Gaian shook his head at the infantry mages. “Let’s go. She’s not a threat.”

“We aren’t going to arrest her?” asked one of the soldiers, cracking her knuckles as though hankering for a scuffle. “She breached the Crown decree.”

Saffron hooked a churlish brow. “Did I?”

Gaian pressed his lips into a flat line. “I don’t think there was any real intent behind her inquiry. She’s just desperate. Lost.”

“Charming.”

He sighed, softening slightly. “Saffron…I’m sorry things ended up here. You were a great cadet, and you would’ve had a lot to offer the force. But you’d be better served moving on with your life. Let it all go. Your mistakes, your failings. Learn to live alongside them, instead of trying to unmake them.”

Sanctimonious vock.

The other soldier stepped furiously forward, a copper braid bouncing against her full chest. “Detective Villar, this is not proper procedure. You are allowing a preexisting relationship with the suspect—”

“Suspect?” Saffron laughed bitterly. “Oh, it’s strange to be on this side of it. Although I suppose I’m already an ex-convict.”

“An ex-con—sir.” The redheaded soldier glared at Gaian. “We must follow proper—”

“Fine, fine,” sighed Gaian. “Let’s question her here.”

“Interrogation by the esteemed Gaian Villar? I’m honored.”

Gaian was famed for his prowess in the questioning room, breaking even the most withholding of suspects with a combination of cool glares and trick-laden lines of inquiry. Saffron quietly believed Gaian was a Compeller—before she’d undertaken the Bloodmoon assignment, Captain Aspar had let slip that such a mage walked among them. Gaian was the natural fit.

“Why did you seek the purchase of a prohibited wand?” he asked.

“Oh, you know, a deep ennui over my purposeless life.” Saffron waited to feel a probing tendril in her mind, a subtle insistence that she tell the truth, but if Gaian was compelling her, she did not feel it. Then again, she was immune to magic—all but Levan’s, for whatever torturous reason.

“Did you have any intention of practicing the maligned art of Timeweaving?”

“Like you say, I don’t have the right blood.”

“If you did have the right blood, would you have unmade time?”

“If your grandmother had straw hair, would she be a broomstick?”

The corner of Gaian’s mouth twitched. “Killoran. This is becoming hostile.”

Saffron sighed, somewhat dramatically. “Look, this is all hypothetical. I am not a Timeweaver, and this kind gentlemage”—she stabbed a thumb in the direction of Mizad—“does not have any weaverwicks to sell. If I went out onto the street and asked a random passerby whether they had any darkseed, and they said no, would a crime have been committed?”

Gaian pinched the bridge of his nose. “Perhaps you should go into philosophy. I can picture you smoking a pipe in a fireside armchair.” He glanced behind him, took several steps toward her, then dropped his voice several decibels and an octave. His breath smelled of old coffee. “Do you know anything about Sebran’s disappearance, Killoran?”

Saffron blinked, confused. “Of course not. Why would I?”

“I heard…rumors. Regarding your post-Academy movements.” A meaningful pause. “The company you choose to keep.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she replied, maintaining her polderdash face. The polderdash face so convincing it had won her the deadliest undercover assignment in the history of the Silvercloaks. “I haven’t heard Sebran’s name in months. I’d almost forgotten he existed, frankly.”

Another lie. She missed her former cohort so much that it burned like an ulcer in her belly.

Some of the tension dropped from Gaian’s shoulders. “I knew it couldn’t be true. A scarlet cloak? Not after what happened to your parents. Still, if you hear anything…”

“Does this mean I’m free to go?”

“Yes, Killoran. You’re free to go.”

Saffron strode past Gaian and out the door.

As she rounded the sandy corner toward the nearest portari gate, Rasso bounded after her, tail wagging, although judging by the slight downward tilt of his ears, the beast understood that Saffron had not secured a coveted weaverwick.

Still, Saffron allowed herself a small, victorious smile.

Inside her cloak pocket was no Timeweaving wand, true, but she’d snagged a decent consolation prize. A navy leather-bound tome of wand lore titled Weaverwicks: From Sacred to Sacrosanct, pilfered from a high shelf while Mizad was in the back room summoning the Silvercloaks. Perhaps, in the absence of her father’s letter, the book could offer some insight on the reviled magical art she had never been given the opportunity to master. Perhaps she could even find her own ancestral history hidden in its pages.

But learning would have to wait, for she could not stay rogue forever.

As she and Rasso stepped beneath the arcane arches of the portari gate, she thought grimly of the next stop on her sojourn.

“Ad Atherin Central-West.”

The whorls of magic folded around her, dragging her back into the heart of Bloodmoon territory.

6

• • • •

In Cold Blood

Saffron drank in the achingly familiar sight of Clay’s Cloakery, the shop her beloved uncles owned in the heart of Atherin. The crisp, early winter afternoon felt oddly nostalgic: the scents of woodsmoke and mulled honeywine, the sprinkling of premature Sancsari decorations, the fogging of breath, the huddling together of cloaked bodies.

Being back in the capital felt dangerous—Levan knew Saff well enough to predict she’d come to the shop eventually—but she’d concealed herself in one of the street’s many alcoves (the walls famously folded in on themselves, to enable impromptu fornication). She peered through a slender crack in the creamstone, expecting a swish of perilous scarlet to pass at any moment.

Rasso nuzzled his nose into her palm as she studied the cloakery. She ran the memory of Lyrian’s final orders through the loom of her mind.

“She needs to hurt for this,” Lyrian had spat, the moment he’d realized the Silvercloaks were ambushing the scarlets in the Havenwood. “Et vocos, Zirlit.”

Zirlit’s response had crackled immediately. “Fair featherroot.”

“Kill the uncle.”

“No!” Saffron had screamed, the raw force of it ripping from the bottom of her belly.

“Yessir.”

And then the wand had gone silent.

Saffron existed in a state of both knowing and unknowing, still clinging to the gossamer hope that somehow her uncle had overpowered the Bloodmoon killer. The classic thought experiment: a Saint trapped in a cave can be considered both alive and dead.

Dust sheets were thrown over the mannequins in the cloakery window—slightly askew, tossed in a hurry—and the sage-green door was bolted and padlocked with deminite chains. For her uncles to have had time to take safety measures, there was a chance they’d gotten away. Fled the city, traveled south to Sarosan, the coastal city Mal hailed from, and where the Bloodmoons held scant sway. Then again, perhaps a friend had locked up the shop on their behalf.

In any case, Saffron would not try to find Mal and Merin herself, would not bring the scarlet cloaks to their door. For now, she had to forget them. For their sake, and for her sanity.

All of this left her in a strange sort of limbo, but if there was one thing she’d learned reading the Lost Dragonborn books, it was that you should never trust a death you didn’t see. She would not allow herself to fall down the endless shaft of grief until she knew for certain her uncle was gone. She needed her wits to survive the next few months or years, and nothing addled said wits quite like mourning.

After purchasing a quill and parchment at the shop next door, Saffron knelt to the pavement, cupped Rasso’s furry face in her palms, and, while scritching behind his ears, whispered:

“I need you to go back to the mansion, alright? Be with Levan, make sure he’s not obliterating himself with loxlure.” The fallowwolf tilted his head, eyes alert, as though to ask what about you? Saffron swallowed hard. “I’ll be back there soon enough.”

Golden Hour was one of the liveliest pleasurehouses on Broad Row, which was saying quite a lot. The entire street was adorned with twinkling red lights and sleek black awnings, dense ivy and the perpetual scent of sex. (Sex, in Vallin, carried no shame, no expectations of modesty or propriety—theirs was a world in which pleasure was a source of power, after all—and no currency was ever exchanged in pursuit of it.)

The pleasurehouses were largely lawless, and the Silvercloaks had long encountered difficulties prosecuting crimes committed beneath their awnings. The lights were dim and the bodies smeared together, and moans of pleasure mingled with masochistic screams in such a manner that it was hard to separate consensual pain from acts of true violence.

Which made it perfect for Saffron’s purposes.

While no money changed hands between one sexual partner and another, there was usually a hefty cover charge. Golden Hour was particularly pricey, thanks to the open bar and complimentary achullah, but Saffron paid her forty ascens and entered the main maze of the establishment.

Golden Hour was a rabbit warren, choked with spiced smoke and bodily musk, winding corridors with endless private rooms in which to fuck and suck and hurt. If the rumors were true, many sex-and-achullah-drunk mages had starved to death trying to get out, though Saffron supposed if you were going to die, you might as well be having an orgasm while you did so.

She wandered for a while, sweating in the stuffy heat but unwilling to remove her cloak or boots, let alone the rest of her clothes. After she’d committed her heinous crime, she’d need to make a quick, inconspicuous departure, and her bare swinging breasts lolloping down Atherin’s main thoroughfare might be slightly too memorable. They were, after all, stupendous breasts.

As she burrowed deeper into the warren, she finally found what she was looking for.

Or rather, who.

A Whitewing, wearing their trademark cloak and little else.

The lithe, pale-skinned mage had a crop of brown hair and an erect vock that veered sharply to the left. He was pressed against a pillar by a female mage in an emerald Brewer’s cloak, her thick black braids rolling over tawny tattooed skin. She worked at his vock with so much vigor it was surely rather painful.

She was a witness, but a witness was perfect.

Saffron ran a palm over the Brewer’s small, pert breasts before brushing several kisses up the thin column of her neck. Such interjections were commonplace in a pleasurehouse, with a general prevailing attitude of the more the merrier, and before long, Saffron was writhing and moaning with them both, performing her very best approximation of arousal.

After several minutes of fondling, the emerald-cloaked woman tugged them both toward an empty private chamber. Saffron’s chest skipped and stuttered as they collapsed onto an enormous oval bed, limbs tangled, mouths wide, the Whitewing supine beneath both women with a look of vague ecstasy on his vulpine face. His otherwise pale cloak had strange raised shoulder pads embroidered with black wings.

Better to make it quick.

Saffron drew her wand and aimed it at the Whitewing’s temple.

There was a brief moment of internal freefall, an ephemeral hesitation, a pinprick of horror opening into a dark canyon behind her ribs.

But she had already done this, had she not? Had already taken a life in the name of the greater good—the croupier Neatras, on the night she was branded—and that had been far worse, because her victim was innocent.

This Whitewing, or at least his ilk, had tried to kill Saffron and Levan on Dubias Row, had slaughtered dozens of innocent servants in the scarlet mansion, had been part of the order of mages who’d sent Alucia into the scarlet ranks and broken Levan’s heart three years ago. The whites represented all that was rotten in this city, and this death, albeit wrought in cold blood, would not be any great loss.

And besides, anything she did between now and winding back twenty years would disappear through the cracks of time eventually.

“Sen ammorten,” Saffron incanted, feeling very far away from her own body.

The killing spell forked into the Whitewing, and he fell still.

The pleasurehouse was so loud and choked with smoke that it took the Brewer a moment to realize what had happened. Before she could scream, Saffron was already in front of her, one hand pressed over the woman’s gaping mouth, the other holding a wand tip beneath her chin.

“Make no sound, or you will meet the same fate. Understood?”

Dark brown eyes wide with terror, the Brewer nodded. Saffron pulled down the neckline of her own navy tunic and revealed the ugly, charred seethe of the crimson brand.

“This is a turf war that need not concern you. You will leave this pleasurehouse and speak of this to no one, or you will feel the full weight of the scarlet fist upon you.”

Tears slicked down the Brewer’s face as she pulled the emerald cloak tight around her body, shielding as much flesh as possible.

Saffron crossed to the dead Whitewing, removing the pale cloak and tossing it over her shoulder. She lifted the cadaver’s arm, aimed her wand at the bone of his narrow wrist, and muttered, “Sen perruntas.”

The white hand fell free like a dead spider, and the Brewer stifled a sob. Saffron tucked the severed hand into her inner cloak pocket like a curious little souvenir, then strode toward the door of the chamber, ready to weave her way back through the mazelike hallways she’d so carefully memorized.

“Silence, hmm?” she said to the Brewer, smiling in a way that was likely terrifying.

The Brewer stared vacantly after her. Some internal shutters had fallen behind her eyes, and Saffron sensed she was no longer truly in the room.

Saff left Golden Hour without pursuit, the white cloak folded over her forearm.

Outside, night had drawn its navy curtain over the capital, and the temperature had cooled dramatically. Stomach heaving without her consent, Saffron began the long walk to the apothecary quarter, where an abandoned shop on Beakpeck Place housed a secret entrance into the Bloodmoon compound.

She was returning, of her own free will, to the mage who wanted her dead.

But first, she had a confession to write.

7

• • • •

Stone by Stone

Ears ringing profoundly, Saffron walked through the Bloodmoon mansion, wand drawn, expecting to be jumped at any given moment. The compound, however, was far quieter than usual, the scarlet numbers diminished, and with the survivors placed on glorified house arrest, there was little reason for anyone to come or go through the atrium.

In the center of the black marble floor, the carved white wings were still starkly engraved. She had no idea what magic they’d used to make the sigil so impossible to remove, only that it must be torturing Levan.

Levan. Levan.

The name beat through her like a pulse as she arrived at his bedchambers, but when she knocked on his door, there was no answer. Patting her cloak to make sure the severed hand hadn’t fallen out, Saffron made her way to the other place he was likely to have sequestered himself in the ruinous aftermath of her betrayal.

The library’s interior still took her breath away. It was three stories tall, with tens of thousands of books lining its walls and alcoves, mezzanine floors and wooden bridges, sliding ladders and antique writing desks, a vast stained glass mural casting blue and green and bloodred light over black marble tiles.

And there Levan was, perched in the velvet banquette beneath the window, washed in jewel colors and sitting so still he might have been a statue.

For several moments, she saw him before he saw her.

She drank him in.

The kingpin wore a neatly pressed scarlet cloak, moon phases embroidered down the lapel in gold. Dark hair fell to his jaw in waves, a scar bisected his lower lip, and the ridge of his jaw could cut through glass. The only minor imperfection was a smudge of navy ink on his temple, as though he’d been thinking particularly hard while writing in his journal, but Saffron actually considered this the exact opposite of an imperfection.

Her emotions grew new layers, tucked away inside one another like a Tarsan nesting doll. There was the obvious outer shell—love, lust, desire. Inside that, guilt and shame over the cruel game she’d played with his affections. Inside that, dread over the coming reckoning. Inside that, a hot animal fear, a primordial instinct to run.

She would never forget the version of time she’d rewritten in the Havenwood—how effortlessly and completely he had overpowered her. She had been a puppet, a doll, a plaything. An object of his will and only his will, all her agency stripped away to nothing. He had commanded her, without words, and her body had obeyed.

She who was supposedly immune to magic.

She who prided herself on her strong-mindedness.

The enormity of his power had been borne from a childhood of torture, sen doloran, sen doloran, sen doloran, cast over and over again until his magic mutated beyond all recognition. Inside Saffron’s fear was also an aching sadness, the desire to protect him, to make everything alright.

As she stepped into the vast library, the movement finally registered in the periphery of Levan’s vision, and he startled. He stood abruptly, tall, proud, his spine a sword, his blue eyes searing as a fever, but did not make to close the gap between them. He simply drew his wand.

“I almost respect the audacity.”

His words echoed in the cathedral-like space.

Saffron gave him a wry smile. “That’s my sweet spot.”

She tossed the white cloak onto the dark floor, then reached into her pocket and casually chucked the pale severed hand on top of it.

“What—”

“I killed a Whitewing on Broad Row. There was a witness, who is silenced for now, but who would testify against me if you applied the slightest bit of pressure. The cloak and the hand represent two pieces of physical evidence tying me to the crime”—she dug once more into her inner pocket, pulling out the parchment she’d purchased earlier—“as well as a handwritten and signed confession, which states that I was not acting upon higher command but rather my own twisted desire for vengeance.”

Shock wiped Levan’s face blank. “I don’t understand.”

“If I ever betray you again, you can have me sentenced to life in Duncarzus. Where the food is terrible, by the way. They don’t even serve hot chocolate, can you imagine?”

Levan seemed to be taking great efforts to bridle his breathing. He stared down at the dismembered hand, haunted. “You got out. You were free. You could have gone anywhere, done anything.”

Saffron badly wanted to tell him the full truth: that for now, they both wanted the same thing. Together, if they accumulated enough ascenite, and if he was willing to relinquish his mother’s weaverwick wand, she could turn back the decades and save not just her parents but his too.

Yet there was every chance he’d slay her where she stood for all she represented.

“The only place I want to be is here,” she said carefully.

“Because by my side is where you have to be in order to secure evidence.” A small head shake, both soft and furious. “Do you think me a fool?”

“If I so much as tried, you could destroy me for the murder I just committed.”

Levan started to pace, as though physical movement would jostle loose his critical thinking. The stained glass cast strange shapes and colors over his face and cloak. “The Silvercloaks would pardon you. If you brought down the Bloodmoons, they’d forgive every crime performed while in scarlet.”

Saffron leaned against the nearest mahogany bookshelf. “My handler is dead. There is nobody left to pardon me, nobody who knows about my assignment.” A slight untruth—there was Nissa, who was in a coma, and who Saffron would not endanger by naming. “And even if the thread of my case was somehow picked up by the new mage-in-command…A lot of the old-timers in the Order are sticklers for the law. They sentenced me to six months in prison for lying about my mage classification. You really think they’d let me off the hook for a cold-blooded murder that was not sanctioned by the kingpin, that wasn’t necessary to keep cover? That actively compromised the investigation by leaving a trail of witnesses?”

Levan’s jaw clenched hard enough to grind his teeth to dust. “This is a play. I know it is.”

“True,” Saffron admitted. “But the only end goal is getting you to trust me again.”

“So you’d go dark from the Order?”

“I have little choice without a handler.”

Of course, in the version of the Havenwood she’d unmade, she’d told Auria Marriosan the full truth of her assignment. As the two stood over Captain Aspar’s dead body, Saffron begged her former colleague to believe she was still working for the silvers, but Auria staunchly resisted. Saffron also confessed what had happened to Tiernan Flane, Auria’s betrothed, who had been compelled into taking his own life by none other than Levan. All of this had gone so horribly wrong that Saffron rewound those ruinous few minutes, and now Auria was once again in the dark.

Levan stopped dead, cloak swirling around his ankles. “What if I wanted you to reestablish contact? Feed them false intel?”

A small surge of victory. He was considering it. “Then that’s what I’ll do.”

His golden hand clenched, unclenched. “Why didn’t you cut and run while you had the chance? Your handler is dead, and you escaped Bloodmoon custody. You could have had a new beginning, away from the silvers and the scarlets both.”

Saffron allowed an intimate silence to swell and deepen before murmuring, “Because I want to be with you.”

And also to make great use of your apocalyptic hoard of wealth, et cetera.

To her surprise, Levan’s expression was one not of hurt or longing but of anger. Righteous, bitter anger—though directed inward or outward, she did not know. She imagined he was thinking of Alucia, of the stomach-drop moment in which he learned Saffron was the very same. Guilt twinged through her like a pulled muscle.

“That ship has sailed.” The anger smoothed away as quickly as it flared. He gestured to the stack of murder evidence without a trace of emotion. “And now you’ve handed me everything I need to destroy you. Or I can kill you, cleanly, and forget you ever existed at all.”

“Shortsighted—you’re too smart for that. The better play would be to keep me close, use me to evade and manipulate the Silvercloaks. Reestablish contact. Let them feed me information, believing me to still be their agent. You wanted there to be another way, beyond killing me or compelling me. I know you did. Here it is.”

Though Levan looked bland and expressionless, Saffron picked up his inner conflict in the subtle flex of his fingers, the too-stillness of his stance. He was visibly searching her proposition for the trick, the trapdoor, still snagging on the why.

“Everything between us was real, Levan.” She allowed a hairline crack in her voice, a subtle splinter of emotion. “If nothing else is true, that is. And if you no longer want me, I understand. But you can still use me.”

“Want is a complex word.” Levan’s left hand gripped his right wrist, just above the golden prosthetic.

“Does it still hurt?”

She studied his face for tension around the jaw, a narrowing of the gaze. She searched too, for a black tint to his veins—an indicator that pain and grief had driven him back into the snarled arms of loxlure, the most potent substance in Ascenfall. A substance to which he had once been horribly addicted. Her swift scans came up mercifully empty.

Levan dropped his grip on the wrist. “No, it’s fine.”

Saffron chuckled softly, though there was little humor behind it. “You’re lying.”

“I suppose you’re something of a specialist on the subject.”

Though the words were designed to sting, they were not suffused with heat. More of a grim resignation, a wound over a wound, a scar reopened.

“I was doing my job, Levan. You of all people should know what it is to put your family and your duty above all else. The Bloodmoons killed my parents. Do you blame me for wanting revenge?”

“No, I don’t blame you. I don’t feel anything for you at all.”

The words were as dull as a blunt axe through wood.

“Another lie,” Saffron parried easily. “And I should know, because I’m something of a specialist on the subject.”

No smile, just that rapidly calcifying suspicion. “The Saffron Killoran I know would not abandon a lifelong desire to avenge her parents for something so petty as love.”

Something twisted in Saffron’s chest. “So you admit that it was love.”

“So you admit that it is past tense.” Levan stared at a point in the middle distance, as though committing every pane of the intricate window to memory. His face was a blank mask. Anyone else might think him numb, empty, but Saffron understood that the stillest waters ran deepest.

I feel everything at full and terrible force. I just keep it inside, where it belongs.

As though some internal decision had been made, he lifted his wand.

Fear drove down through Saffron like lightning through a rod, and it took all her strength not to let it show on her face, not to draw her own wand, not to freeze time with praegelos and flee for Nomaden.

Instead, she lifted her hand to the spot between her collarbones where her old necklace used to sit. The wooden pendant carved from her childhood front door, which Levan had once re-enchanted back into color. She’d bartered it away for the painmaker that had saved Auria’s life in the Havenwood. That her palm sought its familiar comfort was not a performance.

A place for your hand to go when you’re feeling too much, Levan had once observed. He saw her do it now, and somehow, it broke through.

He lowered his wand. Inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, and then set off at a leisurely pace to the nearest bookshelves, as though idly pursuing their contents and not conducting an emotionally fraught and potentially world-ending conversation. “Trust is a bridge that has to be built back stone by stone.”

An ember of hope sparked in Saffron’s chest.

“Thankfully, I’m an excellent mason.” No response, no mirth. She closed the gap between them until they were side by side, facing a shelf of brewery reference titles. “Come on—you make a poetic observation, I ruin it with a joke. That’s how we work.”

“There’s a new shipment of lox arriving in two weeks,” he said crisply. “Oparling darknight. Not into the capital, but into Sorvel. A small port village overlooking Fair Firth, where the Silvercloaks won’t be watching every boat like sunhawks.” A tight beat. “You’ll go in my stead, ensure it runs smoothly. If anything goes wrong…” He gestured to the pile of grim evidence she’d tossed at his feet.

“Of course.” Her hand went to his forearm. “I promise—”

Levan grabbed her by the wrist and forcibly lowered her hand to her side. Finally, he met her eyes properly. The stark blue of his irises was like the surface of the Serantic Ocean, beautiful, gleaming, and yet swirling with deadly sea serpents.

“Stone by stone, Silver.”

Before she could respond, he left the library, scarlet cloak trailing behind him like a bloody shadow.

8

• • • •

Forgotten Coins

Auria Marriosan dreamed of the Havenwood.

Errant curses flew around a rotted cabin, oddly festive, like twinkling Sancsari lights. A bloody starburst spread over the captain’s silver cloak, a terrible blooming rose, the unfurling of crimson petals slow, grotesque. The roof was ripped from the hut as an apathetic owl flew overhead. Mages turned to statues, and as the kingpin and the captain died in the same breath, silence smothered the night.

Saffron was there, in scarlet, her very presence an open wound. She hauled Auria out of the cabin, away from the dizzying confusion, from the roars of grief and the fallen bodies, and then Auria was in the aphotic dark of the forest, and then she was running.

These images and recollections shifted in her dreams—or rather, her nightmares. They gained new contours, depth and sentience, claws and teeth.

The captain’s body whorled into a single curl of white-silver smoke then evaporated. A stone statue fell atop Auria as she tried to flee, crushing her legs, breaking them into a thousand tiny fragments of bone. Saffron was telling her something ruinous. A gas mask filled with blood, and this blood morphed into ruby wax melting over an envelope’s seal. A killing spell pronged into Auria’s chest, and she spent many moments dead before being jerked back, like a fallowwolf hauled out of a chasm on a leash.

She shuddered awake, every nerve ending blazing, as though moments ago she had been on the frontline of some awful war. Darkness still shrouded her chambers; she’d only been asleep for a couple of hours. Last night’s reading material lay crumpled on her pillow.

Her eyes seared with exhaustion after many nights of shallow, haunted sleep. She found herself devastated that it was not yet morning, that there was nothing she could do but sit in the muddy trenches of her own dreams—or memories, whichever they may be.

Neither in sleep nor in consciousness could Auria make sense of the happenings in the Havenwood. Of Saffron’s presence there, in a Bloodmoon cloak, and yet seemingly committing to neither side, even endangering herself to help Auria flee.

There was a warped, layered quality to these memories, the sense that other scenes were tucked inside like forgotten coins in a hidden pocket. She longed to take them out and examine them, but kept finding that the pocket had been sewn shut, that she couldn’t find the seam. Every so often, though, she would feel their shape and heft through the fabric of her mind.

Rolling onto her back, she focused as hard as she could on those forgotten coins, tried to summon a seam through sheer force of will. But the bedroom was sharpening around her, and her senses were brightening and blinking awake, and the further she emerged from her dreams, the more difficult it was to feel the heft of the lost memories at all.

She rolled over in bed, but did not sleep another moment.

Auria’s early morning walk to the hospital wing was too long, illogically long, fatigue pulling the corridors long and gummy as warm toffee. Sunlight poured through the tall arched windows over the creamstone floor. Outside was a blue, grainy morning, textured and gauzy and swollen. Then again, maybe a migraine was coming. Before the headaches usually came a kind of distortion, the world bulging and peeling like old wallpaper.

She hadn’t even been able to pick out a scent for the day. As a lifelong prude with little interest in sex, perfume had always been her preferred source of sensory pleasure—nothing, not even ginger tea, filled her well quite like it. Her collection was vast, an apothecary cabinet filled with tiny, colored bottles from all over the world: varouli and fyrr from Marayat, sweetlemon and rekari from Koura, rosemarroa and opalberry from Irisi. Auria chose a fresh perfume every day, so that they might never lose their potency. But that morning, she couldn’t even bring herself to shower.

Perhaps it was this stale aroma that made Paliran so displeased to see her. Then again, Paliran was never overly thrilled when Auria walked through the hospital wing doors. It wasn’t that the Chief Healer disliked Auria, per se. It was that the detective had been hounding Paliran every day for weeks—ever since Tiernan had been reported missing.

Paliran was Tiernan’s mentor, his first point of contact in the Order, and Auria was laboring under the notion that even if Tiernan was in such peril he could not reach out to his betrothed, he might at least attempt to send a message to a higher-up.

“How is she?” Auria gestured to the comatose form of Nissa Naszi, her greatest rival and least favorite member of the cohort she’d graduated with. Naszi’s warm brown skin had a sallow undertone, and she’d lost a startling amount of weight, atrophying from a leanly muscled warrior to a scrawny street beggar.

Paliran, who looked as exhausted as Auria felt, raked a hand through their caramel-colored hair. The engraved gold and silver bangles on their wrists jangled, and their violet cloak hung rumpled from broad shoulders. “Stop with the farce. You don’t care about Naszi.”

“I do care,” Auria said, somewhat petulantly. While the two had always been at each other’s throats, Auria wished the Eqoran would wake soon. With Saffron apparently participating in organized crime, and Sebran and Tiernan both missing, it was rather petrifying how quickly their cohort’s number had dwindled in the year post-graduation.

And besides, some light antagonism from the dragonesque Wielder might actually be welcome. Most others in the Order were treating Auria as though she were made of gossamerglass, prone to shattering beneath the trauma of the Havenwood. They perhaps had a point.

“There is no change to Naszi’s condition,” Paliran answered, patience carefully measured, precisely performed. “And I have heard nothing from Flane. And my shift finishes in—oh, approximately ninety-eight seconds.”

“Anything from Dallar? Any new leads? Any—”

“Ask him yourself.” Paliran’s tone was soft, yet brusque. The two mages were retreading old ground, and Auria knew she was annoying—she’d always been aware of how grating others found her sanctimonious nature, her constant needling for answers, her meticulous approach to studying, her pious devotion to the law—but in the light of all the grief and uncertainty, she could not quite bring herself to care.

“I have asked him myself,” she muttered. “Many times.” Dallar was overseeing the investigation into Tiernan’s disappearance, and he’d been staunchly tight-lipped, treating Auria like any old civilian rather than a fellow Silvercloak.

“On the official clock, perhaps. But he drinks at the Glory’s Edge most evenings after work. Try approaching him after his sixth pint of bitterale. Once his shoulders have dropped and his pupils start pointing in different directions, he might be more willing to talk.”

Auria nodded gratefully. “Thank you.”

“Of course. I hope you know, Marriosan, that I want to find him as much as you do.”

“No, you don’t.” Auria fought to keep the warmth from her eyes, which were prone to leakage at the best of times. “Nobody does.”

“It’s a rumor, Marriosan. Just a rumor.”

Dallar was indeed slumped over his sixth pint, pale jowls flecked with gray-blond stubble, eyes pink and overly dilated.

The Glory’s Edge was dimly lit, deliberately grungy. A vast mural of Parlin the Great scaling a snow-capped mountain adorned the back wall, callously graffitied to add a comically large vock. The tavern’s booths were made of poorly patched leather, stained tables lit by flickering evercandles. Auria loathed the place, but a lot of senior detectives viewed it as a cultural institution. It was older than the Order of the Silvercloaks, older possibly than time itself, and the maroon carpet older still.

“But you’re treating said rumor like a real lead?” Auria asked, perched at the bar and cradling a mug of ginger tea spiked with flamebrandy. Warmth spilled down her gullet and into all four corners of her chest, but the feeling of hollow cold persisted somewhere far deeper.

Daller shrugged unevenly. “At this juncture, rumors are all we have.”

“Please, just tell me.”

A muscle twitched in Dallar’s jaw. He took another long, slow draw of bitterale. “He was—well, supposedly.” He trailed off, staring into the bottom of his glass.

Auria thought she might go insane if she had to live for one more minute without answers. “Supposedly what?”

“Informing for the Bloodmoons.” Dallar grimaced. “We think he cost us the raid on the docks, leaked our presence back to the scarlets. As for his role in the Havenwood…we’re piecing it together. He was marked missing days before that, but he might have gone into hiding.”

The cold in Auria swelled, overflowed.

Tiernan was a rat?

As soon as she heard the words, it felt completely, terribly plausible. Auria was horrified, disgusted, and yet not shocked, in any real sense.

“Hiding. There’s a possibility…?”

“Until a body is found, there’s always a possibility.”

“What will happen if he does come back?” Auria whispered, overcome with a fear she couldn’t quite name. “Will he—if it’s true? Will he go to Duncarzus?”

Another grimace, stony, jaded. “We’ll weather that storm if it breaks.”

Auria nodded, noting with vague horror that she was crying.

“Don’t let it tarnish the way you think of him, alright?” Dallar laid a fatherly palm on her shoulder, squeezed a little too firmly. His ale-split gaze landed involuntarily on her missing ear. “The scarlet fist is a frightening thing. Stronger mages than Tiernan have cowered beneath it.”

Auria—who was so righteous, so devout to the law, theoretically willing to die for her ideals—swallowed hard. “He’s the reason Nissa is…”

“Yes.” A nod, a sigh, a swig. “Get some rest, Marriosan. You look like mareshit.”

The walk back to the precinct was short, but she took it slow. Her half cup of spiked tea blurred her vision at the edges—she’d never been good at holding her liquor—and she was grateful for it, the smeared membrane between her and the terrible thought that Tiernan might have been a traitor.

She drew in long, cool breaths of the night air, forced herself to look up at the beauty of the starred sky, instead of down at her dragging feet, instead of fixating on all the hideous implications of Tiernan’s treason. She zoomed out of the situation, imagined herself as a frostowl gliding over some distant moor, so far above the suffering of magekind. She pictured herself as a velvine, which she’d always loved, pattering along some high rooftop and—

—she almost tripped over it.

A supine figure lying outside the precinct.

She stumbled back, righted herself.

Looked down at the figure—no, the corpse.

The night canted sharply. Auria’s breath came in short stitches, her blood flowing hot and thin and strange. A black wall of horror rose within her, towering, vertiginous.

The body lay in the gloaming like a marble statue, silver cloak pooled around its torso, a wedge of moonlight draped over a pale face, an imprecision to the cadaver’s stare, a defiant clench to its papery fist, all the contours so familiar and yet so strange, the sight both utterly unfathomable and entirely inevitable.

The bottom fell out of her belly, and then her soul. It was only once she fell to her knees beside her betrothed that she noticed the note pinned to his chest—hammered through his rib cage with a rusty nail, the violence so gratuitous, so ugly and cruel.

This is what we do to Silver rats.

Part Two

Mistrust

9

• • • •

Sixteen Years Ago

The swaddled baby from the woods became a little boy, and the little boy learned the word for what was wrong with him.

Compeller, whispered like a curse, like a death sentence.

The little boy did not understand how abnormal it was for the world to bend to his will, to live a life of no friction. He simply watched with vague interest as other mages rearranged themselves around him, like a river flowing around a rock.

Although he could have commanded anything, his wishes were fairly asinine. An extra serving of a meager dinner. Playing past bedtime in the Havenwood. Always his board game of choice, which he would invariably win—much to his older brother’s ire.

Said brother also had a Compeller’s instinct, the boy thought. Sometimes there was a sort of resistance, a grating feeling, when the boy tried to warp his brother’s will. Two swords clanking together, spraying white-gold sparks. The boy from the woods always won, of course. He was simply too powerful, and any blocks or parries were usually short-lived. But the brother had something—a flint hovering over dried twigs, an ember afraid to leap higher.

The two were thick as thieves. They built dens from snapped branches and old threadbare cloaks, made a pirate ship out of a rotten crate they found in a deadfall. They stole a map from the Rezarans’ resident Healer, jabbed briar thorns through all the places they might venture once grown. The southern tip of Mersina, a valley in Laudon, the craggy heart of Nomaden. Shishai and Soral and Suva. A speck-sized island in the Ashen Narrows. The world was so vast, and their lives were so small.

Neither brother understood the enormity of why they were in hiding, of course. They heard murmurings, but lacked the broader context.

Their parents disappeared for days on end. Often they would return bedraggled, injured even, but always richer in one thing: ascenite. Pearlescent coins by the pocketful, the crateful. A stockpile was built at the center of the tunnels snaking beneath their encampment, guarded by a feral fallowwolf who’d taken a shine to Lorissa Rezaran.

Their numbers grew in kind. The new recruits treated Lorissa with a kind of religious fervor—bowed heads and reverent whispers, a curious swish-flick of their wands to represent their devotion—as though she were a deity in her own right. But to the boy from the woods, she was simply Mother.

One warm summer night, Lyrian and Lorissa departed on a quest to Sorvel, a small northern village overlooking Fair Firth. A kindly old crone by the name of Candin was minding the brothers, ensuring they stayed in their beds and did not get up to mischief. Candin, however, was prone to sudden bouts of unrousable slumber, exacerbated by the immense quantities of flamebrandy with which she spiked her evening ambertea.

Before long, the brothers were creeping out the front door and into the vast woods beyond. The shadows in the forest were long and bruise-colored, the canopy trilling with havendoves. Bare feet skimmed over gnarled roots, black cloaks flapping around skinny ankles, the quiet of dusk draped over the forest like a blanket.

The boy from the woods, now five years old, wore a neat deminite bracelet—nowhere near as heavy or intrusive as the ankle manacles from his birth parents, but enough to temper his power. A precaution, Lorissa Rezaran said. The boy suspected it was largely because of the flamboyant wolftrot he’d encouraged his adoptive mother to perform in the midst of an argument with her husband. Lorissa Rezaran did not like to be undermined, and she certainly did not like to be made to look a fool.

“What shall we do?” his brother asked, voice low and conspiratorial in the eerie woods.

He was seven years old and mid growth spurt, limbs long and gangly, hips too narrow for his newfound height. He was quiet, earnest, a little cowardly, always lost in his rich inner life. The boy from the woods loved him very much, because he had never once made the adopted child feel like a black swan, like an afterthought. They were just brothers, as simple and as complex as that.

The younger boy peered up at the nearest wyrmwood, studying its snarled ladder of branches. It was the tallest in the forest, head and shoulders above its nearest companions. “I wonder if we could see Bellandry from the top of that tree.”

“We wouldn’t know—the Havenwood covers the border.”

“The other way. Over Fair Firth to Brasden.”

“I’m not climbing it, and neither are you.”

“Chickenheart.”

“Yes, yes. I’m a wimp, a featherweight. Any other insults you want to throw at me? They won’t work, but they might make you feel better.”

Frustration surged in the younger boy, a reservoir threatening to overflow a dam. He took a step toward the foot of the tree, where its roots were knotted and protruding from the earth. An inkmouse scuttled over his bare ankle, but he did not flinch. “Suit yourself. I’m going.”

“No! We can’t get hurt. Perant is always low on magic, and if Mother or Father are injured on their mission, our only Healer can’t have wasted his power on broken bones.”

Such logic was of little interest to the younger boy. His limbs twitched with a sort of ingrained restlessness he’d been plagued with ever since he’d learned to walk—the need to be on the move, to be stretching himself, to feel his lungs tighten and his blood pound. He was an addict at five years old, adrenaline his drug of choice.

He took another step forward.

The older brother’s hand went to the spindly wand tucked in his waistband. He’d been given it a year prior, when he turned six, but wasn’t entirely sure how to use it yet.

The younger boy, who knew this, scoffed. “What are you going to do? Fail to cast a basic levitation spell?”

Redness rushed to the older brother’s cheeks. “I’m still bigger and stronger than you.” But he said this uncertainly—he was all angles, while his brother was shorter, stockier, more determined.

“If you’re so big and strong, you climb it.”

There was too much strength behind the words; he knew the moment they left his lips.

It was a command.

Which shouldn’t have mattered, because he was wearing a deminite bracelet.

And yet slowly, terribly, his brother started to climb.

His limbs shook, and he cast a horrified glance over his shoulder at the ground below. The wand tumbled from his hand. “Please. Don’t. Let me down.”

But the younger boy did not retract his inadvertent order—whether through shock, or thrill, or something darker still. He simply stared down at the slender bracelet and marveled at what he was able to do despite it.

“It’s not funny,” the older boy muttered, climbing higher and higher. “I know I don’t want to do this. I know it’s you. Let me down.”

The younger boy fought the smile plucking at the corner of his mouth. “Not until you can see Brasden.”

Two things took root in the Rezaran boys that night.

In the swaddled baby from the woods, a vast and bottomless self-loathing.

And in his adoptive brother, a fear that would simmer and swell for many years to come.

10

• • • •

To Kill a Wand

Levan rolled his late mother’s wand in his golden prosthetic palm.

The wand was a proud, handsome thing, carved of garnet wood and bolstered by an ascenite handle. Its core was shot through with a coveted weaverwick—a gift from dragonkind, allowing its holder to turn back time.

It had always galled Levan that while he was the last living Rezaran, the famed house of Timeweaving, he could not use the wand himself. Even pushing himself to the brink of ruin, he had never been able to wind back a single second. His mother had been weak with the art; perhaps it diluted with every passing generation. Perhaps it had skipped him altogether.

Lorissa Rezaran’s wand was a rare artifact, worth either a hundred thousand ascens or a death penalty, depending upon whom you asked.

And Levan knew, deep in his marrow, that he had to destroy it.

The turncloak was back in his ranks, for now. He had ample evidence to land her a life sentence, if he caught even a whiff of her betrayal. His compelling was a safety net, his ability to overpower her in any given situation. He could keep her tamed, tempered—as long as he didn’t allow his late mother’s wand to fall into her hands.

A shame, really. Saffron Killoran could have been the most valuable weapon in his arsenal. Were she trustworthy, she could make his dark missions so much smoother, could undo any accidental harm he caused to innocents, could enable greater risks in the name of finding a necromancer. Hells, she could even help him revive the prisoner in cell six, turn back time to before they were so grievously injured.

But because he could not trust her, the wand had to die.

He could simply hide the weaverwick, of course, but he knew Killoran well enough to understand that she would stop at nothing to find it. Especially when so few true weaverwicks remained on the continent.

To kill a wand, however, was not a simple endeavor. A mage had to exact more destructive power on the wand than the wand itself possessed—and a wand of this caliber would require an immense amount of magic to best.

Wands were sacred. Sanctified. For the Vallish, to kill a wand was to spit upon all of magic. More superstitious mages than Levan believed such an act would cause future magic to revolt against the destroyer, to resist command, to fight against every utterance and incantation. But Levan was more practical than all of that. He had to ensure nobody could ever wield that maligned power against him again.

The incinerator—a bulky copper furnace large enough to burn three corpses at once, with a broad chimney disappearing into the ceiling—was housed in a windowless room. Brass sconces were bolted to soot-streaked walls, and three braziers stood before the incinerator itself, one burning yellow-gold, one burning pale blue, and one burning pure black. A rack of torches hung on the far wall, ready to carry the different types of flame into the bleak oven.

For this, however, Levan needed emerald. He plucked a vial of freshly made tincture from his potion belt. He’d been rusty, at first, brewing the potions he needed in his old silver cauldron, but there had been a pleasing rhythm to the work, a sort of safe monotony he relaxed into. A meticulous cross-checking of his reference books, a fastidious approach to chopping and grinding and blending ingredients. A clean, uncomplicated satisfaction.

He lifted the heavy door of the incinerator by the wooden handle, blistering heat rushing into his face. He poured the tincture into a shallow groove running around the furnace’s inside, and the orange flames turned vivid green in a smooth wave as the potion trickled along the channel.

Despite the sacrilegious intent, despite all the pain and grief, the perfectly executed spellwork sent a frisson of delight through him. His intellect was one of the purest means of well replenishment he had in his arsenal; very few things gave him more gratification than hard study paying off. That pleasure became power, curling into his well like a whorl of shimmering mist.

As he reached into his pocket to retrieve the weaverwick wand, however, a sharp bolt of agony shot up his forearm, a crossbow fired directly into the stump of his wrist. The golden prosthetic hand gave him flawless functionality, but the phantom pain from the injury itself was still obliterating—sometimes a dull ache, sometimes a searing burn, sometimes a bladed stab, sometimes a crushing sensation as though his hand was trapped beneath a metal bar. The baseline was a sort of fuzzy static, like a rumbling thunderstorm, or the reverberating interior of a bell.

Good, he thought as pain flowed into his well. A well forever diminished by the injury, since he’d had to utter those eternal words—medei perpetua—for the prosthetic’s magic to become permanent.

A quirk of magic was that a mage’s well had a single bucket, so only one spell could be held at any given time. Which was fine, if you were simply transmuting one object into another—coffee into hot cocoa, or a human body into a stone statue. The magic occurred in the changing. After all, a mage murdered by a killing spell would stay dead once the caster moved on to another incantation. But if you needed an object or a person to stay enchanted forever—enchanted, or protected, or alive in some unnatural way—then a part of the magical well had to be sacrificed.

Levan flexed the golden hand, still uncertain he’d made the right choice. He needed every scrap of power for the war to come.

Once the ruthless pain ebbed, he pulled the handle of the furnace’s loading compartment and withdrew the tray-like section, carefully laying the weaverwick wand on the very center.

He would not allow himself to consider the magnitude of what he was about to do. He would simply do it.

Stomach clenching, he raised his own wand.

“Sen abolan.”

Obliterate.

The effect on both the wand and Levan was immediate—and devastating.

The weaverwick shone a bright, apocalyptic white.

Levan crumpled to the ground, his own wand clattering across the flagstones. Every scrap of magic in his well was sucked dry, and then some—a sense of dangerous overreach, of a negative energy balance. The feeling that not just his magic had been siphoned, but something of himself too. His life-force, his essence.

The wand peeled terribly, lambent wood flaying from the core and vanishing in ghostly ribbons, the internal wick emitting a marrow-curdling shriek like a wounded dragon’s final roar.

Levan fought with every fiber of his being to reach up and shove the loading compartment shut.

As the dying wand met the green flames, a fierce explosion detonated through the chamber, through the room, through the city of Vallin entire. Something essential in Levan, and also in the world, perished forever.

For several moments, he lost consciousness.

When he woke, it was as though he’d been in a coma for a decade.

Weak, empty, sore.

A shadow, a negative image, a pale tracing of his usual self.

The braziers blurred above him, yellow-gold and pale blue and darkest black. Lying supine on the cold, hard flagstones, he cocked an elbow over his forehead and squeezed his eyes shut against the scarred inside of his arm. His breaths were shallow, unconvincing, and every inch of his body trembled.

Hells, he needed to replenish, and fast. If someone tried to take him down now, they might well succeed. He vowed to go for a long, brutal run. Ten miles, twenty, enough to hurt badly, so badly it was good, enough to begin the process of refilling his well.

For Levan, pain and pleasure had always been two sides of the same coin. He could not refill his well with a simple cup of hot cocoa, because on some level, he did not believe he was deserving of pleasure at all. No, he had to suffer for it.

Then again, perhaps there was a simpler way.

Loxlure.

A small stash of the black substance was tucked away in his desk drawer; an omnipresent test of will. A test he was dangerously close to failing.

Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw his father’s lifeless body, the shocked peel of his dead stare. Heard the hoot of an owl overhead, the judder of time as Saffron inelegantly paused and unpaused it, her body lurching across the room in uneven fits and starts, uncanny, arachnid-like. Felt a deminite shard through his palm, draining away his very lifeblood.

Loxlure would ease the memories in a way nothing else could, like fresh water cleansing blood from a wound until it ran clear. All the tense muscles and rattling bones in his body would soften. The shooting agony in his wrist would melt to nothing. The questions in his mind, too big for the cage of his skull—how to lead, how to find another necromancer, how to exist alongside the silver traitor he had so loved—would shrink and shrink until he could roll them in his palm like dice.

Oblivion called his name, and it took every shred of willpower he possessed not to answer.

11

• • • •

A Rookie with a Grudge

Saffron loathed the kingpin’s office. The black walls with bolted-in manacles, designed to hold victims in place as they were branded. The heavy red velvet drapes, in which Porrol Vogolan had concealed himself on the night Saffron was initiated. The soot-streaked hearth, once fiercely hot all the time, stifling, oppressive, but today cold and coated with ash.

Levan sat at his father’s old desk, cleared of its old paraphernalia: the bowl of sentient eyeballs, the stacks of correspondence, the miniature golden hourglass. Instead sat only a hexagonal gold teapot, three tea-bag tabs dangling over the handle. Saffron knew exactly what Levan was straining from the scent alone: clove tea, “for the curing of anguish.”

There was something faded, something internally bruised about him. Grief, perhaps. He’d run for three hours that morning, which struck Saffron as vaguely obscene. She badly wanted to be soft with him, to insist he rest and eat and recover, to knead his sore muscles in a gently suggestive manner, but forced herself to match his cool indifference.

Perhaps cool indifference was needed, given what she was about to do.

Levan gave her a terse nod. Rasso snored emphatically from his sprawl along the fireplace as Saffron lifted her wand to her mouth.

“Et vocos, Auria Marriosan.”

Levan and Saffron had argued for hours over whom inside the Order she should target as a new bridge. Saffron felt it should be Tenébo Jebat, who already knew the dead captain had sent someone into the scarlet lair. Levan had compelled the information out of Jebat in the Havenwood: Aspar has an undercover Silvercloak in the Bloodmoons. I don’t know who, but they’re close to you. Jebat was also a kind, merciful mage, trusting when it mattered, a believer in the honor code among detectives, willing to bend the rules in the name of the greater good. Saffron couldn’t imagine a better handler.

But Levan had insisted she approach Auria.

Saffron was reluctant. Not only had Auria not believed Saffron about the assignment in the Havenwood, but she wasn’t senior enough to action anything significant on Saffron’s behalf. There was also the fact that Saffron still cared deeply for her former friend—after all that had happened with Tiernan, the prospect of ensnaring Auria tighter in the crimson web was agonizing.

Yet Saffron would have to heed Levan’s orders if she wanted to stay beneath the scarlet wing, if she wanted access to his vast vaults of ascenite when the time came to unmake twenty years and save her parents. Auria, Jebat, what would it matter in the end?

Auria, however, did not answer.

“Et vocos, Auria Marriosan,” Saff tried again.

Only silence; long, defiant, poignant somehow.

Saffron lifted her gaze to Levan, who watched with a keen coldness not unlike his late father’s. She tried not to shiver. “I told you—this isn’t the right way to reestablish contact. Auria isn’t senior enough, and is such a sanctimonious rule follower that she won’t engage with—”

Levan held up a golden palm. “I found her betrothed’s body in the crypt and had it deposited outside the precinct with a note implying our involvement. She’ll want to know what happened to him.”

The kingpin delivered this information as though discussing dry foreign policy and not the crude murder of her old friend. Despite her vivid experience with his callousness, Saffron still felt a lurch of horror. All the caring instincts she’d felt toward Levan withered and died.

Tiernan had been handed over in the most brutal way possible. Saffron might have had the chance to revive him, to rewrite his terrible fate, but now…

Auria would be destroyed.

Saff swallowed the grief, the disgust. It would all be unmade eventually, if she played her hand right. In the version of reality where her parents survived, so too would Tiernan. Whatever happened between now and then was entirely impermanent—though it was hard to convince her roiling stomach as such.

“Nice plan. Isn’t working, though.” She pointedly held up her quiet wand. “We should try Jebat.”

“No.” Levan rose to his feet, smoothing down his scarlet cloak. Rasso raised a sleepy head, then lay back down with a sigh. “I want Marriosan. She has a grudge against us—first her grandfather dead at our hand, now her betrothed. Rookies with grudges are easier to manipulate and exploit than senior detectives with no skin in the game. We’ll wear her down eventually.”

The grim determination on Levan’s face sent another lance of dread through Saffron. The end justifies the means, she reassured herself. Any harm that befalls Auria in the coming months will be eventually rewritten. Some quiet corner of her conscience wondered just how far this logic might take her.

“Fine. Anything else?” She fought to keep the sarcastic honorifics out of her mouth, such as o’ great leader of mine and your royal highness and other jejune titles that might get her killed.

“Stay on the Whitewings. Follow them, figure out their goal, feed it back to me.”

“A dangerous pursuit. If they catch me, they’ll kill me.”

Levan gave her an expression so cutthroat she realized how entirely expendable she’d become; a pawn to move around a board, to sacrifice in the name of winning the broader game. “So don’t get caught.”

“And if I have to return to the pleasurehouses in the name of Whitewing infiltration?”

“Return?”

“That’s where I killed the last one.” She lifted her chin, imbued her gaze with pointed implication. “One of the more eventful threesomes I’ve participated in.”

For the briefest of moments, Levan went utterly still. She wondered if he was picturing her naked, writhing in pleasure with two mages who were not him. There was a dark flicker behind his eyes, an involuntary clenching of the knuckles, a dart of muscle in the jaw.

Then, with boreal detachment, “Do what you must.”

12

• • • •

Garnet Bark Daze

Auria awoke snarled in her sheets, eyes gummy with tears, betrothal tattoo burning between her ribs—and the voice of a former friend echoing through the tip of her wand.

“Et vocos, Auria Marriosan.”

Something inside her lurched awake.

Saffron had been in the Havenwood in a scarlet cloak—working with the Bloodmoons, perhaps, but she had helped Auria flee the scene when everything went south. Killoran’s presence carried that feeling of a memory inside a memory, the sense there was something important she’d forgotten, some piece of the puzzle lingering on the very periphery of her mind.

Solving that puzzle felt more crucial than ever, after learning of Tiernan’s treachery, after finding him murdered. Killoran could shed some light on exactly what had happened, how he’d been turned, how he’d ended up dead. She could offer an explanation that exonerated Tiernan’s name. Perhaps he’d been killed for resisting the Bloodmoons’ demands, instead of heeding them.

Oh, how Auria hoped that was true. Then she could grieve the mage she had loved so deeply, instead of the coward he was rumored to have become.

If she opened a line of communication with Killoran, the turncloak’s intel could help Auria ultimately bring the Bloodmoons down. They had slaughtered her grandfather, after all, then targeted her betrothed. It was personal, and nothing would give her greater satisfaction than to see them brought to their knees.

But a righteous, self-serving hesitation stayed her hand. A desire not to be tainted by the same ugly crimson, a desire to salvage her name and her reputation—which were already sustaining mortal damage, thanks to her close association with a known rat.

She asked herself what a future Grand Arbiter would do. Keep their hands clean, or take the riskier path, hoping it might lead to the downfall of the deadliest criminal organization in Atherin’s history. Such a victory could be a massive platform to the most powerful law enforcement seat in the country.

Auria, for once in her life, simply did not know what the right move was.

Nor did she care. Grief had hollowed her ambition into a desolate shell. She felt like something once lush now dried out, a pomegranate shucked of its seeds.

“Et vocos, Auria Marriosan,” came that same familiar voice.

Untangling herself from the bear trap of her bedspread, she reached out to the wandholder on her nightstand, grabbed her sapphire-studded willow wand, and hurled it across the circular bedroom. It collided with the far wall and fell to the ground with a clatter.

Saints, her head hurt. Aura migraines, true to her name. Holes of blinding white light piercing her vision, a pain so bad behind her eye sockets that she often vomited. She reached into her bedside drawer and pulled out a couple of garnet bark pills, swallowing them dry. Of course, she could let the pain ameliorate the magic in her well, but she’d never been good at enduring it.

Besides—she couldn’t bear for today to be any harder than it needed to be.

Daylight filtered through a knife-crack in her brocade curtains, signaling that she’d once again overslept. It took so long to drift off each night, her body clenched against the coming onslaught of lurid nightmares, that few alarms could wake her come morning. So far she’d missed several briefings, a breakfast date with her mothers, and the jeweling ceremony of the dead captain.

After the discovery of Tiernan’s corpse, she’d been granted a certain amount of grace by the Order (though not her mothers). Time to grieve, to mourn, was only fitting. Her work, important though it was, could wait until the scales of her emotions had balanced. A Silvercloak acting from a place of despair was not a Silvercloak worth their salt.

But today was different. Auria could not be late.

Because today, a new captain would be announced.

Hundreds of detectives milled around the Grand Atrium awaiting the commissioning ceremony. Officers of the various Atherin precincts rubbed shoulders with professors from the Academy, while eight white-cloaked cadets from this year’s fresh intake clustered together, gossiping and speculating over who would be promoted to the hallowed seat.

Auria made polite conversation in a garnet bark daze. Sympathy was written on some faces, careful detachment on others, as though Auria’s losses were contagious. She barely heard the hushed condolences, the unsubtle needling for information on Tiernan’s possible treachery. She simply nodded vaguely, drifting from conversation to conversation, thinking how unfair it was that she had been ruined and they had not.

While she smelled great—she was wearing the last perfume Tiernan ever bought her, a rare glaciersmoke and lavender blend from the Mølda Isles—she knew, from her brief and troubling glimpse in the mirror, that she looked a mess. She’d wrangled her frizzy ginger hair into a braid over her missing ear, pinned her silver cloak proudly at the throat with a sapphire brooch. Her cobweb scars, which she ordinarily liked—they were ethereal, characterful—seemed starker than before Tiernan’s death. Her black boots were gleaming, her navy tunic and trousers neatly pressed, yet her eyes were puffed beyond recognition, a vein bulging in her forehead from the sheer hysteria of her crying fits.

Too sensitive to be a detective.

Too sensitive for the world.

Her mother’s words from several years ago drifted into her mind unbidden. She’d never been meant to hear them, had eavesdropped from the top of their palatial home’s sweeping staircase, but they had dogged her ever since.

“…was so sorry to hear of your betrothed.”

Someone else was talking to her.

Betrothed. Such a lofty word, so full of promise and tender hope.

A memory, excruciating in its vividity: the soft intertwining of Tiernan’s pinkie with hers as the tattooist needled at her skin. The halo of curls around his face, the glisten of tears in his eyes. If Auria was too sensitive for the world, so was Tiernan. Some said opposites attract, but she had always found immense comfort in the feeling of not being alone. Their hearts cleaved to the same contours, and nothing could have felt more intimate.

Because they hadn’t yet wed, his mother had won his gemstone after the jeweling ceremony. His mother, who had so little respect for him. His mother, who likely kept the pale blue jewel in a sealed box somewhere out of sight. Vathila Flane would not display the body of her second son proudly, but rather tuck it away like an unfortunate family ghost.

“Thank you,” Auria murmured blandly. “It was a terrible shock.”

Only…was it? Or had Tiernan always been fated to be prey? Was his softness always going to be exploited? Were his cowardly tendencies always going to lead him to the gallows in this line of work?

Had his mother been right all along?

Had her own?

“At least he had the good sense to die before tainting you too.”

The crude audacity of the statement yanked Auria from her reverie, sharpening the scene around her. She was talking to a tall, bespectacled man, with thin black bands tattooed around a light brown neck, a large sloping belly, and long white hair tied back in a low ponytail. Auria recognized him from her entrance interview prior to enrolling in the Academy.

“I beg your pardon?” she breathed, through a set of furious blinks. “Sergeant Karvas.” She added this as an afterthought, but there was little subordination to it. A scathing hiss of an address.

The mage clasped his hands in front of him, a bland expression on his face. “I’ll never forget your closing statement during the Academy interview process. Always so idealistic.”

Auria’s jaw clenched so hard she felt it in her temples. “Perfect scores on my entrance exam, and you almost didn’t admit me because of that statement.”

“Setting your sights on the Grand Arbitership so young…we were worried you’d let that ambition impair judgment in your policework. We must always put what is good and right before our own personal goals.”

The words impaled her like arrows loosed from a bow—only this morning she’d been weighing her potential political platform with proper police strategy.

“I have never strayed from good and right,” she replied, her practiced smoothness so at odds with the fire raging in her belly. “What better qualities could one want in a Silvercloak or a Grand Arbiter?”

“Yet should any one mage have the power to decree what constitutes good and right?”

Auria frowned, uncertain whether Karvas was arguing against the existence of one of the highest seats in Vallin, or simply trying to provoke her. “No. That is why we also have the law, written by the finest Vallish minds over the course of several hundred years.”

He peered at her down the long, freckled prow of his nose. “And the law should always be followed to the letter.”

“Of course,” she replied indignantly. “Otherwise why are we here?”

“The end result never justifies the means? We should never, I don’t know, lie in an interrogation to trick a suspect into confessing. Or rub shoulders with unsavory individuals in the pursuit of information.”

There was something behind that last statement, a subtle leaning forward, a revealing of his conversational intent. A knowing keenness to his gaze. Disquiet trickled down Auria’s spine like a melting icicle.

“It is lawful to lie in an interrogation room,” she said carefully, “but I still prefer not to. Ditto cavorting with criminals in any capacity.”

He chuckled mirthlessly. “You exemplify my earlier point perfectly. If the Flane boy had survived, had pulled you into his treasonous orbit, would that not have made you feel dirty?”

Auria felt the rare but acute desire to punch his smug face. “There is still no hard evidence that Tiernan was turned by the Bloodmoons, Sergeant Karvas.”

The very edge of his lip quirked almost imperceptibly, a subtle hook, gone in a flash. “Actually, it’s Captain Karvas.” A performative glance at his pocketwatch. “Or rather, it will be in the next four minutes or so.”

Stomach in freefall, Auria fought the urge to groan aloud.

“Oh, and Marriosan? My first order of business will be taking you off the Bloodmoon case.” An overly rueful smile. “You’re too close to it, too much emotional skin in the game. You’ll be reassigned to the Whitewings.”

Frustration knotted Auria’s belly. “But—”

“Personal vendetta is a dangerous thing. It addles the judgment, skews the moral code. Rots inside the chest, poisoning from the heart outward.” A sickly half beat, a loaded stare, a hammer finally dropping. “Just ask Saffron Killoran.”

13

• • • •

Aforementioned Dangerous Pursuit

Saffron wandered the streets of Atherin for days, but did not stumble upon a stray Whitewing organically.

She wore her scarlet cloak brazenly, beckoningly, knowing the scarlets were targets, knowing she could be jumped at any moment for the audacity of existing in red. She stalked Dubias Row and Buckbeak Place and Arollan Mile with her shoulders hitched up by her ears, wand in hand, nerves fizzing through her like sherbet, a low clench to her belly—but, as so often happened when one went looking for trouble, trouble averted its gaze.

Time to force the matter.

Despite her bravado while taunting Levan over her murderous threesome, returning to Golden Hour brought Saffron little arousal. She was here because she had a job to do, and though the danger did heighten her senses somewhat, she was too focused on staying alive to feel any sort of erotic charge. This was business and business alone.

Just as she was paying the lofty cover charge, however, she spotted a potential mark. Another male Whitewing, this one short and dark-skinned, with a barrel of a stomach and an imprecise gaze, black eyes blurred with liquor. He stumbled out of the pleasurehouse with his white cloak askew, the strings of his tunic still untied and his belt dangling limply by his crotch. Saffron made a show of not having enough coinage, nodded her feigned apology to the doorman, and set off after the drunken foe.

Silencing her boots, she clung to him like a shadow.

The Whitewing staggered down Broad Row, but rather than heading for the portari gate or another tavern, he cut a strange path through the city’s darkest alleys, muttering into his wand as he walked. His words were slurred, his sentences both incoherent and incomplete, but Saffron picked out enough detail to add color to her report of the evening’s investigation.

By the time she eventually lost her mark in the bustle of Velclaw Street, she was both excited and afraid to tell Levan what she’d learned.

Levan was not alone when his wand tip crackled.

He and Segal were going over a set of gamehouse accounts in the kingpin’s office, ensuring the loxlure earnings they’d laundered through the roulette wheels were not so plentiful as to raise flags with the city auditors. Beneath the desk, Levan was idly pressing the nib of the quill into his thigh, but the cutting sensation was barely enough to impact his magic. Pain was like that; diminishing returns.

“Et vocos, Levan Celadon.” Killoran’s voice was accompanied by the vague din of a busy street.

“Go ahead,” he replied evenly. Segal watched him with equal parts curiosity and impatience—he hated going over the accounts, and every passing second was another in which he was not inhaling bitterale. “Dismissed,” he added, and the Risen henchmage slipped out of the office without so much as a farewell.

“I have good news and bad news.”

Is the good news that you had another orgasm at the hands of my sworn enemies? Levan thought, with a bitter stab of jealousy he did not care to examine.

“Alright.”

“The good news is that I have not perished in the line of duty. I know you’re probably wringing your hands with worry, peering out the library window like a mother whose son has gone to war, et cetera. As for the bad, well—do you recall that I slew a Whitewing in a bold effort to regain your favor?”

Do I recall that you slew a Whitewing during a hellsdamned threesome?

“It rings a bell.”

“The raised black shoulder pads on his cloak were not, in fact, a fashion statement. It was the Whitewing leader.”

Cold prickled over Levan’s scalp. “You murdered their leader?”

Saffron, for whatever absurd reason, burst out laughing. “I can’t tell whether it was an extraordinary stroke of good fortune, or hilariously bad luck. The latter would be in keeping with the general trajectory of my existence.”

“Did you happen to glean this leader’s name?”

“Avar Martou?”

Everything in Levan froze.

His ribs became brittle ice, heart throbbing against them like a pickaxe. For several moments, he could not speak, could not process.

“Levan? Did you hear—”

“Yes,” he choked out, recovering enough to add, “I heard” with a little more dignity.

“What is it?” Saffron picked up on his rattled tone even through the faint hum of the wand connection. “Why is Avar Martou significant?”

A memory lit up behind his eyes, bright enough to make him flinch.

Riding atop an axelmare through the Wolfwoods one late spring, spores drifting on the golden light, the canopy trilling with dawndoves. The feel of her back pressed against his chest, long black hair tickling his cheek. She was telling him that though Lost Dragonborn had never appealed to her, Avar lived for the books—modeled himself on the protagonist, even. Levan thought, with a mundane and childlike excitement, that he looked forward to meeting Avar one day. They could share theories, discuss their favorite chapters.

“Alucia’s brother,” he muttered, digging the quill tip so deeply into his thigh that warm blood seeped through his black wool trousers.

Saffron blew air through her lips. “Saints. I retract my churlish laughter.”

Levan forced himself to treat this like any other piece of intel on a rival organization. “How long had he been in command? And who has replaced him?”

“I didn’t discern much more. The Whitewing disappeared out of earshot. I think he—”

There was the sound of a scuffle, a clashing of bodies, a low grunt from Saffron, a panting huff from her—assailant? Boots dragged into an alley, heels kicking and bucking against cobbles. Levan stood abruptly, though to what end, he did not know. He was powerless only to listen.

“Why are you following me, scarlet scum?” came a snarling male voice, consonants slightly blurred.

“How long was Avar Martou in command?” Saffron’s tone was stupidly chipper. Levan imagined she’d been grabbed from behind, a forearm pressed over her throat, a wand to her temple. His blood flared hot and bright.

“Sen ammorten.”

Levan’s stomach lurched at the sound of the man’s curse, but there was another scuffle, overlapping gasps and footsteps, as though they were now circling each other.

“Who replaced Avar Martou?” she asked calmly, that absurd, nihilistic fearlessness.

“Sen ammorten,” the male mage hissed.

“My, what a temper. Can’t we have a civil conversation?”

“Die, cunt. Sen ammorten.”

More tussling fracas, more heavy breathing, more grunts of—pain? Was that pain? Was she hurt?

Levan’s mind wheeled as he wondered how full her well was, how long she could defend herself. Some dark, helpless part of him wanted her to fire her own killing curses, to flee unscathed.

Moments later, she’d either cast something or been killed. The wand connection dropped, and Levan was left with the sound of his own uneven breathing.

“Sen doloran,” Saffron slung out, surprised by the malice coursing through the words. Her lip bled from the fist she’d taken to the face—the taste of salt and metal had clearly riled her up.

The torture curse buried itself in the belly of the drunk Whitewing. Thank the Saints he was so inebriated, so sloppy, or dodging his errant ammortens might not have been so straightforward.

His roars of pain filled the alley as he staggered backward, fell heavily to the ground. His pine wand clattered to the cobbles, and she tucked it in her belt before standing over his writhing body, wand trained over his heart. He bucked and brayed, but nobody from the street came to investigate.

“How long was Avar Martou in command, and how long—oof.”

He kicked out at her ankles like a bucking steed, and she stumbled. Her concentration lapsed, and the spell broke, and the second he was no longer in mortal agony, he found his sobriety. Sensing defeat, he did not try to disarm her, to win back his wand, but rather took off back to Velclaw Street with surprising speed.

Saffron considered pursuing, but she was winded, her struck ankle throbbing like a second heartbeat. She had the sense of a narrow escape, the instinct that she should fold the hand.

Then again, Levan did not seem to care overly whether she lived or died, and it was to him she now answered. She lifted her wand to her bleeding mouth, reestablished et vocos.

“Killoran?” She could’ve sworn there was a note of relief in the word, but this was perhaps wishful thinking. The do as you must command still echoed through her like a funeral song.

She climbed to her feet, stalked toward the mouth of the alley. “I lost him. I had his wand, but took a kick to the ankle while trying to wrangle more information out of him. My concentration lapsed, and the curse fell away, and he ran off drunk and wandless. Should I pursue?”

“Don’t push your woeful luck.” A heavy pause; she could picture him smoothing the front of his robes. “Good work, Killoran. But for now, stop following the Whitewings. Focus on Marriosan—whatever it takes.”

14

• • • •

Clean Hands

After being officially reassigned to the Whitewings, Auria was summoned to the office of Detective Ténebo Jebat.

Jebat was a Sinyi mage with dark brown skin, wiry black hair sprayed white at the temples, and a gold-and-ruby septum ring. The walls of his chambers were hung with framed paintings of racehorses—he loved the chariots—as well as letters from the families of victims to whom he’d brought justice.

Outside, storm-swollen clouds purpled the sky, and a low fog smothered the city’s infamous spires.

“Detective Marriosan.” Jebat gestured for her to take a seat. He was performing a deep squat, gripping the edge of the desk and grimacing slightly. “Excuse me—bad back. The captain has ordered me to get you up to speed on the Whitewing operation so far.”

“Wonderful,” Auria muttered, her vision rheumy, migraine-smeared. The sweet-spice of the cinnamon and tarmot perfume she’d chosen that morning, rather than filling her well with pleasure, was only making her nauseous. She perched gingerly on the edge of a maroon velvet-upholstered chair.

“You seem unhappy to be reassigned.” Jebat’s voice had the gentle lisp regional to Cape Fala. “But given everything—”

“Everything has given me even more reason to want the Bloodmoons eradicated.”

With an immense middle-aged crunching of bone and cartilage, Jebat rose and leaned back against the waist-high windowsill. “Your colleagues are working themselves ragged on that very thing.”

Not as hard as I would work.

“I know.”

“You’re too close—”

“—to the situation. So I’ve heard.”

Jebat hooked a booted toe beneath the handle of his desk drawer and inelegantly tugged it out. With a ring-clad hand—nails painted a rich cherry red—he withdrew a stack of rolling papers and a small tobacco tin. He rattled the tin, raising a brow at Auria. “Do you mind? Ever since my husband and I separated, I can’t kick the habit.”

“Go ahead,” Auria said, even though she minded greatly.

“The Whitewings aren’t the only reason I summoned you.” Jebat got to work rolling an achullah joint. “Aspar was mentoring you, before she passed?”

Auria fought hard to dispel the mental image of her captain’s bloody death. “Yes. First in wielding, then in a more general sense.”

“She spoke very fondly of you. Your brilliant mind. Your frankly demented work ethic.” A knowing smile, the corners of his mouth rippling with wrinkles. “I suppose you think nobody else will work quite as hard as you at purging the scarlet rot.”

“Of course not,” Auria lied.

Lighting the end of the joint with his wand tip, Jebat took a deep drag, cranked a window open—letting in a bitterly cold draft—and tapped the ash into a small jade dish on his desk. “I’d like to fill the gap Aspar left behind. Mentor you, if you’d let me.”

“I’d be honored.”

She meant it. Jebat was highly respected.

“So, tell me of your career goals.” A hand wave. “Yes, the Grand Arbitership, eventually—you’ve made no secret of that. But what does the path there look like?”

“Several years in silver, working high-profile cases, perhaps leading my own task force. Then moving into prosecution. I have my Knight’s Scroll in Law, and I think it’d lead nicely into higher office.”

“Interesting.” Another puff of the joint, two, three, the room now filling with the spiced smoke that always reminded Auria of Nissa Naszi. “You’ll need a squeaky-clean record, though I suspect you know that. Not just the big, obvious stuff—not being a corrupt piece of shit—but how you carry yourself day to day. How you talk to suspects, how you interview and interrogate witnesses. How honest you are when something goes wrong, how meticulous you are with your paperwork.”

Validation surged inside her—Karvas had made this modus operandi seem so juvenile, so naïve.

“Good thing I love paperwork.” Auria pulled out a parchment scroll and began making notes in loopy cursive. She could’ve enchanted the quill to do it for her, of course, but she liked giving her hand and her brain something to do. “The captain already doesn’t like me. How much of a problem is that going to be?”

“Karvas doesn’t like anyone, in the traditional sense. Respect, however—that can be earned. Stay in your lane. Follow every order to the letter. Work the cases you’re told to work, and no more.” Then, dropping his voice and eyeing the door to make sure it was closed, he added, “You may earn his respect, his trust—but that doesn’t mean you should necessarily trust him.”

Auria’s quill stilled on the parchment. “What do you mean?”

“Karvas and Grand Arbiter Dematus are close friends. Allies, even. And…well, Great Gods, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but Dematus is compromised.”

“Compromised how?”

“Nobody quite understands the extent of it, but it’s believed the Bloodmoons have some blackmail that keeps her in line. It’s why securing an arrest warrant for the scarlets has been near impossible.”

Auria felt a rocking of her foundations, a seismic shift in her worldview. Though she hadn’t always agreed with Dematus’s policies, she’d always admired her enormously.

“So the new captain is corrupt too?” She gripped the quill so tightly it almost snapped.

“I said no such thing.”

“You implied it.”

“Implication doesn’t get you very far in a court of law.”

Auria could barely comprehend the gravity of these revelations. With a compromised Grand Arbiter and the new captain loyal to her, bringing down the Bloodmoons was going to be…impossible.

It was no longer her job to care. She needed only to focus on the Whitewings, on fulfilling her duty and mourning the loss of her betrothed and somehow besting these damned migraines. Yet she did care. She cared all the time, about everything.

Mind reeling, she lowered her quill tip. “So: play fair, forget the Bloodmoons, avoid Dematus, don’t ruffle the captain’s feathers. Anything else?”

“The Whitewings are a great opportunity to prove your nous. Rising rapidly in profile and threat level, but sloppier than the Bloodmoons, with no clear chain of command. Not tied to one family, but rather a gang of ex-cons who met in Duncarzus and got organized on the outside. Began as ascenite bandits before moving into achullah—which isn’t illegal, but cutting it with darkseed to make it more addictive certainly is. A sinister operation, if not particularly sophisticated.

“For the full bust, we need evidence of organizational crime. Ascen laundering, widespread distribution of banned substances. We’re working on the darkseed angle, but we can’t get a handle on their distribution model. They don’t seem to operate from a centralized location like the Bloodmoons. They’re scattered, mobile, which means even an arrest warrant might not get us very far. Like trying to gather all the pollen floating away on a breeze. And a search warrant means nothing when there’s no premises to search in the first place.

“But there are plenty of loose threads to tug at. They’re very curse-happy when it comes to killing collateral.” He tapped a pointed thumbnail on the metallic lid of his tobacco tin. “Follow the dead bodies. Two this week we can confidently attribute to the Whites, and likely more by the time Laving rolls around.”

He pushed a manila folder over the desk to her, but she was too busy note-taking to reach for it.

“Files on the first two—patrons murdered in pleasurehouses, both tortured and killed in the exact same way. Find the patterns, tug at the threads. Build the case the way the Academy taught you. Even if you’re just taking down one rotten apple at a time, rather than the whole orchard…that’s how we save lives. One at a time.”

Auria’s hand cramped so severely she was tempted to switch to royal shorthand, but she considered such concession a failure. Jebat watched her furious scrawling with a faint tinge of amusement. She was famous for her never-ending note-making an all manner of subjects, including but not limited to: the types of soil native to Atherin (so that she might know when a perpetrator’s boot-prints hailed from elsewhere); the least congested routes on the portari gate network (so that she might always find the fastest way to a crime scene); and the most commonly frequented taverns of famous stage actor Dallo Tander (for personal reasons).

“You’re going to tear a hole in the parchment.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Call me Tené.” He sighed wearily, rubbing at his eyes. “Why the Silvercloaks, Marriosan? Dematus never wore silver. No detective in history has made that highest of offices. You might have had a more direct track to the Arbitership if you’d gone straight into the courts or taken the scholarly route. Why put yourself through five years on the streetwatch and the rigors of the Academy?”

To prove people wrong was the honest answer, although not necessarily the healthiest one.

She’d always been smart, sparkle-eyed, with a sunshiny disposition and a fundamentally optimistic outlook. Many people in her life told her they wouldn’t want to see such things beaten out of her. Her mothers didn’t want her to become jaded, her sisters didn’t believe she could handle seeing a mangled corpse without vomiting. Even her law professors worried that the dark, seedy underbelly of the world would be too much for her to bear—one had offered her an adjunct teaching position for a more sanitized environment. Somewhere to ponder the philosophy of law from a safe distance.

She wanted to prove to all of them that not only was she capable of facing down this tainted world, but also that she wouldn’t let it tarnish her.

She smiled, trying not to wince at the hammering pain behind her eye sockets. “To do good.”

Jebat looked, for the briefest moment, troubled by this. He tried to smile in return, but it was too thin, too jaded. “Then I consider it my duty not to let the likes of Vel Karvas stand in your way.”

15

• • • •

Desire Lines

“Darling, you look dreadful.”

“Thank you, Mømi,” Auria muttered, slumping exhaustedly into a chair. “Forget the startling intellect and relentless moral fortitude. I’m so sorry that I look bad.”

Auria’s mothers exchanged a dark look over her head.

The Marriosans lived in a tall, elegant townhouse on Goldendawn Avenue, a sought-after residential street near the River Corven. Every inch of the interior was vibrantly hand-painted—a mix of delicate details and bold swathes of color, gold and silver swirls with constellations of pearl-stars, stark pink sideboards, and sunny yellow ceiling roses. A droll city official had once declared it “a crime upon the senses and an assault upon the sensible mind,” which Auria’s artist mother, Lulí, had taken as an immense compliment.

The other of Auria’s mothers, Victaria, was a Royal Wardholder, having given up all the power in her well to help uphold the Great Wards of Atherin. The king rewarded the Royal Wardholders with more ascens than most mages knew what to do with—it was for this reason that the Crown was rumored to be bankrupt, but also the reason Atherin hadn’t been invaded for centuries, and really, you had to weigh these things up.

“Her betrothed just died in the line of duty,” Victaria said, shooting her Nyrøthi wife a cease-and-desist sort of expression. “Perhaps we might forsake commentary on her complexion for the time being. How are you doing, my heart?”

Auria hadn’t shared any real detail on Tiernan’s death—so much of the Silvercloak work was classified, and there was also a sense of shame over how he had died. So she focused not on the events, but the feelings, of which there were an abundance.

“Every room I enter, I expect to see him there.” Tears sprung to Auria’s eyes like her body had some sort of internal leak. “Every corner I round, every time my wand crackles with et vocos. For a splintering second, my heart believes it’s him. I grieve a thousand times over, every single day. I can’t comprehend that the future will exist without him in it. And I just—I don’t understand where he’s gone. That’s the kind of overriding feeling. A kind of frantic existential confusion. Where is he?”

“I know, love. I know so much.” Victaria’s brows crinkled in sympathy as she filled a kettle, voice fogged by her own grief. Her hand went to the new pendant around her neck—the jewel of her late father, the locally beloved Papa Marriosan. The yellow topaz gleamed as though freshly polished. “Falling in love with another Silvercloak was always going to be a risk. Such a dangerous—”

“Says the Vallish patriot who fell in love with a Nyrøthi immigrant falsely accused of spying for her country,” Auria snapped.

“Emphasis on falsely,” Lulí said sweetly. Her frizzy ginger hair, which Auria had inherited, was cropped close to her head. She held up a brown paper pouch, shaking it in Auria’s direction. Her thick, muscular arms were heavily tattooed and smattered with paint. “Cønnafyr?”

Auria nodded half-heartedly, though she really did love cønnafyr—a sweet, spiced coffee from Kylgard. She could use some more pleasure in her well, or at the very least something to ease the swell and scull of this perpetual migraine.

Lulí finished brewing the cønnafyr and laid a silver tray down on the dining table. Victaria slid in beside their daughter, stroking her cheek with her knuckles. This simple brush of affection was enough to loose Auria’s tears in earnest, a hot, salty stream spattering over the table.

Pouring cønnafyr into a cerulean-and-orange cup, Lulí sighed. “It hurts so much now, dærlin—as you know, I was married and quickly widowed back in Kylgard—but I promise, it fades. You will never stop looking for them around every corner, and you will always, always wonder where they’ve gone. But grief turns to remembrance, and the heart finds somewhere else to land.”

“I can’t imagine that ever happening for me.”

A soft smile. “Do you know how new spells are developed?”

“Of course.”

“Explain it to me as though I don’t.”

Auria scowled like she was fourteen again. “Don’t patronize me.”

“Explain it to me, Aury.”

Auria sighed. “Fine. Most think of developing spells as a research effort, an intellectual pursuit. But really, it’s a matter of perseverance and time. New spells work like desire lines. Say, for example, you have five square acres of grass, a castle at one side, and the entrance gates on the opposite side. A fancy gardener or architect might lay a meandering path curving around the outside of the lawn—one that’s more scenic, and that will preserve the grass. But left to their own devices, most people would choose to cut straight over, because it’s a faster, simpler way to their destination. Over time, if that happens again and again and again, a new path forms over the grass, eroded by all that accumulated footfall. A desire line.

“Developing spells is like that. First, a visionary sees a better way of doing something. But because there is no direct pathway, no words linked to outcomes, no established commands to steer the magic…it’s hard to force the issue. Magic is obedient, and will try and follow the nearest existing path rather than creating a new one. It takes an immense amount of coordinated effort—of clear, identical intentions and perfect execution—for a legion of mages to forge a new desire line.” Auria folded her arms petulantly over her chest. “But I don’t know what that has to do with mourning Tiernan.”

Lulí laughed kindly. “You never were very strong with metaphor. When it comes to the loss of a life partner…it’s about gently rewriting desire lines. Because over the course of many years, you have been creating desire lines around them, around their life. You become accustomed to doing things a certain way because the person you love does them that way. You brew the tea to their liking, you take an evening walk because they like to decompress after dinner, you pick up a certain newspaper every time you see it on a stand. You call them every time you see a frostowl, because you know how much they love them. You establish rituals and routines, carved through the ground again and again over time until they become intrinsic to your day, to your very existence. And then the destination is suddenly gone, and you have all these paths that lead nowhere, and it feels both wrong to live as normal and wrong not to.”

She rested her palm over Victaria’s hand. “But one day, when you least expect it, your heart will stumble upon another destination. And just like a fledgling spell, it will slowly, over time, form a new path there. A new desire line.”

Before Auria could process this, the tip of her sapphire-studded wand crackled to life.

“Et vocos, Detective Marriosan.”

Captain Karvas.

Auria hastily brushed away her tears, as though he could see them. “Sir?”

“Code four-eight-V on Broad Row. Detectives Jebat and Dallar have been dispatched, but I want a trained Healer there. I could send Paliran, but there are whisperings that it’s Whitewing related—your patch. Are you nearby?”

Standing from the table, grabbing her cloak, and draining her cønnafyr, she said, “There in five.”

“Make it four.”

16

• • • •

Murder on Broad Row

Saffron perched on the lip of a rooftop high above the slouching, jewel-toned streets of Atherin, watching the nearest portari gate for a glimpse of Auria Marriosan.

She had tried to establish contact via wand several times, but Auria never answered. Saffron would have to do this face-to-face, yet she’d been sitting on the rooftop all day with little luck.

The Order of the Silvercloaks was based in a grand hilltop building on the outskirts of the capital, which meant on-duty detectives took the gates into the city center at the start of a shift. Auria’s patch was central-west, and so it was the central-west gate Saffron had been staring at since dawn.

Twelve hours later, the bowl of the sky had deepened to indigo and then blue-black, the crescent moon swaddled in curls of cloud. The night air had hollowed from an early winter chill to bone-aching cold. Saffron pulled her wrinkled black leather boots back from their dangle and prepared to leave.

Until her gaze snagged on something.

Someone.

Far below, a hurried-looking mage folded out of the portari gate, tucking a lock of frizzy ginger hair behind a sole ear. A silver cloak hung askew on one shoulder.

It was odd for Auria to be traveling alone—Silvercloaks were usually dispatched in pairs. Saffron’s gaze followed her former colleague as she strode in the direction of bustling Broad Row, then vanished around the corner.

Sprinting back inside the townhouse, Saff hurtled down the spiraled steps four at a time, one hand gliding down the banister so she was half running, half floating into each stairwell. She burst out onto the dark, glittering street.

Black cloak snapping behind her like a Paramagi’s chute, she hurtled down West Way, weaving between inebriated mages and feral children racing. She broke onto Broad Row, moans of pleasure and revelry ringing out like church bells, and scanned the street for any sign of commotion.

There.

The Silvercloaks had cordoned off a fuchsia-fronted pleasurehouse called Anila’s, and dozens of patrons were gathered outside in a state of semi-dress, heads tilted together like flowers, exchanging low mutters and trembling breaths. Streetwatchers blocked revelers from pushing back into the building. The air smelled of darkseed and sex.

Auria was nowhere in sight—had likely entered the building already—so Saffron hung back, close enough to catch slices of murmured conversation. She ascertained that a female mage had been tortured and killed by someone in a white cloak. Several orgy participants had heard the screams, and two had seen the suspect fleeing from a window. Apparently the third such slaughter in a palmful of nights, the pleasurehouses a sudden target.

Little did the Silvercloaks know that one of the pleasurehouse murders had been committed by Saffron herself.

Several minutes after entering, Auria walked out of the pleasurehouse, sapphire-studded willow wand held to her mouth. Saffron weaved closer, pulling up her cloak hood and angling her face away from the light.

“…securing the crime scene for forensics. The suspect is still at large, Dallar is setting up a perimeter. No healing to be done on the victim by the time I arrived, but I’ve gathered the details of both eyewitnesses. Both coming to Order headquarters first thing in the morning to give testimony. The housemistress, Anila, is cooperating and—”

“Marriosan, do not let those eyewitnesses out of your sight, do you hear me?” The deep male voice cutting through Auria’s wand was unfamiliar to Saffron. The new captain? “The Whitewings will kill any witnesses they can get their hands on. Do you still have contact?”

Stricken, Auria cast her gaze around the street, locking on the backs of two navy-cloaked Enchanters scurrying toward the portari gate.

“I do.” Auria pushed past the streetwatchers and hastened toward the witnesses. Saffron tucked in close behind her. “I’ll bring them down to headquarters now.”

“Heeded.”

The call ended, but Auria kept her wand squared in front of her. Even though the suspect was in custody, Saffron could tell Auria had been rattled by the notion of more Whitewings appearing to silence the witnesses.

Taking a deep, self-loathing breath, Saffron quickened her pace and fell into step beside the detective. “Auria.”

Auria lost her footing, jerking her body away as though Saffron carried a highly infectious and invariably fatal disease. The hole on the side of her head where her ear should’ve been looked stark and strange in the shadowy streetlight.

She shook her head fiercely. “No. No, Saffron, you can’t be here.”

“Please. Let me have two minutes.”

“I don’t have two minutes.”

Saffron touched her fingertips to Auria’s forearm, gently enough not to rattle her former colleague. She had no idea what the gifted mage thought of her after the rewritten events of the Havenwood, in which Auria no longer recalled their conversation about being undercover, and in which Saffron—in a galling scarlet cloak—had helped Auria flee the scene.

Auria swiveled on her heel and ripped her arm away. The expression on her face was like none Saffron had ever seen—rage and thunder, but something darker and deeper still, like a haunting, like a…child. Like Saffron must have looked all those years ago, seeing her parents’ bodies for the first time.

“Don’t fucking touch me,” Auria whispered, the words sewn together with unimaginable hurt.

Saffron took an instinctive step back. “Please, let me—”

“No.”

“Surely you want to know what really happened to Tiernan. There’s more to it than you think.”

Breaking her gaze to scan the street, Auria hissed in frustration—she’d lost the eyewitnesses. She strode toward the portari gate at an almost-jog. “I need to find these—”

“The new Bloodmoon kingpin compelled him into informing,” Saffron rushed out, desperate to regain Auria’s attention. It worked. Auria stopped dead, mouth peeled open. “Yes, Levan Celadon is a Compeller. Yes, that’s wholly as terrifying as it sounds.”

“How do you—”

“Because I’m undercover. Only Aspar knew of the assignment, and now she’s dead, and I’m without a handler, and I’m terrified, Auria, terrified that I’ll be found out, that without someone on my side in the Silvercloaks, there will be no way to extract me. I will die in agony, and the hard-won Bloodmoon secrets will be buried with me.”

Auria stared at Saffron, then started walking furiously once more. “You’re lying.”

“Doesn’t it make sense? Don’t you feel it?” Saff’s words were hurried, breathless, as the gate came into view. The navy-cloaked Enchanters were still nowhere in sight. “My unceremonious dismissal from the Academy, how loudly it was reported in the newspapers—to make sure the Bloodmoons saw the controversy, to make sure they believed in it. My presence at the docks—a raid orchestrated through intel I fed to Aspar. My presence in the Havenwood, not fighting for either side but trying to emerge unscathed, helping you flee even when it could have cost me my own life to do so. Didn’t you wonder how the Order knew about the Havenwood in the first place? Doesn’t it all fit?”

Auria’s grip tightened on her wand, gaze scanning the street frantically. “Even if any of this were true…I cannot have anything to do with it. I’m no longer working the Bloodmoons, and I certainly cannot be seen associating with a known scarlet. Not if I want a future as a Highcloak. Reach out to Jebat, to Dallar, anyone but me.” A pause, in which some internal battle was fought. “Just…not Karvas. I can’t say more.”

“Nissa knew, alright? Once she wakes up, she can tell you—”

“Nissa might never wake up. That seems to be the pattern with anyone who touches you or the scarlets.” A note of desperation, of pure pain. “Please, Saffron. If you ever cared about me at all, please leave me out of this. It’s all too raw.”

The coarse grief in Auria’s voice was enough for Saffron to relent. “Alright. But there’s something else—something for which I need not a handler but a friend. My father wrote me a letter. Left it with Aspar, I think. I haven’t heard my mother or father’s voice for over twenty years. I want it more than I want to breathe. And I thought…maybe we could trade. I was with Tiernan when he died. I can tell you everything.”

At this, Auria’s tenderness hardened into a wild, scathing fury. “I am not your friend, Saffron. And it is far too great a risk for me to take you at your word, to believe without any real evidence that you’re undercover. Because what if you are lying?” A ferocious head shake. “I will not dishonor Tiernan’s memory by using his final moments as a bartering chip, whether you want a letter or something far worse—because I have no doubt that’s where this leads. We make one trade, this innocent missive from your lost father, and you hold it over me forever. You threaten to tell my captain, the commissioner. You threaten to ruin me if I don’t play your game. So no, I refuse to engage with the very first move.”

Despair crested in Saffron. “No, Auria, I would never—”

“They’re gone,” Auria moaned, spinning wildly in search of her marks. She turned to face Saffron, that annihilated expression only deepening. “You are ruining everything I hold dear, and I hate you, I really do.”

Such a callow thing to say, but Saffron believed it all the way to her bones.

Tears slid down Auria’s pale, freckled cheeks, though she didn’t seem to notice. One hand fiddled with a slender silver bracelet around her left wrist. “Because this all leads back to you, doesn’t it? My grandfather’s death, Tiernan’s. All my worldly pain stems from your choices. So stay away from me. Or I swear—to all the Saints in the sky—that I will toss you back in Duncarzus and throw away the key.”

And of course, she was right. Had Vogolan not been trying to trap Saffron, he would never have murdered Papa Marriosan. Had Saffron not led Levan to the Jaded Saint on that very first night, he would never have been presented with the opportunity to compel Tiernan Flane.

Feeling like the smallest person in the world, Saffron bowed her head and walked away—not knowing that just a few streets away, the mage who held her fate in his hands was fighting for his very life.

17

• • • •

The Final Bargain

Dubias Row was home to crooks and criminals, scorch-marked buildings and defaced murals, puddles of orange lamplight and blood-slicked cobbles. It was also home to Çernasti’s tavern—a dingy, disreputable establishment where the bitterale was watered down, the patrons wore shabby cloaks, and the house stew was an embarrassment of red-brown slop. Coiled ropes, black with soot and grime, hung from the ceiling for no discernible reason.

Levan loathed the place, but needs must.

“Why are we here?” asked the mage who was, in another life, almost certainly Levan’s grandfather.

Miret Tomazin had a long, pale beard down to his waist, knotted with turquoise and gold beads. Hailing from the deserts of Eqora, his skin was brown and crinkled, his pale blue scholar’s robes disheveled, his half-moon spectacles perpetually askew.

Levan sipped his ambertea, wincing at the cheap, sour tang of the leaves. “I suppose you already know.”

“Ha. Taqin.” True. Miret downed his liquor in one determined gulp. “We are here to find a necromancer. With not one but two parents lying in the crypt, the fervor with which you seek the maligned art has intensified. Even though you have seen firsthand what it has done to Sando Segal.”

A gaggle of tipsy mages entered the tavern, trailing behind a red-haired musician hauling a lute case.

“Did you know the Risen would be like that?”

“I had my suspicions.”

“And yet you didn’t voice them.”

“Sometimes I fear your dogged pursuit of a necromancer is the only thing holding you upright.”

The precision of this assessment knocked the wind out of Levan for a few beats. “So why are we here? In Çernasti’s.”

“If I had to make an educated guess—”

“Do you make any other kind?”

“I would say that in a fit of unparalleled insanity and desperation, you wonder whether the Disciples of Halant might be on to something.”

Levan couldn’t resist the smile. “Nothing gets past you. Tell me what you know of Halant.”

“Very well—with the strong caveat that almost all of what I’m about to say is, at best, urban legend.”

“The same could be said of your beloved Saints, could it not?”

Miret laughed his mirthful chuckle—one of Levan’s favorite sounds in the world, as luminous as sunlight hitting a crisp blue lake. “Right you are. So, the necromancer Halant. Born and raised in Tarsa, proficient in death magic from the day he received his first wand. Resurrected birds and bees, flowers and great oaks, until their garden in Amuilly’s Vale was a riot of life and color. So far, so wholesome, until he discovered two things. First, that his gift was outlawed. And second, that it offered him an immense social currency.

“He began trading in promises with other children in school. Yes, I’ll bring back your mother if she passes of the bloodblight—if you are loyal to me always, if you do my bidding, if you act as my servant and my confidant. Yes, I’ll save your brother from the blackfever if you bring me a sack of ascens and a cup of sugared ambertea. Et cetera.”

So the fabled necromancer’s work could be bought, bargained for.

“Did he make good on his promises?”

“Indeed. By eleven years old, he was interested in little else. Started killing and then resurrecting mourncrows just to scare the more skittish students. Eventually, the Pühti Vavra came knocking.”

Pühti Vavra. Pure Guard. The Tarsan police force.

“They arrested and charged him after he resurrected a local journalist assassinated by the Pühti Vavra themselves.”

Levan balked. “They imprisoned him? At eleven years old?”

A grave nod. “Unfortunately for them, he had amassed quite a following by this point. His worshippers orchestrated a jailbreak and led him into hiding on the isle of Nomaden. There, the Disciples of Halant were born.”

“So Nomaden is crawling with the Risen?” Levan asked, equal parts horrified and fascinated. Nomaden was a famously lawless land with little in the way of government, let alone extradition treaties. “How long ago was this? How old is Halant now?”

Miret pushed his wonky glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I couldn’t say with any degree of certainty. Everything I’ve just told you was learned through hearsay. It’s likely little more than folklore.”

Levan sipped at his appalling ambertea. The lutist struck up a surprisingly beautiful rendition of the Bone Queen’s Lament. “What if it wasn’t?”

Miret raised a hooded brow.

“Killoran and I walked past this tavern a few weeks ago. I’ve been learning the languages of the Eastern Republics, and two mages were sitting outside, drinking and jabbering—I caught snippets of rapid-fire Tarsan. They were discussing what they might next offer Halant in exchange for resurrection. Neither of them had yet offered him something he deemed valuable enough to trade. Which implies they have direct contact with the necromancer—that he is more than peasant folklore.”

“We’re here in anticipation of stumbling upon those mages once more?”

Levan nodded in the direction of two bickering Enchanters sitting by the fogged-glass window. On their table sat a silver chain with a pearlescent pendant emitting a high-pitched, bone-rattling frequency. “Do you have any idea what that pocketwatch is for?”

“I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Perhaps we should satisfy your academic curiosity.”

Miret sighed as Levan stood. “No unnecessary bloodshed, child.”

“I’m no child,” Levan replied, although rather than bristling against the word, he felt oddly soothed by it.

Their eyes met, and the moment deepened, swelled. The lutist’s lament reached a sweet crescendo. When Miret spoke, his throat sounded thick. “I wish I’d known you when you were. Someone should’ve protected you.”

At the mention of his childhood, Levan’s internal guards slammed up, but not fast enough. A series of images flitted through his mind’s eye like a deck of cards shuffling: Porrol Vogolan’s twisted face as he uttered sen doloran; the wet patches on Levan’s bedsheets each morning; the spot of black mold on the ceiling of the shack, where he always fixed his gaze in the moments before the torture curse was cast. The pain, the pain.

He tapped out a rhythm on his knuckles, counting in time with his quickening heartbeat. “It is what it is,” he said emptily. “It was what it was.”

Miret’s eyes softened. “Are you sure you want this? To bring them back, after all they did to you?”

“My mother never hurt me.”

Tap-tap-tap on his clenched knuckles, up and down an imaginary scale with each opposing finger, like playing a piano.

“There are many different ways to hurt a person. The torture curse is only one of them.”

“She was good.”

Levan had the sudden intense desire to press a blade into his flesh, to peel away the discomfort like the skin of an apple, physical pain to distract him from emotional hurt.

“Without your parents’ shackles, you could be one of the finest Healers this land has ever seen. I’ve seen the way you talk about Tålun’s work.” Miret gestured to Levan’s golden prosthetic. “You could be his equal, his peer.”

Something soared in Levan’s chest for the slenderest of moments before crashing downward. “No. I’m too far gone.”

And besides, he was fairly sure the brand’s magic worked in such a way that if he abandoned the Bloodmoons, it would constitute an act of betrayal.

He turned his back on the conversation and thought only of forward.

“Ter õhtu,” Levan greeted the Disciples at the window table, sharp edges of the Tarsan language forming clumsily on his tongue.

One of the mages looked up, swayed drunkenly, and shrieked.

“Çarlak rädma! Çarlak rädma! Çarlak rädma!”

Scarlet rot.

The other mage waved her hands in various impenetrable patterns, hushing and murmuring for her companion to quiet. But the drunker mage either could not or would not, caterwauling about how she could not perish yet, because she hadn’t made her Ülam Kasit. Final bargain.

Her fear was real. This was a mage who had met with her chosen deity and failed to win his favor.

“Çarlak rädma! Çarlak rädma! Çarlak rädma!”

Levan raised his wand, aiming it at one of their temples, frightening the shrieker into silence. “M’al net vehça kamet rel.” I’m not going to hurt you. “I just want to see the pocketwatch.” He took it without permission. Even through the synthetic skin of his golden palm, the pendant trembled like a caged beast, the magic inside rattling at the bars of its confines. “Midar çi takhes?”

“Summoning device,” the more levelheaded of the two grunted in Vallish. “When the blood of the recently departed spills into it, Halant appears to resurrect them.”

Levan traced a fingertip over the intricate engravings, the shallow notch labeled saveri. Blood. “Is there a way to summon Halant without a fresh corpse?” The less drunk mage shook her head, lank black hair falling into her sallow face. “How does he get here?”

“Portari. They don’t strip out spells in Nomaden.”

“A long way to portari. A thousand miles, almost?”

The Disciple tilted her jaw upward with something like pride. “He’s a powerful mage.”

“Thank you for your candor.” Levan smiled genially, then withdrew his wand from his belt and aimed it at the drunker mage’s heart.

Guilt pulsed somewhere deep in his belly, but the death wouldn’t stick—Halant would arrive to resurrect her, and she’d spend the rest of her days as a magicless Risen. Levan might not even have to carve the kill mark into his arm, though perhaps for ritual’s sake he would anyway.

The only undesirable matter was that the kill was being made publicly, but the prospect of abducting multiple mages to go somewhere more discreet was no less conspicuous. Çernasti wouldn’t report Levan’s crimes—his was an establishment so disreputable that he wouldn’t want to attract Silvercloak attention—and the lutist wouldn’t willingly insert himself in a Bloodmoon feud. Most common folk had more sense than that.

“Sen ammorten.”

Levan expected the killing curse to fork into his victim’s chest, but instead the incantation sort of…fell from the tip of his wand. Tumbled to the floor without finding its mark.

He tried twice more to no avail.

Fear and confusion fogged his mind—surely his well was not so empty that he could not cast?—as he plucked a dagger from a sheath sewn into his cloak pocket and cut the mage’s throat instead. She crumpled to the dark, stained floorboards in a pathetic heap.

“Nar! Nar! Pulan!” bellowed the surviving Disciple, dropping to her bony knees beside her fallen companion.

Confused and disquieted, Levan probed the dark depths of his internal well, searching for a reason his magic had failed him. Although he’d been wholly depleted after killing his mother’s wand, he’d done his best to replenish, barely casting a thing until—

—hold on.

He’d killed his mother’s wand.

More superstitious mages believed such an act would cause future magic to revolt against the destroyer. He’d dismissed this as parochial nonsense, but now…

A wave of panic crested in his chest. Not just at the prospect of his power turned unruly, but at the thought of other mages witnessing his botched attempts at a basic spell.

Pulse roaring in his temples, Levan held the pocketwatch to the parted flesh of the woman’s throat, watching the blood trickle into the shallow saveri notch in Halant’s pendant.

The shrill frequency ceased at once. The pocketwatch drew in the air in the tavern, as though the entire room orbited around it. Everything seemed to tilt, shudder. Glisten.

The second Disciple looked up, cheeks glazed with tears, an expression of deep existential horror on her gaunt face.

“Time to barter for your friend’s life,” Levan said darkly, as a shriveled necromancer in a violet cloak appeared a handful of yards away.

18

• • • •

Haïl Halant

As the necromancer Halant appeared in Çernasti’s tavern, Levan stepped back into the shadows. He wanted to capture the violet-cloaked mage, of course, to bargain until the blood ran warm and vital through Lorissa Rezaran’s veins.

But first, he wanted only to observe.

Halant was one of the tallest people Levan—who himself towered over six foot—had ever seen in the flesh. Kissing the boundary of seven feet, the necromancer was wiry and pin-straight, like a cathedral spire. Coarsely curled black hair was cropped close to his scalp, and the severe hollows of his cheeks gave the impression his skull had been caved in and never properly repaired. His hooded eyes were deep-set, dark as peach pits, with a heavy brow and a pair of emerald-rimmed glasses. An unusual cinnabar wand with a narrow, pointed tip hung by his hip, leathery hand clenched around it.

“Haïl Halant,” moaned the surviving Disciple, touching her thumb knuckle to her brow and dipping her head in a reverent half bow. Her greeting was thick with tears—and, Levan thought, a serrated edge of terror.

Around them, the tavern emptied of patrons sensing trouble. Only Çernasti and the cheerfully oblivious lutist, who played with his eyes pressed shut, remained. Levan felt the tension emanating from Miret.

Halant strode toward the corpse, and the Disciple started negotiating in such dense Tarsan that Levan only garnered snippets. From those slices he pieced together that the Disciple’s proposals for her final bargain were retreading old ground, and the necromancer met her with stony silence.

Eventually, the Disciple pleaded, “Can’t you just tell me what you want?”

At last, Halant responded. “Ak tösar Djarelki vol avälti çis.”

A true Disciple would already know.

He nudged at the bloodied pocketwatch with the pointed toe of his shoe. “Where did you get this? I certainly did not give it to you. These belong only to those with an Ülam Kasit in place—otherwise I would not have traveled so far to heed the call. It is rather tiresome, and rather risky, but I honor my final bargains. You, however, are a fraud.”

“I found it in an antique artifact shop. But I am a true Disciple.” She climbed to her feet, every inch of her body trembling. “I see your vision. I know you bide your time on Nomaden, gathering strength in numbers, building your army from the devoted and the Risen. I know you’re building boats. I know you plan to take Irisi first. I just do not know how anything I can offer will give you the jeweled throne you deserve.”

All over the world, powerful mages covet thrones, Levan thought. One of the inevitabilities of being born to a great power, to a rare magical classification: the sense that one must put it to good use. Irisi was a fool’s target—a volcano-and-jewel-crusted island with intense fortifications—but Halant seemed arrogant enough to believe a magicless army of the Risen could take it.

“Küratstula,” Halant hissed, an ugly slur insulting her intelligence. “You cannot slot those pieces together?”

The Disciple lifted her chin, a dried smear of amber honeywine around her mouth. “I’ll join you on Nomaden, then. We both will. Leave our lives behind and devote ourselves to your cause.”

Something sickly, almost grotesque passed over Halant’s face. A gargoyle imitating empathy. “You truly love your friend.”

“My sister.”

Some ancient part of Levan felt a sharp twinge of remorse, a remnant of the version of him who’d once been loved by his own brother.

“Very well.” With a curdled grin, Halant extended the sharp tip of his cinnabar wand. “Ülam Kasit.”

The Disciple lifted her own, and as the jagged end of Halant’s pierced the tip, the simple pine wand whimpered in pain. “Ülam Kasit,” she whispered. “Maršta-vel, maršta-vel.” Thank you, thank you.

Halant withdrew his wand then pointed it blandly down at the corpse on the ground. “Avi viçerak.”

One incantation was all it took.

The dead Disciple bucked, spine arched, eyes peeling wide, air gasped into her lungs.

Her sister sank to her knees and wept.

Levan thought bitterly of all the thousands of times he had uttered ans visseran to no effect. All the times he sat beside the body of his mother and sobbed into her cloak. All the times he felt small and sad and helpless, all the times he questioned why he bothered to exist at all if he could not do this one thing.

The surge of emotion ushered him from the shadows, wand raised.

“Sen debilitan.”

The spell flew ninety degrees west of target, sinking into Çernasti’s unsuspecting chest. The tavern keeper stood rigid, immobilized, an expression of shock and outrage hewn into his paralyzed face.

Hells, Levan cursed.

Magic had disobeyed him again.

Halant turned on his heel with a swish of violet cloak, peach-pit eyes narrowing to knife slits. “Siv çurida.”

Vicious shards of magic shot in Levan’s direction. Levan jumped and swiveled, landing on his feet with catlike elegance. The shards buried themselves in a support beam, drilling small, deep holes that sizzled and smoked.

A filthy Tarsan curse, designed to kill—but not in the clean, painless manner of ammorten. Halant not only wanted him dead, but wanted him to suffer, wanted him to squirm long enough to be questioned.

More shards flew in Levan’s direction, and he spun and dodged and ducked with effortless speed, grateful for the combat training Miret had instilled in him, grateful he did not rely on magic as the only source of power.

Behind Levan, the tavern wall was a hissing, perforated mess. Miret sought refuge under the table and threw up a shield, a fundamental pacifist even when his kin was in peril.

“Siv ammovra,” Halant snapped, impatient enough for the cleanest killing curse now.

Levan lifted a squat table by the legs, using its top to absorb the curse before tossing it to one side. “Sen vertigloran.”

As he cast the fresh magic, the enchanted hold on Çernasti dropped. But instead of a disorientation curse, Levan’s wand spat out a stream of colored light, spiraling and squealing through the air like a firework.

Magic was taunting him.

Behind the bar, Çernasti muttered a slew of incantations. A coil of blackened rope dropped from the rank ceiling, hanging like a levitating serpent as Çernasti looked between Halant and Levan—as though deciding who to lasso.

In the moment of hesitation, Halant seemed to realize none of this was worth the hassle and lifted his needle-sharp wand to his mouth.

“Pivar—”

The necromancer was about to portari back to Nomaden.

Hells, how was he powerful enough for two thousand-mile trips and a resurrection within a quarter hour without replenishment?

Levan charged like a bull, lowering his head and slamming into the taller mage’s ribs. Halant, willowy as he was, crumpled beneath the sheer force of it. The cinnabar wand clattered across the sticky floor. Levan wrestled and wrangled the other mage’s thrashing limbs until he was straddling him in a way Harrow might envy.

Pointing his wand at Halant’s throat, Levan had no idea what to do. Perhaps he might still be able to compel.

“You’re coming with me,” he said lowly. “Do you understand?”

Nod your head.

Halant instead began to hum the national anthem of Laudon, making flatulent noises every third syllable.

The riding crop of dread really struck Levan then. He was supposed to be the most powerful mage in the Bloodmoons, in Atherin entire.

Halant twisted suddenly, reaching for his cinnabar wand. His fingertips almost grazed it when a scuffed brown leather boot stamped down on his wrist.

Miret bent to retrieve the necromancer’s wand, tucking it behind his brown belt with a disapproving sigh. “What now, Levan?”

All at once, the Disciples broke into a sprint, aiming straight for Levan as though to topple him from their deity, to prove their loyalty once and for all.

Gritting his jaw and hoping for the best, Levan grabbed Miret by the bony ankle and muttered, “Portari, Rezaran crypt.”

The tavern winked out around them, folding itself into a canvas of blinding white, a swooping in the stomach, a rush in the head, and then they were elsewhere.

Elsewhere—but not the designated crypt.

They arrived in the alley where Levan and Saffron had met for the first time, where she’d found him repeatedly severing and reattaching the hand of an innocent Brewer, where he’d caught sight of her white-blond curls and known that she was the mage Harrow’s prophecy had foreseen. Where his world had rearranged itself in a single moment.

Levan and Halant landed awkwardly, the former still straddling the latter but at an odd angle, giving the necromancer purchase to roll free. Halant lunged for Miret, who still had his cinnabar wand. Levan knocked out the necromancer with a sharp right hook to the temple, and Halant crumpled to the cobbled ground.

Miret sighed a long-suffering sigh. “You have a rather fluid interpretation of no unnecessary bloodshed.”

At this, Levan bristled. Everything about this night was gritty, wrong, like sand beneath his skin. “I don’t take orders from you, Miret.”

Miret, who had never been wounded by something so trivial as a harsh tone, simply smiled. “Yet you care what I think. And I’d like it to be known that I do not approve.”

Levan fought the urge to scowl like a sullen youth.

“Your magic is disobeying you.” The scholar leaned against a creamstone wall still smattered with dried blood. “What did you do, mil?”

Seeing no reason to lie to the one person who might be able to help, Levan’s lips pressed into a flat line. “Abolar. My mother’s old wand.”

“Ah. Dare I ask why?”

“Didn’t want it falling into the wrong hands. And now I know my mother won’t be able to use it once she’s Risen…”

“You did not heed the cautionary tales of what happens to those who kill a wand?”

“I thought it was little more than peasant folklore.”

“The arrogance.”

“You dismissed Halant’s existence as folklore mere minutes ago.”

“Once you reach my age, you earn the right to practice blatant and audacious hypocrisy.”

Levan rested back on his haunches. “Is there a way to mend my relationship with magic?”

“It will be long, slow. A matter of regaining its trust.”

A bridge rebuilt stone by stone. Levan swallowed hard. Jerking his head at Halant, he said, “Help me carry him to the crypt.”

After a few moments, Miret withdrew the necromancer’s wand from his waistband and tossed it on the ground next to Levan.

“No, I won’t.”

And Levan’s closest confidant—the only thing resembling family he had left—turned and walked away.

19

• • • •

The Binding Oath

It took almost an hour for the necromancer to regain consciousness—an hour spent hauling him around the snaking tunnels beneath the Bloodmoon compound and into the Rezaran crypt. By the time they arrived, Levan was drenched in sweat and cursing every Saint he had never quite believed in.

While he waited for Halant to wake, the kingpin leaned back against a marble-cold archway and stared at his dead parents—cast in eerie blue-white light, silent as marble pillars. When he did finally bring them back, would they hate him for it? Would they resent their barren wells, their lives without pleasure or pain? Or would the absence of pain mean the absence of such things as bitterness or hatred?

What did it even mean, to exist without pain?

He rolled his wounded wrist, unable to imagine such a thing.

It troubled him to wonder how the loss of magic would impact his mother’s relationship to the Saints, whose entire manifesto was centered around magic as a life-giving, world-sustaining force. Critics of the faith often noted how this ostracized Ludders, cut them out of any sense of abiding purpose. Imagining Lorissa Rezaran without her deeply personal relationship to the Sixteen was like imagining an empty grave.

Halant stirred, groaned.

Levan had been here before with Nalezen Zares, a necromancer in his grasp but unwilling to cooperate. Hissing alleycats like Zares and proud, stubborn mules like Halant were more likely to grit their teeth and resist than to cave.

Even if Levan’s compelling had been cooperating, it would be impossible to order Halant to do his bidding. Necromancy was an art so dark and power-draining that a mage’s full, authentic will had to be thrown behind it. A compelled command didn’t have the required depth, the raw force—a problem Levan had encountered with Nalezen Zares.

No, he had to call to mind what Halant wanted. Use that as a bargaining chip in pain’s stead.

“Where am I?” Halant’s words smeared together.

“Raise these two mages and I’ll let you walk free,” Levan said blandly in Tarsan, still holding both wands in his golden palm.

Halant scoffed, a coarse, hacking sound. “Do you take me for a fool? I do not know to which order or organization you belong, but there isn’t a dark mage on Ascenfall who doesn’t cover his tracks.”

“You want Irisi, no? I can give that to you. Or I can slaughter you where you stand—it’s your choice.”

A glint of intrigue. “What do you mean by ‘give that to me’?”

“Your current army is doomed to fail. On some level you must know this. The Risen do not good soldiers make—the magicless cannot win wars.”

“With enough swords and siege units they can.”

“Perhaps. But do you have the raw wealth to afford an arsenal of analog weaponry? Such things are rare, and rare things carry a heavy price tag.”

Something like amusement twisted across Halant’s face. “You’re trying to buy me.”

“Once my parents are Risen, every ounce of ascenite in this crypt is yours.”

The necromancer’s mirth sharpened into hunger, a subtle dilation of the pupils, a slight puckering of the lips. “How do I know you won’t renege on your offer?”

“A binding oath.”

Caten Promivat. A sacred promise, an unbreakable agreement. Either mage would perish in an instant upon betrayal—the strand of magic that inspired the Bloodmoon loyalty brand, and likely Halant’s own Ülam Kasit.

Halant clambered to his feet, brushed off his trousers, and surveyed the two bodies on the raised platform. “How long have they been dead?”

“My father a matter of days. My mother a matter of decades.”

Halant swore profoundly. “Not possible.”

“She is the crux, the axis, the purpose. You will work on her first, channel all your power into her resurrection.”

A derisive head shake. “The organs will be rotted, the blood hardened, no matter how uncannily unmarred she appears from the outside.”

“We have scores of mages dedicated to upholding the preservation enchantments on this crypt, and an unsaintly amount of ascenite amplifying them. If you cut open my mother’s chest, it would appear she’d died mere moments ago.”

A slight exaggeration. It had taken time to establish a crypt in the Havenwood after Lorissa died, and with meager ascenite and a single dedicated Healer, the preservation enchantments had not been as strong as they were now. But he didn’t want to give Halant any further reason to doubt the boundaries of possible.

After a few moments of hesitation, Halant reached for his wand. With a twinge of fear deep in his gut, Levan passed it over.

A smirk tugged at the corner of Halant’s thin mouth. “What’s stopping me from killing you right now?”

“You don’t know the right words for leaving this crypt, and few mages ever venture down here—you’d die of thirst staring at my rotting corpse.”

Halant considered this.

“On your word,” Levan added. “We make the binding oath.” Halant would have to be the one to initiate the vow—because Levan’s own magic was an untamed beast.

The cold air in the crypt felt hostile in the ensuing silence.

Finally, Halant raised his wand and nodded. Levan crossed his black elm wand over the cinnabar wand, forming an X.

“Iv Katan Poçivak.” Halant began the spellwork in his native tongue—always stronger that way.

“In Caten Promivat. I offer freedom, plus all the ascenite in this crypt, in exchange for my mother and father’s Rising—and staying Risen.”

One had to be precise with a binding vow, and Levan watched the cogs turn in Halant’s mind as he examined the words for a trap. There was none. It was simple, specific, definitive.

“Iv Katan Poçivak,” Halant echoed.

Raw magic shot from the tip of Halant’s wand and sewed itself around the other. Levan felt a tugging sensation, as though someone was trying to yank the wand from his grip, and he tightened his hold, noticing Halant do the same. With a final glittering flourish, the string of magic shivered away, and both mages loosed their breaths.

Levan distantly wondered whether Saffron might propose such an oath in the name of rebuilding their trust. That she hadn’t already suggested it was suspicious—she was willing to slay a Whitewing and hand over incriminating evidence, but not do this. Then again, perhaps she was simply smart enough to keep her options open. She had to be able to flee if he threatened her.

Levan jerked his head toward his mother’s body, anticipation flaring behind his ribs.

“Now.”

Halant edged closer to the dais upon which the dead Bloodmoons lay, resting a palm on Lorissa’s stony chest. The whole crypt hung suspended on a held breath.

“Avi viçerak.”

Levan was yanked back eighteen years.

His body was still narrow, gangly, every inch of it aching and sore in the aftermath of the torture curse. His eyes burned from tears, his throat from screaming. He remembered that most of all—how badly his eyes and throat would burn, how embarrassed he felt. How small, pathetic.

He remembered a broad hand at his back, pushing him into the cabin in the Havenwood where his mother’s body was kept. She lay on a brass bedstead, cold and still, chestnut braid resting on her chest. The floor was covered in the hoard of ascenite the Bloodmoons had spent years accumulating. Coins and jewelry, trunks and carved busts, diadems and swords and vambraces, all of it essential in keeping her viable—because the further Lorissa moved from her death date, the more unnatural her preservation, and thus the more raw power required to uphold it. The simple spellwork of those early days had long since ceased to be enough.

Vogolan shoved Levan toward the bed, and Levan stumbled and fell, his knees slamming into the top of an ascenite chest, the pain barely registering compared to sen doloran. He lifted his wand, believing as deeply as he could that this time, this time, he was strong enough. This time he wanted it badly enough. This time he had endured enough suffering to finally twist his magic into something new and terrible and worthwhile.

He channeled all his agonized focus into one singular point and incanted, “Ans visseran.”

Nothing.

No, no, please. Work.

“Ans visseran.”

Nothing. He thought he might die from the despair.

And now, in the crypt of the mansion his father had built in his dead mother’s honor…

…nothing still.

Halant sighed. “I told you. It’s been too long…”

“Continue,” Levan said crisply, with a jerk of a nod.

“Is there an outer limit to that word?”

“You will remain here until it is done.” Levan smoothed his robes and strode toward the atrium of the crypt. “I’ll ensure you are well fed and watered. Bring you a waste bucket, clean clothes. What’s your pleasure of choice?”

“Sex.”

“I’ll bring you daily company.”

Halant smiled wryly. “I like my partners…chilled. Cold to the touch.”

A shiver of revulsion cut through Levan. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“A joke.” Halant’s curious grin only broadened. “But I do like the scarred, the wounded. Something interesting to look at.”

Uneasiness spread through Levan like a fever, like a disease. He gave the necromancer another swift nod, turned on his heel, and faced the door to the crypt. Pulling a tiny ornamental hourglass from his innermost pocket, he tapped the top and murmured tempavicissan quietly enough that Halant would not hear. Not that it mattered—without an hourglass of his own, the necromancer was as good as buried in this tomb.

The tunnel outside was dark, dank, the sounds of dripping water and scuttling inkmice echoing through the maze. As the door sealed shut behind Levan, he lifted his wand to his mouth, exhaustion pulling at him like gnarled fingers. His wrist felt like two iron nails had been driven down into the bone, pain shooting all the way into his neck.

“Et vocos, Sando Segal.”

A pause, then, “It’s the middle of the fucking night.”

“And I’m your fucking kingpin,” Levan snapped, unable to keep the sharp whip from his tone. “Steer clear of the crypt. That is an order.”

An order, but not a compelled one. Because Levan’s magic had gone from a controlled blade of fire to a sputtering candle, a reckless forest inferno.

Without it, did he stand a chance at leading this organization in his father’s absence? Even Miret had walked away from him. And Sando Segal would never have spoken to Lyrian the way he’d just spoken to Levan.

Control was slipping through his fingers, and if there was one thing Levan could not abide, it was the loss of control. The only thing holding the operation together was his father’s loyalty brand, and—

Hold on.

How was the brand still active, with the old kingpin dead?

It was an enchantment, at its very core. And for an enchantment to remain permanent, the caster—or another mage working closely with them—would have to give up a part of their well permanently. He had never heard his father utter the words medei perpetua, but his back had always been turned while heating the poker over the fire. Ample opportunity to murmur beneath his breath.

Levan had never thought too closely about the mechanics of the brand. It was a painful subject, with painful memories attached—the sort of thing his mind preferred not to look directly at, because then he’d have to confront the reality that his father had mutilated his own son as a child.

In any case, there were hundreds of branded mages under Bloodmoon command. Had his father really been paranoid enough to sacrifice hundreds of small corners of his magical well to ensure their loyalty?

Levan knew the answer as soon as he thought the question.

Of course he was paranoid enough.

It would explain so much—his father’s relatively weak magic, his increasingly splintered mind. The way he had to rely almost exclusively on his ruthless memory rather than arcane power. How easy it then became for Levan to compel him when necessary, when his father’s decisions could have compromised the entire operation.

It would also mean that, now Lyrian was dead…

The brands were no longer active.

All the Bloodmoons could walk free.

And so could Levan.

20

• • • •

No One Wants the Blood

Saffron hunched over a lamplit desk in the mansion library, running a finger over the worn parchment page of From Sacred to Sacrosanct—the tome she’d stolen from Mizad’s Emporium. The text was dense, written in a stiff, formal tone, so she skipped ahead to the final chapter, which detailed the mass evisceration of the weaverwick wands.

During the Great Purge of 1024, most countries on the continent and the pangea ordered their citizens to turn over their weaverwick wands for destruction.[*] The more civilized nations kept extensive records pertaining to the registered classifications of their citizens, and many of said nations executed all registered Timeweavers in the name of the Divine Augurs.

Collecting loose wands, however, was an altogether more complex affair, due to the small stature of the artifacts—easy to hide beneath an old floorboard or bury in a shallow grave. In addition, it is not possible to ascertain the wick of a wand by sight alone, and though there are spells to reveal such information, it would be an unwieldy pursuit to test the millions of wands circulating in Ascenfall.

This scholar has cross-checked the records subpoenaed from wandmakers the world over with the database of wands destroyed during the Great Purge, and has drawn the following summation: as many as a thousand weaverwicks may remain in the wild, gathering dust in ancestral vaults and attracting sinister eyes in the black markets of Nomaden and Mersina.

It must be noted that one nation has remained tight-lipped in regard to the sanctioning of weaverwick wands. Nyrøth famously offered refuge to dragonkind following the ravaging of the continent at the behest of House Rezaran, and the winged beasts are rumored to reside in the Hældrekys Peaks. None but the holder of the Steel Throne is privy to the terms of this agreement, but since dragonkind was integral in the creation of weaverwick wands, it is unlikely they would accept asylum from a nation who purged said wands from existence.

It is therefore the opinion of this author that the malignant artifacts still exist in the far north.

A harrowing thought, is it not? That a cabal of Timeweaving mages at the top of the world might be unwinding and rewriting reality without our knowing?

How many times has this author written and rewritten the same book?

How many times have you read and reread this very sentence?

Saffron’s mind drudged over everything she had learned. The book’s conclusion posited that thousands of unchecked weaverwicks had been hidden across the continent. The author suggested the black markets of Mersina might be fruitful, and so to Mersina Saffron would go.

Of course, there was one other known weaverwick wand in her orbit. The former queenpin’s—used to little effect by the late Lyrian Celadon, and now presumably passed down to Levan himself. But Saffron hadn’t seen him carrying it on his person, and she knew better than to sneak into his chambers or the crypt.

The truly torturous prospect was that there perhaps existed an heirloom weaverwick with Saffron’s name on it, tucked beneath a loose floorboard or buried in a shallow grave. Because the fact Saffron existed meant her ancestor had to have survived, and to have survived meant they had to have hidden their wands.

Joran’s letter would contain everything she wanted and needed to know. Of that much, Saffron was certain. She thought of Captain Aspar’s scattered insights.

Once upon a time, I owed your father a great debt of gratitude.

Then, six months later, when Saffron’s mission was about to begin:

Why Dragontail?

If you come out of this alive, maybe I’ll tell you.

So many things made little sense. If Joran had been a Timeweaver, Aspar would’ve abhorred him, persecuted him. She was a staunch Augurest whose religion decried Timeweavers as depraved sinners, as scourges on magekind, as a blight to be eradicated. And if Joran Killoran was a powerful Timeweaver, how would the Bloodmoons have so easily bested him on that fateful night in Lunes?

None of the puzzle pieces slotted together, and it was driving Saffron quite batty. She needed that letter, but it was still in the custody of the Silvercloaks.

As she was mulling her next moves, Levan strolled into the library, two Lost Dragonborn books tucked beneath his arm and Rasso trotting at his heel. When the kingpin saw her sitting at his favored writing desk, he stopped dead.

Rasso, on the other hand, took off at a canter, leaping at Saffron, planting his front paws on her clavicle. He licked her face as though it were covered in the delicious and life-sustaining blood of his enemies, and she couldn’t hold back her peals of laughter. As Levan approached, she subtly slid From Sacred to Sacrosanct off the desk and into her lap, covering it with the folds of her cloak.

Levan stopped close enough that she could smell lemon and mint soap. His face was hard and blank as a cobblestone, and she felt a sharp, clean pang of grief. She missed the version of him she had lain with less than a month prior. How open he had been, how raw and real. She thought of handmade matching costumes hanging unused in his wardrobe, and thought, for a short second, that the sadness might cleave her in two.

But even if she could never truly rebuild the trust, rebuild them, she could still wind back the decades and mend the things that had broken them so irreparably in the first place. The truest act of love and sacrifice she could offer him.

“Have you won Auria Marriosan over to your cause yet?” He talked to her like he would any old henchmage, bland and professional, with an undercurrent of authority.

Stroking Rasso on his bony head, Saffron matched his tone. “No. And before you suggest applying more force, that would have the opposite effect. Auria is weak with pain, true, but righteous enough to take her own life before cooperating.”

Levan shrugged. “I could compel her.”

“She’d see right through it. Know that the desire to aid a Bloodmoon could never be genuinely hers. Why are you so hellsbent on Marriosan anyway? If you let me establish a bridge with someone else, I could already be slipping them false intel. She’s no longer even working the Bloodmoons. Too close to it.”

“Because the only way I can trust that you’re not deceiving me is to choose your bridge myself. And I need to ensure said bridge is pliable, if needs be.”

“Marriosan will never budge. Choose again.”

Levan tapped his scarred lower lip. Saffron thought of how he’d borne the injury—falling from a tree as a child—and struggled to imagine him playing innocently in the woods with a brother he no longer spoke of.

“I don’t buy it,” he said. “She’s already compromised, is she not? On the night you were branded, you went to the Jaded Saint and asked her for information on Nalezen Zares. She later delivered it, as well as the tracing charm my father demanded. You can threaten to tell her new captain that she’s a leaky pail, dribbling classified files to known criminals.”

Ah. It was true that Saffron originally approached Auria for the Zares intel, but she’d staunchly refused, as Auria was wont to do. In the end, Nissa had swooped in with both the necromancer’s location and the ill-fated tracing spell. Vogolan had learned the truth—after misguidedly slaying Auria’s grandfather in the process—but Saffron had murdered the thuggish henchmage shortly afterward. Word had obviously never made it back to Levan.

“That was before she saw me in the Havenwood in a scarlet cloak,” Saffron said carefully. “Now that she knows I’m associated with the Bloodmoons, she’ll never cave to blackmail. She’ll kill herself before—”

“Just turn her, Killoran.”

Saffron shot him a rueful glare, trying not to wince at the way her surname had replaced the name Silver. “I did glean some interesting intel during my last conversation with her. Several pleasurehouse deaths in the last week, all of them suspected to be linked to the Whitewings. They’re either growing more reckless or more organized. Are the scarlets still under curfew?”

Levan shook his head. “No. And many of them have not returned from their sojourns to the pleasurehouses on Laving.”

“If their deaths were retribution for the life I took, I apologize. Yet something tells me this is a far bigger problem.”

“I’ll look into it. Everything running smoothly with Tolad and Zef?”

For the last few days, Saffron had been overseeing ascenite laundering. The Bloodmoons had several Ludders in their employ—including Tolad and Zef—whose sole mission was to deliberately lose thousands of ascens in a single evening. Saffron chaperoned their evenings in the gamehouse, making semi-regular threatening facial expressions so that the Ludders would not be tempted to pursue a winning streak or cut and run. It was simultaneously tedious and stressful.

“Consummate professionals, as always,” she said. “Although they said one of the dealers, Sevir, hadn’t shown up for their meeting last night. They’re almost out of ascens to clean.”

A crisp nod. “Noted. How are you finding the work?”

“Well, it’s less psychologically obliterating than carving out eyeballs, so I suppose I must be grateful.”

“Everyone wants the ascens, no one wants the blood.”

Saffron smirked. “Always with the poetry.”

Levan held up his small stack of books in his golden hand. “Guilty as charged.”

This quip was not accompanied by anything so craven as a smile, but there was a slight lift in his body language.

“Something’s changed.” Saff studied him. “Something’s happened.”

Levan set the books firmly down on the desk. “No.”

“You aren’t wearing your grief so heavily—as if someone has allowed you to shrug it off like an unwanted cloak.” A suspicion dawned. “You found another necromancer. That’s what the lift in your step is. Hope.”

“I haven’t felt hope since I was seven years old,” Levan responded emptily, but his body had stilled. “And stop trying to read me like that.”

Her intrigue charred into impatience. “Tell me, Levan. Stone by stone, remember? How am I supposed to rebuild trust without the raw materials?”

“Just make sure Sorvel runs without a hitch.” Ah, Sorvel. The purported loxlure shipment he thought she’d be stupid enough to have raided so soon after the Havenwood. An unsubtle test of her claim to no longer have a handler in the Silvercloaks. “Then maybe we’ll talk.”

So there is something to talk about, Saffron thought triumphantly, and perhaps a little fearfully. She did not especially want Levan to be successful in raising his parents from the dead—not least because both Lorissa and Lyrian had cause to execute her.

Rasso leapt down from Saffron’s lap and padded away in search of Miret, tail wagging merrily. As the animal dismounted, his hind legs jostled the book in Saffron’s lap, exposing the top corner beneath her cloak.

“What are you reading?” Levan asked, eyes narrowing.

“None of your concern.”

“Which is exactly what makes you sound concerning. Show me.”

Another heart clench, another small surge of petty victory. “No.”

Levan straightened, his voice dropping several degrees. “I’m your kingpin. That’s an order.”

“Is that a compelled order? Because unless so…”

“As always, I have no desire to compel you.”

Saffron was glad of his reluctance. She would never forget how it felt, in the version of the Havenwood she had later unmade, to watch her body obey him with so little fight. How it felt when the instincts sprung up from deep inside her, nameless and sourceless, so that if she didn’t know any better, she wouldn’t realize she’d been compelled at all.

“Then you’ll have to take it from me by force.”

Watching the battle play out in his body was an interesting spectator sport. His hand went to his wand, then fell away again. A muscle feathered in his jaw. His weight shifted from one foot to the other—and then he turned and walked away.

“Rasso, here,” he called.

The fallowwolf heeded the command, trotting after the kingpin—but unhappily so, casting glances back at Saffron, making sad little whimpering noises in her direction.

“Levan,” Saffron called thickly after him. He paused, but did not turn. “Why does your magic work on me?”

He did not reply, but the air between them grew taut, crackling.

“Is it only because you’re so powerful? Or is there something more?”

Levan stood perfectly still for a few moments, his hand curled into a fist at his side.

And then he was gone.

Saffron let the breath seep out of her slowly, slowly, then all at once.

“I think the problem is,” came a kindly old voice behind her, “that you made him want to be better.” Miret peered after his surrogate grandson. “You made him believe that it was possible to exist in this dark crack of humanity while maintaining some semblance of morality, and whatever happened between you shattered that belief.”

Several emotions stirred in Saffron at once, too blended together to separate and name. “Does it trouble you, seeing the things he does? Knowing it isn’t him, that he’s just blindly trying to resurrect two people who never deserved to call him their son?”

Miret blinked hard three times, pushing his half-moon spectacles up the bridge of his nose. He smelled faintly of moth-eaten wool. “It ruins me.” He turned to walk away, back to the safety of his bookshelves. Then he hesitated mid-stride. “Please, do not betray him again. I fear for what he might become if you do.”

Skip Notes

Destroying a single wand is an intense and costly process, and to purge so many required the full wells of many thousands of dedicated government officials. Accounts detailing the exact nature of this operation are few and far between, though a private journal displayed in the Museum of Verdivenne describes one civil servant’s fraught relationship with magic following their work during the Great Purge.

Magic itself seemed to riot against the Enchanter, as though it had quite suddenly and violently developed free will. The civil servant was never able to get it back under control, and they eventually slew their entire family in a dreadful housecleaning accident. This testimony may, of course, be an elaborate fabrication designed to reduce their prison sentence.

21

• • • •

Miraculously and Fatally Sober

Levan studied Sorvel from above. A crooked village curving around Fair Firth, Sorvel mostly comprised a simple spired Saints hall—its red-and-gold obelisk old and faded—and a smattering of creamstone houses strewn haphazardly around a small harbor, as though a giant had thrown down a palmful of rocks just to see where they might land.

The night was starry, with a gentle bite of salt on the breeze. Claps of laughter echoed around the village as the locals piled into taverns after their evening worship. Levan sat halfway up the low spine of hill cradling the village, and beside him sat Harrow Claver—rogue, rascal, Royal Prophet.

Harrow was a short, slight mage with freckled skin and deep auburn hair swooping past his ears in waves. It was quite difficult to tell what color his irises were, on account of the fact that his pupils were always dilated by wine.

Tonight was no exception. He’d swaggered up the hill from the small portari gate outside town, swigging merrily from a bottle as he approached Levan. As he’d drawn nearer, bronze Foreseer cloak glowing like a furnace in the moonlight, his brow pulled together in a rather sloppy frown.

“You look thinner,” Harrow announced, flopping down next to Levan on a patch of lightly damp grass. “Food is pleasure, and pleasure is a full well, my darling.”

The problem was that for Levan, pleasure in its simplest form had never been all that effective. He had learned from a young age that most joy was too good to be true, and so whenever he experienced a simple animal pleasure, his higher mind waited for the other shoe to drop. The inevitable punishment for daring to feel a scrap of contentment. Everything that had happened with Alucia and Saffron only carved the grooves of this knowledge deeper into his conscience.

Pleasure was fool’s gold. Only pain could be relied upon.

Yet pain was more complicated still, because the returns were diminishing. Levan had spent so much time on the extreme end of the scale—torture curses and self-flagellation, amputated limbs at the hand of the woman he’d loved—that the tamer forms of it did not ameliorate his magic as they might for others. The idea that he’d feel more powerful from using a snapping band—a popular type of rubbery bracelet flicked against the soft skin of the wrist for a mild stinging sensation—was laughable.

So no, he hadn’t eaten.

But he had run, a lot, his muscles burning, his bones aching. And he had found a sick sort of pleasure in the hollow hurt of his stomach, in the head rush whenever he stood. The brutal sensations in his hand, alternating between stabbing and fizzing. That precarious balance of pain and pleasure, discomfort and satisfaction.

Harrow popped a cork on a fresh bottle of cherrywine, took an almighty swig, and offered it to the kingpin. Levan shook his head.

“So there isn’t really a loxlure shipment tonight?” Harrow asked.

“There is not.”

“May I ask why you no longer trust Killoran?”

Levan had explained the vague shape of the ruse, but not the reasons behind it.

“She was undercover,” he replied flatly, staring out across the water to the distant twinkling lights of Brasden. “Claims she is no longer, that her only handler died at my father’s hand. It would appear the loyalty brand has no effect on her.”

It has no effect on anyone anymore. But he couldn’t let the King’s Prophet know that Lyrian’s death had compromised the whole operation.

Harrow gaped at him. “And you let her live?”

“A long story. She gave me leverage to use against her should she betray me again, and there are strong reasons for keeping her around. Playing the Silvercloaks, staying several steps ahead. But she’s too smart, too strategic, and I’m worried there’s a chess line I haven’t calculated. Hence the traps ready to spring.”

“Hells. I should’ve foreseen all of this.”

“That’s why I dragged you up here.” Levan rolled his aching wrist. “Do you know whether she’s going to betray me again?”

A sigh, a head shake. “I haven’t had any prophetic visions in weeks. The King wants to ban me from drinking—thinks the alcohol is addling my inner sight. A rotten killjoy and a raging hypocrite.”

“He might have a point.” Levan studied Harrow intently, the subtle aversion of his gaze, the shiftiness to his posture. “You’re keeping something from me.”

“I’m keeping many things from you, as I suspect you are from me.” A coy smile coaxed Harrow’s purple lips wide. “I’ll trade you, darling. A secret for a secret.”

“You first.”

A musing pause. “When I was a little boy, my parents sold me to the Queen of Bellandry. I was stolen from her by the Vallish throne while on the cusp of manhood, though I think the Bellandrian Crown believe I’d simply grown tired and departed of my own volition.”

“That must have been difficult. Being sold.”

“On the contrary, it’s given me a very high sense of self. I am worth tens of thousands of ascens, and I am also worth risking war to possess.”

The words were cavalier, but there was something sour beneath them.

“That word, possess. Doesn’t it make your skin crawl?”

Harrow took an indecently long drink of wine. “Not really. I could walk away if I wanted to, but I rather enjoy meddling in the affairs of the powerful. Royals, generals, kingpins. You’re all so delightfully messy. I am quite simply never bored. Here’s a fun little bonus secret—two for the price of one. I asked to be sold.”

“You—what?”

“I had delusions of grandeur from a very young age, and, truthfully, my own sights set on a throne. Any throne, I wasn’t fussy. I thought if I could just enter the royal arena, by whatever means necessary, a path to the crown would emerge eventually. Does it make me sound monstrous, to willingly leave behind my family for such a thing? Honestly, Levan, it was all so dreadfully prosaic in my village. I was made for more.”

A dull ringing echoed in the deep caverns of Levan’s mind.

My own sights set on a throne.

“Do you still wish for such a thing now?”

“The ambition has blunted with age—or perhaps wine. But I’ve spilled too many secrets. Your turn.”

I’m a Compeller.

Saffron Killoran is a Timeweaver.

My magic is disobeying me.

I want to raise my mother from the dead and install her on the very throne you covet.

Harrow knew, in vague terms, that the Bloodmoons had their sights on the crown—but not that the body of the lost Rezaran queen lay in a crypt of ascenite. Not that Saffron Killoran’s line might rise again and ruin everything.

“Whenever I feel overwhelmed, I pretend I’m Aymar Wevelren from The Great Adventures of the Lost Dragonborn. I imagine gliding over the moors and mountains on dragonback, all of reality far below me. Wind in my hair, cold air in my lungs. Distance, freedom.”

“Adorable, but your being an enormous nerd is hardly a secret.”

“True.” Levan surveyed the village below with a hawkish intensity. “Though you’ve never known with quite such specificity.”

There was a sort of resonant silence, a thousand unsaid things hovering between them like fireflies. Harrow rested a palm on Levan’s knee, and the touch sent a small curl of pleasure into Levan’s well.

“You fell in love with her, didn’t you?” Harrow said plainly, without his usual frills and affectations.

Levan gave a short grunt. “Fool that I am.”

“Tsk. I don’t like to share you.”

Levan cocked a brow. “And yet I share you with countless others.”

“Quite, but I don’t enjoy them like I enjoy you.”

Setting down the honeywine bottle, Harrow let his other hand drift almost idly up the inside of Levan’s thigh.

“I—argh.” Levan pulled away, swallowing hard. “Not now. Not here. I have to steel myself for what might come.”

If Harrow was stung by the rejection, he didn’t show it. He shrugged and lay flat on his back, cupping his palms behind his neck. “If Killoran shows up…”

“I’ll have to execute her.”

Execute. Such a blunt, callous word.

“But you don’t want to.”

“Of course not.”

It was true, and yet there was a complicated texture to the not-wanting. Something spiteful, something small and humiliated. Some part of him craved a clean cut. The hand amputated, instead of left to fester with a malignant shard inside it.

Yet wasn’t it a good thing that Saffron had the opportunity to prove herself loyal, to switch sides into true scarlet?

Alucia had not been afforded the same chance.

Levan had discovered the truth one night in his chambers—a careless honeywine-fueled slip, a reference to a key Whitewing player she shouldn’t have known anything about, and when he’d applied the slightest bit of pressure, she’d fled into the night. Levan had gone straight to his father, aired his suspicions, and Lyrian had sent Vogolan after her. The henchmage had returned a couple of hours later, smattered in blood and with frothy spittle around his lips, that gleam in his eyes he always got when he’d made a fresh kill.

In his more troubled moments, Levan wondered if he’d been right to go straight to his father. What if, given the chance, Alucia might have chosen him, after all? Perhaps this was why he’d been persuaded to give Saffron something resembling a fair trial.

He thought of her question in the library: why his magic worked on her, the mage who should be immune. The truth was that he didn’t know, and that was infinitely troubling.

On the hillside, Harrow grew so unnaturally still that he might have fallen asleep. But when Levan looked over at his supine companion, the King’s Prophet was staring up into the stars—unblinking, unmoving, yet transfixed, as though a scene were playing out across the vast canvas of the night.

“What is it?” Levan whispered, the hairs on the backs of his arms standing on end.

No response.

Several minutes passed. Time dilated, blew wide open.

The air around them grew taut, brittle.

Then, finally, Harrow came back into his body—looking deeply troubled.

“Harrow,” Levan muttered, trying not to let his urgency show. “That was a prophecy if I ever saw one.”

The ghost of something terrible passed over Harrow’s face. All at once, he looked miraculously and fatally sober. “I drifted off for a second.”

“You’re lying.”

“Fine, a vision. But it didn’t pertain to you.”

A blatant lie. Harrow could not meet Levan’s gaze.

“I still want to know,” Levan urged.

“What you want is hardly my concern.”

Levan recoiled from the blade-edge in Harrow’s retort. The sharpness was a surefire indicator that there was something of pressing importance in the prophecy.

Possibilities spiraled through Levan’s overactive mind.

He could compel Harrow, or at least try—he hadn’t successfully done so since the destruction of the weaverwick. Yet compelling was a line he rarely crossed with those he genuinely cared about; some pale semblance of a moral code. Perhaps he really was losing his edge, his killer instincts. But he couldn’t do it.

Beside him, Harrow lifted a goldenjade pocketwatch from the breast pocket of his doublet. “Five minutes after darknight. Looks like the turncloak hasn’t betrayed you.”

Something bright and hopeful surged in Levan. He wasn’t sure whether he’d really believed Saffron would fail the test, but it was a relief regardless.

“What now, Levan?” The Bellandrian only ever seemed to bleed into Harrow’s accent when he said his lover’s name. Lay-van instead of Leh-van.

Levan breathed out long and slow, the crisp air pluming around his mouth. Something told him he was still a fool, still being played. And it gnawed at him, that he could never know for sure until it was too late. That even once the bridge of trust had been built back, he would still have to walk over it, believe that it would bear his weight.

He lifted his wand to his face. “Et vocos, Aviruna Castian.”

The answering voice was bleary. Lox-addled, most likely. “Levan?”

“I want you to follow Saffron Killoran.”

22

• • • •

The King’s Prophet

The High Council of House Arollan, beholden to King Quintan first and the protection of the realm second, gathered around a long ascenite table in the Grand Chamber. Among them sat Harrow Claver, lover of fine wine and good sex, foreteller of mostly accurate prophecies, and haver of many excellent opinions.

Harrow sat with an elbow slung over the back of his seat, one ankle cocked over a knee to convey a certain jauntiness, though he felt anything but. As the other Council members squabbled about some long-standing debt or another, Harrow stared into the empty bowl of his hammered bronze goblet, deeply troubled over the vision he’d had the night before.

King Quintan—a broad, bejowled Enchanter with gray-flecked black hair, muddy brown eyes, and a downturned mouth—watched his prophet like a sunhawk, ignoring the droll subject of interest rates. In this room, he cared about one thing only: the contents of Harrow’s mind.

I cannot show him this, Harrow thought, knowing he would soon have little choice.

He had feigned many prophecies before. Not to the king, who’d have his head for the act, but to Levan Celadon. Delicious morsels drip-fed carefully enough to keep the scarlet cloaks close. King Quintan’s head on the Palace steps, et cetera.

All of it nonsense—until now.

He shivered. The king, who was always too warm, had demanded that the tall arched windows be cracked open to let in the fresh air. The creamstone walls of the Council Chambers were hung with three alternating banners—one rich purple with a bronze stripe for Vallin, one a gold chalice and laurel wreath against a burgundy backdrop for the patron saints, and one navy blue with a crown of silver stars for House Arollan—all of which rippled in the cutting breeze.

“No cause is worth going into more debt with the Joribali,” said Chalos Arentar, the Highcloak of Coin, a nervous Enchanter with neat blond hair and a needlessly weak chin. He wrung his hands like a dishcloth and wore so many ascenpearl necklaces that his posture was permanently stooped. “The interest is steep and we’re already failing to cover it. We’re at risk of them seizing—”

“The Mersini, then,” said the Highcloak of War. Cold, ruthless Kesven Flane, who had never actually fought on a battlefield. “The Smugglers’ Bank is generous with its lending.”

“And if you don’t repay within the agreed upon term, they’ll swiftly and merrily declare war.”

“So let them.” Flane banged his palm on the table. “We’d crush them, would we not? What do they have for an army but rogues and mercenaries? They have no national pride, and without national pride, it’s hard to coax bodies to the battlefields. We have it in spades. We’re organized, well-trained. We have allies. Does our defense pact with the Bellandrians not still hold its salt?”

The Highcloak of Coin glanced at the king, who was still not particularly listening. “I fear it sustained mortal damage when those pillaging Nyrøthis dipped south of the Rapier and we did not send reinforcements.”

“That was hardly war, and thus our pact was hardly binding!”

“The argument you made at the time, Highcloak Flane. I’m just not sure the Bellandrians agree.”

Flane’s cheeks had reddened with anger. He turned to King Quintan. “Have you spoken with Queen Vune recently, Your Grace?”

King Quintan’s stare remained locked onto Harrow. “I wish for the Royal Prophet to speak now.”

Dread jerked in Harrow’s belly. “Of what do you wish me to speak, Your Grace?”

The king folded his arms over his chest, sleeves falling away and exposing the flesh up to the elbow. He’d had beads of ascenite embedded beneath his skin and anchored to the bone in a swirling pattern—a fashion statement and a permanent power-bolstering all in one. Many of the Highcloaks and the other upper echelons of Vallish society had followed suit, though it was a rather more painful and expensive procedure than was really desirable, and was thus falling out of favor.

“Whatever has you cradling your goblet like a mother coaxing milk from her teat, Highcloak Claver.”

Harrow forced a cocky smile. “I was simply lamenting its emptiness.”

King Quintan stabbed a thumb in the direction of a servant standing nervously by the door, holding a jug of honeywine. “Refill the boy’s cup.”

The servant scurried over, chin low. King Quintan rummaged in his inner pocket, pulling out a vial of truth elixir and rolling it down the table toward his prophet. Harrow swallowed it down dutifully, washing away the sickly sweet taste with a glug of fresh honeywine.

“What did you see?” King Quintan’s words were crisp and cutting as a blade through wood.

Harrow’s answer sprung from him like a geyser. “With the caveat that, as ever, I do not have a sense of timescale…I saw a bloody uprising. The Palace stormed, scarlet cloaks flapping through the great halls, corpses strewn left and right like rag dolls. Screaming—so much screaming. The throne room had been barricaded, but it would not hold for much longer.”

King Quintan did not visibly react. In fact, for several moments, Harrow was unsure whether the regent had listened. Then, quietly, dangerously, he uttered, “The scarlet cloaks, you say. Bloodmoons.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

Levan had not been in the prophecy—no clearly identifiable face had been. The foretelling was a riot of smeared color and clamorous yells.

“Very well.” King Quintan rose to his feet, his portly stomach juddering the long table. “We’ve tolerated their existence in this great city long enough. Left their eradication to Dematus, to the silvers. But they have failed, and now the scarlet cloaks are coming for the throne. This I cannot allow.”

“What do you suggest?” asked Kesven Flane, a hungry look in his eyes. His own shoulders were ridged with ropes of embedded ascenite beads, giving his silhouette an uncanny severity.

The king turned to the Highcloak of War. “Time to make them bleed.”

Part Three

Deceptions

23

• • • •

Two Witnesses

“I heard the screams and went running,” Riv Minarin finished, folding her arms over her black Mage Practer cloak and casting a defiant stare in Auria’s direction. The second eyewitness from the Broad Row murder seemed far less nervous than the first.

After the rather public altercation with Saffron, Auria had thankfully found the lost witnesses tossing back flamebrandy shots in a tavern next to the portari gate. She was now interviewing them individually in a small interrogation room at Order headquarters.

She sat opposite the witness, sipping at a flask of cønnafyr she’d brought from her mothers’ house. “You were in a pleasurehouse. How did you know the screams were nefarious?”

“They weren’t screams of pleasure, or even of kinky pain. It sounded like someone was being brutally tortured.”

“So both you and your sexual partner ran upstairs.”

“Yes, that’s right. We had the same instincts.”

“And when you got to the top of the stairs, did you turn right or left?”

Riv paused to consider this, closing her eyes as though painting the pleasurehouse’s layout on the back of her lids. “Neither. Straight ahead.”

Auria scrawled shorthand notes down on a fourth sheet of parchment. “What did the crime scene look like when you arrived?”

“It’s all such a blur. The room was strewn with rose petals and fur blankets, and there was an upturned bowl of half-eaten strawberries on the floor. The body was on the bed, contorted with pain but clearly dead. The window was open, and I saw a flash of white cloak as the suspect leapt out.”

Auria’s detective’s instincts snagged on two parts of this statement, but she tucked the suspicions away until the right moment. “What did you do next?”

“I ran over to the window while my companion rushed to the body. The white-cloaked mage who dropped into the alley was short, tanned, bald, and barefoot. He sprinted away in the direction of Parlin Place.”

A neat testimony, answering several questions before Auria needed to ask them. “And did you attempt to cast any spells to prevent the suspect’s escape?”

“No, my magic isn’t very strong—I was lucky to scrape the Mage Practer certificate.”

Auria’s heart rate picked up as a theory formed in her mind. “And how did you feel at that point? Were you fearful? Confused? Shocked?”

Sloppy, Auria chastised herself. Don’t put words in their mouth. Let them find their own.

“I was surprised how calm I felt in the moment. I suppose you never know how you’re going to respond to something like that until you’re in it.”

“Who summoned the Silvercloaks?”

“My companion did, upon realizing the victim was deceased.”

Interesting, Auria thought.

Someone was lying.

“And did you recognize the victim?”

“No, they were not known to me.”

“What about the suspect?” Auria sipped again at the delicious cinnamon-sweet coffee, praying it staved off the fresh migraine bulging behind her eye sockets. “Were they familiar to you?”

“Not at all.”

The answers were growing shorter, less certain, as though Riv had veered off the edge of a known map. It made note-taking easier, and suspicions sharper.

“And were you and your companion the only patrons of Anila’s to attend the scene, or were you merely the first?”

“The only. I went to find Anila while we waited for the Silvercloaks to appear—my companion stayed in the room with the corpse.”

“Was this something you agreed upon, or did you leave without a word?”

A short beat. Riv’s gaze flicked over to a large wall-mounted mirror and back to Auria. “We agreed upon it. Porak was happy to stay behind.”

Porak Zemni, the other eyewitness, was a Tarsan immigrant with a profoundly large appendage. He spent approximately ninety-four percent of his waking life in pleasurehouses. Were he not a Ludder, his magical well likely would’ve been full enough to hold the Great Wards alone.

“Happy?” Auria raised her eyebrow. “He wasn’t worried the suspect would return to the scene of the crime?”

Riv shrugged. “You’d have to ask him that.”

“Did you have a prior relationship with Porak?”

A faint blush of pink appeared on the apples of Riv’s cheeks. “We met for the first time that evening.”

“Did you notice anything unusual at the pleasurehouse prior to the screams? Unexpected sights, sounds, body language? Any conflicts, large or small?”

“No, nothing like that.”

They were nearing the end—for now. Auria couldn’t wait to leave the room and tell Jebat what she suspected. “Anything else you’d like to tell me?”

A tight, too-pleasant smile. “No.”

Gathering her notes, Auria rose to her feet, silver cloak falling around her ankles in silky waves. “Thank you for your time. Let me have a quick word with my colleague—he might have some follow-up questions.”

Jebat was waiting for Auria in the second room behind the wall-mounted mirror.

“Well?” he asked, a stack of papers clutched to his chest and a mug of ambertea in his hand.

Auria paced wildly, the excess coffee making her feel like she might either bite a horse or smash the moon. “Something isn’t sitting right. While the eyewitnesses both relay the approximate shape of events in the same way, there are discrepancies. They each stated that the other summoned the Silvercloaks, for example. And then, when I asked whether they agreed one should go looking for Anila while the other remained behind, one said they did agree and the other said it was spontaneous. It’s possible one of them is misremembering, but…I don’t know. Especially earlier on in the questioning, there was an air of performance, of rehearsal, to their accounts. Identical turns of phrases. Such a blur and a flash of white cloak as the suspect leapt out.”

Jebat sipped at his tea, the dangling jewels of his septum ring clinking against the porcelain rim of the mug. “What are you suggesting?”

Auria stopped abruptly, swirling on her heel to face him. “The witnesses could have been planted. I was so sure that when I lost them on Broad Row, they were going to be killed. Karvas warned me that the Whitewings would send someone to assassinate them, and with the suspect still at large in the area…it seemed miraculous when I found them unscathed. But what if they were unscathed because the Whitewings wanted us to find them?”

The lines on Jebat’s forehead deepened. “Why would the Whitewings plant witnesses to incriminate themselves? Why wouldn’t they say it had been a scarlet cloak fleeing through the window?”

“To keep it as close to the truth as possible. To minimize the chance of being contradicted by genuine witnesses, but without enough accurate detail for a conviction. Switching up certain information where they know they have scope to do so. Saints, if only Dematus would allow truth elixir in the interrogation room.”

Jebat scoffed bitterly. “As long as there’s corruption inside the system, those involved will do anything to ensure they aren’t incriminated.”

Auria crossed to the mirror and studied Riv through the one-way glass. The black-cloaked Practer was humming a folk song about large appendages. “I’d love to look at the witness reports from the other Broad Row murders. Go through them with a fine-tooth comb and—”

“Marriosan,” Jebat interrupted, with an air of apology. “The autopsy results came back on the victim. There was a Bloodmoon loyalty brand over their heart.”

Dread sank into Auria’s stomach. “A targeted attack?”

“Ordinarily, this might not be enough to suggest as much. The victim was still clothed when they died, so it’s unclear whether the suspect knew what lay beneath. But two of the other victims this week were wearing dark red cloaks, and another was a known Whitewing. This is a clear feud between the whites and the Bloodmoons.”

Auria stared up at the ceiling. “Which means…”

“I’m sorry, Marriosan. Karvas insisted we take you off this case.”

She tossed her careful notes onto the floor with a petulant scoffing sound. “But the whites and the scarlets are so embroiled at this point that it’s going to be impossible for me to find a Whitewing case clearly delineated from—”

“I know, I know. You have every right to feel frustrated. But you can still be of immense importance to the Whitewing operation. There’s a location within your patch that’s seen a lot of white cloaks coming and going of late. I’d like you to stake it out for at least a month, gather as much intel as you can. Then deliver a report on whether you believe it to be a drophouse or headquarters of sorts.”

“Fine.” Auria gestured to the mirror on the wall. “Enjoy unpicking the rest of this yarn. I almost had it.”

Jebat bowed his head, and she sensed from his expression that there was something else.

“What is it?” she asked, fear darkening inside her like a storm cloud. A little over a month ago, Aspar had told her, in a conversation not unlike this one, that her grandfather had been found murdered at the hands of a Bloodmoon. What terrible news was Jebat steeling himself to tell her?

He gave her an odd smile.

“Nissa Naszi is awake.”

24

• • • •

What Is Lawful, What Is Right

“Why in the name of all the hells are you crying?” Nissa groaned, as though Auria’s tears were a personal affront.

Auria was sobbing too hard to respond.

“You don’t even like me. Disdain would be too generous a word.” Nissa sighed, resting her head back on three stacked pillows. She looked, quite frankly, appalling. Her usually shiny black hair hung around her sallow face like lank tendrils of seaweed, and her collarbones cut severely through her pale blue tunic. There were bleeding pinholes in the crooks of her elbows from when she’d woken up, spotted the intravenous fluids, and pridefully yanked them out.

“I know,” Auria whispered, tasting warm salt. She took a seat at Nissa’s bedside, and a velvine leapt immediately into her lap, sensing she might need a breath of pleasure. Auria stroked the creature’s sleek black fur, its piercing purple eyes surveying her face. “I abhor you in most meaningful ways.”

“You must have been so bored without me,” Nissa went on, the antagonism bolstering her by the minute, like a plant who’d spent many weeks without water and was suddenly being fed.

“Something like that.”

“Come on, Marriosan. Why are you so overcome?”

Auria looked around to avoid meeting Nissa’s dragonesque gaze. The hospital wing was dotted with golden lanterns and fur pelts, its walls adorned with salacious murals. Orchestral music played softly from an unseen source, and every bedside table and medicine cabinet was stuffed with bowls of candied citrus peels and honey-roasted chestnuts. Beyond the arched windows, a sickle moon hung over Atherin.

“I thought I’d lost everyone, alright? Two months ago, we were all still together as a cohort, bright-eyed and full of wonder at what our futures might hold.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“But now…my grandfather is dead, the captain is dead. Alirrol too. Sebran is missing in action. And Tiernan…”

“Karvas told me. I’m sorry.”

“Are you?” Auria laughed bitterly. “You thought he was a weak-chinned fool.”

“Well, yes. But poor bone structure and a predilection for cowardice does not a deserving victim make. Sebran’s missing?”

“Failed to report for duty in Carduban last month. Vanished into thin air.” As Auria dabbed at her teary face with her cloak sleeve, she caught a whiff of that morning’s perfume: currantpalm and cocoa. She often felt like the only mage on the continent for whom sex was not appealing, but the rich, heady scent sent a lick of pleasure into her well.

“Hells.” Nissa stuffed several crescents of sugared grapefruit rind into her mouth at once, so that her next words sounded gummy. “He’s so obsessed with honor and duty. He’d never abandon his post willingly.”

“Exactly. But we have no real leads.”

Nissa swallowed, then drank enough water to sink a small fishing vessel. “Aspar too. Fuck. How can someone so powerful do something as mediocre as die? Do you think I’m allowed to smoke in here?”

“I think not.” Auria gnawed the inside of her cheek. “So you’ve been briefed on the Havenwood.”

“Indeed. Honestly, the trouble you all get into without me.”

“Are you still on the assignment?”

“I am.” Nissa’s golden eyes fixed onto Auria. “You’ve been moved to the Whitewings.”

“Yes.” The single syllable was hard, raw.

“Bet you love that. Bet you think none of us will work hard enough on the Bloodmoons.”

Auria saw no reason to deny her nature to one of the people who knew her best. “When will you be back to active duty?”

“Within the next five minutes, if they won’t let me smoke on the ward.” Nissa grimaced, her face more lined than it had been before the dock raid, her usually luscious lips dry and chapped. When she shifted in her bed, her mouth let loose an involuntary grunt.

“Are you in pain?” Auria asked, leaning forward, though to do what, she wasn’t sure.

“Not from the curse. It’s my monthly bleed. Did you know that they don’t stop just because you’re in a deep coma? I find it thoroughly unreasonable.”

Auria frowned—her own bleeds were light and relatively painless. “They trouble you that much?”

Nissa clenched her jaw, her gaze growing a little foggy. “It feels like my lower belly is in a vise for days. I often vomit, sometimes can barely stand. Every few months, it makes me feel so low that I consider hurling myself from the highest tower at headquarters.”

Sympathy softened something in Auria—her migraines made her feel a similar way. “I had no idea.”

“Only Saffron and the Healers know. Paliran keeps offering me whiteroot for the pain, but I daren’t get addicted. And Saffron…she’s prone to saying things like this is no way to live. It makes me want to smash something. A life spent in pain is still a life. Or at least, that’s what I work so hard to convince myself. And besides—we live in a world where pain is power. Maybe I’m only me because of it. Is that a fucked-up way to think? Probably.” Nissa blinked once, hard, as though suddenly realizing where she was—who she was talking to. “Why am I telling you all this? Did you slip me a truth elixir? I always knew you were a manipulative shrew. Or has the injury dealt a fatal blow to my stoicism?”

But at the mention of Saffron, Auria had ceased listening.

She looked around the ward. It was relatively full, but the curtains between beds had been enchanted with muffling charms for privacy. “Saffron keeps trying to contact me. By wand, chasing me down busy streets. Claiming she’s deep undercover. She was at the Havenwood in a scarlet cloak, and she was on the docks the night you were almost killed.” Auria studied Nissa’s face for a reaction, but the flame-hearted Wielder had stilled. “She claimed the only people who knew were the captain and…you.”

Auria might as well have struck Nissa hard across the face. The latter mage winced. “Hells, Saffron. She’s trapped in there without Aspar. Did Aspar really not inform anyone…? Hells. Hells.”

A terrible pit yawned open inside Auria. “It’s true?”

“I don’t know if I should—”

“If it wasn’t, you’d deny outright.”

Guilt poured into the gaping hole in Auria’s chest. The way she’d treated Saffron back on Broad Row, the things she’d said…

Saffron was undercover. Saffron had run out of allies, run out of people who knew the truth. And Auria had turned her back, shut her out. Shamed her, belittled her, threatened her.

Nissa sat bolt upright in bed. “We have to get her out.”

“I can’t get involved,” Auria whispered. “Jebat told me to stay in my lane, keep my hands clean of the Bloodmoons.”

Nissa stared at her incredulously. “You see, this is why I so loathe you.”

“Rules are rules, and—”

“Doing things by the book doesn’t necessarily mean doing them right.” The gold lanterns on either side of the open windows flared into wilder, hotter flames, as though responding to the emotions of the powerful Wielder in the bed. “Especially when the very people who wrote the rules are corrupt.”

“Did everyone know about Dematus except me?”

“Who said anything about Dematus?”

“Karvas, then.”

Nissa raked a hand through her oily hair. “There is something crooked about the new captain. I don’t think you were transferred off the Bloodmoons because you were too close to it. I think you were transferred because you’re too good at your job.”

“Maybe so, but—”

“Hells,” Nissa all but spat. “If Tiernan was trapped in a deadly undercover assignment with no one on the outside left to believe him, wouldn’t you want me to help you extract him? What do you care most about? What is lawful, or what is right?”

“As a future Grand Arbiter, I have to say what is lawful.” Auria dipped her chin, feeling anything but proud of her answer.

“Fuck you, Auria.”

The pure vitriol in Nissa’s voice stung Auria like acid. She fought the urge to cry afresh—it would only piss Nissa off more. “We are never going to be able to bring down the Bloodmoons with the likes of Karvas and Dematus at the helm. To make a real difference in this city, this country, I need to rise through the ranks, effect change on a higher level. And to do that, I have to be flawless.”

Nissa shook her head, disgusted. “It could be decades before you earn the Highcloak—if you ever do. Are you suggesting we just let Saffron rot until then?”

“I’m not suggesting we do anything. You can and should help her. But I’ve been ordered to stay away from the Bloodmoons, and that’s what I plan to do.”

“Fair enough.” Nissa slumped back against her pillows, curling her fingers around a phantom achullah. “Tiernan died a coward, and you always were made for each other.”

Auria blinked, stunned by the depths to which her rival would stoop in the name of landing a blow. “Saints, you’re a vicious little cunt.”

Nissa laughed, then, a bitter, rolling thing. “Wow. The great Auria Marriosan, swearing like a sailor?” She closed her eyes, as though she couldn’t bear to look at Auria any longer. “Fetch me Jebat, will you? I need someone with a spine to know the truth about Saffron Killoran.”

25

• • • •

Vari Merkt

If Saffron never saw another boat again for as long as she lived, it would be too soon.

Seasickness was too meager a word for what was happening to her insides. She’d been fine on the riverboat sailing up to Port Ouran all those weeks ago, but crossing Assassin’s Bay in a small catamaran was another matter entirely. She’d retched over the edge for the better part of an hour, dry-heaving when her stomach had finally emptied, and even now, her feet firmly planted on dry land, her head was dizzy and her legs were made of mist.

Mersina rose up beyond the port like a lump of glittering coal. Built mostly from mahogany and basalt, the most notable part of the architecture was what it lacked: spires and obelisks and purple domes. There was no religion here, no Saints or Augurs or old gods. It was a city-state, technically, though state was perhaps an overly generous description.

The northern harbor was crammed with ships of all heights and hues—gleaming white, night black, bloodred, rusted brown, and the precise deep blue of the Sleepless Sea. Mersina was where most pirates docked after their raidings and smugglings, refueling magic wells in raucous pleasurehouses, tying themselves to whipping posts in the streets to turn their new magic into liquid gold, stuffing their bank vaults with all the treasure they could not risk sinking.

Saffron wore her scarlet cloak instead of her shabby black one, believing it would be better to masquerade as predator rather than prey, determined not to mark herself as an easy victim. But while the border control officials in Aredan had been skittish at the sight of her, few in Assassin’s Bay seemed remotely interested.

The cobbled ground swaying and canting beneath her, Saffron gripped her wand tighter and set off toward the heart of the city. She’d memorized the route to the wand market—the Vari Merkt—back in Aredan, not wanting to mark herself as a tourist. The moment she got lost in a place like Mersina—a vicious labyrinth of black stone and blacker hearts—was the moment she became vulnerable.

The very walls of the city smelled metallic, bloodied, and the cracks between buildings seemed malevolent, as though they would greatly enjoy devouring their victims whole. Every body that passed hers, every cloak that skimmed her own, made her tighten. She witnessed no fewer than fourteen pickpocketings and two murders. It was deeply frightening and oddly invigorating.

Half an hour later, despite a few wrong turns, Saffron found the Vari Merkt.

Rather than sprawling around a leafy central plaza, like Vallin’s Cherrymarket, the Vari Merkt clung to the shadows like a vampiric fog. There were countless black markets in Mersina—it was rarer to find a legitimate one—but it was the Vari Merkt Saffron wanted, because it had a reputation for flogging untested and possibly cursed wands to criminals who’d been blacklisted by the International Guild of Wandmakers. The only way to identify it was by a crimson line of cobbles painted down the center of the street in the shape of a wand.

Saffron’s heart leapt when she saw the distinctive red stripe, swiftly followed by a pitted feeling in her stomach as a cruel-glared man without a cloak eyed her up like a piece of meat. She hurried farther down the street, away from his ravenous stare.

The market stalls were a hodgepodge of low folding tables and spread blankets, the most elaborate of which benefited from pale, ragged canvas tents and awnings overhead. Every table and blanket was covered with wands. Some in boxes, some loose. Some so ragged and rotten that they surely could not be functional, some so ancient and unusual that they should be tucked away safely in a museum.

Excitement swept through Saffron. If she was going to find a wild weaverwick wand anywhere, it was here.

The difficulty, however, was going to be spotting one in the first place. As the author of From Sacred to Sacrosanct had written, it was almost impossible to discern what sort of wick a wand possessed. A skilled wandmaker might be able to identify it from sight or feel, but these vendors were not skilled wandmakers. They were crooks and criminals who relied on the steady belt-feed of contraband from pirates and pickpockets, and they didn’t care for the class or creed of a wand beyond what they might be able to sell it for.

Strolling toward the first stall on the street, Saffron smiled at the vendor before quickly regretting her decision. The man immediately sat up straighter, narrowing his heavily hooded eyes and drawing a knife from his belt in warning.

Saffron didn’t know a word of Mersinan beyond the name of the wand market, so she switched to the common tongue, hoping the vendor was familiar.

“Weaverwick?” she asked, sweeping a hand over his small display of wands, most of which were splintered and shabby, perhaps not even wands at all but rather small branches snapped from trees and half-heartedly varnished.

He simply shook his head, scratching at his patchy ginger whiskers. Either he spoke none of the common tongue, or he had no weaverwick wands to speak of.

Many of the subsequent stalls went the same way: hostility, language confusion, terse head shakes. Some greedy, searching looks, as though examining her person for pouches of coin that might be stolen. One recognized the embroidered moon phases on her cloak and began spitting at her like an alleycat. Eventually, she stopped asking questions and instead relied upon that most ancient of magics: intuition.

One stall was a little fancier than the others. The legs of its table had decoratively carved spindles, and the wands were arranged neatly in identical boxes stamped with a mourncrow logo. A pretty, dark-skinned mage stood behind them in a blood-orange Wielder’s cloak, with coarse, close-cropped black hair and a dagger tattooed along each cheek in white ink.

There were a surprising number of higher-value pieces on offer, several of which had ascenite handles—an expensive rarity—and a handful studded with Irisian jewels. The other vendors shot the orange-cloaked stallholder vitriolic looks, and Saffron wondered how the mage kept them from ganging up, slaughtering her, and stealing her superior wares. Perhaps the daggers on her cheekbones signaled that she too was a member of some lethal criminal organization.

Shivering slightly in the shade beneath the cream canvas parasol, Saffron locked her gaze onto a silver birch wand engraved with something that looked remarkably like a wolf.

A fallowwolf, perhaps?

Or just the sigil of some long-forgotten house?

Saff reached out a hand to touch the wand, then hovered over it, looking up at the vendor. “May I?”

The vendor nodded once, her dark gaze sharp enough to cut glass. Saffron found her energy to be rather arousing in ways she did not care to examine.

She picked up the pale wand, expecting—or at least hoping—to feel something. A frisson, a flutter when it met her palm. Some sign that her body recognized the wick, that the magic in her well was innately responding to it.

Nothing.

Perhaps she could go through the motions of casting a tempavicissan spell—to see whether the wand would feel the way Lorissa’s had in the moments before those fateful words were uttered. Charged, expectant, alive.

No, that would be a fool’s errand. She could not attempt to cast Timeweaving magic on one of the world’s most dangerous streets.

The dagger-cheeked mage studied her like a curio in a shop window.

“How much?” Saffron muttered, deciding to take a punt on the wolf engraving.

“Vinta skeni.”

Twenty ascens.

Bartering in Mersina was a complex art. Pitch too low as to be insulting and you’d be swiftly killed for the insult. Pitch too high and it would be assumed you were a patron of enormous wealth, and that you should be followed into an alley, robbed, and killed. There was just a little too much killing involved in the process for Saffron’s personal tastes.

Good thing she liked to gamble.

“Desiz?” Sixteen.

The Wielder’s expression hardened. “Na.”

Saffron had been insulting with her counteroffer. She backtracked hastily.

“Fine, fine. Vinta skeni.”

The vendor held out her palm, which had a jagged purple scar bisecting it. Saffron rummaged in her coin purse and counted out twenty ascens, dropping them into the Wielder’s hand and stuffing the wand box into her innermost cloak pocket.

Saff tucked her chin to her chest and scurried back in the direction of the port. The black buildings towered oppressively overhead, and the overlapping sounds rankled at her nerves. A tin bowl rattling with coins, a piercing shriek of anguish, worn-down boots thumping unevenly over cobblestones. There was the distinctive smoky, metallic scent of spell aftermath, underpinned with something like rotten flowers.

A few streets over, she ducked into a narrow alleyway, determined to test her new purchase. Blood thumping against her temples, she withdrew the small golden hourglass and the wolf-carved wand, both warm from the heat of her body. She closed her eyes and summoned the razor-sharp intention to—

Footsteps landed all around her like a sudden rain.

Her eyes flew open.

She was surrounded by half a dozen mages in blood-orange cloaks, all of whom had familiar twin daggers tattooed along their cheekbones.

They’d leapt from the rooftops into the alley.

And now they were closing in like a pack of hounds.

“Sen praegelos,” Saffron hissed, trying to freeze time so she might flee, but the wolf-engraved wand sat in her hand instead of her own, and all at once it became perilously clear that the piece of wood was a fraud.

There was no wick at all, let alone a weaver, and the magic never materialized.

Time kept rolling.

Six blades found her body. She was so shocked she felt none of them.

All went black.

26

• • • •

A Dark and Angry Crimson

“We have a problem.”

Segal burst into the kingpin’s office without knocking.

“What is it?” Levan stood sharply from the wing-backed chair behind his father’s squat mahogany desk, where he’d been sorting through some post delivered to him personally: a collection of three severed loyalty brands, cut from the chests of Bloodmoons unknown.

“Sevir was killed in a pleasurehouse on Broad Row.”

Varosol Sevir. One of their most lucrative loxlure peddlers. He’d been instrumental in penetrating student halls of residence, getting them all addicted, then ushering them in the direction of the gamehouses. He was constantly complaining that the higher-ups couldn’t get enough loxlure for him to sell. As soon as a fresh batch found his hands, it was gone, ten times the ascenite in its place.

“When?”

“Ten days ago.”

“Why am I only just finding out about this now?”

“The Silvercloaks weren’t in a hurry to inform us, believe it or not.”

A sharp needle pressed into Levan’s wrist stump, and he curled his fingers into a fist. “Have there been any arrests?”

“No, but they’re sure it was the Whitewings. Word on the street is that they’re growing more organized—that they’ve named a leader, and said leader has ordered them to pick off scarlets one by one. They’re leaving behind the scattered approach and developing some semblance of structure.”

A new leader, in the wake of Avar Martou’s death.

“How lovely. Perhaps they’ll unionize.”

Segal hooked a single wiry eyebrow. “Did you just crack a joke?”

“No.”

Levan thought of the severed brands he’d been posted, wondering what their end goal was. “An attempt to weaken us further, then, but not destroy us entirely. Just like the compound break-in. They could have burned the place to the ground that night, if they so wanted to.”

Something that had been troubling him ever since.

Why settle for killing servants and carving wings into the marble?

Levan lifted one of the leathery brands between his thumb and forefinger, trying not to gag at the thought this was a dead mage’s skin. “They’ve been having fun with our servants too. Servants, croupiers. Low-rung lox runners.”

Segal visibly paled at the sight of the brand. “Saints.”

“If I were a gambling man, I’d say they want to take over our gamehouses and loxlure operations. They don’t want the hassle of setting up the infrastructures themselves, finding suppliers and establishing trade routes and staffing it all. They’d rather steal the whole piece. Drill holes in our ship then plug them with their own people.”

The rest of the color left Segal’s face. “You think they’ll send people to be intentionally recruited? So that we don’t realize we’ve been taken over until it’s too late?”

“It’s what I’d do.”

“Ah.”

Shoulders stooped, Segal shuffled to the door, then dragged in an unfamiliar figure in a pale blue scholar’s cloak. The young mage was tall, thin, and petrified. Dark brown hair fell to his collarbones, and his pale skin was blotchy with terror. Wide-set chestnut eyes were rimmed with pink, and an eagle earring dangled from one earlobe.

“Relar Zamorin.” Segal folded his arms defensively. “Whitewing scum, but I thought he could be useful if we branded him. Let’s treat him like a pawn. Maybe send him back into the Whitewings, leave them unaware that he’s been burned and turned. Infiltrate them, as they did us.”

Exactly the kind of thing Lyrian Celadon would do—it was how he had eyes everywhere, how he knew everything that happened in this debaucherous city. And the Whitewings deserved it, did they not? They had slain Sevir, among many others, would likely murder countless more scarlets if they were left to gather strength, gather momentum.

The Whitewings were the biggest living threat to the Bloodmoons—to his mother’s resurrection. Levan had to wrest back control of the situation.

“Very well,” Levan said, but his throat was suddenly dry. He gestured toward the brass rack of instruments by the fire. “Would you like to do the honors?”

“I have no magic,” Segal replied, a tilt of defiance to the words. And then a pointed expression—one that said I believe you are unfit to lead, but here is a chance to win me around. “The honor is all yours.”

Relar Zamorin staggered back on his heels, waving his hands frantically in front of him.

“No. Please, no.” He was almost choking on his own tears. “I’ll do anything. Anything but this, please—”

“How old are you, boy?” There was an undeniable adolescence to the Whitewing’s face. Patchy facial hair, a constellation of pimples. A luster to the hair and skin.

“Fourteen.”

Something deep inside Levan lurched with horror. He turned to Segal, aghast. “You brought me a fourteen-year-old?”

Segal shrugged ambivalently. “He looked older.”

“How did you get involved in the Whitewings so young?” Levan asked.

“M-my grandmother is an apothecary—they threatened to kill me if she didn’t do as they asked. The Whitewings had all these rare ingredients they wanted her to source.” A sharp swallow, the words growing raspy. “I’ve been traveling, finding ingredients from farther afield. She’s not as mobile as she once was.”

Levan’s mind caught on this. “Rare ingredients. For what tinctures?”

“I didn’t recognize most of their names.” Another wobble of the lower lip, another overflowing of tears. “Please, don’t hurt me.”

Segal seemed to notice Levan’s apprehension. “We can’t very well release him back into the custody of the Whitewings.” A slow, pointed shrug. “Maybe it’s cleaner just to kill him, if you don’t have the stomach for the brand.”

“I have the stomach,” Levan snapped, though said stomach was roiling.

Fourteen was so young.

Older than Levan had been when he was branded, but only by a few years. It was cruelty, sheer unadulterated cruelty, and if he did this heinous thing, he would cross a line he could never uncross. For all his wrongs, he had never hurt a child. And this boy, with his scattered pimples and eleven chin hairs and gangly limbs, was just that.

Yet could he afford to show more weakness in front of Segal, who was already doubting his command, who didn’t respect or fear him the way he ought to? Though Segal didn’t know it yet, the brand on his chest was no longer active—he could betray Levan without retribution, if he so chose.

Control was slipping, and Levan could not abide it. He had to demonstrate his ruthlessness, his willingness to do what needed to be done, no matter how ugly.

“Restrain him,” Levan said, his voice sounding very far away.

As Segal shackled the trembling boy with the same wall manacles Silver had been bound in, Levan tried not to think of her screams as the hot poker met her flesh. The rancid smell of it, the frantic pattering of her unconscious heart as he’d carried her to her chamber.

He tried not to think of his own branding. The way he’d pleaded and begged, promised to do anything they wanted without hesitation, no need for the brand, please, I promise, I will never betray—

Then the agony. The forking, shredding, all-consuming heat, his vision bleached white. An owl hooting in the distance, in another world, perhaps. The shame of the wet patch in his trousers.

Crossing the office to the fireplace—stepping over Rasso’s sleeping body—he lifted the branding poker from the brass rack and held the round stamp over the flames until it glowed orange and then white. He tossed a colored powder from a small ashtray into the flames, and they turned a dark and angry crimson. Behind him came the ripping sound of torn fabric. Segal had shredded the boy’s tunic.

“Ver fidan, nis morten,” he uttered, his own brand pulsing with self-loathing. “Ver fidan, nis morten. Ver fidan, nis morten. Medei perpetua.”

Medei perpetua. Not the first time he had uttered those words, but the first time he had used them for ill.

Would it work?

Until now, his magic had bucked and pinwheeled and disobeyed. Now he was asking something so dark of it that he almost prayed it would not respond, but he wouldn’t know until the metal met flesh, until he issued an order and waited to see how the boy responded.

His father had wanted to do this to Alucia—it was one of the conditions of their marriage. Lyrian would not allow anyone to marry into the family without being wholly certain of her loyalties. Levan had, of course, refused this, refused to allow her to endure such pain, such humiliation, just to be with him. They’d been planning to wed in secret, but her treachery had been exposed a week too soon. And as it turned out, his father’s distrust had been founded all along.

The poker was hot enough now, had been for several moments.

As Levan turned to the boy’s shackled form, the sight of the bare torso almost broke him. He was so pale, so bony, with purple stretch marks up his belly from growing too tall too fast. His nipples were tiny, and his breathing was so panicked and raw that his diaphragm rose and fell in tremulous gasps. Tears fell freely from his brown eyes, and his bottom lip quivered uncontrollably.

The black walls of his father’s office were closing in on Levan.

Before the poker could lose too much heat, he crossed the room, round stamp outstretched.

The boy whimpered, tried to pull his body away, to make himself small, but there was nowhere to go.

All at once, Levan was a boy again, flat on his back on the floor of the shack, the pieces of a discarded board game scattered like debris from a great explosion, Perant pinning down his arms with two well-placed knees, Vogolan looming over him with the very same hot poker. Levan had never known fear like the fear he’d felt in the few moments before heat met skin. It still woke him in the night all these years later.

Relar Zamorin, an apothecary’s apprentice, an innocent grandson, would be traumatized for the rest of his life.

Shining brown eyes pleaded with him.

Levan lowered the poker to his side, struggling immensely to control his breathing.

“You will inform for us without the brand.”

He uttered the words with the full force of his compelling—though it was impossible to know, yet, whether said compelling would work. Whether his connection with magic was forever broken.

The boy’s eyes flew wide, hardly daring to hope. A cautious, semi-rabid expression, like a blackfox anticipating a trap but wanting the morsel inside it too badly to resist.

“Yes. Y-yes, sir, of course.”

“You will relay every ingredient the Whitewings ask you for, every request no matter how seemingly small and insignificant. And if they demand information on our operation, you will lie. Say you haven’t been able to penetrate our inner circle.”

“Yes.” A gasp, a sob. “Yes, thank you, thank you.”

Segal stepped forward, outraged. “This is a mistake. This is weakness.”

“Actually,” said Levan, forcing a cool confidence into his tone, “I believe mercy is a kind of strength, but perhaps we could leave the philosophical debates until later. Unshackle him.”

“Your father would never—”

“My father is dead. You yourself are without magic, without pain or pleasure. A ghost of a mage, an afterimage. I take orders and opinions from neither of you.”

Segal made a sharp hissing sound. “Your fool’s instincts almost cost us everything with Alucia Martou, and you have learned nothing since. Saffron Killoran is proof of that.”

At the mention of Alucia, Levan saw crimson.

He strode across the room toward Segal, wand outstretched, jamming it beneath Segal’s chin and shoving upward. “The next time you question me, I’ll have your head. You will beg for mercy, and there will be none. Because mercy is a weakness, is it not?” He jerked his head toward Relar Zamorin. “Now, unshackle him.”

In the few beats of ragged breath before he released the hateful-eyed Segal, the tip of his black elm wand crackled.

“Et vocos, Levan Celadon,” came a breathless female voice.

Castian.

Castian, who he’d ordered to follow Saffron.

Levan wrenched his wand away from Segal’s throat.

“Yes? What is it?”

“Silver is hurt. Badly.”

“What—”

“Stabbed, bleeding out. Saints, I…I think she’s going to die.”

27

• • • •

Fifteen Years Ago

When the boy from the woods was six years old, two Bloodmoons died on a heist, and Lorissa Rezaran narrowly escaped with her life.

The night of the funeral—grim pyre still smoking, though there had not been much left of their bodies to burn, let alone turn into jewels—the boy from the woods overheard his mother and father talking over steaming cups of spiked ambertea.

“…can’t help but think that if I’d had a better weaverwick, I might have been able to wind back the clock further,” Lorissa murmured, almost inaudible over the howling gale outside. The wind blew the scent of charred flesh through the cracks in the windowpanes. “To before we even started the raid.”

Lyrian shifted in his creaky chair. “You think you’re only able to weave for a few minutes at a time because the wand isn’t strong enough?”

A short, terrible silence. “Are you calling my own power into question?”

“No, my love. No, of course not.”

“Because if you’re doubting me, Lyrian—”

“Never. I have never doubted you for a moment. One day, I will be the king to your queen. I believe that with my full chest.”

The second silence was less perilous, but still charged with something raw and expectant.

“I’ve heard a rumor,” Lorissa said. “A rich courtier has a weaverwick wand stored in a private bank vault in Almere. An old family heirloom her ancestors refused to give up during the Great Purge. I’ve been looking into the bank’s security measures, and—”

“My love—a major bank?” Lyrian sounded aghast. “Perhaps a small, family-run institute in Lunes or Sorvel, but Almere is Bellandry’s second city. Their defenses will be great. We cannot afford to lose more mages. The ashes of our recent fallen are still warm, and already—”

“Very well.” The chair legs scraped along the floor as Lorissa stood. “I’ll go alone.”

Lyrian did not argue any further. Even the boy from the woods, tucked snugly in the bed next to his older brother, sensed the finality in the words, in his mother’s indomitable will.

Well—almost indomitable.

The next night, Lorissa Rezaran made good on her promise.

The boy from the woods, eternally restless, followed.

Earlier that morning, Lorissa had paid Vogolan, their best Brewer, a visit. He’d scraped together the ingredients for three single vials of invisibility tincture, and she demanded one of those vials for a solo mission. Vogolan obliged, though not without a wretched scowl and some choice words muttered under his stale breath.

A few hours later, her almost-son compelled Vogolan into handing over a second vial. He employed only a light touch of command, given the deminite bracelet, and when he left the Brewer’s cabin, Vogolan found himself remarking upon what a wonderful little boy the swaddled baby was turning into—reflecting, in a manner not entirely authentic, that he would quite simply do anything to make the child happy.

Once dusk settled over the woods in an indigo haze, Lorissa slipped out of the cabin and into the twilight. The boy threw the blankets off his small body, shrugged a black cloak and scuffed boots over his pale blue pajamas, and padded after her. His brother did not stir, but when Lyrian stopped him at the front door with a thunderous expression, the boy calmly told his father not to worry, and so his father did not worry.

The boy stepped out into the woods, then retrieved the invisibility tincture from his cloak pocket. Gulping it down in one, he watched in awe as his form blurred and vanished, then hared after his mother, who strode in the direction of the portari gate with her jaw thrust high, her scarlet cloak billowing, and her fallowwolf trotting at her heel.

A feeling of excitement fizzed through the boy as he tailed her.

Finally, a real adventure.

Almere was another world.

These buildings were not the rotting teeth of the Rezaran shacks, but rather tall, elegant structures with bottom halves built of dark gray stone, their tops cream-painted wood with swoopy brown detailing. They were arranged in grand, winding streets colored with green-and-gold awnings, snaked through with a series of narrow streams and rivers. Balustraded stone bridges with mossy ashlars arced over clear, babbling water. The city arranged itself among the forest, trees clustered together between buildings and in the middle of boulevards, leafy canopies shading the slate rooftops, cobblestones warped from rising roots.

A gaggle of black-cloaked mages stumbled out of a tavern, arms flung over booze-slumped shoulders, bellowing a folk song in an unfamiliar tongue. The sound of the foreign language gave the boy a peculiar thrill, as though he had stepped right into that weathered map he and his brother spent so long poring over.

A fine rain misted the air, and Almere’s dark stone shone white-gold beneath blurry lamps. Lorissa Rezaran’s crimson cloak skimmed the glistening cobbles, until, down a narrow side street, she plunged her pale hands deep into her cloak pocket, extracted the invisibility tincture, and drank it down—offering a small sip to Rasso, who blinked out of the world beside her.

Tailing them became an exercise in strained ears and tentative forward steps. The invisibility was not absolute, however, thanks to a shortfall in certain active ingredients, and so every ten feet the boy would spot a swish of red, a slice of pale cheekbone, a dark braid bouncing between shoulder blades, a shock of spectral white fur.

The strange party stopped outside a vast building at least triple the size of the structures all around it. Dark stone base, cream and brown wood, with silver archivolts and a gilded sign that read Banq T’el Almèrue. Two stone columns flanked the huge double doorway, each topped with a vulpine gargoyle—the blackfox was the national animal of Bellandry, native to the Forest of Lost Souls in the deep north.

Between the gargoyles stretched a shimmering sheet of magic-spun warding.

To destroy such a ward, one must cast a stripping spell with more force than the cumulative power of all the wardholders combined. For an important bank like this, there would be at least a dozen, which meant Lorissa would have to exert more force than twelve other mages together.

Achievable, for an organized heist crew, but alone…

Back at the camp, his mother had donned her ascenite vambrace with a somber smile. The vambrace was a beautiful piece, originally belonging to the Nyrøthi military, with a series of built-in ascenite shards. There were several ruby buttons notched up the inner panel, and with a single press, one shard would plunge through skin and flesh right to the bone. The surge of pain was useful in battle, since it required no magic to inflict but granted the wearer a powerful boost. The ascenite acted as a sort of conductor on the wand arm, amplifying every spell by a factor of ten. It hurt, but it worked.

For anyone else, this still would not be enough to overpower a dozen wardholders. But Lorissa Rezaran was not just anyone.

The boy listened to the telltale hiss of pain as the Rezaran heir deployed shards of ascenite straight to her ulna. Then, beneath gritted breath, “Sen exuan.”

The ward shuddered and then dropped.

Immediately, a high-pitched shrieking noise erupted from the mouths of the gargoyle blackfoxes, as shrill and sharp as the top note on a violin.

Lorissa’s invisibility tincture flickered, and the boy caught a glimpse of a scarlet figure staggering from the sudden expenditure of massive power.

Moments later, one of the vast brass door handles turned seemingly of its own accord, but the door was, of course, locked. The magical wards were but one defensive measure against intruders, and surely, surely Lorissa was too depleted to—

“T’avunier donte nor,” came her agonized murmur.

The doors flung open at the sound of the password.

The blackfox gargoyles shrieked louder still.

The boy followed the sound of her footsteps over the threshold.

Inside, the Bank of Almere was awe-inspiring. Four stories tall, the cavernous interior was ringed by mezzanine floors with ivy-twined balustrades. The atrium was topped with an emerald glass dome, through which hazy moonlight filtered, green and fragmented, over a vast wyrmwood planted at the center. Dark flagstones concentrically circled the tree, alternating with rings of hammered silver, and a series of streams and fountains was built into the ground, connected by low stone bridges so that the whole place felt like an extension of the city outside. Around the outer edge of the ground floor, hundreds of mahogany tellers’ desks stood on raised daises, though their little bankers’ lamps had been extinguished for the night.

Lorissa’s footsteps were long, dragging, a sure sign of exhaustion. They overlapped with the fallowwolf’s soft patters, sharp claws scraping against the flagstones. The boy followed the twin sounds up a sweeping central staircase to the third mezzanine level before stopping outside an arched wooden door with a small gold plaque reading Vault 426.

Hardly daring to breathe for fear of being too loud, the boy heard the subtle swish of a cloak, then the grating click of a key into a lock—how did she have the key?

A turn, the sliding of bolts, and then the door sighed open.

The boy’s chest lurched. Surely it could not be this easy.

He entered the vault behind her, sliding nimbly through the crack of the closing door. The rich courtier’s vault was like a dragon’s lair. A plain enough room, with dark stone on the floor and walls and goldencandle lamps bolted to the walls, but its contents…

Diadems and broadswords, ancient scrolls and enchanted portraits and treasure chests stuffed with Irisian gemstones, bolts of goldspider silk and an elmwood staff and a vial rack labeled Worst Nightmares, more ascens than he’d ever seen in his young life, more ascens than he knew existed, great pillars of them towering higher than most grown men.

The wild riches shifted and vanished as Lorissa Rezaran rifled through them. Over the clatter of objects and the faint sound of the fallowwolf’s sniffing, the boy strained his ears. The door separating the vault from the rest of the bank was thick, reinforced, but through it he was almost certain he could hear footsteps, shouts, that Saints-damned wailing.

Backup was arriving.

The wardholders must have been alerted of the breach.

Lorissa gave a muffled yes as she finally stumbled upon the weaverwick wand. One moment there was a slender gold wand case perched atop a stack of rare tomes, the next it was invisible, tucked into Lorissa’s pocket or waistband.

The vault door opened, and the boy slipped out behind his mother and the fallowwolf.

Every banker’s lamp burned bright gold. A dozen mages in all manner of robes—blood-orange Wielders, violet Healers, navy Enchanters, a handful of black Practers, and even a bronze Foreseer—sprinted across the atrium floor, over stone bridges, and between fountains, toward the sweeping staircase.

“Asoine,” one of them called to the others, a brash male voice, stippled with fear.

The boy’s heart faltered. They were vastly outnumbered, but they did have the advantage of invisibility—albeit the lurching, fragmentary kind.

Amidst all the chaos, he lost track of his mother’s footsteps.

And there was no sign of her, no swish of red, no slice of pale cheekbone.

He inwardly muttered a cuss he was not supposed to know.

The front doors were the only way out of the bank. He’d just have to make his way there alone.

Unless…

No. With the deminite bracelet around his wrist, there was no way he’d be able to compel so many people at once.

So he ran. Toward the staircase, toward the flurry of bodies, terror ripping through him like a fever.

On the stairs, the wardholders passed him in a gust of scent—myrrh perfume and lavender soap and Bellandrian bitterale—and a cloak hem fanned over his invisible face. A hand brushed his small shoulder. Clutching the banister, he bit down hard on his tongue to keep the yelp from escaping.

Four mages stood stationed by the front doors, wands outstretched to block any exit attempt. An emerald Brewer’s cloak, two black Mage Practers, and a navy Enchanter. The latter yelled, “Sel—”

Before the mage could finish the curse, his heart was torn from his chest by an invisible beast. A blur of white fur flashed and then vanished. The guard next to the Enchanter, open-mouthed with uncomprehension, fell next, their chest cavities gaping holes, their hearts disappearing into thin air as the wolf swallowed them whole.

“Rasso, no!” Lorissa hissed. “No!”

Horror rooted the boy to the spot, unable to stop staring at the fallen, their eyes wide, the life gone from them so suddenly that he couldn’t make sense of it.

“Tempavicissan,” he heard his mother murmur, plead, but the very fact of his hearing it meant she had not been able to wind back time, to undo the wolf’s brutality and find another way out. She was too depleted.

The dark chasm behind the boy’s ribs ruptured into a canyon. He was at once absolutely certain they would both die here.

Where was she?

There.

Just beyond the giant wyrmwood, slumped by an arched stone bridge. The flash of red, the dark braid, here one second and gone the next.

This time, the boy did not run for her, only stayed frozen at the foot of the sweeping staircase.

“Sel effigier,” one of the sentinels bellowed, casting a statue curse straight at her. It missed.

The invisible fallowwolf must have lunged for the sentinel, because she too fell dead, ravaged, a bloody chasm where her heart had beat mere moments ago.

Tears prickled behind the boy’s eyes, then fell in warm rivulets down his round cheeks.

Why had he wanted this?

Excitement? Adventure?

What he wouldn’t give for his safe, warm bed, for the feel of his brother’s body pressed against his.

Fear paled the face of the last remaining sentinel—the navy-shrouded Enchanter—as she muttered something inaudible. A kind of glimmering shield materialized in front of her, but the boy knew it would not protect her against the fallowwolf.

Most of the wardholders who’d torn upstairs to the vault turned back, realizing that the thief was only one guard away from escaping with her life, but they were hesitant to approach when an invisible, feral beast was stalking the atrium.

“D’or laquissier,” a Wielder yelled. Water rose in thick tendrils from every stream and fountain—then crashed down on the spot he knew his mother to be crouching.

There was no cough, no splutter, no gasp.

Which meant she had gone under.

Every time the water spread shallowly over the concentric flagstones, the Wielder lifted it again and again, thrashing great columns of it down on the stone bridge behind which Lorissa hunched.

A small object materialized from thin air, drifting like flotsam on the surface of the rapidly forming lake.

The gold weaverwick wand box.

Lorissa had let it go, which could only mean one thing.

She was either dead or dying.

“Stop,” the boy pleaded, a primal plea, like the very night his mother and father had found him.

And so the Wielder stopped.

Stood frozen on the staircase, arms raised like a mad cleric mid-worship.

So too did the water, hanging suspended in the air like a liquid tower.

Confused yells in unintelligible Bellandrian chorused through the atrium. Two more mages sprinted to the entrance, one futilely checking dead wrists for pulses, the other standing squarely with their wand outstretched, as though expecting the drowning intruder to rise at any moment. Their gaze frantically scanned the room for any white flash of murderous fallowwolf. The boy thought they were maybe the bravest mage in the world.

For several beats, time seemed to hang suspended like the pillar of water.

Then the boy heard the best sound of his young life.

His mother’s cough.

She was alive.

“Sen debilitan,” she croaked, the words echoing several yards away from the overflowing central fountain, but the curse fizzled and died.

The remaining mages descended on her position.

This was the true purpose of the wards, the boy realized. They did not exist never to be broken, but to weaken the breakers badly enough that when reinforcements came, victory would be foregone.

Lorissa’s invisibility faded in and out, enough to show her stumbling across the room to behind a teller’s desk. Every tiny lamp seemed to flicker with terror. In the brief shards the boy saw of his mother, she was jamming the last remaining button on her masochistic vambrace.

Several mages pursued her—though not the Wielder the boy had compelled, since he had not given permission to move again—but his mother had vanished once more. The wardholders glanced around, terrified, blindly firing stone statue curses.

None hit their mark.

“Sen ammorten,” hissed Lorissa, and it hit a mark, and the boy could not believe it, could not believe she would take a life, no matter how desperate, no matter that she was facing certain death or capture herself.

Rasso leapt back into ravenous action.

Many more mutilated bodies fell.

The boy could not separate the emotions writhing inside him. Hope, that his mother might still make it out alive. Dread, that he would never again look at her the same way. Thoughts more complex still, about who deserved to live and who did not. His entire worldview eddying, re-forming, but not yet hardening into a final shape.

Only four wardholders remained—the stilled Wielder and three mages who’d regrouped to guard the front door. An Enchanter and two Practers.

At the sight of the newly dead, the navy-cloaked Enchanter screamed the scream of the newly bereaved, then lunged toward the row of teller’s desks.

“Nie, Vielle!” the Practer yelled after her.

“Sel ammortier,” screamed the Enchanter, Vielle, but her own wild killing curse plunged into a dais, splintering the wood.

The boy shook his head wildly, whimpering no beneath his breath—

—and Vielle stopped running.

Aghast, she looked over to where the boy stood at the bottom of the staircase, wandless, afraid, still wearing his pale blue pajamas, and her mouth fell open in a perfect circle.

The boy looked down, only to find that his body was perfectly visible.

The tincture had worn off.

Tears pouring down his face now, he sprinted in the direction of his mother.

“No,” Lorissa moaned, staggering out from behind the teller’s desk, her own scarlet-clad form pale but discernible now. “Son, n—”

Her moment of maternal instinct cost her everything.

“Sel ammortier,” bellowed Vielle.

Lorissa Rezaran fell dead, and the fallowwolf began to howl.

28

• • • •

His Body Remembered

Levan turned cold and still at Castian’s words.

I think she’s going to die.

Impossible. Someone so vibrant and alive as Saffron Killoran couldn’t die.

“What happened?” he croaked, feeling the heat of Segal’s and Zamorin’s stares. Rasso woke suddenly, as though he sensed his beloved Silver was in danger.

Castian’s voice was panicked, uneven. “I followed her to a black market in Mersina, and—”

“Mersina?”

“She bought a wand from a Wielder with dagger-tattooed cheeks, then got jumped in an alleyway a few streets over. I fought them off—mostly Ludders masquerading as Wielders—but not before six knives found her body. None struck her heart, but there are two nasty ones in her belly and one in her thigh that I don’t like the look of. She’s unconscious, bleeding far too much. Shall I find a Healer?”

Fear burst into flame then, his very skin alight with it.

“No,” he said, hoarse, striding toward the door. Rasso trotted to his heel, whining and wheedling. “I’m the only one who can help her.”

It was true, wasn’t it? Ludder healing—stitches sewn and flesh knitted back together by hand—would not be fast enough. And for reasons neither of them understood, she was immune to all magic except his.

His magic, which no longer obeyed him.

“Can you portari all the way down to Mersina?” Castian asked hurriedly.

Ordinarily, maybe—it was a damn long way, but Mersina didn’t have border control wards. Yet with his magic in rebellion? He couldn’t risk ending up in Sarosan or Teyet or Ni Lahi, completely depleted of power and with no way to cover the rest of the distance.

“Get her to Aredan. I’ll take the portari gate down there. There’s an inn next to the southeastern gate called the Fallen Foe—ask for Darin. He’ll set you up with a room and a bed.”

Castian’s voice sank an octave. “I don’t know if she’ll make it that far.”

“She will. Both of your lives depend upon it.”

Levan’s hand found the door handle, but before he twisted it, he hissed to Segal, “If I find out you’ve killed the boy in my absence, you’ll never breathe again.” He stooped slightly to pet his overly intelligent fallowwolf. “And mind Rasso, will you? He’s hungry—needs some fresh hearts.”

As the door slammed shut behind Levan, he heard Rasso wail and slam against the wood, claws scrabbling to follow his master—or to find his mistress. But Levan knew how devastated Rasso had been by the death of Lorissa Rezaran, how the wolf had screamed over her fresh corpse, and he did not want to put the beast through the same thing twice.

He sprinted to the marble dragon statue on the third floor, heart threatening to detonate in his chest.

The bedspreads at the Fallen Foe were drenched with blood by the time Levan arrived. Saffron’s face was the approximate hue of freshly fallen snow, and her breaths came irregularly, shallowly. She was still fully clothed, stuck with knives like a pincushion.

Levan remembered something Perant, the Rezaran camp Healer, once told him: “Healing is the only magical art worth a damn. Mages believe they need all the lazy practical shortcuts and fancy enchantments, the pleasure on a whim, the ability to wield fire and rain, to make wine from water, but all those frivolous wants are stripped away when there’s a wound in your belly and you’re bleeding out.”

Castian wrung her hands by the window, looking out to the sea she’d crossed with a dying mage beside her in the boat—not as uncommon as one might think, in Assassin’s Bay. The Wielder looked just as terrible as Saffron, her skin pallid and sweat-slicked. Her eyes were bloodshot, but since her blood ran black, the vessels looked like spiders’ legs across the whites.

“She has minutes,” she said. “Maybe less.”

Levan sank to his knees beside the bed, quickly examining the wounds. The thigh was the most lethal. He wrenched the dagger out of the leg as cleanly and smoothly as he could, loosing a tremendous spurt of burbling blood, then raised his wand.

What if it doesn’t work, what if it doesn’t work, what if what if what if—

“Ans mederan,” he uttered, tone calm despite the pulse roaring in his ears, the depth of his want pulling magic from the very bottom of his well, drawing on a lifetime of pain, of hurt.

And slowly, miraculously, the flesh and muscle and skin knitted itself together.

Relief surging through him, Levan repeated this process five more times, healing abdominal organs and bruised bones and punctured lungs, the magic flowing from him so easily the trust might never have been broken, until there wasn’t a mark left on Saffron Killoran’s body—none except the brand over her heart.

Levan laid his palm over the thick crust, feeling for a heartbeat beneath it.

There, but barely. The flap of a moth’s wing, the slightest tremor on the surface of a lake.

“Saints, she’s lost so much blood. Perhaps too much.” Levan ran his palms over his face, one pale, one gold, both so slick with Saffron’s blood that he left streaks of it down his cheeks. “What in all the infinite hells was she doing in Mersina?”

But he already knew—or at least suspected.

She bought a wand from a Wielder with dagger-tattooed cheeks.

He would bet any amount of ascenite that the wand was a weaverwick.

“Damned if I know.” Castian peered at the pale form on the bed. “Why the Vari Merkt, of all places? She has a perfectly functioning wand. Not the prettiest, by any stretch, nor the most powerful for a mage of her caliber, but there are plenty of wandmakers in Atherin she might have gone to for a replacement.”

“The wand she bought—do you have it?”

Castian shook her head. “She dropped it when she was wounded. I was too focused on saving her to pick it up.”

“I want you to take a boat back to Mersina, and I want you to find that alleyway, and I want you to retrieve that wand. And then I want you to toss it in the deepest part of Assassin’s Bay and never speak of it again.”

Castian gave him a curious, exhausted look, but didn’t question the order. She turned to leave.

Levan studied her shaking hands, the veins on the back raised and dark. “Once it’s done, you have my permission to find the most obliterating lox Mersina has to offer and lose yourself to it.”

She bowed her head and left the room. It was only once Levan was finally alone with Saffron Killoran that the emotion came crashing through him.

There was the relief—and copious amounts of confusion—that he’d been able to heal her at all. His magic had responded, thank all the Saints in the sky.

But why now? Why, after weeks of erraticism and unpredictability, had it heeded his command? He thought of everything he’d tried to do since the destruction of his wand, searching the attempted spells for a pattern. It wasn’t hard to discern one: almost everything he’d tried and failed to do since breaking his relationship with magic began with the prefix sen.

Dishonorable intentions. Magic designed to hurt.

Until now—until he’d employed arguably the purest form of magic there was. Magic designed to mend, to restore, to make better.

It made an oddly perfect sort of sense that the way magic wanted him to heal the relationship was to heal the world around him too. There was a childlike rightness to it. Healing magic had been his very first manifestation of a power, the very first thing he’d learned how to do. He would have to find his way back to that innocent boy—the version of him his mother had so adored—in order to find his way back to magic.

But how the hells could he do such a thing when his entire life was dedicated to hurting?

Hurting others, and hurting himself.

After his last conversation with Saffron in the library, he’d hung back outside the library doors long enough to hear what Miret had said to her.

“I think the problem is that you made him want to be better. You made him believe that it was possible to exist in this dark crack of humanity while maintaining some semblance of morality.”

His almost-grandfather was right. Meeting Saffron, falling in love with her, had made him want to be different. The kind of mage worthy of her love.

It wasn’t that he thought any less of her now—yes, she’d been undercover, but for good reason. And it was hardly her fault that she possessed the Timeweaving gift he so desperately coveted. Hardly her fault that her blood may be noble enough to challenge his mother’s claim to the throne.

It was only that she had betrayed him. That she had made time and then unmade it. And that in the other version, Levan was fairly sure she had not chosen him.

Of course she didn’t, you fool.

Why would she turn her back on her life’s purpose for a mage so cruel-blooded and broken?

All at once, the hatred he felt toward her swiveled inward, like a compass swinging from north to south. It was so sudden, so severe, that he felt it like a physical thing, a brick jammed into his belly, a stake thrust through his heart.

It was too much to bear. Physical pain, he could handle. Could lock himself away from, or lock himself into. But the sheer force of his self-loathing was not something that could be easily dammed.

The desire to follow Castian to the seediest underbelly of Mersina, to melt it all away with loxlure, was all-consuming. It was always there, this desire, waiting beneath the surface for a moment of weakness into which to sink its claws. Even when his mind did not think of it, his body remembered. His body wanted.

Worse than hunger, worse than thirst. Worse than staying awake for seven days and seven nights and still not allowing yourself sleep.

It’s what you deserve, said a voice in his head he recognized from the darkest days of his compulsions. Not the release—no, not that. You deserve to be utterly annihilated. You deserve to spend your every waking moment crawling on your hands and knees toward the cruel god of loxlure. You are a blight on the world, and death would be too kind. Any happiness you have ever felt was a grave mistake.

He teetered over the edge of a cliff, gravity pulling at him like a hungry monster, the wind in his hair, the swoop in his belly, the tug toward the ravine of nothingness below.

Only the sight of the silver-haired, silver-hearted mage on the bed kept him from falling.

Pulling the neckline of her tunic down and across, he lifted his golden palm and rested it over her heart. Over the scar his father’s poker had torched into her perfect skin. With his other hand, he raised his wand.

“Ans mederan. Ans mederan. Ans mederan.”

Magic heeded him once more. The scabbed flesh shifted beneath his touch, melting and re-forming, warming and cooling, until finally, it felt like any other part of her body.

Pale, smooth, unmarred. Untainted by the rot that was himself.

It was difficult to tear his hand away; the feel of her heart beating, of her fading warmth, felt like the only real thing in the world.

Downstairs, there was a kind of commotion—an overlapping of sounds, a familiar yowl, and then soft, clawed footsteps scrabbling up the stairs.

Before Levan could register what was happening, the door flew off its hinges and Rasso exploded over the threshold, panting severely, eyes wide and something worryingly crimson around his jowls. Seeing Saffron supine on the bed, soaked in her own blood and barely breathing, barely living, he let out another strangled howl and leapt onto the bed beside her, licking at her neck and face, whimpering and nuzzling and sniffing, before lying down beside her, face pressed into her shoulder, moaning softly.

The fallowwolf had traveled hundreds of miles through the portari gate to be with another mistress as she took what could be her final breaths.

All of it was too much to bear, the dreadful parallels to how Levan’s mother had died—both in search of weaverwick wands, both in pursuit of power in a world that had made them feel so powerless.

None of it should have happened. His mother’s ancestors should never have been slain, and she should never have grown up in hiding, and she should never have had to right that wrong, because it was that very quest that led to the death of Saffron’s family.

Levan dropped his wand to the floor, rested his own forehead on the soft slope of Saffron’s belly—the ragged folds of her tunic still dense with blackening blood—and tried very, very hard not to cry.

29

• • • •

An Ordinary Wound

Saffron awoke, hurting, to the sound of the sea, the crash of waves and the caw of gulls.

Peeling open her gummy eyes, she saw a small, unfamiliar room with a low raftered ceiling, whitewashed walls, dark wooden floorboards topped with a threadbare rug. A square postcard window was cracked open, letting in the tangy scents of brine and salt-fish.

She lay in a narrow bed with a brass frame and a flimsy mattress, the sheets and blankets crusted with maroon stains. Her whole body ached, though she couldn’t say for certain why, couldn’t name a specific source of the hurt.

Levan sat propped up against the far wall, his face streaked with old blood, his chin tucked to his chest in slumber. Rasso snoozed with his head in Levan’s lap, but as Saffron stirred, the fallowwolf’s sharp ears pricked up. Saffron smiled weakly at the beast, and the beast’s tail thumped happily against the floorboards, rousing Levan.

“Where are we?” Saffron croaked, as Levan’s head lifted. Memories came to her in smudged patches. “I—oh, I got stabbed. I got stabbed so much.”

Levan snapped from sleep to wake with no bleary in-between, standing to his feet with alarming velocity. His blue eyes were wide and shining, blood smeared over his cheeks in clear finger strokes. “Castian found you bleeding out in Mersina. She took down the assailants and brought you to Aredan. You’ve lost a lot of blood, and you’ll be weak and dizzy for a while.” A slightly ragged breath. “But you’re awake.”

Saffron propped herself up on her elbows, the room swooping around her. Lifting her wand felt like a godly effort, as though gravity had tripled and her muscles had atrophied entirely. Realizing she could barely hold her torso upright, she leaned back against the headboard and focused very hard on not vomiting.

How much blood had she lost?

How much power had Levan poured into saving her?

The thought was strangely intimate, as though he had replaced her blood with his own—which of course was not the case, but Saffron could’ve sworn she felt some of his essence inside her, as though she had been stitched back together with the very fibers of his being. Then again, she was desperately in love and still mourning their relationship’s tragic demise, so it was possible she was projecting.

As she winced, Levan studied her, concern pulling his dark brows together. “Are you in pain?”

“A little. I’m dizzy, weak, but you’ve done a remarkable job of healing my—oh.” She’d been roaming her hands over her recently stabbed torso when her palm found a swath of smooth, clean skin over her heart. “The brand is gone.”

Levan’s jaw twinged. “It served no purpose.”

Emotion moved through Saffron like a physical thing. “Why don’t you do the same for yourself?”

He crossed to the open window, sweeping his gaze across the choppy blue-gray waters of Assassin’s Bay. “Because there’s magic inside mine—magic that cannot be healed. Yours was just an ordinary wound.”

Saffron swallowed. “If you ever wanted to turn your back on the Bloodmoons, could you? Could you walk away? Or would your brand kill you for the desertion?”

She had asked him this before, when they’d barely known each other. He’d been evasive, combative. Insisted that it was irrelevant, because he’d always choose his family anyway. But she still harbored a thousand questions about the precise bounds of the brand, over what constituted a betrayal, over just how trapped inside this life Levan Celadon really was now that Lyrian was dead.

He ran his golden palm over the dust-and-salt-coated windowsill. “If I ever stop trying to resurrect my mother, my father’s enduring magic will end me.”

There was a strange texture to his words that Saffron couldn’t parse, almost as though he was reassuring himself of this immutable fact. She sensed that the conversation was making him uncomfortable, sad, even, and so she hustled on to a more gently antagonistic tack.

“You say Castian found me. Which means you had me followed.”

“You’d be dead if I hadn’t.”

“That’s not the point. Stone by stone, you said, and I’ve been laying stones. I killed a Whitewing, gave you ample evidence to use against me. And I didn’t betray you at Sorvel—I passed your little test. There was no shipment.”

“No.”

She shook her head, trying to look serious as Rasso licked at her jaw. “Is it always going to be like this? Laying traps, having me tailed?”

“Why were you in Mersina? Why the Vari Merkt?”

“I wanted a new wand,” she replied blandly. “Mine is an embarrassment and an abomination.”

“There are countless wandmakers in Vallin you might have frequented instead.”

Saffron lowered her voice, letting it soften and tremor. “When I was younger, my parents hauled me around every wandmakery in the north, and none of them would sell me anything decent. They thought me weak, underpowered. I didn’t want to face that same experience again as an adult.”

Trying to read Levan’s expression was like searching for meaning on a brick wall. “I’m giving you another chance to tell me the truth here, Silver. To lay another stone.”

He didn’t believe her.

Why didn’t he believe her?

“I am telling the truth.”

A head shake, his hair falling around his face in salt-tangled waves. “Whatever you say.”

For several moments, they sat in the rubble of silence. Levan’s face had darkened, and she still was not altogether certain why. But when he turned to face her, as though to say something, the ferocity of his pale blue gaze shocked her. Rapping his fingertips on the windowsill in a rhythmic pattern, his lips parted, and he took a deep inhale—

—and then Saffron’s wand crackled in her palm.

“Et vocos, Saffron Killoran.”

A familiar voice, lightly accented, soft and feminine yet gritty with the sand of the Eqoran desert. A familiar voice, backlit with a flame of anger that never went out.

Not for the first time that morning, emotion seared through Saffron.

“It’s Nissa Naszi,” Saffron whispered to Levan, her pulse quickening, her heart somersaulting. “Another chance to reestablish contact. It’s not Auria, but…Do you trust me?”

The seconds it took for him to reply sprawled into eternity. Saffron could almost hear the internal war rage, the scales trying to balance themselves, his ruthlessly calculating mind unable to settle on an answer.

Then, finally, a nod. Crisp, unconvincing, and yet permission nonetheless.

“Nissa,” Saffron breathed. “Can we meet?”

30

• • • •

Cross-Contamination

In the corner of Captain Vel Karvas’s office, a pewter cauldron bubbled and simmered with the burnt-sugar smell of truth elixir—though the potion was forbidden in the interrogation rooms, Karvas was not shy about keeping his detectives honest. The scent made Auria nervous, though she couldn’t say for certain why. She had nothing to hide.

“Marriosan.” Karvas closed a file, set it to one side. His long white hair was pulled back with a strip of narrow black suede. “Take a seat.”

Auria sat, wordless, fixing her eyes on the thin black bands of ink around his neck. On the alcoved bookshelves, Aspar’s floral arrangements had been removed and replaced with wall-mounted broadswords and rapiers. Warnings of the captain’s corruption sounded in Auria’s head like klaxons.

He smiled at her, but it was empty of mirth or kindness. “I understand you were disappointed that the Broad Row murders were reallocated following the discovery of a brand on a victim’s chest.”

Auria nodded, trying to find the balance between deferential and resolute, to show she knew her own mind but respected that his overruled it. “Yes, sir. It seems to me that the Bloodmoons and the Whitewings are so intertwined that I’ll struggle to investigate the latter without stumbling over the former. There’s too much cross-contamination.”

“An interesting turn of phrase. Cross-contamination.” Karvas pushed his silver-rimmed glasses up the ridge of his nose. “Your stakeout of the Whitewing activity hub begins this evening.”

“Yes, sir.”

If a Bloodmoon happens to stroll past in search of a tavern, will I be pulled off this assignment too? she thought bitterly.

“I’ve heard your case notes are always a work of art. Tabbed, color-coded. I very much look forward to reading them.”

“Thank you, sir. I won’t let you down.”

“That was never a concern.” With a certain keenness to his gaze, he pursed his lips, as though sucking on a sour lemon. “Although…”

Anxiety curled in Auria’s stomach. “Yes, sir?”

“The night you were unexpectedly called to Broad Row. Your evening off, I believe.”

“I didn’t mind. This job is the honor of my life, and my first priority always.”

Another of those infuriatingly barren smiles. “Well, that’s a relief to hear. Given that you were spotted talking to Saffron Killoran outside the portari gate.”

Before Auria could defend herself, Karvas rose to his feet and crossed to the fountain of truth elixir, plucking an empty vial from an upper desk drawer and filling it with the thick, honey-like potion. Dread plumed between Auria’s ribs as she drank.

“What was the nature of your conversation with Killoran?” Karvas dragged a finger through the lit flame of a candelabra, back and forth, back and forth. For some reason, it felt immensely threatening.

The truth sprung from Auria. “Killoran’s father left a letter in Aspar’s custody. She wanted to know if it was still under the care of the Order, and if so, whether I could get it for her. She offered me details of Tiernan’s final moments in exchange. I told her that I hated her, and that if she didn’t stay away from me, I would toss her back in Duncarzus and throw away the key.”

“And did Killoran explain how she knew details of Flane’s final moments?”

Heart thumping frantically, Auria muttered, “She’s been branded a Bloodmoon, and thus can roam their compound and crypt freely.”

It took immense effort to speak only partial truth, omitting the fact Saffron was undercover. Even though Nissa had confirmed Killoran was on assignment, Karvas was a dangerous person in whom to confide. If he told the scarlets that their new recruit was a silver in disguise, they’d have her executed.

Yet Karvas did not seem at all surprised to hear of the brand.

Personal vendetta is a dangerous thing. It addles the judgment, skews the moral code. Rots inside the chest, poisoning from the heart outward. Just ask Saffron Killoran.

Disquiet thrummed inside Auria like a second pulse.

After a few seconds of deep thought, Karvas pulled his hand away from the open flame and tapped the lock on the bottom drawer. “Ashen Narrows.”

The drawer slid open, and he pulled out a parchment envelope. On the front, written in looping, swirling cursive, were the words: For My Darling Saffron.

Quirking a gray-white brow, Karvas lifted the envelope to the candelabra and dragged it through the flame, as he had his own finger.

Auria’s breath caught in her throat, but the parchment did not burn. Did not curl at the edges, did not flare orange and then black, did not flake into ash.

Karvas stared into the fire. “There are some wicked wards upon it—I can’t open it, can’t destroy it. With Killoran’s father dead, I wonder who still holds those wards aloft?”

Feeling as though her lungs had been replaced with bezoars, Auria asked, “What are you going to do with it?”

“Exactly what you suggested doing to Killoran herself. Lock it up, throw away the key.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

And why did you let me hear the password for the lock?

She knew before he spoke that this was a test.

“I have no time for turncloaks and traitors. Your relationship with Killoran is a concern, and I want to determine your loyalties—or rather, the power Killoran has over you.” He waved the unmarred envelope. “If anything happens to this letter, if it falls into the wrong hands, if you’re ever seen exchanging words with Saffron Killoran again…I will know you are not to be trusted.” A cold, penetrative stare. “Stay away from the Bloodmoons, Marriosan. Your only job is to destroy the Whitewings.”

Auria dropped her chin, as though she’d been chastised. “Yes, sir.”

“Dismissed.”

31

• • • •

Stakeout

Auria spent the first stakeout slotting recent events into troubling place.

If Karvas was indeed corrupt, his order to destroy the Whitewings made awful sense. With violence between the whites and the scarlets escalating, and rumors of improved Whitewing organization and structure circulating, it was clear that the mages in white were one of the biggest threats to Bloodmoon reign. So if Karvas was a scarlet sympathizer, he would want the whites gone—and he would want his best detectives working to make that happen.

Auria took a sip from her flask of cønnafyr and peered across Fallow Grange at the thus far deserted hub of purported Whitewing activity: an abandoned building on a street of otherwise happily occupied townhouses. It stuck out like a rotten tooth, all shuttered windows and wild weeds. Having been used as a plague house during the Zayel Fever outbreak of 1108, no landlord or tenant would come near it. The Vallish believed that death lingered, left a shadow on the world where it occurred, and so the location of so many gruesome deaths was not a fit abode for a well-heeled individual. There had been a stretch of time a decade ago in which it had been overrun by desperate squatters and addicts, but even they abandoned ship after a while.

Now it was Auria’s job to determine whether the Whitewings were using the place as a simple drophouse or something more sophisticated. A headquarters, a central base. A jail for their hostages, a place of torture and death, as befitted its bleak history.

She was situated by the window of a tall townhouse adjacent to the hotspot, sitting in a saggy armchair slightly too short for her to see comfortably over the windowsill. The hideout smelled of damp wood and inkmouse droppings.

It was four hours after darknight, and she hadn’t spied a single soul. This suited her, strangely. Since the deaths of Tiernan and her grandfather, she’d found it so unfathomable that the world continued to turn without them. Whenever she heard laughter, saw children playing or chariots racing or crowds cheering, she felt such a profound sense of separation between herself and the rest of humanity. She had been altered, and they had not.

To walk through the streets of Atherin was to see the shadow of the life she should have been living. The new coffeehouse on Parlin Place where she and Tiernan might sit and read together—he loved graphic novels, she loved law journals. Dallo Tander’s latest play at the Royal Theater, which they’d bicker over—Tiernan would declare it pretentious tripe, when really he was irked by Auria’s infatuation with the lead actor. The blossoming Cherrymarket, where they so often strolled to visit Papa Marriosan at his famous gelato stall. If Auria extended the astral tendrils in her mind, she felt she could almost cross entire planes of reality, could haul herself into the version of the world where these two wonderful mages had both survived.

Almost, but not quite.

So the quiet, the stillness, suited her just fine. She could allow herself to believe the rest of the world had stopped with her. That she had been given the luxury of a great pause in which to process, to heal. Not that such things felt remotely possible yet; it was all still too raw.

Auria drained the last of her cønnafyr, wishing she’d brought more. She would be spending at least a moon cycle of nights in an empty, pitch-black room with nothing but her own thoughts for company.

After discovering Tiernan had been compelled, Auria felt less squirming shame over the way he’d died. He’d had no choice. She missed him so much it was like a toothache in her heart, and yet if she relaxed enough, let go of her inhibitions, she found that she could…talk to him, in a sense. She had spent so many countless hours chatting to him that her subconscious could perfectly replicate the exact pitch of his voice, could predict what he might say.

Tiernan. I miss you.

—Oh, I miss you too, my love. I am so sorry to have failed you, to have left you.

It almost made her laugh, that her mind so effortlessly conjured his self-deprecation.

You didn’t fail. But you did leave. And it hurts.

—Tell me how you are.

Tears stung at her eyes.

Every day is so hard now.

—I know.

I miss the old me. I’ve never felt this kind of despair before. My whole life, I believed everything would work out. Goodness would prevail, justice would prevail. It’s not that I thought I would never experience loss, it’s just…I thought I’d handle it better. That I was strong enough to always find the light. But I am broken, Tiernan. I am broken by the loss of you.

—I’m right here, Aury. Every step of the way. In your head, and your heart. Just beyond your ken.

Next, Auria “spoke” to her grandfather.

Many might think that the loss of her betrothed was a deeper wound than the loss of a mage in his early eighties, a life naturally winding down, but it was the exact opposite. She missed Tiernan terribly, but she had also lived most of her life without him. She had never had to live without her grandfather. He’d held her in his arms as a babe, watched as Auria’s grandmother healed the cuts and grazes on the crying child’s knees, enlisted a gleeful Auria in his gelato recipe development. Auria remembered one fit of the giggles that lasted four straight days after he’d been overzealous with the active ingredient in his strawberry cream fizzle—neither of them had been able to look at each other without peals of fresh laughter.

Papa.

—Sweetling. Oh, don’t cry, my sweetling. I’m alright. I really am.

But the way you died…you must have been so afraid. So hurt.

—It happened so fast. I’m not in pain anymore.

Where are you, though?

—Simply elsewhere.

Auria shook her head fiercely. It was the part of death she’d never been able to comprehend—the where.

Where were they?

Where were they, where were they, where were they?

Worshippers of the Saints believed that when a mage’s body died, their soul was transmuted back into raw magic, which could be used again—for a spell, for nature, for another soul. But Auria had always bucked against that idea. While many found peace in the thought that their loved one was all around them as an arcane force, Auria couldn’t bear the notion of her grandfather being recycled into a simple cloak-mending spell.

Forgetting that she was not talking to her grandfather in any real sense, she found herself asking:

When you passed, what happened? Where did you—

Before Auria could parcel her existential questions so that they could be neatly answered, there was a smudge of movement across the dark street.

A figure in the night, passing through the pools of warm light spilling from the occupied houses, until they reached the plague house. Auria fumbled for her binoculars, lifting them to her face so fast she almost crushed her eye sockets.

The man wore a plain navy cloak over a handsome navy doublet, and dark auburn hair hung around a pale face in perfect waves. He lifted a goldenjade pocketwatch, frowned down at it, then peered up at the plague house with an expression of grim determination. He strode up the front path, weaving between the dead weeds and gnarled tree roots. As he raised a hand to knock, the door opened inward, and the mage in navy stepped over the threshold and disappeared.

Pulse pounding, Auria set down the binoculars and picked up her best quill. She paused, considering how to describe the mage she’d just seen.

There was something distantly familiar about him, something that chimed in the well-ordered recesses of Auria’s memory. She cross-checked her rigorously documented mental files, landing upon the source of the recognition within moments.

During her time at university, this mage had given a guest lecture on the role of prophetic visions in the justice system—how they might be admitted as valid evidence in a trial when they were so hard to prove or verify. It had been a titillating seminar, and Auria still reviewed her notes from time to time, just for the pleasure of it.

Yes, that was him.

The King’s Prophet.

What was a Highcloak doing in Atherin’s criminal gutters?

32

• • • •

The Whitewing Queenpin

The Whitewings were expecting Harrow Claver.

A letter had been delivered to the derelict plague house a day prior, announcing that the King’s Prophet would be paying a visit to discuss important state matters. Harrow had anticipated a more defensive response from the Whitewings, who had only just laid down roots on Fallow Grange and were surely perturbed that their new headquarters had been discovered so soon. But when Harrow arrived at the agreed upon time, the door swung open of its own volition, admitting him inside with a woeful creak of rusted hinges.

The plague house was pitch dark, and reeked of something very old and very dead, like the leathery serpent skins sold in apothecaries. The front door pulled itself shut behind Harrow, and when his eyesight adjusted to the blackness, he picked out a straight, narrow corridor snaking away from the entrance. The only light came from the top of a flight of rotted wooden stairs, a faint white glow with no clear origin.

“Up here,” called a voice—high, soft, female—from somewhere above.

Primal instincts prickling, Harrow drew his wand and climbed, certain his polished boots would crumble through a damp slat at any given moment. The steps opened out onto an equally decrepit landing, the floorboards bare and flecked with black mold, blue wallpaper peeling away like fruit rind, a crooked chandelier dangling from the ceiling and emitting feeble flickers of light.

Harrow stepped through the lone open door at the back of the house.

The room had once been a parlor, judging by the scattered, sheet-strewn chaise longues and proud bookshelves. Crates of neatly labeled substances lined the units, most of whose labels Harrow did not recognize, as well as several metallic lockboxes. The drapes were so moth-eaten they might crumble under a particularly stern exhale, but efforts had been made to make the space more pleasant—embroidered rugs layered over grotty floorboards, a vase of fresh white roses on the curtained windowsill, three velvines purring around their mistress.

Their mistress, who sat behind a tall desk, feet kicked up, wand spinning between her fingers.

Their mistress, flanked by two white cloaked mages with larger muscles than really seemed feasible.

Their mistress, whom Harrow had met many times before.

Alucia Martou.

He stumbled backward.

Impossible.

For several moments, words failed him.

She looked different now—leaner, sharper, dark brown hair hacked off bluntly at her jaw, a white felt patch strung over one eye. Her white cloak had raised shoulder pads embroidered with black wings. A mark of seniority, perhaps.

“The King’s Prophet,” Alucia said, looking lightly amused by his reaction. “What a pleasure.”

“I thought I’d be dealing with Avar Martou,” Harrow eventually managed, trying not to wince as a velvine rubbed against his shin. He was a little allergic to the beasts, and already felt his nose twitch, red bumps rising on his skin.

Alucia shrugged. “My brother is dead.”

Recovering quickly, Harrow summoned his trademark charm, pulling his mouth wide in a charismatic smile. “I thought you were dead, my darling.”

“So Porrol Vogolan would have the city believe. Although my purported murder has been a useful guise as we’ve organized, these past few months.”

“Vogolan lied?” Harrow asked stupidly, for stupid reasons.

“By omission, I suppose—an outright lie would’ve seen the brand slay him. I’ll admit he was clever to outwit it. He’d never have admitted to Lyrian Celadon that I’d successfully fled. Though I hear they’ve both met their demise.” A specter of old emotion ghosted over her face. “How has Levan taken it?”

At this, Harrow bristled (somewhat hypocritically). “I think you lost the right to ask after Levan many betrayals ago.”

“Merely a courtesy. I know everything important anyway.”

“You’ve been dealing some critical blows to the Bloodmoons, of late.”

“I presume that’s why you’re here. You and Levan always had a soft spot for each other.”

Harrow shot her a ravishing smile. “I’m here because I have a prophecy you might find interesting.”

Alucia dropped her heels from the top of the desk, leaning forward. “I’m listening.”

Though Harrow had always insisted that he was loyal to no throne and no cause—not House Arollan, not the Bloodmoons, not even Levan—he couldn’t deny the flicker of guilt. Yes, he was following orders, floating abstractly above the great game of crime and punishment in Vallin’s capital, not caring all too much about who’d emerge triumphant, but the sight of Levan’s lost love made everything a lot more real.

“It won’t come for free, my dear.”

Alucia studied him calmly. “You don’t seem very afraid of me.”

Harrow shrugged. “Years of experience have taught me that I’m far too valuable for most people to consider killing.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t kill you—so far, the throne has largely ignored us, and I’d like to keep it that way. But there are other ways of extracting prophecies. Pain, suffering, truth elixir.”

Harrow withdrew a hip flask from his cloak pocket, taking a hearty swig. “And what would happen when you let me walk out of here—which you’d have to do, to keep the Crown off your back—and I never returned, never again shared any fruitful foretellings with you? Shouldn’t we come to a more civil arrangement?”

Alucia seemed vaguely entertained by his easy air. “Very well. How much?”

“Oh, I have little interest in coin. I’ve never found myself particularly lacking in it. I prefer to trade in secrets.”

Alucia’s stare hardened like fresh forged steel. “My very existence is surely secret enough.”

“A valid point.”

“Continue, then. I’m awaiting a large drop of darkseed, and you’ve already outstayed your welcome.”

Harrow steadied himself to execute the chess move King Quintan had formulated.

“I saw a bloody uprising,” he murmured, imbuing his words with the sort of misty reverence he knew played well when sharing prophecies. “The Palace stormed, scarlet cloaks flapping through the great halls, corpses strewn left and right like rag dolls. Screaming—so much screaming. The guards were dead. The throne room had been barricaded, but it would not hold for much longer.”

The two sentries flanking the queenpin exchanged hateful looks.

Alucia kept her expression neutral, but barely. “The Bloodmoons are going to take the Palace. And the throne?”

“If we allow them to grow in power, then yes, it looks likely.”

“But it could be prevented?” she asked, tone dark with hunger.

Harrow smiled faintly. “Perhaps.”

“Aren’t all of your prophecies guaranteed to come to pass?”

“Nobody truly knows. I just thought you might like to try and change such a fate.”

“So it’s for our benefit. Nothing to do with House Arollan trying to thwart their own downfall.”

“Our goals align.”

“Why doesn’t Quintan enlist the military he’s worked so hard to build? Eradicate the Bloodmoons over the course of a single evening.”

“And spit in the face of the justice system? The courts and the Silvercloaks were established to bring order, to promise fair trial and lawful arrests. Deploying the military would signify lack of faith in his own institutions.”

“So the king wants us to do his dirty work for him.”

“The king has no official position,” Harrow recited by rote. “I came of my own accord.”

Alucia shook her head, straining to understand the bigger picture. “Why are you doing this? Levan—”

“I care for Levan, yes. That does not mean I want the Bloodmoons on the throne. King Quintan may not be the most popular regent in Vallin’s history, but he is a pacifistic one. For all I love to stir the pot, I don’t want to see the continent plunged into war. Who knows where it would stop if the scarlets took control.”

Alucia stood, spine wand-straight, pixie chin raised. “And you’re aware that in the process of attempting to prevent such a thing, Levan himself may lose his life.”

Something deep inside Harrow keened and twisted.

“I would rather he didn’t. But do as you must.”

Part Four

Letters

33

• • • •

Fifteen Years Ago

Lorissa Rezaran was dead in the atrium of the Bank of Almere, and the boy from the woods was filled with ice. The fallowwolf wailed his grief at the sky.

Water lay everywhere, shining pale green beneath the moonlight filtering through the emerald dome. A vast pillar of glassy liquid stood proud, unnatural, at the behest of the Wielder the boy had compelled to stop drowning his mother. A lambent white-gold emanated from hundreds of small banker’s lamps. The air was scented with smoke and ash and honey.

For several long beats, there was an arcane stillness, a pause in reality.

Then it fractured like a bone.

“Mama,” the boy whispered, voice splintering, sobs springing afresh.

“Samien,” moaned Vielle, the mage who’d killed the boy’s mother, as she crawled on hands and knees to the dead body of a handsome mage in a violet cloak. His eyes stared at the domed ceiling, unseeing.

The boy ran for his mother, half-blind with tears, snot running into his mouth. He fell to his knees beside her.

Two sentinels approached the spot where Lorissa Rezaran was cooling into marble, but Rasso’s howling dropped into a low, feral growl.

“Stop,” the boy commanded, with a surge of desperate emotion.

They all stopped. The mages, the fallowwolf, curtailed with unnatural suddenness.

The boy was holding four mages still at once—while cuffed in deminite, no less—but was too distraught to consider the magnitude of this.

“Live,” he compelled his mother, with every last shred of magic in his still-developing well.

She did not live.

“Please. Live. I command it.”

She did not live.

“Mama. Please, Mama. Live.”

She did not live.

A sob turned into a hiccup, and he shook his head frantically, furiously. “No. No, no, no. No. This isn’t real. No.”

“Fant,” one of the sentinels said, his voice so soft it almost broke the boy. “Fant. Cera briet.”

The boy did not speak Bellandrian, but intuited that the mage was trying to tell him either that it was alright or that it was over. But it wasn’t either of those things. How could it be? The woman who’d saved him was dead at his hand. How could he live alongside this truth?

Unless…

He’d heard some of the adults at the encampment discuss a hallowed scroll of necromancers—their last resort. A list of mages who could bring the dead back from beyond the veil. They hadn’t sought out said necromancers for the fallen recruits two days ago, because there hadn’t been enough left of their bodies to revive. But Lorissa was still whole.

If the boy could just get her back to the Havenwood…

“Help me,” he commanded the remaining wardholders, both with words and with his very soul. “Help me get her body to the portari gate. Unseen. Unheard. Help me.”

So they helped him.

As the unnatural pillar of water crashed to the flagstones, the wardholders propped Lorissa Rezaran up on their shoulders and dragged her all the way to Almere’s central-west portari gate, as though hauling a drunken friend home from the tavern. Rasso continued to growl and whine, but did not attack.

The boy followed them, dragging his scuffed boots along rain-slicked cobbles, the canyon inside him filling with an ache that would never, from this night on, abate.

And in the atrium of the flooded bank, a small gold wand box drifted aimlessly on a shining green stream.

Lyrian was waiting by the Havenwood portari gate—leaning against a narrow wyrmwood and nervously carving a wooden board game piece with a paring knife—when the boy, the fallowwolf, and his dead wife arrived home.

At the sight of his murdered beloved, Lyrian let out a strangled sound.

The board game piece fell to the moonlit ground.

“It was my fault.” The boy fell to his knees, dropped his head into his hands. Warm tears poured through the cracks between his fingers like blood from a mortal wound. “It was all my fault.”

“No,” Lyrian moaned, pleaded. “No, Riss—I told you, I told you. Why didn’t you listen?”

“Dad, listen, it wasn’t her fault. I followed her invisibly, and the tincture wore off, and it distracted her, and—she got hit. Because of me.”

The boy didn’t know why he let the truth gush from him like water from a burst dam. Perhaps because the guilt and shame were pressing on his chest with all the force of a ten-ton rock, and if he didn’t squirm out from under it, he might die himself. Perhaps because he just wanted, needed, for someone who loved him to tell him it was all alright, that it was not his fault, that he didn’t mean for this to happen.

How could he have known? How could he have stopped it?

By thinking faster, the boy realized miserably. If you’d compelled Vielle quickly enough, she never would have…

“But it’s going to be alright, isn’t it?” he begged, throat bobbing, eyes filled with salt. “You have the scroll of necromancers. They can bring her—”

Yet Lyrian was already striding away, back toward the camp, as though he could not bear to look at his dead wife or his life-ruining son for a moment longer. The fallowwolf sat vigil beside the corpse of his lost mistress, crying in a way that broke the boy’s already ruined heart.

For several minutes, the breathless boy lay flat on his back on the forest floor, concentrating on the twigs and roots jutting into his spine, pressing his eyes tightly shut and willing himself to wake from this nightmare.

When the distant crunch of overlapping footsteps grew louder, the boy peeled his eyes open. Several feet away, the dropped board game piece was nestled at the foot of a tree. The boy scrambled to get it, muddying the knees of his pajamas. He tucked it in his pocket without knowing why. Perhaps some part of him knew what was coming before it did.

Two figures emerged from the deep black shadows: his father and his brother.

No Healers. Nobody carrying a scroll of names.

Just the only two people left in the world who loved him.

His brother wore a pale, horrified expression that only deepened at the sight of his deceased mother. He shook his head so fast it must have made him dizzy—that universal reaction, that feeling of no, no, no, this cannot be. A violent rejection of this new reality.

His father carried an object that sent a sharp slice of cold down the boy’s spine.

A set of deminite shackles.

Larger than the ones removed from him as a baby. Newer, as though they’d been made especially for him. As though his adoptive parents had always known, on some level, that this moment would come.

“It wasn’t my compelling,” the boy whispered. “I promise, it wasn’t. I only used it to try and help her. I…”

His unlistening father crouched before his no-longer son, movements stiff and harsh, and latched the boy in. The deminite was cold and heavy around his ankles, endlessly more robust than the slender bracelet, and impossible to compel through.

Not that the boy would even try.

Not now. Never again.

Lyrian dragged the boy into the portari gate, through one of the four ascenite arches, beneath the carved axelmares on hind legs with their spectral wings unfurled, and onto the black-tiled threshold where raw magic whorled and swirled.

“Dad? What are you doing?” the boy pleaded, though, of course, he already knew.

“We took you in,” Lyrian said, his voice terrifying in its emptiness. “She didn’t want you, you know. I was the one who insisted we keep you. Protect you. Raise you. And now she is dead because of you.”

The boy’s brother sniffed sharply, as though holding back tears.

“I’m sorry,” the boy from the woods pleaded. “I’m so sorry, Levan.”

But Levan simply stared at him, as though remembering the way he’d been forced to climb the wyrmwood all the way to the top, as though remembering all the board games he’d lost to his indomitable brother, as though remembering every night he’d gone to bed hungry from sharing their meager food rations with one extra mouth.

Then Levan looked at his dead mother, and his entire face collapsed with grief, eyes screwed up, mouth twisted, the sound of his sobs enough to carve permanent grooves into a heart.

It was the last thing the boy from the woods saw as Lyrian raised his wand and uttered a destination. “Ad Novarin north-east.”

The gate obliged before the boy could say goodbye.

The Havenwood swirled and evaporated, and a new city stood beyond the ascenite arches and bucking axelmares.

Beneath a star-sprinkled sky stood tall townhouses of pale creamstone, sapphire spires and crimson obelisks, purple-domed Augurest temples and vendor carts selling cups of whisky hot chocolate. The street hung with the scents of honeywine and old parchment, and each cobblestone was etched with the title and author of a book. Hoof clops and raucous laughter rang out like music. A babble of scholars in pale blue cloaks stood outside a towering library, passing around a smoking pipe and arguing vehemently about something so abstract as to be nonsense.

For the second time in his life, the boy was left alone in the world.

That first night wandering the streets of Novarin was the longest of his life.

The deminite shackles around his ankles were linked together with a chain, and while they did not prevent him from walking, they were cold, heavy, clanking with every step. They filled him with a deep, animal shame, and he could not meet the gaze of anyone who searched his tearstained face. He was deeply aware of the dirt on his pale blue pajamas, of how it must make him look like a beggar. He wrapped his too-big black cloak tighter around himself and kept walking, nowhere to go except away.

Novarin was a scholar’s city, and he felt the hot press of academic stares as he wandered. He was a curiosity, a research subject.

Why was this young child wandering the streets alone?

Why did he wear such thick manacles?

He was approached several times by mages who sank down on their haunches, asking if he was alright, if he needed help. Asking why he was chained up like a killer being hauled off to Malcarzus. But he could not speak, could barely see through blurred tears. He kept walking, ignoring their coos of concern. He could not let himself be taken in again. He could not destroy another family. He deserved to be alone—it was the only way to keep others safe.

With every step, his heart panged afresh.

He would never see Levan again. He knew that with awful certainty. Lyrian had not just closed the emotional door behind him, but locked and bolted it tight.

Yet what right did the boy have to want that?

What right did he have to want anything?

Want was the very problem. Because every time he wanted something, the world gave it to him. Yet when it had mattered most—when the force of his want should have kept his mother from being murdered—he had faltered.

When Lorissa Rezaran had been struck by the killing curse, his little mind was still whirring to make sense of everything he’d witnessed, trying to reconcile the acts of brutal slaughter with the soft-voiced woman who’d raised him. He had, for the first time in his young life, been grappling with ideas of who deserved to live and who deserved to die, concepts of justice and retribution and wrong. He would have been able to save her, if he’d wanted it enough.

How was it fair, that his thoughts could have so much power?

No boy should be able to mold the world around his wants.

And so the only thing he could do, from now on, was to rid himself of all desire. To wipe himself into a blank slate, obeying only the basest of needs in his body: hunger, thirst, exhaustion. A preference for shelter, if it was available. He would become a ghost moving through the world, never leaving a mark.

The boy spent many weeks perfecting his spectral existence. The vacant glaze to his face—borne from grief, and from a desire not to desire—became his permanent mask. He drifted through the city, relying on the goodwill of strangers for food and water, sleeping in doorways and dark alleys until his periwinkle pajamas were black with grime.

By day, he wandered the streets in a slow rhythm, thinking only of the clank of chains and whatever weather had descended upon the city. It was mid-Táryriel, by his calculations, and the sky alternated between fine misty rain and buttery yellow sunlight. The nights were cold, but he learned to embrace the shivering, the gnash of his teeth, the ache in his young bones. It was fair punishment, he thought, for the pain he had caused, and which was now rebounding onto him.

No, he told himself. Most desire springs from pain, and so I must not feel pain either. I must detach myself wholly.

Spring tipped into early summer, and the offers of help dried up with the earth.

In his first few weeks, strangers lavished him with offers of care—a spare room above a tavern, a knapsack filled with honeycakes, a change of clothes, a spot in an orphanage. But the longer he spent haunting the streets, the less he was seen, and the less he was seen, the less the world extended a hand. Food grew scarcer, and the pit of hunger in his belly grew deep enough that it steered all his thoughts.

It hurt, of course, but he buried that hurt so it could not mutate into want.

The only luxury he allowed himself was a single minute every day—the moment after he’d settled into whatever rancid alley he would call bed. He would pull the wooden board game piece out of his pocket, run a thumb over its unfinished grooves. A raven, he thought it was going to be, before Lyrian discarded it. As the wood warmed under his touch, he would weep for all he had lost. For all that was never his to begin with.

It was late autumn or early winter—colder, crisper, the streets crunching with umber and ocher leaves—when he met the mage who would define the next two decades of his life.

The boy traipsed into one of his most frequently visited taverns, the Red Quill, whose owner, Covar, did not mind him using the bathrooms to wash himself over the sink. Once he was done, they’d usually fix him a bowl of hearty soup, with a doorstop wedge of sourdough and enough salty butter to keep him from dying of starvation for another day.

That afternoon, the tavern was oddly quiet. After the boy had dabbed at his body with a bar of lavender soap, he took a seat at the deserted wooden bar—a swirling quill pattern carved into its wine-stained surface—and looked dully at the bowl of soup.

“Whiteclam chowder,” said Covar, polishing a goblet with a cotton rag. “Made from this morning’s catch in the Bay of Silence.”

A flicker of disgust twinged in the boy’s belly—he was mildly allergic to seafood. But he chastised himself for the impulse immediately. If he was not allowed to want, he also was not allowed not to want.

As he nodded his silent thanks and ate, the door gusted open on a bitter breeze, and a tall, black-haired mage stepped over the threshold. He wore a cloak more handsome than the boy had ever seen, the usual scholarly sky blue, but made of a thick, brocaded velvet and pinned with gold brooches.

The academic strode toward the bar in gleaming boots and took a seat right next to the boy. His skin was deathly pale, like curdled milk.

“One pot of ambertea, Covar.” The timbre of his words was low, well-spoken, and the cut of his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose suggested patrician lineage. He was perhaps in his early forties. “And whatever liquor you’d recommend spiking it with.”

The academic peered over at the boy as he ladled small amounts of revolting soup into his mouth. The boy caught his gaze before he could smother the instinct, and the stranger raked his stare up and down the boy’s body.

The scholar blew air through his lips. “There’s only one reason a wandless young boy would wear shackles like that.”

Heart skipping, the boy said nothing.

The mage’s onyx eyes shone with a sort of hunger, a naked flame of ambition. “Truthfully, I’ve been watching you for weeks. Months.” A meaningful beat. “It’s not a sin, you know. The power you have.”

The boy bowed his head, thinking of corpses in atriums.

“I was born with it too.”

With a jolt, the boy looked up again. He’d never met another like him.

“Of course, to be bound in deminite so young…your power likely far outstrips my own.” Again shone that crystal-cut gleam in his eye. “It’s possible to master it, you know. To use it for good, for right. You do not have to live like this.”

The fleeting interest in the boy’s belly soured—though that could have been the soup.

This academic might be like him, but he had not killed.

Your compelling is not what killed your mother, he reminded himself.

But then a deeper, darker voice in his mind said, Isn’t failing to save her the same thing?

If he’d had mastery over his power, on the other hand…

No. He would not indulge such thoughts.

Be a ghost. Be nothing.

“I could help you, boy. Give you a home, give you the tools you need to control your gift.” A rueful smile. “Because that’s what it is, you know. A gift. All I’d ask in return is to be able to study you. Call it a two-way mentorship.”

A home. The boy shook his head vigorously, so very afraid of the bubble of want swelling between his ribs.

The academic leaned closer. He smelled of boot polish and old coffee and warm skin. “Allow me to rephrase, then. You will come with me, and I will help you.”

And so, because the stranger commanded it, the boy went with him.

34

• • • •

Pleasure Is Not Pleasure

Almost three weeks after Levan entombed Halant in the crypt, he returned to find the necromancer deep in prayer.

The kingpin spent the walk down to the crypt trying to contact Harrow, whom he had not heard from since the Highcloak had unmistakably foretold a prophecy. The King’s Prophet’s silence was disquieting. Never before had Harrow ignored Levan’s calls, and not only did it crack wider the cavernous loneliness inside Levan, but it also made him fear that something sinister was afoot.

He came to the crypt entrance, withdrew the hourglass from his cloak pocket, tapped it, and uttered “tempavicissan.” The door revealed itself and then swung open.

Levan had been expecting a wall of stale reek to hit him, but Lindelan had done a thorough job of ensuring the necromancer stayed clean and fresh—regular waste bucket disposal, new tunics and trousers, buckets of soap oil and water. The citrus sent a bar of remembered pain slamming into his phantom hand.

A low, intense mutter echoed around the domed ceiling, emanating from one of the side chambers where the loot was stored.

Halant sat cross-legged over one of the seven-pointed stars, eyes closed. Coarse black curls sprung away from the scalp in a riotous tangle, the hollows of his cheeks more severe than ever. Emerald-rimmed glasses rested on a chain balancing on his bony chest, and his cinnabar wand and violet cloak were discarded in a heap. Before him on the tiled ground were a smattering of hand-painted stones, arranged in a circle to represent the Sixteen.

Levan allowed him to finish the Saintly Prayer before he spoke.

“Is this not sacrilege to the faith of your own making?” he asked, trying to ignore the pang behind his breastbone. Saints stones always reminded him of his mother.

“What can I say? I was raised to worship the Sixteen. Old habits die hard.”

“The patron saint of necromancy was called Halandai. You were named for them?”

“No, my parents called me Patyri. I chose Halant when I got to Nomaden.”

Levan leaned against the arched entrance to the chamber so he could see both the necromancer and his dead parents. Even after all these years, it was difficult not to be reminded of the last night he had seen his mother alive. Difficult not to think of her corpse slumped next to the brother he had loved so much.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Levan,” his brother had pleaded.

But Levan had just…stared. Said nothing. It was shock and grief and the feeling of no, no, this isn’t happening, perhaps if I stay very still I will awake from this nightmare. It had not worked, of course, and eventually he could not bear to look at his mother’s dead body for another second. He had screwed his eyes up tight, letting the tears flow and the sobs hitch in his chest, and when he opened his eyes again, his brother was gone.

The next few hours had been a blur of night-black and bloodred and paling skin, fraught murmurs and frantic bodies, Segal and Perant and his father disappearing to the house of the nearest known necromancer—Saffron’s mother.

“Still no luck,” he said, gesturing to his parents’ bodies.

Halant raked slender fingers through his snarl of curls. Already deep-set, his eyes looked particularly exhausted, deprived of daylight, deprived of life. “It’s getting harder. Further away. My well isn’t replenishing the way it should.”

“Aren’t we feeding you well enough? Providing you with the finest—and coldest—bodies the pleasurehouses have to offer?”

“I told you the cold thing was a joke.”

“You asked for scarred, wounded, interesting to look at. Lindelan tells me those are not so easy to find, in a world where most scars can be healed.”

“Perhaps that’s the appeal—the rarity of it.” Halant still sat cross-legged, his tall back hunched over like a shepherd’s crook. “You strike me as the kind of man who understands that sometimes a delicious meal and a random fuck are not enough to fill the gaping hole.”

Levan raised a brow. “So what is?”

“Teny Tolvas.”

“Teny…?”

“The love of my life. We’ve been together since we were teenagers—they were one of the mages to break me out of Tarsan prison. Nobody in this world knows me better, loves me more deeply.” The necromancer’s voice clotted with emotion. “In a world of mages who see me only for what I can do, Teny sees me for who I am. Pleasure is not pleasure without them.”

Levan knew precisely what Halant meant. He had never been one for the cheaper pleasures—he needed them to be hard won, layered, deep. The love of another mage, the respect of his peers, the aching gratification of a marathon.

Though he did not especially want to indulge the necromancer’s fancies—it could easily be a ploy—he wanted Halant to be successful. Needed him to be.

“I’ll send someone to Nomaden to retrieve Tolvas.”

Halant’s eyes flared, a hopeful twinkle, but it quickly died. “Only if you’ll let them go afterward. I won’t put Teny in danger just because they know something they shouldn’t. You can keep your promises of Irisi. Teny is the most important thing.”

“You have my word. If you resurrect my parents, both you and Teny Tolvas will walk free. I am willing to make another binding oath to cement that promise.”

Halant nodded once, stoic, emotional.

Resolute.

35

• • • •

An Exercise in Wild Conjecture

“I don’t understand why breaking into the Order is necessary,” the kingpin said, from the other side of his late father’s desk. His golden hand lifted a cup of clove tea to his mouth.

“Sneaking in might be a more apt description,” Saffron replied dryly.

She thought Levan looked dramatically older than he did a month ago. The vaguely hopeful lift she’d picked up on in the library had sunk once again into a sort of bleak resignation, and his eyes were bloodshot with exhaustion. She craved another reality in which she could comfort him, make sure he was eating and sleeping. Ask him softly, as they lay together, what was on his mind.

That other world is possible, she thought longingly, determinedly. You just have to make it so. Undo all the things that broke us, write it all anew.

Levan laid down his mug, shot her a hard glare. “If you’re trying to make me suspicious of your intentions, you’re doing a fine job. Reestablishing the Silvercloak bridge could easily be done via wand, with far less risk, and in a way that enables me to be privy to it.”

A fire crackled and spat in the hearth, and a bead of sweat formed at the base of Saffron’s neck. She reached into her inner cloak pocket.

“Ah, but then I wouldn’t be able to plant these.” She held up a pair of tiny enchanted conch shells, bought from the Cherrymarket that morning. “Listening devices. I’ll leave one by Naszi’s bedside. Marriosan has been reassigned from the Bloodmoons, but Nissa hasn’t. Whatever briefings she receives while still laid up in the hospital wing, we’ll hear.”

A calculated pretext; a play within a play.

Saffron also wanted to break into the Order because she’d just been handed a second chance at reclaiming her father’s letter. Nissa had helped her before, with the intel on Zares, with the tracing spell. She might be willing to help with this too, especially if she saw how badly Saffron was hurting, how much danger her former lover was in, how much solace this lost correspondence might bring her.

Levan studied the conch shells. “And if you’re caught?”

The temptation was strong, then, to say, lend me your mother’s weaverwick and we won’t have to worry about that. But the time still wasn’t right; he did not yet trust her enough to conduct a single conversation without his presence, let alone grant her a wand powerful enough to unmake his world.

She shrugged. “I’ll weather that storm if it breaks.”

“How?”

“You remember my little trick with the mattermantic illusions? I’ve spent the day filling my well. If worse comes to worst, I have enough power to escape.”

A hooked brow. “And how, exactly, did you refill your well?”

Pleasured myself while picturing you pinned to a table with a shard of deminite.

“Hot chocolate.”

As though to torment her, he stretched his arms over his head, joints crunching and clicking in the usual manner of a thirty-something. The movement lifted his black tunic high enough to expose a tight strip of stomach. Saffron tried and failed to avert her gaze, wondering, not for the first time, why all the danger and subterfuge made her so hellsdamned aroused. She would have immense difficulty not immediately straddling Nissa upon arrival.

“Are you nervous?” Levan asked, oblivious to her plight. “It’s the first time you’ve returned to the Order since your unceremonious dismissal.”

“Only about getting caught.”

Another half truth. She was most afraid that Nissa would refuse to help.

Not in terms of handling Saffron’s case going forward—the dragonesque Wielder would want to ensure her former lover’s safety—but in terms of searching for Joran Killoran’s letter. Without Nissa, Saffron would be out of avenues, both to hear her father’s parting words and to potentially uncover the location of an heirloom weaverwick.

Without that letter, she’d have to find a weaverwick another way, though she certainly wouldn’t be returning to Mersina or the Vari Merkt anytime soon. Unfortunately, the Silvercloaks were good at shutting down black markets on home soil, but other nations might be fruitful. Certainly not Bellandry, a country of devout Augurests who loathed Timeweavers more than was strictly necessary. And likely not the Eastern Republics—they curved around the outside of Bellandry like a crone’s bonnet, and the religion’s influence had long since seeped across their borders.

Nyrøth held more promise, if From Sacred to Sacrosanct held any muster, but Vallish citizens did not have the right to travel there, and the Steel King tended to execute trespassers on sight. The icy ruler was something of an enigma, his motivations known to very few on the continent, his correspondence scant and—

Wait.

His correspondence.

Several things coalesced in Saffron’s mind at once.

The first time she’d set foot in this very office, terrified of Lyrian Celadon and the branding poker in his crooked hands, she’d noticed a handwritten letter on the squat mahogany desk—signed by the Steel King of Nyrøth.

At the time she had written it off as a forgery, but what if the Bloodmoons really were in contact with the tundral north? Relations between Vallin and Nyrøth had been hostile ever since the Dreadreign, since the dragons fled the continent for the Hældrekys Peaks.

So why would Lyrian Celadon, of all people, have an open line of communication?

As Levan lectured her on necessary precautions, Saff surreptitiously scanned the office for any sign of that old correspondence. Levan had cleared the desk of eyeballs and envelopes when he’d taken over, and she had no idea where he might have stashed his late father’s letters. Her pulse quickened, mind reeling, a sense of significance taking shape.

The Steel King had something the Bloodmoons wanted: access to the dragons who’d turned their backs on the Rezarans centuries ago. The former kingpin had been so besotted with the beasts that he’d frequently cast illusions of them in his office, and the hallways of the mansion were adorned with murals of dragonback battles.

She thought of a passage of From Sacred to Sacrosanct:

The winged beasts are rumored to reside in the Hældrekys Peaks to the east of the tundral nation. None but the holder of the Steel Throne is privy to the terms of this agreement.

A cold, prickly sensation spread from the base of her neck to the hollow between her shoulder blades. It was a common tavern theory that the winged beasts were biding their time in the far north, plotting with the Steel Throne to take the southerly lands by force, but such worries had been popular for several centuries with little in the way of evidence.

Yes, the Steel Throne had a brutal and fast-growing military.

Yes, they had the dragons on their side.

But would those things be enough to conquer such an enormous swath of land? Bellandry stood between Nyrøth and Vallin, but Bellandry was a peaceful, pious country under the rule of Queen Vune—not too difficult for a wielder corps and a dragon infantry to ravage.

And once they had Bellandry…

The border between Bellandry and Vallin was long, porous, mostly unmanned, almost entirely blanketed by the Havenwood. The Nyrøthi could cross en masse without much resistance. The Great Wards of Atherin, however, were all but impenetrable. King Quintan had almost bankrupted the throne to make it so.

All at once, it became very clear what the Bloodmoons might have to offer the Steel King: the power to destroy Atherin from the inside while external forces laid siege to the wards.

The ice trickling down Saffron’s spine intensified.

Perhaps it didn’t quite make sense. The Bloodmoons wanted the Vallish crown for themselves, to install the late Lorissa Rezaran in her purportedly rightful place, so why would they cede it to the Nyrøthi? Unless the Nyrøthi didn’t want the throne, but rather to ensure its holder’s interests aligned with their own.

Though this might simply be an exercise in wild conjecture—Lyrian could have been conversing with the Steel King about their favorite brands of bivkar—Saffron’s blood hummed with adrenaline. If she could prove the Bloodmoons were colluding with a foreign power against their own throne…forget organized crime.

This was treason. Enough to destroy the scarlets forever.

Would she expose such a thing, if she had the opportunity? If she found that letter from the Steel King, would she hand it over to the Silvercloaks and let the Bloodmoons burn?

Until a few weeks ago, nothing would have given her greater joy. Yet in doing so, the Bloodmoon fortunes would be seized by the government. She would lose access to the vast quantities of ascenite that would make it possible to wind back the decades and save her parents.

All the threads of possibility braided and knotted together.

Maybe she could seize the letter from the Steel King and take it back in time with her. That way she could save her parents, then take down the Bloodmoons in that alternate version of reality. If she did it before Levan came of age, became involved in their affairs, he might well be spared. Taken into care. Saved.

As she rose from her chair, tucked the conch shells into her pocket, and nodded farewell to the new kingpin, her vision pitched sideways, vertiginous from lingering blood loss and the scale of the decisions ahead of her. What started as a personal vendetta was quickly spiraling into a series of events that could shape wars, could skew the fate of the world.

And truth be told, she enjoyed the feeling of power at her fingertips.

Saffron’s break-in plan depended upon three assumptions.

First, that Nissa’s condition was precarious enough to still be in the hospital wing.

Second, that the first thing she would’ve done upon waking was demand a freshly rolled achullah, which the Healers would expressly forbid.

Third, that this would fuel Nissa’s ire to such a severe degree—hers was an anger quick to flame and hard to douse—that the Healers would eventually relent, under the condition that the window remained propped open and Nissa hung out of it to smoke, so as not to fill the lungs of the other patients.

As Saffron arrived outside the hospital wing in the dead of night, she couldn’t help but smile at the sight of the window standing ajar.

Levan watched Saffron enter the precinct from a hundred yards away.

Grimly, he lifted the third conch shell to his ear.

He’d pursued Saffron to the Cherrymarket that morning—had been compulsively watching her ever since the Vari Merkt, partly in case she needed his protection, partly because he still did not trust her. After she’d left the stall selling the enchanted shells, he’d paid the merchant an unsaintly amount of ascens to cast the same magic on another conch, to link it with the two he’d just sold the silver-haired mage.

Through its ear-like shape, Saffron’s quickened breathing was crisp and clean and unmistakable. Whatever happened in that hospital wing, he would be listening.

36

• • • •

The Patient

Inside the hospital wing, homesickness broke through Saffron like a wave. The scandalous murals, the stalking velvines, the scents of clove disinfectant and fresh bed linen. The last time she’d been in this room, she and Tiernan had sat by Auria’s bedside, chattering under their breaths about the prophecy Saffron had foreseen during their final assessment. Everything had smelled of Auria’s ginger tea, brewed for her waking by her doting betrothed.

Now the world had changed. Tiernan was dead—such a crude, permanent word—and Auria loathed Saffron. This place was no longer her home, no matter how much it might feel like it.

The sight of her dragonesque former lover wrought both relief and guilt. Nissa represented a steady place to plant a foot when the ground beneath Saffron was so uncertain, her last living ally in a world where enemies lurked around every corner—yet it seemed unfathomably selfish to draw Nissa deeper into this vicious web.

Saffron reminded herself, for the thousandth time of late, that once she was successful in unmaking time, none of it would matter.

In the dark of night, however, a troubled voice called up from some internal coffin. Her subconscious understood that even though the suffering she wrought would be undone eventually, it was still real while it happened. Pain would still be pain, and fear would still be fear, and grief would still be grief. But this astute voice was inconvenient, incompatible with her mission, and so she tried to keep it buried, to focus only on the next few steps on this fraught path.

She nudged the patient awake.

Nissa blinked slowly, like a drowsy feline. She wasn’t one to spook easily, and where most would jolt or recoil from such a sudden appearance, Nissa merely sat up slightly straighter.

“Hells, Killor,” she muttered, voice thick with sleep, eyes bare of kohl, hair freshly washed and fluffy. “How did you get in?”

Saffron pulled the curtains around Nissa’s bed all the way closed, knowing that their muffling enchantments would conceal both her presence and their conversation. “Your smoking habit, and a levitation charm on my boots.”

“Admirably imaginative.”

“Happy to see you too—not least because you’re the only living soul who believes I’m undercover.” Saffron gave Nissa the kind of smile that hopefully said and I care for you deeply but know such a confession would make you wildly uncomfortable.

“Hells, I can’t believe Aspar didn’t have a contingency in place.” Nissa swigged from an old cup of cold mint tea on her bedside. “She knew that if she died, you’d be on your own. Trapped.”

“I was warned that this was deep undercover when I took the assignment. I just didn’t realize quite how deep she meant. Although I’m starting to wonder whether there was a record of the operation, and the new captain either hasn’t bothered to follow it up, or—well, something more nefarious. What are they like?”

“Vel Karvas? Famously close with Grand Arbiter Dematus.”

“Ah.”

Corrupt, then. Or at least corruption adjacent.

Nissa fixed Saffron with a warning look. “Even if he does reach out to you, even if he does try and reestablish contact…”

“I shouldn’t trust him.”

“No.” A loaded beat. “I told Auria you’re undercover.”

“Did she believe you?”

Nissa shrugged, but it wasn’t nonchalant, her shoulders stiff, too high up her rune-tattooed neck. “You know what she’s like. Sanctimonious, self-righteous, a downright zealot when it comes to the law, a hellsforsaken—”

“Are you still on the Bloodmoons, or have you been reassigned too?” Saffron hurried the conversation on, aware that every second she spent here was another in which she might be caught.

“Remains to be seen. I’m on bedrest for another week. But even if Karvas reallocates me, I’ll still work it on the sly. You need a bridge—someone you can trust inside the Silvercloaks.”

Now they were entering uncertain territory—territory Saffron herself had not yet figured out how to navigate. She spoke carefully, noncommittally. “There’s something you need to know. The kingpin found out that I’m undercover, and he spared me, but…he wants me to feed you false information. Keep the silvers off the scarlets’ backs, keep you chasing your own tails. And I have no idea how to navigate that.”

“It changes nothing. Just find evidence against them and bring them down.”

“Yes, it’s exactly that easy,” Saffron replied dryly. “Besides, with Karvas and Dematus presiding over the operation, any such evidence would likely be buried.”

“They’re not beyond reproach, Killor.” A certain fire had kindled beneath Nissa’s tone. “If you brought me something ironclad, and the corrupt higher-ups tried to make it go away? I’d go right over Karvas’s head to the commissioner. To the fucking king himself, if I had to.”

Ironclad.

Like evidence of treason. Evidence of collusion with Nyrøth.

“What’s the alternative?” Nissa added, tucking her legs beneath her slender body, letting golden light burn in her gaze. “You languish in the Bloodmoons forever? Jebat knows you’re undercover. I told him the truth, and he believed me. Seemed he already suspected as much. It wouldn’t just be Auria and me, newly minted Silvercloaks, approaching the commissioner. Jebat holds sway.”

Saffron pressed her lips together, tasting the sweet ghost of hot cocoa on her tongue. “I know. And if I uncover something substantial, I’ll find a way to get it to you.”

A lie. For now, she had to stay in the scarlet fold for access to their ascenite vaults.

Nissa’s stare shredded through Saffron like a prong of lightning. “Why did you come here tonight? Because we could’ve done this via wand without so much risk.”

“To ask a favor.”

Nissa stilled.

“I know I’ve already asked so much of you,” Saffron muttered, tripping over her words in the hurry to lay them down. “Information on Nalezen Zares, the half-formed tracing spell. But I need this for entirely different reasons.”

Saffron described Aspar’s final moments, the letter left behind by her father, the captain’s mysterious references to their relationship. How deeply Saff wanted to see his handwriting one last time, how badly she needed to see, in words, just how much he had loved her.

She omitted, of course, a significant portion of why it was so critical: a potential lead on a weaverwick of her own.

“I suspect Karvas has custody of it now,” Saffron finished. “But I see no reason for him to hand it over.”

Nissa’s expression was impenetrable. “And you want me to steal it for you.”

A hard swallow. “Yes.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to let me try and bring you back in? Recall the assignment. Plead your case, with Jebat’s help, to the higher-ups. Then the letter would be handed to you willingly.”

A subconscious longing opened up inside Saffron, a desire to return to her found family, a gaping hole into which all logic and reason might fall—if she hadn’t learned to control such things a long time ago. “There’s too much that could go wrong. Even if you did somehow manage to convince a corrupt captain that I was undercover, I may not be reinstated in the Silvercloaks. I still lied about my classification, still committed fraud to gain entry in the first place. I’m an ex-convict.”

“But you do want to come back. That’s what all this is for.”

“Of course, but I won’t leave the scarlets until I have enough evidence to destroy them.”

Nissa took a deep inhale, a shorter exhale. “I don’t know, Killor. The reason I heeded your requests before was because your life was in danger. This letter…I know it’s important to you. I know it’s the last thing you have of your parents. But it’s not a matter of life or death, nor is it urgent. And if I get caught, Karvas will eviscerate me. I knew last time that if I was found out, Aspar would be understanding—albeit furious that I knew of your mission—but now the game has changed. It’s not prudent.”

This last word struck Saffron across the cheek like the back of a palm.

“It’s not prudent.”

“If I’m kicked off the force, you’re out there alone. Trapped in the Bloodmoons. That is not a risk worth taking for a letter. But if you fulfill the assignment and make your way back to us, they’ll have no choice but to hand it over.”

Something ugly was simmering in Saffron’s belly, a petulant frustration, a childish ire. “I wouldn’t be trapped there alone. Jebat knows.”

Nissa’s golden eyes flared. “So you admit that me losing my job, my reputation, is an acceptable level of risk, because it wouldn’t impact you personally?”

Saints. “I didn’t say that.”

“Yes, you did. I don’t know who’s more selfish—you or Marriosan. You only see your own goals, and you don’t care who you step on to reach them. I am no longer your tool, your weapon, your piece on the chessboard.” An icy cool had descended upon Nissa, a thousand times more terrifying than her scorching anger. “But I remain a bridge, and I won’t leave you out in the dark. Bring me new evidence. I’ll make sure it climbs the ranks, and this time, I’ll make sure it sticks. Then you’ll get your damned letter.”

“Nissa, I—”

“I’m fine, by the way. Thank you so much for asking.”

Guilt and shame and frustration simmering together into something wholly noxious, Saffron left the precinct the way she’d entered: through the open window, and with the two conch shells still tucked in her cloak pocket.

Levan listened for what felt like hours, until finally, Saffron Killoran leapt from the open window with floating boots, landing softly on the dark, dewy grass below. She pulled her hood up over her moonlit curls and strode back in the direction of the city center.

Horror beating in him like a second pulse, Levan raised his wand and followed.

37

• • • •

Triple-Crossing

As Levan tailed Saffron back into the city center, the crypt-silence of night making way for tavern brawls and moans of pleasure, the blue shroud of darkness making way for ruby and sapphire and gold, he felt his conviction slip.

She would have to die.

He would have to kill her.

But Saints, he did not want to.

He should have done it the second she emerged from that window, should have slit her throat outside the Order and left her corpse for her former—current?—colleagues to find, but he couldn’t force his body to move the way he needed it to. Knowing that his faltering magic meant he’d have to do it by hand, by blade and blood, made the act seem altogether more horrifying.

Segal’s cutting assessment drifted back to him.

Your fool’s instincts almost cost us everything with Alucia Martou, and you have learned nothing since. Saffron Killoran is proof of that.

There was a wound at the very heart of him, a wound borne from his mother’s death, from his brother’s departure and his father’s years of torture: the desire to be loved. Cared for, made human. And this wound had festered for so long that it might never heal, might always represent weakness, might always offer his enemies a place into which to drive a dagger.

Time to cauterize it.

There was barely another soul on the streets as they entered the apothecary district, where an entrance to the Bloodmoon compound was concealed in an abandoned shop on Beakpeck Place. The Temple of Augur Amuilly towered pale and purple to their right, a neat row of old shops notched to their left. A trickier place to leave a dead body, more suspicious than the debauched Broad Row or Jewel Boulevard.

They were approaching Beakpeck Place too quickly. Levan had to pounce on Saffron now—he couldn’t kill her too close to Zamollan’s. The Silvercloaks were staking it out around the clock.

He sped up suddenly enough, loudly enough, that Saffron spun on her heel at the sound of his footsteps, wand outstretched, confusion painted on her beautiful, infuriating face.

Levan grabbed her by the outstretched wrist, yanking it behind her back and shoving her into an alley just off Velclaw Street. He slammed her against a rough creamstone wall and pressed a dagger against her pale, vulnerable throat, thinking of their very beginnings in an alley just like this one.

“It’s over, Silver,” he said, pinning her in place. “This ends here.”

To her credit, she swallowed hard against the nip of the blade but held her nerve. “What are you talking about?”

His teeth were grinding together so hard he felt it in his temples. “You told Naszi I’d found out about your assignment—that I wanted you to slip her false intel. You would not have done that were you truly loyal to me.”

Fear flashed in her eyes. “You were listening.”

“And I was right to do so.” Levan pushed the knife more deeply into her throat, the flesh almost but not quite parting.

“Sen vertigloran,” she hissed, her wand pressed against his hip bone.

He staggered back, dizzied, grabbing for a wall and failing to find it, knee slamming into the cobbles.

And he couldn’t use his magic to fight back.

If he was going to kill her, the knife would have to find her throat, her temple, her heart. All that work saving her in Aredan just to cut the same fate into her a week later.

Kicking out a boot in search of her shin, he found plain air as she incanted, “Et esilan.”

Her boots sprung up like jack-in-the-boxes, and she sailed over his head, landing behind him and jabbing her wand against the back of his skull.

“Sen debilitan.”

The spell landed true, and his body froze, paralyzed, rooted to the spot.

Levan focused all the intention in his magical well on breaking free, the way Miret taught him. It was deeply costly to do so, everything in him straining against the magical bonds holding him in place, but soon they dropped. At least he could still do that.

He spun on one foot faster than Saffron could parry, jabbing his dagger upward in search of flesh. She spun away from the attack, throwing up a shimmering spellshield. Her arm trembled, as though holding up armor too heavy for her frame.

Clambering to his feet, Levan’s mind whirred with the effort of deciding his next move.

Saffron studied him like a curiosity in a museum.

He flung his dagger at her face. She dodged it in a split second, and the blade found the alley wall behind her.

“Why aren’t you casting back?” she demanded. “You could just compel me to stop. If you really wanted me dead, I already would be.”

Saying nothing, he circled, forcing her to turn on her heels, to keep the shield lifted in front of her body. A few seconds later, he’d rotated far enough around to rip the dagger from the wall.

Saffron looked afraid now, realizing that the next time he hurled it in her direction, she might not be fast enough to dodge. “Levan, why would I betray you when I’ve already given you evidence of my own murderous activities? The second you turn all that over, I’m in chains.”

“You must take me for a fool,” he seethed.

While watching Saffron descend from that open window, Levan had finally figured out her long-term play. She was going to secure evidence against the Bloodmoons, then she was going to turn back time to before she murdered that Whitewing and wrote her confession letter—taking the evidence with her.

But she didn’t have the requisite weaverwick wand yet, which was why he had to slay her before she could secure one, before she could unmake everything. Again.

“Take you for a fool? What—”

He raised the dagger. “This ends now, Silver.”

Saffron let out an argh of frustration, dropped her mattermantic shield, and lunged for Levan—an elbow hooked toward his temple, sharp and fast but easy to spot a mile off. He slammed up a forearm to block it, and she used her other hand to grab his wounded wrist—hard. So hard it felt like the bone had been pulverized to dust, like a thousand bolts of lightning fired straight into the stump.

He dropped the knife, and a gasp wrenched loose without permission. The magic in his well swirled, pulsed, became pure, metallic, strong enough to heal the most mortal of wounds.

Yet he still could not use it to kill her.

“Sen debilitan,” she incanted once more, and his body stilled, but she was diminished now, and the shackles of the spell were easier to shake free from.

She used the split seconds of his struggle to talk.

“If you were listening, you already know the truth of why I was willing to say anything to get Nissa to pity me. Because there’s a letter from my father. For me.”

Levan knelt to retrieve the knife, stood tall again.

Said nothing.

“My dad left it in Aspar’s custody, but she perished before she could tell me where to find it. Whether it’s under the care of the new captain, or whether it’s rotting in some distant vault. I thought Nissa might be sympathetic enough to my cause—trapped in a criminal organization whose kingpin knows me to be a turncloak and thus wants me dead—that she’d help me retrieve it.”

“You knew doggedly pursuing this letter would endanger your life.” Levan clenched the handle of the dagger so hard his knuckles stretched white. “That it would cast suspicion over your movements, give me ample reason to doubt you.”

Those doe-like eyes were still wide and shining with fear, but also with something else, something sad and young and lost. “You wouldn’t do the same, if you knew your mother had written you such a letter?”

The painful twist low in his chest confirmed as much.

He thought of how it felt to stand over his mother’s fresh corpse, his brother weeping and pleading, his father forming ruinous plans to slip over the border and threaten Mellora Killoran into raising the body from the dead. He thought of the fact that after that night, Saffron did not speak again for over half a decade—not until she read the Lost Dragonborn books, the story that had saved him too.

He thought of his own mother telling him, as she prayed over her Saints stones, that he was everything she wanted this world to be. He thought of how far he had strayed from that. He thought of what it would mean to him to have a letter from her, of how it might have kept him from this ruinous path.

He thought of slumping over Saffron’s blood-soaked body in Aredan, begging her to wake.

“Levan,” Saffron whispered, sensing his faltering resolve, the cracks in his armor carved by the matching contours of their pain. “I just want to hear his voice one last time.”

Levan’s thoughts spun like the symbols on the gamehouse’s elemental slot machines. “And if this letter made it into your possession,” he said slowly, “you’d stop with the double-crossing?”

“I think it’s triple-crossing at this point,” she quipped, unable to quell her sarcasm even with daggers flying.

“Are the Order headquarters warded?”

She shook her head. “They rely on the strength of their guards.”

“Seems like an oversight.”

“Wards are costly, and the number of mages willing to give up their wells to hold them is shrinking every year. My uncle Merin would say this level of self-interest and lack of national pride is evidence of a decadent civilization, that the fall of Atherin is nigh.”

At the reference to her uncle, the jocular tone slid out of her voice. She hitched on his name, and by the end of the sentence, her throat seemed to have clammed up.

Levan lowered the knife, his breath steadying at last. “I’ll get you that letter.”

Maybe they could mend this, after all, and she wouldn’t have to die, and he wouldn’t have to cauterize the wound inside him. Or maybe Segal was right, and his fool’s heart would be the end of the Bloodmoons. The prospect seemed, at that moment, too abstract to be troubling. The only real thing was the shine of Saffron’s grief-stricken eyes.

But at the suggestion, Saffron visibly hardened with suspicion, as though he were playing a cruel trick on her emotions. “Why?”

“You have lost so much because of me.” He dropped the dagger entirely, its hilt clattering to the flagstones. “Because of my family.”

She stared and stared, searching him for the but, then, when it did not come, she softened slowly, eventually nodded. “The truth is that I’m keeping things from you still—things that will forever change the way you see me. Things I’ve been waiting to share with you, because our trust is still so fragile. But I don’t think it can wait any longer.” She swallowed hard, wiping away the tears beading along her lashes. “If you bring me that letter, I’ll tell you everything.”

38

• • • •

Two Letters

For the second time that night, Levan studied the ajar window on the second floor of Silvercloak headquarters. Any other sound of mind person might have taken Saffron’s intrusion as a sign to perhaps forgo their achullah habit in lieu of more comprehensive security measures—i.e., shut the fucking window—but Nissa Naszi was clearly not sound of mind.

Leaning against a tall oak tree, Levan lifted his wand.

“Et vocos, Grand Arbiter Dematus.”

A shuffle, then a grunt. “Who is it?”

“Edmer Thain.” A code name, plucked from a classic vampire novel. At the sound of it, Dematus sucked in her breath. “Can you talk?”

“Yes.” Her mid-sixties voice danced over the knife-edge between fearful and indignant.

“Hypothetically speaking, if I were caught trespassing on Silvercloak property, could you have the charges dropped?”

A dark silence. “You’re planning a raid on the Order?”

“Less bloodthirsty than it sounds. I merely want to retrieve an object that’s fallen into the wrong hands.”

“It’ll look very bad if I block an arrest warrant following a targeted attack.”

“I’m not particularly concerned about how you look.”

A pinched sigh. “If I make my compromisation too obvious, we both lose.”

“And so we’ll turn the next Grand Arbiter. You weren’t particularly difficult.”

Some of Lyrian’s finest work. He’d threatened Dematus’s daughter into running darkseed for them, then made sure a drop turned violent, forcing the daughter into taking a life. Lyrian had secured evidence of the criminal activity, then taken it to Dematus herself. Said that unless Dematus followed their every order henceforth, he would turn the daughter over to the Silvercloaks, make sure she rotted in Duncarzus. As most parents would, Dematus obliged.

Dematus sounded exhausted as she said, “I won’t be able to do a thing if you leave a trail of dead Silvercloaks in your wake.”

“I intend to remain a ghost. No lives taken. But if I’m caught—”

“Nothing I do or say will lead to your release,” Dematus snapped.

“I was going to say that if I’m caught and then flee, will they still come for me?”

“Depends, once again, on how you flee. Violently or otherwise. If the only crime you’ve committed is breaking and entering…they won’t want you on such a petty charge. They’re looking for organized crime. Treason, not trespassing.”

“Great slogan. I’ll have badges made.”

A confused beat. “Did you just crack a joke?”

“No.”

Why did people keep asking him that?

Hells. Silver’s sarcasm was rubbing off on him. A veritable contagion.

“When does this end?” Dematus’s voice was a coarse whisper, cold and sad and tired.

“When you’re dead.”

The connection between their wands fell silent.

Levan plucked an invisibility potion from his tincture belt and drank it. His body wavered and then vanished, leaving only a vague smear against the night as he strode toward the open window.

Saffron didn’t have long to search Levan’s office for the letter from the Steel King.

If she was going to share the truth with Levan—that she was a Timeweaver, that she wanted to turn back time far enough to save both their parents—she had to have a powerful bargaining chip in case everything went south. Something to hand to the Silvercloaks if she needed to be extracted, and fast. Something undeniable enough to buy her freedom, her survival.

How long would it take Levan to infiltrate the Order and retrieve her father’s note?

A sour pit of fear roiled in her belly.

Fear that he would be hurt or killed. Fear that he would hurt or kill.

Fear that she would be caught snooping.

Casting a muffling charm on her boots allowed her to slip silently to the kingpin’s office door. The cells branched off the hallway to the left of it, and she thought of the night she’d freed Levan from the shard of deminite with a crude amputation spell. That awful roar, its cavernous reverberations, the way it left the air ragged.

Feeling the echo of it tolling deep in her heart, she muttered the password to the kingpin’s office, then pushed the door open and stepped inside.

Levan leapt from Nissa’s windowsill more loudly than planned. He’d tried to cast a silencing spell on his boots, but his magic must’ve sensed his nefarious purposes, and simply rewarded him with a high-pitched shrieking noise instead. Fortunately, none of the patients on the hospital wing woke—Healers in Vallin tended to be overzealous with sleeping tinctures, since deep rest was considered the holiest of cures.

Still, Levan gritted his teeth at the cacophonous sound. This rebellious magic was one of the biggest problems his impromptu raid faced, and so he decided to get back on its good side before he proceeded further.

Nissa Naszi slept soundly—an ugly sleeper, snoring through her mouth and drooling onto the pillow—and so he parted the curtains around her bed and took a stroll around the rest of the hospital wing.

There were a handful of patients he recognized from the docks and the Havenwood, and he was surprised they were still recovering. Advances in healing magic meant that most injuries were either fatal or instantly curable, so why were so many still bedbound? He couldn’t see any missing limbs, like his own, and surely they weren’t all grappling with blood loss, which was difficult to fix with a simple spell.

Illnesses of the mind are hardest to mend, he thought. You know this all too well.

Trauma. These mages had seen so much in their careers, but the docks and the woods had been a bloodbath. Many had fallen, including their captain.

It was a month to the day, maybe to the hour, since that last altercation. Perhaps the Silvercloaks mandated a certain amount of time to rest and regroup after such a thing—though judging by the fact Auria Marriosan was still working in the field, still sniffing around the Broad Row murders…the respite must be optional.

He crossed to a bed where a middle-aged mage with graying brown hair and sallow skin lay sleeping. Intravenous tubes pumped fluid into her veins. A clip chart hung over the brass railing at the foot of the bed. Levan scanned it. There was a lot of medical jargon, but the gist was that she’d sustained massive blood loss during a botched arrest two months ago. Her organs had been gently failing ever since.

A Healer had jotted down a whole array of tinctures and remedies they’d attempted, but though some had shown initial promise, the organ function slipped again hours or days later. Transfusing blood was difficult, because the patient had a rare blood type and they hadn’t been able to find a match. They’d also tried a complex procedure to amplify blood volume, but since this required a combination of advanced enchanting and healing, it had proven beyond the scope of the resident Healers.

Levan’s molars gnawed at the tender inside of his cheek. Technically, he was familiar with the procedure they’d attempted. Tålun, the old friend responsible for Levan’s remarkable golden hand, had once wondrously described it to him over a bottle of honeywine, and the kingpin’s meticulous mind had stored the information away. All the component parts seemed simple enough. The spellwork was similar to transmutation, an admittedly difficult sub-branch of enchanting, only it required an in-depth knowledge of the human body and the composition of blood itself.

Rolling up his scarlet cloak sleeves, he raised his wand and uttered the complex string of spellwork. His magic obeyed, thank the Saints. He felt the tug and flow of it, but he wasn’t sure anything was truly happening.

He vividly visualized every part of the process, pulling fluids from the body’s interstitial spaces and transmuting it into blood, picturing all the different types of cells and making sure he created enough of each, sweat pouring down his temples and slicking down his spine from the exertion. To bolster his power, he slammed the bone of his wounded wrist against the brass bedstead, sending a hideous bolt of pain shooting up his arm and into his neck. The patient stirred at the jostled bed, but did not wake.

Eventually, he had done all he could.

It was impossible to tell whether it had made a difference, whether the patient’s organs would heal under the fresh influx of blood and oxygen, whether the jaundice on her face was pinkening already or whether it was simply a figment of his imagination. Though the initial purpose of the healing was to mend his own connection with his disillusioned magic, he found himself caring about the outcome. The patient. Hoping that he had done something, anything, to counterbalance the damage he and his ilk had done to this city.

He thought wistfully of another life he might have led, a life in which he’d become a Healer like Tålun. He might have dedicated his ruthless intellect to working similar magic on the mind, on the emotional well-being of his patients, if such a thing were possible. Then again, would he have been motivated into such a thing were it not for the trauma he’d experienced in this life? Would his magic have been this powerful without the countless hours of the torture curse, the painmakers, the brands?

He swallowed away the idea of this other life like a bad taste, and moved on to the next patient.

Saffron moved through the kingpin’s office like a ghost haunting her own past.

Everywhere she looked, she saw her own suffering. The spot on the rug where Neatras had fallen dead at her hand. The shackles on the wall where she’d been manacled in place, the row of pokers by the sputtering hearth, all of it sending fresh fire through the skin Levan had healed back in Aredan. A curious kind of sadness curled in her belly at the thought.

He still cared. And here she was, betraying him once more.

But if evidence of Bloodmoon collusion with the Steel King existed, she needed to secure it. A card so powerful it would lead to her extraction, if she needed it to.

The minutes rolled into the dozens, however, and she still couldn’t find it—not stuffed into the desk drawers, nor tucked into any of the ledgers. She was running a palm behind the picture frames on the black-paneled walls when an awful sound echoed through the main door.

Footsteps. An unfamiliar voice, muttering, cursing.

She moved fast enough that the curtain folded around her—smelling of dust and blood and smoke—just as the door opened inward.

A shuffle of footsteps and fabric, then a thump.

Detective’s instincts firing, she peered around the drape.

An unfamiliar mage stood behind the desk, his back to Saffron, wearing the pale blue cloak of a scholar or an apothecary. Dark, shoulder-length hair was pulled back into a low bun, and an eagle-shaped earring dangled from one lobe. His frame was rangy, narrow in the wings where Levan was broad, and he stood with an uncertain stoop, muttering incoherently to himself.

On the desk sat the severed head of Sando Segal.

Levan surveyed the hospital wing with fatigued satisfaction.

He had transmuted blood and strengthened atrophied muscles. He had healed a bedsore that had been missed, and even tried to compel an unconscious mind into letting go of its cripplingly anxious thoughts, though he had no idea whether that one would take.

His well was low, but magic was heeding him once again. Not for the first time in his life, he wished he could replenish as simply as Saffron could—a hot cocoa, the silky breath of a velvine upon his throat—but when one of the purple-eyed felines tried to purr pleasure over him, it felt hollow, unearned. Little power trickled back into his well.

Yet now, observing the good he had done…

Concerning, how suddenly the pleasure gushed into him. The first joy to cut through the pain since he had lain in bed with Silver, wrist throbbing, heart softening.

With a final sweeping glance over the beds, he exited the hospital wing and began his search for the captain’s office.

He did not see the curtain around Nissa Naszi’s bed flicker and part.

Auria sat cross-legged on the floor of the Order common room, hunched over a low coffee table as she finalized her notes from that evening’s stakeout of the Whitewing drophouse. Though the string of night shifts was weighing her down, stinging at her eyes, leadening her bones, she tried to finish off her writing before she fell into bed at sunrise.

The dying coals of a fire glowed in the creamstone hearth. Several velvines curled up in crescent balls on squashy velvet sofas, and portraits of former Silvercloak commissioners adorned the walls. Arched windows encircled the entire room, and beyond them the inky dark was softening to indigo over the Atherin skyline.

A nascent migraine swelled behind Auria’s eye sockets like a palm pressed against a bruise. She frowned at her notes, painstakingly scratched out with her best quill. For the first time, she had something meaningful to report, and it filled her with dread.

A few hours prior, she had watched as a scarlet mage had been levitated, unconscious, into the Whitewing drophouse. The limp figure had been accompanied by two female mages in white and a young, lanky boy in a pale blue scholar’s cloak, often chosen by apothecaries and librarians as well as academics.

When Auria had plucked her binoculars from the windowsill and taken a closer look, she’d spotted a golden eagle earring dangling from his earlobe. The enchanted binoculars were sharp enough to pick out the exact pitch of the bird’s raised wings, the curved talons, and the keen glare on its narrow face. There was something so familiar about the shape of the eagle, but she couldn’t pinpoint it.

Not fifteen minutes later, the King’s Prophet had entered the drophouse once more. The second time she’d seen him there. He walked in dragging his heels, as though he’d rather be anywhere else, and left not long after, disappearing back down the street and out of sight—but not before staring up at the exact place where Auria herself sat. Though she’d shrunk back into the shadows, she’d been left with the disquieting sense that he knew exactly who lurked behind that window and why.

Moments later, the boy in blue left the drophouse alone, carrying a sack in one hand, a wand in the other, and a petrified expression on his face.

Auria transcribed the events with painstaking detail, but her handwriting had deteriorated over the last hour, and so she decided to redo it. If there was one thing in this world she could not tolerate, it was sloppy penmanship.

She’d just rested the tip of the quill on a fresh piece of parchment when the door to the common room opened of its own accord.

Auria would ordinarily have sighed, crossed the circular room, and pressed it shut again, but her body recognized the threat before her mind caught up. Every hair on her body stood on end, and the feeling of sharp, cold fingers raked down her back. She stood, shaking, and drew her wand.

She was not alone in this room.

A mage strode through it with silenced boots and imperfect invisibility, a smear, an outline, an interruption of light and shadow. A foreign scent, lemon and mint and leather, cut through woodsmoke and parchment like a scythe.

“Sen effigias,” Auria hissed, shooting a statue curse at the intruder, but the shape kept moving toward her.

Fear seized her, a sharp, hot shock straight to the veins. The migraine aura warped and eddied the common room around her, streaking the red and gold and blue into an oil painting, and as the intruder stepped through the layers of depth and color, Auria felt as though she’d stepped into a fever dream. A vivid, surreal hallucination.

She took several steps back until her spine pressed against a portrait of the late Captain Mathar Wilsat, who very closely resembled a badger. Willingly shoving her own back against a wall was pure idiocy—she should’ve found cover, ducked behind a couch, but all her physical training deserted her. It had never been her strong suit.

Although in truth, it wouldn’t have been enough to save her.

Within moments, the heat of a body entered the airspace directly in front of her.

The sharp edge of a blade found her exposed throat.

A male voice, deathly quiet, said, “Tell me where to find the office of Captain Vel Karvas.”

Fear hardening into resolve, Auria took a deep, steadying breath, felt the air swell in her lungs, knowing that it might be the last time.

“No.”

The head of Sando Segal was a grotesque thing, severed magically from the neck so that the stump was perfectly smooth and bloodless. His eyes were peeled wide with shock and fury, the dull whites spidered with blood vessels, and his rodent-like mouth hung slightly open. Once-ruddy skin was pale and empty, and a smear of dried blood streaked along his cheekbone like a wound.

Saffron felt nothing.

This was the mage who’d killed her parents. This was the mage who’d caught her snooping through a ledger and almost killed her too. This was a mage who’d already died and Risen, a mage who’d been privy to the worst moments of her life.

And she felt nothing.

Not gratification, not horror or revulsion.

She watched with an outsider’s detachment as the intruder ceased his muttering and crossed to the fireplace, glaring at the instruments on the poker rack. He was shockingly young—a smattering of acne, a brightness to the complexion, the feeble beginnings of a beard.

His chestnut-brown eyes narrowed as he plucked two of the instruments from the rack: the branding stamp and a long poker. He crossed back to the desk, rolled Segal’s head so that the dead man looked up at the ceiling, then jammed the poker through an eye socket with a sickening squelch.

The intruder tucked the branding stamp into a burlap sack, then left the office without a backward glance at the brutalized head of Levan’s right-hand mage.

Levan could not fathom the idea that Auria Marriosan, who had failed torture training, who was not known for her courage, would defy him under threat of death. The refusal was so unexpected that it took him several seconds to understand the word no.

“You know what the scarlet rot are capable of,” he muttered darkly. “What I’m capable of. What happens to people who say no.”

“No,” repeated Auria, a shining dignity to her stare. Bravery layered over grief, desperate sadness layered over a moral code so rigid that neither blackmail nor mortal peril could bend it.

And that was fine. Victims often held their head high and refused a command, even at the cost of their own life, but quickly caved when their loved ones were threatened. Auria had two sisters, two mothers, and a grandmother she cared for deeply. Those were the strings to pull.

Yet before he could pull anything, there was another voice at the open door to the common room.

Female, smoky, murderous.

“If you’re going to sneak around under the guise of an invisibility elixir,” purred Nissa Naszi, “you might want to use a milder soap.”

Shock peeled Auria’s shiny-marble eyes wide. “Nissa, who is this mage?”

“Levan Celadon.” Nissa stood just over the threshold into the common room, barefoot, feral-faced. “The one who tried to kill me on the docks—and the one who, by all accounts, brought me back from the brink.” She smiled coyly in Levan’s vague direction. “I enjoyed all the healing you did back in the hospital wing. Paliran will be so pleased to learn of their redundancy. Do you often atone for your sins prior to committing them?”

Levan stood rooted to the spot. He wanted to hurl a curse at the churlish Wielder, but it might be the first and last thing he did before his connection to magic was once more damaged. He wanted to hurl his knife, but he only had two, and he couldn’t afford to miss—Nissa Naszi was known for her agility.

Taking the calculated risk that she wouldn’t fire a curse of her own, not when he was so close to Auria, he jammed the blade more sharply into Marriosan’s throat. A crisp line of blood drew itself across her pale skin.

Levan gritted his teeth. “I’m looking for—”

“Don’t do it, Nissa,” Auria moaned.

“—the office of Captain Vel Karvas.”

“Why?” Nissa asked innocently, again with that facsimile of interest. Her pupils darted left and right as she parsed the situation, then she sighed, as if to say how very obvious. “Ah. Saffron’s letter. Lovely that she can send you off to do her dirty work for her, even though you’re handing us the grounds for arrest we’ve been trying to pin down for years.”

“I don’t plan on leaving behind any evidence, and your description of my soap scent won’t hold up in a court of law.”

“You must love her.” Nissa’s words were flat, disdainful, as though describing a grotesque disease. “She’d already be dead otherwise.”

Levan lifted the dagger an inch higher and pressed a second razor-thin line into Auria’s throat. “Take me to your captain’s office, or Marriosan meets the same fate as her betrothed.”

“No, Nissa.” Tears clotted Auria’s tone. “No. I’m ready. I can go now.”

Thunder broke over Nissa’s face. “You are not ready, and you will not go. Not for the sake of a letter.”

“It’s what the letter represents.”

“Good and right and lawful. I know.” Nissa took a step forward, then lowered her wand a fraction. “I’ll take you to Karvas’s office.”

“No,” Auria groaned.

Nissa acted as though she did not hear her colleague’s protests. “The letter might not even be in there—might not even be on the premises. Aspar was paranoid enough to tuck it away in some distant vault.”

Levan looked from Nissa to Auria, then said to the latter, “You’re coming too.”

“No, I’m not.” Auria’s eyes were panicked now, pleading. “I can’t have anything to do with this. The captain said that if anything happened to that letter, I’d lose my—”

“So Karvas discussed the letter with you,” Levan said. “You know where it is.”

Auria shook her head so wildly that a third narrow mouth of blood opened beneath Levan’s blade.

At the sight of it, Nissa hissed like a wild serpent. “You hurt her anyway.”

“No, she—”

“Sen effigias.”

Levan dodged the statue curse just in time, lowering the knife from Auria’s throat and hurling it at Nissa’s chest. The Wielder dodged swiftly enough that the dagger found the far wall, splintering the wood panels.

“Az-iruani.” As she defaulted to her mother tongue, Nissa’s eyes glowed a tameless gold. The nearest window smashed into smithereens, and a subtle breeze washed through the room. “Dar-amvenaqi. Dar-iqondrat.”

Wind and fire wielded together in a ferocious flamethrower, torching straight at Levan.

Throwing a yelping Auria to the ground, Levan swiveled, but the torch caught the sleeve of his cloak and the silk burst into flame. Fear shooting through him, he shrugged out of the cloak and tossed it to the floor quickly enough that his flesh survived unburnt.

The flames kept coming, even when Auria screamed at Nissa to stop, even when the velvines scarpered out the open window, even when the curtain caught fire, then the portrait of Captain Mathar Wilsat, then the nearest squashy maroon sofa.

Levan—who was still invisible, but Nissa seemed to recognize the imprecise smear of air anyway—tried to be an object perpetually in motion, leaping over couches and vaulting tables, rolling away from the heat blasting in his direction, choking on the smoky air, retrieving his second knife from where it was embedded in the wall, wondering what in the hells he was supposed to do.

Dematus had warned him that leaving behind wounded or dead would make it impossible for her to block an arrest, but the only weapons he possessed were blades. His magic might obey him after the healing episode, but he was afraid to incapacitate the feral Wielder and have it go wrong. He couldn’t risk her death, accidental or otherwise.

As he darted around the room like a bladebull in an arena fight, he spotted a pot of ambertea next to the notes Auria had been scribbling when he arrived—notes titled Whitewing Stakeout: Night Three.

“Don aquiss,” he muttered, pointing his wand at the liquid and amplicating it like any other crop or resource. Once it was a large wave, he thrust it in the direction of the burning drapes and portraits and furniture, dousing it all with a sizzling hiss.

And it worked.

Because he was healing something.

Mending, saving, his intentions wholly honorable.

But then Auria was on him, finding her fight, her own brand of fire, the word sen forming on her rosebud lips, and Levan launched himself at her, tackling her to the ground so hard her head slammed back against the floorboards, and her eyes rolled in her head, and everything was spiraling out of control, and without his magic or his compelling, he had no idea how to wrest it back.

Auria went limp beneath his body, and panic coursed through him like a current. Saffron would never forgive him if either of these mages died in the pursuit of her father’s letter.

But Marriosan was still breathing, albeit shakily, too dazed to stand.

He grabbed her wand—an elegant thing, sapphire-studded willow—and swiveled back to face Nissa, who looked rather deranged as she held a snake-shaped curl of flame above her wand like a lasso.

As Levan climbed to his feet, Nissa loosed the tongue of fire, and though he tried to dodge, he stumbled on Auria’s supine form and the flame licked at his side, just above the ridge of his hip bone. Burning pain scorched through his skin, his flesh, and he felt it char and bubble, and his vision pitched sideways.

He could abide all manner of hurt, but not fire.

Not fire, when he had been branded as a boy.

Not fire, when it reminded him so deeply of his own failings, of the terrible trappings of his existence.

His lungs tightened into fists, and he could not catch his breath.

In a second film layered over reality, Porrol Vogolan held a glowing branding stamp, a look of grim determination on his face. The pieces of an abandoned board game lay scattered on his bedroom floor. Levan’s trousers were damp with piss.

More fire lurched toward him, stronger than ever.

He rolled away.

How was Naszi still so powerful when she’d been in a hospital bed for almost two months?

He reached desperately for his compelling magic.

Stop throwing fire at me.

And somehow, somehow, she stopped. Let the flaming snakes dancing above her wand return to the hearth, so that only the gentle breeze from the smashed window remained.

Relief flooded Levan. His compelling had worked, because he was only trying to save the scarred little boy at the heart of himself.

He and Nissa glared at each other, both gasping for breath. The common room was obliterated, burned and sooty and coated with ash, the air coarse with smoke. The scorch mark across his side burned all the way to the bone, and his well glowed bright with the pain.

“Sen exarman,” he incanted, a disarming spell, his first attempt at the sen prefix in weeks, but arguably an extension of the self-defense.

His magic shuddered then obeyed, and the wand flew from Nissa Naszi’s hand and into his own golden palm.

But he had forgotten the other Silvercloak in the room.

Auria lunged at his back.

Since he was still mostly invisible, she took the leap at an awkward, imprecise angle, and he threw her off like a steed rejecting a jockey.

In the heat of the moment, he stabbed his wand in her direction and cursed, “Sen debilitan.”

The magic exploded from the end of his wand in a puff of black smoke, failing to find its mark.

Then Nissa was on him too, jabbing and twisting and attacking with a fighting style he had never encountered. He bellowed “sen vertigloran” in her direction, reasoning that disorientation was a less outwardly offensive curse than debilitan, but that too failed.

As he took an elbow hook to the cheekbone, pain exploding across his face, he tried once more to use defensive compelling.

Stop attacking me. Stop fighting.

But this time, Naszi did not obey.

His rewoven magical connection was faltering, like a broken bone that hadn’t been given long enough to heal.

Dizzy from the blow to the face, he lunged out with a knife, not particularly wanting to spill blood, but at a loss for what else to do. He missed, and Nissa used the forward momentum to trip him so viciously that he dropped all three wands. Auria scrabbled for hers, successfully so, and stabbed it in his general direction.

“Sen debilitan,” she hissed, and finally, it hit true.

He was paralyzed.

Frozen.

Of course, he could break free of such things.

But they did not know as much. And perhaps he could use that to his advantage.

He was prone on the floor, invisible still, belly and face pressed against the ground, fire searing his side. He forced his breathing to steady, listening as the two silvers discussed how best to restrain him. Nissa was not equipped with her cuffs or blisblade, given that she wore a soot-streaked hospital gown, but Auria retrieved hers from an abandoned belt by her notes, handing them to Nissa.

Laying aside her wand, Nissa crouched beside him, went to grab his wrist, but she was several inches wide, fumbling around to find his invisible form.

With a surge of energy, he wrenched from debilitan and rolled onto his back in a split second, grabbing Nissa down and pulling her back against his own body, using one arm to pin hers in place and the other to hold a dagger to her tattooed throat.

“You don’t care enough about your own life to save it,” he growled at Auria, his heart thumping erratically, his breathing fraught, “but what about hers?”

At last, Auria nodded.

Saffron sat in the kingpin’s desk chair, staring at Segal’s severed head.

Questions cascaded through her mind.

Who was the boy in the blue cloak?

How had he gotten past the wards on the compound?

Why had he killed Sando Segal, and why was he bolshy enough to bring the evidence of it right into the dragon’s den?

For now, she had to move on. She likely had mere moments before Levan returned, and she still had no letter from the Steel King. Of course, there was a very good chance Levan had recognized it for the damning evidence it was and destroyed it accordingly, but it didn’t seem like the kind of action he’d take. He was obsessed with his parents’ legacy, and if that legacy involved scheming with the High North…

The correspondence was not in the desk or the ledgers, and a cursory check of the picture frames—they were always taught to search mattresses, floorboards, and frames in the Academy—yielded no results.

She had a fair understanding of how Levan’s mind worked, and such obvious hiding places would not call to him. He was more oblique than that, operating at a slant, and yet there was still a predictability to that slant. The password for the desk drawer in his own chambers was Baudry’s bitch, for Saints’ sakes.

Saffron rose to her feet and crossed to the alcoved bookshelves, lined with an array of leather-bound tomes. A cursory search of the titles garnered a potential lead in Nyrøth to Sarth: Tale of the Ages, but when she flipped through the worn, browning pages, there was no envelope tucked inside.

No other titles jumped out at her, and she was on the verge of giving up when she noticed a book less dusty than the others—as though it had been handled more recently. The Flora and Fauna of Flarence. Saffron’s pulse quickened. Flarence was a small town near the Nyrøth-Bellandry border.

There it was. The slant.

A parchment letter was tucked inside, neatly handwritten, several pages long, and signed by Vad Krønik. The Steel King himself.

Leaving the office exactly as she’d found it—with the notable exception of Segal’s severed head—Saffron slipped back to her chambers and began to read.

And a quarter of an hour later, she knew she had it at last.

Evidence of treason, damning enough to bring down the Bloodmoons forever.

Auria, Nissa, and Levan marched through the deserted corridors of the Order, Nissa still pinned back against the kingpin with a dagger to her throat. They avoided the bullpen, where a smattering of night-shift workers finished up, and steered clear of the sleeping chambers where early birds would already be rising.

They came to a stop outside the office of Captain Vel Karvas.

Everything inside Auria was a yawning hole of despair. She had already lost so much, and now she would lose her calling. Not just her current job—any future shot at working in prosecution, at winning the Grand Arbitership.

How could one person lose so much and keep breathing?

Where could she possibly go from here?

Her entire life had had a purpose until now—because of this terrible mage. Was it not enough to take her grandfather, take the love of her life? Did he have to take her livelihood too?

All at once, she understood how hate and anger could coalesce into a force so strong it might drive a person to murder.

Not that she would ever act on it. But for the first time, she understood.

As her throat stung and bled, she ran through a series of alternate plays in her mind, tactical steps that could wrest this ghastly situation back into her favor without costing her the morals she lived her life by—because if she didn’t have her values, she really did have nothing. She came up empty. She doubted that bartering with the information she had on the Whitewings, on the King’s Prophet’s involvement, would be enough to convince Levan Celadon to leave this building without Saffron’s letter.

But then—a stumbling block.

The password Nissa uttered at the lock of Karvas’s door did not cause it to open. The captain must have changed it recently. Nissa tried several more combinations of words from previous passcodes, but nothing worked.

Hope sprung up in Auria’s chest for the first time, until the vague invisible shape of the kingpin turned to her and said, “You’re a gifted enough Enchanter to successfully cast exuan, are you not?”

Auria’s heart sank into her stomach. Exuan was a charm used to strip an object—such as a lock or keyhole—of all its enchantments. It was costly to cast, since a mage had to use more raw power than the sum of all prior enchantments combined, and the captain’s door would’ve been layered with so many old magical passwords that stripping them back would take everything she had. Little wonder Levan was not willing to do it himself.

And the truth was that despite her many magical classifications, Auria was not, by nature, an especially powerful mage. She was smart, a quick study, precise, stringent, but the natural depths of her well were not so substantial. It might not be within her ability at all.

With a dark look that said if you try anything smart, I’ll slay your friend, the kingpin handed back Auria’s wand. Her beloved wand, with its smooth willow and sapphire studs, its elegantly carved spheres and gleaming ascenite handle.

For the briefest of moments, Auria considered one final attempt at disarming the kingpin, but merely repossessing his wand would not be enough. He was too skilled in physical combat and could somehow wrest free from debilitan—the same was likely true of the statue curse. Anything else would be too violent, too risky with Nissa pinned to his body.

Loathing herself with every breath, Auria gathered all the power she could. She crossed to the lock, rested the tip of her wand against it, and murmured, “Sen exuan.”

The magic rushed out of her in a destructive whoosh, and with it went all her worldly energy. She staggered to the side, more depleted than she’d ever been, and slumped to the ground as the door swung open.

Her well was bone dry, her glorious wand now useless, with no clear way to replenish. There was nary a velvine to be seen, and the rosemarroa and varouli perfume she’d applied before her shift had faded entirely.

She closed her eyes and resigned herself to her own impotence. “The letter is in the desk drawer, and the password is Ashen Narrows.”

Goodbye, life’s purpose.

Levan shoved Nissa forward into the office. After several moments of hearing them shuffle and tap and incant, Auria peered around the corner in time to see Levan’s milky outline retrieve the parchment envelope. She thought maybe his invisibility tincture was fading slightly, but was too exhausted to figure out how to use that to their advantage. The migraine pulsed and pounded at her temples, her forehead, the marrow of her skull. The knife wounds on her throat were hot, throbbing.

Nissa’s form relaxed infinitesimally, and behind her, the window opened to a rose-gold dawn. The empty air above the sill filled with an almost imperceptible presence; the kingpin planned to jump.

Then, terribly, and perhaps inevitably, the door to Malcus’s chamber, the room separating the captain’s office from the rest of the Order, banged open.

Vel Karvas stood on the threshold, straggly hair hanging to his clavicle, still dressed in his bed robes but with his silver cloak slung hastily over the top. A vein throbbed in his tattooed neck, and his glasses were askew over his pale blue eyes.

“What is the meaning of this?”

Not an authoritative bark, but rather a deathly cold murmur.

Auria scrambled to her feet, vision swooping so severely she almost lost consciousness. She grabbed at the doorframe for support. “There’s an intruder. The Bloodmoon kingpin came for the letter.”

But a quick glance over her shoulder revealed that the misty smudge over the windowsill had already leapt free.

Karvas took a step into the room, raising his wand—a short, black walnut—and hissed, “I warned you, Marriosan.”

Shaking rather violently, Auria gestured to the three narrow slits on her throat, the blood around the wounds already crusting and clotting. “Would I have done this to myself?”

Nissa appeared at her side. “It’s true, sir. Levan Celadon was here. He threatened us—both of us. Only when he had a blade to my throat did Marriosan relent. Before that, she was willing to die to keep the letter in our possession.”

Karvas barged past them into the office, so close that Auria could smell the stale morning breath, the must of recent sleep. He went to the desk drawer, found it hanging open, and slammed it shut so hard that it popped back out. Auria flinched.

“The kingpin leapt from the window mere moments ago,” Nissa said hurriedly. “We could still pursue him. We tried our best, sir, and we almost had him—I had the cuffs in my hand, but he wrenched free of debilitan, somehow, and—”

“Do you have any evidence of this wild conspiracy?” Karvas snapped.

“The common room,” Auria said desperately. “It’s ruined—Nissa used her fire to wound him.”

Karvas fixed his lupine gaze on her, cold and furious. “Any evidence of his presence.”

Nissa lifted her chin, the gold of her eyes shining bright. “Our word.”

Karvas surveyed the room—the open window, the desk drawer hanging out like a gaping mouth, the two bedraggled mages before him. “I do not abide traitors or turncloaks, and you’ve willingly turned over a valuable resource to a Bloodmoon.”

The Bloodmoons you yourself are weak to, Auria wanted to scream, but she had no fight left.

Karvas gave them a dark, almost glittering look.

“This will be the end of you both.”

39

• • • •

Dragontail

Not long after Saffron returned to her chambers with the Steel King’s stolen letter, there was a knock. Stuffing the pilfered correspondence hastily into the trunk at the end of her bed, she padded to the door and opened it.

Levan stood on the other side, still filmy from the invisibility tincture, holding her father’s letter in his golden hand.

The envelope read For My Darling Saffron.

Tears sprang to her eyes, hot and sudden, and she threw her arms around Levan.

“Thank you,” she murmured into the crook between his neck and shoulder, letting the warm, salty tears fall onto his bare skin, and though he was stiff beneath her, she heard the rapid beat of his heart before she pulled away. “Read it with me?”

Levan’s now-empty hand clenched at his side. “Are you sure?”

“Well, let me read it myself first. But…stay with me. You deserve to know, to understand, after you risked so much to bring it to me.” A gulp of dread. “How did it go? Was anyone—”

“No casualties.” He grimaced, and she only just noticed the fragile way he was holding himself, one hip higher than the other, his heels tentative on the ground. “I got—Naszi burned me. Nothing I can’t heal once I’ve refilled my well.”

So Nissa had been there. Saff didn’t know whether to feel relieved that her former lover was alright, guilty for putting her in harm’s way, or angry that she’d actively attempted to keep the letter from Saffron.

“I don’t like that you’re hurting because of me,” she said softly.

A dark, deep emotion roiled behind his eyes, and Saffron thought maybe he was thinking of all the other ways she had wounded him, but all he did was take a step into the room, close the door, and rest his head back against it.

“Read your letter,” he muttered, fatigue weighing the words down. It was past dawn, and neither of them had slept. “I’ll be right here.”

Heart thumping manically, Saffron crossed to her bed, perched on the very edge, and opened the long-sealed envelope. At the sight of her father’s handwriting, an old pain swelled behind her ribs.

My Darling Saffron,

If you’re reading this, it means I’m gone. And I’m so sorry for that, but in truth, I’m also relieved.

Becoming a parent means agreeing to spend the rest of your life afraid. Nothing terrifies me more than the prospect of losing you—of having to live without you. Selfishly, I am glad you have outlived me. It is the proper order of things. But I also know how much you adore your mother and me, and I know it must be so painful for you to have to say goodbye. Though it is never truly goodbye, my darling. I am there in every beat of your heart. I am you, and you are me. You will never be alone.

Saffron’s body reacted to the words even as her mind was still processing, and she fought the urge to whimper like a little girl.

Still, there is much I never told you—much you were too young to know. I trust that this letter has been withheld from you until the right moment, that the mage I entrusted it to knew that moment when it arrived.

So let us start there, shall we? With the mage who held this letter, and all the myriad ways our lives and fates were intertwined—but also perpetually at odds.

Before either of us emigrated to Vallin, Elodora Aspar and I were part of an ancient order in the Bellandrian region of Tourden. This order was dedicated to the retrieval of the Fifth Prophecy, which was rumored to have been lost in the Old Forest.

Most of Sarcane’s Order was comprised of Augurests dedicated to eradicating Timeweavers, to serving their foreseeing ancestors. Elodora Aspar was one such mage, always so devout, always so hungry for that Fifth Prophecy. But I wanted to find the Fifth Prophecy for a very different reason: because I was a Timeweaver myself.

There it was. Her father, not her mother.

The Fourth Prophecy, cast by the Augur Emalin, foretold that the Augurests would succeed in eradicating most of my kind, but that a few Timeweavers would slip through the cracks. That the Augurests would have to remain vigilant for centuries after their initial conquest, awaiting the second uprising.

My ancestral line was one that slipped through such cracks.

But there were rumors from scholars of old that that Fifth Augur, Sarcane, foretold that the few remaining Timeweavers would prevent a world war, saving many millions of lives, and would therefore be redeemed. One scholar even posited that the Augurests of several hundred years ago willingly destroyed the Fifth Prophecy to justify their continued slaughter of my kind.

You can see, then, why I wanted so badly to recover it.

The Order labored in vain, for the most part, and was eventually disbanded for political reasons I won’t bore you with. I met your mother and moved to northern Vallin, while unbeknownst to me, Elodora Aspar also emigrated south of the border. She worked as a missionary, at first, to spread the good word of the Augurs to the secular and the Saints-inclined, but after witnessing a spate of violent crimes against fellow Augurests, she moved into policing, so that she could create a safer country for any Augurest to thrive in.

The two of us were reunited in Atherin a few years later, when your wonderful mother was nominated for the Vallish Distinction Prize. Aspar attended the ceremony in her silver cloak, and over several bottles of honeywine (long after your mother retired for the night), we confessed we were still haunted by the location of the Fifth Prophecy, if indeed it endured.

We plotted to keep searching for it in secret. Aspar fed me leads from her police work, her missionary practice, and her remaining contacts in Tourden, and I used my dual citizenship to cross the border into Bellandry and pursue said leads. We even had code names—I was Dragontail, and she was Velclaw.

On one occasion she accompanied me on a mission, and a pack of ascenite bandits almost killed her for her earrings. She was badly wounded, but I got her back to Lunes in time for your mother to heal her. After that I worked alone, and it was perhaps for the best, given our conflicting reasons for wanting the Fifth Prophecy in the first place.

Over the course of a decade, I gathered close to a hundred relic wands, but never the Fifth Prophecy itself. Yet the contents of those relic wands…that is why I am writing to you today. Because many of those relic wands contained prophecies about you.

Imagine my shock, when I saw my daughter in a scarlet Bloodmoon cloak—older, but unmistakably my Saffron.

Imagine my shock, when I saw you kneeling over the dead body of Elodora Aspar.

Imagine my shock, when I saw you fire a killing curse at King Quintan himself.

I kept many of the most incriminating relic wands from Aspar, of course. But those images haunt me, Saffron. I have to trust that you were doing all of this for a greater purpose. That the fate of the continent, the fate of Ascenfall, was in your hands. That you had no other choice.

What I never told Aspar was that I did find the Fifth Prophecy—or at the very least, its last known location. I knew that going after it could cost my life, and look, call me a coward, but you’re six years old right now, and you’re curled up on the couch under your mother’s knitted blanket, and in your patchy slumber you’re making these soft snuffling sounds. And tell me, honestly, how I could give up such wonder for something so trivial as the fate of the world?

My love for you has made a coward of me, it’s true. But it has also, I hope, protected you.

I know two things have tortured you over these last few months. The first is your perceived lack of magic, the way the old wandmaker shunned you. You have magic aplenty, Saffron. It’s just the kind our world had been taught to abhor.

The second is your curious magical immunity. A gift from me—perhaps the most important one I’ll ever give. I sacrificed most of my own well to grant it to you. Those fateful words of medei perpetua were both the easiest and hardest I’ve ever cast. In an instant, I became half as powerful and twice as happy. And now, instead of running dangerous missions over the border and risking leaving you without a father, I use what’s left of my well to enchant our little house in a thousand delightful ways. Because seeing your joy gives me immense pleasure, and in turn replenishes my own well. The most glorious cycle. Parenthood is a superpower, in that sense—your child’s joy returns to you a thousandfold.

All any parent ever wants is for the world to be kind to their child. If you’re reading this, that hope has failed. But I also hope that the protection I have granted you—the magical immunity you so resent—keeps you that little bit safer. Because though my passing will mean the severance of my medei perpetua, will mean that my protection falls, the magic will transfer to another. Another who’ll willingly sacrifice his own magic to protect you from ill.

Which brings me to the final thing I need to tell you.

I want you to retrieve the Fifth Prophecy, Saffron, because I believe it’s about you. I want you to redeem our kind and prevent the world war Sarcane once foretold.

And isn’t this just the most outrageous exercise in hypocrisy and contradiction you’ve ever read? I would stop at nothing to keep you from harm’s way, yet here I am, ushering you off on the dangerous mission I myself shied away from. But I already know you go on this mission, because I have seen it. I have seen you take drastic action against the Crown. I have seen you journey through the Forest of Lost Souls in search of this final wand. I already know that trying to talk you into a safer life would fail, and so the best I can do is equip you for the quest.

The Fifth Prophecy is hidden in a tidal cave off the Cinereal Sea, notched in the bay overlooked by the northernmost Bellandrian town of Flarence. Ancient wards protect the entrance, but I was never able to locate the corresponding wardholders. It is possible to succeed, though. Sarcane wouldn’t want the prophecy never to be found, since it’s an important piece in the great puzzle of saving the world.

No, he would want it to be found by the right mage.

And so I’m hoping that when you get there, you’ll know what to do.

I don’t want to end this letter, darling girl. I don’t want you to run out of words from me. I don’t want to leave you behind in this world, and I certainly don’t—oh, Saints, I’m weeping on the parchment now, but I cannot start over, and so you’ll have to forgive the smudged ink. You’ll have to touch the place where the words have smeared and the parchment has gone thin, and you’ll have to know that there lies proof of your father’s love for you.

Because I love you, Saffron. More than anything, and no matter what.

Yours always,

Dad

Saffron could barely see through the hot salt of her tears.

There was so much to take in, too much, the fate of the world and the slaying of the king and the resolution of a major religious quandary, the origins of her magical immunity and the confirmation that her weaving had been her father’s, and yet all Saffron could think was Dad, Dad, Dad. It’s you, after so long. Come back to me, Dad.

“Are you finished?” Levan asked, now sitting beside her on the bed, not peering over at the letter but staring intently at her face.

And suddenly, there was nothing she wanted to do more than tell Levan everything. She needed to discuss all of this with someone, and so why not him?

She had been keeping the Timeweaving from him because she didn’t know how he’d react, and because she didn’t want him to figure out that she’d originally betrayed him in the Havenwood. She didn’t want him to perceive her as a threat to his mother’s birthright throne, and she didn’t want him to eviscerate her accordingly.

But now it was all so much bigger than that.

If her father was right, Timeweavers were pivotal to the prevention of a world war.

So what if she became not just Levan’s enemy, not just a lover, but an ally? Someone who wanted exactly what he did: redemption for Timeweavers, for his mother, and for herself. Someone who wanted to save Ascenfall in the process.

If they worked together, Levan could come with her to Bellandry—Saints knew she’d need the support, if the mission was so dangerous even her experienced field agent of a father was apprehensive about fulfilling it. They could find the Fifth Prophecy together, figure out how to move forward—or rather backward. Perhaps Levan, who’d had trouble finding a necromancer willing to even try to raise his parents, might agree that the best plan of action was to unwind all the way back to the night their parents died and change the course of history.

Perhaps that was how she saved the continent.

Perhaps they were already heading for the brutal world war, and the only way to prevent it was to redo the last twenty years.

There was much the letter did not reveal, of course. Saffron had been hoping for details of her lineage—was she indeed highborn, a true contender for the throne? Had her father’s ancestors slipped over the border into Bellandry generations ago, forsaking their Vallish claim in the name of survival?—but her father had remained vague on the subject. And if Joran Killoran knew of an heirloom weaverwick hidden beneath some unassuming floorboard, he had not shared it with his daughter.

Flarence was a stone’s throw from the Rapier, a narrow blade of land leading up to Nyrøth. Perhaps Saffron could slip over the border and find a weaverwick while hunting down the Fifth Prophecy. Kill two ravens with one rock.

Saffron’s heart fluttered as she looked up at Levan. Their goals and purposes, which had always chafed against each other, now clicked into alignment. And if it all went south, she had the letter from the Steel King. Providing the kingpin didn’t kill her between one minute and the next, she could take it to the Silvercloaks, have herself extracted from the Bloodmoons, and pursue the Fifth Prophecy on her own.

Two possible paths, both risky, both arduous, with ravines on either side so steep that if she fell off course, she would die. But two paths nonetheless.

Saffron wiped her salt-streaked face on the arm of her cloak and handed Levan the letter.

40

• • • •

Brittle as Glass

Levan had never read anything so raptly as that letter. When he finished, a kernel of raw emotion glowed hot inside him—hot enough that the savage burn on his side paled in comparison. The traitorous mage who had upended his life might very well upend the fate of the world, and he had no idea how to process such an idea.

Yet Saffron had handed him the truth on a platter.

Unvarnished, untampered with, unobscured.

That meant something.

“I need you to come with me,” she said quietly. Her hazel eyes were bloodshot and sore. “To Flarence, to the warded cave off the Cinereal Sea.”

“Why?” The mattress felt unstable beneath him.

“As my father said, it’s likely to be highly dangerous. You’re the most powerful mage I’ve ever met.”

Levan snorted. “A glorified bodyguard.”

But instead of meeting his snark with her usual chirpy sarcasm, Saffron shook her head slowly, meaningfully. “You think that’s all you are to me?”

He bowed his head, unable to meet her gaze.

Of course he would go with her. He needed to know what that Fifth Prophecy said—it was relevant to his mother’s line too, after all, and could spell redemption for all Timeweavers. It could smooth the path to Lorissa’s rule, as could Saffron herself. After all, Joran Killoran had seen her fire a killing curse at King Quintan. What if she was critical to the coup that would win back the throne for his family?

Excitement and dread mired together, sucking like quicksand in his gut.

He didn’t want to need her. His pride could not handle such a thing.

“Levan…” She spoke softly, but not sweetly. There was a charged darkness beneath the words. “There’s something else. I learned I was a Timeweaver only a few weeks ago, in your father’s office. He discovered that I murdered Vogolan, started firing killing curses at me—I used praegelos to try to flee, but Rasso kept whining at the golden hourglass. I finally slotted it together and unmade time far enough to rewrite the conversation and keep my cover.

“Ever since then…I’ve wondered if there might be a better way to bring both of our parents back. That’s why I returned after Rasso freed me from the cell. That’s why I’ve genuinely switched allegiances from silver to scarlet. Because I need all the ascenite I can get if I’m going to save my family. Your family.” Her voice was honeyed with emotion. “And isn’t it better this way? It’s too late for mine to be Risen—they’re already jewels—and I think deep down you don’t want that for yours either. The permanent draining of the magical well, the inability to feel pain or pleasure or anything else that makes them human.”

Levan’s mind wheeled. “You’re saying…no. Surely it’s not possible.”

Saffron leaned forward, a chilling fervor in her eyes. “I am powerful, Levan. More so than I ever imagined. And with all the ascenite in the Bloodmoons’ possession, with Rasso at my heel…maybe that’s what the Fifth Prophecy relates to. I stop a world war by unmaking the timeline that was hurtling toward it. And in doing so, I save both of our parents.”

Longing yanked through him like a rope, like they were playing tug-of-war with their greatest hopes and she was winning. “It’s been twenty-one years. No mage’s well can run that deep.”

“But what if it could?”

Levan rapped out the repetitive rhythm on his knuckles, slightly afraid of the clenched feeling in his chest. “The night my mother died, my brother followed her to a bank raid in Almere. His presence distracted her at the wrong moment and cost her her life. All it would take is making sure he didn’t pursue her over the border and…Saints. We could save them all. My brother included.”

“Would you want that? To start all over again, knowing what you do now?”

The tapping intensified. “You and I would likely never meet. You would never feel driven to join the Silvercloaks, never needle your way into my heart while undercover.”

“Maybe our paths would cross anyway. Maybe you’d become a literature academic, a Healer. Something else entirely.”

Again, a pang of yearning behind his breastbone. Levan shook his head. “If my mother lived, the Bloodmoons would still seek the throne. Though we may not resort to organized crime—we only did that to yield enough ascenite to power a crypt—there would still be bloodshed. A coup, perhaps a violent one.”

Although…if the Fifth Prophecy did redeem the Timeweavers, would his mother need to seek the throne at all? Would she still want to rule, when she was free to simply exist? Perhaps not. Perhaps she would devote herself to the Saints, and his father would make board games, and they would be happy and at peace.

This thought carried an undercurrent of longing strong enough to wind him, but he did not share it with Saffron yet. He needed to examine it further, turn it over in his palm like a precious stone, seek any imperfections before believing in its value.

“Then maybe I will join the Silvercloaks anyway,” Saffron said, still breathing with great effort. “Maybe I will needle my way into your heart while undercover. Only neither of us would be orphans. Would we fall in love even without that shared pain? The shared trauma that led to the shared obsession of Lost Dragonborn?”

Levan stood abruptly and began to pace, unable to tolerate the vulnerability, the proximity, the sheer raw force of his wants. “I went by my office on the way here. Found Segal’s severed head on my desk.” The sight had been shocking, but not particularly unwelcome—Segal had been challenging his command for weeks, after all. But as for how it had happened…infinitely more troubling. “For this to have happened inside the wards, it had to have been a Bloodmoon. And the only Bloodmoon not bound into service by the brand is you.” A tactical misdirect. Of course he knew the brands were no longer active, but Saffron did not, and he hoped to pin her in a lie. “You killed him as you did Vogolan. He killed your parents, and you finally got your revenge.”

He presented this last part as fact, even though it was simply a working theory, and finally looked at her. He’d have to meet her gaze if he wanted to pick out the tics and twitches of a lie on her perfect polderdash face.

Her face scrunched into a frown. Shock, or confusion, or both. Seemingly genuine. “No—I swear it. Why would I have waited so long?” A vehement head shake. “I promise, Levan. No more lies. Though I did see an unfamiliar boy wandering the corridors with a burlap sack. He wore a pale blue scholar’s cloak, seemed far too young to be here.”

A cold finger ran down Levan’s spine, suspicion crystallizing inside him. “What did he look like?”

As Saffron described Relar Zamorin in perfect detail, Levan’s belly curled into a hard fist. His refusal to brand the boy had cost Segal’s life, and though he would not mourn the rat-faced mage who’d never respected him, this was another loose thread to tie up.

“You know him?” Saffron prodded.

“Segal brought him in to be branded. Whitewings had turned his grandmother—an apothecary—and they had the boy, Relar, on far-flung expeditions for rare ingredients.”

“Saints.” Her pupils flickered as she parsed this information. “I wonder if the Whitewings are developing a new substance to rival loxlure.”

The hairs on the back of Levan’s arms prickled. “What makes you say that?”

“They’ve been trying to break open the Bloodmoon operation for months. Years. Take it over by force—but they’re not winning. Yes, there are more dead and mutilated scarlets than usual. Yet they don’t seem close to taking the gamehouses, to bringing down the distribution channels. Even to hijacking the lox at the source. If I were them, I’d be looking to build my own operation.”

An astute assessment. “I’ve heard they’re growing more organized. New leadership, new premises. What you’re suggesting—hmm. It makes sense.” He crossed to the door, tiredness fogging his mind like the mist that clung to Assassin’s Bay all winter. “I have some affairs to get in order. We’ll leave for Bellandry in a week.”

Saffron’s face lit up like a child’s, like sunlight had just washed her in gold.

“You’re coming with me?”

He paused with his prosthetic hand on the doorknob. “How do you know that if we unmade time by two decades, we wouldn’t make things infinitely worse?”

Her hazel eyes were wide and warm enough to fall into.

“Hope,” she murmured.

The same word he’d used back in the Havenwood rendered him momentarily speechless.

“I don’t have to use your mother’s weaverwick,” she added. “Not if it makes you feel strange. We can find another.”

For a moment, Levan considered telling her he’d destroyed his mother’s weaverwick wand right after the Havenwood. But that would mean admitting he’d known of her powers all along, and everything was still so tentative between them that he simply said, “Thank you.”

“I meant it when I said I wasn’t undercover anymore, Levan.” Saffron climbed to unsteady feet. She closed the gap between them slowly, slowly, then all at once. “The Silvercloaks cannot give me what I really need: enough ascenite to turn back twenty-one years.” A hitch in her breath, at once seductive and raw. “I want what you want. And I’ll stop at nothing to get it.”

In truth, Levan found this equal parts hot and terrifying, which he supposed was historically Saffron’s sweet spot.

With only a few inches between their bodies, she lifted a hand and rested a palm on his chest—where his old brand warped and discolored his skin, where his heart beat frantically underneath. At the confirmation of his rapid pulse, a subtle curl of a smile plucked at her lips.

Desire flooded him as he felt the heat from her dramatic curves, as the low light made a halo of her pale hair, as he thought about everything this mage was, powerful and smart and funny and stubborn and ruthless and, deep, deep down, a soul whose trauma mirrored his own.

When she kissed him, he did not stop her.

He let himself melt into it, her lips soft as rose petals and just as sweet, and for several glorious moments the simple animal of his body took control. Her hands roamed his chest, his stomach, his lower back, leaving a spreading warmth behind them. When her fingertips grazed the fresh burn on his side, he hissed and bit down on her lower lip, which only seemed to spur her on.

Pushing her back toward the bed, he fought the inane urge to laugh as her calves met the trunk and she stumbled into a clumsy seat on its wooden lid. She peered devilishly up at him through long, pale lashes and unbuckled his belt.

Everything in him came alight at once, the anticipation raw and heady like the moment before the loxlure hit his system, but like the loxlure, there was an underpinning of dread, the feeling of impending doom, a warning bell tolling deep inside his body. He thought of trick steps and false bottoms, of the exact moment he realized he’d been lied to, the sick drop of it, the self-loathing, the fortress of mistrust growing higher with every betrayal, and he knew he could not do it.

Saffron felt the moment it shifted, stilling her hands.

The air between them turned brittle as glass.

He took a step back. Two, three.

“I’m sorry, Silver.” Levan rebuckled his belt, fighting the absurd swell of anger inside him—the sense that she had manipulated his basest urges for her own end. “I can’t.”

41

• • • •

Sex, Saints, and Solitude

Saffron wandered the streets of Atherin like a homeless velvine, searching for something, anything, to fill the void that had opened up inside her.

The night air was hard with winter chill as she meandered in the vague direction of Broad Row—perhaps a night of carnal pleasure might, at the very least, replenish her well.

Everything hurt. She’d imagined that her father’s words might fill the gnawing hole behind her ribs, might sate a craving she’d had since she was six years old, but instead it had only made her ache.

What did it say about her, that she could barely think about the enormous truths he had shared with her? What did it say, that she didn’t care about her place in the grand war between Augurest and Timeweaver? What did it say, that while she was willing to journey to Flarence in search of the Fifth Prophecy, the only thing she really hoped to find was a weaverwick she could finally use?

She would give anything, do anything, to see her father again. Her mother.

To run away into the warm, safe arms of the past.

The night rang out with the jubilant sounds of sex and revelry as she finally rounded the corner onto Broad Row. She craved release, craved escape, craved the simple intimacy Levan had not been willing to engage in.

His rejection stung more than she cared to admit—not just the blow to her pride, but an acute feeling of loss. She wanted so badly to lie with him as she once had, feel the soft caress of his fingers lacing through her hair as she slept on his bare chest. She had told him almost everything, the great truth of her existence, the plundered depths of her pain, and it still had not been enough to win back his trust.

Then again, wasn’t Levan right to not trust her entirely?

The Steel King’s letter burned a hole in her cloak pocket.

Rinerva’s Rapture was in full swing by the time she arrived. Dark violet awnings and climbing blackroses adorned the outside of the creamstone building, and a scantily dressed butler offered her a shot of blisquer upon arrival. The rich aphrodisiac drink tasted of rose and lychee and creamy vanilla bean, and magic flowed into her arid well, viscous and bright.

She shrugged off her clothes in the cloakroom and sauntered into the main area of the pleasurehouse wearing naught but her black cloak, as was customary at Rinerva’s. Her low, full breasts swung against the soft pale rolls of her belly, and she felt the stare of several mages as they lusted after her. Fuller figures were very much preferred on the continent—a sign of an overflowing well, of power and of magic, of a rich and delicious life.

The floorplan of the pleasurehouse was shaped like the head of a flower, with a large circular room in the center in which to meet a potential partner (or seven), and dozens of petal-shaped bedrooms surrounding it, in which to disappear with said partner(s) if one was the sort of mage who preferred privacy. Many did not, and countless mages were in various stages of coupling, backs pressed against marble pillars, wrists pinned above heads with palms and silk scarves, soft thighs scissored together, overlapping moans echoing around the domed ceiling. The whole place smelled of sex and lychee.

Saffron pushed through the round room to the very center, where an oval bar served beverages from crystal-cut glasses. She ordered three more shots of blisquer and necked them fast enough for her vision to blur and warmth to spread down her gullet and into her belly.

Standing beside her at the marble-topped bar was a mage in a deep green Brewer’s cloak. A few inches shorter than her, as were most people, with a soft, swoopy crop of wavy blond hair. His body was thickset, roped with muscle and softened by a clear love of food.

He hooked a fluffy blond brow in Saffron’s direction, and she nodded.

His hands were firm, ravenous, as they roved over the peaks and valleys of her body. Their lips met and began moving immediately as one, an effortless dance of a kiss, teeth nibbling and tongues probing and shoulders dipping as they relaxed into it.

When he nodded in the direction of a rose-petal bedroom, she followed wordlessly. Usually she liked to lead, to take control, but tonight she was so exhausted and sad and lonely that she was happy to let someone else take the reins.

They found an empty private chamber containing a large round bed, a smattering of fur and satin blankets, and an open chest containing all manner of whips and chains, plugs and gags, riding crops and spiked belts and things so painful-looking Saffron cringed.

With a gentleness that surprised Saffron, the emerald-cloaked Brewer laid her down on the bed and parted her legs. He planted kisses along her lower belly, up and down her thighs, over her pubic bone, and then tentatively over the place where heat and wetness and want usually pooled.

But it wasn’t happening.

All Saffron could think was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Because he wasn’t Levan.

She tried to shake away the thoughts, to let the blisquer smooth her mind enough to let her body ease into it, but the longer it went on, the worse the feeling of wrongness became. And when the perfectly pleasant and attentive Brewer moved to thrust inside her, a shameful sob ruptured her throat, and she shimmied up the bed until their flesh was no longer touching.

Tears spilled from her, and she wondered how long she’d been crying.

“I’m sorry,” she rasped, pulling a cream-colored fur blanket around her body. “It’s not you, it’s just…”

“I’m not the one you want.” He ran his fingers through his disheveled hair. “I know the feeling. My long-time partner was killed by a Bloodmoon a few months ago. I thought I was ready, but…”

A terrible, shameful cold draped over Saffron. She fled the room, tugged on her clothes in the cloakroom, and hurtled out into the night.

Saints, save her.

How far she had fallen, how far she would still fall before she met the ground.

Saffron walked for many hours, shame following her with every step, until her feet were chafed with blisters inside her boots, until she no longer felt the bitter cold. A few hours before dawn, when the city was finally settling into slumber, she found herself outside a Saints hall.

She hadn’t been inside one since she was six years old. Her mother, who had been reasonably devout, insisted upon going every Plenting—the day dedicated to refilling the well—but after Mellora passed, Saffron had no desire to continue the practice. Her uncles showed little interest in religion, and in truth, she didn’t miss the hollow act of rote worship.

The Saints hall on Bowes Street was like most others, carved from creamstone and shaped like a bell. A crimson-and-gold obelisk jutted through the center, narrowing into a sharp point, while the flared base of the building was surrounded by a curve of statues honoring each of the sixteen Saints.

To worship the Saints was to worship magic itself, as the Sixteen had famously come together thousands of years ago to create the world and all its forms of magic. This had been widely disproven and contradicted by both archaeologists (who had used fossils to ascertain that the world had existed for millions of years, not thousands) and other famous Vallish legends and historical figures (such as Parlin the Great, who carved the first wand a millennium ago), but true Patrons did not seem especially troubled by these discrepancies. They continued to worship out of a generalized fear that if they didn’t show enough faith, the Saints, and therefore magic, would turn against them. Small matters of science and history were altogether irrelevant.

Saffron looked up at the obelisk to see a mourncrow perched on the very top.

A heaviness settled once more on her chest. To see a mourncrow in the wild meant that the beholder would dream of lost loved ones that evening. She hadn’t dreamed of her parents in a while, and welcomed the thought of spending time with them—real or otherwise.

She stepped inside, unsure exactly what she was looking for. Many spoke of the peace and purpose they found in religion. Perhaps it could be her salvation still.

The main hall was a cool, cavernous space. The base of the crimson-and-gold obelisk was rooted in the center of the room, narrowing as it rose through a hole in the roof. There was a clear circle of open space around the obelisk, so that rainwater might flow down the length of it and into a series of shallow marble basins at the bottom. To drink from these basins was to become one with the Saints, or something equally implausible.

The white floor tiles were hand-painted in jewel tones with intricate depictions of the Saints and all their varying forms of magic. Notched into alcoves in the outer wall were chiseled stone statues of the Sixteen, each with another shallow marble basin in front of it to collect donations.

Saffron stopped by the statue of Aevari, the patron saint of Timeweaving. Aevari held a stone hourglass in one hand and a pocketwatch in the other, eyes closed in reverence, robes twirling up and around their body as though falling through time and space itself. There were signs of hastily repaired vandalism to the statue, some parts of the stone darker and cheaper than the rest, a smear of red paint poorly cleaned from a stone chest.

Standing before her patron saint, Saffron waited for a rush of emotion, for the feeling of a divine palm on her shoulder, for the sensation of clouds parting to reveal a long-lost sun, but there was nothing. She saw only a chiseled lump of rock.

And so, as she had from the pleasurehouse, she fled once more.

Her final destination, as the sun rose lavender over the horizon, was Clay’s Cloakery, its sage green door bolted and padlocked, dust sheets tossed hastily over mannequins. The shopfront hadn’t changed in the weeks since she’d last visited. Feeling dizzy from lack of sleep, lack of food, lack of pleasure, she pulled her wand from her cloak pocket and tapped the padlock.

“Good Glastyl.”

Glastyl was her uncle Mal’s favorite character from The Great Adventures of the Lost Dragonborn—an impish little sprite who followed Aymar around, offering up hostile quips and priceless advice in equal measure, much like Mal himself. He’d been using the name as a password for decades.

Inside the cloakery, the air was cool, a little stale, a little moth-eaten. The countertop at the back held signs of a life abandoned in a hurry. A full cup of ambertea, its surface filmy with dust. A pair of silk shears resting atop a half-cut bolt of fabric, a needle looped with whisperthread, a pincushion with no pins. The sound of nothing at all—nothing but the dawndoves outside, heralding the start of a fair-weather day.

Saffron felt like the only person in the world.

In his letter, her father had written: Though it is never truly goodbye, my darling. I am there in every beat of your heart. I am you, and you are me. You will never be alone.

So why did it feel so agonizingly that she was?

That there was nobody left to love her?

There was a nook Saffron often hid inside as a child, a small crawlspace behind a freestanding mirror, a row of silk crates, and a trio of shapeshifting mannequins. She used to lie there for hours, reading Lost Dragonborn from cover to cover yet again, letting the merry sounds of a working cloakery comfort her like a favorite blanket.

Now, a dozen and a half years later, she gathered up all the cloaks that smelled most like her uncles, arranged them in a tragic nest in the crawlspace, curled up on top of them, and fell promptly asleep.

She had seen a mourncrow perched atop the Saints hall, and so she would dream of her parents. For now, that would have to be enough.

Part Five

Quest

42

• • • •

The Defense Rests

A week after the kingpin broke into the Order of the Silvercloaks to steal Joran Killoran’s letter, an inquest was held to determine how to punish Auria Marriosan and Nissa Naszi.

Though Captain Karvas would have quite happily dumped them at the gates of Duncarzus and blown air kisses as they went inside to rot, there were procedures for such things, and the commissioner had insisted upon following them. In the first instance, there would be an administrative investigation to examine any potential breaches of the Order’s Code of Conduct—and also to discern whether a further criminal investigation ought to be carried out.

Between the break-in and the inquest date, Auria and Nissa were suspended from duty and placed on curfew, which meant they were often trapped in the common room with only each other for company. A punishment in its own right, for two mages who had historically loathed each other and had recently committed a string of serious offenses in order to keep each other safe.

If Nissa was concerned about the upcoming hearing, she didn’t show it. She spent most of her days chain-smoking achullah out of a common room window—ignoring Auria’s complaints about the cold early winter air—and lamenting the lack of opportunity to refill the pleasure in her well.

A handful of mornings after the invasion, Auria and Nissa were sequestered in the common room, empty breakfast trays scattered on low coffee tables—they’d been having their meals delivered to them, so as not to contaminate the other detectives with their unfathomable cowardice and corruption. The sky over Atherin was a blank winter white. Auria was curled up on one of the squashy couches, sipping ginger tea while scribbling away with her favorite quill. She wore an old pale blue scholar’s cloak from her time in law school—it didn’t seem right to wear silver when her very future at the institution was in jeopardy.

While smoking her eighteenth achullah of the day, Nissa watched her colleague scrawl and ruminate. “The sheer quantity of notes you’ve written is unsaintly.”

Auria laid down her quill and poured a fresh cup of ginger tea from the pot. When no steam curled from its surface, Nissa wordlessly heated it up with her wielding.

“Only once I write down every single tiny detail of a case can I pick out parts to expand, to work on proving with evidence.” Auria sipped at the now scalding tea. “I’m throwing everything I have at our defense.”

Auria had eschewed the legal counsel offered to her by the union and demanded to represent herself. Nissa had followed suit, stating that Auria was the most sickeningly diligent and infuriatingly meticulous mage she’d ever come across, and thus there was nobody else she would trust with her case.

“What do you have so far?” Nissa asked.

“First, I need to establish Levan Celadon’s presence. Karvas will argue that we were either acting alone or conspiring with our turncloak of a former colleague. There are logical flaws in both stances, but I’d feel more confident if I could prove the kingpin himself was here.”

“And then?”

“We prove that our lives were in jeopardy. There’s a reason I won’t let Paliran heal these cuts on my throat—they’re evidence. But Karvas can still argue I did it to myself, or you did it to me.”

“Surely that’s a stretch. No judge would believe—”

“No decent judge. We still don’t know who’s going to be brought in. If they’re in league with Karvas and Dematus…”

“Surely not. The commissioner herself is overseeing the inquest. She’ll make sure the judge is impartial.”

“Hopefully. My concern is that even if I can prove the kingpin was here, and we were facing imminent torture or death…we still broke the code, didn’t we? Insubordination. Trespassing. Leaking confidential information. So this hearing is not just a matter of evidence, but of ethics. When we’re sworn in, we promise to protect this institution with our lives. We didn’t do that.”

“So it’s a lost cause?” Nissa looked troubled for perhaps the first time.

“We’ll be found guilty no matter what. My main goal will be to negotiate a lenient punishment—to protect our jobs, and keep both of us out of Duncarzus.”

The thought of going to prison sent a roil of dread through Auria’s belly. She’d been so holier-than-thou when Saffron met that fate, so insufferable when she bumped into Saffron in the Jaded Saint after her release. And now here she was, facing the very same prospect.

“You know what’s been needling at me?” Nissa stubbed her achullah out on the windowsill and tossed the remains into the hearth. “You valued my life above your own. You were willing to die for that letter, but you weren’t willing to let me. Why?”

Auria shrugged. “I’d rather have died than lived with another loss. Tiernan is dead, and Saffron has turned, and Sebran is missing. I couldn’t lose the last friend I have left in this place.”

“Friend is a bold word. I abhor you in most meaningful ways.”

“Most?”

“You have nice hair.”

“No. It’s always frizzy.”

“Full of life, like you.”

Auria rested her head back against the high arm of the chair. “I don’t feel it anymore. Now there’s this…emptiness. I have no idea how to fill it. I don’t know who I am without my work.”

“Maybe that’s the reason you can’t fill the emptiness.”

“What do you mean?”

Nissa took a seat by the hearth. “When my sisters died, my parents didn’t survive just because they still had me to care for. They survived because they had full lives. Yes, we mourned my sisters. Yes, we had to move from our home country. But throughout it all, my mother still sang opera, and my father still dried his own achullah leaves, and they still went out dancing with their friends every Plenting. My father once ran through the Devil’s Dunes for a week straight to bring in ascens for a local hospital.”

“They sound amazing.”

“They are. I mean, they’re also just people. They fuck up and make mistakes and cry a lot, and every day they miss my sisters. You can survive this, Marriosan. Even if we’re fired, jailed. It won’t be for long, and then after that, you have a whole life ahead of you.”

Not buying into the idea in any real sense, Auria swallowed hard. “What will you do? If we are kicked off the force.”

“We won’t be kicked off the force. You’re our defense, and you’re the best there is.”

Auria glanced over at Nissa with a quirk to her lips. “I think this is the longest we’ve ever spoken without threatening to ammorten each other.”

“Well, it’s now abundantly clear any such threats from you are empty. You sacrificed everything to keep me alive, and I plan to lord it over you for the rest of eternity.” A wide, vulpine grin. “Now, how do I help you win this thing?”

Auria drained the last of her ginger tea, pulled a fresh piece of parchment from her stack, and dipped her quill in her favorite navy ink.

“Tell me again what happened in that hospital wing.”

43

• • • •

Truth Entire, Truth Alone

The hearing was held in a small courtroom mostly used for mock trials. With polished oak paneled walls, cream flagstones, and gleaming pews with emerald-cushioned benches, it was one of the nicer rooms at headquarters, though it had always smelled, quite inexplicably, of stale rye bread.

Atop a raised dais, Judge Taril Nercan sat behind a bench. In front of him were several pages of notes, a quill and inkwell, a hardwood gavel, and a crystal-cut glass of lemonade, which Nercan was famously fond of. There was also a set of small, intricate ascenite scales, engraved with the words: Truth Entire and Truth Alone, Justice Served and Vallin Grown. Many found the motto of the court system trite, mawkish, but Auria adored the words, the simplicity of them, the idea of forging a just country one case at a time.

The judge himself was in his seventies, with heavily hooded eyes, severe jowls, and wisps of white hair on either side of his bald head. He wore a dark green judge’s cloak, the color of a forest under nightfall, and seemed to be in a perpetual state of nodding to himself.

Auria and Nissa were ushered into the courtroom last, when everyone else was already seated. At the sight of Nercan, Auria sighed with relief. He’d been working in Atherin for four decades and was not affiliated with either Karvas or Dematus in any known way. His politics slanted left of center, particularly in instances of nonviolent crime, and he was famous for antagonizing the prosecution into really proving their case beyond reasonable doubt.

That doubt, that ambiguity, was the ravine inside which Auria would build her case. She would turn the intruder’s invisibility into a strength of the defense, rather than a weakness.

Nissa, dressed in a glorious blood-orange Wielder cloak, was shown to the accused bench, while Auria, wearing her periwinkle scholar’s gown, laid out her notes on the opposing counsel bench. Several high-ranking detectives and officers of the courts occupied the frontmost pews—including Auria’s mentor, Tenébo Jebat—while Captain Karvas took the bench that would be reserved for the prosecution, if this were a real trial.

But it was not a trial. It was only a hearing. Auria had to remind herself of this.

The judge called the room to order, and Nissa and Auria were sworn under oath, each resting one palm over a weathered Saints’ manifesto and another over their hearts. In turn, they murmured, “Truth entire and truth alone.”

“I henceforth declare this hearing in session,” said Judge Nercan, the edges of his voice crusted with age. “Captain Karvas, you may begin your opening statement.”

Karvas paced in slow circles around the patch of floor in front of the judge’s dais. His hair was combed into a low ponytail, and the veins stood out starkly in his ring-tattooed throat. “One week ago, early on Laving morning, I was sleeping soundly in bed when an alarm triggered—an alarm I had frankly been expecting to trigger for days. Said alarm was linked to a desk drawer in my office, which contained a letter written for Saffron Killoran by her late father. This letter had been inexplicably in the possession of Captain Elodora Aspar, may she rest in peace, alongside a note ordering her successor to pass the letter on to its recipient upon Aspar’s own death. I, however, do not engage with traitors or turncloaks, and opted not to carry out this request.”

A pause for emphasis, as though daring anyone in the room to challenge his decision, or perhaps break into applause, but the court remained silent.

“I did, however, inform Detective Marriosan of its location.” Karvas pursed his thin, dark lips. “I’d been having doubts about her loyalties, as well as those of Detective Naszi. Both detectives have been spotted talking with the traitor Killoran since her incarceration and subsequent indictment into the Bloodmoons. I suspected that if Marriosan knew of the letter’s whereabouts, she might act upon it. I found it both validating and disappointing that this came to pass so soon.

“At the sound of the alarm, I quickly left my bedchambers for my office, where I found Marriosan sitting against the wall next to my office door, looking extraordinarily guilty. Inside the office was Naszi, staring at my open desk drawer as though it contained all the world’s riches.”

“Objection,” Auria said, rising to her feet. “Your Honor, the prosecution is editorializing.”

“There is no prosecution, Marriosan,” Judge Nercan replied, but not unkindly. He had a calm, genial manner not unlike her late grandfather. “And you know as well as I do that editorializing is permitted in the opening statement.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” said Karvas sourly, as Auria sat back down. “By the time I arrived, the letter was already gone. Perhaps dropped into the hands of Saffron Killoran, who may have been waiting beneath the open window.”

Objection—speculation, Auria wanted to scream, but instead she bit down on her tongue hard enough to draw blood.

For the thousandth time, she wished truth elixir was allowable in an interrogation chamber or a court of law. Dematus had upheld its prohibition under the mantle of “protecting state secrets,” but since learning of the Grand Arbiter’s corruption, Auria was certain it was to protect herself. If Auria ever made it as far as the hallowed seat, one of her first orders of business would be overturning it.

Karvas deepened his voice. “Not only have these two detectives breached the Order’s own Code of Conduct, but also Vallin’s Constitution of Laws. For the former, I might posit insubordination—Marriosan was ordered not to tell a soul of the letter’s location—as well as trespassing in the quarters of a superior office, and the leaking of confidential information. In terms of criminal law, it’s inarguable that Marriosan and Naszi committed burglary and property damage, as well as the aiding and abetting of an enemy.”

Judge Nercan’s nose wrinkled. “I might caution you against the word inarguable, Captain. These are the very accusations we are here to argue, after all.”

Karvas visibly puffed up at the word accusation, as though his version of events was a foregone conclusion and he hadn’t anticipated any rebuttal, but said nothing further.

“Detective Marriosan, if you’d like to share your counter statement?”

And so Auria described, in truth entire and truth alone, what had happened the night Levan Celadon broke into the Order. She did not share his name, for she could not prove it had been him, but referred to him throughout as the intruder. She described the way he’d entered under the guise of invisibility, the way the migraine and the night-shift exhaustion and the incomplete invisibility tincture had smeared the colors of the common room, the way she had sacrificed her life for the letter, the way Nissa had pursued him from the hospital wing, the fight that broke out and the damage that was done, and how the intruder had somehow wrested free of debilitan to press a knife to Nissa’s throat.

She confessed everything that happened thereafter, her eventual concession to his demands, all the acts of wrongdoing, the breaking of the locking charms and the removal of the letter from the drawer, how she had sat, broken and empty and entirely despondent, as the intruder had fled out of the window. Then, of course, the arrival of Karvas.

Throughout her statement, the captain watched her ardently. As it became clear she was not contesting the actions she took, his eyes shone with a kind of hungry gleam, and a sense of disquiet swelled inside her. Perhaps she’d been foolish to essentially plead guilty—perhaps a tough sentence was awaiting them both.

But she could not lie, not under oath. Instead, she had to argue that her actions were not as immoral as they seemed.

Once she’d finished talking, the not-prosecution presented key evidence. Karvas laid out the broken lock of his office door, carved out of the frame and bagged in a rare kind of clear silk, as well as a ruined curtain from the burnt common room, and the literal empty desk drawer that once held the stolen letter.

At the sight of the drawer, Nissa shot Auria a comically disbelieving look, as if to say the melodrama is astounding. Auria found herself trying not to smile.

In an effort to establish motive, Karvas called Detective Dallar to the stand, who had seen Saffron approach Auria on the night of the Broad Row murders. He hadn’t heard a word of the conversation, but he did admit that it looked fraught. Karvas committed more egregious speculation in the name of constructing his narrative: that Killoran had approached Marriosan and convinced her to steal the letter.

He wasn’t far from the truth.

Auria tried not to be too rankled by the testimony. She had a powerful rebuttal, and while she’d never been skilled at polderdash—Killoran always mocked her for folding too early—she knew the card would have more impact if played later.

She cross-examined him, mining that ravine of uncertainty, having Dallar confirm repeatedly that he had not heard a word. Perhaps a wishy-washy tactic, one that often didn’t play so well with juries, but Auria knew that a judge as experienced as Nercan worshipped at the altar of reasonable doubt.

Once Dallar left the stand, Karvas continued his monologue. “I believe Marriosan and Naszi lied about the presence of a third-party intruder inside the Order on the night of the crimes—sorry, the night of the events—and that they went to extreme lengths to stage the violence that purportedly forced their hands. Of course, it is difficult to prove that they were acting alone, that there was no third party inside headquarters—much like trying to prove that a deity doesn’t exist. But I can certainly call them to the stand as witnesses anyway, catch them in a lie. Marriosan, if you please.”

Expecting this tactic, Auria took to the stand, masking her nerves with a coy smile. “I’ve never lied in my life, so good luck with that.”

“I somehow doubt that.”

Auria shrugged. “I’d down a vat of truth elixir right now, if such things were permitted.”

“Well, that’s a matter for the Grand Arbiter. Speaking of which, I understand you have career aspirations of the highest seat. This blemish on your record will make that borderline impossible, no?”

Auria lifted her chin. “Charges are yet to be brought.”

Karvas shot her a sickly smile. “You were caught red-handed burgling your superior officer. Unless you’re disputing that I did, indeed, catch you in the act?”

“No, Captain.”

Karvas resumed his slow pacing, hands clasped behind his back. “You also admit that when the supposed intruder arrived in the common room, you were almost delirious from your headache and your night-shift fatigue, correct?”

Auria gritted her teeth. She loathed when non-migraine sufferers equated them to simple headaches. “I don’t believe I used the word delirious, no, but I was feeling hazy.”

“And so how can you be sure there was a third-party intruder in the room, and that the supposed ‘invisible outline’ ”—scathing air quotes—“was not just a figment of your aura headaches?”

“Because figments cannot hold blades to throats,” Auria replied calmly.

Karvas’s questioning continued in a similar manner, designed to rattle rather than discern any new information. When Nissa was called to the witness stand, he attempted to undermine her credibility, focusing on her time out of service and the aftereffects of her grievous injuries at the docks. Was it not possible that trauma had caused her imagination to fabricate the illusion of an intruder?

Nissa bared teeth. “Either you believe that Marriosan and I were calculated enough to fake the presence of an intruder, as you initially posited, or you believe that we were both so physically and psychologically compromised that we became delusional. I don’t suppose both can be true.”

Auria smiled to herself, until Karvas said, “All rather inconsequential, isn’t it? The fact of the matter is that you were caught burgling your captain. We’re only really debating your motives and methods, rather than the crimes—sorry, the acts.”

Finally, it was Auria’s turn to present evidence and call witnesses. She fought the childish urge to crack her knuckles, as though preparing for a bar fight.

“I’d like to call Captain Vel Karvas to the witness stand.”

Karvas strode to the bench with a confident ease, as though he were the one in control.

A common thing, to mistake power for control.

“Captain Karvas, you suggested ‘aiding and abetting’ when describing our potential breaches of the Constitution of Laws. Surely this would imply that there was a third party present on the night in question?”

Karvas shook his head. “I meant aiding and abetting in the sense that you were stealing the letter for a former colleague—a former colleague who is now a Bloodmoon, no less.”

“What exactly are you trying to suggest happened? As Detective Naszi pointed out, you cannot seem to decide whether it was an elaborate scheme or a consequence of delirium.”

“I believe that you and Naszi staged an intruder inside the building in order to justify your burglary. And I believe, though I cannot prove it, that Saffron Killoran was waiting outside my office window for the letter to be dropped into her hands.”

Auria gave an exaggeratedly confused smile. “You did not think to pursue Killoran, in that case? You could have been out of the window in an instant, hot on her tail. But instead you focused on reprimanding your own detectives.”

“I had just woken up, and my well was far from full.”

“Did you at least cross to the window, in an attempt to positively identify Killoran?”

A muscle twitched in Karvas’s jaw. “No. I assumed that she’d be under the guise of an invisibility tincture or similar.”

Auria frowned. “So you do confess that it’s within the realms of possibility for a Bloodmoon to have infiltrated the Order using such a potion.”

“Of course it’s within the realms of—”

“Tell me, Captain Karvas,” she interjected, knowing that this was a man who hated to be interrupted. Let him grow rankled, ireful. Such a temperament might make him slip. “Do you trust the mages under your command?”

The captain’s cheeks reddened with barely suppressed anger. “I’ve seen enough in my career to be jaded.”

“No, then.”

“I suppose that would be an accurate summation.”

“Which explains why you did not even entertain the idea of taking us at our word—that you immediately assumed everything out of our mouths had been a lie, even when we’d given you no reason to doubt us in the past. Other than our out-of-work conversations with Killoran, of course, which I am happy to describe at great length. Yes, Killoran asked both of us in turn to help her retrieve the letter, but we both turned her down.”

“An easy thing to claim, but difficult to prove.”

Auria beamed genially. “Thankfully I’m in the habit of wearing a bracelet enchanted with a listening charm whenever I’m called to a crime scene—in case I end up capturing key evidence, you see.”

She held up her wrist to reveal a wire-thin silver bracelet inscribed with a series of enchanted spellwork. Withdrawing her wand from her pocket, she tilted her gaze to the judge.

“May I? Casting magic is not usually permitted in court, but…”

The judge nodded. “This is not a formal trial, so go ahead.”

Auria tapped the tip of her sapphire-studded willow wand to the bracelet, muttering the stanza of words that would recall the recordings of a specific date and time.

Saffron’s voice echoed through the room, tinny but unmistakable.

“My father wrote me a letter. Left it with Aspar, I think. I haven’t heard my mother or father’s voice for over twenty years. I want it more than I want to breathe. And I thought…maybe we could trade. I was with Tiernan when he died. I can tell you everything.”

“I am not your friend, Saffron. And it is far too great a risk for me to take you at your word, to believe without any real evidence that you’re undercover. Because what if you are lying? I will not dishonor Tiernan’s memory by using his final moments as a bartering chip, whether you want a letter or something far worse—because I have no doubt that’s where this leads. We make one trade, this innocent missive from your lost father, and you hold it over me forever. You threaten to tell my captain, the commissioner. You threaten to ruin me if I don’t play your game. So no, I refuse to engage with the very first move.”

“No, Auria, I would never—”

“They’re gone.” The muffled sounds of the street filtered through the bracelet. “You are ruining everything I hold dear, and I hate you, I really do. Because this all leads back to you, doesn’t it? My grandfather’s death, Tiernan’s. All my worldly pain stems from your choices. So stay away from me. Or I swear—to all the Saints in the sky—that I will toss you back in Duncarzus and throw away the key.”

Auria tapped the bracelet, ending the recording. She turned to Karvas, whose cheeks had deepened into a wrathful red-purple. “This last part was slightly petulant, I’ll confess.”

“It strikes me as rather convenient that you recorded such a conversation,” Karvas retorted, his tone low and hateful.

“Yes, how convenient that I’m so good at my job. As you can hear, I was under immense duress, pursuing witnesses down the busiest street in Atherin lest the Whitewings slay them before they could talk. Do you really think I stopped and thought, hmm, later, when I betray the very institution to which I’ve dedicated my life, I should have some evidence of this conversation?”

“It’s within the realms of—”

“Do you not hear how paranoid you sound?”

Judge Nercan rapped two fingers on the bench. “Careful, Marriosan—dangerously close to badgering.”

“Apologies, Your Honor,” Auria said sweetly. “Let’s move on to my evidence, shall we? I’m afraid it’s rather more conclusive than an empty drawer.”

44

• • • •

Justice Served, Vallin Grown

As Karvas left the stand, a heady buzz hummed through Auria, like she’d drunk a thousand cups of cønnafyr in quick succession. She’d forgotten how much she loved this. Truthfully, she got so much more satisfaction from it than she did from pursuing a criminal down a debauched street, than she did from deminite cuffs clicking around violent wrists.

The courtroom was her home, and she could not wait for the day she found her way back to it.

“Now, if you’ll allow me to construct a narrative of my own?” she said, nerves dissipating as she found her groove. “I have physical evidence to prove that the intruder entered the Order through an open window in the hospital wing.” A chastising glance at Nissa. “There, for reasons still unclear to me, the intruder spent around half an hour healing several of the patients on the ward before proceeding farther into the building. I’d like to call Detective Etan Herlan to the stand.”

A detective rose from the backmost pew and strode to the witness stand, silver cloak swilling around her feet. She was in late middle age, gray-brown hair tucked behind heavily studded ears. Bright red kohl lined her blue eyes, matched perfectly to the crimson tint on her thin lips.

“Detective Herlan.” Auria reveled in the crackle of anticipation in the air. “You were a patient in the hospital wing on the night in question. Can you describe your experiences to me?”

“I had been on the ward for several months, after severe blood loss led to multisystem organ failure. Paliran had tried to cure me herself for many weeks, to no avail. That night, I had gone to sleep feeling particularly terrible, my skin more jaundiced than ever, the whites of my eyes a muddy yellow, but I was also oddly—at peace. As though my body expected not to wake. But then I did wake, and felt well for the first time since my injuries.

“I was extraordinarily confused and disoriented for the first few moments, but when the room sharpened around me, I realized there was someone there. Healing. A vague outline, the afterimpression of a shape, standing over the bed next to me. They hadn’t closed the curtain, so I saw, or rather heard, everything. A low male voice, muttering and incanting. Strange spellwork, unfamiliar to me, but if I had to parse it, I’d guess he was trying to relieve a tormented mind of its anxieties.”

“What happened next?”

“After the invisible mage finished healing, he left the ward for the main corridor. It was only then I realized someone else was awake and watching.”

“Who was that person?”

“Nissa Naszi. She’d been peering through a narrow crack in her curtains, and when the intruder left the hospital wing, she followed. Wand in hand.”

“Very well. Would you like to cross-examine the witness, Captain Karvas?”

Karvas made a stuttering job of the cross-examination, inexperienced as he was in the trial system, and largely focused on the same argument he’d tried to spear Auria with. Extraordinarily confused and disoriented was, he posited, evidence of unsound mind, and an unsound mind was unable to provide valid testimony.

“Yet you described a similar phenomenon when your alarm woke you at dawn,” reasoned Auria. “It was your justification for not pursuing the fabled Killoran.”

Karvas had no response to this. Herlan was dismissed from the stand.

“If it’s undeniable evidence you seek, Captain,” Auria went on, “I have one of our esteemed colleagues from crime-scene investigation on hand to describe the next movements of the intruder. Officer Lizon?”

Lizon, a short, pale-skinned Enchanter with long pitch-black hair and a penetrative green gaze, sauntered slowly up the aisle to the bench.

Auria picked up a new sheaf of notes. “Can you describe what you discovered when examining the crime scene?”

Being that this was not an official trial, Auria had not been required to enter any of this into evidence, and so Karvas was now squarely on the back foot.

When Lizon spoke, it was deathly quiet, nasal, with an acute southern accent. “My first port of call was to sweep for foreign footprints, of which we found many, of course. Likely from Healers, and from the various guests Detective Naszi and her fellow patients entertained. But there was indeed a trail of prints matching Detective Herlan’s testimony precisely, beginning at the windowsill beyond Naszi’s bed.”

There had actually been two sets of prints beginning at the sill—Nissa had admitted to Auria that Killoran had visited her earlier the same night—but Auria opted to omit this from evidence.

“Can you describe these footprints?”

“Size twelve, broad enough to suggest a male intruder. They belonged to a set of boots manufactured by a Bethune & Sons up in Novarin.”

“Can you describe the trajectory of these footprints after arriving at Naszi’s bedside?”

“I used vestipedan, a common spell used in crime-scene investigations to illuminate the path a given set of footprints followed. It showed that the owner of said boots ambled around the hospital wing for approximately half an hour, stopping at various bedsides, before eventually departing the ward, searching the Order for a further quarter hour, then finally arriving at the common room.

“Thereafter, the footprints in the common room were muddled, chaotic, suggesting some sort of physical altercation with multiple parties. Casting the same spell upon the footprints of detectives Naszi and Marriosan confirmed that they were said parties. Finally, all three footprints led to the office of Captain Karvas, before the intruder leapt out of the window and into the night. There, we lose him.”

Auria smiled. “Thank you, Officer Lizon. Captain, if you’d like to…?”

Karvas was already on his feet. “And you’re able to pinpoint these footsteps to the night in question?”

“The spellwork is not yet advanced enough to—”

“So it is possible, then, that this supposed intruder entered the Order on a different night entirely?”

“I suppose so.” Lizon scratched at his small chin. “But when considered alongside the testimony of Detective Herlan…”

Changing angles, Karvas said, “Saffron Killoran is of tall stature and broad foot, is she not? Could the footprints not have belonged to her?”

“They were men’s boots, as stated, procured from a boutique cobbler in the north, but there’s nothing to prohibit a female mage from choosing to wear them. However, as Herlan testified, it was a male voice heard healing the patients on the ward.”

“That is all,” Karvas seethed, sitting back down.

Auria was supposed to move along to her final defensive prong, but she couldn’t resist addressing the captain directly. “You’re suggesting that Nissa and I actively fought Saffron Killoran in the common room? This rather contradicts your suggestion that she waited patiently beneath your office window, does it not? Either we were colluding with her or we weren’t. Which is it?”

“Move along, Marriosan,” said Judge Nercan plainly.

But Auria didn’t care about the subtle chastisement. She had sown seeds of reasonable doubt, made it impossible for Karvas to prove anything.

Still, there was one inarguable fact: they had been caught red-handed. They were guilty of many crimes—under great duress, but guilty nonetheless. Time to hammer home said duress.

“When the intruder entered the common room, I was making notes from my night of staking out the Whitewing drophouse. I always utilize my listening bracelet during stakeouts, and was yet to turn it off for the night—or the day, more precisely. As a result, I recorded the entire altercation in the common room.”

Every single mage in the courtroom sat up straighter as Auria tapped the bracelet.

“Tell me where to find the office of Captain Vel Karvas.”

The voice was low and male—undeniably not Saffron Killoran.

“No.”

“You know what the scarlet rot are capable of. What I’m capable of. What happens to people who say no.”

“No.”

Next came Nissa’s entry into the common room, during which time she addressed the intruder as Levan Celadon. This garnered a ripple of murmurs throughout the courtroom.

“Take me to your captain’s office, or Marriosan meets the same fate as her betrothed.”

“No, Nissa. No. I’m ready. I can go now.”

“You are not ready, and you will not go. Not for the sake of a letter.”

“It’s what the letter represents.”

After that came the ferocious sounds of a fight, the whoosh of wind and flames, the cries of pain and anguish. At the time it had seemed to go on forever, but played back it was over in a few minutes. It ended with Levan’s knife against Nissa’s throat, which the court obviously could not see, but it was evident from context, from what the kingpin said next.

“You don’t care enough about your own life to save it. But what about hers?”

Auria ended the recording, and was met with a crypt-like silence.

Karvas blanched white.

Judge Nercan was the first to speak, and when he did, it was with a crisp, quiet tone. “It is your belief that the intruder was the Bloodmoon kingpin?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Other than this recording, do you have any evidence?”

His scent and his scent alone, Auria thought to herself, but as she was preparing to say no, though maybe they could attempt to get eyes on his boots to see if they matched the model from Bethune & Sons, Nissa’s voice burned from the pew behind her.

“A positive facial identification, Your Honor.”

Auria stilled in horror.

That was a lie.

A lie under oath.

Judge Nercan smoothed down the front of his robe. “A positive facial identification, despite the invisibility elixir?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Nissa said easily, so easily. “By the time dawn came and we’d infiltrated the captain’s office, it was wearing off. Just as Levan Celadon was about to leap from the windowsill, his face flickered into view. I’d know it anywhere.”

She might as well have dropped a blackpowder bomb on the hearing. Detectives and high-ranking officials erupted into chatter in the pews.

Nissa had lied under oath. Perjured herself.

Of course, she hadn’t told Auria she planned to do it—not only would Auria have tried to talk her out of it, but Nissa would also have made her ethically complicit in the lie, despite her privilege. Nissa had been trying to protect her.

And now Auria faced yet another moral dilemma.

Should she approach the bench? Tell the judge, in a low, troubled voice, that she knew her client was lying? Which was worse to violate: attorney-client privilege, or duty of candor?

Lawyers could not allow false evidence or testimony to stand uncorrected. Yet rather than going straight to the judge, they were usually obligated to try to take remedial measures first. To convince their client to rectify the lie, or recuse themselves from the case entirely.

But Nissa had never been persuaded to do anything against her will, and a correction now would reveal her perjury—and for that, she would almost certainly be tried as a criminal, not just as a breacher of administrative codes.

How could Auria recuse herself? That would essentially confirm to the judge and the court that she knew Nissa was lying and did not want to associate herself with it. The whole hearing would be cast into a new light. Auria would be tarnished with the same brush, all her airtight evidence called into question. She could lose everything.

For several long moments, as the courtroom descended into chaos, she stood frozen.

Judge Nercan cleared his throat, waving his hands irritably. “The implication of Levan Celadon in this case is certainly a significant one, but it is also a matter for another court. We are here to discuss the acts of detectives Naszi and Marriosan, and I would like to reach a decision today. Marriosan, continue, if you please.”

And then Auria was continuing, leaving Nissa’s lie unchecked, nausea rolling through her. “I have never denied my actions, but I hope this recording of the altercation provides ample context. I was willing to die for that letter. It still wasn’t enough. Everything I did, I did to save a colleague. Nissa Naszi too risked her life to protect mine—if she hadn’t walked in when she did, I would be dead.

“We aided a Bloodmoon in stealing a personal letter. As ever, I am willing to live and die by the law that forbids such a thing. I only ask that in considering our punishments, you consider our fear, our desire to do the right thing no matter the personal cost. Before we close, I’d like to bring forth a character statement for each of us. Detective Tenébo Jebat will offer mine, and Detective Harou Qubayan will offer Naszi’s.”

Jebat and Qubayan took to the stand and talked at great length about the defendants’ characters—Auria’s love of the law, her meticulousness, her unwavering faith in the institutions that uphold Vallish civilization, and Nissa’s courage, her fortitude, her desire to do good in all its forms.

Auria barely heard either statement over the roar in her ears.

Nissa had perjured herself. Auria had let her.

Twice in seven days she had broken laws—both times because of the dragonesque Wielder standing behind her. The self-loathing ossified into anger, into rage. All Auria had ever wanted was to live in service of the law, but her colleagues, both former and current, were making it borderline impossible. First Saffron, now Nissa, trampling all over Auria’s respect for the rules. Forcing her into corners she could only escape by playing low and dirty.

Only when the judge cleared his throat did she realize Qubayan had finished his testimony and left the stand, leaving the courtroom hanging silent.

“Thank you, Detectives,” Auria said roughly, her voice distant. “Your Honor, I am ready to move on to closing state—”

But Nissa was on her feet in the front row pew, and the judge was looking questioningly at her. For the briefest of moments, Auria hoped she’d had a change of heart, that she planned to confess her own false evidence and free Auria of the ethical obligation.

“I would like to offer a character statement for Detective Marriosan.”

What?

Nercan nodded. “Very well. You may retake the stand.”

As Nissa glided to the bench in her blood-orange cloak, Auria’s stomach somersaulted.

When Nissa spoke, her tone was ardent, alive. “Auria Marriosan is one of the most infuriating mages I have ever had the misfortune of knowing. Everyone in the Academy knew we were forever locking horns—precisely because of her turgid moral code, her unwillingness to brush up against a rule, let alone dance over it. Two weeks ago, I asked her whether she would rather do what is right or what is lawful. She said ‘what is lawful’ with her whole chest. I told her to fuck herself, or similar, and I stand by it. She would have died to protect that letter, not because of its contents, not because it was right, but because it was fucking lawful.”

The judge bristled. “Detective Naszi, your language, please—”

“I have to admire that level of conviction,” Nissa went on, as though Nercan had not spoken. “That unwavering faith in your own belief system, in the laws that govern our world. She only faltered when it was my life on the line, and I cannot even fathom the agony of the mental calculations she had to perform to make the choice she did. It was possibly the first rule she’d ever broken, and it has been eating her up ever since. She could have let me die in the name of her moral code, but she saw the pain and fear in my eyes and she chose what was right.

“That’s the most important thing you need to know about Auria Marriosan—she may sometimes hesitate between right and lawful when the two do not necessarily overlap, but she will never entertain the idea of wrong. So while I find the mage before me preachy and judgmental, sanctimonious and supercilious and smug, inflexible and infuriating and quite frankly dull, there is no denying that she is good. That is all.”

Detective Jebat looked between Nissa and Auria and then, for no clear reason, burst out laughing. “Seconded.”

Auria’s cheeks burned, and for some Saintsforsaken reason, she felt the pathetic urge to cry. She found she could not look directly at Nissa.

The Wielder had lied under oath, and then she had done this.

After that, the closing statements were a blur. Turmoil sculled through Auria like vicious oars, and at any given moment, she thought she might call out to the judge, might confess the terrible thing she knew: that her co-defendant was a perjurer. But she never did. When she wasn’t talking, her tongue remained glued to the roof of her mouth, cemented by cowardice or fear or self-preservation.

Finally, the courtroom rose to hear the judge’s verdict.

Nercan nodded and nodded and nodded, then spoke.

“It is clear that several breaches of the Code of Conduct were committed here, and punishment must be issued accordingly. My order is for detectives Marriosan and Naszi to be suspended for one week. With pay. They may use the time to rest and recuperate before returning to work in their usual capacity.”

Auria’s heart lurched with disbelief.

One week of suspension.

With pay.

She felt like cheering, like laughing, like crying.

Captain Karvas, on the other hand, seemed ready to detonate with fury. He thumped a palm on his bench. “Your Honor. This sets a dangerous precedent—what is to stop another Silvercloak from committing an egregious felony and then simply blaming Bloodmoon pressure?”

Judge Nercan steepled his fingers in front of him, a mild expression on his weathered face. “Detective Naszi touched on a core philosophical idea: the difference between what is right and what is lawful.”

“As a judge, surely you ought to believe they are one and the same,” Karvas blustered.

“Most of the time, yes. But if you asked any sound-of-mind individual whether one should allow oneself to be murdered to prevent the theft of a letter written by a dying man for his surviving daughter, said hypothetical individual would surely agree that this would not be reasonable or necessary. Yet Auria Marriosan was willing to do just that.

“There has been wrongdoing, yes. Breaches of the Order’s Code of Conduct, absolutely. Insubordination, the leaking of confidential information under extreme duress. Perhaps these might teeter into criminal charges—these detectives did certainly facilitate burglary. But both Marriosan and Naszi took reasonable measures to prevent the theft of the letter, and Marriosan went far beyond the call of duty in agreeing to sacrifice her life for it. I have no interest in pursuing a criminal investigation. And frankly, Captain, it’s alarming to me that you appear to be more concerned with punishing your own mages than with catching the intruder who forced their hands.”

“But Your Hon—”

“Dismissed.”

45

• • • •

Five Trips

Before leaving for Bellandry, the kingpin made five trips.

A week had passed since he’d read that letter—and rejected Saffron’s advances. Now every time they crossed paths in the corridors of the mansion, they gave each other stiff nods, or Levan would ask something inane about the laundering she was overseeing. The responses were stiff, un-Saffron-like. There was no talk of their upcoming trip north beyond when and where they’d meet, and certainly no talk of the love lost between them.

Which was fine by Levan, because he had business to attend to.

First, he went to cell six, only to find the prisoner still unconscious. Bruises faded, body weakened. A loose collection of muscle and skin and bones. Breathing, but barely. As he always did, he tried to heal the prisoner. As he always did, he failed.

This trip to see the prisoner made Levan crave loxlure more than he had in years, and he had to run sixteen miles to rid himself of the desire. Even then it simmered below the surface, an itch, an impulse, a voice screaming at him without cease. A hunger for oblivion. A thirst that could only be slaked by one thing and one thing alone. An agony so great that only loxlure could numb it. It troubled him that the need was growing louder with time, not quieter.

It took several days to heal the burn on his side. He debated back and forth for hours at a time, half glad for the sharp sting, the way it ameliorated his wavering power, the punishment it served for his many ills. The other half of him knew that an act of healing would go a small distance to repairing his severed command over magic itself, and it was to this argument that he eventually ceded. He couldn’t go on this potentially doomed journey to Bellandry without his compelling to fall back on.

After soothing his own burn, he healed wherever he could: people, plants, objects. Slowly, he felt the connection to his magic strengthen. Often the only thought keeping him from succumbing to loxlure was that it might somehow tarnish this nascent bond.

So that was the first trip.

Second, he went to his mother’s crypt to check on Halant’s progress, which was nonexistent. But the necromancer seemed pleased when Levan told him a scarlet mage had been sent to Nomaden to retrieve Teny Tolvas, without whom well replenishment was impossible. Tolvas should be in Atherin by the end of the month, and Halant agreed to keep attempting resurrection before then.

By now, though, the prospect of a better way had laid down roots in Levan. Why settle for a Risen mother and the legacy of a brutal criminal empire when Saffron could unmake it all? He was called to the idea of a blank slate, a fresh blanket of snow ready for a new set of footprints. The opportunity to make cleaner, kinder marks on the world. This would save the prisoner in cell six, would save the hundreds of others who had fallen in the name of resurrecting a dead queenpin. The greatest act of Healing he could imagine.

He’d often thought, since his mother’s death, that the real reason he wanted to bring her back was not to install her upon a stolen throne, but to return to the version of himself she had so adored. Saffron’s plan offered that in the realest sense, and so he would do whatever it took to ensure her success.

Third, he went to Elderstones—the apothecary where Relar Zamorin worked with his aged grandmother. But Levan did not plan to punish Segal’s killer yet. There was a far smarter game to play.

Saffron had wondered whether the Whitewings were gathering ingredients to make a substance to rival loxlure. If Levan killed Relar and his grandmother, the Whitewings would simply find another unfortunate apothecary to blackmail and threaten into cooperation. Far better to keep the one Levan did have influence over alive—and working for the Bloodmoons.

Perhaps it had been a mistake to let the boy walk away unbranded, but it was a decision Levan would make again, even at the cost of Segal’s head. There had to be a way to keep mages loyal without mutilation.

Elderstones was a small, neat shop with teal awnings and a gold eagle emblem on the hanging sign. A tiny bell tinkled over the doorway as Levan entered, the scents of dried herbs and old spices and stale blood hitting him like a physical thing. Two mages looked up from the counter—one a hunched older woman with facial moles and an apothecary’s monocle, the other a lanky, pimple-faced teenager—both wearing pale blue cloaks and fearful expressions.

Relar stepped back, pinning himself against a row of tall mahogany shelves, and then fixed a determinedly normal expression on his face. His grandmother’s hand went to his elbow, gripping with gnarled, arthritic fingers.

“You killed my right-hand mage,” Levan said evenly, striding up to the counter and resting his golden palm on it. He kept his wand notched in his belt, letting the implied violence of his scarlet cloak do all the intimidation.

The grandmother pressed her palm against her mouth, as though to keep a scream from escaping. Relar’s head shook wildly, as it had right before Levan almost branded him. “No, I—”

“I have a reliable witness.”

The boy’s chin wobbled, and Levan splintered. He saw himself in Relar: quiet, studious, smart, deeply afraid, feeling the life he’d wanted for himself slipping away on the violent tide of another mage’s greed.

“P-please, I had no choice, I—the Whitewings forced me, and—”

“I’m not here to brand you. Not that such a thing would be possible, since you stole the relevant iron. Planning to use it against me?”

Relar lifted his chin. “No. Stopping you from using it on anyone else.”

“How admirable.”

“Why are you here, if not to punish me?” Relar asked warily, sensing a trap just beyond his ken.

“I want you to work with us. I want you to tell us everything the Whitewings ask you to source, and I want to know everything you see or hear around them. I also want you to accompany me on a trip to northernmost Bellandry tomorrow. I’m leaving the city for a while, and I need to keep tabs on the Whitewings in my absence. You represent one way of doing that.”

Relar’s hand quivered to the handle of his wand and then withdrew again, as though he couldn’t decide whether to attack or defend or run. “Why would I risk that? The Whitewings would kill me if they found out.”

“I will offer your family protection against the Whitewings.”

The grandmother’s breath hitched in her throat. “Protection?”

“I’ll station two mages near the apothecary, and provide you with an enchanted panic button, so that you can call upon them at a moment’s notice. While Relar is with me, he’ll be untouchable. And if they discover you’re working with the scarlets, I’ll ensure safe passage out of the city—the country, if needs be. I don’t think the Whitewings have the will or the means to follow.”

Rather than looking relieved at this offer, Relar stared despondently over Levan’s shoulder, as though expecting a Whitewing to burst in at any moment and catch him liaising with the scarlet kingpin. It was a valid concern, but hopefully the Whitewings weren’t watching the shop too closely.

“I don’t suppose I have another choice,” Relar said at last.

“Death, or the brand. I’m not a forgiving man, and you murdered one of my men. I understand that you had little choice. Trust me when I say I’ve had to make the same decision myself many times—it’s how we all end up in this life. Once you’re dirty, you’re always dirty. Once there’s blood on your hands, it cannot be washed away.”

Relar looked at his grandmother, who was crying silently. While her hips were still rounded and her breasts swelled low on her belly, her face had the gaunt, shriveled look of someone who had lost a lot of weight very quickly—from stress, from fear.

“When do we leave?” the boy asked, more resolutely than he likely felt.

“Tomorrow morning. You’ll tell the Whitewings you’re traveling north for an ingredient.”

“Alright. I’ve still been unable to procure any spinebark for them. I’ll tell them I’m following a new lead.”

A chill scraped down the back of Levan’s neck.

Spinebark?

Hells.

Spinebark was a rare form of pain relief so powerful—and addictive—that the continent had been stripped clean of it during the Battle of Independence between Bellandry and the Eastern Republics. Though many attempts had been made to replant the spine trees that produced it, the saplings would never take to the soil in which they had once thrived. An ongoing source of bafflement for botanists the world over, but also, as most people tended to agree, for the best. Spinebark addiction and subsequent withdrawal ravaged the Eastern Republics in their first decade of freedom from the Bellandrian throne, and they were almost reconquered because of a weakened army.

Levan tried not to let his disquiet show.

With a final nod farewell to the terrified apothecaries, and instructions to meet him at the Acolyte Avenue portari gate the next morning, the kingpin left the shop and made his way to another.

Artan’s Antiques was a dusty old establishment that Levan abhorred in most meaningful ways. It was so disorderly, so chaotic, its artifacts levitating and diving at random intervals, its shelves laid out with no clear order or pattern so that you could never quite find what you were looking for. Levan suspected Saffron would find it all rather charming, but he tried to make his own visits as perfunctory as possible.

“Afternoon,” he said, to the slender, fox-faced proprietor with hair the color of sun-burnished wheat.

Unperturbed by his scarlet cloak, Artan gave him a little mock salute as she failed to wrangle a set of cursed polderdash cards back into their wooden sleeve. “What can I do for you?”

“I was wondering whether you might have anything that…” He trailed off, which he was not usually prone to doing, but the unspoken words filled him with a sense of failure.

Anything that might mend a broken connection to magic.

It seemed a death wish to go on the quest to Bellandry with his magic still splintered, yet paranoia curdled in his belly at the thought of confessing to this random shopkeeper that the kingpin of Atherin’s deadliest criminal organization was weakened.

Artan raised a brow, but did not prompt him to continue.

As he reached for a small black mourncrow ornament on a shelf, however, she glanced at his golden hand and then hissed, like some sort of feral serpent. “I wouldn’t touch that, if I were you.”

Withdrawing his palm, he frowned. “Why not?”

“It’s supposed to make you dream of lost loved ones, like its living counterparts, but…every time I’ve touched it, it’s given me horribly realistic nightmares. My lost loved ones Risen from the dead and come to seek vengeance on me for letting them die in the first place.”

“Ah.” Perhaps not the best talisman at the present moment. “Why be honest with me? Surely your job is to sell whatever you can?”

“Oh, no,” Artan said cheerfully. “Those lost loved ones were dreadfully wealthy and left me everything. This is merely a hobby.”

“Perhaps I’ll just leave it, then. Thank you for your candor.”

As Levan turned to leave, however, his gaze caught on a jewelry cabinet—and a very familiar necklace hanging inside. Delicate gold chain, wooden oval pendant, two gemstones set on its surface. Purple sapphire and glittering emerald.

Saffron told him she’d lost it.

An immense dread expanded low in his stomach.

What would have been worth trading her most precious possession for? The last thing she had left of her parents—her parents themselves, their bodies, their souls. Surely there was nothing. Certainly not that painmaker she’d used in the Havenwood, or—

Oh.

A weaverwick was not the only thing required to turn back time. Levan knew for certain that his mother’s old hourglass had been left behind in his father’s office that night, and such things were incredibly rare, incredibly expensive to purchase from establishments just like these.

Saffron was so hellsbent on seeking the protection of tempavicissan that she’d trade anything for it. But Saints, how it must have hurt her.

He should feel angry, should be writhing with it. She’d used that hourglass to betray him. And yet all he could think of when he saw that pendant was the girl she must have been at six years old, watching her parents as they were brutally slain by mages in cloaks just like his. He thought of the jeweling ceremony, how heavy those gemstones must have felt around her young throat. He thought of how she had not spoken for half a decade thereafter, thought of how her hand went to that very pendant as an adult when she was feeling too much.

He lifted his golden palm to the glass cabinet, his breath fogging the front.

“How much for the necklace?”

The fifth and final visit Levan paid was to Harrow Claver, whom he had not seen or heard from in weeks. It was Asting evening, which meant he’d be sinking bottles of honeywine and heckling the poor bard at the Twelve Jackals, a centuries-old tavern tucked around the corner from the Palace.

The King’s Prophet was hiding something, and it was time to figure out what.

46

• • • •

To the Horizon

There was nothing Harrow loved more than to heckle the bard at the Twelve Jackals, but tonight, he wasn’t in the mood. Instead, he sank into a booth near the back corner of the tavern, making his way through the Summerhills honeywine list, playing a single-person variation of polderdash with varying degrees of competency.

His day had been excruciatingly long.

Over the last couple of weeks, Vallin’s diplomatic relations with its neighboring countries had soured somewhat, and the king was in an atrocious mood.

First, Bellandry threatened to revoke their open border pact, since the recent scarlet-silver showdown in the Havenwood had made its southern citizens nervous. Queen Vune sent a stern missive insinuating that King Quintan was too busy fortifying the wards around the capital to purge the evil inside the walls, and now the Bloodmoons were spreading, metastasizing. She would ensure the scourge remained contained inside Vallish borders by any means necessary.

Then the Palace received a delegation of ambassadors from Eqora, sent with the intention of smoothing over the fracas by the Mountains of Promise, the missing Silvercloak, the simmering skirmishes. House Arollan had expected the southern emissaries to be apologetic—they were undeniably the aggravators of the border provocations, and it was clear they had something to do with Sebran Aduran’s disappearance—but to the king’s immense ire, the delegation was actively antagonistic.

The Eqorans spent the afternoon needling King Quintan about the rising gang warfare in his capital city—they’d passed a dismembered Whitewing on Arollan Mile, the brutalized body impaled on the obelisk of a war memorial. The delegation’s jesting quips fast became barbed ridicule, and tensions between the parties ratcheted. When the Vallish regent insisted he would not be belittled in this way, the Eqorans threatened to rescind the trade agreement in which Eqora provided Vallin with achullah. Without the earthy spiced tobacco, Atherin would certainly riot.

Word of the Bloodmoons was spreading across the continent, invoking not just fear but mockery. And if there was anything King Quintan could not abide, it was mockery.

So he’d summoned the corrupt Grand Arbiter to the Palace, suddenly and feverishly determined that it was not enough for the scarlets to simply bleed. They must be obliterated.

“The death penalty?” the Grand Arbiter whispered, grip tightening on her quill. Her already pale face blanched to the color of fresh parchment, starkening the hue of her violet lipstick. Though her gray hair was pulled neatly into a low bun and her purple highcloak was perfectly pressed, there was still something haggard about her, something weary and afraid.

“Only for convicted traitors, of course.” King Quintan sat at the opposite end of the long ascenite table in the Grand Chamber. The windows were cranked open, as usual, and the royal banners shivered in the breeze.

Harrow had gone so far past cold that he was simply numb.

The Grand Arbiter chewed the inside of her cheek, deepening her many wrinkles. “But Your Grace, according to your own impassioned manifestos…the death penalty is unethical. Barbaric. Not the purview of a civilized modern society. I understand that tensions are—”

“I’m not here to debate this, Dematus.” King Quintan did not raise his voice, but his tone had all the cutting finality of a guillotine. “I’m here to issue orders.”

Dematus squared her shoulders, drawing on forty years of pride in her work to bolster her convictions. “Your Grace, the Grand Arbitership has always been a seat designed to function separately from the Crown. I do not take orders.”

“It’s not just the death penalty,” the king went on, waving a beefy palm as though she had not spoken. “We will also require official prophecies to be admissible as evidence in a court of law. Not just from any old street Foreseer, you understand. But from pedigreed prophets, like Highcloak Claver here.”

Harrow continued to stare out the window. A storm was gathering over the city, and a feeling of impending doom was gathering behind Harrow’s ribs.

“You see, Highcloak Claver recently foretold that the Bloodmoons would stage a coup.” King Quintan drilled a meaningful look through the Grand Arbiter. “Storm the Palace, take the throne by force. Treason, pure and simple.”

A fervent head shake loosened a strand of pale gray hair from Dematus’s bun. “Even if royal prophecy did become admissible—and that’s a rather large if, because prophecies are, of course, impossible to replay or verify externally—the death penalty seems unnecessary. Duncarzus is ample punishment for—”

“All scarlet aiders and abettors will be executed.”

This final decree was loaded with subtext, a layered threat, a subtle assertion of the regent’s knowing. But whether or not Dematus picked up on the implications, she did not allow herself to meeken.

“I’m sorry, Your Grace. I will not support the return of capital punishment.”

A long, terrible silence, almost apocalyptic in its barrenness. Then King Quintan spoke quietly, dangerously—more regally than Harrow had ever witnessed from the boozy ruler.

“For decades, the ruling house has so rarely intervened on matters of law and order. You and your predecessors have always held my full trust—even when unsavory rumors have spread about your loyalties.” A lethal smile. “Amend the constitution, Dematus. Or I’ll order an official investigation into your conduct.”

Harrow swilled the nectar-colored honeywine in his goblet, mulling over the implications of a death penalty for Bloodmoons—and their myriad aiders and abettors, of which he was arguably one. The whole thing was far from ideal.

He’d been avoiding Levan ever since he’d entered the Whitewing drophouse to discover that the kingpin’s former betrothed was still alive. Three years ago, Harrow had seen firsthand what Alucia’s double-crossing had done to Levan. He’d never forget finding his casual lover in a pool of his own urine, frothing at the mouth, muscles seizing violently, and eyes hanging empty after an overdose of loxlure. Alucia’s unexpected survival might unravel the kingpin once more.

Uncertain how to navigate this snarl of a situation, and spooked by the reintroduction of the death penalty, Harrow thought it best to avoid the scarlets entirely. So when none other than Levan Celadon entered the tavern, the King’s Prophet felt unsure of how to behave.

“He lives.” Levan slid into the booth carrying an honest-to-Saints glass of elderberry cordial.

A grown man. Cordial.

Harrow lifted his own glass to his lips before realizing it was empty. “Evening.”

“You’ve been avoiding me.”

“I’ve been busy,” Harrow replied vaguely.

“That’s never stopped you from fucking me before.” Levan’s hair was pulled back with a piece of tan leather string, and he seemed to be carrying himself gingerly, though there were no obvious injuries. Harrow recognized this posture from the deepest days of Levan’s addiction—the sense that if he brushed up against anything too solid, it would hurt him, and if he hurt, then he would want loxlure too badly to deny himself.

Harrow shrugged. “My libido isn’t what it once was.”

“A spectacular lie. My source at the pleasurehouse on Saintsvale tells me you’ve frequented them daily.”

“Is nothing in this city sacred?”

Levan took a tentative sip of his fucking cordial, grimacing as though it were the hardest bivkar Nyrøth had to offer. “Ever since our trip to Sorvel…you foretold a prophecy, and then, for all intents and purposes, fled.”

The bard plucked up a new tune, and the alcohol in Harrow’s system caused all the twangy notes to thrum together with his own pulse. He was rather too inebriated to remember why he ought to not tell the truth.

“Fine. It was a similar prophecy to the last I shared with you—a bloody uprising, the head of King Quintan on the Palace steps, et cetera.”

“Alright.”

“Only this time, it was real.”

Levan stilled. “You lied before?”

Harrow chuckled and spread his hands wide, in a what-a-rascal-I-am sort of way. “I tell people what they want to hear. It cements my value. And when you’re valuable, they keep you alive. A mere survival tactic.”

At this revelation Levan visibly struggled to control his anger—this was not a mage who liked to be lied to, played. Not after everything that had happened with Alucia and Saffron. But for whatever reason, he was going to great lengths to keep his wrath tempered, which usually meant he needed Harrow for something.

Interesting—and dangerous.

“When you say it was real this time…”

Harrow waved to the barkeep to bring another bottle of wine. “I didn’t see the king’s head rolling, but I did see the Bloodmoons storming the Palace. So many dead, so much blood and fear. And truthfully, it made me afraid of you.”

Levan’s eyes narrowed. “I thought you weren’t loyal to the Crown.”

“That doesn’t mean I want to see House Arollan slaughtered.”

“You’ve always known my goal.” The kingpin’s thigh jostled and jerked beneath the table, nervous energy overspilling.

“I suppose I never thought you’d actually manage it.”

“Yet this prophecy implies that I will?”

The barkeep arrived at the table with a fresh bottle of honeywine, not bothering with the rigmarole of showing Harrow the label or pouring out a sample. All the barkeeps at the Twelve Jackals knew that by the third bottle, they could serve him Ludder piss and he wouldn’t notice.

Levan leaned forward, resting his forearms on the wine-sticky table. His golden hand glowed unnaturally in the low light of the tavern. “I’m going on a trip to Bellandry. Near Flarence, near the Forest of Lost Souls. I’d like you to come with me.”

“How quaint. But I’m needed in the Palace.”

“We have a location for the Fifth Prophecy, and reason to believe that Saffron Killoran is the only one who can reach it.”

The music in the bar seemed to quiet, time itself slowing like treacle.

“The Fifth Prophecy.” Harrow shook his head vehemently. “Impossible.”

“Killoran’s dying father left clear instructions on where to find it. Don’t you want to be privy to its contents?”

The quickened thrum of Harrow’s heartbeat answered for him. “I’m not an Augurest. I don’t hold much stock in the Divine—”

“This is not just religion. It’s history in the making. Whatever we find in that cave will shape the world for centuries to come.”

Harrow’s inebriated mind whirred. “Why do you want me there?”

“It seems prudent to have a Foreseer present. If the relic wand requires a prophetic hand…you’re the only one I know and trust.”

“I’ve told you many times that you should not trust me.”

Levan leaned back once more, studying Harrow so closely it made the King’s Prophet itch. “Back in Sorvel, you told me you once had your own sights set on a throne. Do you still? Is that why I shouldn’t—”

“No, darling.” Harrow snorted. “Who has the energy for a coup?”

The truth, for once. He’d given up such childish ambitions long ago. In reality, he hadn’t the disposition nor the inclination to rule. All that talk of debt and interest and trade agreements, the ceaseless concerns of regional politicians, the pandering to foreign dignitaries, the never-ending conflict of clashing theological belief systems. It was both needlessly complex and dreadfully dull.

“So what makes you untrustworthy?”

Harrow ran a thumb around the narrow glass rim of the honeywine bottle. “The king sends me on official business. Official business that often threatens your goals.”

“You don’t need to tell me of your official business, Harrow. You just have to help us retrieve the Fifth Prophecy. For history’s sake.”

The King’s Prophet let his foggy mind sift through the idea.

House Arollan was likely days away from passing the death penalty. Harrow trusted in his own ability to weasel out of such a thing, to claim that he’d been acting according to the king’s orders all along, that he was doing whatever it took to rid the land of the scarlet rot…but still, there was risk involved. A lot of risk.

Yet as complex as this web of deception was becoming, Harrow knew he couldn’t resist this quest. He lifted a glass, gesturing for Levan to do the same.

And when they toasted, it was an old travelers’ tribute.

To the horizon.

47

• • • •

A Better World

At the sight of Levan in a violet Healer’s cloak, something in Saffron splintered.

It seemed prudent to travel to Bellandry in their regular cloaks rather than the conspicuous crimson, and though Saffron had wondered what color Levan would wear, she wasn’t emotionally prepared for the reminder of what he truly was beneath all the violence and hurt.

“Always reminds me of my mother,” she murmured, traipsing down the stairs into the chamber beneath the dragon statues.

Levan stood by the portari gate, one arm pressed against the carved axelmares, one foot hooked around the other ankle. Rasso sat patiently by his side—until he saw Saffron, at which point the beast leapt up as though struck by lightning, bounding over to her and almost knocking her over with the force of his excitement. Levan hastily stuffed a small book into his inner cloak pocket, and Saffron recognized the lilac leather of the fifth volume in the Lost Dragonborn series.

With a sad pang, she remembered the costumes he’d made back when they still thought it was possible for them to attend the Erling Tandall signing together. Long gold cloaks, pearlwillows clumsily stitched on the breast pockets. She yearned to see him in those costumes, to see the childlike glee in his eyes as they met their hero. All at once, she was overcome with the desire to wrap her arms around him, hold him close. But then the memory of his romantic rejection slapped her afresh, and she shrugged away the pathetic urge.

“What reminds you of your mother?” he asked, frowning.

“The violet cloak.” She gave a wistful smile as Rasso thoroughly cleaned the palms of her hands with his rough tongue. “She was burned in hers.”

Levan studied her as she approached. He was freshly shaven, his hair recently washed and trimmed, the cords of his black tunic neatly tied over his muscled chest. “When you rewrite time, she won’t be burned at all. Not until she dies in her sleep at the ripe old age of a hundred and eight.”

Warmth spread through Saffron’s chest at his words. It felt so good that Levan knew the truth, that he was behind her on her quest. That they could finally work together for real. Some semblance of trust had been rebuilt.

Despite the letter from the Steel King in her cloak pocket.

Despite the fact she could still tear down everything he had so painstakingly built.

“Shall we go?” She gestured to the gate. The week since reading her father’s letter had passed in a stubborn trudge, and impatience snapped inside her like a riding crop.

“We have a few more members of the party to wait for.”

“Who?” Saffron asked, confused.

“Miret, first of all—he’s studied the Augurs, the Timeweavers, and the lost prophecy in immense depth over the years.”

“Can’t he stay in the safety of the library? Contact us via vocos?”

“Daft old bastard has a habit of leaving his wand lying around in rooms he is not inhabiting. Occupational hazard of a distractible scholar, I suppose.”

Saffron didn’t see the need to refute this. She’d always liked Miret, always enjoyed watching his grandfatherly relationship with Levan. “Who else?”

“Harrow Claver.”

Saffron blinked, sure she’d misheard. “The King’s Prophet?”

“We might need a Foreseer. Your father believes that the Fifth Prophecy pertains to you, and thus that you’ll be able to see it when the time comes. But if that isn’t the case, and it requires a Foreseer to channel it, we don’t want to be stymied.”

“Alright. Anyone else?”

A terse nod. “Relar Zamorin.”

Now Saffron really must be suffering from moderate aural hallucinations. “The apothecary who killed Segal? I assumed he’d already be dead. Why is he coming?”

“Keeping an eye on him—and the Whitewings. I didn’t brand him, so I can’t trust him fully, but I offered his family protection. The whites have him searching the continent for spinebark, and I can’t allow that to happen.”

Saffron’s detective’s instincts stirred. “Spinebark? Saints.”

“If they find it, loxlure will be the least of this city’s worries.”

But the mention of the highly addictive ingredient was not the part Saffron snagged upon. “You didn’t brand him?”

A curious emotion passed over Levan’s face. “No.”

“Have you branded anyone since you took over as kingpin?”

A head shake.

“Why?” Saffron said softly.

He shrugged, yet it was anything but ambivalent. She could see how much he cared about this in every line of his too-straight body, in the aching depths of his clear blue eyes. “I want there to be a better way.”

Miret’s words from a few months ago came back to her. “You made him believe that it was possible to exist in this dark crack of humanity while maintaining some semblance of morality.”

Pride flooded her, warm and bright. “If anyone can find a better way, you can.”

The very corner of Levan’s mouth pulled up. Bashful, almost, still gazing at her. He so rarely looked at her these days. At least not like that. The air between them hummed and crackled, but Saffron thought of how badly she’d misread that hum and crackle on the night she’d shared her father’s letter and forced herself to look away.

A few moments later, the other members of their strange party appeared. First Miret and Relar—both wearing pale blue scholar’s cloaks—then Harrow Claver, looking distinctly unruffled in his bronze Foreseer cloak. Beneath the bronze he wore a plain black tunic and trousers, since his royal attire would attract even more attention than Bloodmoon scarlet.

Once everyone had assembled by the portari gate, Levan shared their plan.

“We cannot take a gate directly into Bellandry, so we’ll have to portari up to Lunes then cross the border on foot.”

“Lunes?” Saffron breathed, gripped with an excruciating clutch of homesickness.

Homesickness not just for the place where she’d grown up, but the people who once inhabited it. The people all of this was for. She hadn’t been back to her beloved home village since her parents’ funeral. Her hand went to the pendant around her neck, but, of course, she had traded away the piece of their old front door, the jeweled bodies of her mother and father.

Levan watched this movement—he knew it was her tic—and for the briefest of moments, emotion flickered behind his eyes. “Will you be alright? Going back there?”

Saffron nodded, more confidently than she really felt, and tried to focus on the logistics. “There’s an axelmare breeder in Lunes—Donan Trilmere. Perhaps we could hire steeds? It’d get us through the Havenwood a lot faster.”

“Stealth is more important than speed. We ideally don’t want to leave a trail, and if we rent axelmares, Donan Trilmere becomes one more witness.”

“Witness?” Miret frowned. “You assured me this was an academic excursion.”

“Yes,” Levan replied, sort of patiently, “but if the excursion goes wrong, and curses are fired…we want to make it impossible for the Silvercloaks, or indeed the Vergard, to build a case against us. If we hire steeds near the border, that’s evidence of our movements.”

“So we traverse the Havenwood on foot.” Saffron knelt to ruffle the spot behind Rasso’s ear that he loved to have scritched. “There’s no way you can just portari us all there with your imported wand?”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “I could try, but I might perish.”

“A sacrifice I’m willing to make,” she quipped, before quickly adding, “Joking.”

Lunes was almost exactly as Saffron remembered it, filled with overgrown wildflowers and cobbled courtyards, shabby cloaks and warm faces, the scents of rosemary and honeywine.

Parts were different, of course. Certain shops and taverns had closed, become other things. New houses had cropped up around the village green. Renzel’s Wandery had expanded dramatically, swallowing up the buildings on either side—how was there so much demand for wands in such a small place?—while the Saints hall had been renovated, its ramshackle wood replaced with immaculate creamstone, the crimson-and-gold obelisk taller and grander than before.

The shape of Lunes might have changed, but not the feel, not the heartbeat. All at once Saffron was six years old again, flying through the streets on a rug her father had enchanted for her. Memories lurked around every corner, her parents’ merry laughter ringing outside the Sleeping Wolf like clinking glasses.

The village had a neat little portari station on the High Street, its walls strewn with framed famous newspaper headlines, its vaulted ceiling corniced with silver and mahogany. As she stood just over the threshold of the gate, Saffron swallowed the lump in her throat, willing the tears not to come.

“Silver,” came a voice beside her, Levan standing just behind her in the quiet station.

“Hmm?” murmured Saff, lost in her memories.

But then something was being lowered over her head from behind, and for a petrifying moment Saffron thought he might be garroting her, of all things, which would have been a very pedestrian and anticlimactic way to be murdered, but then his hands fell away, and she looked down, and she could not fight the gasping sob at the sight of what he had given her.

Her parents’ necklace.

“How?” she choked, her palm going to the familiar wooden oval as she turned to face him. The pendant was warm, as though it had been pressed against his body for a long time.

His expression betrayed very little, apart from the subtle indent in his scarred lower lip that told her he was biting the inside of it. “Saw it at Artan’s Antiques. Bought it back for you.”

Saffron could not find the words to thank him.

Instead, she looked down at the colors swirled around her parents’ gemstones. Gone was the clover green that once painted Levan as an enemy, and so too was the pale pink that suggested a burgeoning relationship; they were past that now, for better or worse. All that remained were vibrant orange, for someone trustworthy, heart-red, for a lover past or present, and a streak of purest gold.

“What does the gold mean?” Levan asked.

“I have no idea,” Saffron tried to say, but the words snagged on the shard in her throat.

It was the truth. She didn’t know. But she suspected.

Levan’s warm pinkie brushed her own, and for a moment, her panging heart stilled. She longed to rest her head against his shoulder, to lace her fingers through his, to show him all the places she had loved as a girl. There was so much in that brush of skin against skin.

But then Miret and Relar arrived behind them, chattering about their favorite types of beak to use in tinctures, and then Harrow stepped through, tutting at their provincial destination, and Levan pulled his hand away so fast it might never have been there at all.

The walk through the Havenwood was long, cold, arduous. Snow fell in flurries, at first, and then in great white drifts, and it was only Levan’s excellent sense of direction that prevented them from straying off course. He seemed to come with a built-in compass.

“How do you know which direction we’re traveling in?” Saffron muttered, during a particularly vicious downfall of snow. She was trying to be polite, because he’d brought her parents’ necklace back to her, but the cold was transmuting her into something of an ornery goat.

Levan looked at her bemusedly, as though she’d asked how he knew that the sun would rise each morning. “How do you not?”

After the first two days, Saffron’s feet blistered, and though Levan was quick to heal the sores, she was still rather childishly irate at the whole thing. What was the point of possessing magic if you still had to hike almost a hundred miles on foot?

Not to mention the camping.

It was an unfathomable hardship. She missed walls, ceilings. Hot baths.

Harrow shared her ire, and threatened to go home approximately every quarter of an hour.

Levan, on the other hand, was giddy about the whole thing.

The brooding, dangerous kingpin. Giddy.

In a canvas backpack, he’d brought them each a tent, enchanted to collapse down to palm-size when not in use, and rolled-up bedspreads enchanted for warmth. When the food he’d brought from Atherin ran low, he lit campfires and cooked foraged sustenance—small forest animals, winter roots, a freshly caught midnight squid from the half-frozen river splicing through the forest, as well as several mushrooms confidently identified by Relar as non-poisonous.

The kingpin took the apothecary’s grandson under his wing, teaching him how to trap and humanely kill wild game (Saffron noted, with mild curiosity, that Levan never cast the killing spells himself), introducing him to the Lost Dragonborn books he and Saffron doted upon, discussing the latest research on tolrus tusks in the cure of roughscale.

There was a purity to Levan’s conversations with Relar—at least from his side. Occasionally Saffron noticed the boy looking sidelong at the kingpin, with fear or distrust or something of a similar texture.

Relar regularly kept his grandmother abreast of their movements, his voice tender and worried whenever they spoke, though Levan repeatedly assured the boy she was well-protected. If the Whitewings paid her a visit, the scarlets would move in swiftly and ruthlessly. She was safer now than she’d been in months.

As the days wore icily, painfully onward, the kingpin gained more color. They were so far removed from laundered ascens and loxlure-spiked drinks, gambling and gamehouses and tortured witnesses, necromancers and crypts and all that usually weighed so heavily upon him. And as Saffron watched him day after day with the apothecary’s grandson, she finally understood why he had not branded the boy who had killed his right-hand mage.

Because Relar Zamorin was exactly like him.

Once she’d made the comparison—the awkwardness, the tendency for fewer words, the love of books and learning, the deep affection for his family—she couldn’t help but feel horribly sad. Was this who Levan would have been had he not been tortured and branded by his own father?

Little wonder he wanted to save Relar from the same fate. She just had to hope his mercy on the boy would not come back to bite them.

On the fourth day, when Saffron’s morale was especially low—they had traveled so far and had only just arrived on Bellandrian soil—Levan made hot chocolate. The others had retired to their tents early, leaving Saffron and the kingpin sitting alone around the campfire.

“How much do the others know about what we’re doing?” Saffron rubbed her hands together in a futile bid to keep them warm. Levan had provided her with a set of leather gloves, but they weren’t enough to stave off the bitter winter cold.

Levan was heating a copper saucepan of snow over the fire. “Harrow and Miret know we have a lead on the Fifth Prophecy, and that it likely pertains to you. Neither knows you’re a Timeweaver, nor that we want to wind back over two decades and rewrite the night we lost our parents. Relar knows nothing.”

“You like him. The apothecary’s grandson.”

The orange-gold flames of the fire danced in his pupils. “I do.”

“You think he can be trusted without a brand?”

“I’m hoping decency and kindness will earn his loyalty.”

Wincing at the ache in her legs, Saffron shifted on the felled tree trunk she was using as a bench. Levan perched on the stump opposite her. “If you had to kill him, for whatever reason…because he betrayed you, compromised you. Could you do it?”

“A dark question.”

“We lead a dark life.”

The kingpin peered out across the moonlit forest. “Do you think I’m weaker than when we met?”

“Why would I think that?”

“On the night our paths crossed, I amputated the wrist of a Brewer I knew to be innocent, then killed him when he proved unfruitful. A few weeks later, in the Havenwood raid, you watched me falter and fail to sever a detective’s hand. It was shortly after I lost my own, and I chose to compel him instead, even though it revealed my secret to you. That was weakness.”

“Deciding not to inflict pain upon another human is not weakness.”

He shrugged stiffly, still not looking at her. “I didn’t do what needed to be done.”

“You did—just differently. Isn’t that what you’re trying to do? Rule differently than your father?”

Levan did not respond for several moments, simply gazed into the spitting embers of the fire, lost in thought.

“Tell me something about your mother,” Saffron murmured. “I want to know her.”

He raked a hand through snow-dusted hair, looked up at the vast whale-belly sky. “I think that if she hadn’t been raised in hiding, she would have been a Hand of the Saints.”

This surprised Saffron—Hands were pastors, of sorts, pillars of the community who delivered sermons and prayers in Saints halls. They comforted the bereaved and the hopeless, offered their own homes to the homeless, fed the hungry and nursed the sick and held the hands of the dying as they transmuted from consciousness back into raw magic. All Saffron knew of Lorissa Rezaran and her dogged pursuit of power did not marry with any of it.

She left a soft silence, let Levan expand his idea.

“My mother was the most devout mage I’ve ever met—even more so than Miret. She believed so wholeheartedly in the Saints, in their doctrine, in their ideals. Magic as a force for good, something that heals and mends and makes new. The great cycle of the world. She found so much peace and comfort in faith, and whenever I watched her share that with others—telling parables over campfires, leading prayers over caskets, letting the kids in the settlement play with her Sixteen Stones—she glowed from within. It’s exactly how I feel when I’m Healing.”

The soft orange light on his face, the susurrating fire, the misted reverence in his voice…all of it made Saffron feel almost nostalgic, as though she had stepped back into a simpler time. “So why didn’t she become a Hand?”

“She couldn’t risk embedding herself in a real-world community. If anyone discovered who and what she really was, if they found the hourglass or the weaverwick, if they heard her speak of time in any sort of unnatural way, if they realized she prayed first and foremost to Aevari…our whole family would be slaughtered.”

“And she couldn’t have hidden her weaving? Buried the hourglass and wand, prayed to the Sixteen equally?”

A head shake. “She believed that the Saints granted her the power of Timeweaving, and to turn her back on Aevari, to conceal and deny her magic, would be to spit on their gracious gift. She knew the only way to make Vallin safe for her family was to rise to power, change the law, and exonerate the Timeweavers.”

Saffron let these insights wash over her, felt a bud of sympathy for the fallen queenpin take seed in her chest. “Little wonder you were so keen to accompany me on this quest. If I can exonerate the Timeweavers with the Fifth Prophecy…”

Finally, his flame-lit eyes found hers. “Maybe my mother will never have to take the throne at all. She can become a Hand, and I can become a Healer. We can wind back twenty-one years, and live the lives we should have lived all along.”

Saffron sighed. “I want that very much.”

Levan prodded at the fire with a long stick. “Over the last few days, I’ve realized the necromancer path was always the wrong one. My mother would be horrified to know we kept her teetering on the cusp of life and death all these years. We did not allow her body and soul to return to the endless current of magic—that which she always believed to be the proper order of things. We did not honor the Saints with her passing. We made her sacrilege.” He peered into the saucepan, dipping his wand into the pooled liquid. “Ans calococar.”

Saffron grinned. The same transmutation spell he’d used after she’d been branded. She’d asked for hot chocolate instead of coffee, and he’d obliged. Her first real insight into the plunderous depths of his power—and also a damn fine cocoa.

He poured the dark, creamy liquid into a metal camping cup and handed it to her. It was hot enough to warm her palms, even through her leather gloves, and though her first sip almost scalded her tongue, it was the first real pleasure she’d felt in days. Magic swirled and glittered into her well, and she stifled a moan of joy.

Levan watched her drink, an impenetrable expression on his face. When he spoke, it was somehow both soft and rough. “I’m sorry for—the night you showed me your father’s letter.”

Saffron stared down at the ash-flecked snow between her boots. The memory was still embarrassing—though not half as shameful as running out of a pleasurehouse in tears because her partner was not him.

“No,” she mumbled, feeling as though she were fourteen years old and speaking to her schoolyard crush. “I’m sorry for coming on so strong.”

A long silence, into which an owl hooted. He poured himself a cup of hot chocolate, even though he wasn’t especially fond of it, and then raised it over the campfire.

“To a better world.”

Saffron smiled and clinked her own cup against it, a thousand emotions barreling through her.

“To a better world.”

48

• • • •

The Heretical North

Harrow Claver was ready to commit a series of violent crimes in exchange for a proper bed. Levan, to his credit, had provided the King’s Prophet with a steady flow of honeywine throughout their arduous hike, but Harrow had never had a blister in his life.

How unseemly. How unbefitting of a Highcloak.

Almere was just as he remembered it; a smattering of rain-slicked cobbles and stone bridges, cream-brown buildings and green-and-gold awnings, mossy balustrades and pooled lamplight, wide boulevards and narrow streams and a ravenous forest threatening to swallow the city whole.

All the same as it had been in his childhood—except for the crowd of protesters huddled around every portari gate in the city.

When the hodgepodge crew of Bloodmoons, prophets, and apothecaries reached the first portari gate, a few streets over from the Banq T’el Almèrue—a building Levan regarded with a curious amount of vitriol—they stopped dead in their tracks.

Several Augurests with shaven heads and tattooed eyelids had bound themselves to the carved axelmare arches of the gate, humming and chanting in eerie unison. Another two dozen Augurests circled like vultures, echoing the frenzied chants of the manacled.

Harrow discerned a clear theme to their chorus: that Queen Vune was a heretic who’d turned her back on the good word of the Augurests, who did not hold their warnings in high enough regard, who did not go far enough in ensuring Augurism was upheld as the state religion. They demanded more funding for the upkeep of Augurest temples, more rigorous education around the doctrine of the Divine Augurtures, a harder line on Saints missionaries slipping over the border into the Augurest motherland. Criminal convictions for the blasphemous, mandatory head shavings and facial tattoos for the most heretical of them all—including Queen Vune herself.

Saffron blanched pale as bone, which Harrow found curious.

To his knowledge, Saffron had no affiliation to the Augurests, and though she’d been raised a patron, she wasn’t especially devout. Yes, they were traveling to find Sarcane’s Fifth Prophecy—an item hallowed by all the mages who chanted and charged before them, and which purportedly pertained to her. But it wasn’t as though—

Oh.

Suspicion hardened, crystallized.

The events of the past few months rearranged themselves from a series of scattered shards into a stained-glass window both beautiful and damning.

Saffron Killoran was a Timeweaver.

Harrow knew this with a sudden clarity, an unshakeable certainty. Why else would the Fifth Prophecy be about a jaded detective turned organized criminal? He met this revelation not with horror or anger, but a sense of vague entertainment. What a quest he’d found himself on.

“Let’s find another gate,” Levan muttered.

But around every corner they found the same thing: bald heads and spread-eagle limbs bound to the arches, hordes of angry protesters marching in circles around them.

Miret sighed knowingly. Rain fell in a fine mist, flecking the elderly scholar’s eyelashes. “Sancsari is upon us. I’ve seen many a tavern adorned with patron banners. No doubt the protesters want the Crown to outlaw Saints-based celebrations.”

“Queen Vune would never enact such a ban,” Harrow said thoughtfully. “Though she herself is an Augurest, she’s always promised religious freedom in her country. Last time a Bellandrian ruler tried to clamp down on the patrons, it triggered the Battle of Independence, and they lost the Eastern Republics.”

Relar frowned. “And these fanatics think binding themselves to gates and caterwauling will make Vune renege on a long-time policy of secularity?”

Miret laughed, as though this were a very, very funny thing to say. “Oftentimes, when people protest, it’s not because they anticipate actual change will occur. They just want to give their anger somewhere to go. To build a community around shared outrage. Nothing is quite so valuable in human connection as a common foe. They know Queen Vune will never relent, but they’re here anyway—not for the outcome, but for one another.”

“Sancsari is in, what, two days?” Levan rubbed at his unshaven jaw. “Let’s lie low in the city until they abandon their posts. Find an inn somewhere.”

Harrow surged with excitement. The prospect of luxury! Of a real bed! “I know a place on Flacher Strast. Downy pillows, great honeywine.”

“Truly all that’s important.” Levan seemed grumpier now that their time camping in the bitter woods was over. What went through that mage’s head was truly beyond Harrow.

There were only three rooms left at Meraude’s Inn.

Miret offered to share with the apothecary’s grandson, and Harrow staunchly advocated for a room to himself, ostensibly so that if either King Quintan or the Whitewings reached out to him in the night, he would not be at the mercy of listening ears, but also because he was a pampered prince who did not like to share.

Neither Levan nor Saffron objected too heavily to sharing a room—Harrow tried to ignore the sting of jealousy.

They all went their separate ways, planning to freshen up and rest for a few hours before meeting downstairs for dinner. Harrow’s stomach growled at the prospect of the herby butter inside Meraude’s famous venison pies, but before he allowed himself the luxury of a bath in the claw-footed copper tub, he crossed to the windowsill and lifted his wand tip to his lips.

“Et vocos, King Quintan of the House Arollan.”

The king’s answer was brusque. “Highcloak Claver. Where are you?”

Harrow looked out over the rain-slicked cobbles and babbling brooks snaking through the streets below. A blackfox with a stolen wand in its teeth trotted along the high edge of a bridge.

“Following a lead on the Bloodmoons. I’m in Almere, and the Augurest protests are intensifying. They’re blocking all the portari gates into and out of the city, and the Vergard have made no efforts to disperse them. I thought you might like to know that her approval is plummeting. Just in case she continues trying to strong-arm us about the open border pact.”

“Very well.” A fumbling as the king undoubtedly reached for some wine, followed by a thick glugging sound. “What of this Bloodmoon lead?”

I’m accompanying a crew of Bloodmoons and Timeweavers on their quest to find the Fifth Prophecy, which may ultimately lead to widespread war, depending on its contents.

A hefty secret to keep under his hat.

And secrets, of course, could quite easily become power.

For years, all he’d really wanted was to have a certain level of status without having to work terribly hard for it. To use his natural foreseeing ability to his advantage, to gather information on all the warring factions in Atherin so that he would always have a card to play if he needed one.

But was that lazy prestige still enough for him? He’d rather perish than take the throne himself—too much bureaucracy. Yet if he was honest with himself, did he have a preference on who should rule Vallin? Until he figured out the answer, he’d keep picking up cards, laying down as few as possible, waiting for the right moment to make his move.

“No, Your Grace,” he said at last. “Nothing meaningful to report.”

“A pity. I met with the Grand Arbiter again this morning. The death penalty will be passed by noonday on Oparling, at which point royally approved prophecies will become admissible in court. You just became a whole lot more powerful, Highcloak Claver.”

Rather than filling him with any kind of satisfaction, this notion carried with it an undercurrent of dread. It was not too difficult to imagine a world in which the king would encourage Harrow to fabricate prophecies to ensure certain convictions.

If Levan, Saffron, and their other associates were captured, they’d certainly be executed.

There were two knocks on the door, the first timid, apologetic, and then the second firmer, as though the knocker had decided not to be so meek.

Harrow sighed. “I must go, Your Grace. I’ll keep you abreast of any further information—or any further prophecies I foretell on the road. Don’t reach out to me first. I’ll contact you whenever it’s safe.”

This was rather more dismissive than Harrow would usually be to his regent, but really, he had blisters on his feet.

He let the connection between the wands drop, then crossed begrudgingly to the door. There were many hardships he could tolerate, but not the further postponement of his much-needed bath.

Relar Zamorin stood on the other side, scholar’s cloak streaked with forest debris, boots trudging rain and soil through Meraude’s immaculate tiled corridors.

“Can we talk?” the boy said in a low voice.

“I was just about to—”

“I saw you at the Whitewing drophouse,” Relar muttered, half-apologetically, half-threateningly. “The night I cut the head off a Bloodmoon.”

“Ah. You’d better come in.”

Relar crossed to the windowsill. He was so tall that his scalp almost brushed the ceiling, and so thin that his clothes hung off him in tragic swathes of fabric. “I suppose Levan does not know of your involvement with the Whitewings?”

“He does not. Are you going to tell him?” As he asked the question, Harrow subtly drew his wand, hoping he would not have to use it.

Relar eyed the wand not with fear, but with a weary exhaustion, as though being threatened under peril of death were a regular and somewhat fatiguing occurrence. “I don’t plan to give anyone a reason to want me dead. You included.”

“So why are you here?”

“I want to know who you’re loyal to. White or scarlet. I’m navigating the same conflict of interest, and having someone in the same situation whom I could trust…”

“I’m loyal to no one but myself.”

Relar stabbed a thumb in the direction of Harrow’s wand. “What if the Whitewings contact you while you’re here? The kingpin will kill you in an instant.”

“He won’t,” Harrow parried easily. “I’m too valuable.”

The apothecary’s son rubbed his palms over his pimple-strewn face, blinking with exhausted red eyes. “Do you think the kingpin is true to his word? Is he really protecting my family?”

“Yes. He hates the Whitewings enough to undermine them, to take away one of the pieces on their board. But he also…I think he cares for you, in his own way.”

“Why?”

Harrow shrugged, stifling a yawn. The boy’s plight was not particularly interesting.

Relar looked out over the city of lush green and dark stone. “I still don’t understand why I’m here. On this quest. Why Levan wants or needs me.”

“Nor do I. Is that all…?”

“Does the fear ever go away? Fear of being caught between different parties who all want one another dead. Who think of you as an expendable piece on a board.”

“Being a piece on a board doesn’t make you a victim. Not if you’re playing your own game.”

Relar turned back, the smallest tug of a smile at the corner of his thin lips. “I like that.”

“Good.” Harrow stood pointedly, sweeping a hand toward the door. “Now go away, will you? I need to wrench my feet from these ruined boots, and it’s not going to be pretty.”

49

• • • •

The Tall Order of the Knight in Black

Levan might have heard the cascade of revelations from the King’s Prophet if he’d pressed his ear up against the narrow wall separating them. Only Levan was not listening to the dim murmurings next door, because Saffron Killoran was naked a handful of yards away, and the blood in his ears was roaring too loudly to hear much else.

The clawfooted brass bathtub stood merrily in the middle of the bedroom. Lying on his back in the middle of the bed, head resting on his palms, Levan averted his gaze as Saffron stepped out of her forest-bedraggled raiment, though the corner of his eye snagged on the creamy white outline of her curves. Swallowing hard, he unhooked an elbow from behind his head and adjusted his trousers in an entirely ineffectual way.

Saffron’s moan as she slid into the warm, clean water did not help matters.

She fiddled with the countless taps and spouts on the basin, playing with the different temperatures of water before finally settling on one hot enough to scald a dragon. Once she’d added both bubbles and oil to the tub, the subsequent steam and white froth were opaque enough to blur the precise contours of her body. She sighed into it, resting her neck against the back of the tub and closing her eyes.

“Fuck camping,” she said blearily, a smile spreading across her face as pleasure swirled into her well. Why did magic have to be so hellsdamned intimate? “Honestly, even Duncarzus was preferable. A real roof over my head, no need to walk twenty miles a day through several feet of snow. True, it was cold and dark and damp, and the ground hurt to sleep on, and the food was much worse than yours. But still.”

“Mmmph,” Levan said uselessly.

She was naked in a bath.

“This is what I’m built for,” she went on, oblivious to his turmoil. “I’d stay in the bath forever, if I could.”

“I knew our similarities had to end somewhere.” Levan had never been one for a bath, in the same way he’d never been one for hot chocolate. On a certain level, he didn’t feel he deserved a pleasure so simple, so indulgent. Perhaps that was why the particular discomforts of camping—cold lungs and hard earth to sleep upon—so appealed to him.

“Although it’s frustrating not to be able to go straight to Flarence, I can’t say I’m too distraught over a night of pure pleasure replenishment.” She stiffened, registering the implications of what she’d said. “Not like that.”

Levan gnawed at the inside of his cheek, then changed the subject so abruptly that it mostly killed the blood flow to his lower belly. “You seemed rattled by the protesters at the portari gate.”

“It’s one thing to know in an abstract sense that a large sect of the population wants you dead. It’s quite another to see a physical manifestation of it.”

“I know. I grew up in a dilapidated settlement in the Havenwood for that very reason.” Levan rolled his wrist while she wasn’t looking. The cold had made the shooting pains sharper, the penetrative ache deeper. He wished he could temporarily remove the golden hand, wrap the stump in bandages infused with whiteroot.

Then again, the pain had a purpose. It always did.

“What was it like?” Saffron asked. “A childhood in a place like that, with parents like that?”

“More ordinary than you might think. My brother and I played board games my father made. We climbed trees and made dens in the woods, studied maps and fantasized about the adventures we might go on someday. I didn’t realize how unusual my childhood was until I came to the city. Discovered how everyone else had been living all this time.”

Saffron let silence mingle with the steam for a few moments. “You never talk about your brother.”

“No,” Levan replied, with the force of a full stop.

Saffron, however, wasn’t perturbed. Was she ever?

“What happened to him?”

Levan closed his own eyes, remembering that terrible night in the Havenwood. How the moonlight had draped over his mother’s corpse, how snotty his brother’s sobs had sounded. The scent of cold, damp earth all around. “My mother died because of him. Which means yours did too.”

Another pause, this one tauter. “How?”

“He followed her on a raid in…well, here. Almere. She broke into the bank, believing there was another weaverwick in one of the vaults. When my brother’s invisibility tincture wore off, she got distracted, and that moment of distraction cost her life.”

Saffron blew air out through her lips. “Are you alright? Being so close to where it happened?”

“I’m always alright.”

Or he never was, which was a very similar thing.

“You don’t fool me, Levan.” Saffron’s voice took on a low, foggy quality. “I see you holding your wrist when it hurts. I see the way your limbs twitch whenever the topic of loxlure comes up. I see the longing on your face when you look at Relar—how much you wish you had been allowed to become a young mage like that, instead of what did happen to you.” She swallowed. “It can happen. In the timeline we remake, you can be just like him.”

Levan said nothing. What could he say, to the mage who already knew everything about him? Who knew everything about him, and who was still here. A miracle, in so many ways.

“You know I’ll have to find a weaverwick wand?” she asked, refilling some of the bathwater with the hottest of the taps. It squeaked and croaked as she turned it. “In order to save our families. You’ll have to trust me enough to allow that to happen—to help me, even.”

“I know.”

And he did. He just didn’t like to think too deeply about it.

It was an immense amount of power for any one mage to possess. A power that triggered wars and founded world religions, that inspired fear and hatred and genocide. Could he really allow her to wield such a thing? Could he cede so much control? Was it possible to trust anyone that much, let alone a mage who had betrayed him so badly in the past?

“I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately,” she sighed, in a murmur that suggested she was on the very verge of nodding off.

Levan snorted. “Camping isn’t for everyone.”

“Ha, that too. I just…I might have to do some heinous things in the pursuit of this goal. Saints, I’ve already done heinous things, and my conscience is not yet calloused against it. And I know that it’ll all be undone once I unmake time, but…what if I fail? If I fail to unmake time, all the pain and suffering I’ve caused becomes permanent. Real.”

“It’s real already, Silver.” The logic was so flawed he couldn’t help but point it out. “It’s real because we’re feeling it now.”

Even if she did manage to unmake twenty-one years, would some part of him always know that he’d been tortured by his own father in another version of reality? Would those ghosts follow him through time itself?

“I know.” Saffron opened her eyes forcefully, as though to keep from drifting off, and rubbed her upper arms with a bar of soap. “How do you cope with the guilt? The shame?”

Levan smiled darkly, looking over at her. “Could you really call carving kill marks into my arm and then obliterating myself with loxlure coping?”

Saffron studied him, her pale curls pulled dark and straight by the water, the tired patches under her eyes beautiful, somehow. Only her clavicles were visible above the deep waterline, somehow more intoxicating than seeing everything. The shine of oil along her collarbone, the way her parents’ pendant nestled so neatly between the ridges, with those whorls of orange and red and brightest gold. The steam all around her.

“When was the last time you used loxlure?”

A stake of shame pierced his belly, and he turned away again, staring not at her but at the ceiling. He loathed that he was an addict, how dirty it made him feel. “Two years ago, or thereabouts. There was a yearlong downward spiral after Alucia.”

Water swilled as Saffron washed herself. “You’re a strong person, you know. To have wrestled free of it, gone so long without it.”

“Far from strong. I still think about it all the time. Miss it, in a way.”

“You miss it?”

“The thing about addiction is that it gives you a default response. Bad day? Wash it away with loxlure. Good day? Celebrate with loxlure. Frustration, pain, guilt, shame, grief, hate, longing. All of it can be obliterated with a single sip. Now I have to sit with those things, sip at my ridiculous anguish tea, trying to ignore the screaming animal inside my body, the hunger that seems to gnaw all the way to my marrow. It never goes. Not truly.”

Saffron laid down the soap, combing through her hair with her fingers. “During my long stretch of silence as a child, my uncles sent me to a mind doctor. And they said that it didn’t matter that my coping mechanism was destructive, as long as I was coping. As long as it kept me alive another day.”

Levan didn’t have a response to this. He understood this as a justification other people might find solace in, but some part of him believed he should be stronger than that. Able to cope through his own strength of will.

Saffron seemed to realize her borrowed wisdom hadn’t landed, and so when she stood from the tub, so fast Levan almost didn’t turn away in time, she said with a smile, “Perhaps we both need to go back to basics. Did I see a copy of Lost Dragonborn tucked into your rucksack?”

“Book five,” Levan said, the words distant, because she was once again standing naked just a few yards away. “The Tall Order of the Knight in Black.”

“Nooo,” Saffron groaned, mercifully wrapping herself in a dark green towel. “The book where Baudry Abard dies.” The wise old mentor’s death was a crushing one.

“The worst. I cried endlessly over it when I was a kid.”

Steam pluming from her bare skin, she lay down beside Levan on the bed. “I can’t imagine you crying, even as a boy.”

Levan shrugged, thinking of how close he’d been when she’d almost bled to death in Aredan. “Emotions are funny things. Never cried once over the torture curse, never cried once over my failed attempts to resurrect my murdered mother, but the death of a fictional character? Floodgates opened. Inconsolable.”

“You didn’t cry when you were tortured?”

“No, but I did piss myself quite a lot.” He said this with the cadence of a joke, before realizing just how unfunny it was. Hopefully Saffron, who’d always enjoyed gallows humor, would find the light in the—

“Levan…” Saffron whispered, laying a hand over his tally-scarred forearm.

All at once the conversation became unbearable, as though he’d accidentally torn away not just old scabs but a fresh layer of new pink skin. The palm resting on his forearm seemed to press against that exposed flesh, and even though he knew it would wound Saffron’s pride, he had to pull himself away.

He didn’t hate that the stones of the bridge between them were being relaid. He didn’t hate that they were close enough to feel the heat of her body, smell the strawberry-rosehip soap. It was that he didn’t want his past to bleed so staunchly into his present, didn’t want that hellforsaken pity to widen her pupils and soften her gaze.

Yet did he pity her, when she talked about her past? The loss of her parents, her long stretch of self-imposed silence, her time in Duncarzus?

No. He simply understood.

Levan had never properly talked about that part of his childhood—not even with Miret, who had long ago stopped asking. Yet Saffron knew the darkness that existed in the cracks of their world, and she would not flinch to hear he had lived inside it.

He shifted on the bed, discomfort crawling through him like ants under his skin. “When most people hear the word torture, they probably think of the pain. And of course, there was that. Plenty of that. Physically, I’ll never be the same. It’s permanently warped my perception of pain, my ability to regulate it. But the effect on your mind—it’s difficult to describe.”

Beside him, Saffron had gone utterly still.

“It happened at different times every day, and so I spent my life on a knife edge wondering when it would be this time, how bad it would be. But what that uncertainty also did was…hells, it sounds fucked up, but it made me crave it too. Because only once it was over could I ever truly relax. The sooner it happened, the better. So I woke up every day wishing for the pain to come.”

A storm drew in behind Saffron’s eyes.

“There’s also a kind of…mundanity? It’s strange how quickly these things become monotonous. I once went to see a performance of Enemy Lines at the Royal Theater, and there was a torture scene with all this dramatic lighting and music, a full orchestra singing the victim’s pain. But in real life, it’s not like that. It’s a silent cabin, ordinary daylight filtering through the window. The same thing over and over. Mundane.”

Still rigid as a board, still visibly fighting to control her anger, Saffron whispered, “It sounds lonely.”

“Yes—like you’ve been abandoned by the world. By the old gods and Saints and Augurs, by the rest of humanity. You are apart, in some way. Something other. Even now, I don’t believe any other person can truly know me, because they weren’t there.”

Saffron tilted her head toward him, cheeks still pink and dewy from the bath. He thought she was maybe the most beautiful woman in the world.

“I want to know you,” she murmured.

No, you don’t, muttered the scarred mage he’d become, but something far younger inside him responded to her words. That raw, exposed feeling was still there, still intolerable. But there was also a slightly lifted feeling in his chest, as though a great stone had been crushing him for years and someone had begun to lift it off. Not all the way, but enough to ease the pressure.

He cleared his throat. “I was going to read.” He swiveled on his side to grab the book from the bag discarded next to the bed. “Would you—shall I read aloud? It might help you sleep.”

Saffron’s hazel eyes shone. “You’d do that?”

“It’s only reading.”

“No, it’s not.” A sweet, sleepy smile. “But thank you.”

He chose a nice, safe chapter at the beginning of the novel, before Baudry Abard’s death, before Aymar Wevelren’s dark night of the soul. A delightful scene in which Aymar rode his dragon over the mountains, reveling in the freedom of the wind in his hair.

Less than four paragraphs in, Saffron fell asleep to the sound of his voice, an errant curl draped over her relaxed face, her hands curled up at her chest, her full pink lips slightly parted. Her towel slipped around her waist, and Levan wrapped her in the downy blankets Harrow had raved about, not wanting her to catch a chill with her wet hair and her distinct lack of clothes. Next to her, Rasso snored obnoxiously and incessantly, all four paws dangling above his belly.

Outside the window, the sun set and the city came to life, taverns filling with patrons, glasses clinking, and laughter crackling like wood on a campfire. Levan felt like a different sort of person to them entirely, removed from humanity not just by a windowpane, but in some fundamental way.

He tucked his favorite bookmark—cracked brown leather, etched with the Lost Dragonborn world map—inside the book, laid it on the bedside table, and tapped his wand to the lantern to extinguish the light inside the room. But when he rolled over to get some rest, Levan found he was the one who could not sleep.

50

• • • •

Fourteen Years Ago

The boy from the woods lived with the scholarly Compeller for twelve years.

Tarth’s manor in the Royal Riverlands was a vast, lavish estate with a household staff and hundreds of acres of lush green hills. Two rivers converged on its grounds, and the boathouse at the fork was painted a handsome burgundy. Everswallows—birds who could fly for years without tiring—swooped and dove across the fells, eddying in black and bronze smears against the sky.

Over time, the boy allowed himself to love the house, though he would never indulge himself the word home.

Tarth spent several months making sure the boy healed before entering into any mentorship. First, as a show of faith and trust, he sat the boy down on the edge of a grand four-poster bed and removed the deminite shackles. The boy’s mouth fell open as the cuffs fell away, exposing ankles so brutalized that it gave him a strange sort of thrill. The skin was risen, welted, scabbing, weeping, some parts raised into scar tissue, others as raw and wailing as a fresh whip lash. He supposed he’d forced the pain so far into the back of his mind that he’d ceased to feel it at all.

“Why take the shackles off?” he said hoarsely, feeling the well inside him surge and shimmer for the first time in most of a year. “I could do anything to you.”

Tarth spread his pale hands wide. “Do anything to me, then.”

The boy, of course, did nothing. The very thought made self-loathing rip through him like fire through a coal seam.

“Do your ankles hurt?” Tarth asked, frowning so intensely that his thick dark brows knitted together.

The boy shrugged. “I don’t let myself feel pain.”

Tarth studied him for several penetrating moments before disappearing to run him a bath.

Upon being asked his name, the boy found that he could not quite remember. His attempts to wipe himself into a blank slate, to become a ghost, had been more successful than he realized. And so Tarth offered him a new moniker, with a different surname to his own. A fresh start. The boy took it, feeling a small wedge of distance open between himself and the beggar from the streets of Novarin. The immaculate new clothes helped, as did the verbena bath oil, the hearty meals, the fire crackling in the hearth.

You don’t deserve any of this, he often thought, small and miserable, but the young child at the heart of him was grateful to Tarth for taking the decision out of his hands.

The boy spent the first few months tortured by the understanding that all of Tarth’s affection was conditional upon one thing: the beggar’s ability to compel. The time would soon come when his mentor’s true motives emerged—the twisted mission he needed the boy for, the personal ends he hoped to meet. This anticipation soured any relief fresh clothes and a warm bed might have brought. He began every morning with a clench of dread, and when he fell beneath his blankets each night, unharassed for another day, his final thought before sleep was this is too good to last.

Tarth often disappeared for weeks at a time to fulfill work duties. During these absences, the boy roamed the land around the estate. He scaled small rock faces and ran up hills, climbed trees and swam in rivers no matter how strong the current, his body getting stronger, keeping the darkness from taking root inside his brain. He perpetually sought the kind of mental blankness he’d mastered on the streets of Novarin—a corporal exhaustion so absolute that deep thought was almost impossible.

And then, of course, there was the part of him that believed the more fatigued he was, the less potent his compelling would be when his mentor finally ordered him to unleash it.

One warm, rainy day in Súdimiel, Tarth had the boy dress in his finest black cloak, because they were visiting a wandmaker in Novarin.

Upon their arrival at the nearest portari gate, however, the boy had shuddered so viscerally and immediately—images of Lorissa Rezaran’s corpse assaulting his inner eye—that Tarth sent for two axelmares instead. As they rode side by side through the verdant valleys of the Royal Riverlands, it struck the boy for the first time that Tarth might care about him beyond his twisted potential.

A rich, heady exhilaration coursed through the boy as the axelmares pounded the terrain, their hoofbeats strong and rousing, the whip of the wind in his hair. He looked over at Tarth and whooped before he could talk himself out of it. Tarth smiled back, something paternal crinkling his eyes.

By the time they left the wandery, however, the merriment had died in the open grave of the boy’s chest.

Korad Somary was an Irisian wandmaker with crescents of gemstones circling his under-eyes—emeralds and sapphires and darkrubies and even ascenite studded into his creamy brown skin. He wore his gray hair in two plaits tied off with leather, and his charcoal cloak was of the same brocaded velvet as Tarth’s. Somary’s wands were things of rare beauty, the finest cuts of wood engraved with detailed depictions of great historic battles, gemstones and rings of ascenite embedded in the handles.

As Somary ushered the boy and his mentor into a plush back room filled with ornate furnishings, he swished shut a creweled curtain, lit a musky incense, and gathered a selection of wand boxes. He clipped the ascenite cuff around the boy’s wrist, plunging the inner needles into his veins without a word of warning. The boy, as ever, did not allow the pain to register.

“Have you felt any kind of pull toward a particular branch of magic, child?” Somary asked, his accent looping and swirling like the waves of the Vainian Sea.

The boy looked at his mentor for guidance. Tarth simply shrugged, giving his charge a half smile, as though to say, it’s your call.

Shaking his head, the boy said, “No. No pull.”

Somary unfastened a red ribbon from around a sleek, gilded box and pulled out a narrow whitethorn wand. “The national wood of Irisi. The first I like to try, though few young mages know quite what to do with it.”

As soon as the pale wood met the boy’s palm, a rush of cold, dark power plunged through his veins. All the air seemed to drain from the room, leaving behind an abyssal nothingness, an utter desolation—though ostensibly nothing changed. At least not visually.

Somary stared at the boy, and then the wand, with the expression of a mage recently bereaved. Not of a person, a love lost, but of a worldview, of a sense of safety and comfort, of his own understandings of the outermost bounds of power.

“Get out,” he muttered, a deathly whisper, existential horror weighing down each syllable.

Tarth did not look at all surprised or perturbed by the wandmaker’s reaction. He simply said, calmly and coolly, “No. We’ll be trying out the wands until one can match the boy’s ability. And then you will sell it to us, and then you will never speak of our presence in this shop again.”

Somary nodded blankly, all the fear wiped clean from his face, and the boy realized with a sickening jolt that Tarth had compelled him.

The boy was afraid to touch his new garnet grovus wand for many weeks.

Every time he looked at the gilded box, a sense of shame washed through him, a sense of utter despair. He had always known that his power was monstrous, wrong, but to have it so plainly confirmed on the bejeweled face of the wandmaker…

Tarth, however, was not content for the boy to wallow.

The grand library in Tarth’s house became their classroom. A small pair of desks were set up facing each other, topped with parchment and ink and quills.

“It is about time,” Tarth said, “that we see what you’re really capable of. You are reluctant, I know. But such raw power cannot go unchecked, unmastered. The effects could be cataclysmic. We need first to understand the depths of what we are working with, and then we must move on to said mastery.”

The boy stared dully at the unopened wand box, self-loathing spreading inside him like oil. “I’d rather never use it at all. I’ll keep myself wiped clean, I promise. I will not want. I will not hurt. I will be nothing. It’s the only way to keep the world safe. I managed for months on the streets of Novarin, didn’t I? And I’m older now, better at controlling my instincts and impulses.”

Tarth sighed. “There are many instincts and impulses you are yet to experience—instincts and impulses that are not so easy to tamp down. No mage in Ascenfall can control their every thought. Oftentimes, they rear up from the subconscious between one split second and the next.”

“But—”

“We could go back and forth for several minutes before I order you to do as I ask, or we could cut straight to the part where you obey.” A taut beat. “Open the box.”

The boy opened the box.

“Pick up the wand.”

As the deep red wood met his skin, again came that rush of cold, that roiling darkness.

Tarth leaned back in his chair. “Command me to do something.”

This was, in itself, a command. A command the boy had no choice but to obey.

“Blow a raspberry.”

Tarth—his immaculate, self-respecting mentor—made a noise of rather profound flatulence.

Despite himself, the seven-year-old fought to keep the smirk from his face.

Ten years went by.

The boy grew in confidence and diminished in self-loathing, although every time he was ordered to compel his mentor, a small part of him flinched and retreated. Their lessons grew in intensity until, around the time the boy turned fourteen, their epic clashes of will became an exercise in self-flagellation for Tarth. The boy’s power was simply too strong.

Eventually, the boy became entirely resistant to Tarth’s orders. He could no longer be compelled into compelling. For a time, he worried this would render him obsolete, a research endeavor that had run its course, but Tarth made no moves to evict the boy from the estate.

In fact, it seemed the mentor had grown rather fond of the beggar he’d plucked from the streets, a familial texture knitting between them, and so Tarth turned his attention to a more rounded education. Enchanting, brewing, several hideously executed attempts at wielding, plus a woefully inaccurate session of foreseeing that predicted a foreign species would rise from the shadows of the world and take over all central forms of government.

When his mentee was seventeen, Tarth enrolled him in a set of local examinations, and the boy emerged with a Mage Practer certificate—having intentionally botched his compelling tasks.

On the day the certificate arrived in the post—along with a ludicrously luxurious black cloak, now that the boy was fully grown and his mage class was set in stone—Tarth took the boy to the finest parlor in the house and asked him, over a pot of ambertea, what he planned to do with his life.

“I don’t want to use my compelling.” The boy’s voice was rough and gravelly now, more brusque than he usually intended. He cracked his knuckles in his fists; a nervous habit. “Ever.”

Tarth took a sip of too-hot tea through pursed lips. “I did not ask what you don’t want to do with your life. I asked what you do want.”

Want.

That impossible word. The one that still caused the boy such immense turmoil.

“Why did you rescue me, all those years ago?” The question he had longed to ask for over a decade. “It can’t just have been academic curiosity.”

A nonchalant shoulder jerk. “An endeavor can start as one thing and end up as quite another.”

“Tarth,” the boy sighed. “Answer the question.”

It was not a command, but it had the timbre of one.

“You were just a project.” Tarth softened his voice, his usually rigid posture. “And then I grew to love you.”

The boy bowed his head, willing away the tears beading at his waterline. He’d never told his mentor about his life in the Havenwood, about that fateful night in the Bank of Almere. Perhaps if he had, the mentor would never have allowed that love to take root. He had tricked yet another person into caring for him.

But it was finally time to come clean. To tell Tarth everything.

And so he did.

Then, when he was finished, he added, breathless, “Maybe that’s what I should do with my life. Stop things like that from happening. The thievery, the murder. To make the world a little bit better for my presence.” His voice hitched. “Not worse, as it has been.”

Tarth let the revelations roll over him, draining the last of his tea and pouring himself another cup.

“Crime prevention. I can see that.” A genuine smile. “The Silvercloaks, hmm? There’s only one problem—the Academy recently changed their entry requirements. Applicants require a specialist mage classification to join their ranks. And since you intentionally wrote off your compelling exam…”

The boy’s chest sank, sensing a dead end approaching, but there was a twinkle in his mentor’s eye.

“As you know, I lecture at one of the hallowed institutions in Novarin. But it is not one of the universities, as you have likely assumed all these years. It is the military college. I teach during term time, spend semester breaks conducting immersive exercises for the cadets. Though I’m mostly retired from active duty, I’ve been deployed twice in the time you’ve known me.” Tarth cleared his throat. “I do prefer the Professor moniker to Colonel, however. Less ostentatious, don’t you think?”

Something fluttered behind the boy’s ribs. “Why are you telling me this now?”

“There is another way into the Silvercloak Academy—the military track.” A loaded shrug, as though something he had long hoped for was finally coming to pass. “My name goes a long way. I could get you onto it in a heartbeat.”

The boy considered this. There had been little in the way of war on the continent in the time he’d been alive, so he’d be very unlikely to actually fight. He could pass through the military academy, spend however long he needed in active service, then transfer to the Silvercloaks.

“Would you tell the military about my compelling?”

Tarth shook his head. “Not without your blessing. The way you ride a steed is enough to get you into the axelcavalry.”

“Maybe the infantry. I think if an axelmare was slain beneath me, I’d perish of sadness there and then.”

“Very well. The infantry, then.”

There were a few moments of amiable silence, the library scented with old books and the north’s favorite tea. The boy studied his mentor—the now wrinkled face, the sprays of gray in his black hair, the gold-rimmed reading glasses—and finally allowed himself to feel the rush of gratitude and affection he’d suppressed for so long.

The love he’d always suspected was a trap.

“Thank you, Tarth,” he whispered, a little choked. “For everything.”

“Now, Sebran. You’re about to enter into my scholarship, are you not?” A warm smile, shot through with pride. “You’d best start calling me Professor Vertillon.”

51

• • • •

Flarence

Saffron found herself oddly sad to say goodbye to Almere, because she felt her father’s presence so strongly. Bellandry was his homeland, and he lived on in every lilting snatch of conversation she overheard, in every glass of warmed honeywine, in every crop of golden-brown hair she passed on the street.

He was here—and so was Levan.

For the first time since her betrayal in the Havenwood, she felt a subtle opening in him. A book that had been padlocked shut sighing free of its bounds, allowing her not to read its chapters, exactly, but at least to brush her thumb over the edges of its pages. The camping had helped, as had their conversation about his childhood. Hearing about it had made her want to reach back through the bounds of time and space and destroy the people who had done it to him—though, of course, they were already destroyed. She couldn’t say, with any amount of truth, that those deaths haunted her.

I woke up every day wishing for the pain to come.

If she had another chance, she would make both Vogolan and Lyrian suffer far more than they had.

Two days after arriving in Almere, their odd traveling band packed their things, departed Meraude’s Inn—Saints, Saffron would miss that bath—and arrived at the portari gate, now clear of shrieking Augurests, though Saffron still saw the afterimage of those bound figures, wrists stretched wide and bound to the ascenite axelmares, shaven heads and tattooed eyelids, chanted litanies echoing through the streets.

A larger picture of the continent was emerging. The skirmishes Nissa reported on the Eqoran border, the unpoliced protests against Queen Vune’s rule in Bellandry, the collusion between the Bloodmoons and the Nyrøthi Steel King. The world had been at peace for decades, and yet that peace felt fractured, uncertain.

As a modern history scholar, Saffron had learned to recognize the patterns that preceded major conflict. Was this how it felt to live in the prelude to the Six Wars? The War of Eight Mountains? Feeling tensions simmer and crackle, with the acute sense that one more unfortunate incident could trigger devastating hostilities?

What if she was that unfortunate incident?

What if the Fifth Prophecy was?

With an unconvincing smile in Levan’s direction, she stepped beneath the axelmare arches of the gate, dispelling the thoughts as best she could.

Saffron blinked, shivered, and looked around.

Flarence was notched on the border between the Bellandry and Nyrøth. It was a village of in-betweens; a crooked, uneven seam separating two cultures, two peoples. Just above it was a narrow stretch of land known as the Rapier, a sword of frozen earth separating the Stone Sea from the Cinereal. The Rapier belonged squarely to Nyrøth and made the tundral nation almost impossible to invade by land—although historically, many battles had been fought over which nation owned the Rapier itself. Flarence nestled at the foot of the razor shard like a worn-down rubber sole, its people carrying an innate weariness, an ancient fear of invasion.

The village had clear Augurest influence—statues to the prophets, a gleaming purple temple, smatterings of shaven heads. Situated far enough north to be fully blanketed in snow and ice, many houses were painted in the pretty pastels native to Nyrøth—butter yellow and blossom pink, dusty indigo, the precise blue of a winter sky. A small, cobbled square contained both a pillory and a whipping post, since corporal punishment was still in vogue in the tundral north. Saffron spotted at least two military-looking mages who were scarified from the neck down.

Harrow stifled a yawn, clearly uninterested in the curious little place.

“What now?” he asked, with the tone of a man who hoped the answer would be sleep or drink.

Levan reached into the pocket of his violet Healer’s cloak—it was still so surreal, so warming, to see him in it—and pulled out a finely inked parchment scroll. “The object we’re looking for is rumored to be hidden in a tidal cave off the Cinereal Sea.” He tapped the top of the scroll. “I’ve studied the map, and—”

“You? Studying a map?” Saffron quipped, faux-astonished. “Will the wonders never cease?”

“—and the likeliest location is a small inlet a few miles east of here.” Levan politely ignored her sarcasm. “It’s the only place with cliffs around the water. Everywhere else, the ground is too close to sea level for tidal caves to have formed.”

Saffron nodded. “I wrote ahead and requested rooms at a local inn.” She turned to Harrow, Miret, and Relar. “They’ve reserved two chambers for us—I hadn’t realized that the three of you would be joining us—but I’m sure Levan wouldn’t mind sleeping in the Forest of Lost Souls, since he loves camping so much. What does a bit of frostgnaw matter?”

“Fine with me,” Levan replied, deadpan. “The local blackfoxes might have more insightful conversation.”

Saffron raised a brow. “Ah yes, you are famed for your loquaciousness.”

A muscle in Levan’s jaw quirked, while Miret looked between the two of them with that kindly twinkle in his eye, as though sensing a rift newly repaired.

“We should deposit our things at the inn and then set off for the inlet.” Saffron peered at her watch. “It’s still early, and if it’s only a couple of miles on foot, it shouldn’t take too long to—”

“I said a few miles,” said Levan. “Not a couple.”

“Always with the pedantry. How many is a few, oh great navigator?”

“Maybe two hours on foot. Three at most.”

Harrow looked incredulously at him. “My blisters have only just started to heal.”

“You should have worn better footwear.”

Harrow pressed an outraged palm to his chest. “I’m a Highcloak. All my better footwear is for balls.”

“I could heal them for you, if you weren’t such a prideful martyr.”

“Hypocrisy, thy name is—”

“Why don’t you piss off to the inn, then? Take Relar. Don’t let him have any bivkar.” Levan said this last part with a fatherly sort of tone.

“No, it’s fine.” Harrow sighed elaborately. “I do want to bear witness to the Fifth—”

“Harrow,” Levan interrupted, with a subtle widening of the eyes that insinuated Harrow should shut his royal mouth. “Take Relar.”

The apothecary’s grandson, whose beard was growing in patchy tufts, and who seemed to have implausibly grown another inch overnight, rubbed the back of his head with a leather-gloved hand. “I should search for some spinebark while we’re here. Even if I fail, I can bring the Whitewings something of similar potency. Cover my tracks for this excursion, avoid suspicion.”

“That sounds like it would also involve walking,” Harrow complained, with no real amount of shame or self-awareness.

Relar shrugged. “I can go alone.”

“I’ll accompany the boy, if you like?” said Miret, removing his gold half-moon spectacles and rubbing away the smudges on the sleeve of his scholar’s cloak. “I have quite the eye for botanicals.”

“No, we need you at the caves,” Levan said.

Relar looked from the kingpin to his librarian. “I’m not going to run. Why would I leave my grandmother in jeopardy? If I disappear, so does your protection.”

Levan sighed. “Fine. Harrow, to the tavern. Relar, to the woods, but take Rasso. Savage beasts wander the Forest of Lost Souls, including several known fallowwolves. You should be left alone if you’re accompanied by Rasso. Saffron, Miret, and I will scope out the caves.”

It struck Saffron that Levan was far more trusting than he used to be. Harrow had always insisted he was loyal to no one, and yet the kingpin was more than happy to leave the King’s Prophet with enough alone time that he could be feeding their movements back to the Crown. And Relar had known affiliations with the Whitewings, had beheaded Levan’s right-hand mage. The boy should be dead, but he wasn’t. He was here, out of some vague nurturing instinct of Levan’s.

There was a sort of nihilism to Levan’s decisions, as though the promise of unmaking twenty years and starting his life over rendered what happened in the present obsolete. But Saffron knew they had to be more careful than normal—they had to evade capture, ruin, so that the conditions in which they could rewind the years would still be possible.

Everyone seemed uneasy as they went their separate ways.

“Saints.” Saffron stood atop a craggy cliff by the Cinereal Sea, a sharp wind snapping through her hair and cloak. “Where do we begin?”

The inlet was far larger than it looked on a map, with hundreds of tidal caves surrounding it. The water was low, though the tide was waxing quickly, and the sheer quantity of the caves left Saffron with a sinking feeling. Because of the tides, they’d only have time to cover a few every day before they disappeared back underwater.

Levan raised a brow. “Why do you think we brought Miret?”

“Hmm?” Miret peered out across the sea, as though searching the horizon for the secrets of the known universe.

Levan turned to Saffron. “Your father’s letter said the entrance to the cave containing the prophecy was warded. We don’t need to search inside each one, because the very fact of being able to go inside must mean it’s not the right cave. In theory we could rent a boat and sail around the inlet, attempting to shove a hand over the threshold of each one—wherever we meet resistance, we know we’re in the right place.

“However, these seas are treacherous, unpredictable. Prone to sudden storms, riddled with scarsharks. We’d have to get so close to the caves that the boat could be thrashed against the cliffs at any moment, and many have stone shards jutting through the water in front of them. A natural defense, tricky to navigate in a vessel, and surely the type of hard-to-reach spot Sarcane would have chosen.”

Miret rocked on his heels, rolling the balls of his feet back and forth. He wore some kind of leather slipper, despite snow on the ground. “I’m still waiting to hear how I might be useful.”

“Oh hush, you old crone.” Levan smiled, rare dimples divoting his cheeks. “You’ve always been able to pick up magical frequencies better than anyone I know. So we walk around the edge of the cliffs on foot, and you feel for a powerful ward below.”

It took several hours, pausing every two dozen yards as Miret closed his eyes and placed a palm over his heart to search for the resonant hum. Eventually they struck gold halfway around the inlet.

After standing still as an old oak for several minutes, Miret peeled his wrinkled eyes open and murmured, “It’s one of these three below—I can’t pick out exactly which.”

Inching as close to the edge of the cliff as she dared in high winds, Saffron peered down to the thrashing gray water below. “If I had to hazard a tactical guess, it would be the one with the natural rock barrier surrounding it.”

Levan nodded. “We’ll have to abseil down, when the time comes.”

“When the time comes?” Saffron turned to him, aghast. “We aren’t going now?”

A terse head shake, his golden hand gesturing to the darkening sky, the storm-bruised clouds. “Not with the sun setting, the tide coming in, and a ward still in place.”

“You’re the most powerful mage I’ve ever known,” Saffron argued, a rare impatience rearing inside her. Usually she was adept at biding her time, waiting for the right moment to strike, but knowing the Fifth Prophecy may be hidden beneath her very feet was taunting. “Can’t you strip out the ward by force?”

Saffron was surprised by the slightly wounded look on Levan’s face, as though she had crossed a line by acknowledging how powerful he was. Was it crass, when she knew what terrible things had been inflicted upon him in the name of said power?

“Only as a last resort,” he replied evenly. “We don’t know what other kinds of heinous magic we’re going to face in that cave, and I can’t be weakened so severely.”

Miret nodded his assent. “We also don’t know how strong the ward is—and that’s crucial before attempting to strip it. It might be held by a single wardkeeper, and Levan would certainly be able to overpower that, but it could also have been cast by far more mages. The effort could kill him.”

Saffron swallowed hard. There were many cases during her time on the streetwatch in which thieves had underestimated the strength of a ward, and had drained the lifeblood from their bodies in their attempt to breach it. “So we find the wardkeeper—or wardkeepers—and convince them to drop the ward.”

“And if they refuse?” Miret asked mildly.

Saffron shot Levan a dark, wordless look, and judging by the grim expression on his face, he feared for how far she might have to go.

52

• • • •

Restraint

Flarence reeked of nightpoppy. It likely wasn’t all that noticeable if you weren’t addicted to loxlure, but for Levan it was as physical as a smack to the face.

Nightpoppy, the dark-petaled botanical from which loxlure was made, was native to Laudon, just a few hundred miles to the east. Ordinarily one might not be able to smell it so far away, but a westerly breeze blew over the Cinereal Sea, carrying with it the unmistakable scent of the dark fields. Levan was no stranger to it, of course, after his many years handling shipments for the Bloodmoons, but the crates he received were always dried.

Fresh from the valley, it was a thousand times stronger.

He wanted it more than he wanted air, his whole body aching and begging for it. It was a curious inner battle, because Levan had always prided himself on his strength of character, his ability to endure. But when it came to nightpoppy, to loxlure, he suddenly didn’t care about strength, didn’t care about anything so abstract or arbitrary. He became a creature of want and want alone.

By the time the party made it back to the village, Levan was physically trembling from the restraint. Rather than dining with the others, he excused himself to the pokey bedroom he shared with Saffron. Almost as soon as he crossed the threshold, he collapsed to the ground, shuffling into a cold, hard corner and pressing his back against the wall. Resting his elbows on his knees, he held his head in his hands and tried to extract the claws of addiction from his flesh one by one.

The smell was so strong, even through the rickety window of the humble inn, even though the scent of salty stew and fresh bread wafted up from the tavern downstairs. The tavern where the others sat, normal mages with no ruinous vices, sharing a meal and likely laughter.

As ever, he was alone.

But a few minutes after he’d retired to the shabby room, there were footsteps in the corridor. A key turned in the lock, and the door swung open. Saffron entered, carrying a bundle of skinny sticks the approximate color of cinders. When she saw Levan crammed into the corner of the room, she didn’t seem at all surprised, and Levan barely had the vim to feel embarrassed.

“What’s that?” he muttered weakly, gesturing to the sticks in her hand.

She laid them down on the bedside table, rummaging in the top drawer and pulling out a small wooden oblong, engraved with blackfoxes and notched with a groove in the top. “Cølsa—a kind of Nyrøthi incense. It’s strong and obnoxiously coal-like, but it’ll mask the smell.”

“What smell?”

“Nightpoppy.” She lit one of the rods on the table lamp and slid it into the wooden holder. A plume of purple-gray smoke curled from the tip. “You think I didn’t notice the high wind carrying it over the Cinereal?”

Something skipped between Levan’s ribs. “Honestly, no. I didn’t think anyone not addicted to loxlure would notice.”

Saffron perched on the edge of the bed, looking down on his pathetic position. Starlight filtered through the window behind her, illuminating her curls like a halo. “I might not be addicted, but I care about someone who is.”

Levan’s ribs turned painful all of a sudden. “I didn’t tell you I’ve been struggling.”

“You just lost your father,” she said softly.

Hells, I love you.

The thought came to Levan before all the emotional and logistical reasons not to. He dropped his head back into his hands, so he wouldn’t have to look at her. The pulse at his temples felt like hoofbeats.

Saffron shifted on the bed. “I’ve asked the innkeeper to bring bowls of snowfish stew to the room. You need to eat. It’ll help the shaking.”

She’d noticed his trembling.

He should have felt embarrassed, but…he didn’t.

He felt cared for, which was just as discomfiting.

The cynical kingpin he’d been forced to become insisted it was only because she needed his enormous power to achieve her own ends, like a sword she had to keep sharp. Perhaps he should dispel her false ideas of his fortitude.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” he muttered into his palms, one warm skin, one cold and golden. “I wasn’t going to, because—well. We live in a world where weakness is exploited. But I’ve been having trouble with my magic ever since I destroyed my mother’s weaverwick wand. The legends say such a deed turns magic against you. I thought it was folklore, but…”

As he trailed off, there was a fraught silence.

“You destroyed your mother’s wand?”

Levan’s belly plummeted. That was sloppy. The cravings had addled his judgment.

“Yes. Not long after the Havenwood.”

“Why?” Saffron’s tone was unreadable.

He forced himself to meet her blazing stare. “Because I had my suspicions about your abilities, and I could not trust that you would not use the power against me.”

Again.

Could she sense that final unspoken word?

Saffron dropped her gaze to the hands curled in her lap. Levan waited for her to ask how he’d known, but instead she murmured, “That’s why you kept prompting me to tell the full truth in the aftermath of the raid. You knew I wasn’t just undercover—I was something far more fatal.”

Levan nodded grimly.

“You understand why I couldn’t tell you at first, don’t you?” She peered up through pale lashes. “I didn’t know how you’d take it, knowing I was a threat to your mother’s claim. But I don’t want the throne. You know that.”

“Yes, Silver. I know that.”

Levan sensed the cogs turning in her mind, the way she was casting everything in a new light. Understanding the depths of his mistrust with renewed perspective. Processing what this revelation meant for their joint quest.

“What do you mean by trouble with your magic?” she asked eventually.

So they were moving past the revelation with relative ease. Despite the tension in the tightly strung instrument of his body, Levan found himself a little lifted as one more secret fell away.

“It disobeys me, unless I’m acting from a place of pure and honorable intent. Healing seems to strengthen the bond. I’ve been able to compel a few times, but it refractures any progress I’ve made rebuilding the connection.” He raked his fingers through his salt-tangled hair. “Once we get into that cave, if there’s more sinister magic guarding the prophecy…I might be able to protect you. That, in itself, is a pure and honorable intent. But I may not be able to destroy, if such a thing is required. That would fall to you.”

Saffron was silent for a moment. Levan thought she must be horribly disappointed to lose her best weapon, but when he looked up at her at last, he saw not despondency or disenchantment but that same soft concern. It was almost too much to bear, like looking directly at the sun.

“That must feel…complicated. When you have such a fraught relationship with your power to begin with.”

He nodded again, stiff, tense, a little embarrassed.

“I didn’t want you here just because you’re powerful, Levan.”

“Why else would you—?”

His monstrous power was his only worth in this world.

“A complicated question,” she said, her voice soft and oddly sad.

The words whorled between them like smoke.

“The incense is working,” Levan noted, gesturing to the cølsa.

The incense, or her presence. Both strong enough to fend off the demons—for now.

“You’re still shivering.”

“I know.”

“There’s a whole bed of blankets here. They might not be as downy as Meraude’s, but…”

“I’m fine,” Levan said, knowing that if he got up onto that bed right now, he might not have the restraint to resist her.

“Always a martyr.” Saffron chuckled, tugging the topmost blanket off the bed and tossing it to him. It landed over his outstretched legs, and he didn’t pull it any farther up his body. All at once he felt rather ridiculous.

“Back on the cliffs…” Saffron started. “You didn’t like when I referenced how powerful you are. Was it because it reminded you of—”

“No,” Levan said, unwilling to spend another night reliving his childhood torture. “It’s because I’m not powerful. Not right now, not the way I usually am.”

Against his will, his mind drifted back to the last time he was truly powerless around Saffron Killoran.

Yet you’re the one pinned in place, and I’m the one who could hurt you if I so wanted to.

At the memory, his body reacted. The sharp pain in his impaled hand as she moved back and forth in his lap. The feeling of being wholly at her mercy.

What did it say about him, that the thought of surrendering—to Saffron, to the oblivion of loxlure—was so appealing? What did it say about him, that his body found the relinquishing of control so intoxicating?

Control yourself, he thought darkly, knowing this woman could be the end of him, knowing his life was at the mercy of her desires, and yet he was so tired of controlling himself. He was using all his restraint to fend off the lure of lox, and there was little left to temper his traitorous vock.

Only it wasn’t just his vock. It was his heart too. And that was infinitely more troubling.

He focused on the hard ground beneath him, on the smoky incense, on the dim sounds of the tavern below, but it was no use. His whole body was screaming at him, but now it was not for nightpoppy.

And if he was going to cave into either vice, better it was this.

He discarded the blanket and rose to his feet, swaying slightly from lightheadedness—he hadn’t eaten since arriving in Flarence, so strong was the smell of nightpoppy.

At his approach, a light flared behind Saffron’s eyes. She stilled, and as he lay down beside her, there was a crackle of anticipation, both of them fighting too hard to control their bodies. Saffron rolled flat onto her back, the full peaks of her breasts rising and falling with shortened breaths. Levan cupped her jaw in his golden palm, running a thumb over the petal-smooth skin of her face. She tilted her head to face him, pupils blown wide and black, her teeth subtly biting into her lower lip.

“Thank you, Silver.”

“For what?” she breathed.

He nodded to the incense, hating how ragged his own voice sounded. “It’s been a long time since anyone…”

Cared.

Dropping his hand from her jaw, he pressed his forehead against her upper arm, the curve of her shoulder, and let his eyes flutter closed, feeling both exhausted to his bones and entirely awake. Saffron laced her fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck, so gently it almost unraveled him, and he lay there for several moments, letting the want in his body swell and pulse until he could no longer bear it at all.

Once it felt like his lungs—or his vock—might explode from the pressure, Levan traced his cold fingertips down the side of her throat, across the ridge of her collarbone, around the pear-shaped curve of her breast. Her body shivered involuntarily, and she closed her eyes, but did not move to touch him in return. She simply let him rove and wander, a palm splayed over her flared ribs, a thumb stroking the swell of her hip.

He planted the smallest kiss on her temple, her cheekbone, the side of her mouth. Now she was the one trembling, but she kept her hands at her sides, fingers curled into tight fists.

Did she still carry the embarrassment of his rejection all those weeks ago, when he’d left her sitting on the trunk at the foot of her bed, just moments from taking his vock between her lips? The memory was so fresh he could practically still feel her warm breath against his tenderest skin.

Levan traced a finger back down her jawbone as he whispered, “Touch me, Silver.”

She shook her head slowly, this stubborn mule of a woman. “You’re not yourself right now—you’re struggling.”

He gave a rueful laugh. “I’m always struggling.”

Saffron pressed her palm against her ribs, clawing her nails into the fabric of her tunic as though trying to create a sensation other than desire. Levan was familiar with the tactic. “I don’t want to take advantage. Last time—it was ill-judged. I got caught up in the moment.”

“Do you really think I turned you down because I didn’t want you?” Levan said roughly. “Silver, what you said all those weeks ago about my compelling, my will bleeding into yours…causing you to slip, make careless mistakes, bend to my subconscious command. That terrified me. The only thing that kept me from spiraling entirely was the knowledge that the first time we…well, I was pinned in place with deminite. It couldn’t have just been my desire seeping into you. But the time after—I made such a show of being the one in control. Tying you, silencing you.”

“Levan.” To his immense surprise, Saffron laughed, bright and clear as a church bell. “I have wanted you most seconds of most days since the moment you re-enchanted my necklace. Even when you’re nowhere near me, and so could not possibly be compelling me. Even when your mind is so clearly on other things. I promise my desire is entirely my own.”

Though the laughter lightened the atmosphere, these words did little to assuage Levan’s concerns—he did not understand, in any real sense, why anyone would want him at all. An addict, a killer, someone who came across so cold and callous despite (or perhaps because of) his deep inner turmoil. Subliminal compelling was the only feasible explanation.

Saffron turned to face him, peering at the harsh lines of his face through her soft, fluffy lashes.

“You’re so beautiful,” she murmured, as though reading his self-loathing thoughts.

His stomach flipped. “What? No.”

“You are.” She traced the very tip of her forefinger over his cheeks, his brows, his chin dimple. “The most beautiful mage I’ve ever seen.”

He had to look away. It was so patently untrue. Whenever he looked in a mirror—which he tried very hard not to do—he saw only a monster.

“If it’s deminite you need to feel certain I genuinely want you…” Her voice dipped into a breathy, devilish tone. “You brought manacles in your backpack, did you not? Just in case the apothecary’s grandson turned on you.”

The air caught in Levan’s throat.

Saffron retrieved the cuffs, moving slowly through the room as though wading through treacle. The feeling of imminent implosion only intensified in Levan, and as she clamped the cuffs around his wrists, the deminite cool and hard against his belly, the blood rushed to his head so hard and fast the room stippled black.

She locked them, but there was still a small gap through which he might be able to wiggle a hand free.

“Tighter.”

Saffron raised a brow. “That sounds like a command,” she murmured, adjusting the manacles until they were flush against his wristbones. “You can’t cede control and issue orders. I can be quite punitive, when I want to be.”

Levan’s voice was coarse, his whole body aflame, as he lifted his bound wrists over his head and he said, “Punish me, then.”

For a moment, Saffron looked at him as though he was the most complicated mage in the world.

And then she got to work.

As he had done to her, her hands roved over the muscled lengths of his thighs, the veined column of his throat, the hard planes of his torso. Climbing on top to straddle him, she ran a palm over the peak in his trousers, and a ragged groan tore free from his throat. The weight of her on top of him and the tightness of the manacles compared to the perilously light touch…it made him throb.

Unbuckling his belt, she paused for an interminable second, perhaps remembering the rejection that had followed the last time she did this, and deciding to make him suffer for it. She ran a forefinger along the low ridges of his hips, lowering herself to plant tiny kisses right above his waistband, each of them punctuated with a tiny flick of her tongue.

When the belt finally came undone and his underwear came with it, the cold air of the bedroom was a fresh kind of torture.

“Silver,” he begged, knowing it would not work.

Plucking her wand from her own waistband—why was she still wearing so many clothes?—she ran the beech tip down the length of him, slowly, as though deliberating what to do next.

“Do you know how hot this is?” she whispered, moonlight pouring over her shoulder. “To dominate the indomitable?”

Saffron unbuttoned her trousers and, leaving them sagging loosely around her hips, slid a hand down into her underwear. The dome of it moved through her trousers as she kneaded herself, loosing several intoxicating little moans and sighs as she watched Levan grow harder beneath her. Levan’s belly clenched with want, his throat dry and his pulse pounding in his temples, between his legs.

“If you ever find yourself doubting whether or not I truly want you,” she murmured, shuddering and shivering, “think of this moment.”

When she came, it was a soft shattering, and Levan felt the reverberations of it through his thighs as she clamped her legs together around her hand.

With an airy expression, she removed her boots, her trousers, her perilously thin and lightly wet silk underwear. Perfect thick thighs trembling, she lowered herself onto him at last, and the pleasure was so rich, so complete, that Levan’s eyes rolled back in his head. She ground her hips, once, twice, and every part of him throbbed.

And then there was a knock on the door.

Instead of ignoring it, Saffron gave Levan a frankly evil look, climbed off him, tugged her trousers back on, and ambled over to answer it. The bed was only just out of eyeshot of whoever stood on the other side, and Levan flushed furiously and brought his manacled hands to between his legs—though if their visitor entered the room, there would be no preserving his modesty.

“Your stew, Mademe,” came an old, gruff male voice, deckled with a northern accent.

“Much appreciated.”

She took the tray and pushed the door closed with her foot, carrying the two steaming bowls and plate of crusty bread rolls over to a small desk by the window. Horrifyingly, she pulled out the crooked chair and sat, tearing into a bread roll and slathering it with butter.

“Silver,” Levan groaned. “Really?”

She shrugged.

“I’m hungry,” she said sweetly. “And in no particular rush.”

As Levan lay there and watched her eat, he thought that she was perhaps a twisted sort of genius—because he was no longer thinking about nightpoppy at all.

53

• • • •

Tiny Bat’s Arsehole

The day after Auria’s paid suspension ended, she found herself back on night shift, staking out the Whitewing drophouse on Fallow Grange as though nothing had happened, nothing had changed, except it had. Everything had, once again. Whenever she managed to find a foothold in the new order of her life, the ground beneath her shifted and cracked, sometimes almost imperceptibly, sometimes seismically.

That first rainy night, she sat at a small wooden table by the window—far enough back from the sill that while she could see out, her shadowed figure wouldn’t be obvious to anyone peering in from the street—and alternated between studying the drophouse and poring over Detective Alcabal’s handover notes. The accomplished Brewer had covered for Auria while she was out of action, and though they’d had a thorough debrief in person, Auria was now comparing Alcabal’s notes with her own, searching for patterns.

There was little of significance—neither the King’s Prophet nor the boy in scholar’s blue had been seen since her last shift.

She was heating some water for a fresh pot of ginger tea when the downstairs back door flew open, banged against the wall, then slammed loudly shut. For a few split seconds, Auria’s hackles raised, and she drew her wand, pointing it toward the open doorway leading out onto the landing. But if this was an intruder, they were not trying to be subtle. A familiar grunting and grumbling sounded as a pair of boots stomped up the stairs, and by the time Nissa Naszi appeared in the room, Auria had already laid her wand to one side.

“I brought snacks,” said Nissa flatly. Her usually sleek black hair was slick to her face from the rain, black and gold kohl streaking down her cheeks in rivulets, silver cloak sodden and boots squelching miserably.

Auria frowned at her colleague’s dishevelment. “You couldn’t have wielded the rain out of your own orbit?”

Nissa lifted her two tote bags emphatically, showcasing that she had, indeed, brought vast quantities of snacks. “I had my hands full. There’s a ginger theme—nougat, pastries, candied peel, studded chocolate, flavored cønnafyr—but it’s likely all drenched now. You do like ginger, don’t you?” This last question was flung like an accusation.

A little snort of entertainment slipped through Auria’s nose of its own accord. “I do. But what are you doing here?”

Nissa dumped the bags of snacks on the table and squeezed some of the moisture from her hair, loosing the scent of the jasmine oil she used to keep it glossy. “I was finally cleared for active duty, and Karvas, perhaps unsurprisingly, reassigned me from the Bloodmoons. Told me I should accompany you on your stakeout, in case your migraine auras ‘once again’ addle your judgment.” A feral, toothsome smile. “Most inconvenient when you’ve been trying so hard to avoid me, I know.”

Auria averted her gaze.

Ever since Nissa had perjured herself during the hearing, Auria had kept to night-shift sleep patterns so their waking hours didn’t overlap. She spent as little time as possible at the precinct, ambling around the city despite the winter chill, picking up last-minute holiday gifts for loved ones—it was Sancsari tomorrow, and she had always enjoyed the gift-giving and large feasts associated with the anniversary of the Saints coming together to create the magical world.

Her efforts to steer clear of Nissa had been mercifully successful, but the time apart hadn’t helped to unmuddle Auria’s feelings about the inquest. Yes, Nissa had given an impassioned character statement in Auria’s favor, but she’d also committed a serious crime and put Auria in a terrible position. For the first time in her career, Auria had failed to obey truth entire and truth alone. If this ever got out, she could wave goodbye to the Grand Arbitership, to any future in prosecution or the courts.

Auria was livid with Nissa, but she was also livid with herself, and not quite ready to confront it.

In response to Nissa’s quip, she muttered, “After your positive facial ID of the kingpin on Silvercloak grounds, I’m surprised they didn’t want you heading up the task force.”

“Quite the contrary—it gave Karvas grounds to claim I was too close to the matter. His favorite line.”

Having grown used to operating in the patchy darkness of the apartment, Auria tipped a spoonful of tea leaves into her favorite pot—midnight blue and adorned with white-and-gold dawndoves, hand-painted by her mother Lulí—and dropped the lid. Her stomach growled, and she longed to rifle through Nissa’s proffered snacks, but the petulant child inside her was still pissed off. “What’s happening with said positive ID? Are they pursuing an arrest?”

“Not yet.” Nissa sat down in one of the two chairs by the window table. “I think they want to tie your boot prints to the kingpin—it’s more robust physical evidence than my say-so. And it doesn’t look like Killoran is going to provide anything more definitive anytime soon.”

Auria frowned. “You don’t think so?”

As Nissa braided her still-damp hair into a plait, the rain-streaked light from the streetlamp poured through the window and illuminated the runes tattooed up her brown throat. It felt so oddly intimate that Auria had to look away.

“The last time I spoke to her was a couple of weeks ago, right after I woke up. She stole into the hospital wing through an open window.”

“And after that, you didn’t think to close said window?”

“The heart wants what it wants, and what mine wants is achullah. It was either that or smoke out all the other patients, which seemed inconsiderate.”

Auria idly stirred the tea, gaze still pinned to the street outside. “So Saffron came to see you.”

“I told her I’d asked you to help me get her out—and that you’d refused.”

“Thanks for that.”

Nissa shrugged. “If you’re going to make shitty decisions, you have to own them. Anyway, Saffron was unsurprised, but didn’t want us to extract her yet anyway, because she didn’t have what she went for—evidence. I offered to be her bridge in Aspar’s absence, somewhere for the evidence to go when she procured it, but she was skeptical. She knows Dematus and Karvas are corrupt, that they have the power to bury said evidence. Bury her.”

“Did she agree to keep informing?”

“Sort of, but then…she asked me to steal the letter for her. Didn’t seem to give a tiny bat’s arsehole that it could cost me my career. I lost it, to be honest. Much like I did with you when you refused to help her. If there’s one thing I can never stomach, it’s selfishness.”

Auria forced herself to stay calm, measured, to not give Nissa the satisfaction of the rise. “That’s a strange thing to say to someone who breached their entire moral code to save your life. When there was a knife to your throat, I was thinking of you, not of me.” The spoon grinded around the inside of the teapot. It was, by now, the most relentlessly stirred tea that had ever existed. “I’m not selfish, and I didn’t turn my back on Saffron just because I want to be Grand Arbiter someday. I did it because I thought it was right.”

Nissa stifled a yawn with the back of her hand. “Yes, yes, I know. I’m tired of hearing about good and right and lawful.”

Biting her tongue down on the savage retort, Auria blandly asked, “How did it end with Saffron?”

“I told her to bring me evidence so ironclad that it’d obliterate the Bloodmoons forever, and I’d make sure it was escalated over Karvas’s head. All the way to the commissioner.”

“And you don’t think she’ll do that? Even if she does find such evidence?”

A loaded silence. “I have my doubts.”

“Why? She’s dedicated her whole life to bringing down the Bloodmoons—she’d sacrifice you or me or herself for it. Why would she secure evidence, then continue to operate as one of their own?”

“I don’t know.” Nissa leaned back in her chair, the wooden legs creaking in the too-quiet night, and stared out across the street. “There’s something strange going on—something larger at play. Something to do with that letter, with the reason the kingpin risked everything to get it. I just can’t figure out what.”

Steeling herself, Auria finally crossed to the table with her cup and teapot, the lid rattling as her hands shook. “Is that why you lied about seeing the kingpin’s face? Because you no longer trust Saffron to bring him down, and you wanted to take matters into your own hands?”

Nissa, who always found the most infuriating possible response, erupted into low laughter.

“It’s not funny, Nissa,” Auria hissed, narrowly suppressing the urge to slam her palm on the table.

“Oh, I do love when you spit my name like that.”

“It’s a serious offense, and as a lawyer I—”

“Look, if we’d lost our livelihoods over that night, I at least wanted something good to come of it. I wanted it to lead to his downfall. And I also did it to save Killoran, since she clearly has no interest in saving herself.”

“You committed perjury, Nissa. And you forced me into allowing it.”

“You weren’t forced. You could’ve abdicated from the case, gone to the judge. But you didn’t. You’re as complicit as I am. You chose what was right over what was lawful, and I’m proud that you did.”

“False testimony is neither lawful nor right.”

“So why didn’t you come forward? Why did you allow it to happen?”

Auria shrugged heavily, thinking of the Grand Arbitership. “Maybe I am more selfish than I like to admit.”

Nissa studied her with hawkish curiosity. Her golden eyes were the only sources of light in the otherwise darkened room, and everything still smelled of jasmine oil. Auria hated that she smelled good.

“Do you resent me for putting you in that position?”

“It was a very conflicting few minutes,” Auria answered, without really answering. “First you perjured yourself, made a liar of me, turned your back on truth entire and truth alone…then you gave that character statement. Why did you do that? Defend me so ardently?”

Nissa looked away. Flushed, perhaps, though it was hard to tell in the dark.

“You need to get me up to speed on the Whitewings,” she said, a sidestep, a detour.

Auria slid her stack of papers and parchments across the table. “Here are my notes, compiled with Detective Alcabal’s. It makes for thrilling reading.”

“Or you could just tell me what I need to know, like a normal person.”

“Normal people don’t read?”

Nissa shrugged off her sodden cloak and rummaged around in the pocket. “It’s hard to read and smoke at the same time. I don’t want to get ash on your precious paperwork. Mind if I crack a window?”

“No, Nissa.” Saints, there she was, hissing and spitting the name once more. Even when Nissa smirked triumphantly, Auria couldn’t resist pressing forward with the beration. “I’d rather you smoked me out than alert the Whitewings to our presence.”

Nissa’s smirk broadened, eyes glinting evilly. “Smoking you out sounds sort of sexual.”

Heat rose to Auria’s cheeks—she’d always been a prude. “You get a real kick out of making me uncomfortable, don’t you?”

“Our interactions have always given me a kick, Marriosan. I thought you knew that.”

“That’s a strange way of describing our historic enmity.”

Another laugh as Nissa lit her achullah. “In Eqora, hostility is a sign of affection.”

The deserted street below suddenly became immensely more fascinating. Auria raked her gaze up and down it assiduously enough to carve lines in the cobbles. “Are you just being nice because you feel bad for the perjury? Because I saved your life at immense personal cost? Or because Tiernan died and you know I’m ruinously sad about it?”

“I’m not being nice, and I resent the accusation. I think you’re an obnoxious bat’s—”

“Bat’s arsehole, yes. Got it.”

A tentative truce struck, Auria pulled a second midnight blue cup out of her satchel—it was only civilized to carry a spare—and poured Nissa a cup of ginger tea, thinking the flavor profile might complement the spice of the achullah quite nicely. She was surprised to find she didn’t mind the scent of it fogging the room, earthen and clove-laced.

Nissa grinned devilishly and lifted her cup by the delicate handle, as though making a toast. “To reluctant allyship—and bringing down the scarlets and the whites.”

54

• • • •

A Secret on Sancsari

Dawn rose, and the rain eased, and when Auria and Nissa slipped out the back of the stakeout house—nodding amiably as they changed guards with Detective Dallar—it was officially Sancsari.

“I don’t suppose you’ll be celebrating the holiday,” Auria said to Nissa, exhaustion smudging her words together. Her tongue tasted stale and bitter from the overconsumption of ginger tea.

Nissa shook her head—the Eqorans were largely disinterested in the Saints as a construct, and though Nissa had lived in Vallin more than half her life, she’d never adopted the faith. “I usually get together with my grandmother, but she died a few months ago.”

Auria’s chest sank. “You didn’t tell me. Or anyone.”

Nissa shrugged, the sun accentuating the shadows beneath her eyes. If she felt any sorrow, she didn’t show it. “I keep my personal life personal.”

“Were you close?”

“I’m too tired for this, Marriosan. What are your plans?”

“Heading to my mothers’ house for a few hours of sleep, then spending the day drinking and eating and exchanging gifts before I’m due back here in, oh,”—she checked her watch—“fourteen hours.”

“You do strike me as a person who adores holidays.”

“I’ve been dreading it, to be honest,” Auria admitted. “The first one without my grandfather, without Tiernan.” But at least I won’t be alone, she thought. “Do you want to—no, forget it.”

Nissa raised a dark brow. “Do I want to what?”

“Spend the day with my family,” Auria muttered, a feeling of immense stupidity crashing through her. “My grandmother will be there, and my sisters. Nary a vock to be seen.”

Nissa erupted with laughter. “Nary a vock. Who talks like that?”

“It was primarily designed to make you laugh. Anyway, forget I said anything. You probably don’t want to spend a holiday you don’t care about with people you don’t like. But on the off chance you did…there are spare bedrooms. You could get some sleep, wake up to the smell of fresh brewed cønnafyr and my grandmother’s honey roast Sancsari lamb. Both of which are divine in their own right.”

Nissa eyed Auria suspiciously. “Why would you offer that?”

“We just toasted to reluctant allyship. Unlike some, I honor my oaths.”

Miraculously, Nissa seemed to be considering it. “Would your family not mind?”

It was Auria’s turn to laugh. “I’ve complained ceaselessly about you for nearly two years. I’m sure they’re intrigued enough to allow you into their home. Either that or they’ll believe I’m acting under duress.”

“Perhaps you are. Those pesky migraine auras, always causing you to hallucinate violence.”

“Saints, Karvas is such a—”

“You probably shouldn’t blaspheme on Sancsari,” Nissa pointed out.

“My hatred of him is deep enough to warrant it.” Auria jerked her head in the direction of her family home. Somewhere above them, dawndoves cooed. It would be a fine day, the winter sun buttery and clean. “Shall we?”

When the house on Goldendawn Avenue came into view, Nissa let out an emphatic whistle. “Wow. You kept your tremendous wealth quiet.”

Auria, who had always been a bit embarrassed of it, tilted her chin high as she knocked on the pastel pink front door. “My mother is a Royal Wardholder. King Quintan rewards her handsomely.”

“You know it’s all funded by the Joribali, right? The wards, most of our defenses. We’re in immense amounts of debt.”

The thought of Vallin’s empty coffers always rattled Auria. Their nation was showing all the classic signs of decadence, the hedonism of pleasure-induced magic, the materialism of fine things for the sake of fine things, the faithlessness of vast swathes of the population, the immorality festering among the scarlets and the whites and everyone trapped in-between. She hoped she didn’t live to see the downfall of the society she had dedicated her life to protecting and upholding, but she suspected that once the Jade Bank of Joribal decided enough was enough and they’d recoup their debt—through war if necessary—it would all come crumbling down.

Lulí answered the front door in a lavender silk nightgown, her round face bare of makeup, her close-cropped ginger hair frizzy and somehow oranger than ever. She smiled and made the sign of the Saints, hands balled into fists and knuckles slotted together.

“Joyous Sancsari, Mømi,” Auria said. “This is my colleague Nissa—she’ll be joining us today.”

Lulí’s smiled broadened. “Joyous Sancsari, dærlin. Joyous Sancsari, Ni—”

“—Nissa isn’t a patron.”

“No matter.” Lulí shrugged and gestured for them to come inside. “We’re not all that zealous here either. I mostly celebrate the gifts and the truly excellent honey roast lamb.”

Hedonism, materialism, faithlessness.

Auria smacked down her irksome education with the blunt side of a shovel.

As they walked through the lavishly decorated hallway—Nissa staring bemusedly at all the intricate paintings—Lulí looked at Auria’s drab work satchel, clearly stuffed with notes and not gifts, and frowned. “Sweet child of mine, I do hope you haven’t come empty-handed.”

Auria laughed. “I stashed your gifts here last time I visited—though I have to admire that you don’t even pretend it’s my company you cherish on this holy day.”

“Can’t a mage want both?”

Victaria was already awake and pottering around the kitchen. Her eyes were a little pink and raw, as though she’d been crying—it was her first Sancsari without her father, after all. Auria felt the grief echoing in her own chest, hollow and oddly afraid, a small animal inside her searching for a lost owner, that feeling of where are you, where are you, come back, I need you, where are you?

“It’s so early that you’ve beaten everyone out of bed, I’m afraid.” Victaria smiled, but it was pale. She folded a tea towel that did not strictly need to be folded—she’d always been one to keep busy, to mask the pain with doing. Auria inherited that from her, the same way she inherited the frizzy copper hair from Lulí. “By the time you catch up on your own sleep, the festivities should be in full swing. All the bedrooms are taken—your aunt and uncle came in from Carduban at the last minute, and your sister brought a friend—but we can make up a bed of couch cushions on Auria’s floor? With enough heaped blankets, it should be comfortable enough.”

“No blankets needed,” Nissa laughed, that rough, smoke-laced sound. “I run hot.”

Lulí piled several pots of fresh cønnafyr on the table, along with two plates of coffee cream puffs covered with edible gold—it was Sancsari, after all—and gestured for Nissa and Auria to take a seat.

“I didn’t want to bring it up myself, but since you mentioned running hot…I must say that your eyes look distinctly dragonborn to my Nyrøthi eye.”

Nissa stiffened mid-pour of cønnafyr. “So I’ve heard.”

Auria silently willed her mother to cease this topic of conversation, to pick up on Nissa’s clear discomfort, but Lulí had never been especially good at registering social cues.

Stirring her own drink absently, Lulí’s voice grew soft and misty. “I grew up in Kälva, right at the foot of the Hældrekys Peaks—where the dragons sought refuge after the Dreadreign. Folktales were exchanged over bivkar like coins, and my favorites were always about the dragonborn. Many were crude, of course—mages fornicating with dragons, can you believe!—but some really captured the imagination.”

Nissa sat like a stone statue next to Auria.

“All nonsense, I’d imagine,” Auria muttered, knowing how much Nissa loathed to talk about the heritage that led to her family being chased out of Eqora by dragonseekers.

“Well, of course,” said Lulí, waving a hand. “But indulge an aging crone her myths, won’t you? Many years before I was born, there was a young immigrant boy in Kälva who was obsessed with dragons.” Lulí intentionally thickened her Nyrøthi accent for the purposes of the story. “His family were Augurest missionaries from western Bellandry—Charlet, I believe—and his parents had uprooted his life to bring him over the Nyrøthi border, so that they might spread the great word of the Augurs.

“They were not particularly well received, as you might imagine. The Nyrøthi are immensely proud of the fact we offered safe haven for the dragons in the aftermath of the Dreadreign, yet many of the staunchest Augurests believed the dragons should be destroyed, so that the Timeweavers may never return to power. And so the boy was raised as an outcast, the ridicule of the schoolyard and the high street alike, and a Ludder, to boot. Poor kid.

“Could anyone blame him, then, when he developed a fascination with the very dragons his parents preached against? In secret he read and researched and questioned, but when his mother found out about his heretical hobby, she beat him senseless. At the ripe old age of twelve, the boy left home alone in the dark of night, bruised and bloody, and made for the Hældrekys Peaks, where the dragons had been biding their time for many generations.”

Auria could’ve sworn she heard the frantic patter of Nissa’s heart.

Lulí took a sip of her cønnafyr, completely oblivious to the tension around the table. “After many months, perhaps years, it’s rumored that the boy found the dragons, entered their mountain lair, and underwent an arcane ritual—one that nobody in this world knows anything about—to become dragonborn. He returned to Kälva many years later, gold of eye, fire in his blood, the wielding ability manifested seemingly from nowhere.”

Victaria frowned over her cup. “But why would a Ludder be worthy of the dragonblood ritual?”

“A good question.” Lulí leaned forward, gleeful now, like a polderdash player about to play the winning card. “With the caveat that this is all likely just folklore, there is a Nyrøthi scholar who has gone to great lengths to verify the accounts. That boy has long since grown, and has always refused to talk about his experiences in that mountain lair. But the scholar’s working theory is that the dragonborn exist as a check to the Timeweavers’ balance. Dragons famously produce the wicks necessary for a weaver’s wand, and yet the wicks themselves are never granted directly to the weavers. Only a dragonborn can harvest a wick.

“It is believed that only those of great honor, those whose goodness runs all the way to the bone, are made dragonborn—that way, when they vouch for a Timeweaver, the dragons have faith in said weaver’s intentions. Checks and balances. Dragonborns and Timeweavers.”

“So where is the boy now?” Victaria asked.

Lulí grinned. “Rumors are that he has the fading disease, but he’s made a wonderful life for himself writing books. His name is Erling Tandall.”

“The author of The Great Adventures of the Lost Dragonborn?” Victaria scoffed. “Sounds like he has a great publicist.”

But Auria was barely listening. Her gaze was trained on Nissa, who was growing stiller with every line of the folktale. Disquiet prickled up Auria’s neck, the backs of her arms, the bone of her sternum.

Nissa rose to her feet, her spine straight as a staff. “Actually, I’m not feeling too well. Night shift always leaves me queasy—or perhaps it was all the ginger pastries. Thank you for the hospitality, and I wish you all a joyous Sancsari.”

Auria had never heard Nissa talk like that before—overly polite, overly controlled, stiff, and eerily pleasant. The gold-eyed Wielder strode out of the vast, bright kitchen to the blossom-colored front door, opening and closing it with a spectral silence so unlike her entry to the stakeout house the night before.

Auria shot her mother a death stare and hastily followed, catching up to Nissa halfway down Goldendawn Avenue. She grabbed her colleague by the arm from behind, but softly, a nudge rather than a yank, not truly expecting Nissa to stop.

But she did stop. She turned slowly on her heel, and when Auria saw the expression on her face, she fought the urge to gasp. It was as though someone had scooped all the life out of her, all the soul, leaving naught but an empty shell behind.

No. Not empty. Something dark and devastating stirred beneath the surface.

“I’m sorry, Nissa,” Auria said, her tone pleading. “I know it makes you feel like a zoo exhibit when people talk about your heritage. It’s not an excuse, but my mother is an eccentric. She—she just loves old folklore, fairytales, mythology. All that stuff. Although I’m not convinced that was even a Nyrøthi folk story. I think she plucked it from—”

“It’s true,” Nissa murmured, golden eyes shadowed, haunted. “My sisters didn’t die in a sandstorm. Without my parents’ knowledge, we snuck away to Háldriel’s Hill one night—we’d heard it was the only place on the continent other than the tundral north where dragons still resided. We were young, and we were foolish, and we were right.” A single tear beaded along Nissa’s waterline before slipping to the pavement. “My sisters died during the ritual, but I lived. I became dragonborn, and it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. To my family. My parents have never truly forgiven me, and I have never forgiven myself.”

“Nissa, I…”

“If you really value our reluctant allyship,” Nissa murmured, as though she’d seen a ghost, “you’ll keep that to yourself.”

And then she turned and walked away.

Nissa Naszi, the dragonborn.

The check to the Timeweavers’ balance.

A person so innately good that the winged beasts had made her one of them.

Auria felt everything she thought she knew about her colleague—and about the world—shatter.

55

• • • •

The Wardholder

Over the next handful of days, Saffron asked questions around Flarence about a potential wardholder.

Is there anyone inexplicably wealthy, despite appearing powerless?

Anyone reclusive, strange, whose story doesn’t quite add up?

Any families who have been here for many, many generations?

But the locals in Flarence were a stubborn, loyal bunch, and very few offered answers, even when Harrow tried to assimilate with his creamy, natural Bellandrian. The population saw right through his fine clothing and his marbled royal accent, his chattering teeth as the icy chill deepened. So Saff met only terse head shakes, suspicious shrugs, and, on one occasion, the intervention of the local Vergard, who insisted they move along from the congregation outside the Augur temple.

By the fourth day, Saffron was ready to scream into her knuckles.

The crew sat around a scuffed wooden table in a small tavern called the Skarver Vau—Crooked Dagger—whose barkeep offered Saffron a bemused, almost distrustful expression when she requested hot cocoa. The Nyrøthi culture of pain over pleasure had bled across the border—as evidenced by the lack of local pleasurehouses, which Harrow was chagrined by—and most citizens seemed to find her blatant indulgence an affront.

Instead, she cradled a glass of warm honeywine, the smell of which reminded her of home. She’d never particularly liked the stuff, preferring the efficient burn of flamebrandy, but it seemed preferable to the goblets of dark, frothy bitterale Miret and Relar nursed. The boy was green in the face over the dry, sour taste.

Saffron surveyed the tavern, decorated with fish-scale wallpaper, rusted anchors, and wooden boat rudders. Her radar for trouble was a finely tuned instrument, and it snagged on a straw-haired, middle-aged woman sitting alone at the bar. The black-cloaked mage shot their party furtive glances, and while it might have just been the sound of their crude Vallish she abhorred, Saffron kept an eye on her.

“How do we know the wardholders even live in Flarence?” Saffron sat next to Levan, trying not to think about how close their thighs were. She spoke loudly, slowly, intentionally, surveying the room for reactions. “They could be anywhere.”

Levan took a sip of unspiked ambertea. “Wards have to be recast regularly, or their strength fades. And they cannot be recast at a distance.”

“They could return to Flarence via portari gate whenever they needed to replenish.” Saffron injected her voice with volume, enunciating every word precisely enough that a Bellandrian with a passing grasp on Vallish might understand. “How often is regularly?”

Miret scratched at his beard, and when he spoke, his teeth were brown-black from the grotesque ale. “The Great Wards around Atherin are cast once a month, but they have thousands of casters. For a place with a handful of mages…every week? Every fortnight?”

“So we stake out the cave,” suggested Levan. “Watch for a mage—or group of mages—arriving to recast the wards, take them out before they can do so.”

At this, the straw-haired woman at the bar drained her glass, slammed it back on the counter, then slid from her stool with an inebriated stumble. She scurried to the door and fled into the frozen night, leaving behind a thick outer robe lined with pale gray fur in her haste.

“We might not have to wait that long,” Saffron muttered, abandoning her revolting honeywine and making for the door. Levan followed without a word.

Dusk was settling over Flarence, a white salting of stars dusted across the indigo north. The tavern was on a side street a few hundred yards from the village square, cobbles piled with banks of fresh snow—which made it easy enough to follow the scarpering mage’s trail. They pursued her onto the next street—a residential area, lined with neat wooden houses of peach and lemon and dusty rose pink. Saffron and Levan walked quickly and quietly until the woman’s black-shrouded back was a mere fifty yards away, the silhouette of a wand clenched in a fist. Her breath plumed in panicked puffs, though she did not peer over her shoulder, as though to see them coming would be to make it real.

Guilt clenched Saffron’s belly as she withdrew her wand. “Sen effigias.”

The curse buried itself in the black-cloaked mage’s shoulder blade.

All at once, she turned to stone.

“Can you lift her?” Saffron muttered as they closed the gap. “Carry her somewhere more discreet.”

Levan grabbed the statue by the waist and hoisted it over his shoulder. It must have been extraordinarily heavy, but he didn’t emit the slightest grunt of exertion as they slipped into a narrow alley between houses. He set the Mage Practer on her feet then went to her back, pulling a dagger from his pocket and holding it to her throat from behind.

Saffron, facing the woman with her wand raised, said, “Ans disseffigias.”

Unlike a spell that held a victim in an enchanted state, such as sen debilitan, effigias worked almost as a transmutation between human and stone, their masses perfectly equal (providing the caster was skilled enough). Just like coffee would stay hot chocolate once transmuted, effigias could be held forever without draining the caster’s well or requiring medei perpetua. It had to be actively reversed lest the recipient stay stone in perpetuity. These quirks were why the Silvercloaks preferred the stone curse to debilitan, because it was much easier to take down several perpetrators at once, only reversing the spells once they were safely in custody.

As soon as the statue became human, Saffron fired a second curse.

“Sen exarman.”

The aspen wand leapt from the mage’s clenched palm into Saffron’s. A precaution.

“You hold the ward over the cave?” Saffron asked in Vallish. The other mage was obviously proficient, if she’d heard enough in the tavern to be spooked.

The woman’s slanted gray eyes—half-Nyrøthi, if Saffron had to hazard a guess—narrowed, her thin jaw set. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her uncertain Vallish was pitted with fear.

“Our conversation in the Skarver Vau troubled you.”

The woman squirmed beneath Levan’s blade, but said nothing.

Saffron raised an eyebrow at Levan. “Can you compel her into talking?”

Chewing the inside of his cheek, Levan gave a short nod. He did not speak aloud, keeping the commands internal, but when the woman failed to crack, an expression of deep frustration broke over his face.

Saffron gritted her teeth. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she said softly, like the black-cloaked mage was a patient whose bone she was about to reset. “But I will, unless you talk.”

The woman spat a thick globule of saliva onto the snow-covered cobbles.

Saffron knew she was about to do something heinous. Everything she had been through had prepared her for this—slaying the croupier Neatras on the night she was branded, carving out the eyeball of Kasan Melian on the dock, killing Vogolan in a moment of self-preservation, slaying the Whitewing in the pleasurehouse—and yet the prospect still sickened her. Though that could be the honeywine, which sat in her stomach like oily syrup, threatening to regurgitate.

She clung to the gossamer logic that had gotten her this far: that it would all be unmade eventually.

This woman would experience immense pain now, and it would, as Levan pointed out, still be real—just like his own torture could never truly disappear from the world. But after Saffron retrieved the Fifth Prophecy, after she found a weaverwick wand and wound back the decades, the black-cloaked mage would not know what terrible ills had befallen her in another life.

Not true absolution or redemption, but it was all Saffron had.

“Hold her arm up,” Saffron muttered.

Levan obliged, gripping the woman’s forearm with his golden palm. As he realized what Saffron was about to do, she saw the emotional shield thrown up behind his eyes.

Saffron pressed her wand tip to the stranger’s wrist. “Sen perruntas.”

A pale, bony hand fell to the snow, and the woman’s wail cut through the twilight like a scythe.

“Reattach it for me?” Saffron asked Levan lowly, knowing she was asking him to do something terrible, something he had not been able to do for himself, but he was a far more gifted Healer than she, and they needed the woman to know that unless she cooperated, the suffering would go on forever.

Swallowing hard, Levan pressed his own wand to the stump of the mage’s wrist. “Ans annetan.”

The hand leapt from the snow and clamped onto the stump, skin and flesh and bone sewn back together. Tears of agony poured down the mage’s cheeks, her whole body trembling in Levan’s grasp.

“It won’t end,” Saffron said. “We can do it all night—in all the time I’ve known him, his well has never run dry of power. Or you can answer our questions, and keep your hands.”

The woman muttered something in rapid-fire Bellandrian, but it was a strange, twisted accent, braided with Nyrøthi influence.

“ ‘You’ll kill me as soon as I answer your questions,’ ” Levan translated.

Saffron shook her head. “All we want is to breach those wards. If you allow us to do that, you’ll live.”

The woman shook her head once more, but Saffron sensed the weakening of her will—an instinct she’d honed over years of practice police interrogations. “Are you currently holding a ward over a cave mouth in the Cinereal Sea?”

After several shaky, whimpering moments, the woman looked down at her now immaculate wrist and nodded. Straw-colored hair fell into her tear-streaked face.

“Why? The person who concealed something in that cave died a thousand years ago. Why continue to hold the ward?”

The woman answered in that alloyed accent, and Levan translated.

“ ‘It’s the pride of my family. Enchanters since the dawn of time, powerful enough to hold a ward to prevent the world’s end.’ ”

A ward to prevent the world’s end.

So she knew how critical her role was. She hadn’t just inherited a task that her family had long since forgotten the purpose of. She didn’t resent the duty that cost her her magic, which would make it all the more difficult to convince her to betray it.

“If I did kill you now, would the ward fall?” Saffron asked. “Or do you have children of your own also upholding it?”

At the very mention of the word children, the woman shook her head so passionately that Levan had to peel back the blade so as not to cut her. He didn’t bother to translate, but from context—and the recognition of the word fante, for girl—Saffron would have guessed her to be pleading: “Please, not my girl—please. Anything, I’ll give you anything.”

“Anything,” Saffron said, barely recognizing the cool timbre of her own voice. “So you’ll let the ward drop? Let the world end?”

“Oul, oul, abien-cor.”

Yes, yes, of course.

How many parents would let the world end to save their children?

“And how do I know you won’t recast the ward when we leave?”

The woman spoke, and Levan translated, a darkness to his tone, a bitter bite to the edges of his words. “ ‘Take my tongue if you must. Just leave my daughter alone.’ ”

Doubt and shame warred in Saffron’s mind, in her heart. She knew that to get to the Fifth Prophecy, she’d have to do this. Kill or maim, threaten or hog-tie.

And yet the woman seemed too ready to give up the ward, especially when she had acknowledged the weight of her duty.

Was she one of many? Did she know that her lowering of the ward spell would not make Saffron any more likely to breach the cave’s entrance? Were there enough mages still loyal to Sarcane after a thousand years to uphold it without her?

A tall order—most councils and Crowns struggled to persuade enough mages to donate their wells to important defenses, let alone uphold a legacy ward with no clear purpose.

“Are there others?” Saffron kept her wand resting on the outer bone of the woman’s wrist. “If you let it fall, as does your daughter, will the ward still hold?”

“ ‘I don’t even know what the ward protects, let alone how many wells might be required to guard it,’ ” Levan translated.

“You said it prevented the world’s end.”

The woman’s slate eyes glistened in the moonlight, a smear of spit drying across her chin.

“ ‘So my family legend says.’ ”

Saffron searched the depths of this woman’s gaze for any trace of a lie. “You don’t have any idea what might hide inside?”

The woman’s breathing was still ragged as she replied, in warped Vallish, “I always thought it might have something to do with the Sordai.”

This caught Saffron by surprise. “The ancient foe Parlin defeated?”

Little was known about the creatures of old, other than that Parlin the Great had carved the first wand from the Elm of Eternity (giving the name to Elming, the third day of the week) in order to defeat them (giving the name to Sording, the fifth day of the week). Besides the occasional flinging of the word as an insult to a particularly ghoulish mage—what an absolute Sordai—Saffron had never heard the name used in any real context.

“Parlin lived a thousand years ago, did he not?”

“Yes. He did.” Saffron shook away the curious disquiet at the mention of the Sordai—the cave concealed a relic wand, not an ancient demon foe. “After you lower the ward, I don’t need to take your tongue. Only your wand. But first, reach out to your daughter. Tell her to drop her ward.”

The woman nodded, and Saffron held the tip of the aspen wand to their captive’s dry, cracked lips.

“En vorcier, Ary Archatel.”

“Imera?” came a soft feminine voice. Mother?

The woman fixed Saffron with a look of vitriol so defiant and pure that it sank into her like venom. In thick Bellandrian, she muttered something that made Levan’s face harden.

“ ‘Don’t let the ward drop. Find your father and run. I love you.’ ”

The woman closed her eyes and murmured a prayer, a litany that sounded Augurest in nature, though she didn’t wear the shaven head or tattooed eyelids of the truly devout. She crossed her wrists into an X—a northern symbol of power and inner strength—and pressed them over her heart.

She expected to die for her treachery, but Saffron was not expecting to have to kill her. She’d offered the woman leniency in exchange for a fallen ward, believed the woman would take it. Now her bluff was called.

And Saffron did not want to take an innocent life.

If Saffron killed Archatel, her wards would fall. But she’d told her daughter and daughter’s father to run, which meant there were still at least two active wardholders protecting the cave. Would Levan be able to overpower them with exuan when his magic was so compromised?

She found her gaze drifting to Levan’s shredding blue stare, silently asking him for guidance.

“She’s a witness,” he said softly. A death sentence.

Saffron’s lungs felt like bruises. “Would you?”

A nod, small and self-loathing.

And yet when Saffron looked at this weeping mage, she saw her own mother. Mellora Killoran had died to protect her daughter, and Archatel had just resigned herself to the same fate.

“There has to be a better way,” Saffron whispered. “She sacrificed her life to save her daughter—and I’m sure that love flows both ways. I would have died for my parents, even at six years old. And I know you would too.”

Shadows gathered behind Levan’s eyes as Saffron lifted Archatel’s asper wand to her own lips.

“Et vocos, Ary Archatel.”

The shape of the Bellandrian name felt unfamiliar on her tongue.

“Oul,” came the terrified response, the daughter obviously recognizing the Vallish as the source of whatever threatened her family.

“We have your mother,” Saffron said, her own voice shaking now. “If you and your father come to us willingly, she’ll live. You all will. If you don’t, she’ll die painfully, and we will find you anyway.”

A long, pregnant silence. Then, in far cleaner Vallish than her mother’s: “Where are you?”

Saffron described their location. “And if you attempt to alert the Vergard, your mother will still die painfully.”

“I’ll be there in a quarter hour,” Ary whispered. “With my father and no one else.”

“Nie, Ary,” the captive mother wailed, but the link between the wands was already dead.

Archatel slumped to the snowy ground, pressing her face into the blanket of frigid white, weeping like the newly bereaved. Death of honor, death of duty. Those things mattered to the Nyrøthi, and here, at the foot of the Rapier, it was clear the attitude held similar weight.

“What do we do once they drop the wards?” Saffron asked, talking low and fast, smudging her words together so that the Bellandrian wouldn’t be able to see the exact shape of them. “Because they will. Love is more powerful than duty, especially when your family has long ago forgotten what said duty is for.”

“I think you know what you have to do,” Levan said, smoothing down the front of his violet cloak.

Saffron hated that she’d asked him to use his healing for such ills, then wondered why she felt such a way. Hadn’t he done these things of his own volition countless times? But lately…she’d gotten the sense that he did not truly want this. Any of it. Was it really that his broken magic would not allow him to wound or kill? Or was it a subconscious phenomenon, the child at the heart of him resisting now that there was no father to force the issue?

“Will you think less of me for doing it?”

A muscle twitched in his jaw. “I’d be an almighty hypocrite if I did.”

“That’s not a real answer.”

He shrugged. “I hate that either of us have to do these things. I hate that our families have left us with the weight of the world on our shoulders, with birthright thrones and doomed quests to the edge of the continent.”

Still not a real answer.

At Saff’s feet, the straw-haired woman wept and moaned, her head snapping up at every nearby sound, clearly petrified of what would happen when her beloved family arrived.

“We could restrain them,” Saffron suggested, somewhat desperately. “Hold them somewhere with Miret and Relar guarding them. Bound and wandless, but alive and unhurt. And then after we have the relic wand, we…”

“Let them go, so they can tell the Vergard everything? The Vergard will escalate it to the throne. And Queen Vune, who is already facing scrutiny for her weakness on upholding Augurism, will become known as the regent who allowed the hallowed Fifth Prophecy to be stolen from her own country by Vallish thieves. Wars have been fought for far, far less.”

He was right, and Saffron loathed that he was.

“And yet it still feels like it’ll be the death of me.” Her hand found the warm wood of her pendant, his eyes following the movement. “To become the evil that killed my own parents.”

Two sets of hurried footsteps approached down the residential street.

“Sel ammortier,” came a shrill scream from the mouth of the alley, where two shadowy figures had appeared.

“Ans clyptus.” Saffron threw up the mattermantic shield as soon as Ary’s mouth formed the sel sound, and the killing curse buried itself in the glimmering wall of raw magic.

Levan stooped to haul Archatel up by the armpits, placing the dagger at her throat once more. For a few split seconds, Saffron thought he meant to threaten the woman’s family, to shout that if they didn’t stop firing killing curses, their wife and mother would die.

But then Levan dragged his blade across the pale skin of the woman’s throat, and as she slumped dead, Saffron realized what he intended to do.

“Levan…” she murmured, as screams of rage and grief overlapped and echoed around the alley. The daughter, Ary, launched herself at her mother’s body, but her father held her back, petrified, muttering in twisted Bellandrian.

“I’m already a monster,” Levan said, lowering the blood-slick dagger to his side, then striding toward the daughter and husband with an expression of cold, dark determination on his face. “But you don’t have to become one. Not like this.”

56

• • • •

Fields of Black

Pressing a single petal of nightpoppy to his tongue would melt it all away.

Back at the inn, after killing three innocent wardholders one by one—with a dagger, no less, a cowardly weapon, an insulting death, as though their lives were not worth draining his magic for—and tossing their bodies into the Cinereal Sea, Levan carved the three new tallies into his arm.

Saffron had been grateful, of course.

He had saved her this hurt, and that was the only thing keeping him from leaping off the nearest cliff onto the shards of rock below. There could be honor in dishonor, if you looked hard enough. He only hoped that the end would justify the means. That in killing those three wardholders, they would secure the Fifth Prophecy and somehow avert a world war.

Long after Saffron fell asleep, however—incense burning by the bedside, its coarse smoke causing her to snore lightly—Levan lay flat on his back beside her, wide awake and in deep, deep turmoil.

He trembled violently, limbs folded around his belly like a babe in a womb. Thoughts of loxlure obliterated all else, until, after an hour of resisting, resisting, resisting, he stuffed his feet into his boots and shuffled down the corridor toward Miret’s bedroom, bent at the waist from the intensity of the craving.

His knock was pathetic, even to his own ear.

The kindly old scholar appeared behind the door, fully dressed in his pale blue cloak and brown tunic, earthen skin deepening into bronze in the low light.

“Sorry to wake you,” Levan muttered, still in his slate-gray nightclothes.

“I’nar nilaq,” Miret replied airily—a common Eqoran expression meaning it’s nothing, which they sprinkled throughout their speech like confetti. The Eqorans were a nation of people who needed you to know how unbothered they were. “The old don’t need as much sleep as the young.”

Miret’s chamber was almost identical to theirs—worn rug, rickety desk and patched chair, threadbare blankets over a wobbly brass bedstead—only far neater, since Saffron was an agent of chaos who scattered her belongings around like a sweetblossom tree shedding its spores. Without the incense, the scent of nightpoppy was stronger, overlaid with the undeniable smell of old man.

“I killed tonight,” the kingpin muttered. “Three innocents—man, woman, grown daughter. Wardholders.”

“Ah,” Miret replied softly.

Though Miret’s response was not overtly damning, it was still charged. “The disappointment in your voice kills me.”

Miret sat down cross-legged on the threadbare rug, surveying his set of colored Saints stones. “Well, it would be disingenuous to imbue my tone with any other emotion. I want better for you, and you know that.” Hovering a palm over the stones, he murmured something inaudible in his mother tongue, then said, “So we’re closer now. Without the wardholders.”

Levan nodded, trying not to relive the way their gossamer skin had parted beneath his blade. The spurt of blood, the wails from the last victim—the daughter, watching her parents slain, which seemed kinder than the alternative. “We can’t be sure they were the only ones, but we should go to the caves as soon as dawn rises. See if you can still pick up a frequency.”

Miret gathered the stones into their black velvet pouch. “I’m not especially busy right now.”

Levan looked at the old mage as though he’d gone quite mad. “It’s the middle of the night.”

The scholar’s twinkling gaze was almost warm enough to thaw the cold grasp of addiction. “Are you unfamiliar with the miracle of torchlight?”

Saffron awoke to the call of a frostowl and an empty bed.

Fear hooked through her, and she sat bolt upright.

After killing the three wardholders, Levan had been silent for the rest of the night. The trembling had returned at full force, and this time, it could not be so easily dispelled with incense. She’d watched him heat the dagger to sterilize it before carving the new kills into his arm, feeling a grim sense of defeat borne from knowing nothing she said could convince him not to do it. She could not judge the ways he found to cope, especially when he was only in this situation because of her reluctance to do what needed to be done.

She was grateful to him—immensely, feverishly so. He’d absorbed the guilt and shame so that she didn’t have to, and in the moment, all she’d felt was relief.

But now…

He’d already been struggling.

What if her hesitation tipped him over the edge of relapse?

Saffron knew how deep the addiction ran in him, like a poisoned artery, like a toothache that had rotted the nerves all the way to the bone. She plucked her wand from the neat wooden holder on the bedside table.

“Et vocos, Levan Celadon.”

No response.

Before she had a chance to think about what she was doing, she shrugged her black cloak over her lilac nightclothes and padded down the corridor to Miret’s room.

No response there either.

The disquiet in Saffron only spread, blackened. The animal sense that something was happening just beyond her periphery. For lack of anywhere else to turn, Saffron knocked on the door on the other side of the shabby wooden corridor, its blue-gray wallpaper peeling, its waist-high paneling worn and splintered.

“No,” came a disgruntled call from the other side of the door.

“Harrow,” Saffron hissed. “It’s about Levan.”

The disgruntled call transmuted into reluctant footsteps, an open door.

Harrow seemed even shorter than usual, as tall as Saffron’s shoulder, and she realized that he must wear slightly heeled boots the rest of the time. His auburn hair was disheveled from sleep, though his emerald silk nightclothes were immaculately pressed.

“What is it?” He peered over his shoulder into the bedroom, where Relar still snored. Saffron’s detective instincts insisted she treat the snoring as feigned.

She kept her voice low, blurry. “He was already struggling with the smell of nightpoppy drifting over from Laudon. We told you earlier that we’d found and killed the wardholders, but what we didn’t say is that I was tormented by the prospect, so Levan did it for me. A dagger swiped across three innocent throats, quick and brutal and self-loathing. I’ve just woken up to find him gone.”

Harrow’s creamy, freckled face remained perfectly neutral. “After everything he and his family have done, he balked over three pedestrian kills?”

Saffron felt an acute missed-step lurch. She’d thought Harrow would share her concerns. “He’s never found it easy.”

Still with that oddly bland look, Harrow leaned against the doorframe, hooking one ankle around the other. “And you understand him better than I do?”

Was Harrow…jealous? In a world of murder and betrayal, sin and addiction and world-shaping prophecies, could it really be something as ordinary as that?

“I think you make a point of not understanding anyone,” Saffron said, matching his placid tone. In the predawn silence in the remote north, both of their voices echoed eerily. “I think you’re a flake and a drifter and coward with no real loyalty or purpose, and Levan shouldn’t trust you as far as he can throw you.”

Harrow’s lips quirked in amusement. “Did you come here in the middle of the night just to hurl insults?”

“No,” Saffron snapped, but quietly. “I thought you might care. A mistake, it would appear.”

She turned, ready to storm away, until the cool marble of Harrow’s next words rooted her to the spot. “Do you really think this world would be better with the Bloodmoons on the Vallish throne?”

Again, that missed-step lurch in her belly, the sense that the whole world had tipped off-kilter.

“It’s where all this is headed,” he continued. “And you’re walking the path willingly.”

“That doesn’t mean the path will never diverge.”

“I don’t understand why he trusts you—knowing you were undercover. Knowing you were Alucia in a different color, a different font.”

Saffron had the sudden acute urge to smack him in the face. “He doesn’t trust me. Not all the way. But that doesn’t mean we can’t strive toward mutual goals, and it certainly doesn’t mean we can’t care about each other.” She folded her arms across her chest, somewhat petulantly. “Are you going to help me find him or not?”

He smoothed his wild auburn hair with his palm, face still completely unruffled. “I’m a flake and a drifter and a coward, with no real loyalty or purpose. I think I’ll let this play out as it may.”

Saffron simply shook her head and walked away.

But not before Harrow added, as a flippant afterthought, “The opening and shutting of doors woke me twenty minutes ago. I went to the window and saw him leave the village on foot with Miret. It looked like they were heading for the cliffs.”

The dread on Saffron’s periphery sharpened into focus.

What if Levan’s departure wasn’t about nightpoppy at all? What if he and Miret were stealing the Fifth Prophecy from under her nose?

“You’re thinking exactly what I did,” Harrow said softly, almost triumphantly.

Realizing she’d been toyed with, a stormy anger broke through Saffron. Yet she didn’t have time to loose the thunder on Harrow. Not if Levan was going for the Fifth Prophecy without her.

After hastily grabbing her boots, Saffron raised her black hood and slipped out into the moonlit night, wondering if she’d been a fool to mend the bridge with Levan, and hoping beyond hope that she was not too late.

The northern moors of Bellandry were beautiful in the starlight.

The clouds had parted and snow hadn’t fallen for hours, though the rolling hills and jutting crags were still shrouded with blue-white. Levan was surprised how bright it was with the moon shining overhead; they barely needed the torch spell Miret lit on his wand tip.

A mile away, the sea thrashed against the cliffs, and the saltwater fizzle was as good a medicine as any. The fresh air and the metronomic steps eased some of the tightness in Levan’s chest, cooled some of the sour want in his empty belly. He still felt like a husk, a half mage, a ghost haunted by his own flaws, but at least it was easier to breathe.

“A little while ago,” Levan began, surprised how stark his voice sounded in the night, “I realized that the loyalty brand was no longer active. My father used medei perpetua to hold them down, and now that he’s dead, there’s no magic well for the enchantment to draw from.”

“Ah. I wondered how long it would take you to figure that out.”

Levan snapped his gaze to the old mage. “You knew?”

A casual shrug, as though they were discussing common bird species and not a life-defining revelation. “I’ve long hoped that once you were free from the fatal claws of your obsessed father, you might choose to walk away. But once the time and opportunity finally arrived…I suppose I was afraid of being proven wrong. Afraid that you would continue to choose this life.”

Levan’s jaw clenched. “Well, your fears were founded. I’m still here. And you’re a hellsdamned hypocrite.”

Miret absorbed the vitriol like a pillow folding around a fist. There was a soft silence as they walked, their feet perfectly in step, and then: “I’m proud of you, mil.” The scholar’s voice splintered a little. “I truly am.”

Levan scoffed, feeling deeply fraudulent, like a monster being praised for their small fragment of humanity. “What is there to be proud of?”

“You are here, talking with me, instead of obliterating yourself with loxlure.”

Miret hesitated.

“Let me ask you something. If you could click your fingers right now and have your parents resurrected, would you?”

“Yes,” Levan said, by habit or rote or obligation.

“Why?” Miret sounded genuinely curious.

“Neither of them should have died. They should both be here.”

“Death is rarely a mistake,” Miret countered easily.

Levan stared at him in betrayal. “How can you say that?”

“Mil, the reason you so value my counsel is that I do not prioritize your feelings over the truth. Both of your parents died as a result of their own reckless ambition. Clear cause and effect. Not a mistake. Not a tragedy. Hubris in action.”

Breathing through his anger, Levan waited for his ire to abate before responding. “Be that as it may, I still want them back.”

“Why?” Miret asked again.

Because I miss having a family.

Because I miss who I once was.

Because it’s a purpose, and purpose is the only thing keeping me upright.

Only now…a small voice in his head told him there could be other purposes, if he so wanted there to be.

It felt like a night for the truth, and so he said, “My whole life, I’ve never had a choice. Now that I do, the prospect of deciding is crippling.”

“When you feel ready, I’d be honored to help you make that choice.”

Emotion throbbed in Levan’s throat like a second pulse. “I’ve been indulging thoughts of pursuing healing, truthfully. But in Vallin, at least, my reputation would preclude me from any medical school worth its salt. And I don’t want to buy or blackmail my way through the hallowed doors of a university.” He scoffed, the bitterness coarse on his tongue. “Sometimes it feels like I took all the promise of my life and burned it to ash.”

He thought of the three corpses he’d tossed into the sea just a few hours earlier and shuddered.

“The brand gave you little choice,” Miret said gently. “And there are plenty of countries that know not of the Bloodmoon scourge. The best medical school in the world is in Cape Fala.”

Deep in Levan’s gut, longing tugged like a rope. “What if there were another way? A way to bring my parents back and to become the Healer I might always have been. To wipe myself clean of this heinous addiction, to scrub the world of all my evil deeds.”

A long, woolly silence. Miret parsed his meaning with remarkable ease. “She’s a Timeweaver, isn’t she? That’s why the Fifth Prophecy pertains to her.”

Levan bowed his head. “Powerful enough to unmake twenty-one years. And if her father is right, and the lost prophecy foretells her redeeming all Timeweavers with a war-preventing act, my mother would never have to…”

“Seek the throne by force.”

“Yes.”

“That’s a rather large if.”

“The idea that the prophecy foretells her saving the world?” Levan looked up, consternation clear in his side profile. “What do you think Sarcane predicted instead?”

“I have no idea. Nobody truly does.” Miret sighed an academic sigh. “But I stand by what I said. Death is so rarely a mistake.”

“Death is so rarely a mistake,” Miret said, only just loud enough for Saffron to hear from fifty yards behind, boots magically silenced, breath pluming in the night. “I would prefer to see you relinquish your parents’ bodies and souls to the Saints at last, and then move on with this life.”

The two walked in fermenting silence for half a mile, leaving Saffron to process what she’d overheard.

Levan wasn’t planning to steal the Fifth Prophecy out from under her nose, but he had confided their ultimate plan to Miret. And while she’d always thought kindly of the grandfatherly scholar, his knowledge still filled her with unease.

“Can’t you understand the appeal of being six years old again?” Levan’s voice was fissured with misery, black stitches threading through his words like lox-ridden veins. “Six years old, with a fresh field of snow in front of me? One unsoaked in blood, untainted by addiction. I would have no brand, both hands, nil ruinous cravings, and two parents who loved me. Can’t you understand why I want that so desperately?”

“Of course. I have always understood you, mil.” Miret peered over at his surrogate grandson, smiling knowingly. “As does, I believe, Saffron Killoran.”

A gruff sound. “For better or worse.”

“If you went back twenty years and pursued that fresh field of snow, you might not chart a path to her. And if you did somehow find her again…you would both be so different. You might not fall in love.”

The thought sent a curl of sorrow through Saffron, a peeling sensation low in her belly. As a Timeweaver, she would remember Levan in the remade reality, as she remembered the other versions of the world she’d rewritten—the iteration in which Lyrian had almost killed her, the iteration in which Levan had succeeded in killing Auria. But based upon the fact Auria did not retain her earlier memories of the Havenwood, Saff had to assume Levan would not know to find her at all.

Would it be worth it? Bringing back her parents, but losing him?

“I think,” Levan said, his voice rough and low, “that any permutation of me would love any permutation of her.”

Everything in Saffron soared, her heart spreading and beating like dragon wings. She wanted to run to him, press her face in his back, declare her paradigm-transcending love for him in return. Yet a part of her regarded his statement the same way she did the Saints’ manifesto: as a glorious, well-meaning, ultimately baseless fantasy. They could not know for certain that he would find her, let alone love her. And she had never dealt well with uncertainty.

Still, the romance of his words was almost enough to make her bury the Steel King’s letter in the endless northern snow, to let the cold wet wash away Vad Krønik’s ink until it was no longer evidence of treason but rather a sodden piece of useless parchment.

Almost, but not quite.

When they reached the cliffy inlet, Miret and Levan stood above the cave containing the prophecy—a patch of frozen earth dotted with small copses of leafless, narrow-trunked trees. The old scholar closed his eyes and raised his hands, palms facing the earth.

After several moments, he dropped them back to his side, and in a slightly strangled voice said, “There’s no longer a frequency. All wards have dropped.”

Levan’s stomach tied itself in a knot.

Tomorrow, they’d find the Fifth Prophecy.

Tomorrow, they’d know whether Saffron would indeed save the world—or unmake it as she had him.

57

• • • •

The Eagle Earring

In the weeks after Sancsari, despite countless long nights spent staking out the Whitewings, Auria and Nissa never discussed the revelation about her dragonblood. One night, however, in a fit of unprecedented goodwill, Nissa did agree to read Auria’s case notes.

“And you haven’t seen the King’s Prophet since this night?” Nissa asked, pointing at the date on a particularly lengthy page.

Auria sipped her ginger tea, watching the steam curl from the spout of her midnight blue dawndove pot. “No, not since then.”

Snow fell softly outside. The apartment was cold, but they couldn’t light a fire in the hearth, lest they betray their presence. Auria wore a thick outer robe over her silver cloak, the suede-like fabric a light teal with a white fur trim. Nissa had removed her cloak, unperturbed by the chill.

I run hot.

They sat, as usual, at the small table, the two chairs essentially molded to their bodies at this point. Most nights they watched the street in silence, like two old mages who’d been married too long and whose only form of entertainment was people-watching from their porch.

A familiar ache spread through Auria’s chest at the thought of the future she would never have with Tiernan. She thought of her mother’s words:

One day, when you least expect it, your heart will stumble upon another destination. And just like a fledgling spell, it will slowly, over time, form a new path there. A new desire line.

The thought still felt like a betrayal.

A few days prior, she’d received a letter inviting her to give a guest lecture at her alma mater, and in her initial gush of excitement, she’d thought, I can’t wait to tell Nissa. Not Tiernan—at some point, he’d ceased to be her subconscious default, and she hated it. On some level, the mind beneath her mind was letting go. Searching for a new desire line.

Of course, it had only latched on to Nissa because of sheer proximity—the fact that they spent six nights a week together on this operation.

Nissa squinted down at the parchment, struggling to read by the low light. “And you’re sure it was the King’s Prophet.”

“Positive. And by positive, I mean I correctly identified his facial profile, rather than simply lying about it in a court of law.”

Nissa ignored the jibe, though it was still a sore point. The corrupt Grand Arbiter had recently ruled that one detective’s say-so was not enough grounds for an arrest warrant, and that they’d need more physical evidence to bring in the kingpin. There had been no progress on confirming the boot prints belonged to Levan Celadon, and so progress had stalled, and Nissa had lied for little reward.

“Why would the King’s Prophet be meeting with the Whitewings?”

“I don’t know,” Auria admitted. “I’ve been scratching my head ever since.”

“This is the night with the most activity at the drophouse—the boy in the blue cloak, the King’s Prophet, the unconscious Bloodmoon who, judging by the collation of your notes with Alcabal’s, never left the building. Either he’s still being held hostage to ransom the Bloodmoons, or his head came out of that building in the sack the scholar was carrying.”

“You think the Whitewings used the boy to send the Bloodmoons a message? Delivered a head to their door?”

“Still doesn’t explain the presence of the King’s Prophet.” Nissa tapped a talon-like fingernail on her pierced bottom lip. “This is also the date the kingpin broke into the Order and stole Killoran’s letter. Coincidence?”

“I suppose.”

“Come on, Marriosan. You’re too good a detective to believe that.”

“I’ve tried to slot the pieces together—and they don’t. Possibly because they’re from two separate puzzles.”

Nissa’s lip-tapping intensified. “I heard a rumor that the King’s Prophet was fucking the Bloodmoon kingpin. That’s the piece that really doesn’t fit.”

Auria startled at this. “How reliable a rumor?”

“Not very. But if it were true…is Harrow Claver betraying the Bloodmoons to their greatest rivals? Or is he feeding information from the Whitewings to Levan Celadon? And how do King Quintan’s interests marry up with any of it?”

“The Palace surely wants both scarlets and whites gone—perhaps the prophet is assuring their mutual destruction.”

Nissa laid down the notes, staring out at the street beyond the snow-topped sill. “Why would the Crown bother? Neither the scarlets nor the whites pose any threat to House Arollan’s rule. Criminal activity is inevitable in any city—most monarchs allow it to flourish, to a certain degree. Better the devil you know. And like it or not, Vallin is all but bankrupt. The Bloodmoons actively contribute to our economy—fraudulently, of course, laundering dirty money through their legitimate gamehouses, but it’s taxable income nonetheless. I can’t see a compelling reason for the King to want them gone so urgently that he’d send his most valuable advisor into their midst. And the Whitewings are petty nuisances, really. No reason for a Highcloak to be dabbling in their affairs.”

“So what are you suggesting?”

“That it’s fucking weird.”

They sat in silence for several more hours. A couple of Whitewings came and went from the drophouse, and while they were only talking and laughing and not behaving altogether suspiciously, Auria jotted the times down regardless. She drank more ginger tea than was really wise and gave herself the jitters, while Nissa smoked an obnoxious amount and read the notes through once more. At one point, Auria noticed that the wand beside Nissa’s achullah tin was carved of ash. She could’ve sworn that yesterday, it was sleek elm, and the day before, it was currantpalm.

“You switch up your wands?” Auria asked.

Nissa looked down at the ash wand, as though surprised to see it there. “Oh—yes.”

“Why?”

“Paranoia, mostly. I don’t like the development of the tracing charms. I also have six registered home addresses and a fake identity should I ever need to flee to another country.”

“The tracing charms are only worrying if you have something to hide.”

Nissa did not dignify this with a response, but rather pivoted to an even more charged conversation. “I never thanked you for the inquest, did I?”

“I don’t think you’ve ever thanked anyone, period.”

“You were fantastic, you know.”

Auria fought the smile. “I know.”

“So humble too.” Nissa’s golden eyes flickered over Auria’s face as she lit yet another achullah. “You belong in the courts.”

“Are you trying to get rid of me?”

“Of course not. Who would I antagonize without you?”

“I’m sure you’d find a way.”

“Why the Grand Arbitership?” Smoke billowed from Nissa’s nostrils. Auria was coming to love the smell; crave it, almost. “With a mind like yours, you could go anywhere, be anything.”

Auria leaned back in her chair, tugging her thick robe tighter around her. “When I was young—maybe seven or eight—King Quintan became obsessed with Nyrøthi immigrants. One day he randomly decided that every Nyrøthi living in Vallin should join a register and submit to extensive background checks. Their homes searched, their lives combed through.

“He got it in his head that the Steel King was conspiring against him, that the northerners had sleeper spies in every Vallish city, probing for weaknesses in the wards, ready to open the metaphorical gates in a siege. For whatever reason, his task force took against my mother Lulí, even though she was an artist and always had been. Her parents were high up in the Nyrøthi military, and that was suspicious enough for the king. He tried to have her deported, and almost succeeded. My sister and I went to see her in this…in this cage of a wagon, along with dozens of others about to be piled onto a ship in the Bay of Silence. Sailed over the Stone Sea to Välgard, never to be returned.”

Auria shook her head at the bitter memory. She still remembered the frantic cries, the dusty summer heat, the stink of sweating bodies. The precise streak of dirt on her mother’s forehead.

“Dematus blocked the mass deportation at the last possible minute. Since then, I’ve always wanted that kind of power. To be able to prevent injustice on a larger scale. To have a say in what is considered right and wrong, and to make that match what is lawful and unlawful as closely as possible.”

Nissa took a deep pull on her achullah, and for once, Auria didn’t chastise her when ash dropped onto the parchment notes. “So Dematus wasn’t always terrible.”

“I don’t think she’s terrible now. I think the Bloodmoons must have threatened her horribly for her to be complying with their demands.”

“Ugh. Cowardice.”

Auria glared at her. “Was it cowardice when I gave in to the kingpin’s commands to save you?”

Nissa didn’t have a response for that. After she finished her achullah, she went back to the case notes—possibly the longest time the dragonblooded Wielder had ever spent reading.

Less than an hour before dawn, as the black night faded to indigo, Nissa sat up straighter.

“Hold on.”

Auria, who had entered a sort of sleepy trance, jolted. “What?”

Nissa stabbed the parchment with her forefinger, sharp nail almost shredding the surface in a way that made Auria twitch. “The blue-cloaked boy wore an eagle earring—one you’ve described at great length. Why did you snag on that detail?”

Auria sighed. “I could’ve sworn I recognized that eagle. An emblem from somewhere, something. I was hoping my subconscious would work on solving it while I slept. I often catch my mind midway through an important thought when I wake in the morning, but night shift has me too exhausted.”

Nissa’s golden eyes—the ones Auria would never look at in the same way again—glittered excitedly. “It’s not from Etherstone Apothecary, is it?”

“Yes, that’s exactly where it’s from! Saints, yes. How did you know?”

A scant vestige of the haunted expression returned to Nissa’s face. “The old lady who works there is an expert in dragonblood. She helps me ease certain symptoms.”

“But why would an apothecary be colluding with the Whitewings?”

“Why does anyone collude with them? Threat, blackmail. Violent coercion.”

“I’ll rephrase—why would the Whitewings want to violently coerce an apothecary?”

Nissa raked her hands through her jasmine-scented hair. “You’re not in a rush to get to bed after our shift ends, are you?”

Though exhaustion burned behind Auria’s eyes and a migraine was turning screws at her temples, she shook her head. “No, why?”

“I think perhaps we should take a trip to the apothecary district.”

The eagle emblem hanging above the door of Etherstone’s matched the boy’s earring perfectly.

Business hours were not yet in swing, but a shadowy shape stirred inside, ambling behind teal awnings and frosted windows. A hunched old woman, weighing and measuring, straightening displays and polishing scales. The two detectives watched in silence until she turned the small, gold-plated sign from Closed to Open.

They were not the first patrons to step inside, however. A short, barrel-shaped man in a plain black cloak appeared from nowhere, shuffling over the threshold with a familiar nod to the shopkeeper. His ears were filled with wiry gray hair, and he walked heavily on one foot. Auria and Nissa followed him inside.

Etherstone’s was a neat, ordered place, its air scented with dried rosemarroa and clove, with fernroot and slainearth and something metallic Auria couldn’t place. The eagle emblem was everywhere—stamped onto every neat product label and engraved in every brass ingredient scoop, even emblazoned on the faded wallpaper.

The shopkeeper standing behind the weighing counter lowered her monocle as the detectives entered, a smile sweeping across her aged face. Her skin was pocked with moles, and her soft hazel eyes held a kindly twinkle. There was a tension there too, Auria thought, in the deep ravines of the woman’s smile lines, the knotted muscles on her high forehead, the frazzled mess of her long gray hair.

“Detective Naszi,” the shopkeeper said, appraising Nissa’s silver cloak. “Rare to see you in uniform.”

Nissa nodded in greeting. “Morning, Ila.”

Auria stepped forward with an awkward palm wave. “I’m Detective Marriosan. We were wondering if we might ask you a few questions, if you have a moment?”

“I’m being taken in for interrogation?” The old woman looked part-terrified, part-relieved at the prospect.

Auria shook her head, fixing a warm expression on her face. “Here is fine, though if you’d rather somewhere more private…”

The old woman’s throat bobbed as she surveyed the apothecary. “This is as private as we’re going to get.” She gestured toward the barrel-shaped Mage Practer who’d entered the shop the moment it was open. “That’s just old Filan Ferrow—he’s here browsing every day. Deaf as a post, but deep pockets. Buys all sorts, spends hours here. I think he just likes the scents. They say, don’t they, that if you lose one sense your others become stronger?”

The shopkeeper looked at Filan Ferrow as though he were a shield standing between her and an enemy approaching on a battlefield, but Ferrow seemed completely oblivious to the entire situation.

To the untrained eye, it might seem as though he hadn’t heard a word anyone had said—he was running a gnarled finger over the labels in the Claws & Talons section—but Auria’s eye was far from untrained. There was something unnatural about his ignorance, a completeness that was rare to find in the real world. Deaf or not, the human eye was drawn to movement, and Ferrow hadn’t so much as glanced at Nissa, who was stalking around the apothecary as though searching its nooks and crannies.

But the old woman wanted to talk here, in front of Ferrow, and Auria didn’t think it was wise to escalate the situation by insisting they question her alone.

“Very well.” Auria pulled a fresh scroll of parchment and a quill from her satchel, then enchanted the quill with a transcription charm, so that it would perform the note-taking on her behalf. “Perhaps we could start with your name?”

“Apoth Ila Zamorin.”

Auria fought to keep the surprise from her expression. Apoth was an honorific used for apothecaries of the highest order. The babbling crone in front of them was a veritable genius.

“We’re investigating a spate of crimes attributed to a criminal organization called the Whitewings. Are you familiar with the name?”

The Apoth stilled almost imperceptibly, which is precisely why Auria used the transcription charm in scenarios like this. She’d have missed it otherwise.

“It rings a bell,” Apoth Zamorin said carefully, color draining from her cheeks. “You hear things, when you serve as many patrons in a day as I do. Most of my customers are rather lascivious. Gossips and scoundrels, the lot of them.”

“Have you ever knowingly served a Whitewing in this establishment?”

Apoth Zamorin became very busy measuring and chopping an unfamiliar gray-blue plant root on the wooden block before her. “They wear white cloaks, do they not? In which case, I don’t think so—the only white-cloaked patrons I’m familiar with are cadets from the military or the Silvercloak Academy. Though my memory isn’t what it was.”

“Does anyone else work here with you? A young man perhaps, tall, teenaged?”

Old hands froze over the chopping board, began to tremble. “That would be Relar, my grandson.”

“Apoth Zamorin, your grandson was recently sighted entering a known Whitewing drophouse.”

At this, Apoth Zamorin blinked furiously, as though trying to clear fog from her vision, then laid down the knife and pressed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets.

“Is everything alright?” Auria asked gently. She’d never liked this part of her profession, whether in the courts or the streets—pressing witnesses, no matter how much emotional distress they were under.

In the far corner, Filan Ferrow tilted his head a fraction of a degree to the left, as though trying to hear better. The hair on Auria’s forearms prickled.

“Perhaps it might be best if we take you down to the Order.” Auria took another step forward until her palms rested softly on the weighing counter. “You’re not in any trouble, Apoth, but we want to ensure you’re safe and comfortable while talking to us.”

“They’ll know,” whispered Apoth Zamorin. Terror was carved into every syllable. “They’re watching. They’ll kill me before they let me follow you, and they’ll likely kill you too for good measure.”

Auria tried not to let her own fear show. “Who’s watching?”

“The Whitewings.”

“Why are they watching?” The transcribing quill hovered questioningly, as though struggling to pick their words up. Auria badly wanted to let the enchantment drop—what if the Whitewings did attack, and she’d drained her well to keep a quill afloat?—but she had the sense that the apothecary was about to reveal all. She needed those notes as testimony.

“They came to us months ago. Said they’d kill us both if we didn’t help them find certain ingredients, and we obliged. Spinebark, among other things. But then…then the Bloodmoons caught wind, somehow. Took Relar, threatened to brand him. Didn’t, in the end, for reasons I’ll never understand, but thank the Saints for regardless.” Tears spilled from her hazel eyes. “Now both sets of evil mages have us in their pockets, playing us off against the other, threatening and bargaining. One wrong step and we’re both dead, except every step is wrong in someone’s eyes.”

Another snarl of a knot, tied with yarns both scarlet and white.

“Where is Relar now? Is he in danger?”

“On an excursion to Bellandry with the Bloodmoons. They offered protection in exchange for his presence on the mission—that’s all I know. But not only are the Whitewings watching the apothecary, the scarlets are too.” The old woman’s wrinkly throat bobbed. “Protection, they say, but I don’t know.”

“Would you be willing to testify to all of this in a court of law?”

Apoth Zamorin’s eyes peeled wide and afraid. “I don’t—no, no, then they’d certainly kill us. I can’t.”

“We can offer special protection,” Nissa said, and Auria jolted. She hadn’t heard her colleague approach the counter. “There are witness programs—we could have you disappear. Start a new life somewhere else, under new names, new backgrounds. Neither the scarlets nor the whites would ever be able to find you.”

Apoth Zamorin looked from Auria to Nissa, and then finally nodded.

“Alright, I’ll—”

The bell above the front door tinkled, and Auria saw the horror on the apothecary’s face before she turned.

Two mages in scarlet cloaks.

Bloodmoons.

58

• • • •

Crossfire

The Bloodmoons—both women, one spire-thin and dark-haired, one a buxom blond—shot cold smiles at Apoth Zamorin, meant to intimidate, to intimate, without crossing into overt threat.

As discreetly as she could, Auria stuffed her transcription quill and parchment back into her satchel, trying desperately to think her way out of the situation. She couldn’t arrest the Bloodmoons. It wasn’t inherently unlawful for them to be here, and besides, it wasn’t her case. Nor could she leave Ila here to be killed, which she almost certainly would be.

She had to get Apoth Zamorin out of danger—without triggering a curse-off. Yet Bloodmoons would not let the Apoth walk out of here alive, arm in arm with the Silvercloaks, knowing she would be offered protection to testify against them.

Nissa’s hand twitched on her wand, her thoughts and calculations likely mirroring Auria’s own. Ferrow’s palm went to his own side, though he didn’t look directly at the Bloodmoons. The shopkeeper seemed to have frozen solid.

Auria cleared her arid throat. “Apoth Zamorin, perhaps you’d prefer to come down to Silvercloak headquarters to tell us more about your niece’s mail fraud. It sounds like quite the strange situation.”

A lie spun from thin air, a reason for the shopkeeper to be talking to the detectives other than implicating the two criminal organizations threatening her life.

Of course, the Bloodmoons might have had means of listening long before they entered the shop, in which case…

Apoth Zamorin shook her head. “No, it’s alright. I’ve told you everything I know. Hopefully that’s enough.”

“Apoth Zamorin, please, come with us. We won’t let any harm befall you.”

The Bloodmoons drew their wands, and Auria thought her bowels might empty from the terror.

The apothecary’s tears flowed silently and furiously. “Leave me be.”

I can’t leave you be, Auria screamed internally. They’ll kill you for what you’ve just told us.

“Detective Marriosan,” Nissa muttered. “The Apoth has told us everything she knows. It’s time to go.”

No.

Auria searched the old woman’s face, the warm hazel eyes, the kindliness to her smile, and she saw her own grandfather: Papa Marriosan, the gelatier, the life of the party, the head of their family, one of her very favorite people in the world. Slain by Bloodmoons, as Apoth Zamorin would be too.

She couldn’t let them keep doing this.

Relar Zamorin would be shattered the same way she was shattered.

Perhaps she could fire effigias curses at the Bloodmoons while Nissa got the apothecary out alive. If only she could communicate subliminally with Nissa, get her to assist with the extraction, maybe then—

“Marriosan,” Nissa hissed, striding toward the door.

Panic towered inside Auria. Turning her desperate gaze back to the apothecary, she whispered, “Apoth Zamorin, please…”

But the shopkeeper simply shook her head, resigned to her fate. Trembling, sobbing, but resigned.

Why wouldn’t the old woman at least try to escape with her life?

Almost as soon as she asked the internal question, she answered it.

The apothecary wouldn’t want Auria and Nissa to perish in the crossfire. It was a hallmark of the old, the way they threw themselves upon the sword to protect the young. She saw it time and time again on the streetwatch.

As she made her final decision, she felt the touch of Papa Marriosan’s broad hand on her shoulder, smelled sweet citrus and pistachio and rich caramel gelato, and mourned so suddenly and gravely that it rendered her hollow.

That hollowness propelled her to the door.

Past the Bloodmoons, past Filan Ferrow, and onto the street.

But not before she slid the listening bracelet off her wrist and into an open sack of tea leaves.

Outside, she was surprised to find the sun was shining, the thin blanket of snow already melting. It seemed impossible for the capital to be washed in warm gold when such horror nestled in every corner. Nissa rested a palm on the back of Auria’s arm, gently ushering her down the street and around the corner, out of sight of Etherstone’s.

“The Whitewings have the apothecary hunting out spinebark?” Nissa leaned back against the creamstone wall of a quaint milliners’ while she sparked up an achullah. “Hells. That’s even more addictive than nightpoppy.”

But Auria could barely think about spinebark, about the gang war, about the case. She could only think of Apoth Zamorin. “I left my bracelet in there to record whatever happens next. It doesn’t give us ears right now, but it’ll capture…whatever happens next.” Her eyes stung, and she let out an involuntary choking sob. “We left her there to die, Nissa.”

“There was no other option.” Nissa’s tone was softer than usual, but still coarse with achullah smoke. “We didn’t have the evidence to make an arrest. You tried to get her out of there, and it was admirable, but if she refused, what could we do?”

A velvine strolled down the street, stopped by Auria’s heel, and brushed up against her calves. She’d always attracted the beasts, for some reason. The black-furred, purple-eyed cat leapt from the snow-dusted cobbles onto Auria’s shoulders, purring soft breath over the bare skin of her throat—right where the kingpin’s blade had sliced three shallow cuts. Pleasure rolled into Auria’s well despite the devastation of the situation.

“It isn’t right. We should have been able to stop it.”

Nissa pressed her mouth into a flat line, smoke billowing from her nostrils. “We did what was lawful.”

“Really? You’re trying to make a dig about—”

“No, Marriosan.” Auria’s surname sounded like a whip-crack from Nissa’s forked tongue. “Not everything out of my mouth is a personal attack. We followed the rules. You worship at the altar of rules. Surely that brings you some comfort.”

“Well, it doesn’t,” Auria retorted, disturbed to find that it was true. “And I’m surprised that you, the great bender of rules, were content to simply walk away.”

Nissa rested the back of her head against the wall, tilting her face toward the sun and closing her eyes. The kohl on her eyelids was smudged from a long night. “If I’d been working alone, I would’ve killed the Bloodmoons. Claimed self-defense. But you were there, and I didn’t want you to have to lie to cover my back again.”

Auria stared at her colleague, processing the audacity. It went against the oaths they swore both upon entering the Silvercloak Academy and graduating from it. “You would’ve killed them?”

A shrug, almost petulant. “Better them dead than the Apoth.”

Auria physically recoiled. Such a statement was both unlawful and wrong.

Wasn’t it?

From nowhere, her mother Lulí’s voice drifted through her mind.

It is believed that only those of great honor, those whose goodness runs all the way to the bone, are made dragonborn.

Perhaps the dragons had a different moral code. Perhaps they served a greater good, not a rigid set of rules. Perhaps they recognized that ruthlessness, that savagery, that willingness to sacrifice and avenge, in Nissa.

A small part of Auria—a very, very small part—thought that maybe her dragonblooded colleague had a point. If Auria had to decide whom she’d rather perish in the next quarter hour, it would not be the innocent Apoth. And yet her choices, her fervent belief in the law, would likely lead to a different outcome.

She found herself openly crying, legs shaking so violently she was moments from crumpling. “I once overheard my mother worrying that I was ‘too sensitive to be a detective.’ I think maybe she was right.”

Nissa saw the second Auria fell and caught her.

Muscled bronze arms steadied Auria, and she folded into the goldeneyed mage she had once despised. Auria’s face pressed against the ridge of Nissa’s shoulder—she was a few inches taller than the Eqoran—and she wept over the lapel of Nissa’s cloak, their torsos pressed together, Nissa’s heartbeat remarkably steady compared to the frantic cantering of Auria’s.

“I think your sensitivity is what makes you a great detective,” Nissa murmured into Auria’s hair, not exactly cradling her, but just…holding her. Steadying her body, her spirit. There was no softness in her tone; she spoke matter-of-factly, as though reporting a plain truth. “If every detective were like you, this city would be a far better place.”

Some small, childlike wound in Auria smoothed over at the words. They stood like that for a few moments, and it did not feel strange or unnatural. Just warm, safe. Anchoring. Eventually Auria’s sobbing slowed, her legs grew more solid, the pressing nature of the situation re-dawning on her.

“Why do you smell so good, by the way?” Nissa muttered, as though irritated that this were the case.

The shock of the question wrenched loose a laugh, of all things. Auria pulled away, sniffing and wiping her slick cheeks and nose on her cloak sleeve. “I love perfume—my preferred form of pleasure. I wear a new scent every day to keep them fresh, potent enough to fill my well. Last night I chose varouli and fyrr from a perfumier in Marayat.”

Nissa smiled, and it was slightly unsettling, like seeing an alleycat tap dance. “Reminds me of home.” She cleared her throat a little awkwardly. “Anyway, if the Apoth is killed…it will be a terrible, terrible thing.” She took a deep, tormented drag on the joint, which she’d somehow kept lit during their embrace. “But your detective’s instincts were right to leave the bracelet. Her death will be evidence, whether against Filan Ferrow of the Whitewings or the two Bloodmoons. It might finally secure some arrests, give you grounds to raid the drophouse on Fallow Grange.”

“I know,” Auria replied miserably. “But people’s lives are worth more than evidence.”

Nissa sighed. “You don’t want to leave, do you?”

“No. I don’t.”

Nissa dropped her achullah to the cobbles and snuffed it out with the heel of her boot. Auria couldn’t even bring herself to lecture about littering. “I spotted a back entrance I could slip through without alerting them to my presence—if you want me to see what’s going on. To step in if they move to hurt Apoth Zamorin.”

Auria blinked at her in astonishment. “You’re deferring to me on this?”

“The Whitewings were your case before they were mine. I’m following your lead.”

“But it’s not just the Whitewings, is it? It’s the Bloodmoons too. They both have the Zamorins in their fists. And we’ve been ordered not to work the Bloodmoons. The lawful thing to do would be obey that command. To simply listen and gather evidence against the Whitewings. Hand it over to our superiors who have the authority to act.”

Nissa shrugged. “Your call.”

Judge Nercan’s words echoed in Auria’s mind; his acknowledgment, even as a highly esteemed honorary of the court, that sometimes lawful and right do not overlap. His argument in favor of the latter.

She thought, once more, of the old woman’s hazel eyes, and of her grandfather.

Auria nodded once, resolute. “Go. I’ll watch the front. And if either the Whitewings or the Bloodmoons attempt to harm the Apoth—do what you must.”

59

• • • •

Two Dead Scarlets

The minutes Nissa spent sneaking back into Etherstone Apothecary were the longest of Auria’s life.

What if the dragonborn was caught, captured, killed?

It would be Auria’s fault. She should’ve been the one to creep through the alley entrance, and yet she knew that if it came down to the heat of the moment, Nissa would be able to defend herself, to do what needed to be done—to take two red lives and save one blue.

Auria would falter under fire. She was many things, but she was not brave.

I’m in the wrong job, she thought miserably, searching the street for a good vantage point. Maybe I’ll resign. Go back to the courts, to prosecution.

The prospect gave her a sense of relief, but also preemptive regret. She couldn’t bear to hang up the silver without any meaningful busts under her belt, to admit that her mothers were right, and she was too sensitive for this work.

She was settling into position behind a chimney on a rooftop across the street from the apothecary when her wand tip cracked.

“Et vocos, Auria Marriosan.” Nissa’s voice was so quiet it was almost inaudible.

“Here,” Auria replied, matching the volume, establishing contact.

The sound inside the shop was distant, tinny, a little crackled and weak, but a male voice was in the middle of talking.

There was only one man inside that apothecary: Filan Ferrow.

Auria had been right to suspect him.

“—need to keep the Apoth alive, otherwise the boy will never return.”

Auria’s cantering heartbeat steadied. Ila was safe for now—providing her grandson stayed in line.

“What of…the two Blood…?” came a female voice, even more distant, and Auria had to strain to pick out each word. Many syllables dropped out of earshot entirely. Ferrow must have been talking to her through his own wand, and the sound was hard to parse through all the degrees of separation.

“Both dead,” Ferrow said gruffly. “What shall I do with the bodies?”

“Skewer…and eat…like kebabs, for all I care. Ask the Apo…where…her grandson.”

Who was this woman?

The Whitewing leader? The elusive figure sequestered in the drophouse?

Ferrow grunted at his captive, “You say Relar is north with the scarlets. Where?”

Apoth Zamorin made a whimpering noise. “They went to Bellandry on foot from Lunes. Got stuck in Almere for a few days—last I heard they were in Flarence. Please, don’t hurt him, he—”

“Enough,” Ferrow snapped. Then, dropping his tone in deference to the woman on the other end of the wand line, “What’s your order?”

“Not worth…hassle of pursuing to Bellandry. Thanks to…mishap in Hamren, there’s a warrant…arrest. The second you enter a portari gate, the Vergard will…on your tail. Better to wait for…scarlets in Lunes, assuming…cross back over the border on foot.”

“Understood. I’ll make my way there and—”

“No. Stay with the Apoth. If we kill…boy has no reason to return. I’ll go to Lunes myself.”

The line to the leader went dead.

A few moments later, the sound on the end of Nissa’s wand changed subtly from the echoey quiet of a storeroom to the birdsong in the alley behind the apothecary.

“What do you think?” Nissa asked Auria.

Auria lay back on the snow-flecked roof tiles, letting the miraculous sun wash over her face. A dawndove cooed in the nearby chimney pot, and the velvine from earlier had joined her. She thought, and she thought, and she thought some more, but Nissa didn’t push her for an answer until she was ready to give it.

Perhaps the most patience the dragonborn moron has ever shown. Auria chuckled, surprised to find that her inner voice was accompanied by a subtle undertow of affection.

Finally, she spoke into her willow wand tip. “I think the bracelet now carries evidence of Ferrow murdering two Bloodmoons—but if I contact Karvas right now, he’s going to send someone else down here to make the arrest. The scarlets aren’t my patch. And what if the Silvercloaks he sends fumble? Aren’t subtle enough? Apoth Zamorin is essentially a hostage. Ferrow would take her life before we took him in.”

“So what are you saying?”

“That this is a lot bigger than a lone Whitewing murdering two Bloodmoons.”

A long, strange pause. “Hells, Marriosan. You want to go to Lunes, don’t you?”

“I want to go to Lunes,” Auria confirmed, a small swell of prideful purpose inflating her lungs. “The leader might be there, as well as Saints know how many other Whitewing foot soldiers. We could take so many more down.”

Nissa let out a low, admiring whistle. “Karvas won’t like it. He could block the whole thing.”

“Do you think Jebat could send backup without Karvas’s knowledge?”

Months ago, she had told her new mentor that all she wanted was to do good. And he’d replied: I consider it my duty not to let the likes of Vel Karvas stand in your way.

Despite the peril of the situation, Nissa laughed. “The high and mighty Auria Marriosan, plotting behind her captain’s back?”

Auria huffed. “Now isn’t the time to—”

“The Apoth’s life is secure, for now, which means it’s the perfect time to mock you.”

“Nissa, I’m serious. Is this the right call?”

Another pause, Nissa weighing her words like an apothecary measuring ingredients on a scale. “Killoran once told me that you should only gamble if you can accept the worst possible outcome. Could you accept the outcome of being disciplined again? Another inquest, another opportunity for the captain to have you disgraced and thrown off the force for insubordination?”

What was more important to Auria?

Doing good, or subordinating?

Doing good, or following the rules?

Doing good, or achieving her lifelong dream?

Surely, surely, it was doing good.

It had to be, otherwise what was the rest of it for?

Before she could talk herself out of it, she let the line to Nissa drop, and then spoke clearly into her wand, “Et vocos, Tenébo Jebat.”

“Marriosan?” came the accented male voice. “It’s early.”

Auria dimly registered that most day shift detectives would not yet be at their desks. She’d lived a thousand lives, become a whole new person since her own shift started the previous night.

“I know.” She stripped the apology from her tone. “I need to request backup. The Whitewings are planning an assault on the Bloodmoons in Lunes, and I want to bring them all down at once.”

60

• • • •

Into the Cave

The sky over the Cinereal Sea was a blotchy winter gray, snow falling softly and silently as ash. Wind thrashed against the crags, whipping the slate-colored water into foamy meringue peaks, buffeting the four cloaked figures standing on the cliff’s edge. Today it smelled not of the floral nightpoppy of the east, but the briny salt and tundral cold of the north.

Saffron thought of the dragons biding their time in the Hældrekys Peaks just across the body of water—the mountaintops likely within eyeshot on a day with better visibility—and wondered whether her much-coveted weaverwick wand might be closer than she thought.

One thing at a time.

Since the sea was in such a frenzy, abseiling down into the cave was a better option than going by boat. Levan had pilfered a sturdy length of rope from a nearby port, which he tied around the base of the nearest tree. The four mages—all but Relar, who was foraging in the woods with Rasso—lowered themselves into the cave below. Though the cliff was slick with salt water and ice, Miret cast a kind of sandpaper charm on the soles of their boots, which gave them a decent amount of grip. Still, by the time Saffron’s feet found the mouth of the cave, her hands were rubbed raw from the rope. Every muscle in her body trembled from the exertion and the worry of falling into the thrashing, shark-filled sea.

When they passed over the threshold of the cave, no wards offered any resistance.

Saffron’s tight lungs eased somewhat, but the relief was followed by a barbed whip of self-hatred. Three innocent mages had died for those few footsteps.

Inside, the cave was smaller than anticipated; a crescent of rocky land surrounding an ink-dark rock pool. Tucked inside the pool was a little colony of slowcrabs, their shells a pearlescent white.

“Is it in the water, do you think?” Saffron mused aloud. “Are the slowcrabs there to guard it?”

Harrow snorted. “I don’t think the Fifth Prophecy would have survived for a millennium with just three wardholders and a family of crustaceans standing sentinel.”

Levan and Miret murmured among themselves, then the older mage set off around the cave, running his palms over the floor and walls, searching for magical frequencies. He paused on a stretch of wall that looked like all the others, to the back of the cave and quite far away from the utterly ambivalent slowcrabs.

“Et lustran.” As Miret’s wand tip illuminated, it washed a white-gold glow over the craggy wall.

Carved into the rock were five words in an unfamiliar language:

Sani de praegeni, darae voli.

Beside her, Levan jolted slightly, and Saffron realized he could read it.

Ancient Sarthi. One of the kingpin’s favored obscure languages, and the tongue likely used on the continent around the time Sarcane lived and breathed.

“What does it say?” she asked, but it was not Levan who answered.

Miret breathed, “Blood of a Foreseer, given willingly.”

“Wonderful,” muttered Harrow. “I’m quite possessive over my blood, believe it or not.”

Yet Saffron could barely hear him over the ringing in her ears. She stared at Levan, though he did not return it, instead locking his own gaze on the carved instructions. “You knew we were going to need that. How?”

He swallowed, shrugged. “Gut instinct, I suppose. I’ve read a lot of quest novels. There’s always mandated bloodshed.”

“I suppose I’ll have to maim myself, shall I?” Harrow sighed exaggeratedly, more concerned over his imminent wound than Levan’s strange prescience. “Anyone have a knife?”

Levan handed him the dagger he’d used to kill the wardholders. “I’ll heal you straight afterward.”

“What a gentlemage.” Harrow pressed the blade to his palm, then hesitated. “I will confess that I don’t love pain. And the sight of blood makes me quite faint. I saw a little Foreseer cart back in Flarence—a shawled old woman, probably a fraud, but she might have some genuine prophetic ability in her. Perhaps we could go and capture—”

“Harrow,” Levan said bluntly. “We’re about to uncover a prophecy pertaining to the fate of the world, and you’re not willing to slice a small patch of your Highcloak skin for it?”

Harrow gulped, then handed Levan both the knife and his trembling hand. “Do it for me, will you? I can’t watch.”

Levan cut into Harrow’s hand without a beat of hesitation, and Harrow screamed like a dying gull. Levan grabbed Harrow’s forearm and pressed the welling blood to the cave wall, where the Ancient Sarthi words immediately began to glow scarlet, as though drinking the dark liquid directly from the King’s Prophet’s heart.

Yelping once more, Harrow pulled his hand away and cradled it to his chest. Levan cast a healing spell over the cut, and the skin instantly knitted back together as though it had never been parted. Saffron caught the small smile of satisfaction on Levan’s face as he watched the wound mend.

With an immense grinding noise, the engraved cave wall folded in on itself, revealing a secret entrance to another chamber. As an arch appeared in the rock, cold, stale air wafted out from the next cave—cold, stale air that had likely been trapped for a thousand years.

Saffron shivered uncontrollably as the air washed over her, and with it came a sense of wrongness, of dread and foreboding and the violent urge to run.

All the worst moments of her life flooded her body as though a dam holding them back had finally burst. Her parents’ deaths, the burnt honey stink of it. An eyeball carved out by her own hand. Captain Aspar bleeding from the mouth, the chest. The look of pity and hate on Auria’s face as Saffron pleaded for her understanding. The long, cold, barren months in Duncarzus, hungry and afraid and so very alone.

She wanted to collapse to the ground, to keen and moan and cry, to give up, give up, give up, because none of this was worth it. All her worldly suffering paled in comparison with what was to come. She would never know peace again if she stepped into that second cave, never feel sun on her skin or the feeling of laughter, never—

“Oh hells, no.” Harrow took a tremulous step back, face pale as the moon and glowing faintly red from the illuminated writing. “Whatever lies beyond that arch is evil.”

Miret staggered, almost falling beneath the crushing weight of the despair. He muttered something in Eqoran, withdrawing his velvet pouch of Saint stones and tipping them into his palm for strength.

Saffron forced deep breaths into her lungs, trying to channel the sense of doom into action, as she always had before, but it was hard. Saints, it was hard, all her bones turned to lead, her heart petrified like lightning-struck soil. Better not run; in fact, better just to curl up in a ball and perish, because there was no way she could go on with life knowing a sorrow this powerful existed, no way she could see the light beyond it.

Levan was the only one who seemed unrattled by it, and with a horrible lurch, Saffron realized it was because he was used to this depth of turmoil. He lived with it every day.

“Shall we?” the kingpin said blandly, stepping through the arch into the dark cave beyond.

61

• • • •

Ancient Bones

Saffron followed Levan through the dissolved archway, her ribs heavy with dread. They were walking to their certain doom.

Did he not feel it, did he not know? Or did he not care?

The knowledge of their imminent demise was so overwhelming, so clear, that her blood coursed with ice, with something more electric still, the feeling of lightning an inch from striking earth, and yet there he was, strolling ahead, unbothered, resolve etched in the stoic lines of his body. Miret followed, though Harrow was still slumped on the floor in the previous cave, clutching his healed hand to his chest and shaking his head violently against the savage tide of sorrow.

The next chamber was larger than the first, and far darker. It took Saffron’s eyes several moments to adjust, even when Levan illuminated his wand tip. The proportions of the space defied logic and reason, the ceiling so high that it surely protruded past the top of the cliff above, while the floor was a circle so perfect it was surely hewn by mage instead of nature. An outer ring of rocky land surrounded another pool of inky water—round as a brand poker and deathly still—with a raised platform of circular stone at the center. The entire chamber was arranged like an Augur eye, and Saffron was struck with the suspicion that if any of them set foot in the dark water, it would swirl like the pupil of an ancient prophet.

“What is that?” Levan muttered, squinting across the pool. “On top of the platform? Hells, I think I need glasses.”

Saffron’s vision was sharpening. “A deminite chest, and a set of ancient bones.”

“Oh my.” Miret shuddered viscerally. “Someone who tried to steal the prophecy and failed?”

“Or Sarcane himself,” Levan suggested. “It seems like the sort of dramatic thing an Augur would do. Seal themselves in a cave and die next to their life’s work.”

“Are you sure it’s deminite?” Miret asked. “The chest. It seems the malevolent energy is emanating from there, and deminite shouldn’t have such an effect.”

Levan frowned in genuine confusion. “What malevolent energy?”

Trying to ignore the fresh peal of sadness, Saffron turned to Miret. “I’m fairly sure it’s deminite from the hue and lack of luster. Though that doesn’t make sense—why would a prophecy need to be sealed inside a chest that dulls magic?”

Levan rubbed at his jaw. “I suppose it won’t be as easy as walking through the water to retrieve it.”

“Your healing is at full power, you say?” Miret asked. When Levan nodded, the old scholar sank to his knees beside the water and lowered a forefinger into it. Levan yelled his warning, and Saffron lurched toward the blue-cloaked academic, but when his skin touched the ink-dark pool, nothing happened. Miret shrugged, withdrew, and said genially, “The water seems fine to me, though deeper than it looks. We might have to swim.”

“I can’t swim,” Levan admitted.

“You can’t swim, mil?” Miret seemed horrified by this confession, as though Levan had confessed to enjoying the flayed skin of newborn babes as a snack.

Levan stiffened. “Most people learn as children, and my childhood was rather…busy.”

“Ah.” Miret shuffled awkwardly. “Salron?”

It took Saffron a few minutes to realize the borderline-senile old man meant her. “Oh—no, I can’t either. My mother was overprotective—she was a Healer who’d failed to save a child who drowned in the river. Wouldn’t let me near water.”

“A certain irony to her argument, is there not?” Miret said. “Surely teaching you to swim would have reduced the chances of a fatal accident.”

“I’ll be sure to share your parenting feedback with her,” Saffron replied dryly.

More awkward mumbling from the old man. “Well, shall I?”

Saffron and Levan exchanged a worried glance. Saffron felt they should study the scenario in more depth, put more thought into the best path forward, and yet she also acknowledged that the old man was several orders of magnitude smarter than her, and they were battling for time against the imminent high tide.

“Have you checked for magical frequencies in the water? On the rocky platform?”

Miret nodded sagely. “Other than whatever’s inside that evil chest, there are no other enchantments in this cave. The water is just water.”

Saffron raised her wand. “Et ascevolo,” she incanted, hoping to levitate the chest over the water, but the spell simply sank into it like a body disappearing into quicksand. There was a thirst to the vanishing magic, as though the malevolent spirit inside had drunk it like a tonic. “Does the chest have locking charms on it? A password, perhaps?”

“Not that I can tell.”

Levan shifted his weight. “Sarcane wouldn’t risk a password—such a thing could so easily be lost to the sands of time. He didn’t hide the prophecy so that nobody could ever find it. He would have just destroyed it, if that was his aim. He wanted the right mage to find it.”

“So Sarcane would have wanted the right mage to kill those wardholders?” Saffron asked quietly, knowing the question would hit like a hammer, but needing the answer anyway. “Or was there another way we didn’t see?”

Levan took several steadying breaths. “I think he would have known the right mage would have done whatever it took. Your father wrote that he had foreseen many of your heinous deeds leading up to this point. Sarcane would have known you’d take a handful of lives to potentially save many.”

“Assuming this does foretell me preventing a war,” Saffron countered, that feeling of dread in her belly knotting tighter now that they were right up at the coal face of the future.

“Yes,” Levan said quietly. “Assuming that.”

He did not meet her gaze—because Miret was already stripping off his clothes.

Miret’s body was narrow, wrinkled, covered in skin tags and several scars unbefitting of a scholar who spent most of his time in a library. Saffron had the acute sensation of looking at an old map.

In naught but his knee-length underwear, he waded into the water.

“Haleen’ah!” he gasped—the Eqoran cursing equivalent of fucking hells.

“What? What is it?” Levan dashed forward, kneeling by the edge of the black pool and extending a hand.

“It’s cold.” Miret’s teeth chattered violently as he kicked off from the edge.

He made clumsy paddling motions toward the rocky platform. His progress was slow and stuttering, and Saffron thought it was a bit of a stretch to call himself a swimmer, but given that he was risking hypothermia for the sake of her mission, it didn’t seem polite to criticize his technique.

Eventually the old man reached the platform, hauling himself up with a surprising amount of upper body strength. Though his arms were slender, the brown skin wrinkled and papery, there was the unmistakable cording of muscle and sinew beneath the surface. His shivering intensified upon the dark rock, and Saffron worried he might expire there and then.

“Et ascevolo,” she incanted again, hurriedly this time, levitating his clothes over the surface of the water and landing them in a heap beside him.

“In retrospect,” Miret muttered, clumsily wrapping his raiment back around himself, “perhaps I should have tried to levitate myself.”

Saffron laughed. “If it were that easy, magekind would have mastered birdlike flight many centuries ago.” It was theoretically possible, but most were afraid to try—if the caster’s magical well emptied halfway through, or they were otherwise distracted or wounded while holding the enchantment, the flier would plummet to their death.

Once Miret was dressed, he tremulously knelt to examine the chest. “Deminite, indeed. Explains why it couldn’t be levitated. Kaf juriat…”

How curious.

The dread inside Saffron deepened, darkened. The urge to run, to never look back, or perhaps to curl up in a ball and perish.

Thanks for this, Dad, she thought bitterly.

“It would appear,” Miret said mildly, after running his palms over the chest one more time, “that I can simply open the clasp and lift the lid. Shall I?”

No, screamed some primal instinct inside Saffron.

“Yes,” said her mouth, because what else could they do? “We only have a quarter of an hour before the tide comes in, and we cannot levitate the chest out of the cave, let alone up a sheer cliff face.”

“Very well,” Miret said calmly.

Too calmly—eerily, supernaturally calmly. As though being…coaxed by something.

Something unseen, something terrible.

That voice inside Saffron kept screaming no.

She tried not to listen, not to hear. Not to believe.

Miret flipped up the silver clasp with a casual thumb, seemingly hardened to the crushing waves of sorrow and despair washing through the air. Somewhere in the first cave, Harrow still moaned and muttered.

The whole world seemed to slow, time treacling and congealing until seconds no longer felt as rigid or boundaried as they used to. Entire lifetimes, entire universes, could fit into a lone minute.

The lid opened slowly, and then all at once, as though shoved from within.

All the air sucked into the center of the room, like an enormous invisible creature had inhaled.

And then—

—a shadow.

A shape, a blur, a smear of pure darkness, soared from the chest.

It swirled through the air like a tornado.

Miret threw himself backward, wrists slamming into the rock, but did not cry out. None of them did. Sound had ceased to function normally, at once deathly loud and unearthly silent.

The shadow plunged into the set of bones.

And the bones leapt to life.

Monstrous, ungodly life.

They blackened to soot, assembling themselves in the approximate shape of a wolf standing on hind legs. The skull filled with dark smoke, eyes glowing white in cavernous sockets.

Saffron thought her bladder might empty, thought her body might simply cease to stand from the sheer depth of her terror.

All at once, she knew—without truly knowing—what she was looking at.

“I always thought it might have something to do with the Sordai.”

“The ancient foe Parlin defeated?”

“Parlin lived a thousand years ago, did he not?”

Saffron had been so dismissive. But the bones of her, the soul of her, knew exactly what she was looking at. As though her ancient ancestors had passed down the knowledge of it, an inherited understanding, borne of world-ending fear.

That’s who the internal screams belonged to. The innate terror, the inherent dread.

It was theirs. The mages from a thousand years back in her bloodline.

These thoughts and realizations occurred between one second and the next, and in that time, the Sordai hovered suspended over the rocky platform, eyeless but with eyes, soundless but somehow roaring, and then it swooped down, down—

—straight at Miret.

Miret tried to roll away, to scramble back, but he wasn’t fast enough.

The Sordai dove into him, through him, and out the other side.

Taking with it…something.

A light, a glow. Something essential and life-giving.

It moved through Miret, and it drank.

Levan bellowed, his wand drawn, but what curse or counter spell could he fire?

Miret slumped to the ground, though he was not dead. He was simply…changed. Duller, emptier. Like Segal after he had Risen.

“Levan,” Saffron screamed. “What does Sordai mean in Ancient Sarthi?”

“Soul death,” Levan murmured, coming to the same terrible realization as Saffron.

The Sordai swooped and swirled through the air above, brighter now, stronger.

“Don’t let it touch you,” Miret whispered, the words echoing around the towering cave, then muttered the Saints’ Prayer in guttural, fearful Eqoran.

“Sen ammorten,” Saffron yelled, aiming her wand at the floating Sordai.

Thanks to half a decade of shooting practice at the Academy, her aim was true. But it didn’t matter. The killing curse sailed straight through the Sordai’s belly, ineffectual, meaningless.

It turned to stare at her, through her, and then dove again.

Saffron ducked and rolled away just in time, but it changed course at the last minute, plunging toward Levan, who took two staggering steps backward.

“Ans clyptus,” Saffron roared, and a shimmering spellshield leapt from the tip of her wand into the air between Levan and the Sordai.

The Sordai slammed straight into it, and though Saffron shuddered from the impact, the shield held.

Levan regained his composure and quickly sidestepped, jump-twirling around the side of the shield and incanting, “Sen debilitan.”

A curse without honorable intentions, though hopefully the self-preservatory nature would encourage magic to heed his command.

The curse leapt from his wand, sharp and true, driving into the skull of the Sordai. But again the spell had no impact on the monster; it simply drank the magic like a tonic, its form shining brighter and sharper still.

Worse—it was stealing her shield.

Whorls of the glowing bronze-gold matter drifted into the Sordai, like iron filings drawn to a magnet. Horrified, Saffron let the shield drop, breathless with fear. Her lungs burned like coals behind her ribs.

How could they defeat a foe that gained strength from killing curses?

She chastised herself for never paying attention to Parlin the Great lore in school, although she wasn’t certain anyone truly remembered how he’d beaten the Sordai a thousand years ago. Something about a wand from the Elm of Eternity, but…no. All she recalled, all anyone recalled, was the impressive length and girth of his famous vock.

In magekind’s defense, the Sordai were supposed to be long extinct. Yet Sarcane had left one here to guard the Fifth Prophecy. Had left bones for the monster to reanimate. It was smart, effective. Too much so. It was invincible, unvanquishable.

Had Sarcane assumed the right mage would know how to best such a beast? Had he assumed that Parlin’s knowledge of the ancient foe would endure through the centuries?

If so, he had woefully underestimated the tendency humans had to forget the distant past. Auria had often tiraded about societal decline and the hallmarks of decadence. If the Vallish had given history the weight it deserved, if they hadn’t been so distracted by wine and sex and gambling and chariot races and all the empty pleasures of their hedonistic land…

These thoughts happened instantly, simultaneously, as the Sordai chased Levan around the cave. Saffron pursued the Sordai itself, throwing up spellshields over and over again as it lunged for her lover, but while the initial collision of monster with magic bought Levan time to flee, every time the Sordai would end up drinking the shield, gaining more power.

Saffron’s well was emptying by the second—and her enemy was strengthening. Fear guillotined through her as she wondered how exponential said strength might be.

Miret was limp, lame, on the rocky platform. Levan was a single lapsed spellshield from meeting the same soul death. Cold sweat poured from Saffron’s shoulder blades with the effort of keeping him safe.

Harrow entered the cave, wand raised, hand trembling, as though coming to see what all the fuss was about, but at the sight of the dark flying skeleton with glowing eyes and a malevolent smoke billowing from its body, he muttered, “Oh fuck no,” and promptly ran back in the direction of the rope.

Did he have the right idea?

Should they somehow try to flee?

Miret wasn’t in any fit state—soul-dead, whatever that meant. And without the prophecy, it would all be for naught.

Where was the prophecy? At the bottom of the chest?

“Miret!” Saffron called over the inky water, hoping the Sordai would not comprehend—especially when Ancient Sarthi was the common language last time the monster had walked Ascenfall. “Check the chest for the relic wand.”

Miret dragged himself toward the chest, though the sloughing movement was weak, unhurried, as though he could not convince his body to care.

Saffron turned her gaze to raise another spellshield, and though her aim was true and it held up the Sordai, the monster was doing something different. It had gained enough form from the magic it consumed to have something resembling a palm, and it was this oar-shaped extremity that it raised in the air now, expectant, charged.

Through bottomless almost-eyes, it studied her so slowly, so hungrily, so deliberately that every muscle in Saffron’s body begged her to flee. Those distant ancestors wailed a warning from beyond the veil, but her magical immunity would protect her—it had to, this gift from her father, bestowed upon her in the name of this very quest, handed down like a beloved cloak, born from—

The Sordai thrust its palm outward, loosing a cord of violent, blinding white.

The whole cave illuminated like a dying sun.

The cord locked on to Saffron like a manacle, like a kiss of death.

Her father’s protection failed.

Something was being pulled from her, lassoed on the rope of sinister magic. Her will to live. Her very soul. Perhaps this was a power so ancient and arcane that a lone mage’s sacrifice could not even begin to contain it.

For several moments—maybe seconds, maybe centuries—Saffron felt a sense of peace as the desire to exist bled from her.

How much easier it would be to relinquish all the struggles that kept her moving forward. How much easier it would be to surrender. She could rest, for the first time in her adult life. She could simply be. Empty of that poisonous desire for revenge, empty of that heavy sense of duty, of obligation. She would be so light, so free.

It would feel so good—was already feeling so good.

She sighed around the yanking, tugging sensation, at the cord of white pulling behind her ribs. There was pleasure in it, so much pleasure, and what was a mage without pleasure? She’d never felt pleasure like it, the euphoric texture, the undercurrent of rightness, every cell in her body glowing as though bathed in saintly light.

True acquiescence was close. It brought with it a dreamy, floating feeling, like dying peacefully in one’s sleep. Why had she ever made it so difficult for herself? Why had she turned every day into a fraught mission for something greater? Why had she not just let herself be? Exist, exist, that’s all, unburdened by petty human wants.

Distantly, someone was roaring.

“SILVER! Fight! Fight, Silver!”

A male, ragged roar, familiar, aching.

Some internal hand grabbed onto the rope of grotesque soul magic and held it fast.

The Sordai grunted its displeasure.

“Yes! Silver, that’s it! Whatever you’re doing—keep doing it!”

Levan, his name.

Serious and tender, soft and kind and tormented, devastatingly smart, a Healer, a dragon nerd, a gifted writer, a tortured little boy, a mage with the weight of the world on his shoulders. He was so many things, but above all else, she wanted him to be hers. She wanted to feel his heart beating through the warm skin of his chest as she rested her head against it. She wanted to feel his fingers stroke her hair, wanted to press a kiss against his temple, his branded heart.

Wanted to love him.

Loved him already.

Enough to hold on.

Now the cord of soul magic was not just halted—she was tugging it, inch by painstaking inch, back into herself. And it hurt, Saints, it hurt to go against nature, to go against what the animal of her body so craved, to beat back oblivion, to tap into her higher mind, her higher purpose.

Purpose. Purpose had brought her here.

Her hand found the wooden pendant resting between her collarbones.

She thought of her mother, her father, her home in Lunes, how badly she wanted to go back.

The brush of her father’s lips on her forehead as he carried her up the spiral staircase, after she’d fallen asleep by the fire following a long illusion-practicing session. Her mother’s laugh as she danced around the kitchen, tipsy on honeywine and on life. The swoop in her own belly as she careened around the village on a flying carpet, the whooping and hollering of the Sleeping Wolf’s patrons as they cheered her on. The weeping silence of that same tavern following her dead parents’ jeweling ceremony, the new weight of the pendant around her young neck.

The cord was flowing back into her now, and so too were her desires.

She wanted to be back in the Order, she realized. When she unmade time, and brought back her parents, she still wanted to become a Silvercloak. To relive that year at the Academy with her cohort, with Nissa and Auria, Sebran and Tiernan and Gaian. To graduate, to wear silver. To make the world better, safer, so that no other children would ever have to go through what she did.

She wanted it all. Her family, her lover, her friends.

To save the world.

With a huge wrench, she hauled her soul, her will, back into her body, and felt the cord tying her to the Sordai shudder and snap.

She staggered backwards—had she been standing? When did that happen?—and fell to the rocky ground, pain jolting through the heels of her hands, reminding her she was alive.

She had done it.

She had fought a Sordai and won.

Perhaps this was what Sarcane had counted on—not that the right mage would know exactly how to defeat the creature in open battle, but that they would have enough strength of character, enough sense of self, enough raw want to fight off its attacks. To keep their will, their soul, firmly inside their body.

Miret had not been so lucky. He was old, near the end of his life, with little except rote faith and academic curiosity propelling him through his days. His will was ripe for the taking, and he had relinquished it with little resistance.

And Levan was weakened by loxlure, by pain, by the weight of his endless grief. Saffron could not let the Sordai’s evil rope of magic lasso him. He might not have the strength to wrangle free.

She climbed to her feet, gasping, shaking.

Across the cave, Levan’s shoulders slumped with relief.

The Sordai lost a little brightness, a little shape, as though its corded attack was a charge it had used up and now had to start fresh. Once again it began its pursuit of Levan, diving and dancing around him, forcing Saffron to keep casting her spellshield—which it then drank.

“We have to starve it of magic,” Levan yelled at her.

“How? I need to protect you.”

“To what end, Silver? Sooner or later, you’ll run out of magic and won’t be able to cast the shield. It’ll plunge into me and do whatever it’s done to Miret. What it almost did to you. The only thing we can do is try to escape.”

Desperation flared inside Saffron.

They had to run, but how could they leave Miret?

“Miret!” Saff yelled, right after flinging another bronze spellshield over Levan’s body. The Sordai fed hungrily, as though drinking directly from her very well. Her whole body shook, weakening by the second. “The chest! Is the wand there?”

“Umpf,” replied Miret helpfully, forcing Saffron to cast a glance over.

He was holding up the relic wand.

Relief coursed through her, mingling with desperation and fear.

At least this had not all been for nothing.

If they could just get out of this hellforsaken cave, even if they weren’t able to destroy the Sordai…perhaps it wouldn’t be able to follow. Perhaps it was weak to daylight, perhaps—

Another sound came, more terrifying than even the Sordai.

A trickle, then a rush.

Realization crashed into Saffron like a physical thing.

“The tide,” Levan called hoarsely, heaving with exertion. “The tide is coming in.”

62

• • • •

Merciful Tide

The tide could save them—or it could ruin them.

It depended on two things: the existence of scarsharks, and whether the Sordai could drown. The monster hadn’t made any contact with the inky pool.

“Levan,” Saffron shouted, taking off at a run toward the dissolved archway. Seawater flowed into the mouth of the cave. Harrow was nowhere to be seen. “Jump into the rockpool and sink below the surface. See if it follows.”

For a split second it looked like Levan, who could not swim, might counter with petty fears such as drowning, but then his mind caught up with Saffron’s theory, and with a stoic expression, he took a running leap into the crab-strewn surface of the ink-dark water.

The Sordai pursued him while he was still on land, but the second Levan disappeared into the pool, the Sordai froze to a halt in midair. Then it floated back and forth over the surface of the water, pacing, waiting for Levan to reappear.

When Levan hauled himself back onto the edge of the rockpool, the Sordai swooped down twice as fast, twice as furious, and Saffron narrowly cast the spellshield in time. As the monster collided with it, and then inevitably devoured it, Saffron sensed that it would be one of the last she was able to conjure.

Yet now they had a weakness to exploit.

“It couldn’t follow you,” Saffron gasped, feeling as though her bones were made of lead. “Can you—”

But Levan was already in motion.

“Don aquiss,” he bellowed, the deep tenor echoing like thunder around the cave.

The black water rose from the pool like a wall. With a flick of his wand, Levan lassoed it into shape, hurling a long rope-like coil of it straight at the Sordai. Though the Sordai effortlessly glided away to dodge it, there was a flare of white light in those hideous skull holes, as though it was angered.

Levan kept lashing curls of water at it, fast and furious, until two things happened.

One, that it grew harder for the Sordai to dodge, because the whole cave was a riot of water.

Two, that the rockpool gradually emptied, its bottom exposed.

As the seawater gushed in from the outer cave, Saffron wasted no time sprinting down the steep slope onto the floor of the pool, her boots crunching and squelching over the fossilized carcasses of slowcrabs and opalfish, then back up the other side, scrabbling with both hands and feet onto the platform where Miret lay moaning and murmuring. Her palms bled, cut open on the craggy rock, but she barely noticed the hot, stabbing gush as she scooped the old man up in her arms. He weighed less than a sandbag, though that might have been the adrenaline.

Breathing raggedly, the old scholar went to hand her the relic wand.

“No,” Saffron snapped, too harshly. “Not yet, not here. If I touch it, the prophecy might play out, and the tide’s coming in.”

Levan lashed more tendrils of water at the Sordai, buying Saffron time to rescue Miret and the prophecy. But the rockpool was filling again, this time with seawater. They didn’t have long before the scarsharks descended.

“Hold on to me,” Saffron murmured to Miret.

Returning to the basin of the pool was far harder with Miret in her arms. She sat on the lip of the rocky platform, then shuffled on her backside over the jutting crags, feeling the fabric of her cloak and her trousers tear, barely wincing at the cut of rock into her flesh. By the time she reached the bottom, the water was high enough to cover the top of her boots—and filling fast.

Wading inelegantly to the other side, she realized she couldn’t scale it while still carrying the old scholar. She pressed his limp form against the wall of the pool so that his feet angled down, his body sloping at an angle. Through gritted teeth, she cast et esilan at his boots.

He lurched up and over the lip of the pool edge, landing on the saltwater-slicked cave floor. She scrabbled after him, smearing the rocks with a burgundy slick from her palms. Every inch of her was wet—with sweat, with wielded water, with blood. That crushing sorrow still washed through her, like a new vein network had opened with the express purpose of transporting dread through her body. She felt certain she was about to die.

What happened next was like watching some great tragedy occur from afar.

A wide ribbon of seawater belted into the second cave, carrying with it a scarshark. Saffron saw the outline—the maroon scales, the arrow-shaped head, the snarl and gnash of venomous black teeth—before her body fully registered the reality.

The scarshark swam straight for Miret.

“No!” she and Levan both screamed at once, as a dark mouth closed around Miret’s side.

The shark’s head wrenched viciously, taking a chunk of Miret’s torso with him.

The water did not fill with blood; the scarshark’s bite cauterized the wound closed. Miret was too far gone to wail or scream. His head simply tipped to the side, as though falling asleep, the shock and pain knocking him clean unconscious.

In his horror, Levan let all the rockpool water crash down at once.

It all fell on the Sordai, and the ancient monster went under.

The cave was nearly a quarter full of water, and the only mage who could swim was in a coma-like state, his grip on the Fifth Prophecy loosening and then uncupping entirely.

Levan conjured another thin tendril of water, lassoed it around the relic wand, and yanked it into his own palm. Tucking it into his waistband, he hauled Miret’s mangled body over his shoulder and bellowed at Saffron to follow.

Waist-deep in water, Saffron and Levan waded toward the archway, knowing that somewhere around them swirled a scarshark hungry for flesh and a Sordai that could…do whatever it had done to Miret. Each desperate step took an eternity, heavy with water and swaying under the sheer force of the tide, the water gushing into the cave shoving them back and forth, side to side.

Somehow, they reached the archway between the two chambers, water up to their chests, normal steps becoming impossible. Because the first cave was smaller and lower than the second, it was almost entirely full of water.

“Don aquiss,” Levan incanted, voice ragged and weak now.

The water parted into two taller banks, creating a corridor through which they could run to the mouth of the cave, which was still flooding with the sea. The tide flowed into the cave and immediately separated into the two banks, but the banks were not solid, not steady. They tremored and wobbled under the strain of Levan’s magic, and Saffron knew he could not hold them for much longer.

Mercifully they reached the mouth of the cave—

—only to find that the rope they’d left hanging down was gone.

“Harrow,” growled Saffron, with all the ferality of a wild fallowwolf.

“No.” Levan shook his head frantically, whole body trembling. “Harrow is a coward, but he doesn’t want us dead.”

“Doesn’t he?” Saffron all but spat, thinking of how Harrow had, on many, many occasions, declared himself untrustworthy. It was easier to feel searing hatred for him than it was to feel the utter desolation of their situation.

“Maybe the rope fell after he escaped. Maybe it’s somewhere around here.”

There was the faintest scrap of magic left in Saffron’s well. She focused on the pain in her palms from scaling the craggy rocks, letting the burn penetrate the rush of fear and adrenaline. As the warmth grew into a hot, sharp sting, the magic in her well deepened and glowed like liquid gold.

She aimed her wand vaguely into the thrashing gray seawater, focusing her intent on the exact color and texture of the rope.

“Et convoqan,” she incanted, a simple summoning spell.

No rope rose to meet it.

She tried several times to no avail. Finally, desperately, she incanted another esilan at Levan’s boots, attempting to propel him and Miret high enough to clear the cliff, but they barely moved.

Her well was emptied.

Moments after her own magic ran out, so too did Levan’s.

They looked at each other, a thousand emotions passing from his blue eyes to her hazel. Tucking away his wand, he extended the hand not clutching Miret, and she took it. His skin was surprisingly warm in the freezing water.

Behind them in the cave, the banks of water crashed together, the force of which thrust against their backs and shoved them out into the icy, churning sea.

Saffron was plunged underwater, the cold and the salt stinging at her eyes and mouth, but she did not let go of Levan’s hand.

Many believed drowning to be a peaceful death, but when the will to live still burned so brightly, no death could be peaceful. The desire to save the world, to save Levan, was too strong. Save herself, her parents. There was so much still to do, and purpose beat through her like a heartbeat, that determination and meaning she’d found while fighting the Sordai in the cave.

Though she could not swim, she held on to life for as long as she could.

Her lungs burned from lack of air, muscles screaming.

The blue-gray of the water vignetted into black.

Save me, she screamed at all the Saints she had never quite believed in.

Save us.

There was an almighty tug of current, and at first Saffron thought that was it, the furious wave that would smash her into the cliff, but then she was above water, gasping, spluttering, and she realized it had been Levan’s arm hauling her up.

After the salt water cleared from her vision and several gulps of frigid winter air reinflated her lungs, she peeled open her eyes to see a few distinct shapes.

Levan, still holding Miret.

A rope.

A cliff.

And Harrow Claver’s anxious face peering over the top.

“Go first.” Levan’s teeth clenched with the effort of holding both her and Miret.

Saffron’s body moved of its own accord, hauling up the cliff with the new rope, her cut palms transcending pain into a cold white numbness, and then Levan was climbing behind her, Miret still flung over his shoulder, and then, somehow, impossibly, they were all slumped in the snow on top of the cliff, gasping, gasping, but alive.

Rasso was there, panting, licking, wheedling at Miret’s wounded side.

“Harrow,” panted Levan, flat on his back with the heels of his hands pressed into his eye sockets. “What in all the hells happened?”

“Relar cut the first rope,” Harrow replied, breathless and leaning back against the tree trunk the rope was tied around. “After I…fled…I was waiting behind the tree line for you to reappear. Relar dashed out of the woods, didn’t see me. The rope was cut before I realized what he was doing.”

“You didn’t think to stop him?” Saffron tried to snarl, but instead erupted into a waterlogged coughing fit. She had never been as cold or as exhausted, her entire body both hard as ice and clumsy as jelly.

“I tried,” Harrow snapped back. “But he was frantic, feral. Tear-stricken, beside himself. Said the Bloodmoons protecting his grandmother were dead and soon his grandmother would be too, no matter what he did next. He fled, muttering something about letting us all destroy one another. I ran the whole way back to Flarence to buy another rope. You’re welcome, by the way.”

“Welcome?” Saffron stared at him incredulously. “You abandoned us to fight an ancient foe and then—”

“The Bloodmoons protecting the apothecary are dead?” Levan interrupted, clearly more perturbed by this news than the King’s Prophet’s cowardice. “Whitewings. It must be.”

At the mention of the name, Harrow’s face blanched—which was impressive, when it was so pale to begin with. “Levan, there’s something I need to tell you about the Whitewings. About their leader. It—”

“Not now,” Levan muttered, forcing his depleted body up off the snow to examine Miret. He pressed two fingers to the scholar’s throat, feeling for a pulse, and grimaced at what he found. “Weak. Watery. Far, far too cold, and I’m out of magic. We need to get him back to the inn. I don’t know how to begin healing him—whether this can be healed.”

For the first time, Saffron looked at the hole the scarshark had left in the old scholar’s body. It started just above the hip bone and ended just below the ribs, everything in between missing in a perfectly smooth semicircle. There was something uncanny about the lack of blood, the lack of a visible wound.

“If we can get him to Tålun,” Saff whispered, “maybe he could…”

Do what, she didn’t know.

“I’m less concerned about the wound than whatever that Sordai did to him.” Levan laid his golden palm on his surrogate grandfather’s chest, a brief but intense pain cresting on his face. “Miret? Miret, can you hear me?” He kneeled lower, forehead resting atop his hand. “Please, wake up. Please. Or I’ll send a necromancer to raise you, and I know how little you want that.”

Miraculously, Miret’s eyes drifted open. The goading worked, and yet there was a sort of emptiness to the scholar’s gaze. An awful blankness.

“Can you describe what you’re feeling?” Levan sat upright, talking more urgently. “What the Sordai did?

Miret closed his eyes again. He didn’t seem to have noticed his gigantic torso wound. “My magic—it’s gone. Not just an empty well, but…the well entirely. It stole it from me. As the legends say. They steal a well, then drink the magic of other mages to fill it. And I find that I do not care. I do not care about anything, truthfully. I could die right now and not overly mind.”

Saffron recalled how close she had been to relinquishing her own soul, her own will, and felt violently ill. Shivering rather extremely, she muttered to Levan, “Do you think the Sordai drowned in the cave? Or do you think it managed to get out?”

Levan shook his head. “I have no idea.”

“Saints.” She let her own eyes fall closed. “We might have just released a Sordai back into the world. That’s…terrifying.”

“It is. But we also got what we came for.”

Levan pulled the relic wand from his waistband.

Harrow’s eyes widened, breath hitched.

Only now, under the rheumy light of a winter’s day, could Saffron properly discern the wand’s features. It was smooth, hard, the color of fresh snow—an extremely rare and ancient kind of whitebeam. Its surface was covered in various engravings, from rune-like symbols to Ancient Sarthi expressions she couldn’t translate, and the handle was a grooved cone of ascenite inset with thin gold rings.

Saffron reached out her hand, and Levan set the relic wand into it.

The world bleached white, and the Fifth Prophecy began.

63

• • • •

The Fifth Prophecy

It starts with an image.

Saffron Killoran sits atop the Vallish throne, an intricate fallowwolf-shaped crown nestled in her wild silver-blond curls, a weaverwick wand in her palm. Her cloak falls in rich swathes of purple velvet and gold satin. Her face is set with stony terror, her fingernails digging into the arm of the ancient seat.

The image widens.

By her side, on another throne, is Harrow Claver. He wears no crown, and though his cloak is the same unctuous purple velvet, it’s streaked with Foreseer bronze instead of Timeweaver gold. They wear matching engraved rings on their middle fingers, silver bands engraved with Ancient Sarthi.

Behind them in the throne room hangs a vast purple banner with an unfamiliar sigil, a white fallowwolf curled like a snake around a gold hourglass, its pupils spiraled like an Augur’s. Beneath the sigil, in formal letterplate, are the words: House Killaver.

The image widens again.

The throne room is carnage. A vast, opulent space hewn from pure ascenite—more ascenite than exists in the rest of the country, enough to dwarf even the Bloodmoon’s overflowing vaults. Yet it has not been enough to save them. Tapestries burn, and walls crumble, and the Palace echoes with the roars of violent battle. Petrified guards stand with wands raised, preparing to die defending their monarchs.

The image widens, pans out.

Atherin is under siege.

The Great Wards have fallen, and three armies have breached the city walls: the green-cloaked Bellandrians, the coral-cloaked Joribali, and the gray-cloaked Nyrøthi. The River Corven has been wielded like a weapon, lifted from its groove and washed through the city in a terrible bloody gush. Buildings have crumbled, and the streets are flooded with crushed and drowned bodies: men, women, children, babies. Piles of cloakless Ludders are stacked like sandbags fortifying a trench. Debris of wands and coins and tiny infant shoes scatter the surface of the water, the flotsam and jetsam of a desolated magekind.

The image narrows all the way to its beginning.

Saffron turns to Harrow. She looks both older and ageless. “We have to unmake now, while we’re still surrounded by ascenite.”

“How far?” he murmurs, hoarse with existential terror. “We’ve unmade so much. It never ends differently, and reality is growing frayed. If you’re not precise, you’ll cleave the fabric of the world in two.”

“So let it cleave. The world is ending anyway.”

Saffron lifts her weaverwick wand, climbs to her feet, and closes her eyes. Reluctantly, Harrow stands beside her, lacing his fingers through hers. Their matching rings glow like iron on a forge.

When she utters the word, there’s an air of finality to it, of resignation, of fear and self-loathing and utter, utter despair.

“Tempavicissan.”

There’s an almighty tearing sound, and the world falls away, and there the prophecy ends.

Saffron reeled backward, stumbled, fell. It all slotted into terrible place.

Sarcane didn’t hide the prophecy because it foretold her saving the world from war, nor because she was going to redeem the Timeweavers from their terrible slaughter and rehabilitate them into public life.

No, the prophecy was hidden because she was going to end the world.

Saffron lay still in the snow for several moments, trying to process the magnitude of what she’d just seen. A thousand questions spiraled through her mind, as dark and terrible as the drowned corpses on the future streets of Atherin.

Why will Harrow sit the throne beside me?

What will happen to Levan?

Can we possibly prevent this devastating war?

Surely, surely, she could. She had already relegated one prophecy to another timeline—her killing of Levan, committed and then undone. Surely this could be undone too.

She had the Steel King’s letter. When she went back in time to save her parents, she would take it with her. Make sure it was handed to the Silvercloaks, to the king himself if she could. Give the Palace enough warning to prepare for a siege from the High North. Prevent the battle before it ever became a seed in the Bloodmoon kingpin’s mind.

Then again…what if knowing an attack was coming wasn’t enough to stop it?

Frantically running back over the Fifth Prophecy in her head, she tried to remember whether there had been any scarlet cloaks among the foreign forces—especially among the gray-cloaked Nyrøthi—but the visuals were already fading in her mind. Was there a way to replay the scene?

Beneath the confusion and the fear, there was also a desolate kind of sorrow, a balloon of swollen hope suddenly pierced, deflated. If the prophecy had foretold her saving the world, it could have led to the rehabilitation of Timeweavers, their historic pardoning. Lorissa Rezaran could have been a Hand of the Saints, and Levan could have been a Healer, and everything could have been different. Better. Now, if they were indeed successful in saving their parents…the queenpin would still seek the throne, perhaps violently.

Everything in Saffron splintered and broke at the thought of telling Levan.

Can’t you understand the appeal of being six years old again? Six years old, with a fresh field of snow in front of me? One unsoaked in blood, untainted by addiction. I would have no brand, both hands, nil ruinous cravings, and two parents who loved me. Can’t you understand why I want that so desperately?

Panic rose and fell with her breath. There was so much to consider—and it took her several moments to realize she was not the only one considering it.

Her gaze found Harrow’s.

The King’s Prophet’s expression was like none she had ever seen before. Horror and awe and confusion. Hunger perhaps, and curiosity, and…validation? But mostly horror. Deep and dark and devastating horror.

Levan looked between Harrow and Saffron, waiting for someone to say something. When nobody did, he slung out, “You saw it too, Harrow. You saw the prophecy.”

Neither Saffron nor Harrow found the words. They could not confess that they were going to sit the throne, oversee the end of the world…and that Levan would not be part of it.

“Silver,” Levan murmured, desperation threaded through the word.

She shook her head violently, the kernel of despair swelling in her chest, pressing out against her ribs.

The Augurests had been right. The Timeweavers would unmake the world.

She would unmake the world.

Trying to save it, of course—but she would unmake it nonetheless.

“Harrow,” Levan said, but now all the emotion was scrubbed from his tone. It was simply a command, and whether or not it was imbued with compelling magic, Harrow heeded it.

Saffron dropped her face into her hands and listened as Harrow told the kingpin everything.

Once Harrow had finished, Levan stood to his feet, smoothing down the front of his sea-soaked robes. His face was set like stone, like he was no longer a living, breathing mage with hopes or fears or emotions. He scooped Miret into his arms and then spoke with a ghostly emptiness.

“I’m taking Miret back to Flarence. Follow me or don’t.”

Before he was finished talking, he was already a dozen yards away, a hundred, and neither of them followed, neither of them even breathed.

And then Saffron was alone on a frozen clifftop with the mage who would stand by her side as she destroyed all of reality.

For several moments, there was only the sound of waves crashing against the cliffs, of soft snow crunching as Harrow began to pace. Everything was too white, too bright, too loud, and too quiet. Unreal, otherworldly.

“This is going to sound like the most arrogant thing any mage living or dead has ever uttered,” Saffron said slowly. “But I think I can prevent this.”

Somehow Harrow’s auburn hair was still arranged in perfect waves around his face, but his bronze cloak was disheveled and rock-torn. “How?”

Saffron leaned back against a tree trunk, the ridges of her skull rolling against the knots in the wood. A blackfox watched from a hundred yards away, head cocked. “Back at the Academy, I touched a relic wand that foretold me kissing Levan—and then killing him. In the Havenwood, that came to pass. Exactly as the relic wand had shown. I kissed him for what I believed was the last time, and then I killed him.” This confession hung between them like a noose. “But after that, a series of events went wrong, and I unmade that night, saved him. The death didn’t stick.

“So if I could override that prophecy, wrench us onto another timeline, who’s to say I can’t do the same with Sarcane’s vision? Maybe that’s what we saw at the end of the prophecy. Not me destroying the world, but pulling us onto a new timeline by force.”

Harrow stopped pacing, crossed to the edge of the cliff. Looked out over the slate-gray sea, the chalky sky above. “What if it isn’t?”

Saffron laid all her cards on the table. “Do you know what brought Levan and me back together, after the Havenwood? Once I realized the depths of what I could do, I realized that I might be able to wind back twenty-odd years and save both of our parents. With enough ascenite—and Saints, there was more than enough ascenite in that throne room—I could do it, Harrow. Save his parents, save mine. And in doing so, lead us into a safer world. A world unravaged by war.”

Harrow voice was deathly quiet as he said, “No.”

Saffron didn’t know exactly what he was saying no to, but resolve was hardening inside her, iron forged into steel. She stood, all the cold leaving her at once as she mentally charted a path. “First, I need a weaverwick. Not just for the broader plan, but to make sure we have total control over how fate unfolds. So that we can undo any mistakes, keep bloodshed to a minimum. Levan destroyed his mother’s wand, and I’ve been unable to find another. But we’re a stone’s throw from Nyrøth, where there might still be—”

“Stop.” Harrow turned to face her, and she was surprised to see that he was crying quite heavily, snow coating his lashes and then melting into the warm salt of his tears. “Stop. I can’t—I need time to…I can’t. I just found out I’m going to play a part in the world’s end.”

“Harrow—”

“King Quintan recently reestablished the death penalty for traitors.” His voice was clotted. “Did you know that? We could hang for this very conversation.”

Saffron did not know that.

The revelation sent a lightning bolt of fear through her, not only because of what the Fifth Prophecy had foretold, but because of what she was doing now. If she was caught while still inside the Bloodmoons, and she couldn’t prove her undercover status, she would lose her life.

But before she could respond, the King’s Prophet walked away—not in the direction of Flarence, where Levan was taking Miret, but deeper into the trees above the clifftop. The small forest into which Relar had run not half an hour earlier.

Saffron looked around, a sense of unreality washing the world into strange light.

Across the Cinereal Sea was Nyrøth, the brutal, pain-loving nation whose king had colluded with Lyrian Celadon to wage war against her homeland. A hostile, unforgiving place, where she’d be in danger the moment she stepped over the border, and yet perhaps the best chance she had at securing a weaverwick wand.

Behind her was Flarence. Levan, frantically trying to save the last real family he had left. Levan sad, afraid, grieving. Levan angry and confused at the prophecy, Levan just a moment of weakness away from loxlure relapse, Levan, Levan, Levan.

After several moments of indecision, she closed her eyes, ignored all logic, all cause and effect, and asked her gut what she should do.

The answer was clear. She opened her eyes, pulled her sodden cloak tighter around herself, and set off through the clean white snow.

64

• • • •

Fight or Freedom

Levan laid the fragile body of his beloved mentor on a tavern bed.

Miret, who had been drifting in and out of consciousness on the bitterly cold journey back to the inn, sighed as his head hit the cushion. Levan couldn’t look at the hole in the old man’s side—he knew enough about anatomy to know that the scarshark hadn’t gouged any major organs, but the right-hand ladder of Miret’s abdominal muscles had been torn away like meat from a bone. A hunk of rib too, no doubt.

The old man, however, showed no pain. Rasso leapt up next to him on the bed, curling his warm body into the scholar’s unwounded side. Miret patted the beast’s head absently, though it seemed to cost him an immense amount of effort, and there was little affection to it. Muscle memory, plain and simple. Levan found himself more devastated by Miret’s psychological state than his physical wounds.

The kingpin cupped his palms around a lantern, warmth washing through his hands, his arms. The sensation was slightly painful as his frozen flesh thawed, like tiny icy shards piercing his skin, but this worked to his advantage—the rich pleasure-pain combination trickled a small amount of magic back into his well, which he used to evaporate the water from Miret’s clothes, but Levan left his own raiment cold and wet. The sensation was making him suffer, and the longer he could bear suffering, the more potent the rush of pleasure when said suffering finally ended.

Somewhat unbelievably, it was still light outside. For a few moments, the clotted winter clouds parted, despite the enduring snowfall. Streaks of low, buttery sunlight washed through the window, turning snowflakes into fireflies so bright Levan had to turn away.

He looked instead at his mentor, the pallor of his skin, the limpness of his body. Turmoil brayed inside him, and he could not help but give voice to it.

“What am I supposed to do?” Levan asked, voice low and hoarse. He was very thirsty from all the salt water he’d accidentally swallowed, and yet such a concern felt so small, so meaningless, in light of what he’d just learned. “I knew when I met Silver that she was going to be the beginning and end of everything. I just thought the stakes were a little more personal than the end of the world.”

Miret smiled emptily. “She has an apocalyptic energy to her, does she not? Ruq a’l valqamin, we call it in Eqora. The air of the end days. Usually a compliment to describe a mage who feels like a force of nature, but this is rather more literal.”

“Do you believe in predestiny?” Levan restlessly stalked Miret’s room in a bid to keep his teeth from chattering, his limbs from trembling. “That everything is already written.”

Miret drew his Saints stones from their velvet pouch in his inner cloak pocket, spilling the small painted rocks into his wrinkled palm. He frowned at them, a look of betrayal on his face, as though he’d been expecting them to bolster him and they’d fallen short.

“Once, I believed in the guiding hand of the Saints in all things. I believed in our own power to do what is right, in accordance with the will of the Sixteen, no matter what has been previously ordained by prophecy. I believed that the Saints’ light was powerful enough to guide us through anything, to bend magekind along the arc of goodness through magic and faith.” Miret shook his head, as though trying to dispel a ringing in his ears. “Now I have seen the truth. There is nothing out there but us. No court, no arc. Magekind has always been alone.”

Something in Levan dropped. “Before your brush with the void, did you believe that the Augurs were…what? Fraudulent?”

“Far from it.” Miret ran a desolate thumb over the bronze stone that represented Evisusari, the patron saint of Foreseeing. “I believed the act of prophecy foretold what would happen if magekind continued along its current path. But I also believed it was possible to change that path.”

Magekind’s current path was abhorrent—yet, in Miret’s eyes, preventable.

The images Harrow described from the prophecy came back to haunt Levan, corpses piled up like sandbags, baby shoes and Saints stones bobbing along the surface of the drowned streets, like the slowcrabs and opalfish in that hellish cave.

Levan’s hands shook violently. He’d almost drowned, and though his brain was trying to forget this fact, his body wasn’t quite so quick to move on. “So you believe that if I follow the Saints’ light, I can prevent the Fifth Prophecy.”

Oh, the irony. His mother had been so certain that the Saints would bring peace to their world, and yet he’d abandoned his belief the night his father cast the first torture spell.

Miret stared blankly at the ceiling, as though he could see the sky through it. “I don’t believe anything at all.”

The kingpin gazed into the flickering orange diamond of the nearest candle flame, imagining it to be the fire of a Wielder corps just beyond Atherin’s city walls.

“Levan?”

“Yes?”

“Will you kill me now?”

A missed step feeling in Levan’s belly, a horrible lurching jerk. “What? No. Of course not.”

Miret’s vacant eyes drifted closed. “Without faith, I am nothing. This is the true meaning of soul death—death of belief. The Saints have abandoned me, and now I am lost.”

And then Miret was asleep. Rasso pressed closer to the old man’s lithe body, rested his furry white chin on Miret’s chest, and fell asleep too.

Levan watched them for several moments, his body cold and empty, his mind a cascade of terrifying calculations. Horror pressed in on him from all angles, not just over Miret’s newfound despondency, but over the decisions he would soon have to make.

He might be able to save Saffron from herself, and the world from Saffron.

Then again, he might not. He might just walk away entirely.

Saints or Augurs.

Head or heart.

Fight or freedom.

Too big a decision for right now. And besides, there was a loose end he needed to tie up.

Reluctant to leave his beloved mentor, he slipped out of Miret’s room and back to the chamber he shared with Saffron, lighting lanterns and candles by the bedside. As the rusted faucets of the crooked white bath started running—he knew he’d be no use to anyone with his well as depleted as it was, and so the simple animal pleasure of warming frozen bones would have to suffice—he lifted his wand tip to his mouth.

“Et vocos, Relar Zamorin.”

For a few seconds, there was no response, and then the sound quality filtering through the wand changed. No voice, no acknowledgment, but the hard breathing of a fast-moving body, the crackle of frozen undergrowth beneath pounding boots.

Relar was on the run.

Instead of accusing him of cutting the rope and leaving them all to die, Levan simply said, “The Whitewings killed the protection I left?”

“Yes,” Relar gasped. “Which means my grandmother is likely dead too.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“You’re—what?”

“I wanted to protect you, and I couldn’t.”

“Why in the world did you want that?” Relar said, partly bitter, partly disbelieving, as though anticipating vicious recourse for his stunt with the rope.

“Because you’re who I wish I could have been,” Levan said simply.

The sound of running footsteps stopped abruptly, though Relar kept breathing hard. Levan wondered how far he’d made it, where he was running to, but found that he didn’t truly want the answer.

After a few minutes of raspy silence, Relar ground out, “If you want to protect me, you’ll leave me alone. You’ll let me run, let me start a new life, and you won’t follow.”

Levan found himself envious, of all things. Relar’s break would be so clean. A bone snapped in two, not fractured into a thousand small shards that could never functionally heal.

“You have my word.”

A hitching breath. “Thank you—for that, and for not branding me.”

“I’m just sorry you were caught up in this at all.”

Relar did not respond right away, and for a moment, Levan thought that they would part without a goodbye. But then, fear simmering under every syllable, the apothecary’s grandson muttered:

“You can’t trust the King’s Prophet.”

Something inside Levan lurched horribly. “Harrow? Why?”

But the line was already dead.

Saffron had intimated something similar, and now she and Harrow were on that frozen clifftop, scheming over hells knew what. Perhaps he shouldn’t have left them, shouldn’t have given them such an opportunity to make moves behind his back. The prophecy foretold their joint rule, after all.

So many missteps, in the last few hours, the last few days, the last few years. Miret thought the Saints could guide Levan onto a new path, but some subconscious part of him suspected he was too far gone. He could walk away, of course. But perhaps, after all the ill he had inflicted upon the world, it was his moral duty to prevent Saffron and Harrow from destroying everything.

As Levan shrugged out of his soaking clothes and lowered himself into the steaming fir-scented water of the bath, he tried not to look down at his own body—the harsh ridges of rib, the fresh cuts on his arm, the betrothal tattoo, and the ugly, ugly brand—but instead focused on the magic pouring back into him, and the life-defining questions in his mind.

Just as he’d started washing himself with a bar of pine resin soap, a key turned in the lock of the bedroom door.

Saffron Killoran, the Timeweaver, the world-ender, stepped over the threshold.

65

• • • •

A Prayer, an Elegy

Levan’s entire body clenched at the sight of Saffron. Her wet hair slicked to her face and collarbones like tendrils of seaweed. Beneath her sodden black cloak, her tunic clung to every curve and slope, revealing the whitebeam relic wand tucked into her waistband.

“Levan.”

The word had a strange, haunted quality. Like a prayer, or an elegy.

“I’m surprised you’re here.” His voice sounded far away. “I thought you’d already be halfway across the Rapier in pursuit of a weaverwick. There’s a throne with your name on it, after all.”

His words were petulant, yet the day had been long, and his life even longer, and his restraint was failing him.

Shivering violently, Saffron crossed to a lit lantern and cupped her hands over it. Levan was surprised to see the steady fall of tears down the pink apples of her cheeks.

“I don’t want any of what we just saw,” she whispered. “You know I don’t. I don’t want the throne, to wage wars, to decide the fate of the country or the world. I don’t want to rule alongside Harrow, of all people.” A sad sniff; she sounded so young. “I just want my parents back. I want my parents back, and I want you.” Her eyes were red raw as they finally met his. “And I still think that by turning back those twenty years, we can avert the utter hell Harrow and I foresaw.”

The naïve little boy inside him—the one who’d allowed himself to fall prey to the schemings of Alucia, and then Saffron herself—longed to comfort her, to scoop her into his ruined arms, to warm her and soothe her and reassure her. But he thought of what Harrow had described, a burning city littered with the drowned bodies of innocent children, and had to smother his foolish desires.

“Perhaps the crown is what will allow you to turn back those twenty years.” He wrested his tone back into something detached, stripping out the bitterness and dread he truly felt. “That throne room filled with ascenite. My worst fears were right—you do represent a direct threat to my mother’s claim.”

Saffron’s eyes fluttered shut. “She can have it.”

Her speech was slurred, slightly, as though she’d been drinking plentiful bivkar. Levan’s Healer brain kicked in. She’d been out in plummeting temperatures in soaking-wet clothes, and now she looked drowsy, disoriented. Her breathing came fast and shallow, and though her cheeks were pink from cold, the rest of her face was bone white, almost blueish around her lips.

Early signs of deepcold.

“Silver, take off your wet clothes and get into the bath. Now.”

He knew things were bad when she didn’t offer a filthy quip, only nodded once, slowly, and fumbled with her tunic strings. Her garments fell to the floor with a wet smack.

Climbing into the bath was awkward, inelegant, but as she sank herself into the warm scented water opposite Levan, a sigh loosed from her lips, and a flush returned to her skin. In the golden light of the lanterns, the stark redness of her bloodshot eyes was all the more evident. Her palms were a mess of frayed skin, and he knew the backs of her thighs were in no better shape, but she didn’t react to the sting of hot water against the wounds. He’d mend the cuts and grazes once the deepcold had dissipated, once his own well was full enough.

“There have been three points in my knowing of you,” she began, tucking her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms tightly around herself, “that I’ve feared new revelations would destroy the way you looked at me. First, that I was undercover. Second, that I was a Timeweaver. And third, this. But you know me, Levan. You saw me grapple endlessly with the killing of those wardholders. You know I would rather end my own life than let so many die because of me.”

She seemed so sure that this was true, and yet Levan had watched her kill the innocent croupier Neatras to save her own skin. She had killed a Whitewing to earn her place back in the scarlets following the Havenwood. And he knew as well as anyone how fast those single kills added up, how they all blurred together into one terrible smear on the soul.

“I’m going to stop it, Levan. If it’s the last thing I do, if it costs me my own life to do it, I’m going to circumvent the hell we just foresaw. What’s that Aymar Wevelren quote? Greatness does not belong to those who win the battle, but to those who prevent the battle from ever being fought. I have a purpose inside a purpose now. Save my parents, and save the world.”

The Lost Dragonborn quote cleaved through Levan like an axe. “I want to trust you.” He stared out of the window, watching flakes of snow flurry and drift. “But all of this can wait. We need to get Miret to Tålun. He’s physically stable, but I want him checked by a Healer more adept than me. And then…we need to find a way to get his soul back. I have to believe there’s a chance of that. So we’ll take the portari gate down to Almere, then rent a couple of axelmares to carry us over the border to Lunes, since Miret can’t walk and I can’t carry him all that way.”

“How is Miret?”

Horror clenched its fist in Levan’s throat. “I’m yet to fully understand what soul death means. He still talks like he used to, is still capable of deep thought, but something’s missing. He says it’s his faith. He can no longer feel the Saints’ presence, much less believe in them. For someone as devout as him, that is a fate worse than death.”

“Omedari’s fist,” Saffron muttered—one of her mother’s favorite curses, and one Levan usually enjoyed hearing her utter.

A thought suddenly occurred to him. “Where’s Harrow?”

Saffron grabbed a bar of soap and ran it softly over her knees. “He said he needed time. Vanished into the woods.”

Relar’s words rang like clamorous bells.

You can’t trust the King’s Prophet.

“Levan.” Saffron reached out a hand, rested it on his scarred forearm. Despite the bath, she still felt freezing to the touch. “I’m devastated—truly. I wanted, more than anything, for the Fifth Prophecy to show me saving the world. I wanted, more than anything, to exonerate Timeweavers once and for all. I wanted, more than anything, for us to both have true fresh beginnings as children. For your mother to become a Hand, and for you to become a Healer, and for us to be free of all the pain and tragedy that has plagued us for decades. But we can still do as we planned, still unmake those twenty-something years. Save our parents. Yes, your mother will still have cause to pursue power. But she will live.”

Levan’s eyes burned. “You don’t seem afraid.”

“I’m terrified.” Her grip on his forearm tightened.

“Not of the Fifth Prophecy—of me. You’ve seen the lengths I will go to for my mother’s legacy, and yet you’re assuming that I won’t hurt, incarcerate, or kill you to prevent you from stealing the throne.”

Saffron raised a pale, fluffy brow, pulling her hand away. “You were so worried about me succumbing to deepcold that you insisted I get in the bath with you. Why not let Mother Nature run its course?” As though to affirm her lack of fear, she slid deeper into the bath, head back, letting the warm water soak her hair, her ears, the soft line of her jaw. When she surfaced, her words were more serious, loaded. “Isn’t some part of you…relieved? If you do believe in the prophecies, in the Augurs, then your mother will never reclaim her crown. Isn’t that permission to walk away from all of this? To finally abandon the doomed quest you’ve been forced to pursue since childhood?”

From the intensity of her hazel stare…it was almost as though she knew the brand was no longer active.

“Do you want me to walk away?” he asked softly.

“I want you with me, fighting to save our parents.” She rested her chin on her knees. “But more than that, I want you to be happy. Or at the very least alright.”

Tears rose behind his eyes, warm and heavy. He blinked them away and stood abruptly from the bath. Saffron made no attempt not to brazenly ogle him, which he almost had to admire.

“Let’s go,” he said, suddenly unable to tolerate another moment.

Saffron peered up at him. “Where to?”

“You want to save the world, but first, I need to save mine. Save Miret.” A sharp, definitive nod. “To Almere—and then to Lunes.”

Part Six

Collision

66

• • • •

One Year Ago

“You’re not really a Brewer, are you?” Gaian murmured, studying Sebran from beneath long, fluffy lashes. “You’re a Compeller.”

It was the night before the final assessment at the Silvercloak Academy, and the rest of the cohort had retired to their chambers to catch some fitful sleep. The common room was littered with the debris of their evening—a fire burned down to glowing ashes, decks of polderdash cards stained with flamebrandy, Auria’s scattered textbooks and Nissa’s discarded achullah roll-ups, Tiernan’s list of reminders to himself, which he had, inevitably, forgotten.

Until Gaian’s question, the two remaining mages had occupied separate squashy maroon armchairs, contemplating the upcoming challenge in amiable silence. Upon hearing the accusation, however, Sebran stilled, fixing his gaze on the creamstone hearth.

His silence was as damning as an outright confession.

Letting out a soft chuckle, Gaian shook his head and sipped from a leather hipflask. “You so nearly made it to the end of the program without anyone finding out.”

Dread sank into Sebran’s stomach.

The day had finally come.

After making it through the military academy and completing two years of service in the Vallish infantry—which involved no active combat—he had at last applied to the Silvercloak Academy.

Only to be rejected.

It had been a record year for applications, since the rise in Bloodmoon crime had led to a rise in civilian desire to do something. The quality of applicants was high, and the range of abilities and life experiences was vast, and the two playing cards that made Sebran the perfect candidate—his inner knowledge of the Bloodmoons, though his early years were faded in his memory, and his lethal compelling—were kept close to his chest. He applied as a Mage Practer with minimal military experience, and was rejected as such.

Until Tarth Vertillon took matters into his own hands.

Until he told Captain Aspar both truths.

Until she agreed to admit Sebran into the Academy—with a forged Brewer accreditation slapped onto his file, so that the admission of a lackluster candidate did not raise too many eyebrows. He’d even been made to use a less conspicuous wand; pine, instead of the garnet grovus associated with compelling.

Sebran had barely spoken to Tarth since. His mentor had known how much it meant to Sebran never to use his power.

For the last twelve months, the captain had set Sebran clandestine task after clandestine task, made him manipulate his friends and co-workers, made the self-loathing in his belly rot into a noxious black substance that burned him from the inside out.

“How did you know?” he asked Gaian gruffly.

Gaian shrugged, sipping again at his bivkar. “Last month, I realized I’d never seen you mix your own potions from scratch. I’ve seen you tinker endlessly, pour from the cauldron into vials, stopper and rearrange your belt. But never brew. So I watched you more closely. I’m fairly certain you compelled Nissa in the tactical village last week. She would never have surrendered of her own volition.”

Sebran ran a finger over the tincture belt looped over the arm of the chair, notched with potions slipped to him by Aspar herself. Said nothing.

Gaian unhooked his gaze from Sebran and peered out the nearest arched window at the starry sky. Beyond the glass, Atherin glowed gold and crimson and deep shimmering purple. “I can keep a secret. I’ll trade you for one of mine.”

Sebran shrugged to disguise his thumping heart. “Go on.”

“I also have a past life few know about. I was born female. Underwent the transition spells a few months before I joined the Academy. Changed my name, all of it. My mother knew what it meant to me, gave up part of her own well to make the transition permanent.”

There were two different ways one could change physical sexes. The first was less costly in terms of magic, the equivalent of surface level surgery, and once it was completed, it required no ongoing flow of power to maintain. The second was deeper, more complete, and altogether more costly—a continuous enchantment that caused the body and its organs to function exactly as the desired sex. It required medei perpetua to uphold.

At the revelation, surprise flickered through Sebran. “I had no idea.”

Gaian’s gray eyes glittered silver. “Now we’re even.”

“Hardly. Compelling is shameful in a way your secret is not.”

“Only if you allow it to be.” Gaian took another swig of bivkar. “Does Aspar know?”

A stiff nod. “She ordered me to compel Nissa. She orders me to compel a lot of people.”

Gaian’s stare ripped back to him. “And someone as powerful as you likes that? To be ordered?”

Something in the intensity of Gaian’s gray eyes sent a shiver down Sebran’s spine. “You don’t make it through the military without taking command well.”

“You should be the one in command.”

“Maybe one day.”

Slipping his hipflask into his inner cloak pocket, Gaian stood with feline grace, despite the liquor, and strode the few steps to where Sebran sat. He perched on the edge of the arm, so close Sebran could smell warm skin and sweet, sharp bivkar. Then, so fast Sebran barely registered the movement, Gaian reached out and cradled Sebran’s jaw in the valley between his thumb and forefinger. The touch sent a scalpel slice of something through Sebran’s lower belly.

“I don’t think you mean that.” A few strands of long ash-blond hair had come loose from Gaian’s leather tie.

“Why not?” Sebran was painfully aware of the bobbing shard in his throat.

“Because I know you, Aduran.” Slate eyes flickered over Sebran’s face. Gaian’s skin was pale as moonlight and just as ethereal. “I know you bury your desires so deep inside yourself that they die from lack of air. I know the way you hold that ruthless body—as though your entire existence is an apology. I know you can only relax when someone else is telling you what to do, because if it goes wrong, you won’t have to blame yourself. You will never lead, because you do not have the requisite faith in yourself, in your thoughts, in your wants.”

Sebran felt each blow as a physical thing, the bruises calling up a furious sort of heat. He so rarely allowed himself to feel anger, but his friend was striking him in the soft underbelly, and the wounded child inside him balled up his fists. “Perhaps the people who can detach from their own personal desires make the best leaders.”

“Perhaps. But they’ll also spend their entire lives miserable and unfulfilled.”

Sebran swallowed, said nothing to refute this.

“You want that Pons Aelii posting so badly, even though you’d never admit it—to me, or to yourself. And you could reach out and take it. You could compel me to drop out of the race, hand it to you in a heartbeat. You want it, Sebran.”

It was true. Sebran wanted to be as far away from Atherin as possible—as far away from the Bloodmoons as possible. Because if the time ever came to take down Lyrian or Levan, the people who had raised him and loved him and then abandoned him, he wasn’t entirely sure he could follow through.

“If I get the Pons Aelii posting,” Sebran said in a low timbre, “it will be because I earned it.”

“But still you won’t admit that you want it.”

And then Gaian leaned in and kissed him.

Everything inside Sebran exploded.

At twenty-six years old, he had never felt another person’s lips on his. Had never allowed it, because he could not trust any such desire. Could not trust the force of it.

In that moment, he knew he had been right all along.

Because this…

…this was too much.

Lust towered inside him, sending all the blood from his head to between his legs. Gaian ran his palm down from Sebran’s jaw to his brawny chest, over the ridges of his stomach, to the top of his waistband. His lips were soft and cool and booze-tinged, brushing and then pulling away, not a furious clash of tongue and teeth but something far more tender.

Gaian kissed his temple, the bridge of his cheekbone, the corner of his eye, while his hand wandered over every peak and plane of Sebran’s body. It cost the soldier everything he had not to moan into it. Not to surrender, not to desire more.

“You are allowed to want, Sebran.”

Gaian’s voice was silk, satin, a flake of pure clean snow.

“No,” Sebran said, hoarse, and then spoke more truth than he had in months, years. “I’m not. Because right now, I want you. I have always wanted you.” He grabbed Gaian’s wandering hand by the narrow wrist, forcing it still. “But if anything were to happen between us, how could I ever know for certain that you’re acting of your own free will? How could I ever know for certain that the sheer force of my want had not overflowed into you? There is a reason I smother my desire until it dies. Because then, it’s only killing me.”

With a firmer hand placed against Gaian’s chest, Sebran pushed away his friend—the first person he’d ever kissed, the lover he so craved—stood to his feet, and strode away.

For the first time in a long time, he felt every single one of the raised, ragged scars around his ankles.

67

• • • •

A Few Months Ago

At a watchtower notched halfway up the Mountains of Promise, Sebran stood on an outside window ledge, gazing down on the dusky spires and domes of Carduban.

Beyond that, smudged with warm desert haze, stood the vast white walls of Zitra. A narrow teal river with a single heavily guarded bridge—built from an alternating pattern of creamstone and painted marble—marked the border between Vallin and Eqora. In the last few hours, a cluster of axelmare-riding mages in earthen brown cloaks had gathered on the opposite side.

Border skirmishes, indeed.

The fighting had been minimal, thus far. A smattering of taunts and nonlethal spells, a general sense of defenses being sized up. Exaggerated gestures toward the mine entrances in the mountains. A sense that this was uncoordinated, unsanctioned by any actual government. Mere posturing, Sebran suspected, though to what end he was not entirely sure.

All he knew was that he was grateful to Nissa Naszi for being unable to keep her cool (or tolerate the boredom) during the border posting—because it had gotten him out of Atherin. Away from the Bloodmoons, away from the growing number of people who knew his secrets.

Sebran looked down at the ground beneath the window ledge, the tips of his polished boots poking over the lip, relishing the dizzy tilt inside his head.

He’d never much cared for heights—until he learned to fly.

He plucked the hem of his silver cloak and pressed the tip of his pine wand against the silk. “Et volinotan.”

The fabric swooshed up behind him like a parachute, and he leapt into the air. A southeasterly gust carried him forth, and he fought the childlike urge to whoop and holler his glee. For a moment, he was the boy in the Havenwood searching for his next adventure, before Lorissa, before everything else.

The mountain rolled out in front of him, his rate of descent deliciously equal to the gradient of the peak, and he glided and glided and glided until eventually coming to land several hundred yards from the guard tower, the soles of his boots grazing rocky earth as he jogged gracefully to a standing stop.

It had taken years of practice. Nobody at the Academy knew he was taking nighttime flying lessons from Naro Terrian, a crotchety old colonel who’d spent his career training an elite special force called the Paramagi. It was a finicky art, halfway between enchanting and wielding, neither of which Sebran had ever been particularly gifted at. Dangerous too—if your magical well ran out halfway through a flight, you’d plummet to the ground in a heartbeat. But with a brutish stubbornness and an unfaltering willingness to deploy his blisblade, Sebran mastered the skill well enough that Terrian could abandon the safety nets and take the soldier on his first real flight off the top of an Augurest temple.

Since then, Sebran had fantasized about all the places around the world he’d love to fly. The Divine Peaks, the Twin Mesas, Bhondriel’s Bluff, the Far Ridges. And it just so happened that Carduban was the perfect place to stretch his wand-wings.

A smile fought its way through Sebran’s stoic exterior as he climbed the steep ascent back to his post, feeling the sweet burn of strained muscles as he walked.

Saints, he loved to fly.

But his mirth was short-lived—because waiting for him in the topmost room of the guard tower was the last person he’d ever expected to see on the craggy outskirts of Carduban.

Levan Rezaran—or Celadon, as he was now known—sat on the open windowsill, his scarlet cloak fluttering behind him, black elm wand hanging loosely from one hand, nothing like the gangly little boy Sebran remembered. His jaw was sharp, his body muscled, his blue eyes devoid of all light.

Sebran stilled in the doorway, subtly drawing his wand, but Levan did not seem to be here to cause harm—rather he jerked a thumb over his shoulder, gesturing down the mountain, and raised a brow.

“Impressive.” His voice was, of course, lower than Sebran remembered, and the light northern accent had washed away with time.

Sebran felt a muscle ripple in his own jaw. “Levan.”

“Laris.” A humorless smile. “Well, it’s Sebran now, I suppose. Sebran Aduran.” A subtle head shake. “I’ve spent so many years looking for you.”

At the sound of his old name, some young, internal part of Sebran reacted. He had worked so hard to shed his Havenwood identity on the streets of Novarin, and his not-brother had just tossed it back at his feet like a forgotten scarf. The reminder was bracing, like a sharp wind somewhere inside him, stripping away his defenses and leaving him raw and vulnerable.

“How did you find me?”

“We turned one of your cohort. They told me two things: that there was a Compeller among their number, and that one cadet had a mysterious past. That nobody knew where he came from, before the military academy. I wondered.”

Sebran’s mind juddered. The Bloodmoons had turned one of the cohort?

Surely not righteous Auria, nor stubborn, hotheaded Nissa. Gaian—he thought the name with a pang of grief—was across the border in Pons Aelii, which only left Tiernan. Weak-willed, weak-hearted Tiernan, with his important father and his absent spine.

Unless…no. Saffron Killoran was still in Duncarzus.

Sebran shrugged. “You always were the more cerebral of us. You thought, I acted. Though it seems you’ve been doing rather a lot of acting yourself, in recent years.”

If Levan felt any guilt or remorse, none showed. “Are you ashamed?”

“Of?”

“Calling me your brother.”

Sebran fixed him with a wooden stare. “I’m not your brother. I never was.”

“That’s mareshit and you know it.” Genuine anger simmered below Levan’s flat tone. “Blood could not have made our bond stronger.”

“I think you’re misremembering,” Sebran retorted, driving the chisel in even farther, retribution for the way Levan had not intervened when it mattered. “You spent years resenting me for what I could do, and the moment your father moved to abandon me, you did nothing to stop him.”

“I was in shock. I was staring at our mother’s corpse.”

“Your mother’s corp—”

“Will you stop with that?” Levan pushed himself off the windowsill, taking several quick steps toward Sebran. At last, his eyes shone with an emotion.

Sebran raised his wand without thought, military training signaling danger. “How did you get in here?” He gestured around to the sparse guardroom, whose creamstone walls were lined with analog weapons—swords and daggers and crossbows, all of which Sebran knew how to wield.

“The portari spell is still in my wand,” Levan muttered. “Imported from Bellandry. You’d think a guard tower would be warded against such things.”

Sebran thought of the wards in the Bank of Almere all those decades ago, of how they required a whole team of dedicated wardholders to give up their wells to keep the magic intact. A bank was able to pay handsomely to reward such a sacrifice, but an old watchtower built during some long-ago war wasn’t worth the hassle, even with the Eqorans toeing the nearby border.

“What’s it all for, Levan?” Sebran asked, shaking his head, revulsion and sadness miring high in his belly. “The killing, the mutilating. The loxlure.”

For a long, taut moment, Sebran thought his once-brother would not respond. But then, low and reverent and somehow very young, Levan whispered, “Bringing her back.”

It took Sebran a sickly moment to realize what Levan meant. “Bringing—your mother?”

The shutters closed behind Levan’s eyes at Sebran’s horrified tone—as though he had been expecting understanding and was instead met with disgust. He fixed his gaze on a point just over Sebran’s shoulder. “Forget it.”

“You’re trying to bring Lorissa Rezaran back.” A shiver bolted down Sebran’s rigid spine. “And you’re still trying to win her the throne she believes she deserves in the meantime. I’ve heard the Risen don’t truly come back. Not as they were before.”

“I’d still take a living, breathing mother over a cadaver in a crypt.”

Sebran was momentarily at a loss for words. If he strained, he could still hear the cavernous grief echoing in Levan’s words. Sebran softened his stance, lowered his wand. Dropped his resentment, if not his guard. “Why are you here, Levan?”

“I’ve thought about you every single day since you left.” Levan still did not look directly at Sebran, but rather at a spot in the middle distance. “Since our father sent you away. As soon as I was old enough, I searched for you for years.”

A nameless emotion blurred Sebran’s thoughts. “Does Lyrian know? Who and where I am?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me—it seems he knows everyone in Vallin and the people who love them—and yet he’s never mentioned you to me. Perhaps the fake name did its job.”

“It’s no more a fake name than Laris,” Sebran replied bitterly. “I’ll never know my birth name.”

“I could help you find out. I have my methods. We could find your—”

“Why are you here?” Sebran asked again.

“Because I want to know you again. I understand that it can never be how it was before, but…I miss having a brother. I’m not asking you to join the cause. Hells, I’m not even asking you to forgive me. Just—a flamebrandy, perhaps, in a local tavern.” A small, boyish smile. “Maybe you could teach me how to fly. Because that was epic.”

With an immense amount of internal effort, ignoring the wants of the little boy still inside him, Sebran kept his emotional drawbridge high. “I have dedicated my entire life to eradicating the sorts of evil you and your family perpetuate every single day. What makes you think I would turn my back on that now?”

“If I could just tell you everything.” Levan’s throat bobbed. “Over a drink, or right here. If you could just listen to—”

“No, Levan.” Sebran gritted his teeth. “No.”

And then he felt it. A tendril of outside influence brushing up against his consciousness, one that whispered: please, let me in. I need you. I need someone.

Most would not feel the subtle stroke, but Sebran had spent days and weeks and months and years of his life practicing this art. He slammed up a shield as fast as he could, and Levan recoiled; a subtle step back, a widening of the eyes, as though he were not used to resistance.

“Where did you learn to do that?” Sebran asked, blood pounding in his temples.

Levan said nothing.

“I always thought you were a Healer.”

“I am.” Levan’s grip tightened on his wand. “But I’m other things too.”

For the first time, Sebran took a step forward. “Where did you learn to do this? Neither of your parents have it in their bloodline.”

Another agonizing silence. Then, “After our mother passed, I—you’re right, I was a Healer. And necromancy is a subclass, is it not? Our father recognized this potential, but my power wasn’t strong enough. They tried to force the matter. I taught myself to compel in self-defense.”

An icy cold spread from the base of Sebran’s torso up to his heart. “What do you mean, tried to force the matter?”

A terse head shake. “Forget it.”

“No. What did you mean?”

Forget it, said the tendril of command disguised as Sebran’s own internal voice.

“No. What happened to you, Levan?”

But from the haunted look on his former brother’s face, Sebran already knew. And for the first time, he truly understood what a lucky escape he’d had from the Rezaran family. Grief reared up inside him, vast and splintering. Not for himself, but for his brother. A crack in his emotions he so rarely allowed himself, expanding rapidly into a ravine.

A lifeless body in a drowned atrium.

His brother’s crumpled face at the sight of his dead mother.

The clank of his shackles as he roamed the streets of Novarin as a beggar.

A deep loneliness, written into every fiber of his being.

“Leave,” Sebran said, more softly now. Softer than he’d been in years, decades. Not compelling, but coaxing. “Leave it all behind. You are better than this.”

Levan’s pupils were blown wide and black. “No, I’m not.”

“Who we are as children is the truest version of us. Which makes you good and kind and loyal and smart and—”

“Stop saying that.”

“You could make the world better for your presence in it.”

“No.”

“You are not fundamentally broken, Levan. You are not stuck on this path. There is redemption, if you want it.”

“STOP!” Levan roared, sending a flock of ascenbeaks soaring out of a nearby tree, only the kingpin’s son did not just shout it externally but also internally, with so much force that the tendril of command became a battering ram, and the order slammed into Sebran’s vulnerable mind so severely that not even the most powerful shield could withstand it.

Sebran stopped.

Every piece of him.

He fell to the ground.

Sebran Aduran did not wake.

After hours of frantic attempts at resuscitation, begging his healing to work, work, please fucking work, Levan had no choice but to portari his unconscious brother back to Bloodmoon mansion. Back to a place where nobody would think to look—a place that would keep Sebran safe and contained, should he wake in Levan’s absence.

Levan took Sebran to cell six.

68

• • • •

A Few Hours Ago

Week after week, Levan visited cell six, but his brother never roused. Levan called upon his own healing magic with an animal desperation, but emotion clouded his ability—either that, or his brother was too far gone to revive.

After a few fruitless days, he enlisted the help of a more experienced Healer—a middle-aged mother named Rivalin—so that Sebran could receive food and water intravenously. The Healer asked no questions, and Levan gave no answers, only compelled her to speak of this to no one.

And so she spoke of it to no one.

After his own hand was amputated by the woman he so desperately loved, the first thing Levan did—before visiting Tålun for a golden prosthetic—was to send Saffron away and check on his brother just a few cells down. Levan hoped beyond hope that Sebran had woken in the time he himself had been pinned to that table, but found his brother the same way he’d left him.

Dead in all meaningful ways, but for the steady beat of his heart.

The weeks wore into months, and Levan’s magic splintered and then slowly knitted back together, and when it came time to leave for Bellandry, Levan commanded the Healer to check on him day and night, hour after hour, and to stop at nothing to revive him.

And so the Healer, Rivalin, stopped at nothing to revive him.

Using the dark magic of martyrcraft, she drained her own life-force to feed the captive soldier’s.

Rivalin died, and Sebran woke.

The first thing Sebran saw when his eyes peeled open was the limp body. A mage in a violet Healer’s cloak, streaks of white in her copper hair, curled around herself like a babe in the womb, wand discarded at her side.

The second thing he saw was the creamstone cell—its door hanging slightly ajar, as though the corpse by his side had been following orders that did not involve locking it behind her.

The third thing he saw was the needle in his arm, attached to a bag of fluid.

He tore the needle from his flesh without the slightest flinch. As he staggered to his feet, his muscles felt weak, his limbs watery, and only sheer force of will kept him upright.

The last thing he remembered was begging Levan to walk away from the Bloodmoons. A sickening glance at his watch told him it had been months since that day. Little wonder he felt so depleted, so unlike himself.

His mind was smeared with fatigue, but his body took over, drawing the wand from his now-loose waistband—why hadn’t Levan disarmed him?—and adjusting the disheveled silver cloak hanging heavy on his shoulders. He left the cell with foreboding prickling at the back of his neck like an insect.

After navigating a few unfamiliar corridors, he met a lone mage in a scarlet cloak.

Give me your wand, he compelled.

The mage—a tall, spindly man with ruddy cheeks and owlish glasses—handed over his wand.

Tell me where I am.

“Bloodmoon mansion.”

Tell me where Lyrian Celadon is.

“Lyrian is dead—killed by the Silvercloaks. Levan is kingpin now.”

The sick feeling in Sebran’s stomach twisted deeper.

Tell me how I can leave this place.

“There’s an off-grid portari gate. Go to the dragon statue on the third floor, tap each claw, and say ‘tempavicissan.’ ”

Sebran wondered how the mage was able to talk so openly.

Tell me whether the rumors are true. Have you been branded? If I order you to turn yourself in to the Silvercloaks, will you perish?

The mage nodded, fear pinning his pale eyes wide. “Yes, the brand will kill me.”

Horror towered high in Sebran’s chest. How had the man who raised him for the first six years of his life, the man who carved board game pieces and baked the world’s best spiceloaves, built this hell?

Tell me why the brand isn’t killing you right now for talking to me.

“I have no idea.”

Sebran switched to talking aloud. “I always wondered how the brand worked—how it stayed permanent without Lyrian having to sacrifice a portion of his own well. It shouldn’t be possible without medei perpetua.”

“Perhaps he did use medei perpetua,” the mage said slowly. “Perhaps that’s why he was never as powerful as a mage in his position ought to be—his greatest asset was his memory, not his enchanting. Perhaps he sacrificed most of his well to keep the scarlets loyal to him.”

“In which case, now that Lyrian is dead…”

Something brightened behind the mage’s eyes. “The enchantment would no longer be active.”

Sebran shrugged. “You’re probably free to go.”

The brightness dulled almost as fast as it flared. “I’m afraid to try.”

“In less than a quarter hour, I plan to be inside that portari gate on the third floor. The last thing I will do in this hellforsaken place is set the whole thing ablaze. The ascenite won’t burn, but everything else will. Gather as many innocent mages as you can. Tell them the truth about the brand—that it is no longer holding them here—and flee. Flee the city, flee your grotesque lives. Flee.”

And because Sebran had commanded it, he knew the mage would obey.

With a final nod, Sebran handed back the mage’s wand and strode down the corridor toward the staircase, his vision starry and swaying, his silver cloak flapping around his ankles.

When he staggered to the dragon statue in the hallway, he plucked a tongue of flame from the nearest lantern and flung it around the creamstone chamber, hoping his wielding was strong enough, hoping the fire would find enough fuel to catch.

It caught.

It caught the crimson carpet runner streaking down the hallway.

It caught the tapestries and drapes hanging on the walls.

Sebran tapped the stone claws and descended into the chamber housing the portari gate, and then he stepped inside.

69

• • • •

Lunes

Night was falling over Lunes, and Auria could barely breathe.

Detective Jebat had pulled together a tactical team remarkably fast, and they’d arrived in Lunes in dribs and drabs via portari gate over the course of the afternoon so as not to attract attention. They wore plain clothes, cloaks of black and emerald and navy, chattering casually as they exited the station into the village. Of course, in a place as small as this, locals would eventually notice the slew of unfamiliar faces, but that couldn’t be helped.

Auria stood in the station for hours, nodding calmly to the stream of detectives filtering in, her pulse thrumming like a long, drawn-out chord.

She had just taken the biggest gamble of her career. Her life.

“How’s it going?” Nissa asked via wand tip. Outside the station, dusk was a moody indigo, the sky bruised with rain clouds.

“The last of the tac team just arrived. They’re setting up position in Renzel’s Wandery—it has a strong vantage across the village green. To the east it has eyes on the portari station, and to the west the Saints hall. Most of the action in Lunes seems to happen between these four points, so we’re in a good spot to watch how things play out. Move in when we can. The local streetwatch is small, only half a dozen or so on the force, but primed to offer backup if we need it.”

She needed killing curses to be fired between the whites and the scarlets. She needed their leaders to be drawn out, dragged into the fray. She needed to bide her time, letting enough momentum build for the arrests to be airtight. Thankfully Detective Jebat had a lot of field experience—Auria was skittish, prone to playing a hand too early, but he’d know when to move in.

Tonight was the night. She felt it in the hum between her ribs, the jangle of her nerves, the thunder charge at her temples.

“Any updates at the apothecary?” she asked Nissa.

“Contact dropped between the Whitewing and the boy, Relar. Ferrow told him that his Bloodmoon protections were dead, and I think he’s gone dark. Now Ferrow is sending threatening messages, promising to kill his grandmother unless he answers, but…if I were the lad, I’d know it was a lost cause.”

“Are you going to intervene if Ferrow tries to kill her?”

“It’s your case. Do you want me to intervene?”

Auria played out the various scenarios in her mind. “Yes—providing the risk to you is minimal. Save her if you can, but not at the cost of your own life.”

“Heeded. I can handle a swine like Ferrow.”

There was more Auria wanted to say to the dragonborn Wielder, but she was too cowardly to say it—she was channeling all available courage into the operation.

Heart in mouth, she pushed off the wall of the station, back and feet numb from hours of rigid observation, and strode out into the night.

If it weren’t for the sinister mission, Auria might find Lunes quaintly beautiful. Novarin was her heart home, the scholar city a hundred miles west, but its influences here could be felt like dim echoes; a branch of her favorite parchment shop, several secondhand bookshops (more than there was surely demand for), a library with a yew tree growing through the thatched roof. There were taverns, though not like the brawling, raucous drinkhouses of Atherin—sleepy, comfortable places, serving as much ambertea as they did bitterale, with gentle music floating out into the night sky, the crackling laughter of the elderly.

How she loathed to bring violence into such a place.

Fighting the urge to flee—her limbs were flooded with adrenaline, and she’d never been good at coping with the sensation—she strolled down the high street, past the village green and the wandery where her colleagues lay in wait. She kept her wand in her palm, though tucked up in the wide, loose sleeve of her scholar’s cloak.

She made a show of stopping to look in the window of the library, though turning her back to the village green felt like an almighty risk—she half expected to be ambushed at any moment. Rather than studying the texts in the window, she kept her gaze trained on the reflections in the glass. Though it was hard to pick out exact shapes under the shroud of night, the streetlamps surrounding the green had no silhouettes standing suspiciously beneath.

The village was eerily quiet, which only highlighted the busier spots.

On the other side of the green, adjacent to Renzel’s Wandery, was a pokey little tavern called the Brimming Keg—more sound came from the bar than the rest of the village combined. The windows were opaque with moving shapes.

Flashes of white cloak. Unmistakable.

She lifted her wand subtly and called Jebat.

“Marriosan?”

“I see white shapes in the window of the Brimming Keg.”

“Heeded, and already noted. It would be a rather conspicuous place for them to hide out, but it does offer eyes on the portari gate, where they’ll be expecting the Bloodmoons to head for. And they’re used to being able to conduct their business brazenly in the capital. Perhaps they haven’t thought about how obvious their position is in a quieter locale. We’re keeping a close watch.”

“Heeded. Stay safe.”

Her skin prickled with fire as she set off on her patrol once more. Every instinct screamed at her to charge the tavern now, to use the slaughter of the Bloodmoons at the apothecary in Atherin to arrest these Whitewings, but she knew it was the nervy, shortsighted play.

No, she needed killing curses to be fired. Preferably by the Whitewing leader, who’d told Ferrow she was coming here herself.

Of course, there was also the Saffron of it all. There was every chance her former friend was with the Bloodmoons—still undercover, and walking right into this ambush. The Whitewings would kill every scarlet they laid eyes upon. Ordinarily Auria would try to extract Saffron before that happened, yet this operation required killing shots to be fired.

So many moving parts—three factions of mages, all at odds.

The timing would have to play out perfectly, or Saffron could lose her life.

At the top edge of the village green was a glorious Saints hall, its creamstone new and perfectly pale, its crimson-and-gold obelisk shining in the patchy moonlight. She felt a curious tug toward the hallowed hall, and with a fretful glance over her shoulder, she went inside.

The space was smaller than the Saints halls in the capital, but there were still all the usual hallmarks—a kiosk selling velvet pouches of painted stones, a bell-shaped main hall pierced by the obelisk, statues of Saints notched into alcoves in the outer walls and holding out basins for donations. There was also a private curtained chamber where the Hand of the Saints would conduct private conversations with troubled parishioners, but tonight it wore a little sign reading: At the Pub, Find Me If You Need Me.

Auria went to the groove around the base of the obelisk, where errant snow and rainwater had flowed down the length of the column and into the circular basin. Kneeling before it, Auria went to cup her hands and drink from the water when something stopped her.

Anger, bitter and grainy as old coffee grounds.

She sank back onto her heels, looked up, and muttered like a madwoman, “I know you do not concern yourself with individual lives, individual loves and losses. I know you have always set out a grand plan for the world, an eventual bend toward peace and prosperity. And I used to believe in that so staunchly—that in the great arc of humanity, goodness would always win. I still do. The day I abandon that faith is the day I am lost.

“But I’m so, so angry. Angry Tiernan had to be sacrificed. Angry he’s not here with me now. Because he was good. And you were supposed to honor the good more than anything. What use is a world filled with whites and scarlets when you let silvers die so freely? How is that following the great arc of anything?”

A single tear fell down Auria’s cheek into the basin, mingling with the holy water. “I once loved the idea that after we die, our souls are turned into a raw energy used to guide humanity through its great arc toward peace. That our souls become magic itself, and that magic is the force that will mend the world. So it should bring me comfort that every time I cast a spell in the name of good, I’m using Tiernan’s life-force to do it. My grandfather’s life-force. But it doesn’t. Every time I cast, I know I’m one step closer to a true goodbye. One day soon, a spell will be cast using the last of them—maybe not even by me—and then they’ll just be gone.”

Her breathing was growing ragged now, desperate. “And all of this got me thinking…if you need fresh death for magic to endure…it’ll never stop, will it? That’s why you allow violence and war, why you allow children to die of terrible illnesses. You need their life-force. How is that fair? How is magic worth it?”

She was about to launch into another tirade when the wand in her palm crackled.

“Et vocos, Auria Marriosan.”

It took her several beats to place the voice, but when she did, she gasped.

“Sebran?” She climbed to her feet so fast her head rushed. “Where are you? Where have you been?”

“Captive in Bloodmoon mansion. Long story, but I just escaped. I’m back at the Order, but Jebat’s secretary told me you’re on a raid against both the whites and the scarlets.”

Auria’s mind scrambled to catch up. “Hold on. Why were you—”

“Marriosan, I’m coming to help.” His tone was as brusque as ever, yet something new underpinned it; a hum of anger, a nihilistic seethe. “I will bring those bastards down if it’s the last thing I do.”

Auria was torn.

On the one hand, he was likely not briefed, not even debriefed on his captivity. This went against all protocol, all good detective practice. She should insist he fill out the necessary paperwork, conduct the necessary interviews. Assure him that next time, he’d be here.

Yet…there might not be a next time. It could all end here, whether a defeat for white, scarlet, or silver. And his presence could be the thing that tipped the scales in their favor. There was nobody more skilled in ground combat, nobody more ruthless, nobody better at following orders. Sebran would do whatever she told him, and he would do it extremely well.

Perhaps she could order him to protect Saffron—extract her, if he could.

Knowing that this was yet another line she was crossing, she swallowed hard and said, “We’re in Lunes, already in position. How fast can you get here?”

70

• • • •

A Wild Ghost Appears

Levan surveyed the village of Lunes from atop an axelmare, feeling deep in his bones that something was wrong.

Their dwindled party reentered Vallin via the Everswallow Bridge, which arced across the River of the Patrons (or, if you asked the Bellandrians, the River of the Augurs) in a sweeping curve of dark stone and oak. Saffron rode her own axelmare—black cloak spilling over its haunches, wild white-blond curls spilling over her own shoulders, all rather breathtaking—while the wounded Miret slumped in the saddle in front of Levan. The legendary steeds were enormous, jet black, skeletal, though not quite the creatures associated with portari itself. The two they’d hired from a stable in Almere County lacked the broad gray-silver wings, having been bred for more practical purposes than surging through time and space itself.

Rasso trotted alongside them, panting. The axelmares had hurtled through the Havenwood so fast that the wolf had finally been able to sprint to his fullest potential. Of course, now he was rather exhausted, on account of being used to a life of luxury in Bloodmoon mansion and thus rather out of shape. When they reached the river, he dipped his entire head into the water and drank so deeply Levan thought he might drown.

Levan squeezed his thighs and jerked the reins, drawing his axelmare to a halt while Rasso recovered his composure. They stood at the foot of the Lunes side of the bridge, to their right Donan Trilmere’s stable, where they’d leave the steeds for transport back to Almere, and to their left, a winding path through the trees that Levan knew led to Saffron’s childhood home. She was trying too hard not to peer in that direction, her gaze fixed firmly straight ahead—at the village itself.

The village where something was wrong.

Clouds drifted across the waxed moon, causing the spectral light to shift, vanish, and brighten by turns. All the buildings were exactly where they ought to be, and the smattering of people he saw milling outside the nearest tavern and the portari station seemed perfectly normal. The night air smelled of forest and honeywine and woodsmoke, of soft loam and looming rain. Peaceful, ordinary.

Yet there was a…charge.

Much like the peculiar frequency Miret had taught him to pick up while searching for nearby magic. A resonance, like the inside of a ringing bell, felt in the prickle on the back of his neck, the needles at his temples.

Perhaps he was simply exhausted from a long, fraught quest to the far north. Then again, perhaps his perilous life had taught his body to perceive a threat before his mind made sense of it.

He peered over at Saffron, the former detective, the mage whose instincts should have been as talon-sharp as his own, and yet she had the same misty, nostalgic expression she’d worn the last time they’d set foot in her hometown.

Deciding to trust his own body, trust the intuition sharpened against years of torture and danger, he dismounted the steed, making sure Miret was compos mentis enough to take the reins, and said to Saffron, “Return the axelmares to Donan Trilmere. Rasso and I will scope out the portari station before we all go charging in.”

The clouds behind Saffron’s gaze parted. “Why? Are you expecting—”

“I don’t know. But my spine feels like an icicle, and the hairs on the back of my arms are standing on end, and I intend to find out why.”

Once Rasso had filled his belly with river water, Levan drew his wand, ordered the wolf to heel, and then set off in a stiff saunter on the straight road into the center of the village. By the time they reached the portari station, Rasso was growling beside him.

“What is it, boy?”

Levan swept his gaze across the village green.

Everything seemed…ordinary.

At the far end was a Saints hall, illuminated from within, crimson-and-gold obelisk cast in ethereal moonlight. Behind it was a half-circle curve of buildings—taverns, apothecaries, a cloakery, a shabby inn, few of them attracting many patrons.

To the right of the green was a tavern called the Brimming Keg, which seemed disproportionately full compared to the rest of the village, but perhaps the ale was cheap and good and strong. Next to the tavern was a low stone building where the local streetwatch was housed, but the lights inside were off—if there was anyone on night shift, they were likely on call and perched atop a barstool next door, debating whether to risk a second pint on the clock. So it went, in villages like this.

Still, that prickle on the back of his neck.

Still, Rasso growled.

Levan slipped into the half-moon portari station, wand drawn, but it was deserted. The gate stood in the middle of the room, the air beneath its axelmare arches shimmering and shining, but there were no mages to be seen.

Rasso stood outside the station, still growling threateningly. Levan went back out, crouching by his companion’s side.

“What is it, boy?”

Then—

—shapes.

White-cloaked shapes spilling from a tavern, moving toward him.

White-cloaked shapes with wands drawn, vicious smiles cutting moonlit faces in two.

And one white-cloaked shape in particular, the shoulders of her robes raised and black, as though to mark seniority. Battle experience. Importance.

Levan stood, raising his wand, adrenaline bolting through him like a hot metal rod. As the marked leader moved beneath a streetlamp’s pool of golden light, his legs turned to water.

It couldn’t be.

It couldn’t be.

Alucia.

Alucia, who was supposed to be dead.

Alucia, who he had loved, and who had betrayed him.

He staggered back, and Rasso’s growls turned feral.

“No, boy,” Levan whispered, sensing the forward twitch of his companion’s legs, sensing Rasso was about to tear the throat out of his former betrothed.

Striding ahead of her henchmages, Alucia muttered similarly, keeping them at bay. Insisting that he was hers.

She looked different now—leaner, sharper, her dark brown hair hacked off bluntly at her jaw, a white felt patch strung over one eye. Had she lost the eye in the battle with Vogolan? The battle she had apparently won?

As she approached, Levan’s emotions bled into one another like overlapping wounds.

Hatred, confusion.

Revulsion, devastation, the faint afterimage of love.

And, though he hated to admit it, fear.

Alucia was a skilled enough Enchanter, but ordinarily he’d easily be able to best her in a duel—if his magic was cooperating, and if she didn’t have half a dozen mages in her corner.

He didn’t know what would be worse: for Saffron and Miret to come to his aid, or for them not to.

“Judging by the shock on your face,” Alucia said, and oh, hells, he never thought he’d hear that quiet, crisp voice again, “the King’s Prophet did not betray my little secret.”

It was all Levan could do not to stagger backwards again.

Harrow knew?

How could he possibly know such a thing? Simply through the royal grapevine, the whisper network among Highcloaks and lowborns alike? Or was there something more sinister at play?

Relar’s words: You can’t trust the King’s Prophet.

Levan’s vision vignetted, his throat blockaded with shock.

He could not speak, could not think.

Alucia was alive. Harrow was a traitor.

Beneath all the crosshatched emotions was one stronger than the rest: shame.

Failure.

He had not known any of this, but his father would’ve. His father knew everyone in the city, their weaknesses and strengths, their lies and loyalties. Levan, on the other hand, had been so consumed by his own internal struggles that he hadn’t seen what was right under his nose. Hadn’t even tried to pull at the strings of the Whitewing deaths. Had been too concerned with saving one apothecary’s grandson, neglecting the bigger picture.

“You aren’t dead,” Levan said, intelligently.

A feline grin spread across Alucia’s face, like a velvine who’d been pursuing the same inkmouse for a year and finally had him cornered. “No, though I can see why Vogolan wouldn’t have wanted to confess as much. I must admit I wasn’t devastated to learn of his death.”

From the bustling tavern, raucous laughter erupted onto the green. Lute strings twanged as someone in another world struck up a song.

“You overpowered Vogolan?” Levan stood taut and rigid. “Fled?”

“Brewers are notoriously weak in dueling.”

Yet the loyalty brand had not killed Vogolan for the lie of omission.

“Where have you been for the last three years?”

Another shrug, those black-embroidered shoulder pads lifting and lowering in the moonlight. “Organizing. Amassing loyalty. If you’d bothered to recruit another rat in the Silvercloaks, you’d know this—they’ve been watching our drophouse for months.” Another strange smile, the lashes of her lone eye fluttering almost…flirtatiously. Coyness, suggestive lust, used as a force of antagonism. “You look as hurt as you did on the night you learned what I really was. Haven’t the last three years hardened that hurt into anger? It’s surprising that you haven’t channeled more energy into destroying us, especially given the heavy losses we’ve dealt recently. Sando Segal should’ve set you ablaze with fury.”

Levan felt as though his ribs were being plucked like the nearby lute. “You’ve been trying to provoke us? Because—why?”

“First, because you killed my brother. But also to lure you to our door.”

“And, what? Kill me?”

She laughed, bright and cruel. “Taking you prisoner would’ve been preferable. Supplanting myself at the head of your very lucrative operation.”

“To what end? Why do you want or need so much wealth?”

“The same reason you do,” Alucia said, though he had never confided in her the truth about his mother lying in the ascenite crypt. “So that I never have to feel powerless again.”

Her own childhood had been cratered with tragedy, having spent several years in juvenile detention for a crime she never committed. By her own admission, she’d taken the concept of double jeopardy slightly too far.

Levan thought of those nights spent in his bed, making love, reflecting on their childhoods, revealing the long shadows cast over their hearts.

“Was any of it ever real?” he muttered, loathing the vulnerability of the question.

“No.” The word came swift and sure as a judge’s gavel, though perhaps too swift, too sure.

“Even when we had the holly tattooed on our ribs?”

Behind Alucia, her subordinates exchanged bemused glances.

“Even then,” she snapped, her taunting smile faltering then falling. “I never truly understood why you fell for the ruse. There was mutual attraction, yes, but it was always a shallow thing.”

Levan stared at her like he might a ghost. “I mourned you for years, and you were never dead.”

“We were dead. Hells, we were never alive in the first place.” With the suddenness of a spooked horse, Alucia jerked her head in Levan’s direction; an order to the rest of the Whitewings. “Bring him in.”

They all raised their wands at once, stepping toward him.

Stay back, he compelled, imbuing the command with the deep desire for self-preservation. Stay still.

The magic obeyed.

So did the Whitewings.

Despite the peril of the situation, Levan felt a curl of satisfaction—he’d never compelled six mages at once before. His magic was as strong as ever, providing he did not use it for ill.

Overhead, a cloud swaddled the moon, darkening the sky and the village below. Alucia looked behind her, at her unnaturally rigid henchmages, and then at Levan’s clenched jaw, his balled fist, the intense concentration on his face.

He had never told her he was a Compeller.

“Looks like I wasn’t the only one keeping secrets.” Alucia’s tone aimed for flippancy, but Levan knew her well enough to pick out the first flickers of fear. She raised her own wand grimly. “Sen ammorten.”

Levan dodged the killing curse, naïvely surprised at the savage suddenness with which she’d cast it.

She wasn’t bluffing. He really had meant nothing to her.

“Sen ammorten.” She cast several more in quick succession. “Sen ammorten. Sen ammorten. Sen ammorten.”

He ducked behind a pillar, scrambling for a plan. All his focus and magical energy were channeled into holding back her six henchmages. He tried to extend the perimeter of his compelling sphere to include Alucia too, but for whatever reason, it didn’t take—perhaps he’d have to drop the first command and reissue it to include her, but that could give them a gap in which to launch an assault. There was a chance he couldn’t compel them again, that his ornery magic would obey once and once only.

Sloppy. If he’d imposed an end condition on his initial command—as he had with Tiernan Flane, ordering him to be compelled until discovered, and then take his own life—it would have stuck, and he’d be free to cast other magic. But he’d been panicked, knee-jerk.

He retroactively tacked on a condition to his command, hoping it would take.

Stay back, stay still, until your leader has fallen.

Yet he couldn’t know for certain that it had worked—not without risking casting a new spell and hoping for the best.

Hells, what a bind.

Alucia fired killing curses so furiously that the pillars in front of the station—including the one he hid behind—began to crumble.

Dipping and dodging, Levan fought the urge to run inside the station and hurl himself into the gate—he couldn’t leave Saffron and Miret. He racked his brain for a better plan. There was a dagger in his pocket, but he’d have to get close enough to use it—and his throwing skills had never been reliable.

He could run in the direction of the river, leaving the half-dozen compelled mages on the village green, luring Alucia away from her protection. As he drew close enough to wield the currents, he could use the river to drown Alucia, as he had the Sordai in the cave.

No, he thought fiercely. Saffron and Miret are back in the direction of the river, and I can’t drag a horde of angry Whitewings toward them.

There were other elements to wield besides water, of course. The streetlamps were filled with condensed magical light, not fire, and he’d always been weakest at wielding earth or stone, but a light breeze blew down the High Street—could he turn that into a ferocious enough gust to knock the Whitewings down like bowling pins?

No. Too strong and there might be collateral—civilians were pouring out of the tavern like a leak in a jug, keen to watch the curious duel breaking out on the village green—too weak and it wouldn’t be worth the risk of dropping his compulsions.

Alucia was on him now, raining down killing curses almost faster than he could dodge them.

Rasso wove through the falling pillars, still growling viciously, and Levan wondered if he had it in him to order a savage fallowwolf death on the woman he once thought he’d marry. No—he could stomach the image of her ravaged body, of her bleeding heart in the jaws of his pet beast, but not the image of Rasso falling dead at the hand of her errant killing curses.

A vicious forked spell plunged into a window just behind him, so close to his ear that he heard it whistle past. The glass shattered, tinkled over the cobbles. Levan felt like a cornered animal, pacing back and forth in front of the station and its crumbling pillars, unwilling to run in the direction of the tavern and risk civilian crossfire, unwilling to run in the direction of Saffron and Miret.

His fool’s heart had already cost him so much.

Panic mounted and bucked in him like an axelmare. He tried to summon the sense of calm he got when practicing sparring with Miret. After dragging a few ragged breaths deeper, slower, a coolness settled into his muscles, and he drew from a place of trust in his own body, his own ability.

He stopped abruptly, changed direction, dropped to the ground, and aimed his wand cleanly at the now feral-gazed Alucia.

“Sen debilitan,” he incanted, imbuing the curse with all the self-preservatory intent possible.

His wand obliged and fired his spell, but it missed Alucia, who dodged with a catlike agility he’d never seen her deploy. Behind her, the six compelled mages started toward him. His retroactive end condition hadn’t worked.

“Sen debilitan,” he muttered again, but again Alucia dodged. The curse found one of her fast-approaching henchmages, but that was of little use to Levan. He needed to sever the serpent’s head, not freeze a small portion of its middle.

Frustration built as Alucia dodged three, four, seven curses, and his calm splintered. She’d clearly been training, during all these years she’d spent in hiding. While he’d been plunging himself into the darkest depths of loxlure addiction, she had been drilling and practicing—little wonder she looked so lean, so strong, so dangerous.

The other henchmages were almost upon him, raining down curses—not to kill but to impede, so that their leader might finish him off.

A debilitan struck him in the bicep, and for a few terrifying seconds, it pinned him to the spot. He wrested free, the way Miret had taught him, but it was costly, both in terms of energy and time. He staggered, as though lurching free of time itself—

—straight into the last pillar as it crumbled.

A large hunk of stone slammed into his back, knocking all the air from his body. The pain was delayed, but he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t regain his footing. He fell to the ground, dropping his wand, and then the agony cracked through him, as though an axe had buried itself beneath his shoulder blades.

He rolled onto his back, searching for his wand, but his vision was speckled with stars.

Alucia stood over him, wand pointed at his heart.

Stop, leave, go, he tried to compel, but he could barely even think the words, let alone imbue them with enough power to make them stick.

As his hand scrambled for his wand, she looked at the veinless golden skin with something adjacent to amusement. “A victim finally had their revenge, I see. I hope you suffered. Sen—”

Behind her came a feral tearing sound, an agonized scream, the wet squelch of flesh torn from bone. She spun on her heel in time to see Rasso ripping the throats out of her backup.

Levan used the hesitation to kick at her ankles, sending her careening to the ground. He scrambled to his knees, found his wand, but his hands were fumbling, as though the falling stone had knocked all his coordination loose.

Alucia let out an enraged scream as Rasso tore through two more Whitewings—then blasted killing curses at Levan’s companion. Though the beast was fast, all it would take was one misstep.

Levan yelled, “Rasso, go! Away!” as fear belted through him.

But the beast wasn’t listening.

Stop firing killing curses, Levan compelled, begged, and the Whitewings obeyed, but it was not a specific enough command, and instead they plunged the torture curse at Rasso instead.

The brutally trained animal of Levan’s body saw red, and almost without thought, he grabbed the dagger from its sheath and hurled it at Alucia. It was about to fly west, but Levan wielded the breeze subtly enough to nudge the blade’s path toward its target.

It plunged straight into her back, right between her ribs.

Howling, screaming, spinning fiercely on her heel, Alucia blasted a killing curse at Levan so suddenly that he had to hurl himself through the air to dodge it—

—colliding with a rogue torture curse.

He fell into doloran’s cruel arms the way he might an old friend.

There was nothing like the feel of it.

Lightning met every nerve ending, every tendon and ligament peeled apart with a white-hot fork, a bleaching of the vision, a whole complex human body reduced to a single scream. A fundamental altering of worldview, because most people had no idea this depth of pain existed, that a body could endure it, survive it, without crumpling beneath the unbelievable force.

All at once, Levan was eight years old.

He was in his childhood bedroom, discarded board game pieces scattered on the floor, his lost brother’s spare nightclothes still peeking out from under a pillow—left there by Levan in case Laris ever found his way home. Somewhere in the distance was the clop of hooves over the Havenwood’s undergrowth. Vogolan stood over him, craggy face twisted in concentration.

Levan was inside the pain, inside the memory.

It was something he’d considered many times before, as both a language enthusiast and someone who’d experienced so much trauma, that to be in pain was the correct preposition. Pain turned your body into a cage, a box your mind couldn’t escape from, a—

The agony ended as suddenly as it began, Rasso tearing the heart from the chest of the Whitewing who’d cast it, but as Levan’s vision turned from white to red to truth, he realized he was pinned back against the wall of the station with a wand tip at his throat.

The last thing he ever saw would be Alucia’s twisted face.

He hurt in every way it was possible to hurt.

“Goodbye, Levan,” Alucia murmured, teeth gritted with the pain of her knife wound, single eye alight with hatred and greed and a feral, bladed hunger. “Sen ammort—”

But then the clop of hooves, which had been growing louder and faster, manifested into a blur of black bones and white-blond curls.

“Sen ammorten,” Saffron snarled, and the killing curse forked cleanly from the end of her knobbly beech wand and buried itself in Alucia’s temple.

71

• • • •

A Steed Slain

The scene outside the portari station was a bloodbath by the time Saffron arrived. Six Whitewings lay dead on the village green, hearts and throats ripped out by Rasso, who was licking his bloodied chops in the manner of a very good boy.

“Are you alright?” Saffron asked Levan, who was dizzy, wandless, barely upright.

But he did not answer, only fell to his knees beside the corpse of the Whitewing who’d almost taken his life. Saffron had never seen such an expression on his face, as though he was simultaneously feeling nothing and everything.

The perished mage wore black wings on her shoulders that implied importance, but other than that, Saffron failed to see why her death would elicit such a response.

“Levan,” she said, soft yet firm, urgent. “We need to get out of here. I’ll drop back to get Miret, then—”

Inside the portari station came the echo of overlapping footsteps.

White cloaks moved behind shattered windows, pouring from the gate like a melting bank of snow.

“Saints,” Saffron hissed. “Levan, with me, now.” She offered him a desperate hand up onto the steed, ready to flee deep into the Havenwood—

—but Levan stayed on the ground.

Staring. Bewitched, entranced. Horrified on some existential plane.

The Whitewings filtered out of the station in an angry knot of bodies, and at the sight of their fallen leader, their fallen friends, they bellowed and opened fire.

Saffron—not even halfway replenished after battling the Sordai—threw a shimmering spellshield in time to block three killing curses. The word ammorten wrenched the kingpin from his reverie. He pulled his dagger from the dead woman’s back and climbed to his feet, slowly and yet somehow fast, smooth. Deliberate. Terrifying.

And then he became someone else—something else.

Less a man or a mage than a machine made for killing and killing alone.

He sliced through the Whitewing reinforcements like they were nothing, cutting throats and shredding chests, Rasso feasting and gorging. The Whitewings’ spells, whether defensive or offensive, were no match for the graceful spin of the kingpin’s body, the fluid twists of his torso as he arced a blade through a wrist, a cheek, a belly.

Saffron didn’t know whether to be impressed or afraid.

But he was only one soldier, and white cloaks were bleeding through the portari gate like a wound that could not be stanched. Several moved around the skirmish, unwilling to fire a killing curse into the fray lest they fell a fellow white, and toward Saffron instead.

She couldn’t best a dozen enemies, but nor could she abandon Levan.

“Sen effigias,” she incanted, blasting off two or three statue curses, but while one found its mark, too many bodies were coming toward her, all firing killing curses. Of course they couldn’t hit her, thanks to her magical immunity, and yet…what if one of them was powerful enough, somehow? Levan could breach the walls she once believed impenetrable.

Levan.

A blur of death, an affront to the violet cloak he wore.

Too many were crowding around him, and she had to draw them away.

She threw up a spellshield, dug her heels into the axelmare’s sides, hauled the reins, and went, galloping away from the station, away from Levan. A glance over her shoulder showed that several whites followed on foot, sprinting across the green behind her, cloaks billowing, casting curses that lit up the night like fireworks. She angled her shield to cover her back, pressed her belly lower on the saddle, felt the axelmare’s strong body shift and work under her ribs as the night blurred around her.

She was nearly to the Saints hall when she saw it.

A short, sharp flash of silver cloak, and then a gush like a burst dam.

Familiar faces streamed from Renzel’s Wandery and cast a flurry of statue spells at the Whitewings on Saffron’s tail. White-clad bodies turned to sudden stone.

The Silvercloaks were here, and Levan had just slain so many Whitewings they’d be able to arrest him. Fear cracked over Saff’s heart like a belt buckle, but a Whitewing was still firing on her—and on her horse.

An ammorten curse found the axelmare’s haunch.

Saff was hurled from the saddle onto the flagstones outside the Saints hall, her wrist snapping in two as she tried to break her fall with her palms. She heard only the sound, knowing the pain would come, but shock and adrenaline kept it from her like a secret. Behind her, the black beast lay slain, and behind its dead body, a battle between white and silver raged.

“Sen effigias,” she gasped, firing the statue curse at the white who’d killed the great black steed.

It landed true.

Pain broke up her arm like a storm, left hand hanging limply from her wrist, bolts of agony shooting all the way into her jaw. She staggered to her feet, and a Silvercloak’s stray effigias curse flew wide of its target and buried itself in her belly.

For the first time in her life, she turned to stone.

The next thing she knew, she was inside the Saints hall, newly reanimated and collapsing to the ground. Her broken wrist slammed into the tiled floor, and the bone sharded through her skin in a spurt of blood and agony. She felt the pain in her scalp, in the arches of her feet.

Vomit rose in her throat, but she gulped it back down.

The sheer panic, however, was harder to suppress.

She had spent all her time at the Academy casting illusions to make it appear as though she’d been turned to a statue during drills, because her magical immunity made such a thing impossible.

Until now.

The rogue spell hadn’t been cast by Levan, the only mage she knew to be strong enough to overpower the gift from her late father. Her immunity had faltered.

Though my passing will mean the severance of my medei perpetua, will mean that my protection falls, the magic will transfer to another. Another who will willingly sacrifice his own magic to protect you from ill.

Fear and grief and confusion blurred together as Saffron scrabbled to regain her breath, her mental footing. Did this mean that the other mage who’d sacrificed his own magic to hold the protection had perished too?

Surely her father had a long line of succession planned to keep the immunity in place. Surely—

But then she remembered something terrible.

Back in the Havenwood, she’d used a saqalamis to summon immense amounts of pain in the dying minutes of an already-lost battle. A final resort, a nothing-left-to-lose play. Saffron had used it to wind back time—her well almost entirely depleted—and save Auria’s life.

It had wrought the most world-ending pain Saffron had ever experienced—worse than the loyalty brand, worse than anything her mind could ever comprehend, terrible enough to turn the dregs of power left in her well into liquid gold. Drawing from some unseen place, a sense of perilous overreach.

Auria had lived because of it.

But in the aftermath, Saffron had felt like a claw, a husk, a mangled mass of broken bones. As though the painmaker had done something terrible and permanent. And in the weeks that followed, she felt…bruised somehow. Damaged in some fundamental way. Altered.

Perhaps it had obliterated the gift her father had left her—his last act of love.

The thought was as agonizing as the painmaker itself.

Maybe she was wrong. She racked her brain, trying to remember whether she’d been hit with any other spells since then, whether any left a mark that shouldn’t have, but she came up empty. Even the knife-cheeked assailants in Mersina attacked her with daggers instead of wands.

All these thoughts happened between one moment and the next, closely followed by another internal question:

How had she gotten inside the Saints hall?

Who had rescued and then reanimated her?

Her vision clearing slowly, vague smears of color and light and shade resolving into solid shapes, she peered up.

Above her, wand trained sharply at Saffron’s forehead, was a mage cobwebbed with scars from her own time as a statue. Frizzy ginger hair, missing ear, glasses askew on a pretty, pale face.

Auria.

72

• • • •

Saints, Forgive Me

Auria’s hand trembled as she trained her wand on Saffron.

She still associated her friend’s face with nights spent in the common room losing at polderdash, with spells of silence peppered with dirty jokes and fascinating facts about modern history, with hot chocolate and sarcasm and a general aversion to any manner of tidiness.

Not with this. Not with blood and fear and death.

She looked so vulnerable. Here, in the place where her parents had lived and died, in the hall of the Saints who should have saved them and didn’t. Her curls corkscrewed in a thousand stubborn directions. She cradled a broken wrist to her ribs, the bone jutting through skin, pain etched in all the lines and grooves of her face.

Auria’s heart hurt for her. She’d gone undercover, and it had gone wrong, and now she was badly trapped.

“Ans mederan,” she murmured, aiming the healing spell toward Saffron’s arm. In a braid-twirl of raw magic, the bone sealed itself back together in perfect alignment.

Saffron looked down at the mended wrist, then back up at Auria. “I thought it wasn’t worth risking your own neck to rescue me.”

Despite it all, Auria laughed. It was such an absurdly Saffron response, heavy with sarcasm and rich with scorn. “I was wrong, alright? But you’re safe now. I have you.”

“Safe.” The word dripped with cynicism.

“Yes.” Auria ignored the babble of arrest and casualty updates streaming through her wand. “The kingpin is about to be arrested, and if you testify against him, against the Bloodmoons…we could finally have an organizational bust.”

Saffron clambered to her feet then took a step back, wet boot heels squeaking on the tiles. “Not with Dematus and Karvas still—no. I’ll be thrown in Duncarzus with the rest of the scarlets.” A fraught head shake, gaze darting to the exit, to the village green where hell had broken loose. “I have to flee.”

“And go where? Freedom is never really freedom when you’re running from the law.”

“Plenty of countries don’t have extradition treaties with Vallin.”

“Mersina? Nomaden? You’d want a life there?”

Saffron thrust her chin and her wand higher. “King Quintan is about to pass a death penalty for traitors.”

Auria frowned. “What? No. We won’t go back to capital punishment.”

“Yes, we will.” Saffron’s voice was small, hollow. “He’s paranoid about the Bloodmoons coming for the throne—he’d kill them with his own bare hands if he had to.”

“No,” Auria repeated, stunned by this revelation, feeling a sort of internal shifting of tectonic plates. “The Grand Arbiter will never let that happen.”

“She’s not beyond bribe or blackmail, as we know.”

Auria lowered her wand, took a few steps closer to Saffron, but her friend backed away like a cornered animal. “It won’t come to that for you—neither the bars nor the gallows. Nissa, Jebat, and I can all fight your case, prove you’ve been undercover. And Karvas is not infallible. I defeated him in an inquest, and I can do it again. I’m quite good at arguing.”

“And if you can’t? If Karvas and Dematus are too powerful to overrule? What then, Auria?”

There was no way to win this argument—because Saffron was right. It was a reckless gamble with her life and freedom.

But there was also something else.

A careful hesitance, as though Saffron was…stalling. Waiting to see how the cards of the evening fell before calling a winner. Auria couldn’t blame her. In both the dock raid and the Havenwood, the Bloodmoons had appeared cornered then wriggled free.

“Either way, you’re going to be arrested,” Auria said softly. “It’s just a matter of whether you plead your own undercover case or not.”

Saffron’s face hardened. “Surely you aren’t going to arrest me.”

“I am,” Auria said, trying to convince herself of it. “It is lawful.”

The great conundrum of Auria’s life distilled into a single moment.

What do you do when lawful and right are not the same?

“Auria.” Horror peeled Saffron’s eyes wide as her hand clenched tighter around her wand.

“I can’t let you go back out there and fight against the silvers,” Auria whispered. “You know that.”

A ragged roar tore apart the night outside—louder than was really feasible, given the thickness of the creamstone walls. A shredding male scream of anguish. The sound seemed to pierce Saffron like a sword.

“With all due respect,” she said to Auria, “I don’t think you can stop me.”

She strode toward the exit, fear on her face, determination in her stride.

“Sen effigias,” Auria incanted, firing the statue curse at Saffron, but the turncloak feinted effortlessly, sending back one of her own before raising a spellshield around her body.

Auria dodged the statue curse with a lurch to the side, but it was close—too close. She’d never been skilled in dueling, her body slow and uncoordinated. She was a good shot, through many hundreds of hours of target practice, but the rest of her combat technique left a lot to be desired.

Trying to tackle Saffron to the ground would be a fool’s errand. Killoran had several inches of height and several stones of weight on Auria, plus a natural fighting ability and an arsenal full of mattermantic spellshields.

“Et vocos, Tenébo Jebat,” Auria muttered desperately into her wand tip, Saffron halfway to the exit.

“Here,” came Jebat’s panting voice.

“Requesting backup to the Saints hall.”

Jebat grunted. “We’re taking heavy fire out here. Be prepared to fight on your own.”

Auria rarely cursed, but every fiber in her body flinched.

Where was Sebran? He’d offered support. If he was already in the fray, he could use his physicality against Saff.

There wasn’t time.

Saffron was running, almost at the kiosk, and for a moment, Auria considered letting her flee into the night, to Mersina, to Nomaden, where the gnarled fingers of corrupt lawmakers could not drag her back to the gallows.

But from the look on Killoran’s face, it seemed she had no intention of fleeing. She was going to him. The kingpin, who had just roared as though his life was ending.

Auria couldn’t let Saffron spoil this arrest. Not when she’d already cost them the Havenwood mission. Once Saffron was in custody, once the reality of a harsh sentence was staring her in the face, then Auria could play to her strengths, convince Killoran to finally prove she’d been undercover.

“Saints, forgive me.” Auria aimed her wand at the statue of Aevari, the patron of Timeweaving. “Sen iruinan.” The statue shattered into a hundred jagged pieces. “Sen ascevolo.”

A hundred hunks of smashed stone hurtled through the air toward Saffron.

The mattermantic shield could only repel magic, not mortal materials.

Most of the rocks missed, but one particularly large piece slammed into Saffron’s temple. She hit the ground, not unconscious but severely dazed.

Auria crossed in a sprint and sank to her knees beside her arrest, wrenching the deminite manacles from her belt and cuffing them around Saffron’s newly healed wrists. She disarmed her captive the old-fashioned way, tugging the wand out of a concussion-loosed grip and tucking it into her waistband.

Her wand tip crackled again, but this time, it was not Jebat.

“Et vocos, Auria Marriosan.”

Auria was surprised by the twist of relief she felt at the sound of the low female voice.

“Nissa.”

“What’s happening?”

Trembling madly, Auria looked down at her prisoner with a burrowing sense of dismay.

“I have Saffron Killoran in custody.”

73

• • • •

The Red Veil

A red veil had descended behind Levan’s eyes.

Gone was the young boy who just wanted to heal.

He thought only of blood.

Alucia’s savage smile in the moments before she slayed him was imprinted on the back of his eyelids, stamped onto his psyche, branded over his heart.

His mind went blank, his body took over, and Whitewings fell. He spun in the air, bringing the dagger down on the papery skin of a throat. He twisted at the waist, slicing through a femoral artery. He ducked to the floor, cutting at heels and hamstrings, through wand-holding wrists and into gut-spilling bellies.

Killing curses forked toward him, but the highly trained animal of his body dodged with such perfect precision that they found different marks. Whitewings killed Whitewings, screaming in pain and confusion, bellowing at one another to stop using ammorten, but what else could they do? They were fighting a monster, and on their faces Levan saw the same reaction he’d had to the Sordai. The sense that all was lost, that they had made an immense mistake in coming here, that they’d pay for it with their lives.

But then—

—another color.

Silvercloaks spilled into the station, barking orders and spells, and whites began turning to stone. Terrified faces, wounded mages, transmuted to gurning statues.

Jolting from his violent reverie, Levan ducked behind a stone figure, heart thumping like a Bokolani battle drum, some of the crimson fog in his mind clearing. He surveyed the carnage, noting with vague horror that he’d killed more whites than he could count on his hands. Dark blood—blacker than it was red—soaked the flagstones, pooled at the feet of statues, trickled beneath the axelmare arches of the portari gates.

This had been so different from the killing of the wardholders in Flarence. That had hurt him, badly, but this had not. It had been mindless, furious, righteous. He hadn’t seen his foes as fellow human beings, only as enemies. As other.

It had not been in his mother’s name, nor at his father’s command.

This was all him.

Miret was wrong. He was a monster, after all.

There was no redemption. The prospect had always been a fallacy.

And judging by the hordes of Silvercloaks, he was about to be arrested for all he had done—unless he could get to the portari gate.

He was loath to leave Saffron after she’d saved his life, but he could get a message to her once he reached safety. He’d go down to Aredan, over Assassin’s Bay to Mersina, catch his breath on the isle of mercenaries and mendicants. She’d flee this skirmish without too much trouble—she was atop an axelmare and immune to magic, after all—providing she didn’t come back for him.

Shouts and footsteps thudded and blurred around him, echoing in the rafters. A Silvercloak tore toward him—Tenébo Jebat, the Sinyi mage he’d compelled in the Havenwood—and Levan knew he had to move.

The portari gate was twenty yards away, but statue curses flew with reckless abandon. Sweat poured from his temples, pooled in the small of his back, as he picked up a heavy Whitewing statue as a shield and broke into a grunting run.

Fifteen yards.

Ten.

The statue slipped from his slick grip and fell to the floor, the stone-hewn mage snapping at the waist.

Out of the corner of his eye, Levan spotted the fork of a death curse just in time. He ducked out of the firing line and kept running, pulse roaring in his ears.

Five yards from the gate, his boots slipped and skidded in a bloody puddle. He fell forward onto the ground, knees and palms bearing the brunt of the impact. He dropped his wand but snatched it back quickly, almost blind with adrenaline.

He was close enough to the gate to drag himself there on his screaming knees.

Four.

Three.

Two.

Planting his wand-bearing golden palm on the floor of the gate, he thought, for a luminous moment, that he was going to make it.

A hand closed around his ankle, hauled him back. A glance over his shoulder showed a snarling Whitewing face, standing with her wand pointed down at Levan’s face. Levan compelled her to let go, and she let go. He compelled her not to kill him, but the curse had already left her mouth.

Then—a Silvercloak ran at the Whitewing.

Then—a soft thud as a new mage arrived beneath the portari arches. The sole of a richly polished boot slammed down on the back of Levan’s golden hand.

Levan looked up, and the whole world ceased to turn.

His brother.

Emotion crashed down onto Levan like a crumbling temple.

Laris was alive, Sebran was alive, he was alive.

Shortly followed by the fear.

He was alive, but he was here, in the violent chaos.

Everybody except Sebran Aduran—stop. Stay back.

The dozens of silver- and white-cloaked bodies in the room froze at once. All the sound died with a strange echoing taper.

“Brother,” Levan breathed.

Every broad peak and shallow valley of Sebran’s face was hard with hatred. “No. Look at all you have wrought.” Sebran swept a horrified hand around the slaughterhouse of a station, the mutilated bodies, countless stab wounds. Levan was the only mage carrying a dagger. Blood still dripped from its tip to the tiles, and his clothes were drenched crimson-black. “I take back what I said. You are fundamentally broken, Levan. And there is no redemption, whether you want it or not.”

Sebran raised his wand, silver cloak shifting on his thinner frame, all the brawn he’d painstakingly built atrophied during his time in cell six. Levan could take him down physically, if he wanted to.

But he no longer wanted to. The fight was leaving him, the red-eyed animal who slew all these mages now mortally wounded, cowering in the undergrowth and waiting to die. Casting a gaze once more around the carnage he’d created, at the gleaming cloaks of silver and white soaked in patches of ruinous blood, Levan knew at once that—

No. Not all silver and white.

A pale blue scholar’s cloak had appeared in the doorway atop a skeletal black axelmare. The rider was mild-faced, almost disinterested, and missing a chunk of flesh from his torso, but still searching the room for something. Someone.

Miret too was frozen in place by the compelled command to stop, but he could still see, hear, understand what was happening. Levan did not want that, did not want him to have to watch his surrogate grandson perish.

Levan looked desperately back to Sebran. “Are you going to kill me?”

“You do not deserve such a mercy,” Sebran spat, a vein bulging in his forehead. “Throw me your wand.”

If Levan thought his own compelling was powerful, it was naught by comparison with Sebran’s.

The command was hard, absolute, unflinching, both surgically precise and as strong as a hurricane, and as Levan tossed his wand at his brother’s feet, he could not help but marvel at how the boy from the woods had grown into his ability. He could command the world entire, if he so wanted. How easily Levan might have been overpowered in the watchtower, had his own power not surged and broken first.

With a frighteningly steady hand, Sebran unlooped a set of deminite manacles from his belt and threw them at Levan’s feet. “Clasp these around your ankles.”

A perfect mirror of what had been done to Sebran on the night of Lorissa’s death.

Levan’s own hands shaking, reality dawning, the sudden and terrible knowledge that he was caught at last, the kingpin crouched to one knee and restrained himself.

As the cold deminite met his skin, the compelled command holding the room hostage fell, and the station descended once more into chaos. Shuffles and yells and incantations, a blur of color and sound.

Fear pulsing through him white and cold, Levan did not look up at his brother, but rather across at Miret, his anchor, his safe haven, the port in the great storm of his life. Surely the old mage could do something. Fix this, without necessarily hurting Sebran.

Miret’s warm eyes met Levan’s cold blue ones.

“Mil,” he murmured, my child, and something soared in Levan then, because the word was imbued with emotion, and surely someone truly soul-dead could not feign such depth of feeling, but then—

—a spell leapt from a Whitewing wand toward a Silvercloak.

The Silvercloak ducked, and the scholar did not.

Miret Tomazin, the mentor, the surrogate grandfather, one of so few people who had ever seen the good in Levan, fell lifelessly from the axelmare’s saddle to the blood-soaked ground.

The roar Levan let out was louder than thunder, than an earthquake, than a dragon’s furious scream. A scream from the very cellar of his soul.

Twice the pain of his mother’s death, his father’s, the suddenness lending an unreality to it, and yet Levan’s body knew, his heart and his throat and the mind beneath his mind knew…that this one was permanent. Miret had wanted this, had asked for as much. To take him to the crypt and beg Halant to bring him back would be a disservice.

Miret was gone.

“No,” he moaned, though he wasn’t sure any sound left his mouth. He was a little boy again, the killing machine of the previous minute vanished somewhere deep inside. “I can’t keep losing everyone. I can’t, I can’t…”

As Levan continued to howl his despair, Sebran knelt and took into custody the last Rezaran wand—and with it the possibility of all the lives his brother might have chosen instead of this.

74

• • • •

Death Penalty

Saffron sat on the floor of a holding cell, shivering profoundly.

She had not yet been stripped of her cloak, her own clothes, but she was wandless, hopeless. It was cold in the cell, yes, and had been cold in the winter-bitten north, but the shivering was borne more of an ingrained trauma, an involuntary bodily response to captivity. She hadn’t thought her time in Duncarzus had affected her—until she had been cuffed, chained, locked in once more. The deminite bars filled her with a feeling of profound emptiness, of dark numbness.

“You were right—King Quintan has passed the death penalty,” Auria said softly through the bars of the cage, leaning back against a creamstone wall on the other side. Her pink, dewy face looked recently scrubbed clean, the cobweb scars starker than usual. “He heard the Bloodmoon kingpin had been arrested. Wants to make an example.”

“What are the charges?” Saffron croaked. Her throat was dry, and bizarrely enough, she was yet to be offered hot chocolate. “Surely nothing organizational. You don’t have enough to bring down the Bloodmoons entire. That’s why you’re here.”

“The kingpin committed sixteen counts of murder, for a start.” Auria rolled the back of her skull on the wall, then peered through the bars at her disgraced former colleague. “And no, that’s not why I’m here. I’m here because I don’t want to see you die for this. I know you were always willing to, that you wouldn’t have taken the job otherwise. But—”

“I meant what are the charges against me.” Saffron’s teeth were gritted in a feeble attempt to control her trembling. “Yes, I killed a Whitewing, but it was self-defense. Well, Levan-defense. And—”

“Treason, Saffron.” Auria’s voice was gentle, terrible. “The charge is treason.”

The floor fell out from beneath Saffron, but she tried not to let her fear show. “How is this treason? The Bloodmoons are a criminal organization, yes. You might get them on ascenite laundering, murder, but treason? No.”

They had their sights on the throne, true.

But the Silvercloaks should not know as much.

A worried muscle flickered in Auria’s narrow, pale jaw. “The King’s Prophet foretold that the Bloodmoons would take the throne by force. The king therefore pressured the Grand Arbiter into allowing prophecy, at least royally sanctioned prophecy, into the courts as evidence of future crime. Dematus caved. Legally, the scarlets and all known associates are already guilty of treason.”

The cascade of revelations left Saffron breathless, and cursing a name she had cursed so many times of late.

Harrow.

No wonder he had gone on the run. The Fifth Prophecy was now evidence of his own treason, and if anyone found out what Sarcane had kept hidden all these centuries, the King’s Prophet would lose his life.

As would Saffron, if she couldn’t maneuver her way out of it.

She still had one card left to play: the Steel King’s letter, hastily hidden in the woods outside her childhood home in Lunes. But if there was a way to escape this situation without turning it over…

“You think it’ll hold?” She swallowed hard. “A treason charge.”

“I think you’ll be convicted with extraordinary ease. Unless…”

Saffron grimaced. “I prove I’m undercover.”

So that was why Auria was risking this unsanctioned conversation. Saffron was yet to be properly interrogated, and anything she said now to her former colleague would be unrecorded, inadmissible. A bureaucratic breach so unlike Auria Marriosan, and she was doing it to save Saffron.

“Do you have anything? Anything, Saffron.” Auria’s tone was pleading. “I’ve spoken to Jebat, and he’s willing to go over Karvas’s head with any evidence you can provide. Straight to Commissioner Dillans, who can pardon you—celebrate you—and push for a Bloodmoon-wide arrest.”

Yes, Saffron had something.

But it would be the end of Levan.

She no longer needed the Bloodmoons to achieve her goal—Lorissa Rezaran’s weaverwick wand had been destroyed, and if the Fifth Prophecy was anything to go by, their ascenite vaults paled in comparison to the Palace throne room. Saffron could travel to Nyrøth, find her own weaverwick, then follow the course of destiny toward Vallin’s highest seat. There she would have everything she needed to unmake twenty-something years and save her parents—and Levan’s. She wouldn’t let the continent descend into war.

There was nothing tying her to the Bloodmoons anymore, nothing tying her to Levan.

Nothing but a foolish, ill-fated love.

Perhaps they’d find their way back to each other, in another reality. Perhaps they wouldn’t.

It was too great a decision to make—too permanent, too ruinous.

Saffron ran her hands through her knotted, smoke-scented hair. “Has Levan told you anything?”

“Not a word since we brought him in.” Auria shook her head. “It’s like something has snapped inside him. Some tether to sanity, to reality…broken.”

“Maybe if I could talk to him…” Saff trailed off.

“I think you know we can’t allow that to happen.”

Saffron’s hand went to her necklace; the pendant that reminded both of her parents and of Levan. “When will I see him?”

It took a few beats for Auria to respond, as though a pause might somehow soften the blow. “Likely never. You’ll be questioned separately, held separately. Tried separately. Executed separately.”

Despair flared inside Saffron, hot and bright. There was nothing she could do to save them. If some genius chess move lingered just beyond her ken, she couldn’t see it. Not in her exhausted, terrified state.

“We’re running out of time, Saffron. They’ll be here to take you for interrogation in the next few moments. I already hear footsteps.”

Saffron’s mind took off at a sprint, everything around her blurring, as though she were a beast of prey fleeing through the woods so fast the colors smeared together.

There was so much Saffron wanted, needed, to do. She wanted to bring back her parents, to save the world, to redeem the Timeweavers and prevent the annihilation of her beloved homeland. But she also wanted Levan to be by her side throughout it all, not hanging from a noose outside the Palace steps. The thought was so profoundly terrible that it thrust a sharp pain through her chest.

She could not live with such a thing, even if there was a chance she might later undo it. She could not let him die, could not let him take his last breath believing that once again she had not chosen him. That he was not worth choosing at all.

Images fell through her mind like the royal suits in a polderdash deck.

Levan, brow furrowed as he brought her father’s magic back to life around her neck.

Levan, his hand absently scratching behind Rasso’s furry ear.

Levan, reading a section from The Lost Dragonborn to help her fall asleep.

Levan, making fresh hot cocoa around a campfire, toasting his cup to hers.

Levan, teaching the apothecary’s grandson how to build a shelter.

Levan, shivering and broken in a bathtub.

Love crashed through her, fierce and destructive and cleansing all at once.

Surely there had to be a way to prove her innocence and evade the death penalty without destroying the mage she adored in the process. Surely there would be fair process, a trial, the chance to appeal, the opportunity to outsmart and outplay.

The new kingpin had spent the last weeks and months trying to find a better way. A way to leave behind the brutal brands and the rule of fear, a way to uphold his mother’s legacy without leaving such a trail of devastation in his wake. Many times, the quest had forced his hand. Many times, he had fallen short. But he was trying. She had to try too.

She thought of that toast in the snow-blanketed forest.

To a better world.

The overlapping footsteps stopped outside the cell door. There was a jangle of keys, a low murmuring.

Auria looked at her, hopeful and pleading.

“I have nothing.” Saffron’s voice splintered, her hand finding her parents’ necklace for what might be the final time. “No evidence. No proof I can give you.”

“Saints.” Auria paled to the color of bone. “Then you’re going to hang.”

75

• • • •

The Kingpin’s Interrogation

Levan had been in the interrogation chamber for several hours and had yet to speak a word.

First Auria Marriosan attempted to wrangle answers out of him—to no avail. Then Jebat threw every trick in the book at the captured kingpin, trying to get him to talk.

Nothing worked.

Not because of some grand plan on Levan’s behalf, not through willpower or wisdom or stubborn pride, but because he was not truly there in that room.

All the parts of him that usually thought and planned and felt—his mind, his intuition, his heart—had been decimated, leaving behind a wasteland entirely devoid of life. He was by turns numb and utterly ravaged by grief, and in both states, the questions levied by the increasingly frustrated detectives did not penetrate the fugue.

Miret was dead.

First his mother, then his father, now his surrogate grandfather.

At some point, Tenébo Jebat was replaced by a younger mage with long, ashy hair tied back in a ponytail. His interrogation technique was more sophisticated than the other attempts, a masterclass in dark psychology and subliminal warfare, but it didn’t crack Levan either. There was nothing left to crack. The kingpin simply dissociated out of his body, out of the room, out of the world.

After the sixth or maybe sixteenth hour, Sebran entered the room. Levan’s long-lost brother was almost enough to penetrate the emotional fog.

Sebran looked weak, exhausted, as he sat too heavily into the seat opposite Levan. His eyes were red with lack of sleep, his once brawny arms and chest drowning in the folds of his silver cloak.

When he spoke, his words destroyed anything that remained of Levan’s soul.

“Saffron Killoran has handed over evidence of Bloodmoon treachery. It would appear she was undercover all along.”

Levan stared down at his hands, manacled to a table in short-chained cuffs.

Saffron, who brought him incense to burn away the scent of nightpoppy. Saffron, who held him as he tried not to weep. Saffron, who had outplayed him, who had once again not chosen him.

Of course she hadn’t.

He was a monster.

He was beyond redemption.

He was nothing.

All of this played out in some deep cave of Levan’s mind, without rising as far as his facial expressions or body language. Sebran found this utter lack of reaction infuriating, fist clenching at his side. He could not use his compelling to force a response when Levan was bound in deminite. The irony, that such bounds offered them both protection—from each other, from themselves.

“You’re going to hang. A mercy you do not deserve.”

Levan was very far away from it all, in a similarly dissociative haze to the kind he experienced while on loxlure, only without the raw animal pleasure.

Loxlure.

He would give anything for it right now. That was the one desire capable of cutting through the oblivion. His whole body curled around the pit of his stomach, the intensity of the craving turning him inside out.

Sebran leaned forward, something terrible and raw in those dark brown eyes. “I burned your mansion to the ground. It’s naught but ash.”

The faintest reaction flickered beneath Levan’s fugue.

The crypt. His parents’ bodies.

Everything was gone, yet all he could think about was loxlure. The first rush of euphoria, like the crest of an orgasm but more drawn out. Broader, deeper, better. And then the oblivion. Not the raw, grief-stricken oblivion he currently felt, but something blissful and pure, like an embryo in a womb.

At the very height of his addiction, the black substance had ceased to provide any of this—no euphoria, no oblivion. He had to take it just to feel normal. But since he’d gone two years without it, that first time would be pure heaven.

Sebran grew increasingly irate at Levan’s lack of response. He’d obviously assumed these pieces of information—his lover’s betrayal, his death penalty, his home burned to ash—would cut through his silence, would force the kingpin to talk, but revelations only seemed to drive him deeper inside the labyrinth of his own mind.

When Sebran got up and left for what would likely be the last time, Levan ran his brother’s words through the loom of his ruined heart.

You are fundamentally broken, Levan.

And there is no redemption, whether you want it or not.

Several hours later, Levan was back in his holding cell awaiting transportation to Duncarzus. The wasteland of his consciousness was repopulating with thoughts, feelings, memories, each one of them fresh agony.

He thought of his brother’s hateful stare, and of their time as children in the Havenwood. Of the map they used to study, pressing pins into the places they might one day adventure to: the southern tip of Mersina, a valley in Laudon, the craggy heart of Nomaden. Shishai and Soral and Suva, a speck-sized island in the Ashen Narrows. He thought of the boat they’d made of old rotting crates, how they’d pretended to be pirates plotting their path around the world.

He thought of Miret, of all the thousands of hours the kooky academic had spent teaching him how to defend himself, of how little it had mattered in the end. He thought of half-moon spectacles, of colored Saints stones, of leathery laughter, of a beloved library burned to ash. He thought of a blue-cloaked body tumbling from atop an axelmare’s skeletal black back, lifeless before it hit the bloodied ground.

He slammed his manacled wrists into his forehead over and over again, trying to banish the memories. It hurt too much, and there was no release, no escape.

If he could not have loxlure, at least he could have death.

A release from the pain at last, because this was too much for anyone to bear, too much grief, too much relentless suffering. And yet, did he deserve such relief? He had murdered sixteen mages after Alucia was killed, when the red veil had fallen behind his eyes. He had sentenced sixteen families to this same devastating loss.

I am a monster, and everyone knows monsters exist to be slain.

There was the jangle of keys, and then somewhere beyond his cage—both mental and literal—two figures appeared. Vel Karvas, Captain of the Order of the Silvercloaks, and a lone streetwatcher.

“We’re here to transport you to Duncarzus,” the captain said evenly, though the black ring tattoos on his throat rippled and warped as he swallowed hard.

Levan followed Karvas and the streetwatcher through the halls of the Order, ankles and wrists bound in so much heavy deminite that he shuffled rather than walked. They passed the common room, where Levan had waged battle against Marriosan and Naszi, and the hospital wing, where he had healed half a dozen patients. Somewhere low in his ribs, he felt a brief pang of loss, regret. He would never heal again, never feel that rush of pure, clean satisfaction.

Beside him, Karvas’s body was a hard line of tension. He smelled of stale sweat and something dankly earthen, like rotting trees. Whenever they passed another detective, the captain offered a nod so brittle it was as though his neck might snap.

The Silvercloaks had a portari gate housed in a small, functional room not unlike the one in Bloodmoon mansion—there is no longer a mansion, Levan had to remind himself. The walls of the gate room were pale creamstone, hung with perhaps two hundred different town maps and diagrams of Vallin’s portari network.

With a final strained nod at the streetwatcher, Karvas grabbed Levan by the forearm and hauled him over the threshold of the gate.

Levan closed his eyes, trying desperately to banish the image of Miret’s corpse. When he opened them again, they were not in Duncarzus. They had arrived, bodies squashed together, in an unfamiliar gate—in a very familiar city.

The tang of brine, the clamor of a marina. Tall creamstone buildings, a glittering blue sea.

Aredan.

The street was almost deserted. Judging by the pale pink of the sky, it was only just gone dawn. A second figure stepped out from beneath a shop’s indigo-and-silver awning.

Grand Arbiter Dematus wore not her purple highcloak, but a pale blue scholar’s robe. Graying hair fell around her face in limp locks, and she wasn’t wearing her distinctive violet lipstick. She seemed pale and sickly without it.

“There’s a boat waiting for you in the dock, ready to take you to Mersina.”

He stared at her, through her.

“This was always the plan, was it not?” She looked at him with a tortured expression.

Levan dimly recalled the night he’d broken into the Order to retrieve Saffron’s letter. He’d told the Grand Arbiter exactly what to do if he was caught, and now she was making good on her word. She would do anything to save her daughter, after all, and obviously assumed the kingpin still had the power to ruin her from inside Duncarzus.

Karvas unlocked the deminite manacles, first wrists, then ankles. Still the kingpin did not move, did not react. That numbness was back, that oblivion, a sense of watching events unfold from another plane of reality.

“This is the end of me now,” the Grand Arbiter whispered, her words punctuated by the garish caw of seagulls. “My career, my life. You cannot ask any more, because the card has been spent. Burned. All I ask, all I have ever asked, is that my daughter remain unharmed.”

“You have my word,” Levan croaked, ears ringing, limbs still leaden. The thought of hurting Dematus’s daughter seemed foreign, absurd, even though he had slaughtered sixteen mages not two days earlier.

“Nobody need know of your involvement,” Karvas said to the Grand Arbiter. “I’ll say the kingpin overpowered me at the portari gate. You can still emerge from this unscathed.”

Dematus stared at him for several long, penetrating moments. Levan dimly registered that her grip had shifted, tightened on her neat yew wand.

“Atherin and its various institutions are rotten to the core,” she murmured. “An orchard growing more spoiled fruit by the day. It’s time to carve out the corruption at the root.” She rose her wand, aimed it at Karvas’s widening eyes, and incanted, “Sen ammorten.”

Karvas fell dead, and Levan was jerked free of his reverie by the shock of it.

“What—?”

“It ends here.” The Grand Arbiter turned her wand on him. “With me. With you.”

For a moment, Levan felt nothing but relief.

True oblivion at last.

And while the young, innocent boy at the heart of him might have pleaded, no, don’t hurt me, I want to live, the ruined mage he’d become welcomed it. He closed his eyes and waited for the sound of the killing curse, for the ravaging fork to find his chest.

It didn’t come.

He opened his eyes warily, only to see that Dematus was standing still, trembling, her lips moving around inaudible words, as though trying and failing to cast the curse.

As though compelled.

Realization struck Levan then.

The young, innocent boy at the heart of him hadn’t just pleaded.

He’d commanded.

Some part of him, buried beneath the scorched earth of his trauma, must still want to live.

He was free—if he wanted to be.

There was a boat waiting for him in the harbor. He could go to Mersina as planned.

And do what? he asked himself bitterly.

The answer was already there.

For every hand he’d severed in the name of extracting information, he would heal a wound. For every life he had stolen in his mother’s name, he would make another better.

With one final look at Dematus, he turned and walked away. Toward the harbor, toward his new life. But as he reached the end of the street, the compulsion over the Grand Arbiter shuddered and dropped—he was obviously still depleted from the battle in Lunes.

He expected to hear the cry of a killing curse, to feel that vicious fork into his back, but when he peered over his shoulder, the last thing he saw before rounding the corner was Dematus lifting the yew wand to her own chin.

A few moments later, he felt, rather than heard, her body hit the ground.

76

• • • •

One Final Letter

Though Karvas’s death sent shock waves through the Order, Auria was privately thrilled to see Tenébo Jebat behind the captain’s desk.

“Congratulations on your promotion,” she said, taking a weary seat in front of her mentor. Exhaustion had turned the marrow in her bones to lead.

“Many thanks, Marriosan.” Jebat too seemed utterly drained. He poured them both a cup of much-needed coffee. “Of course, the circumstances are rather grim, but…”

“You’ll be a far better captain than Karvas ever was.” Auria lifted her chin defiantly. “You won’t let the highest-profile prisoner in decades escape, for one thing.”

Jebat handed her a gold-rimmed cup of coffee, then raised his own in a mock toast. “Here’s hoping.”

“Captain, I…Saffron.” Auria swallowed hard. “Is there really nothing we can do?”

Jebat sighed, long and slow. “You and I both know she was undercover. Naszi knows too. Could vouch for her, testify for her. But if Killoran is really going to dig her heels in, refuse to testify for herself…what can we do?”

“Sebran lied,” Auria said, hurriedly, as though the words were so bitter she didn’t want to taste them for too long. “I read his transcripts from the conversation with the kingpin. Why would he do that? Why would he tell Celadon that Saffron had turned him in?”

Jebat shifted in his chair. “That I don’t know. Aduran has been placed on a leave of absence following his imprisonment in the Bloodmoon compound. He will spend the next few weeks or months recovering, debriefing. For now, my best guess is that he simply wanted to hurt the kingpin as much as possible. Revenge for his own capture, I suppose. Although I sense there’s a missing piece we’re yet to uncover. In Lunes…he and the kingpin seemed to have an especially charged conversation. I was nearby, but couldn’t quite make out their frantic mutters. It was as though they knew each other beyond their roles as scarlet and silver.”

“There’s always a bigger picture, isn’t there?”

“Always.”

A column of despair towered in Auria’s chest. “We can’t see Saffron hang, sir. Please.”

“That is a matter for the courts and the courts alone.”

“Perhaps I should represent her,” Auria suggested, knowing already what Jebat’s response would be. “I successfully defended myself and Nissa at the inquest. Maybe—”

“Clean hands, Marriosan,” Jebat replied gently. “Embroiling yourself in this mess, representing a known traitor…you could wave goodbye to the Grand Arbitership forever.”

Would that not be worth it, to save the life of my friend?

A decision for another day. Saffron’s trial was high-profile; there would be months of preparation. Auria had time to figure out how to help, if at all.

“So what happens now? With the kingpin having escaped.”

Jebat turned in his chair to peer out over the skyline of Atherin, where life continued mostly as usual for its citizens—except, perhaps, for speculation over how an entire block of buildings had burned to ash, or why all the Bloodmoon-run gamehouses in the city had suddenly shuttered.

“We’re allocating extraordinary departmental resources into finding him, but since Karvas’s body was found down in Aredan…” Jebat sighed. “I’d imagine Celadon is tucked safely away in Mersina by now. And as we all know and despise…”

“Mersina does not have an extradition treaty with Vallin.”

A defeated nod. “Not for the Highcloak of Justice’s lack of trying. Perhaps a new Grand Arbiter might have more luck, but it could be many weeks or months before that high seat is filled.”

An interim Grand Arbiter had been instated, of course, but they wouldn’t be able to make any major moves or decisions.

Auria still could not quite decide how to feel about Dematus’s death. On the one hand, the Grand Arbiter had been corrupt, and the country was better off without such a rotten figurehead. On the other hand, a death was a death, a life was a life, and some things were not so clean-cut as lawful and right.

“So what else can we do? To bury the Bloodmoons for good?”

Jebat patted the frankly enormous stack of files on his desk, some so new the ink was barely dry. “Round up as many scarlets as we can. Many perished in the fire at the mansion, but many, many more escaped. It’s our job to find them, bring them in. Gather testimonies, evidence, so that when we finally rearrest Levan Celadon—which we will, if it’s the last gods-damned thing I do—there’s no way he’ll wriggle free of a conviction.”

Auria took a sip of almond-sweet coffee. “An enormous undertaking, rounding up hundreds of scattered scarlets.”

Jebat latched his gaze onto her. “Which is why I’ve created a new task force—and why I’d like you to lead it.”

Auria’s hand halted with the cup halfway back to her lips, suspending it stupidly by her chin. “But I’m—the inquest. My insubordination in the Lunes operation. Going behind Karvas’s back.”

She’d come here expecting to be placed back under suspension, not given the most important task force of the city’s recent history.

“There will be no inquest,” Jebat said calmly. “This just became war, and war calls for special measures.”

Auria struggled to make sense of this. “But…I’ve only worn silver for a year. I don’t have the experience to lead a task force, let alone—”

“You have one of the finest investigative minds I’ve ever encountered. Were it not for your own captain’s treachery, you would have secured an arrest and a charge many before you believed impossible.” Jebat’s gaze intensified. “You are brilliant, Marriosan, and brave, and determined. Integrity like no other mage I’ve known. There is no one else I would have lead this final charge against what remains of the Bloodmoons.”

Trying not to be ashamed of the warm tears that very quickly spilled down her cheeks, Auria smiled and nodded, thinking, I can’t wait to tell Nissa.

“Thank you, sir. I won’t let you down.”

“You what?” Nissa sat bolt upright in the slouchiest sofa in the common room. Behind her hung a new set of navy-blue curtains, as though the kingpin had never broken into the Order and almost slain them both.

“I’m leading the Bloodmoon task force,” Auria repeated, still in a state of deep shock.

“Hells, Marriosan,” Nissa muttered, raking her clawed hand through the silken black sheets of her hair. “Talk about failing upwards.” For a moment, Auria thought her colleague might resent this development, but then the dragonborn broke into a feral grin. “That’s fucking fantastic.”

Some of the tension in Auria’s chest eased, and she allowed herself to match Nissa’s smile with her own. It felt wrong when so many were hurt or dead, but for the first time in weeks, months—since before Tiernan died—Auria felt some of her old optimism return.

Karvas and Dematus were gone, could no longer crush any significant developments beneath their corrupt boots. They finally had Bloodmoon arrest warrants coming out of their ears, and while their targets had scattered and the kingpin might be beyond legal reproach, it finally felt like they could win this thing.

And Saffron…well, Auria had to figure out what to do about her old friend. Perhaps she could convince her to change her mind. Now that the kingpin had fled without her, had made no attempt to rescue her from death row, her loyalties might not be quite as staunch.

After months of grief weighing her down, Auria once again believed that in the great arc of humanity, goodness would always win.

“Thank you,” she whispered to Nissa, and then the tears fell once more.

“No, none of that,” Nissa said tersely, slapping her thighs and climbing to her feet. “We’re going out to celebrate. Jaded Saint? First flamebrandies on me.”

Auria laughed and nodded, feeling a rush of gratitude for this unlikeliest of friendships.

“Oh, this came for you, by the way.” Nissa rifled in the papers that had spilled over the couch when she leapt up, tossed Auria a parchment letter, then headed in the direction of her own bedroom to freshen up.

Frowning—for she rarely received correspondence to the Order directly—Auria tore into the envelope, hands trembling as though her body knew before her mind did that this was not the sort of letter she’d ever wanted to receive.

Detective Marriosan,

Allow me to cut right to the heart of the matter, without the meandering preludes for which I am ordinarily known. I am miraculously and fatally sober, you see, and not feeling especially loquacious.

So: the heart of the matter.

I was listening to every word uttered during your stakeout in the apartment opposite the Whitewing drophouse. A little enchanted artifact not unlike your own bracelet—so useful for hearing what the ear cannot, for keeping record where a quill cannot.

This is how I know Nissa Naszi perjured herself during an official inquest.

This is how I know you let her.

If this got out, it would be the end of both of your careers, no?

Oh dear, Marriosan. I think that means you’re mine now.

Yours enchantedly,

Harrow Claver

77

• • • •

The Blackest Embrace

Loxlure was not difficult to find in a place like Mersina.

It was known by a different name on the isle of mercenaries and mendicants, but the kingpin—was he still a kingpin, now that his empire was ash?—had always had a knack for languages. A few muttered words into the right ears, a few gentle death threats, and he soon found himself in a dingy tavern that smelled strongly of piss, candied cherries, and nightpoppy.

Levan rolled the glass vial in the palm of his golden hand.

There were many ways one could take loxlure. It could be ground into a fine powder, which one could either snort, rub into gums, or smoke in an achullah pipe. But Levan had always preferred to drink it in a deep, dark shot of liquid. The release was less immediate, since the substance took longer to enter the bloodstream, but Levan loved that. The anticipation, the tingling, the way the high hit slowly, slowly, then all at once, the blackest embrace welcoming him home.

He unstoppered the cork, lifted the thin glass rim to his lips, and swallowed it down in one. The taste was exactly how he remembered it, as sweet as it was bitter, acrid as smoke yet somehow floral, a little metallic. The scent of nightpoppy, but a thousand times more intense.

He closed his eyes and waited.

The sounds of the tavern dissolved around him, the roar of pirates gambling away their treasures, the bleat of a stringed instrument, the clink of glasses, and the scuffle of footsteps.

It was all so far away.

Senses like sound and smell and taste and sight were all so abstract compared to the pain.

Miret, dead and empty in a heartbeat.

Alucia, alive, snarling, and then killed in front of him.

Saffron, taking his face in hers, peering into his soul as though it were not monstrous but wonderful, and then betraying him anyway.

His father, slain by the Silvercloaks because Levan had trusted the wrong woman—again.

His mother’s dead face illuminated by moonlight, his brother pleading next to her.

His brother telling him, cold and true, that he was beyond redemption.

But these agonies were already softening, swaddled by loxlure. The sharp, scraping horror lost its bladed edge, leaving behind a strange kind of resignation. Surrender. Yet surrender felt curiously like freedom.

All behind him now.

It could just be him and loxlure; the only thing he’d ever been able to count on.

He would never fulfill his mother’s twisted legacy. Never avenge her death, never win back her throne. And that was fine. That was good. He’d never wanted the crown anyway. First thing tomorrow, once the nightpoppy loosened its claws, he would heal the magicless brand on his chest. He would make new. Become something other.

The soft haze became a savage swoosh of release, every muscle in his body slackening, the tension around his jaw and temples easing. He smiled into it, feeling not like a mage or a monster but rather an amorphous entity. The pure, raw pleasure would be next, and he would welcome it with open—

—an unexpected sound scythed through the feeling.

His own name.

Coming from his wand.

“Et vocos, Levan Celadon.”

It took him a few moments to place the voice, but when he did, it was like a shovel biting into crisp earth. Some of the loxlure clouds parted—not entirely, but enough for him to make columns of his spiraling thoughts.

Halant.

The necromancer he’d left behind in the crypt.

The crypt…which was underground, surrounded by ascenite on all four sides.

And ascenite could not burn.

“What is it?” Levan asked, slurring, distant, but straining for alertness.

“I’ve done it,” said Halant, equal parts elated and terrified.

Levan’s vision pitched to one side, his insides turning to ice. “I—what are you saying?”

A loaded pause, in which a thousand new possibilities took seed.

“House Rezaran has Risen.”

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I’d like to thank Northern Edge Coffee in Berwick (especially baristas Simon and Eilidh), who make the best flat whites and old-school sheet cake in the world. All that sugar and caffeine really saw me over the finish line of this book, and things are about to get even more intense with the third installment. Prepare for me to singlehandedly keep you in business.

In all seriousness, it really does take a village, and I have so many people to thank—so buckle up!

Thank you to my legendary agent, Chloe Seager, and everyone else at Madeleine Milburn, especially Valentina Paulmichl, Hannah Kettles, and Georgina Simmonds (who brought this series to so many foreign markets); to Kelly Chin and Ella Welch for all the practical help (of which I require a lot); and to Hannah Ladds and Rachael Naylor for the hard work on the adaptation side.

Thank you to editors extraordinaire Sam Bradbury (with whom I gleefully bought MATCHING JACKETS) and Emily Archbold (nobody stans Rasso harder and I love you for it). This second installment is infinitely better for your wisdom and insight. And to Kate McHale—welcome aboard the Silvercloak Saga train!

Thank you also to the wider Del Rey teams on either side of the pond: Sophie Wingrove, Beccy Jones, Kirsten Greenwood, Phoenix Curland, Jess Meredeen, Issie Levin, Lily Capewell, and Rachel Hughes in the United Kingdom, and Tricia Narwani, Keith Clayton, Julie Leung, Alex Larned, Marcelle Iten Busto, Madi Margolis, David Moench, Emily Reilly, Tori Henson, Brittany Bunzey, Maya Fenter, Regina Flath, Sarah Horgan, Paul Gilbert, Erin Korenko, Bridget Sweet, and Barbara Bachman in the United States.

Thank you to Elliot Lang and Dan Simpkins for the phenomenal covers, and to Francesca Baerald for the map of my dreams. These books are works of art because of your talent.

Thank you to my wonderful foreign publishers and all the translators and teams who work so hard on international editions (and on bringing me to your delightful countries on tour): Penhaligon/Blanvalet in Germany, Pandora/Trei in Romania, Galera in Brazil, NOX/Albin Michel in France, Rizzoli in Italy, General Press in Hungary, Uroboros/GW Foksal in Poland, Alpha in Denmark, Umbriel/Urano in Spain, Secret Society/Penguin Random House in Portugal, WSOY in Finland, and Xander in the Netherlands.

Thank you to my phenomenal beta readers: Kate Potter, Katie Robinson, and Trevor Hedges. This story truly would not exist in this form without you. I’m grateful for everything, whether pointing out minor magic system inconsistencies or exchanging long emails about all the places you put the book down and all the things I could do to make that impossible. Thank you to Imi McDonnell, the first ever reader of book one (back when there was no pleasure-pain magic system), who has had the longest wait for Turncloak. Thank you also to Steve Eggleston and Steve Emery, for the generalized Silvercloak Saga hype.

Thank you to all my wonderful writing friends and colleagues, of which there are far too many to name, but especially to Victoria Schwab, Sarah Maria Griffin, and Heather Askwith. Without you, I would simply not be sane. Your presence in my life (and my work) means the entire world.

Thank you to my longtime besties: Toria, Lucy, and Nic. You’ve been in my acknowledgments for eleven years now—here’s to eleven more.

Thank you to my family: Mum and Dad (who were told they were not allowed to read these books but did so anyway); my brother, Jack, and sister-in-law, Lauren; my fantasy-obsessed cousins; and the whole bonkers familia. Also to my gran, who I miss every day.

Thank you to you, the readers and booksellers and bloggers and reviewers and librarians, for championing my endlessly messy mages. Without you, none of this is possible.

And finally, to Louis, Blair, and Obi, who will always be my home, and for whom I would sacrifice my magical well in a heartbeat.

About the Author

L. K. Steven is a #1 New York Times bestselling and award-winning author from the northernmost town in England. She has written several young adult novels as Laura Steven, such as Every Exquisite Thing, The Society for Soulless Girls, and Our Infinite Fates. When she’s not writing, you can probably find her trail running, reading chunky fantasy novels, baking cookies, venturing on Pokémon GO safaris, playing old men at chess, or ignoring her husband and son to perfect her Stardew Valley farm. The Sunday Times bestselling Silvercloak Saga is her adult debut series.

laura-steven.com

Instagram: @laurasteven

TikTok: @authorlaurasteven

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