Page 132 of Silvercloak

Another beat, in which Zares weighed her options—and quickly realized this was her only one.

She rolled her body sideways, dropping her feet from the wall, and pushed herself up on her elbow. “Now?”

“Now,” confirmed Saff, relief flooding her veins.

This was going to work. Tiernan would marry Auria. He would prove his father—and his mother—wrong.

She tried not to think about the lore surrounding the Risen, the ancient belief that the undead never truly came back. That some fundamental spark in them would be dimmed, extinguished. They would bealmostthemselves, but not quite, and such uncanny variance could drive their loved ones mad.

She tried not to think of Segal’s milk-white stare, the emptiness of his movements, as though he could retrace old steps but not choose new ones.

It was better for Tiernan to rise, albeit a little altered, than for him to stay gone.

Wasn’t it?

Zares clambered shakily to her feet, and Saff took her by the snarled, bone-cold hand.

Getting Tiernan’s corpse to the warded tunnels unnoticed would have been impossible if it weren’t for Levan’s Bellandrian wand—which she’d pocketed the last time she was in his room. Somehow, she’d been able to conjure aportarispell almost immediately, powered by a raw, animalistic desperation that hummed through her very bones. One moment she, Rasso, and Tiernan were hunched in the darkened alley outside the Jaded Saint, and the next they squeezed through the fabric of the world to the concealed entrance of the tunnel. Miraculously, nobody had been coming or going from the mansion. The only sounds were the scuttle of inkmice and a vague dripping noise somewhere deep in the bowels of the building. She’d left Rasso guarding Tiernan’s body, so that nobody stumbled upon it and tossed him in the incinerator.

“Et portari, Tiernan Flane,” Saff whispered now, gathering all her power into a piercing kernel.

Levan’s wand obliged.

With an earsplitting pop, Saffron and Zares dropped into the dark tunnel as though from a great height, limbs crumpling beneath them as they collapsed next to Tiernan’s body. Rasso licked at Saff’s salty brow and nuzzled his face into her stomach, as though he’d missed her enormously. Corpses were famously not great company.

It was all Saffron could do not to faint. Her well was dangerously depleted, between theportariand the fruitless attempts to resuscitate Tiernan, but she wasn’t in the mood to pleasure herself in front of a necromancer at the moment.

“This is who I need you to revive. He’s only been dead for quarter of an hour.”

The necromancer looked from Tiernan back to Saff. “Fine.” Then, “You really don’t know why they brought me here?”

Saffron shook her head, breathing shallowly.

Zares gave a scathing snort. “He wants to bring his mother back.”

“Sorry?”

“Lorissa Celadon.” Zares wiped her mouth on the back of her rancid sleeve. “Her son wants to bring her back from the dead.”

Saffron frowned. “But she died over twenty years ago. That’s not poss—”

“Exactly what I tried to tell him.” Zares shrugged. There was a sort of hateful canine snarl to her mouth. “No matter how much ascenite you use to power your crypt, over time the body—”

“Crypt?”

“That’s why they’re so hell-bent on hoarding ascenite. It’s the only thing keeping the old queenpin viable, but they need more with every passing day. They can’t sustain her for much longer.”

The whole world sharpened to a single point of realization, a truth that should have been so obvious finally revealing itself.

The grand purpose. The why of it all.

The reason Lyrian and Levan Celadon did what they did.

Their plan was pure, desperate delusion. And yet Saffron understood it, deep down. Sometimes she thought there was nothing she wouldn’t do to bring her parents back to her.

Mellora and Joran would be fully decomposed by now.

But for the old queenpin …