Page 4 of Silvercloak

She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out.

Hunched over her mother’s body were two mages in long silver cloaks, pinned at the neck with sapphire brooches. One mage drew a chalk circle around her father by hand, while the other examined the ruined door. Their wands were scrawling in notebooks suspended midair, and they talked in low voices.

At the sight of Saffron, one detective looked up. She was pale, narrow-nosed, thin as a spire, and for the briefest of moments, pure, unfiltered grief flashed across her face.

“Oh, sweetling,” she murmured to Saffron, shielding the corpses from view. “Come here. You’re safe now.”

SAFFRON’S CLOAK WOULD TURN SILVER BY SUNDOWN—IF SHEwasn’t caught in a lie first.

A mere quarter hour stood between her and the final assessment.

Twenty years of grief and determination distilled into a single sequence.

She arranged her features into a neutral expression and set down a winning polderdash card. The priestess on the front winked coltishly.

Her opponent, Gaian, groaned like a dying hog.

“A whole year of having my hide whipped, and still I take the bait.” He slid a pearly ascen over the bench, and Saffron pocketed it with a smirk. “You must have more coin than the city treasury at this point.”

Not far from the truth. Saffron had spent most of her adult life gambling rather fruitfully against her peers and countrymen. Everyone else was sobadat card games.

Shuffling the deck idly in her hands, Saffron cast her gaze around the brewing lab. Orange-gold sunlight poured through the mullioned windows, turning dust motes to fireflies. The high walls were lined with shelves holding glass jars of common tincture ingredients: herbs and spices, ash and earth, fallowwolf claws and mourncrow beaks, flesh and blood and bone. Six long wooden benches ran parallel down themiddle of the lab, each topped with pewter cauldrons and an array of gilded instruments. Along the benches, two velvines stalked and purred. Slender cats with purple eyes and black fur, their satin-cool breath sent ripples of pleasure across bare skin. They patrolled the Silvercloak Academy day and night, replenishing the magical wells of drained-dry mages.

The six cadets had gathered in the lab ahead of the final assessment, so that Auria and Sebran—the only Brewers amongst them—could stopper their tinctures. Though the cohort had spent twelve months competing against one another for the top rankings, they had become unexpectedly close-knit, and though none of them would admit as much, they all wanted to make the most of their last moments together. Before they were sent to far-flung corners of the continent for their first postings, before they no longer lived in one another’s pockets.

Assuming, of course, that they all passed.

Tension hung heavy in the room. The cadets stood on the cusp of an ending and a beginning, and they all felt the knife-edge beneath their feet.

“Look alive, folks.” Auria beamed, bright and earnest, her eternal vim never wavering. “We’re all going to turn our cloaks silver tonight. I can feel it.” A velvine brushed against her arm, purring pleasure over her throat as she notched three final vials into her tincture belt.

Nissa hung out of the arched window, smoking a hand-rolled achullah. It smelled of orange and clove and an earthy type of tobacco grown in the hottest part of the Diqar desert.

“Have you ever, even once, believed things wouldn’t work out?” Nissa drawled, blowing out a smoke ring. Black hair fell to her waist in a sleek, shining sheet. “Despite all evidence to the contrary?”

Auria flashed another sincere smile. “No, not really.”

Nissa’s own lips curled. “You know, in Nyrøth they consider blind optimism a sign of low intelligence.”

“Good thing we don’t live in Nyrøth,” Auria replied cheerily.

In truth, Saffron found Auria’s sunny veneer comforting, but she didn’t say as much. Despite overcoming her six-year stretch of silence when she was twelve, she still preferred to stay quiet.

From across the room, Nissa caught Saffron’s eye with a privatesmile, and it felt like grabbing a fistful of gallowsweed—as though everything in her blistered at once. Saff and Nissa had been ensnared in a clandestine relationship for the last few months. It began with simple, stress-relieving fucking, and slowly bloomed into something richer, softer. A stroke on the cheek, a flower left on a pillow,I saw this and thought of you.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, Nissa had ended things. Said that they needed to focus on their futures, and the very real chance that they’d be posted hundreds of miles apart. Nissa believed that the best Silvercloaks cut off sentimentality at the root. But for Saffron, the entire reason she was at the Academy was an emotional one.

She looked away from Nissa, gathering up her playing cards and tucking them back into her white cloak.

Tiernan—a tall, uncertain Healer, mainly at the Academy to appease his father—stopped his frenetic pacing to shoot Nissa a withering look. (Well, as withering as it was possible to be, when he’d sooner perish than insult someone.)

“I, for one, appreciate Auria’s positive spirit.” Tiernan blushed, raking a hand through his pale brown curls. He and Auria were mutually infatuated, and yet both believed their feelings to be unrequited. “Her love of the game makes it easier to reconcile the fact we’re both teammates and competitors.”

He had a point. The final assessment was not just of the Silvercloak cadets as individuals, but of how they worked together as a field unit.

The Academy was reserved for the best of the best, and there were only six mages in Saffron’s cohort. There was Saffron herself: stubborn, quietly cunning, relentlessly single-minded, even more relentlessly sweet-toothed, and frighteningly good at gambling. An Enchanter, in the eyes of the Academy—if not in truth.

Shy, awkward Tiernan, whose father was in the King’s Cabinet. A talented Healer, albeit a perpetually nervous one.