Page 41 of Silvercloak

Levan uttered an inaudible incantation, and Saffron’s arms snapped wide, deminite manacles folding out from inside the stone wall and closing around her wrists. They pulled taut, yanking Saffron’s hands so far apart that every muscle screamed in protest. Her feet only just grazed the ground.

Segal stood mere inches away from her, stale breath wafting over her face.

“Et laceran.” He streaked the tip of his wand down the front of Saffron’s tunic and it tore cleanly in two, leaving her bare breasts and pale torso exposed.

Shame burned through her cheeks. She felt as powerless and humiliated as a hog on a spit. Sweat beaded on her clavicle, from the fear and the stifling heat of the room. Levan pointedly averted his gaze, and in that moment, Saff was grateful for the tiny show of humanity.

Lyrian rolled up his tunic sleeves. From a brass rack, he unhooked a poker with a solid circle on its end, then held the round stamp over the fire.

Saffron’s breaths came fast and shallow. The sight of the brutish instrument glowing orange sent a fresh lance of dread through her.

Wand in his other hand, Lyrian muttered a conditional curse at the licking flames.

“Ver fidan, nis morten. Ver fidan, nis morten. Ver fidan, nis morten.”

Saffron’s brain worked frantically. She’d never heard magic cast like that before: a hiss, a litany, a serpentine snap.

The flames grew darker, bloodier, until they were the exact hue of Lyrian’s scarlet cloak. The poker glowed furious white, and Lyrian withdrew it.

He stepped over Neatras’s body, paying it no mind, and Saffron wondered then whether the murder had truly been necessary. The body had played no part in the spell; the poker had not been dipped in his blood or pressed against his unbeating heart. Did Lyrian simply enjoy watching her suffer and squirm, enjoy watching her wage war against her own humanity?

It doesn’t matter if your motivations are not what you claim. We’ll be able to control you regardless, fit you with a tight collar and a tighter leash, walk you down the streets of Atherin like a dog, should we so please.

Panic clawed up her throat as he approached.

She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’tbreathe.

Then the searing circle at its tip was upon her flesh, right over her heart. There was a split second in which she felt nothing, and then the agony cleaved her in two.

A frayed scream tore from her.

Her body violently rejected the scorching metal, legs bucking like a frightened foal in a bid to escape it, but the bindings at her wrists held firm, and she remained pulled taut beneath the torture, nowhere to go but inside the pain itself.

Still he held it there.

What began as a contained burning, a vicious shredding sensation like every one of her skin fibers was being pulled apart by lightning, became an all-consuming crimson. Her vision was cloaked scarlet, and her chest felt flayed open, flames licking at the exposed flesh inside.

Still he held it there.

Her other senses severed themselves one by one until nothing existed but the pain.

She folded in on herself like a dying star.

Still he held it there,the poker clamped against her skin, the surface fizzing and bubbling, but by now she barely saw anything but Lyrian’s vague outline.

The world pressed in on her from all angles until everything sank into darkness.

SAFFRON AWOKE IN AN UNFAMILIAR BED, HER CHEST A CRUCIBLE.

For a moment, she didn’t understand where she was.

The scene was smudged in hazy blurs of cream and gold and red. She wasn’t in the stony Duncarzus cell, nor in her cozy room at the Academy, nor in her late-childhood bedroom above Clay’s Cloakery. She made out the frame of a four-poster bed, but though she was flat on her back, her limbs were not bound to its oak spindles. Her heavy palms found the thick, textured brocade of a bedspread.

A distant wail bled through the walls, interspersed with high pops of laughter and the low ooze of a saxophone.

A fallowwolf howled.

And then she remembered.