Page 92 of Silvercloak

Unheard of.

How did he have so muchpower? The hoards of ascenite? Or something more?

Saffron thought of pleasure and of pain—the twin pillars that held up the magical world—and she wondered.

When the flame burned through the fabric to Zares’s bare skin, Levan began to chant.

“Ver fidan, nis perruntas. Ver fidan, nis perruntas. Ver fidan, nis perruntas.”

He was branding her, but it was different. Lyrian had repeatedver fidan, nis morten,which Saff had interpreted as a sort of conditional curse. If you betray, then you’ll die. Butperruntaswas not death—it was a severance. If Zares tried to betray Levan or the Bloodmoons—attempted to shoot a killing curse at his chest instead of reviving Segal—her hand would cleave clean away from her wrist.

I always win, necromancer.

Saff’s own dark crust pulsed in sympathy, the skin around it tight and stinging, its roots burrowing deep into her bones.

When the brand was done, Zares left panting raggedly, Levan handed back her wand. Saffron admired the necromancer for not passing out, feeling a strange kind of shame that shehad.

A solitary tear darted down the necromancer’s sallow cheek. She seemed to know, without reallyknowing,what the brand meant. She raised her wand to Segal.

“Hal-exaat.”

The membrane holding Segal in the air evaporated, and his lifeless body slumped to the ground.

“Hal-avissa.Hal-avissa.Hal-avissa.”

In that moment, Saff was six years old, quiet, afraid, watching her mother try to revive her father through a keyhole.

Her chest heaved with sadness, so fresh and brilliant it might have been yesterday. She remembered the moment her hand had gone to the doorknob almost of its own accord. A primal instinct to run toward the people she loved most in the world. To seek her parents’ comfort in the worst moment of her existence.

How could something as pure and bright as a child’s adoration bring everything crashing down?

How had it led herhere?

Levan’s mumbled apology from the previous night came back to her:I know what it’s like to feel like every choice you make is the wrong one. To understand that the world can come crumbling down with a single wrong move.

She felt the words in her bones.

“Hal-avissa. Hal-avissa. Hal-avissa.”

Slowly, slowly, and then all at once, Segal groaned back to life, smacking his lips as though awaking parched from a dreadful hangover.

The room hung suspended on a breath.

Saffron had never met a maligned Risen before. For most, the idea of the undead was confined to storybooks, but the defining moment of Saffron’s life was watching as her mother attempted to raise her father. Joran had hung momentarily on the cusp, but both parents had been slain before he ever passed back through the veil betweenthereandhere.

Segal blearily surveyed the blood-splattered room, an uncanny blankness to his expression. There was a sort of milky, glassy quality to his gaze, its color faded and wan. Stooping to retrieve his wand from the floor, his movements were lurching, almost spasmodic. Unease slithered just beneath the surface of Saffron’s skin.

Hauling himself upright with immense effort, Segal strode toward the doorway where Saffron still stood, his gait somehow both too slow and too fast, too heavy in the heel, a sort of disconnect between his upper and lower body.

When he spoke, his words were long and loping, as though his tongue wanted to swallow them.

“Move out of the way, Filth—”

Levan was on him in an instant, grabbing a fistful of collar and slamming his recently revived henchman against the wall. Segal was not a small man, and yet his feet were lifted off the floor by Levan’s sheer raw strength. Still his gaze remained pale, almost unseeing, as the kingpin’s son pushed against his throat.

“We’d both be dead right now if it wasn’t for her.” Levan’s tone was dangerous, every vein in his neck bulging to the surface. “Do. Not. Call. Her. Filthcloak.”

He dropped Segal inelegantly to the ground. Saff stepped out of the way, and Segal left the room, still uncannily blank, stillwrong,somehow. He had not done anything out of character, anything to suggest his spirit had been fundamentally lost, yet he still sent a shiver down Saffron’s spine.