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D READ CIRCLED IN SAFFRON’S STOMACH LIKE WATER AROUND a drain.

“What lies?”

Aspar withdrew her hand from the cadet’s cloak, white folds of silk sliding back down Saffron’s arm. Now that attention had been drawn to the mark of a spell landed true, Saffron couldn’t unfeel the ghost of magic’s touch.

The captain crossed to the mullioned window and stared out at the hazy moonlight settling over Atherin.

The back of her head was ridged with bones.

“You were struck by that curse. You were impossible to compel. Auria Marriosan did brew the levitation potion perfectly.” A meaningful pause.

“And unless you find some honesty within yourself, you can pack your bags and leave the Academy this very second.”

Saff was backed into a corner, but although the thought of airing the truth filled her with fear, it also carried a light, lifted sensation: relief. The feeling of laying down a heavy load she’d carried for so long.

“Magic has no effect on me,” she started, keeping her voice clear of emotion, which Aspar famously abhorred. “Doesn’t matter who casts it. Myself, a friend, an enemy. My body just … absorbs it. Repels it. Does something—or nothing—in a way I can’t quite figure out.”

A fairly unique quirk—Saffron had never met another mage like her. And she had spent a long time looking, researching, asking quiet questions over pints of bitterale, nothing ever yielding the response she craved: that she was not alone.

“I’ve made it as far as I have in the Academy because I have a fairly advanced grip on mattermancy,” Saffron went on. “Illusionwork. I can make it look like an enchantment has affected me, if only for a short while. It costs my well immensely.”

Aspar sat back at her desk, tapping her wand to a locked drawer with an et aperturan. She pulled out a fat black folder, from which she withdrew a familiar cream and gold document.

Saff’s heart careened off a cliff.

The captain cleared her throat. “Your mage school certificate says you have an Enchanter accreditation. But that’s not the truth, is it?” A hawkish glare. “If you cannot enchant yourself, you fall drastically short of specialization standard. So you had the record forged.”

Saffron bowed her head. Aspar didn’t just know about the lies Saff had told this evening—she knew about the big lie. The colossal lie. The lie that could have her thrown out of the Academy, or even charged with fraud.

Because while Saffron had graduated from mage school with a Mage Practer certificate—that was to say, she had enough grasp on the fundamentals of magic and the practical daily spells to officially be called a mage—she had fallen short of the excellency required for specialization standard.

She had her strange immunity to magic and six years of silence to thank for that.

At first, she hadn’t been too worried about not achieving a specialization.

Back then, the Silvercloak Academy only required a Mage Practer certificate for a candidate to be eligible.

But sometime during Saffron’s university years—while earning a Knight’s Scroll in Modern History, a non-magical subject—the commissioner, Dillans, had decided that he only wanted the best of the best in the revered silver cloaks.

From then on, Mage Practers couldn’t make it past the streetwatch without a specialization.

Which left Saffron in a bind. It was too late to go back to mage school (only attended between the ages of six and eighteen) and use her illusions to scrape a specialization. She was stuck as a Mage Practer.

And so her accredited Enchanter record was an illusion.

Illusions, of course, were designed to be held for a short period of time.

They were hard to conjure and costly to maintain, and ordinarily Saffron’s certificate would only be enchanted for the length of time she was able to hold the spell.

But it wasn’t good enough for the forged accreditation to simply pass first inspection—what if someone at the Academy took it out at a later date, only to see the words Mage Practer written clear as day?

In a moment of desperation, Saffron had done what very few mages were willing to do: made the spell permanent.

Such things were possible—it was how magical objects were made to stay magical—but bore a great price.

To make a spell last forever, the caster had to give up a part of their magical well forever too.

No matter how much they refilled on pain and pleasure, the magic used to cast the permanent spell would never be replenished.

For an illusion as minor as some text on a piece of parchment, it was a small, almost negligible part of the well Saffron had given up. But she had given it up nonetheless.

She would always be slightly diminished—because she’d uttered the words medei perpetua after casting the illusion. Medei perpetua had carried an awful, heavy anchoring sensation, then the feeling of something inside her breaking away.

And now the sacrifice had been for nothing. Would her father be ashamed of what she had used his mattermantic teachings for?

“How long have you known?” she muttered to her captain.

“Since your very first interview—we have every school certificate stripped of magic, of course. You’re not the first candidate to lie your way through these doors.”

A feeling of utter humiliation came over Saff, as though she’d been fixed naked into a pillory outside the Palace.

She’d put so much effort into her training, her reputation, and the stack of lies that held it all up, but it was doomed from the start.

Five years on the streetwatch, a year at the Academy, all of them for nothing.

“So why did you let me enlist in the first place?” She fought to keep the misplaced anger from her tone.

Something dark passed over Aspar’s pointed features. “Once upon a time, I owed your father a great debt of gratitude.”

Saffron’s chest twinged. “You knew my father?”

“A story for another day.” Aspar leaned back in her chair, spine straight as a rapier.

“Do you know why you’re a great detective, Killoran?

Because you think and you act in equal measure.

The likes of Auria and Tiernan do too much of the former.

Nissa and Sebran throw too much weight behind the latter.

You take the extra beat to look at every angle, then you run toward the danger.

The perfect intersection of cunning, calculation, and courage.

You hold your goal in your head, and you chart a path toward it, and even when an obstacle arises, you recalibrate intelligently and ruthlessly.

You wend your way through the wilderness, no matter how long or arduous the journey.

You never lose sight of why you’re here. ”

Saff bowed her head, thinking of her parents’ wake.

The entire village had piled into the Sleeping Wolf, a pokey tavern with a thatched roof and dark saintmoss climbing the arched doorways. As she’d perched on a long wooden bench near the crackling hearth, Saffron’s hand had never strayed from the fresh wooden pendant around her neck.

“How’re you holding up, sweetling?” her gruff grandfather had asked. Saffron barely knew her mother’s father, who’d traveled north from the southern coastal city of Aredan when he’d heard the news. He was spry, one-eyed, bearded, pale-skinned, and quite astonishingly drunk.

Saffron had shuffled in her borrowed mourning cloak and taken a sip of hot chocolate. She hadn’t spoken a single word in the week since her parents’ deaths, and couldn’t quite remember how.

“It’s alright to cry, you know.” Her grandfather had taken an almighty swig of bitterale, his cloak sleeves sopping with spilled drink. “You didn’t shed a single tear at the jeweling ceremony. Don’t feel like you have to be stoic for us old folks.”

Saffron hadn’t known what stoic meant, but nodded anyway.

“Let me tell you something about loss, sweetling.” Saff had hated her mother’s term of endearment on those ale-puckered lips. “You can either yield to grief, or you can use it.”

Saffron had looked up at him, questioningly.

“Those are the only two choices, in the end. Grief can bury you, or it can fuel you.” He’d leaned in closer. “That’s what I’m going to do. Make those scarlet bastards pay.”

Her grandfather had died not four months later, after drunkenly ambushing two Bloodmoons on the street.

But his idea had seeded itself in Saffron, and she was willing to bide her time to execute it.

She would not swagger into the situation with inebriated bluster.

She would think, plan, think some more, plan some more. And only then would she act.

Aspar saw that in her. Had always seen it.

The captain slid the fraudulent certificate back into Saff’s file, looking intently at her cadet. “Something happened when you touched that relic wand.”

Another sharp diversion. Saff’s knee-jerk instinct was to lie again, but what was the use in it now? All the polderdash cards were already on the table. She was about to be thrown out anyway.

“There was white mist across my vision.” Saff remembered the sheer brightness of it, like she’d been in a dark cave for years and finally emerged. “Then I saw myself … killing a Bloodmoon. I wore a scarlet cloak.”

For personal reasons, she kept the kiss to herself.

Aspar’s expression hardened, a kind of keen Augurest hunger in her gaze. Her palm drifted to the clothbound cover of the Divine Augurtures, as though about to swear an oath. “And have you ever had such visions before?”

“No. I was horrible at foreseeing in mage school. This vision felt like … it came from the wand, not me.” Saff rolled her own ugly wand in her palm, and even though it had been twenty years since Renzel had reluctantly sold her the near-useless thing, his clear disdain for her broken magic still stung. “Is the relic real?”

Aspar’s lips pursed. “That’s above your pay grade.”