Page 13

S AFFRON BLINKED INTO THE SUN. AFTER SIX MONTHS IN the dingiest of Duncarzus’s dungeons, the brightness felt like hot pokers in her skull.

The navy tunic and dark slacks she’d worn at her sentencing hearing now hung loose in tragic swaths.

She’d borrowed a length of rope from the warden to loop through her trousers, but there wasn’t much she could do to disguise the collarbones jutting through the laced-up neck of the tunic.

The feel of them protruding through her skin made her cringe.

Fuller figures were very much preferred on the continent—a mark of power, of a well generously filled—and she was chagrined to lose the charming tummy rolls she’d been rounding all her life.

Her leather boots, polished and proud while she was at the Academy, were dusty and wrinkled from their time in storage.

She looked—and smelled—like a street rat.

It would work in her favor when she entered the gamehouse later that afternoon, yet shame clung to her like tar and feathers.

She had spent her whole life fighting the urge to become this person, the urge to give up on herself and the world, and yet now, here she was. Tragedy manifest.

The street outside Duncarzus was deserted, and there were no car riages to be seen. Not that she was likely to hail one. Any horse with the slightest bit of pride would whinny and flee at the sight of her.

She could always take a portari gate into Atherin—while the transportation spell had been stripped out of Vallin’s wands, a series of interconnected and highly regulated gateways had been established using the same magic—but she craved the rhythmic patter of her footsteps, the sun on her bare skin after so many months confined to a cell.

There were two routes into the center of Atherin.

Strolling down the wide boulevard of Arollan Mile would see her pass Clay’s Cloakery, run by the two uncles who’d taken her in after her parents died.

Mal and Merin Clay were by turns flamboyant and eccentric, married in a flower-filled riverside ceremony the year Saff was born.

Wealthy customers traveled from all over the continent to buy a cloak from Clay’s—and to hear the scandalous court gossip from its proprietors.

Few paid much mind to the silent, wild-haired girl moving through the storerooms like a ghost, a clothbound novel tucked under her arm, its spine cracked and pages loose from over-reading.

Her uncles had attended Saffron’s sentencing earlier in the year, after she’d plead guilty to all charges.

Mal had wept in the gallery, while stoic Merin had worn an unbearable expression of resignation.

As though he’d always known that Saff, with her crushing trauma and frightening single-mindedness, was fated for something like this.

There was a saying in the north: misfortune begets misfortune.

She was living proof.

When she’d been led away from the gallery in shackles, Merin had whispered three strangled words: coradin se vidasi.

An expression from Ancient Sarthi, roughly translated as: “my heart will not beat until I see you again.” From Mal she’d have dismissed it as campy melodrama, but from restrained, repressed Merin, it cut through her like a blade.

In Saff’s last letter to her uncles from Duncarzus, she had lied about her release date. She couldn’t bear for them to see her like this.

She chose the other route into the city.

It was early Sabáriel, the seam between summer and autumn, and the clement sunlight had a kind of buttery quality.

Atherin’s streets were narrow and winding, decorated with mosaicked tiles of dark blue and forest green, grand murals painted into shallow alcoves.

The pale creamstone of the buildings had settled over the centuries, the townhouses slouching into one another like common drunks.

Every so often a wall would fold in on itself, offering a shaded nook in which two mages could spontaneously fuck each other senseless.

The omnipresent sounds of horse hooves and orchestral music were frequently punctuated with moans of desire.

The entire city was built upon this pursuit of pleasure.

Flower shops and massage parlors and pavement cafés spilled into the streets, a riot of color and scent and incense, the fresh gardenias and praline cocoa almost enough to cleanse the Duncarzus stink from Saff’s memory.

Stray velvines stalked the cobbles, sipping at bowls of sweetened cream left out by grateful residents, leaping upon the shoulders of drained-dry mages and purring upon their naked throats.

Magic wouldn’t replenish itself, after all.

Food and sex were the most potent sources of pleasure, so essential to the survival of the species that human bodies craved them, magical or not.

Pleasurehouses were notched into every street, strung with twinkling red lights and black awnings and tangled ivy vines.

No ascens were ever exchanged; they were a place in which sex flowed freely, joyfully, fueled by achullah and flamebrandy, bodies entwining against rough walls and satin bedsheets.

Most of the King’s Cabinet could be found in a pleasurehouse the evening before the Great Wards were recast around the city walls each month, filling their wells until they overflowed with raw power.

As a country, Vallin vastly preferred revelry and bliss over the grittier power of pain.

Nyr?th, on the other hand, was a culture entirely devoted to the latter—beds of nails and carved-up forearms, spiked cuffs around bleeding thighs, streets lined with whipping posts and pillories, dark-windowed shops flogging thumbscrews and torture racks, government officials scarified from the neck down.

It was a point of pride, amongst the Nyr?thi, to see how much they could take, how potent they could make their power.

There was a reason nobody would declare war on the tundral north—they were brutal, unconquerable, their military and their royals forged of steel and suffering.

And this culture of sadism and masochism was bleeding farther south, into the Eastern Republics of Laudon, Esvaine, and Tarsa, kissing at the edges of the devout queendom of Bellandry.

Atherin was idyllic by comparison, a work of hedonistic art, but Saff had spent long enough patrolling the city to know the Bloodmoon vise had grown tighter.

Rows of shutters were closed despite the pleasant breeze, and a Wielder washed the cobbles clean of blood smears, cursing beneath wine-furred breath.

A wizened mage with a braided beard installed deadbolts made of deminite — which nullified magic’s power—to his front door.

Such bolts might have saved Saffron’s parents’ lives, all those years ago.

As she walked, she felt horribly like she was being followed. The danger of her imminent mission was already toying with her senses. Paranoia blurred the shadows, making her smell smoke where there was no fire, until at last she reached her destination.

The Cherrymarket was a vast cobbled cacophony of stalls that never wound down, even in the dark of night.

Named for the bountiful copse of ever-blossoming sweetcherry trees at its heart—forming a natural pavilion over the plaza—the plaza was boxed in on three sides by narrow townhouses, tall-pillared Saint halls, and a purple-domed Augurest temple.

On the fourth it was sided by the gushing River Corven—the very lifeblood of the high-walled city.

Atherin was landlocked in the center of Vallin, and spliced along its belly by the Corven.

The capital was flanked by mountains to the east, where the river’s source was notched, and valleys to the west, which swept all the way down to Port Ouran.

Trader boats sailed up and down the arterial river and sustained the capital with imported gold and silver, silks and cottons, cocoa and coffee and spices and salt.

Today the Corven was topped with dozens of riverboats in purple and navy and emerald.

Beside it the Cherrymarket hummed with activity, its vendors flogging everything a mage could possibly require.

There was a stall dedicated entirely to different types of feathers—raven and phoenix, owl and parrot and sirin—which were important for all manner of flight tinctures.

One sold vials of waneweed elixir, useful if one wanted to temporarily shrink down to palm-size, while another sold luxurious bolts of cloak silk with different defensive and amplifying properties.

Papa Marriosan’s Gelateria, run by Auria’s kind-faced, potbellied Brewer of a grandfather, sold a vast array of enchanted flavors.

Coffee and walnut, to literally put a spring in one’s step.

Bitter lemon-grapefruit, to put hairs on one’s chest. Honey-pistachio, to make one more attractive to wildlife (invaluable for apothecaries seeking rare ingredients).

Saffron’s stomach grumbled at the heaped mounds of chocolate gateau gelato, which promised substantial aphrodisiac effects, but she thought it might not be altogether prudent to mount her captain like a steed, so she decided against it.

She found Aspar by a hot chocolate stall, holding two red paper cups.

At the sight of Saffron, the captain held one out. “Your favorite.”

Saffron took a long, rich sip of peppermint cocoa, struggling to contain the groan as her long-empty well of magic gradually filled.

After six months behind deminite bars—nature’s opposite to ascenite, suppressing magic rather than fueling it—the utter lack of magic in her body had felt like a gnawing pit. Like absence; like grief.

Aspar studied Saffron as though searching for evidence of corruption or disease. “How was Duncarzus?”