Page 18

“Please.” The word was laden with grief, its single syllable sagging in the middle.

“I had a daughter your age, and I cannot watch another …” Neatras stared down at his liver-spotted hands as though they belonged to someone else.

He wore a deminite cuff around one wrist. He peered up at her pleadingly through slate eyes winged with wrinkles.

“You feel it already, don’t you? The restlessness in the tips of your fingers, in the space behind your ribs.

Like you won’t be calm until you lay down more ascens. Until you win again.”

Saffron searched herself and found him to be right.

The initial euphoria from the blackcherry sour had almost worn off, replaced by a jittering disquiet.

There were subtle aches in her body that hadn’t been there before, and the craving for another drink, another gamble, was so intense she could think of little else.

But she had to lose all her ascens . It was crucial to the plan.

“Nothing will ever be enough for you again.” Though his voice was low, quiet, he’d abandoned all effort to speak through his teeth.

“You won’t stop until the debt is too high, and the debt is binding .

Do you understand the meaning of the word?

You’ll soon find yourself dancing naked in one of those glass jars, hoping that maybe in a few months or years or decades, the meager tips will finally be enough to clear your balance slip. ”

This is what finally got through to her.

The naked dancers … they were trapped there until tips paid their debts?

What if that happened to her ? What if she wasn’t offered the option of receiving the brand? What if they saw a young woman whose nude dancing would reap plentiful ascens and shrunk her down with waneweed before she could protest otherwise?

Would Aspar do anything to help her then?

“This is my daughter.” Neatras picked up the roulette ball, and the eye—for it was definitely, unmistakably an eye—swirled to look at Saff.

“She resisted the glass jars, and now … all that she is exists in this ball, and she must watch day after day as her father is complicit in this hell. And so I beg you one last time. Go home.”

The final words were rough, desperate.

Saffron stood from the roulette table and walked away.

She needed to regroup, to restack her emotional defenses.

One of the first things she’d learned on the streetwatch was that it’s almost always better to take an extra beat to steady yourself before diving headfirst into danger.

Professor Vertillon, a decorated colonel in the Wielder corps, said that an extra moment of inaction is usually safer than hastily executed action.

Catching her breath would not cost Saffron anything, in the long run.

She pushed her way toward a sign that read ACHULLAH TERRACE .

The outside decking area was abuzz with gamblers sitting on beanbags around low tables, and the smoke choked in Saff’s lungs.

Dodging a waiter carrying a blown-glass pipe of ruby and bronze, Saff hurtled down several wooden service steps and onto the uneven cobbles of a dusk-darkened alley.

It snaked around the nearest buildings, and Saff followed it until the chafing laughter from the terrace was a distant echo, and the loudest sound was the roar of blood in her ears.

Pressing back against a cold, rough wall, Saff clutched her knees and lowered her head, forcing her breaths to steady. Her vision canted sideways, terror throwing her off-kilter, but she focused on the rhythmic filling and emptying of her lungs until the stars across her gaze faded.

Slowly, doggedly, she forced her spiraling thoughts into tidy columns.

Everything was going to be alright. She knew that.

When she had touched the relic wand during the final assessment, it had shown her a vision so clear it could only be prophecy.

And Aspar had confirmed that all prophecy was real.

Yes, the captain was a zealot about such things, but Saffron had seen it with her own eyes, had felt it resonate in the deepest corners of her chest. She didn’t understand how or why the prophecy had been cast, only that it had.

Cera belrère. It is written.

She was not going to end up in a jar. She was going to become a Bloodmoon.

The croupier was wrong. She had nothing to fear.

She wiped the arm of her cloak across her clammy forehead. Her thick silver-blond curls stuck wetly to the back of her neck, and the aches in her body grew deeper, more bruise-like. Saints, she wanted another blackcherry sour. She wanted it like she wanted air.

Standing up and turning back toward the gamehouse, however, she heard an echoing cry of anguish from a nearby alley.

No, not anguish.

Agony.

A roar, bloodcurdling and coarse.

Well-drilled instincts sparked beneath her skin. Saffron was a trained Silvercloak, and trained Silvercloaks always went toward the danger.

Heart thudding, she drew her wand and pointed it at the soles of her boots.

“Et aquies.”

The muffling charm took immediate effect. She crept silently down the alley, rounding several corners before a muddle of human shapes came into view.

Night had fallen, the sky fading from lilac to indigo, and her eyes struggled to adjust. Tucking behind the nearest wall, she lifted the hood of her plain black cloak over her head, casting her face in shadow.

Then she withdrew a palm-size mirror from her pocket, angling it so she could see around the corner without exposing herself.

An analog trick—one she’d discovered because she couldn’t perform augmentation magic on her vision, like her counterparts could—but effective nonetheless.

The silvered glass showed three male figures hunched at the far end of the alley, illuminated only slightly by an almost burnt-out sconce.

Two of the mages wore scarlet cloaks, the moon phases embroidered in black and gold.

One of them held down the third figure—a reed-thin mage in a green Brewer’s cloak—while the other muttered spells under his breath.

“ Sen perruntas, ” incanted a tall, broad-shouldered Bloodmoon, his voice low, malignant.

The Brewer screamed as his hand was severed from his wrist. It fell lifelessly onto the ground in the alley, blood spattering across the pale creamstone.

“ Ans annetan, ” the same Bloodmoon called.

The hand leapt off the cobbles and clamped itself back onto the Brewer’s wrist, magically reattaching, the bone and flesh and skin fusing not quite seamlessly, but convincingly enough.

The Bloodmoon must be a talented Healer—albeit a terribly cruel one.

Tilting the mirror slightly, Saff studied the scene for any evidence of a siphoning device, but saw nothing. The Bloodmoon didn’t look to be stealing the victim’s pain-power for himself.

“I can do this all night,” he growled at his victim, who whimpered in the other Bloodmoon’s grasp.

“We can cut it off and mend it as many times as it takes to get you to talk. And when you black out from the pain of it … well. We’ll be right here waiting for you to wake up.

At which point you may find yourself missing certain other appendages. ”

“P-please, I d-don’t know anything,” the Brewer stammered, curling his body futilely around his crotch. He had deep brown skin with a purplish undertone, almost certainly hailing from Nomarea. “ Nibabayo, don’t you t-think if I did, I would end this? I— arrrrrghhhhhhhhhh. ”

The Bloodmoon muttered another severing curse, and the hand fell raggedly to the ground.

“Where. Is. Nalezen. Zares?”

The name sparked no recognition in Saff’s mind, if indeed it was a name.

“You have the wrong person, I swear it, nibabayo, I have no—”

“ Sen ammorten, ” the spell caster snapped.

The screams and kicks stopped abruptly, though they echoed around the narrow walls for several haunting moments, an almost prayer-like quality to them, as though a whole congregation were murmuring a funeral prayer.

The Bloodmoon holding the Brewer in place dropped his limp body, and the spell caster kicked the errant hand so far down the alley that it rolled to a stop at Saff’s feet.

The cruel mage lifted his head until half of it was limned by the dim sconce.

At the sight of his face—the dark hair against pale skin, the chiseled jaw, the strong nose, the scar bisecting his lower lip—a deep chill scraped through Saff, peeling the marrow from her bones.

The Bloodmoon from the prophecy.

The one she was fated to kiss—and to kill.

And he was staring straight at her outstretched mirror.