Page 24

S AFFRON 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.

She had slain Neatras as Segal had slain her parents.

She deserved the seething char over her heart. She deserved to be peeled apart.

Consciousness came in fits and starts, like sunlight through a slatted window.

When she slept, she dreamed of the common room at the Academy, of Nissa and Auria and Tiernan laying on their stomachs by the fire as they read fat manila case files, the whole scene basked red from a waxen bloodmoon shining through the window.

She dreamed of her uncle Mal’s green eye in a marble ashtray, of a handless Merin’s frantic whisper: coradin se vidasi . My heart will not beat until I see you again.

She dreamed of pain itself: a towering scarlet, a never-ending shaft of darkness.

Minutes or hours later, she awoke to a terse knock on the door.

A dark figure entered with the swish of a scarlet cloak.

At Levan’s heel was a sleek, white-eyed fallowwolf, its fur a shimmering pale silver, its nose and ears starkly black.

Saff flinched—her mother had been good with animals, but even she was wary of the fabled fallowwolves—yet it neither growled nor raised its hackles at her, only studied her with a careful curiosity, head tilted to one side.

Levan carried a silver tray topped with more food than Saff had eaten in six months.

A cafetière of coffee with a little jug of sugared milk, a mound of flaky pastries stuffed with apricot puree and pistachio cream, a plate of pepper-crusted sheep’s cheese and ripe halved figs, a platter of cured meats and glistening strawberries, half a loaf of sour-risen bread with a tiny bowl of salt-flaked butter.

Enough to replenish Saffron’s well in full, yet as Levan set it on a high table by her bedside, her stomach roiled, threatening to empty northward.

He also handed her a small pot of seafoam-colored ointment, sealed with brown paper and wax. “Salve. For the pain.” He didn’t meet her eyes.

Saff forced herself up onto her elbow, the room pitching around her.

The brand was bright and raw and burning, a hideous tugging sensation whenever she moved an inch. Her tunic had been stitched neatly back together, though her shabby black cloak had been discarded.

To make way for the new.

As she broke the seal on the salve, the scent yanked her back to her childhood home in Lunes—a cool, sweet mingling of buttermint, saintflower, and garnet sap. Her mother had made salves just like this.

Saff dug two fingertips into the soft putty, lowered the neckline of her tunic, and gingerly spread the salve over the crusted wound, trying very hard not to vomit—the texture was rough and pitted, like a chunk of coral from the reefs below Sarosan.

She couldn’t bring herself to look, but the brand felt like it was the size of a jam jar lid.

She didn’t expect the salve to actually work.

Most were made with magic, and magic would have no effect on her.

Yet this salve melted away the pain almost instantly.

A cool spreading sensation, crisp and clean as the River Corven in winter.

Perhaps it was made with simple, natural ingredients, with no spellwork to be seen.

Saff spread more over the grazed, bloodied forearm she’d scraped against the alley wall, and the residual sting faded to nothing.

Levan stood with his back to the stone wall, his body a half-drawn blade. He gestured stiffly to the platter of food.

“You should eat.”

Saffron ignored him, instead eyeing the smoothly carved wand holder on the bedside table. Her knobbly beech wand was notched into the groove—and why wouldn’t it be? She wasn’t a prisoner. She was a Bloodmoon. She was one of their own.

Levan took a pointed seat on a dark red armchair by the door. “Here, Rasso.”

The fallowwolf lay obliging on the floor beside him. It moved with spectral silence, as though cloaked in shadow.

Fallowwolves were once known as the Timeweavers’ most loyal companions, for the beasts could devour seconds and minutes as easily as they did their prey, but without their human conduits, their time-consuming powers had all but deserted them.

Now they wandered Ascenfall aimlessly, attacking random mages for lack of anything better to do.

Saff wondered vaguely how Levan had domesticated one.

“Now,” said Levan, patience wearing thin. “Eat.”

Saffron clenched her jaw. There was a fruity, almost alcoholic taste at the back of her mouth. A sure sign she was about to throw up. “Why do you care whether I eat?”

“You’re little use to us without your magic, and judging by the fact you had to slit the croupier’s throat the Ludder way, I suspect you drained your well with that little alley illusion of yours.”

“That little alley illusion had you fooled.”

He made an irritated sound but said nothing to refute Saff’s victory.

In fact, he looked very much like he’d rather not exchange words at all.

As though, now they were no longer firing curses at each other, he had no idea how to interact with her beyond brusque instructions to fill her belly.

As though practicalities were the only safe ground between them.

He looked downright awkward .

Saffron stared at him for several long beats.

The lantern on the wall behind him limned his high cheekbones with a pale, threaded light.

Wavy dark hair framed his face, falling to the sharp line of his jaw.

It was curiously exhilarating to be in the same room as him, knowing he was the climax this mission would always build toward.

His body emanated its own energy field, tugging at her like gravity, that strange urge to prod at a wound.

How would they get there, to that moment she had foreseen?

There was no denying he was attractive. He had the chiseled face and physique of the carved statues that stood outside Saints halls.

If she met him as a handsome stranger in a tavern, she’d undoubtedly sink several flamebrandies and suggest they get a room.

But he wasn’t a handsome stranger in a tavern.

He was a murderer, a torturer. Dark and cruel to his bones.

She’d just have to focus on the part that came after the kiss: sinking a killing spell deep into his stomach.

Propping herself farther up on the bed, Saffron tentatively plucked an apricot pastry from the tray. She brought it to her mouth, and a violent shudder of cold tore through her. An image had taken root in her mind: a rolling eye on a bloodstained tile, the grout seeped with scarlet.

“What did you do with the croupier’s daughter?” She couldn’t even bring herself to say his name.

Levan shrugged. “Took her back to the gamehouse.”

“How long will she stay there?” The sailor’s knot tightened around her belly. She was shaking from head to foot, and she hated that she was. “And where’s the rest of her?”

His face remained impassive, gaze still averted. “Just focus on finding Nalezen Zares.”

Saffron tore the pastry in half. The fallowwolf eyed it longingly, even though the beasts famously only consumed other animals’ hearts. She lifted the pastry to her mouth, but nausea lurched up her gullet, and she laid it back down with a grimace.

Levan sighed. “Is there a problem?”

Saffron’s jaw clenched. She didn’t want to share her turmoil with this monster, and yet some part of her wanted him to know that she was still good . Or, at the very least, better than he was. She wanted her moral objections to be known at every juncture.

“Not all of us can take a life and still stomach our dinner.”

The reply came whip-fast. “Better get used to it. We own you now.”

The kingpin’s words haunted her. 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 …

Saffron shakily poured the coffee into a black clay mug, wrinkling her nose at the bitter scent. “I don’t suppose you have any hot chocolate?”

Levan’s brow furrowed. “Are you twelve years old?”

“Yes,” said Saffron, deadpan. “I wonder what puberty will feel like. Apparently I’ll grow hair on my—”

“Fine.” Levan, less than amused, pointed his wand at the mug of coffee. “ Ans calacocar .”

Saffron stared in amazement as the dark coffee faded to a milky brown, thickening and frothing of its own accord. “You can transmute?”

Turning one object into another entirely different object was one of the most challenging types of magic in existence, because the objects must have the exact same energy and mass.

If the old object contained more energy than the new, there would be a rather dramatic explosion, and if the new required more energy than the old, the mage’s own lifeblood would be drained to make up for the shortfall.

Lesser mages died trying, but Levan only shrugged, no trace of pride on his face at the casually devastating magic he’d exhibited.