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Saff ordered her face into a plain expression.

“And why do you think that?”

“I had a tracing charm on him and it dropped last night. Now I can’t find him.”

Saffron’s mind reeled. How accurate was the tracing charm? Would Lyrian know his right-hand man had died in her chambers? Surely not, or he’d already have hunted her down.

A muscle worked in Levan’s jaw. “Maybe he doesn’t want to be found.”

“It was you, wasn’t it?” A searing snarl of an accusation. “You killed him. You’ve always hated him, ever since—”

“Let’s talk about this face-to-face.” Levan pinched the bridge of his nose. “Without an audience. Et cludan. ”

The connection between their wands dropped.

“Is your father always this paranoid?” Saffron asked, grateful for her training, for how easy it felt to maintain aloofness.

She’d always been the best at holding a polderdash face—Tiernan wore every emotion in the notches between his brows, while Auria’s voice grew shrill under pressure, and Nissa was incapable of tamping down her anger.

Levan shrugged. “He’s paranoid for a reason. A lot of people want to hurt him. And since Porrol Vogolan is his fiercest ally and closest confidant, wiping him off the map would be a brutal blow.”

Saffron nodded sagely, disguising the flip in her stomach. “Thanks for the tip.”

“It’s not funny.”

“Should I send a flower arrangement afterward?”

“It’s not fun—”

“He strikes me as a magnolia man.”

Levan sighed gruffly. “You’re not as afraid of him as you should be.”

“Would you like me to quake a little?” Saffron pointed at her boots. “ Ans quassan .”

Her feet lurched and shuddered, giving her the appearance of riding on horseback, jostling chaotically in the saddle. Against all odds, Levan’s lips quirked upward. Almost imperceptible, and immediately suppressed, but they quirked nonetheless.

Then the black elm wand in his hand crackled and hissed. “ Now, Levan.”

With a long-suffering sigh, Levan swept past Saffron without a backward glance.

Saffron looked around for a moment, stunned that in his distraction, Levan had left the door to his room wide open.

So much for I control everything.

This was his first lapse in said control—wrought by one of her father’s ridiculous jokes, no less.

Perhaps that had been the real reason for Joran Killoran’s unrelenting jocularity: he was secretly running extremely dangerous undercover missions, frequently using humor and whimsy to slip between the cracks of suspicion.

Or, alternatively and far more probably, he was just a clown.

In any case, Saffron’s instincts ushered her inside the open doorway.

Levan’s bedroom was bigger and brighter than Saffron’s, and exponentially neater.

Even the bedspreads on his four-poster bed—mounted on a raised dais at the back of the room—had been straightened with military precision.

Is that what he’d been doing while Harrow introduced himself to Saff?

Making his bed? Saff had to stifle a laugh.

Ever-burning goldencandles were studded around the walls, and the sill of the arched window was lined with plants she recognized from her mother’s medicinal greenhouse—each of them neatly labeled with genus and watering instructions.

The glass windowpanes were stained sapphire and emerald, depicting a grand dragon breathing yellow-gold fire.

There were books everywhere, not only covering rows upon rows of shelving built into the alcoves on either side of his bed, but also in carefully arranged stacks on the floor, ordered seemingly by genre and then subject and then author surname. A veritable library.

Saffron debated where to begin. Even if there was some kind of lox ledger to be found here, it would be like searching for a specific coin in a vault full of ascens.

Her eyes found a small antique writing desk in the corner of the room. It was a handsome thing, with spindled legs, several inkwells, and a glossed mahogany finish. A hexagonal gold teapot sat on the surface, the strings and tabs of three teabags dangling through the lid. He liked his tea strong.

Down one side of the desk there was a column of small drawers.

Quickly and silently, Saffron crossed to the desk and opened the top drawer.

It was full of blank parchment scrolls, lavishly feathered quills, and several pots of ink in various jewel tones.

The next drawer down was segmented with little wooden compartments, each holding dozens of different sachets of tea.

Herbal, fruit, and a burlap pouch of loose leaf that smelled strongly of clove and star anise.

They were also arranged in alphabetical order, which was a very normal and not at all obsessive way to store tea.

The third drawer was locked fast.

The fourth drawer contained a single sleek notebook, whose pages would not open no matter how hard she pried.

A lox ledger? Something else that could be evidence?

Chewing her lip, Saffron wondered whether the password she’d heard the Bloodmoons utter countless times might charm the volume open.

“ Fair featherroot, ” she muttered, but nothing happened. Sighing, she tapped her wand on its plain black cover. “ Et exuan. ”

Again, nothing happened. Exuan was a spell used to strip an object of its enchantments, but Saffron had never quite cast it successfully.

It was a simple uttering but required a lot of raw power—more than the sum total of the other enchantments layered on the object.

And Saffron was already depleted from casting the killing spell—and breaking her victim into a thousand pieces.

After several failed attempts, she shoved the ledger back into its drawer and left Levan’s room before he found her snooping.

As she made her way into the city, scattering handfuls of Vogolan as she went, she thought of the prophecy Harrow had shared: a bloody uprising. And Levan’s subsequent question: A Bloodmoon boot at his throat?

Was there something important to be gleaned from this conversation?

Something to do with the why of it all?

As she’d told Levan, she didn’t believe that some people were just born violent, born greedy, born bloodthirsty.

That some people wanted power for power’s sake, wealth for wealth’s sake.

Though she did understand that some people had so sorely missed these things as a child, and spent the rest of their lives trying to rebalance the scales.

But Aspar believed there was a deeper reason beneath the Bloodmoons’ drive for power.

The head of King Quintan on the Palace steps. Just as the pulps depicted.

Did the Bloodmoons have their sights set on the crown?