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Staring after the kingpin’s son, Saffron couldn’t quite comprehend Levan’s overblown reaction.

He was usually so controlled, so closed off.

Why should it matter to him whether she thought of him as a captor?

As human? His focus seemed wholeheartedly on finding this necromancer—and presumably bringing his lost love back to life.

Saffron was a means to an end. The way she thought of him should be an utter irrelevance.

Still, she felt a curious thrill that she’d managed to evoke such a strong response.

Her efforts to get under his skin were working.

Wrenching her focus back toward the larger mission, Saffron decided to use the slumbering passengers to her advantage.

“ Et aquies, ” she muttered, tapping each of her boots in turn. A basic silencing charm.

Creeping across the deck, past Rasso and Miret, Saffron ducked beneath the wraparound scarlet awning and inside the upper level of the riverboat.

The air inside the peg-straight corridor was cool and salty and a little stale, like brine and old coffee and dusty manila files.

The latter reminded Saff of the back rooms at the Academy, where she, Auria, and Tiernan had spent hours poring over obscure and impossible vanishment cases.

Rather than knocking the wind out of her, the memory was fortifying.

The light at the end of a long, dark tunnel.

She would get back there. Not only would she no longer be ostracized, but she’d also be actively celebrated for what she had done.

All the doors lining both sides of the corridor were closed.

There were twelve in total, and she knew one would reveal a snoozing Segal, and one a livid Levan.

The first handle Saff tried was locked, as was the second.

Another was an empty cabin with two stiffly made bunks.

There was a faded maroon mark on one bedspread, as though someone had bled to death and even magical cleaning charms couldn’t get the stain out.

The next room was also a cabin, but this one contained Segal’s sleeping form on a bottom bunk.

At the sound of the door opening, he sat bolt upright, thunking his head off the slats of the bunk above.

He screwed his eyes shut and swore rather profoundly, allowing Saffron to sneak away without being seen.

Three more doors. Two cabins, and then finally an office.

It was small, neatly ordered, lined with floating shelves.

Through a wide porthole, dappled light spilled onto the floorboards, illuminating a squat desk, a rickety chair, and little in the way of reading material—just a dried-up inkwell, an empty coffee press, and a single drawer with a gold keyhole.

Saff tried to open it with the aperturan charm, then the fair featherroot password, but the lock wouldn’t budge.

The shelves bolted to the walls each held a row of plain black notebooks, with red reading ribbons and year dates embossed on the spine. As she pulled the oldest-dated volume down, the air fuzzed with dust motes. The notebook fell open in her palm, and a thrill bolted through her.

A ledger.

From ten years ago, but a ledger nonetheless.

A ledger detailing every shipment of loxlure the Bloodmoons had orchestrated.

The early dates were sporadic, the quantities tiny, hidden amongst vast quantities of other legitimate supplies. But they were there nonetheless. Saff sucked in a mouthful of dusty air.

The Bloodmoons had been smuggling lox into the city for over ten years.

She replaced the ledger with a shaking hand, then ran a fingertip over every spine until she found the most recent date.

The previous calendar year. As she leafed through the latest notebook, she discerned a clear pattern.

The Bloodmoons received weekly shipments every Elming from Port Ouran—originating in Laudon and the other Eastern Republics—but not all of them contained lox.

Three shipments a month were clean, involving only routine spell ingredients and other luxuries.

Silks and cottons, parchment and inks, rare mountain ash and refined soil from the Valley of the Seers in the heart of Esvaine.

Only one shipment a month carried lox, albeit in a vast quantity.

Clever, Saff thought. If the Silvercloaks tried to raid a shipment at random, there was only a twenty-five percent chance they’d get lucky. If they failed, they wouldn’t be able to raid another without a proper warrant, or the Grand Arbiter would have their heads.

As for which shipment contained the lox, it cycled according to a basic monthly pattern—hugging closely to the moon’s own cycles, since each of the thirteen calendar months was also a lunar period.

(The months were named for the thirteen founding dragons, and as a mark of respect, they were the same in every language.) In Mónyriel the shipment would arrive on the first Elming, in áqiriel the second, in Gláciel the third, in Magnáriel the fourth, and then it would rotate another two times throughout the year.

In Nyrápiel, the thirteenth month, it seemed to land on a random date.

All shipments arrived at darknight, when the docks were relatively deserted.

It was early Sabáriel, which meant the next lox shipment would fall on the second Elming.

In three days’ time.

Euphoria flooded Saff’s veins, rich and vibrant.

She was going to do it. She was going to get this information to Aspar, and the Bloodmoons would be successfully raided, and the vast quantities of lox would be more than enough to bring both a charge and a conviction.

Sinking into the desk chair, she hugged the ledger to her chest, and a coarse voice echoed in the doorway.

“What are you doing, Filthcloak?”

Her back was to the door, but she didn’t have to turn around to know who had caught her.

Segal.