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T HE SILVER FALLOWWOLF DRAGGED ITS SLENDER BODY FROM beneath Levan’s protective grip, fixing a pair of stark white eyes on Saffron. Emotion welled in the pale irises, as though the beast was seeing her for the first time.

Saff recalled what Aspar had said.

Praegelos is an abomination. Too reminiscent of timeweaving.

Did it remind Rasso of Lorissa, his long-lost mistress?

The fallowwolf approached her silkily, raising itself onto hind legs and resting a front paw on each of her collarbones. Another soulful gaze, and then a rough pink tongue licked her cheek.

Everything else remained frozen.

This moment was theirs alone.

And this time, unlike in the final assessment, the charm did not feel anywhere near as onerous to hold up.

It was as though she had … support beams. A light, lifted feeling, as though she were carrying feathers instead of bricks.

A gift from the fallowwolf—and from the giant block of ascenite at the center of the room.

But she knew it could not last forever, not when her well was already so low.

She ruffled Rasso’s sweet ears, lowered him back to the ground, and quickly crossed to Levan.

His body was hunched atop a faded rug embroidered with a map of Mersina, the infamous isle of merchants, mercenaries, and mendicants.

Saff grabbed one side of the rug and hauled it across the floor—not easy, given Levan’s bulk—so that when time resumed, Levan would not be in the firing line of the killing curse.

Rasso watched intently, head cocked, eyes bright.

Trembling from the exertion of holding time still, she wrapped around the island to where Zares stood in a semi-crouch, face still twisted from the casting of the spell. She wanted to use effigias, to turn her to stone, but she wouldn’t be able to cast another spell while holding time still.

She looked around for something, anything, she might use to tie Zares up. Her gaze landed on the ascenite island—and the dull gray manacles bolted to the surface, one at each corner. The material seemed to absorb light, absorb energy, its surface darkening and then lightening in slow fading sweeps.

Deminite.

How the necromancer restrained her victims.

Using brute strength instead of magic, Saff hauled Zares’s gaunt body onto the counter, wrestling her stiff wrists into the top two corners, her dirt-streaked ankles into the bottom cuffs.

She removed Zares’s grubby walnut wand from her claw-fingered hand, because while it wouldn’t be much use with deminite shackles, it was good Silvercloak practice to disarm captures.

The wound on Saffron’s arm dripped scarlet all over the star-shaped tiles, but adrenaline numbed the sting. Later she’d have to stitch it up with an old-fashioned needle and thread.

She surveyed the room one last time. Segal was still suspended in the deadly membrane, entirely lifeless, but his demise didn’t bring the sense of victory she thought it would.

Because while the man who’d killed her parents was dead, the man who really killed her parents was not.

And so she felt nothing. Not vindication, not revulsion.

Not even a vague sense of justice. Just a dull ebb of pride that she had wrested back control of this situation, where two hulking Bloodmoons had failed.

She glanced at Rasso, who stood by her feet like a loyal servant, and nodded.

The praegelos charm dropped.

Levan crumpled to the ground. The killing curse splintered the back wall instead of his head. On the countertop, Zares let out a roar of frustration, confusion spreading over her face. She had been winning, and then, between one breath and the next, she wasn’t.

There was a split second in which Levan stared up at Saff, gaze ripe with surprise and something like awe, before he climbed hastily to his feet, shaking off the shock. He strode over to where Zares was pinned helplessly to the island.

“Necromancer.” His voice was silk-smooth, as though he hadn’t almost been overpowered, as though the chandelier hadn’t almost shattered his spine. As though his colleague did not hang suspended three feet to his left, all the life sucked clean from his lungs.

Zares spat at Levan’s face, but he tilted his head and the globule missed its mark.

“We have someone we’d like you to bring back,” he said blandly.

“I’d rather die,” snarled Zares, her voice accented, grains of sand between each syllable.

Levan ran a palm over the smooth ascenite island.

“So this is where it happens. Where you bring your victims to kill and revive, over and over again.” He tapped the manacles.

“Deminite . Very clever. Prevents any sort of struggle. Particularly if you have the misfortune of accidentally abducting a Compeller.”

Compellers often didn’t require wands to cast their magic. Only deminite could tamp down their raw power.

Zares glared at Levan hatefully. She thrashed her head back, and her skull cracked on the ascenite, but if she was trying to knock herself unconscious, she failed.

Levan pressed the tip of his wand to her exposed wrist. “We’re going to exercise a little persuasion upon you, and then you’re going to revive Segal.”

Saff’s stomach lurched.

Zares was about to lose her hands.

And Segal was about to become Risen.

“I cannot revive in manacles,” snapped Zares. She stared straight up at the ceiling, cracked and crumbling where the chandelier had wrenched loose. “And if you give me back my wand, I’ll kill you. You will not win, Bloodmoon.”

“I always win, necromancer. Sen perruntas .”

The hand fell from her wrist, all the tension leaving its snarled fingers. Zares screamed like a beast at the abattoir. She thrashed her handless arm against the counter, magic already knitting the stump closed.

“Ans annetan.”

The wound reopened with a bloody spurt, and the limp hand stitched itself back onto the stump.

Segal still dangled lifelessly from the ceiling, suspended in an invisible membrane like a moth preserved in amber.

This is a scene straight out of hell, Saff thought, grateful for the many years of hardening on the streetwatch.

There was the echo of horror somewhere deep in her psyche, but not the full force of it, and she understood why the Academy mandated the five years for all candidates.

She might not have emotionally survived situations like this otherwise.

Levan repeated the process three more times, until Zares whimpered like a child. Saffron could not reconcile how cold and callous he was, how at odds it was with the quiet, studious child she knew was at the heart of him.

“Will you cooperate now?” Levan asked, as though this was all very boring.

“ Za’t, ” sobbed Zares.

Yes.

Levan unclasped the manacles one by one, then magically bent Zares at the waist so she sat bolt upright. Levan pointed his wand at one of the flickering sconces bolted to the wall.

“Don incendras.”

The white-hot flame leapt toward his wand in a strand of brilliant light, and he guided it to Zares, scorching a black hole through her filthy brown tunic.

She screamed a wholly new scream.

Saffron stared in disbelief.

Not only was he a gifted Healer, not only was he the finest Enchanter she’d seen in years, not only could he transmute one object into another … he could also wield.

The elements were temperamental, disobedient, incredibly draining on the magical well. And he’d just manipulated fire as though it were nothing.

Four mage classes.

Unheard of.

How did he have so much power ? The hoards of ascenite? Or something more?

Saffron thought of pleasure and of pain—the twin pillars that held up the magical world—and she wondered.

When the flame burned through the fabric to Zares’s bare skin, Levan began to chant.

“Ver fidan, nis perruntas. Ver fidan, nis perruntas. Ver fidan, nis perruntas.”

He was branding her, but it was different.

Lyrian had repeated ver fidan, nis morten, which Saff had interpreted as a sort of conditional curse.

If you betray, then you’ll die. But perruntas was not death—it was a severance.

If Zares tried to betray Levan or the Bloodmoons—attempted to shoot a killing curse at his chest instead of reviving Segal—her hand would cleave clean away from her wrist.

I always win, necromancer.

Saff’s own dark crust pulsed in sympathy, the skin around it tight and stinging, its roots burrowing deep into her bones.

When the brand was done, Zares left panting raggedly, Levan handed back her wand. Saffron admired the necromancer for not passing out, feeling a strange kind of shame that she had.

A solitary tear darted down the necromancer’s sallow cheek. She seemed to know, without really knowing, what the brand meant. She raised her wand to Segal.

“Hal-exaat.”

The membrane holding Segal in the air evaporated, and his lifeless body slumped to the ground.

“Hal-avissa . Hal-avissa . Hal-avissa.”

In that moment, Saff was six years old, quiet, afraid, watching her mother try to revive her father through a keyhole.

Her chest heaved with sadness, so fresh and brilliant it might have been yesterday.

She remembered the moment her hand had gone to the doorknob almost of its own accord.

A primal instinct to run toward the people she loved most in the world.

To seek her parents’ comfort in the worst moment of her existence.

How could something as pure and bright as a child’s adoration bring everything crashing down?

How had it led her here ?

Levan’s mumbled apology from the previous night came back to her: I know what it’s like to feel like every choice you make is the wrong one. To understand that the world can come crumbling down with a single wrong move.

She felt the words in her bones.

“Hal-avissa. Hal-avissa. Hal-avissa.”

Slowly, slowly, and then all at once, Segal groaned back to life, smacking his lips as though awaking parched from a dreadful hangover.

The room hung suspended on a breath.

Saffron had never met a maligned Risen before.

For most, the idea of the undead was confined to storybooks, but the defining moment of Saffron’s life was watching as her mother attempted to raise her father.

Joran had hung momentarily on the cusp, but both parents had been slain before he ever passed back through the veil between there and here.

Segal blearily surveyed the blood-splattered room, an uncanny blankness to his expression.

There was a sort of milky, glassy quality to his gaze, its color faded and wan.

Stooping to retrieve his wand from the floor, his movements were lurching, almost spasmodic.

Unease slithered just beneath the surface of Saffron’s skin.

Hauling himself upright with immense effort, Segal strode toward the doorway where Saffron still stood, his gait somehow both too slow and too fast, too heavy in the heel, a sort of disconnect between his upper and lower body.

When he spoke, his words were long and loping, as though his tongue wanted to swallow them.

“Move out of the way, Filth—”

Levan was on him in an instant, grabbing a fistful of collar and slamming his recently revived henchman against the wall.

Segal was not a small man, and yet his feet were lifted off the floor by Levan’s sheer raw strength.

Still his gaze remained pale, almost unseeing, as the kingpin’s son pushed against his throat.

“We’d both be dead right now if it wasn’t for her.” Levan’s tone was dangerous, every vein in his neck bulging to the surface. “Do. Not. Call. Her. Filthcloak.”

He dropped Segal inelegantly to the ground. Saff stepped out of the way, and Segal left the room, still uncannily blank, still wrong, somehow. He had not done anything out of character, anything to suggest his spirit had been fundamentally lost, yet he still sent a shiver down Saffron’s spine.

Levan glared after him, then, instead of meeting Saff’s questioning gaze, he rearranged his cloak and looked back at Zares, who glared loathingly through her tears of pain.

“Shall we?”