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T HE SILVERCLOAKS COALESCED ON THE QUAY, EVERY WAND RAISED toward the boat as though worshipping some sadistic god.

Bones transformed from cat to captain, conjuring repeated forks of lightning from the dark velvet sky. Behind Aspar, crates and shipping containers and coils of rope smoldered and erupted into flames.

Flames she could now use against them.

The crew workers on the dock scattered and scurried like ants, but there was no safe place to go.

“Sen ammorten. Sen ammorten. Sen ammorten.”

Something in Lyrian had splintered. He shot hard-eyed killing curses at the dock, indiscriminate, unhinged. Segal was somewhere in the fold, but the kingpin didn’t seem to care whether he hit one of his longest-serving allies.

He wanted ruin , and he was going to get it.

A Bloodmoon crew worker was struck and fell dead, ankle snapping in the fall.

Lyrian still did not stop.

Levan stared at his father in shock, hatred, but he did not move to stop the anarchy.

The Silvercloaks seemed to be awaiting a command. A vast, shim mering wall of magic separated them from Lyrian’s curses: a mattermantic shield. Detective Dallar’s brow glistened with effort. It would not hold for long.

“ Don aquiss! ” yelled Castian, hauling a great wave from the river and sending it cascading toward the Silvercloaks.

As the water was torn from the river, the boat juddered and tilted violently, its hull scraping along something hard and rocky. Saffron pitched sideways, steadying herself before she hit the deck.

Dallar’s protective barrier fell to the wave.

The fresh bodies of the customs officers were washed away toward fiery containers, flames licking toward the dark sky like grotesque tongues.

Several Silvercloaks—including Nissa and Auria—were wiped out before Aspar halted the rest of the wave in midair, the wall of water suspended into something solid and wrong.

A string of effigias charms shot up at the deck from Detectives Alirrol and Fevilan.

Saff ducked just in time.

Hunched on the wooden deck, she conjured her own shaky mattermantic shield and threw it over herself and Rasso. The fallowwolf, far from the fierce predator she knew he was, cowered behind a bench, shaking from the roar of thunder. He pressed his body into her torso, whimpering in her ear.

“It’s alright,” she whispered to him. Possibly the worst lie she had ever told, and his doleful eyes told her he knew it too.

What would happen to the beast when every human he’d ever known was arrested? Perhaps he’d stick with Saff. The idea warmed her for a second, until she realized Aspar would never allow a creature so intrinsically linked to timeweaving into the Academy.

Fallowwolf aside, Saff just had to stay calm and survive the battle. She urged herself to keep her head down, to let the Silvercloaks take the Bloodmoons, to pray to a court of Saints she barely believed in that none of her friends fell victim to Lyrian’s errant curses.

But … no.

She couldn’t take that risk. She couldn’t let Auria or Nissa die. She could not leave this in the hands of the Saints.

She had to disarm Lyrian, to neutralize his threat.

Another thunderclap, and Saff pressed her eyes shut against the blinding flare of light.

Think.

Think.

Thinking is your superpower.

How could she get to Lyrian without raising suspicion? If Levan or Castian saw her surreptitiously fighting for the Silvercloaks, and the raid didn’t go to plan … they would know beyond all doubt she was a traitor. That the loyalty brand hadn’t worked.

Hells, they’d likely know anyway.

Saffron lowered her shield as an effigias curse sailed over her head. With another whip-crack of lightning, a second docked boat caught ablaze. There was an echoing roar of anguish, but from who or where she could not discern.

From her position crouched on the ground, she had a clear line of vision toward Lyrian’s stomping boots.

Footsteps stormed up the gangway, echoing beneath her in the hold.

“ Sen ammorten, ” Lyrian incanted, over and over, a wildness to the words now, burning indiscriminately as brushfire, even though his own son was somewhere in the fray, and Saffron understood why he was the top of the hierarchy, why he’d been impossible to topple for so long—because there was nobody he would not kill to ensure his own survival.

There were no threads to tug that would weaken his will.

The boat rocked violently as Castian continued to wield river water, hurling it down the gangways and surely flooding the hold. Aspar’s counter charms roared from ground level.

Crack came the lightning.

With a heaving snap, the boat tore itself clean from its mooring, gliding downriver back toward Port Ouran. A few moments later, it was brutally hauled back to the dock by some invisible force. Saffron fought to keep her dinner in her stomach.

Where was Levan?

And why did she care ?

A wooden keg burst nearby, sending thick, sweet honeywine spreading all over the deck, sticky and cloying. The smell reminded Saffron of her mother, and her mother reminded her of …

Praegelos.

Was there something she could do with the praegelos charm?

It had worked back in Nalezen Zares’s house. If she could freeze time for a moment …

How would that help? She couldn’t very well restrain the Bloodmoons herself, in case it didn’t work and she somehow had to maintain her innocence.

Her father’s magic, on the other hand …

Maybe there was a thread of Lyrian’s that could still be plucked.

She conjured an image from an old, dusty file she had perused endlessly during her time at the Academy. She called to mind every precise stroke of the myriad artist sketches, the parchment worn and thin, the charcoal pencils sharp and stringent. Every detail just so.

“ Et lusio Lorissa Rezaran, ” she muttered, grateful for her full magical well.

An illusion of the long dead queenpin sprung to life.

Lorissa was as tall as Levan, but spire-thin where he was broad.

Chestnut hair plaited in a thick braid down her back, her face an orphic white against the bloody scarlet of her cloak.

There was an awful blankness to her gaze—she wouldn’t fool anyone for long—but hopefully it would be enough to stun the kingpin for a moment or two, to make him believe, if only for a moment, that she had Risen.

The mirage might spook him enough to stop errant killing curses from finding their marks.

Directing the illusion with the tip of her wand, Saffron glided Lorissa over the deck and into Lyrian’s line of sight.

He staggered back at the sight of her, his wand clattering to the deck.

Thunder bellowed overhead, and there was a shrill scream on the docks. Smoke fogged the air, but not so much that Saffron couldn’t see the look on Lyrian’s face, falling somewhere between horror and hope.

A firm hand grabbed her by the upper arm and hauled her upward.

Levan. His face contorted with fury and … something else.

Saints. Had he seen the illusion?

Surely not. Surely the sight of his dead mother would’ve felled him where he stood.

As he dragged her up from the ground, she lifted Rasso with her, pressing his cowering face into her chest.

A visible ache darted over Levan’s face at the sight of them, and then he muttered, “Conjure a shield.”

She dropped the illusion and incanted, “ Ans clyptus. ”

The spellshield leapt into a glimmering sheet of raw magic.

Saff took a split second to look around.

The sky was torn apart with lightning and ash and flames and immense towers of water that refused to fall.

The boat’s deck was shredded by spell starbursts, its wood splintered and hanging apart.

A strong smell of burnt coffee hung on the air, as though a pallet had caught fire somewhere in the hold.

Levan ushered Saffron and Rasso inside the top deck of the boat.

The layout was similar to the boat they’d taken to Port Ouran, only smaller, and with fewer sleeping quarters.

The lanterns bolted to the corridor walls flickered and blinked with every thunderclap, as though cowering from the din of the docks.

Saff peered back toward the deck, where the kingpin’s gaze swung wildly from port to starboard, eyes peeled wide, as though he’d seen a ghost. His lips mouthed the word Lorissa, but no sound came out.

Standing bolt upright amidst the countless flying curses, she had no idea how the kingpin hadn’t been struck by effigias yet.

Perhaps Levan had conjured a ward or shield around him—it would explain why he’d needed Saffron to conjure clyptus.

“Your father …”

“I’m going back for him and Aviruna,” he said through gritted teeth, and it was clear he was holding something . “I had to get you and Rasso out first.”

Was he trying to repay some perceived debt from Zares’s house? Is that where this misplaced trust came from? Or did he genuinely care?

Emotions warred in Saffron’s mind. She didn’t want to escape this situation. She wanted to watch as every last Bloodmoon was arrested and hauled off to Duncarzus. And yet some ridiculous, traitorous part of her was touched that Levan had put her above his own flesh and blood.

The enchanted necklace weighed heavy against her clavicle.

They ducked into a cabin containing a narrow bunk bed and a small desk. The porthole had been smashed in the furor, the floorboards lit tered with shards of glass. Levan took up half the cabin with his hulking frame, his lemon-mint smell, the tang of something metallic.

Saff pressed herself behind the bunk, so she couldn’t be struck with stray spells through the open porthole, and reassuringly stroked Rasso’s fur, sticky with honeywine.

“Wait here for now,” Levan ordered. “I think we’re overpowering them, but they’ve scattered.”

Saints.

This was all going wrong.

“Once I’ve got my father and Aviruna, I’ll use portari to get us away from the docks.”

Saffron stared at him. “But portari is outlawed in—”

“I have an imported wand from Bellandry.” His voice was terse, hurried. “It hasn’t had the spell stripped out of it.”

Oh. “Is that how you—”

“I’ll explain later.” He held the door open a sliver and peered out into the corridor, every inch of him alert, precisely poised, like an archer atop the battlements of a besieged city.

“Look after Rasso. And if someone comes, Silver …” His face softened almost imperceptibly.

“You don’t have to kill. I know they were your friends. Just neutralize them and wait for me.”

Levan slipped into the corridor, met immediately with a female roar of, “ Sen effigias. ”

The voice was so shrill, so piercing, that Saff didn’t recognize it. Fear had a funny way of strangling pitches. The spell must have struck the wall instead of Levan, because the cabin-side splintered from the impact.

“ Sen ammorten, ” came Levan’s unflinching response, and a body hit the deck.

Horror tied a knot around Saff’s heart.

Who was that?

Who just died at Levan’s hand?

Echoing from far below in the hold, three overlapping voices sent a lance of despair through her.

“There’s no lox!”

“Why is there no lox?”

“… bad information …”

Oh, hells. Had she been wrong about the pattern?

But no, she couldn’t have been. Lyrian’s very presence here proved they’d been expecting a shipment of the substance. Her information wasn’t bad. It had just been undermined.

She ran back over the evening in her whirring head.

Levan had disappeared as soon as Aviruna said something wasn’t right.

And his wand worked beyond the laws of the land.

Had he used portari to magic himself into the boat’s hold?

Had he offloaded the lox into the river, or stashed it elsewhere?

No wonder he’d been so rumpled and breathless when he returned.

Either way, the raid was a failure. The Silvercloaks might be able to bring Lyrian in on murder charges, but the organizational bust they’d hoped for hadn’t worked.

Saff was still trapped in the Bloodmoons.

And they would undoubtedly kill her for what she’d done.

Yet … why had Levan saved her first? Surely he must have figured out by now that she’d leaked the shipment information to her former colleagues.

There were so many whys and not enough time.

Because there was a body on the other side of the wall.

And Saff had to know.

She had to know.

“Stay here, sweetling. I’m not going anywhere,” she whispered to Rasso, ruffling his cowering ears.

Rasso whimpered, burying his face in the bedsheets of the bottom bunk.

Saff tiptoed toward the corridor, unsure why she even bothered—nobody would hear her over the cacophony of wielded elements and torn wood and fractured yells. When she didn’t hear any footsteps on the other side of the door, she opened it.

A female body lay motionless on the floor, curled around herself like a newborn babe.

A silken sheet of black hair covered her face, but Saff would know that outline anywhere.

Nissa.