Page 59

T HE CELL WAS A COLD, BARE SPACE MADE ENTIRELY OF CREAMSTONE . No chair or bed, no tap for drinking, just a hole in the ground for various ablutions.

Saff shivered as Rasso trotted in beside her. When Levan had tried to take him on the quest to find Segal, the beast had growled and bared his vicious teeth. Thanks to praegelos, he had bonded to Saffron, and Saffron could only be grateful for the ally—even if Levan was wounded by the betrayal.

Levan. At the thought of him, emotions stirred up like a forest floor in a gale.

Emotions so contradictory and infuriating that she couldn’t separate them, couldn’t examine them individually.

There was the way it felt to kiss him, and the way it felt to crouch over Nissa’s body knowing he’d killed her.

The way it felt when he asked her to go to the arts festival with him, and the way it felt to watch him sever Nalezen Zares’s hand.

The way it felt, all of it, when she was not used to feeling these things so deeply.

“Aren’t you going to rough me up a little?” Saffron asked Castian, her sardonic tone unfaltering even when her heart felt weak.

Castian ruffled Saff’s hair with a small flicker of wielded breeze. “I’m one of those freaks who believes in innocent until proven guilty. Don’t get me wrong—if it emerges that you did this, I’ll gladly obliterate you. But not before.”

“Very noble.”

Sarcasm, but Castian took it literally. “The only way you can survive in the Bloodmoons, emotionally.” Her skin was clammy, her movements twitchy, pained.

She was going into withdrawal. “Retaining some kind of moral code, no matter how dark things get. If you survive this, I suggest you do the same.”

Saff rolled her eyes, absently petting Rasso’s head. “It’s hard to retain a moral code when the kingpin is threatening to brutally murder your family.”

“Believe me, I know.” There was a hollow, haunted look to her star-lined eyes. “But the kingpin is not always here. What you do in his absence matters.”

Saff twirled her wand between her fingers. “Speaking of which, aren’t you going to confiscate this?”

Aviruna smiled thinly. “Strangely enough, his majesty forgot to give me that order.”

The door shut behind her, and Saff heard a deadbolt slide across the outside.

She still had her wand, but even if she could muster the strength to magic her way out of this cell, she knew deep down it was where she had to be. Because the Silvercloaks had failed to bring down the Bloodmoons, and that meant the assignment was far from over.

In that moment, lost and alone and afraid, Saffron—for the first time in a long time—did not have a plan.

She did not know how she was going to salvage this, could not see the reroute, the clever sidestep, the winding mountain path.

Even if a miracle occurred and Lyrian let her live, she knew another raid would be borderline impossible without a warrant.

For a warrant, they’d need evidence, and how would she get within touching distance of such a thing now?

For the time being, she had been outplayed by Levan. By his cun ning, by his raw power, by those tendrils of control he and his father had wrapped around the whole of the city.

I control everything.

I always win.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, OR maybe four hundred, Aviruna escorted Saffron to Lyrian’s office. The clammy pallor of Aviruna’s skin had made way for a relaxed grin, a looseness to her limbs, and the smell of blackcherry had only intensified.

Every step up the corridor felt like a march toward the hanging tree.

Aviruna knocked on the kingpin’s door, and it swung open.

At Saffron’s heel, Rasso was stiff, alert, white eyes wide and searing.

When the fallowwolf saw Lyrian standing by the fire, he let out a low, threatening growl.

It surprised Saffron—Rasso had belonged to the kingpin’s late wife for decades, while she had only known the beast for a couple of weeks.

How swiftly the loyalties of magical creatures could shift in times of ruin, as the dragons had deserted the Rezarans all those centuries ago.

“Good luck,” whispered Aviruna in Saffron’s ear, and then she was gone, and it was only Saffron, Lyrian, and Rasso.

Her wooden pendant glowed a pure, poisonous green.

Saff searched the room for any signs that Mal and Merin were held hostage, but she didn’t find any evidence of struggle, no telltale scents of silk dye and spiced cookies.

Lyrian stared into the flames of the stifling fire, as though trying to read his fortune in the embers.

His hands were clasped behind his back, wand protruding between snarled fingers.

It was an arrogant pose, as though he did not believe for a moment that Saffron would dare attack him.

Unless, somehow, impossibly, he still held faith in the brand.

“Are we going to go through the farce of pretending you weren’t behind this? Or are you just going to confess and let us be done with it? I can have Levan portari your uncles here in an instant. It’ll all be over very quickly.”

“I wasn’t behind this.” Saffron only narrowly resisted the urge to fire a killing curse into his exposed back. “And fair trial is not a farce.”

He turned to face her, the light of the hearth casting a sharp shadow on one side of his hooked nose. “Fair trial? Does this look like a fucking courtroom to you?”

The seething hatred in his eyes was almost too powerful to look at head-on—so different from the cold, blank apathy of that first night. What was it about Saffron that unraveled something in these dark mages? Was it her refusal to cower and beg? Or was it what she represented?

Lyrian tucked a hand inside his cloak, and Saff caught a glimpse of Vogolan’s old tincture belt. The kingpin pulled out a vial of truth elixir and handed it wordlessly to Saff. She drank obediently, the now familiar syrup-sweet taste leaving a thick fur on her tongue.

“Did you leak the shipment information to the Silvercloaks?” Lyrian asked stiffly.

“No.”

“It was you . It had to be.” He searched her face.

“You know, I have all the ideas for how to torture the truth out of you. I could tear the scab from your brand, for instance. It would hurt like hells, and you’d doubtlessly be honest then.

” A heavy sigh, weighed down with exhaustion.

“But I don’t want to. The older I get, the less bloodlust I have.

The less I like to get my own hands dirty.

Far better to summon Levan to do it on my behalf. ”

Dread flickered like a flame behind her ribs, but she did not let it show on her face. She averted her gaze, looking instead at the miniature gold hourglass on his desk. The pearly grains of ascenite were settled at the bottom.

At her lack of reaction, Lyrian stared out of the window at the city he all but owned. The spires and peaks, the domes and lanterns, dust kicked up from chariot races, all its jewel-toned glory.

“I lost control on the docks,” he said quietly—so quietly she almost missed it. “Killing those customs officers was something like a reflex. A desire for a clean cut of the threads. But the rest … I saw red. Or white —blinding, blinding white. And for the first time in a long time, I lost control.”

Again, Saff said nothing, silence her faithful modus operandi.

Lyrian kept talking, every sentence more unexpected than the last. “It frightens me, how far I have strayed from the man I used to be. I was never meant for this life. But I fell in love with Lorissa, and she had all these big ideas, big dreams—she chose me and my unfaltering memory for a reason.”

Fear wrapped its branches around Saffron’s ribs. These were the sort of insightful words you shared with someone you were about to kill.

“We complemented each other so beautifully,” he went on. “But before I was swept along on her undertow, I was a humble amplicator.”

Amplicators were pivotal to Vallish society—they magically enlarged crops so that nobody would ever go hungry.

The Crown had strict rules over what could or could not be amplicated, because if luxury resources like gold and silver and silk and cotton could be endlessly created, inflation would skyrocket, and it would become very difficult for anyone to sell their wares if nothing was scarce. Supply would far outstrip demand.

Saff’s uncle Merin often went on flamebrandy-fueled rants about how the Crown should abandon the outdated notion of “making a living”—a concept born before the amplication spells were perfected—and embrace the idea that in a world where nothing had value, in the traditional sense, everyone would be free.

People would still work and make and buy and sell, because humans did not like to be bored.

Mal and Merin would still make cloaks, because they loved the art of it.

But King Quintan was old-fashioned, and the economy gave him something to control. And, as Merin would drunkenly yell, House Arollan lived in the lap of luxury, and would it be luxury if everyone had it?

“Lorissa was so beautiful, so smart, so powerful.” Lyrian’s tone was misty with nostalgia. “It didn’t start out so violently, you know. This drive for ascenite. But she grew obsessed.”

“Why did she want to gather so much?” Saff asked, determined to keep him talking, because if he was talking he wasn’t summoning her uncles for slaughter.

Lyrian, however, did not seem to hear her.

“I don’t want to be violent or cruel, but I never seem to have a choice.

Take this awful knot of a situation. I can’t just let you back out into the world, because you know too much.

And I can’t keep you as a Bloodmoon, because you’re a rat.

Once a Filthcloak, always a Filthcloak. And so what am I supposed to do?

There’s no real option, is there, but to incinerate you? ”

Saff withdrew her wand as discreetly as possible. The prophecy had not yet come to pass, so she must not die now. She just had to conjure a way out.

Lyrian took a step toward Saffron, and Rasso’s growls intensified.

“I don’t want to,” he repeated, almost pleading with the animal. “But I would do anything to protect my family. The Bloodmoons are my family, and my family’s safety means more to me than anything. I failed them once, the night Lorissa died, and I vowed never to fail them again.”

This seemed so at odds with the impression Saffron had from earlier that evening, the sense that Lyrian was impossible to bring down because he had no threads of affection to tug. That was certainly true of the version of him who’d seen red, or white, as he so claimed.

And yet he seemed too to be speaking the truth now. He was highly erratic, a walking contradiction, a game without rules or order. He was volatile, capricious, a pendulum always in swing. And he was all the more dangerous for it.

The kingpin gave a brittle, sad smile as he looked from the fallowwolf to Saff. “So I’m sorry. I am. But you must die. If it’s any consolation, I’ll let your uncles live. For once, there’s no need for collateral.” He raised his wand. “ Sen ammorten .”

Rasso leapt in the way of the curse.

“ Sen praegelos, ” Saff cried.

The killing curse froze midair.

Saffron edged out of the way, so that if time suddenly flowed again, she’d be out of the firing line.

Rasso hit the floor, falling short of sinking his teeth into Lyrian’s chest, and looked back curiously at Saffron.

Heart thumping wildly, Saffron knew her only real option was to run. To flee the mission, a failure but alive. To abandon the thing she had worked her whole life for, to beg and plead her way back into the Silvercloaks so that she might make some oblique difference behind the scenes.

Because what else could she do? The kingpin had resolved to kill her. And Lyrian Celadon was not one to change his mind.

The fallowwolf crossed to her in a flash, nuzzling her hand insistently, as though trying to communicate something critical.

“What is it?” she whispered, confused.

Rasso stared at her, and then at Lyrian’s desk, and then at his former master.

She followed the wolf’s gaze, and several disparate images coalesced with a sudden, startling clarity.

The golden hourglass, grains of pearlescent ascenite lying at the bottom.

The Timeweaver’s wand in the kingpin’s hand, power untapped.

The fallowwolf himself, the way the animal had curiously bonded to her.

Everything in her went perfectly still, as though she too were beholden by praegelos. Rasso tilted his head questioningly, or expectantly, as though he knew what she was thinking and had been waiting for her to finally figure it out.

She pressed her eyes shut, trying to conjure the image of the tunnel carvings that depicted timeweaving. She didn’t have an eidetic memory, like Levan, but her brain had retained the word, stashing it in the mental file marked important.

Tempavicissan.

It was preceded by something, she remembered. The hourglass turned upside down, to signal the reversal of time.

Slowly, she turned back from the doorknob and looked at Lyrian, at the frail, wizened shape of him, like a shepherd’s crook, even more withered when time pinned him in place.

The wand was taut with a kind of urgent energy.

Perhaps because it had just cast the darkest curse possible, or perhaps because it was … waiting.

She crossed to Lyrian and removed the wand from his grip, guided by some nameless force, her heart hammering in her ribs. Then she took the hourglass from the table and turned it upside down.

Rasso purred hungrily, approvingly, as though to say, Yes, that’s it, that’s it.

She tapped the top of the hourglass with Lorissa Rezaran’s wand. It felt warm in her palm, not from Lyrian’s own heat, but from something brilliant and pure.

“ Tempavicissan, ” she whispered, like a prayer, a litany—

—and the world turned itself around.

An immense smudging, a bleary haze, the feeling of being yanked upward from a great depth. Images blurred around her, Lyrian and Rasso moving backward so unnaturally it made her want to vomit.

Still pressing the wand tip to the golden frame of the hourglass, Saffron felt her lungs squeeze tighter and tighter, compressed through the narrow crevices of time itself, until eventually she could bear it no longer and she tore the wand away.

And then it was several moments ago.