Page 6

S AINTS , CURSED SAFFRON, STOMACH TWISTING VIOLENTLY AS she ducked out of sight.

What did that kind of obliteration mean?

Could such damage be repaired? Once Auria was reanimated, would she still be in a hundred pieces?

Limbs and organs spread over the mosaic-tiled floor like a spilled coin purse?

She wouldn’t be the first candidate to die in a Silvercloak assessment, but it was rare.

Yet one of the first things Saffron had learned in life was that when the worst could happen, it usually did. It was this cynicism that made her a great detective—she was very difficult to catch off-guard—but also prone to gloom and misanthropy.

Somewhere far below, the Bone Queen’s Lament picked up pace, lute strings twanging fervently beneath the musician’s deft fingers.

A second effigias curse flew in Saff’s direction, shattering another section of the glass roof.

It wouldn’t actually turn her to stone, of course, but she couldn’t let the Academy know that, or her forged Enchanter accreditation would be exposed.

She could cast one of her illusions, if circumstances became truly dire.

Her father had taught her the rare art of illusionwork when she was a child, so she could cast a shimmering glamour to make the others believe she was hewn from stone.

But such spells were difficult to wield and costly to hold for more than a few seconds, draining the magical well faster than almost any other kind of enchantment—which is why so few modern mages used them.

Below, Sebran fired disarmament spells at the Bloodmoons.

One landed true, sending a wand careening across the rounded room.

The other Bloodmoons turned their attention away from the figure on the roof and closed in on Sebran, their faces thunderous, their scarlet cloaks drifting behind them like shadows.

Two effigias curses struck Sebran at once, and he turned to stone.

Saff was on her own.

How should she play this?

How could she salvage this ruined assessment to come out on top?

She could disarm the Bloodmoons one by one from the roof, but that wouldn’t buy her enough time to free the hostages.

She would have to cast to kill—or, in this case, turn to stone.

Yet she badly wanted to prove there was a way to execute this assessment without crude slaughter.

Even if she could take one Bloodmoon alive, they’d be a valuable source of information.

She ran through her arsenal of enchantments, landing on one Auria suggested before everything went wrong. Vertigloran, to make a target dizzy and disoriented.

Could she use that? And then cast an illusionary version of herself to trick the Bloodmoons, distract and confuse them while she approached from behind?

It would drain all her magic almost immediately and expose her knack for illusions to the Academy, but both would be worth it to emerge from this trial as the sole survivor.

Then the Atherin posting would have to be hers.

In an ideal world, she’d have plenty of time to stop and consider every potential ramification of her plan. But this was not an ideal world, and hers was not an ideal life, and with all other cadets neutralized, the Bloodmoons turned their attention on her.

The remaining purple panes of glass shattered one by one, and then she was falling.

Her wand-free hand flailed above her, finding purchase on an un expected solid length. Her enchanted broomstick gradually lowered itself from the ceiling, the levitation potion wearing off.

Hanging on for dear life as she descended, Saff yelled, “ Ans vertigloran! ” into the chamber below. It struck true on the first try, making her glad for the hundreds of hours of target practice they’d gone through earlier in the semester.

One Bloodmoon staggered and fell to clumsy knees, but the other two wore murderous expressions. The shorter of them fired another effigias spell up at her. It narrowly missed, but the next one likely wouldn’t.

“ Ans clyptus, ” Saff bellowed.

A shimmering spellshield formed just in time to repel another effigias.

The spellshield shuddered and nearly dropped, and Saffron trembled with the effort of keeping it up.

While matter could not be created from nothing, certain Enchanters could use raw magic to maneuver intangible forms, such as illusions and spellshields—a rare sub-class of enchanting known as mattermancy.

Thanks to her father’s tutelage, Saffron was the only cadet at the Academy with any sort of grasp on mattermancy, much to Auria’s chagrin.

The mattermantic shield would not protect Saffron from a fist or a sword, but it would repel most charms and curses. It was, however, incredibly costly, and Saff felt her power drain with alarming speed, as though a sinkhole had opened beneath it.

With the spellshield raised, she couldn’t cast another spell at the same time—magic being a well with a single bucket—but it bought her precious seconds in which to think.

Should she cast to kill? Conjure an illusion, even though it was likely too late, now that she was mere moments from the ground?

Keep firing vertigloran and hurry out the remaining hostages in the confusion?

But now the other two Bloodmoons trained their wands on her, and she couldn’t shield herself from all angles.

“ Sen effigias, ” bounced and echoed around the chamber, sparks flying, her shield flickering dangerously.

And then she was struck.

The spell grazed her shoulder just as her boots hit the tiles. She sucked in a breath, half preparing to be turned to stone—would she still be conscious, just unable to move?—but of course, it never happened.

Her heart thudded against her ribs like a battering ram.

Everyone would have seen that spell hit her.

Everyone would know.

The lapse in concentration caused the shield to evaporate.

The three Bloodmoons closed around her in a circle formation, one still wobbling from the disorientation spell. The end was nigh. She couldn’t disguise three spells striking her square in the chest.

“ Ans vertigloran, ” she shouted, and this one found its target, but while the struck Bloodmoon keeled backward, the other two approached with menacing glares.

Both cast effigias at once.

Saff pointed her wand at her boots and called, “ Et esilan. ”

One of her favorite tricks.

The boots leapt from the ground as though on springs, and Saffron sailed forward on the momentum, clearing the Bloodmoons’ heads—and overshooting quite dramatically.

Slamming into the opposite wall, she crumpled to the ground.

Rolling over to face their backs, she raised her wand, but they were already above her, the word sen hovering on their twisted lips.

Desperation cresting, Saff remembered a rare spell her mother had admitted to using on occasion.

It would freeze a scene exactly as it was, if only for a few moments.

Mellora sometimes used it to buy herself time when a patient was bleeding out, or if they had precious few seconds in which to diagnose and heal—she said it bought her invaluable thinking space.

Worth a shot.

She raised her wand, unsure what to aim at. “ Ans praegelos. ”

Nothing happened, but the Bloodmoons spun their heads wildly, a strange expression on their faces. Something like fear, or revulsion, or disbelief.

Saff sharpened the intent in her chest to a single defiant point. “ Ans praegelos. ”

Still nothing.

Was she pronouncing it wrong? Had she misremembered the word?

Or was the prefix the wrong one?

Magic was commanded verbally, and when casting a spell, one had to announce one’s intentions.

Ans represented honorable intentions, while sen represented ill.

An important distinction, a built-in fail-safe, making it difficult to injure or destroy by accident.

There were a couple of other prefixes— don for the elements, which didn’t particularly care for human notions of right and wrong, and et for the practical everyday magics—but neither of them fit this scenario.

Why wouldn’t ans be the correct prefix? Saff believed her intentions were honorable: save the hostages.

Get Auria medical attention. But magic was as elusive as it was pedantic, and it had its own ideas as to what constituted good and evil.

Some commands were inexorably linked to a prefix, such as sen incisuren, because the magic would always consider cutting and severing to be a destructive act.

Did it have similar preconceptions about praegelos ?

The Bloodmoons recovered their composure, raising their wands simultaneously.

“ Sen praegelos, ” Saff bellowed with as much ferocity as she could muster.

There was a burst of blue-silver light, and the world fell silent and still.

All except Saffron.

The hostages ceased squirming and fake-sobbing, and the Bloodmoons froze in place, one of them in the middle of a backward stagger, the tilted angle of his body defying gravity, the ruby brooch at his throat shining like a pearl of fresh blood.

Even the distant muttering from the viewing gallery fell to nothing.

Every inch of Saff’s body shuddered and coiled with the effort of holding it, an immense pressure pushing at her from all angles.

Time was not a beast that took well to being bridled.

Not wasting a precious second, she grabbed the three outstretched Bloodmoon wands and tossed them into the corner of the room.

She used the two manacles looped to her belt to fix the three Bloodmoons together, knowing the restraints might not hold once she unfroze the world, but it would be enough to buy the surviving hostages time to escape through the spiral corridor, enough to seal herself as the clear winner of the final assessment.

Dizzy with the effort of holding praegelos, every fiber of her being willed her to let it drop, the bottom of her well exposed and scraping, but something else bothered her. She had to know if her initial instinct was right—that the Bloodmoons had a motive for holding up an innocent temple.

Searching the chamber for a potential vault entrance, she spotted a large, well-worn rug arranged rather precisely over the apex of the round room.

Another small yank in her stomach—something she’d come to realize was a gut instinct.

She followed it to the faded blue rug, pulling it back from the mosaicked tiles of forest green and star white and amethyst purple.

Beneath the rug was a hatch. It blended almost seamlessly in with the rest of the tiles, but it was an unmistakable hatch nonetheless.

She dug her fingernails around the edges, trying to haul it upward, but it was too heavy, its seams too smooth.

And while holding time still, she couldn’t use magic to open it.

Remembering a trapdoor with a spring-loaded mechanism in her own family home—devised by her father, in case magic should ever fail them—she pressed her palms against two opposite corners and pressed down hard.

The hatch swung open, and Saffron blinked rapidly, forcing her vision to clear.

She’d half expected a spiral staircase leading to a vaulted cellar, but there was just a small round compartment no wider than a horse’s cart, no deeper than a grave. At its center was a purple velvet cushion with a wand-shaped indent in the middle—but no wand.

Validation surged in Saff’s chest. She’d been right. They were here for something.

Where was it now?

She only had a few more seconds left in her, and she used them to study the room.

There. Tucked into the waistband of the mid-stagger Bloodmoon.

Another wand. Short, chunky, made of a warm-hued wood Saff didn’t recognize.

Saff reached for it. Just as the praegelos charm fell, Saffron’s quaking fingers closed around the tip—

—the world bleaches white.

A figure emerges through the blank mist.

No—two figures, mid-kiss.

One is Saffron.

The other is tall, pale, dark-haired, with a chiseled face and a scar bisecting his lower lip. His fingers are laced through the back of Saffron’s blond curls, every hard line of his body pressed against hers.

They both wear Bloodmoon cloaks: flowing folds of scarlet, moon phases embroidered in black and gold.

The kiss deepens, intensifies.

Saff digs one hand into the hollow of his hip, and the man lets out a soft, rough moan.

Her other hand presses her wand against the man’s stomach.

“ Sen ammorten, ” she says.

The killing spell leaps, a fork of lightning, a death kiss, and the man staggers back, eyes wide with horror.

He slumps to the ground, dead.

Something hard struck Saff in the face, and the mist dissipated.

The worship chamber materialized. She was flat on her back, relic wand in hand, stars in her eyes, temple aching from where she’d hit the ground.

The Bloodmoons above her struggled with their bonds.

Auria lay in scattered stone shards all around her.

“ Go, ” murmured Saffron at the hostages, her voice distant and watery.

The hostages clambered to their feet, escaping past their captors into the spiral corridor.

Was it over?

What just happened ?

Saff wiped her sweating brow on the sleeve of her cloak, focusing on the final assessment and not the white-hot relic wand in her hand.

She had saved more hostages than the others had killed, and taken three Bloodmoons alive.

In a real scenario, they’d be invaluable sources of information to the Silvercloaks.

One of the Atherin postings was hers. It had to be.

Her cloak would soon be turned silver.

Saff looked blearily up at the viewing gallery, expecting a round of rapturous applause once her assessors had realized what she’d done.

But instead she was met with a cold, stony silence.