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L YRIAN’S BACK WAS TO SAFFRON, ONCE AGAIN FACING THE fire. His bony shoulders protruded through the scarlet cloak, and the lambent candlelight caused the shadowy folds of the robes to shift and eddy.

“Or are you just going to confess and let us be done with it?” he was in the middle of saying. “I can have Levan portari your uncles here in an instant. It’ll all be over very quickly.”

Lorissa’s wand was still in Saff’s palm, and she tossed it at Lyrian’s feet like a hot coal. It clattered against his ankle, and he stopped speaking to frown down at it, as though he couldn’t remember dropping anything.

Silently, Saffron set the only other evidence back onto his desk. Grains of ascenite flowed through the miniature hourglass, when before they had pooled at the bottom, but Lyrian did not seem to notice the slight disturbance in reality.

“I wasn’t behind this,” she stammered, trying to remember her lines. “Fair trial is not a farce.”

Slowly, impossibly, he said: “Does this look like a fucking courtroom to you?”

Saffron could barely hear him over the roar of blood in her ears.

He turned back to her, and she thought she was going to faint from the enormity of what she’d just done.

She was weak and dizzy and afraid that he would know, and that she would not have the strength to do it again.

Her well had never been so empty—a kind of desert aridness that felt like it would never refill.

Rasso rested his head in Saffron’s hand and licked her palm, tongue rough and warm.

As he had done already, in another version of time, Lyrian tucked a hand inside his cloak and pulled out a vial of truth elixir. Saff drank, noticing that there was no longer sweet fur on her tongue from the first tincture.

Strange, strange, this is so fucking strange.

Once again, he asked, “Did you leak the shipment information to the Silvercloaks?”

“No.”

Saff’s heart thundered. She needed this to go differently this time.

A different fork in the path appeared. One she’d been too panicked to see earlier.

“But I got the spell-tracing charm for you.” Her voice sounded like it was underwater. “From my informant. It’ll lead you to Vogolan’s killer. And it won’t be me.”

There was an almost imperceptible lurching sensation, a cart rattling along a preestablished track before abruptly changing direction.

“What’s the charm?” he asked, curiosity piqued.

“ Novissan vestigas. ” She omitted the fact it only worked half of the time. He didn’t need to know she’d brought him damaged goods. “You’ll need to find Vogolan’s body, and cast the trace on the starburst where the killing spell met his skin.”

Good luck with that.

She’d scattered the rubble of Vogolan’s corpse all over Atherin.

But Lyrian’s eyes glowed, unperturbed. “I believe I have a work-around for that. Et convoqan Vogolanphial. ”

One of his desk drawers sprung open, and a small vial the approximate width of a wand leapt into his waiting palm. It was filled with dark red liquid.

He held it up to the light, an almost wistful expression on his face.

“My closest companions submit a blood sample, so that I might find them should they ever go missing. The Whitewings have a habit of holding my most valuable confidants ransom. There’s no reason to suspect this spell-tracing charm won’t work the same way as a location charm. ”

Saff’s stomach jolted with a missed-step sensation, a hook of pure adrenaline.

“My informant said one must hold their wand to the curse’s starburst for the trace to have the desired effect.

Otherwise it won’t know which spell to follow.

Vogolan has likely been struck with a thousand curses in his life. ”

“But ammorten was the most recent, and surely the trace is intelligent enough to know that.”

He rolled up his sleeves and dipped the tip of the wand into the vial of blood.

Saffron’s breath hung suspended in her throat.

Would it implicate her—or her wand?

Or would the spellwork fail, since the charm was already erratic, and the vial of blood was no real substitute for a body?

“Sen novissan vestigas.”

There was an infinitesimal pause, charged with expectation and prayer and a rotting kind of despair.

Then a wisp of blue-ish silver vapor spilled from the vial, thin as a strand of cloakiers’ thread. It swirled in the air for a moment, like a dog tracking a scent, and Saffron’s life hung with it, but then suddenly, impossibly, it snaked across the room and through the thick wood of the door.

“That strand will lead you to the killer,” Saff said, letting the lodged breath loose slowly, inconspicuously, trying not to wonder who she’d just condemned to a wrongful, tortured death. It was suddenly very difficult to remain standing, her legs weak and watery.

Lyrian stared after the vaporous string, lost in thought. “Take a seat, Filthcloak.”

She obliged, slumping into a leather seat.

Rasso leapt onto her lap and curled up in a ball.

He was heavy, but the weight was steadying.

It settled the sense of unmooring, the sense that everything she knew about magic and about herself had been turned upside down.

The fal lowwolf was something solid to hold onto when the rest of the world reeled around her.

Lyrian remained standing in front of the fire, his cloak drifting dangerously toward the licking flames. Saff watched hopefully. It would save her quite a lot of hassle if he caught fire of his own accord.

“So the trace has not indicted you. But you cannot deny that everything has been going wrong since you showed up and asked to be branded.” Lyrian’s tone had lowered to a coiled whisper, and she had to strain to hear him.

Another small wrest of control. “You can’t expect me to believe that’s a coincidence. ”

“No, not coincidence,” Saff agreed. “But the cause and effect isn’t what you think.

Maybe the Silvercloak contact who gave me the tracing charm grew suspicious about why I needed it.

She could’ve cast a listening spell on my cloak, heard Levan telling me about the lox.

” She swallowed hard. “I may have made a mistake, but I’m no traitor. ”

I’m a Timeweaver.

She could not grasp the enormity of it.

“True as that may be, sloppiness can be equally fatal. The Bloodmoons are my family, and my family’s safety means more to me than anything in this world.”

Saff’s stomach gave another strange lurch as the forks in the path intersected, then veered off in different directions again. “And I would never do anything to willingly endanger them. I hope I can make this up to you in time.”

She looked at the cruel-eyed man before her, and all at once, she realized exactly how to play him.

“I do believe you, you know.” She dropped the bravado from her voice, letting it soften and blur around the edges.

“That you don’t want to be like this. I’ve heard you say something along those lines a few times since I arrived.

I know you would prefer not to hunt or kill. ”

Her detective’s eye caught the slight dropping of tension in the kingpin’s shoulders, the way the deep notches of his frown grew shallower. As though she was confirming some truth he had once known about himself but had long forgotten.

Saff allowed herself the smallest exhale.

She was remaking a fate.

It was wrong and exhilarating and strange, for she had unmade not just her own fate but all the other events in all the world that had taken place in those few erased moments.

A monstrous thing.

With a sickly pang, she suddenly understood the Augurests’ reasoning, even if she did not agree with their methods. There was something unnatural about what she had just done.

Still, she pressed forward. “On the streetwatch, I met plenty of crooks who just loved to cause pain and suffering. But that’s not you, is it? It never has been. You do all of this for a reason.”

There was a long, ear-ringing silence, his gaze following the vaporous strand as though he could see it all the way to the end. Then a black wall came down behind his eyes, something hard and cruel, something that resembled … epiphany .

Saints knew what that epiphany was, or how it might implicate her. But it must have been compelling, because somehow, somehow, he muttered, “You’re dismissed, Filthcloak.”

Barely believing her good fortune, Saffron climbed tremulously to her feet and left the room, Rasso at her heel. The corridor was deserted but for the tracing strand, and the shimmering blue-gray vapor sent a sharp yank of dread through Saffron.

And then the dread took a certain form, a certain shape.

Levan.

It has a particular penchant for elm.

His wand was black elm, the same as Nissa’s.

Call it Silvercloak instinct, call it deep intuition, call it a strange kind of logic, but she knew beyond all doubt or reason that the strand led to him.

And Lyrian had already accused Levan of the murder once.

The epiphany that had fallen down beneath the kingpin’s eyes … the blackness of it, the way it had ushered all thoughts of Saffron from his head.

Saints.

She had to warn Levan.

Saff didn’t know where the thought came from—Levan was every bit the crook his father was—but it likely had its roots in guilt.

She had killed Vogolan, and Levan had not, and yet he would be falling on the sword for her.

Deep down, she knew she should let this happen, because it would solve so many of her problems, would neatly sidestep the fact that Levan had to know she was a rat, and yet, and yet, and yet …

In a horrified daze, she followed the tracing strand, and sure enough, after several winding corridors, it disappeared wispily into Levan’s bedroom door.

She knocked loudly, insistently, Rasso still purring at her side.