Page 67

S AFFRON WAITED IN THE JADED SAINT FOR SEVERAL HOURS , but none of her old cohort appeared.

Nursing a small goblet of honeywine, she sat at a table by the entrance, surrounded by vines and candles and statues of mournful Saints, willing her friends to walk in, heads thrown back in laughter, but they never did.

Her brain rifled through the very worst possibilities with a sort of terrible inevitability. Nissa hadn’t made it out of the raid, after all. Auria’s hideous airborne weapon had turned on her. Tiernan had died on the dock, drowned by the wall of water Castian conjured.

In this world, the worst always came to pass.

Still she drank, and she waited, and she ruminated on Levan’s words.

I see you, Silver. For all that you are.

From the way the conversation had evolved thereafter, it hadn’t seemed nefarious. Neither an insinuation that she was a rat, nor a Timeweaver. But still the comment had left her unsettled, uncertain of the terrain she was attempting to navigate.

Brave, in a way most would consider reckless. Afraid, though you’d never admit it. Good, though you’ve started to doubt it.

It was an intimate thing, to be seen so completely.

A little after darknight, once she had thoroughly decimated her own emotions, she finally admitted defeat and left the tavern.

“Saffron?” came a timid voice from the alley behind her, and she swung on her heel.

Tiernan .

His frenetic gaze darted behind her, looking for a second figure. “Are you alone?”

Of course. He was here for Levan. Ordered to be, most likely.

“I am,” she said, feeling uneasy. “Is everyone alright after the raid? Nissa? Auria?”

His face twisted. “They’re alive, but Ronnow … Ronnow drowned.” A thick swallow. “By the time Paliran and the other Healers got to him, it was too late to save him. He had a family. Two kids.”

“Oh, Saints,” Saff moaned. Ronnow had always been kind to her, had shared his old notes when she was struggling with the procedural exams.

And now he was dead, thanks to Tiernan’s betrayal.

She should be furious that his corruption had compromised everything she had worked for, but in truth, she harbored no judgment toward him.

He had always been governed by fear, but he wasn’t a bad person.

And she knew better than anyone how impossible it was to escape the Bloodmoons’ snare once you were in its grasp.

The scarlet rot, once it had set in, had no known antidote.

“Are you alright?” she asked, remembering the grace he had shown her with his apology.

“No, but also yes.” Tiernan ran his hands through his mousy curls, clenching his wand tight. “After everything that happened … I asked Auria to marry me.”

“Tiernan!” A brief spark of joy in her chest, like flint to dry leaves. She had forgotten what it felt like, the kind of happiness that flared from within. “Tell me everything?”

“The morning after the raid, I just realized … we face death every single day. Every single mission, every single arrest, it could go so violently, irrevocably wrong. Look at Ronnow, look at his bereaved family. So why put off happiness? We could leave that warm common room one day and never come back.”

“I’m hoping Auria said yes?”

Saff’s tone was light, but everything in her sank. This joy was not as uncomplicated as it had first appeared. Because now that Tiernan had been turned by the Bloodmoons, marrying Auria would make her compromised by association.

Every person in this city is mapped out in my head. Every strand of love and kinship between them shimmers before me, begging to be plucked. The most efficient means of compelling, other than compelling itself, is to tug those threads until they hurt.

The dark tendrils were spreading ever further into the Silvercloaks, into Saffron’s found family.

And Tiernan had to know that. He had to know that his proposal was a manacle.

He laughed sincerely. The lanterns in the alley lit him from behind, casting a halo of golden light over his frizzy curls. “To my immense surprise, she said yes.”

Saffron smiled, as warmly as she could muster. “I’m so happy for you two. Is your father pleased?”

Something bitter snapped across Tiernan’s face, as though he’d been struck. “I haven’t told him yet. He’s a horrible snob, and her family makes gelato. Or … they did. Her grandfather was found murdered by the Bloodmoons.” A pained grimace. “By the people holding puppet strings over our lives.”

Our lives.

It was essentially an admission that he was indeed the rat, but Saffron couldn’t bring herself to ask for details yet. “Is Auria alright? After Papa Marriosan …?”

Tiernan’s lips pressed into a flat line.

“You know her. She’s thrown herself even deeper into her work.

Eighteen-hour days, barely eating or sleeping.

She got the fourth classification, but hardly cared, just became obsessed with chasing a fifth.

I’m worried sick, but what can I do? I love that woman, Saffron.

” A shard of emotion bobbed in his throat.

“So much of my life I spent trying to make my father proud of me. I used to polish his cabinet of ministerial awards by hand, promise him I’d follow in his footsteps.

I made my fingers bleed practicing the violin because I knew he liked orchestral music.

I studied twenty hours a day in university and still didn’t graduate top.

Auria did. But it’s funny, with her … I find myself not caring about my father.

I just want to make her happy. Make her proud. ”

Emotion pealed through Saffron’s chest. “And I have no doubt you’ll do that.”

“But I’m not, am I?” Tiernan looked behind her anxiously once more, as though Levan might be concealed by invisibility elixir, hidden in the shadows. “I’m not making her proud at all.”

So he knew that she knew.

“You were there that night,” Tiernan said in a low voice. “On the docks. Auria saw you in a scarlet cloak.”

A sharp pang of shame, even though hers was not a true betrayal.

She was undercover. She was still acting in the Silvercloaks’ best interest. But she didn’t want Tiernan to know that, because it might make him shut down, stop confiding in her.

He had to believe they were in the same situation, or he wouldn’t talk.

“What happened, Saff?” He took a step toward her, intensity rising in his stare. “How did they get you?”

She shook her head fiercely. “I can’t talk about it.”

A long, weighted beat. “I understand.”

There was a haunted look carved all over his face. Even when he’d been talking about marrying Auria, there was a quiet desperation to it, a dark undertow of fear.

Which of his loved ones were being held at wandpoint? Auria herself? Was he living in such excruciating fear that he had almost entirely shut down?

Only one way to find out.

First, she needed absolute confirmation. “Tiernan … the night of the raid. Someone tipped off the Bloodmoons that a tactical team was moving in. And that person was you, wasn’t it?”

At once his eyes snapped open, unnaturally wide. He trembled violently, like a fly trapped in a spider’s web. His hand clenched tighter around his wand, and slowly, shakily, he lifted it to his throat.

Saffron realized what he was doing a moment too late.

“Sen ammorten—”

“ No! ” Saffron screamed, the sounds echoing around the alley, and there was a spark of bright light, and she withdrew her own wand to cast praegelos but it was too late, she was too late, and Tiernan fell lifelessly to the ground.

Rasso howled at the moon.

It all happened so fast, so impossibly fast, just like the night her parents were slain.

How quick it was to end a life, to turn all that rich and complex essence into a pile of flesh and bones.

How much tragedy could unfold between one heartbeat and the next.

She threw herself over his body, shaking him by the shoulders as though convincing him to wake up, wake up, but he was gone, everything that made him Tiernan was gone, there would be no marrying Auria, no spawning brilliant, wide-eyed children, no rising through the ranks to prove his father wrong.

As she clutched at his face, his chest, his hands, she thought of the night they first met on the streetwatch.

The two of them had been placed with two more experienced watchers, spending the evening shadowing them on their patrol of the city.

Tiernan had cowered behind Saffron the whole time, terrified of his own shadow, seemingly mortified by the moans of the pleasurehouses, petrified of the merest suggestion of a scarlet cloak.

But ten minutes before the shift was over, he had seen something the more senior watchers missed—two silhouetted figures on a rooftop, dark cloaks flapping and billowing, one pushing the other to their death.

Tiernan slowed the trajectory of the falling body enough that the ground’s impact did not kill them.

Saffron had known then that he had something to offer the Silvercloaks—what he lacked in pride or courage, he made up for in astute observation and clever, nonviolent solutions.

As the shaken victim was giving a statement half an hour later, Tiernan’s mother had emerged from nowhere, having been cloaked in invisibility elixir and tailing him all night.

Her face pale and tearstained, she’d thrown her arms around him and told him how proud of him she was—because she didn’t think he’d survive that first shift.

Tiernan later told Saffron and Auria that her quiet lack of faith had been worse than his father’s outright vitriol. Because if your own mother couldn’t see the strength in you, who would?

I do, Auria and Saffron had said at once, and it had not been a lie. By then, Saffron had learned there were all different kinds of strength.

And now he was dead because of her.

Over and over she tried to bring him back— ans visseran, ans visseran, ans visseran —but just like it had with Nissa, nothing happened, nothing ever fucking did.

She withdrew the miniature hourglass from her cloak pocket, half believing that sheer desperation might conjure a miracle with her wickless wand, but no matter how many times she tapped it, turned it, begged it, time marched resolutely, unflinchingly forward.

“ Please, ” she begged Rasso, grabbing him by the soft, ridged shoulders, staring deep into his doleful white eyes. “Please save him.”

Rasso tilted his head to one side but did nothing, could do nothing, and Saff whimpered, letting her face fall into her hands, sinking her bottom back onto her heels, all the conviction leaving her in one terrible swoop, and she thought that this was it, she could take no more, this was something she would never come back from, would never let herself come back from, because everything everything everything was her fucking fault.

A mother and father left behind a desolate daughter.

A kingpin’s son would bleed a slow, slow death.

A beloved Silvercloak left behind a grieving fiancée, the image of a confetti-strewn wedding now nothing but an open grave.

Not to mention Neatras, Kasan, Ronnow, and however many others had served as collateral damage in this doomed quest for revenge.

Tiernan’s body grew cold beside her, death’s fingers curled around his soul. He looked so small, so fraught, so afraid. The only thing that could save him now was a necromancer, but—

The idea came to her sharp as a fishhook, and she sat bolt upright so suddenly that Rasso started.

She knew exactly where she could find a necromancer.