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S AFF BURST INTO ZARES ’ S CELL TO FIND THE NECROMANCER lying flat on her back, legs kicked up against the wall, crossing and uncrossing her ankles while whistling a tune.

Around both wrists were dark purple scars, symptoms of constant severing and reattaching.

Her lank hair was splayed around her, greasy and matted at the ends.

Saffron almost retched at the oily stench in the room.

“If you bring back one innocent person for me, I’ll free you.” Saff’s words all rolled into one.

Zares raised a dark, hooked brow, folded spindly arms over her sunken chest, and said nothing.

“I’m sorry about what happened back in your house. I don’t even know why we were there, why you’re so important. But helping me now is the only way you’ll ever be free of this. Because he won’t stop, you know. Levan. He won’t stop until you finally break.”

Another beat, in which Zares weighed her options—and quickly realized this was her only one.

She rolled her body sideways, dropping her feet from the wall, and pushed herself up on her elbow. “Now?”

“Now,” confirmed Saff, relief flooding her veins.

This was going to work. Tiernan would marry Auria. He would prove his father—and his mother—wrong.

She tried not to think about the lore surrounding the Risen, the ancient belief that the undead never truly came back. That some fundamental spark in them would be dimmed, extinguished. They would be almost themselves, but not quite, and such uncanny variance could drive their loved ones mad.

She tried not to think of Segal’s milk-white stare, the emptiness of his movements, as though he could retrace old steps but not choose new ones.

It was better for Tiernan to rise, albeit a little altered, than for him to stay gone.

Wasn’t it?

Zares clambered shakily to her feet, and Saff took her by the snarled, bone-cold hand.

Getting Tiernan’s corpse to the warded tunnels unnoticed would have been impossible if it weren’t for Levan’s Bellandrian wand—which she’d pocketed the last time she was in his room.

Somehow, she’d been able to conjure a portari spell almost immediately, powered by a raw, animalistic desperation that hummed through her very bones.

One moment she, Rasso, and Tiernan were hunched in the darkened alley outside the Jaded Saint, and the next they squeezed through the fabric of the world to the concealed entrance of the tunnel.

Miraculously, nobody had been coming or going from the mansion.

The only sounds were the scuttle of inkmice and a vague dripping noise somewhere deep in the bowels of the building.

She’d left Rasso guarding Tiernan’s body, so that nobody stumbled upon it and tossed him in the incinerator.

“ Et portari, Tiernan Flane, ” Saff whispered now, gathering all her power into a piercing kernel.

Levan’s wand obliged.

With an earsplitting pop, Saffron and Zares dropped into the dark tunnel as though from a great height, limbs crumpling beneath them as they collapsed next to Tiernan’s body.

Rasso licked at Saff’s salty brow and nuzzled his face into her stomach, as though he’d missed her enormously.

Corpses were famously not great company.

It was all Saffron could do not to faint. Her well was dangerously depleted, between the portari and the fruitless attempts to resuscitate Tiernan, but she wasn’t in the mood to pleasure herself in front of a necromancer at the moment.

“This is who I need you to revive. He’s only been dead for quarter of an hour.”

The necromancer looked from Tiernan back to Saff. “Fine.” Then, “You really don’t know why they brought me here?”

Saffron shook her head, breathing shallowly.

Zares gave a scathing snort. “He wants to bring his mother back.”

“Sorry?”

“Lorissa Celadon.” Zares wiped her mouth on the back of her rancid sleeve. “Her son wants to bring her back from the dead.”

Saffron frowned. “But she died over twenty years ago. That’s not poss—”

“Exactly what I tried to tell him.” Zares shrugged. There was a sort of hateful canine snarl to her mouth. “No matter how much ascenite you use to power your crypt, over time the body—”

“Crypt?”

“That’s why they’re so hell-bent on hoarding ascenite. It’s the only thing keeping the old queenpin viable, but they need more with every passing day. They can’t sustain her for much longer.”

The whole world sharpened to a single point of realization, a truth that should have been so obvious finally revealing itself.

The grand purpose. The why of it all.

The reason Lyrian and Levan Celadon did what they did.

Their plan was pure, desperate delusion. And yet Saffron understood it, deep down. Sometimes she thought there was nothing she wouldn’t do to bring her parents back to her.

Mellora and Joran would be fully decomposed by now.

But for the old queenpin …

Could it be possible, in a crypt of raw ascenite?

First things first, she had to revive Tiernan. Then she could worry about Lorissa Rezaran, about the Bloodmoons’ twisted mission, and about how to finally end it.

She would have to give her wand to Zares—the necromancer’s had been confiscated long ago.

Yet despite the knowledge that Zares had been branded, that she could not betray Saffron without losing a hand, something about handing over her own knobbly beech filled Saff with unease.

It would be worth the risk, to bring back Tiernan, and yet—

—there was a slamming sensation against her head, an elbow hook to the temple, a starburst of agony across her vision, and she collapsed to the ground, everything bleached white.

Zares howled a lupine howl, her hand severed clean from her wrist, but instead of succumbing to the pain, instead of crumpling to the ground in agony and despair, the necromancer clambered inelegantly to her feet and ran for her life.

Vision still vignetted, Saff lifted her wand and aimlessly incanted after the disappearing figure, “ Sen effigias .”

But Zares’s footsteps were already vanishing up the tunnel, and the spell fell dramatically short. The wards would let the necromancer pass too thanks to the brand on her chest.

Hope deserted Saffron with the sudden completeness of an eclipse.

She could barely cling onto consciousness, let alone pursue her mark.

Bleary-eyed, she stared up at the carved markings on the tunnel wall, the depictions of elegant timeweaving almost mocking her for what she could not do without a wick.

Her shoddily conceived plan had been a shambles.

Rushed, poorly executed, an embarrassment to her Silvercloak training.

She should’ve restrained Zares until the last possible minute.

She should’ve been more alert for an attack, should’ve anticipated that the necromancer may have considered her hand a fair price for freedom.

Saff had let desperation and impatience addle her judgment, let them undo years of hard-fought savvy.

It was clear now that Zares had been distracting her with stories of Lorissa Rezaran, but did that mean they were not true?

No. It had chimed the tuning fork in Saffron’s chest, plucked the instrument she had begun to recognize as her detective’s instinct.

Lorissa Rezaran, preserved in a crypt for twenty-one years.

A crypt.

Saff sat bolt upright, heart pounding with realization, still dizzy, still nauseated. The tunnel tipped around her, and she tried not to look at the necromancer’s snarled hand lying next to her best friend’s corpse. A museum of her failures.

Focus. Something Levan had said on the night of the raid, as he was using portari to help them escape, came back to her: Cryptmouth Tunnel.

Cryptmouth.

Again came that chime, that tuning fork, her instincts clarion clear.

Dazed, she tentatively touched her fingers to the nearest tunnel wall.

The crypt was behind the markings. It had to be. What better way to honor a mother long gone than with art about what her blood had been able to do?

Climbing shakily to her feet, Saffron’s mind reeled.

If she could just get into the crypt—a crypt so piled with ascenite that it had kept a corpse viable for over two decades—maybe she could leave Tiernan there until she found another necromancer.

Or until she could find a weaverwick wand and rewind the clock to before she confronted him.

She slid a palm along the rough wall, hoping to find a seam of sorts.

Nothing.

Using her own wand and then Levan’s, she tapped at various spots on the markings—the words, the hourglass, the figures—and tried every password she could think of. Fair featherroot. Baudry’s bitch. Even, through absolute desperation, Dragontail.

Nothing.

She recited the timeweaving spell over and over.

Still nothing.

Just as she was about to give up—about to accept that the tuning fork in her chest might be off-pitch—a final idea came to her.

Maybe Lyrian kept an hourglass on his desk for a reason. Maybe it was a key, of sorts.

She pulled her own hourglass from her cloak pocket and tapped it with her wand.

“ Tempavicissan, ” she whispered, and the world did not turn itself around, but a section of the wall in front of her melted into the ground.

Everything in her leapt. Grabbing Tiernan by the ankle, she hauled him over the threshold, then tapped her hourglass again. The wall closed behind her, and she exhaled slowly, looking around.

They were in some kind of entry chamber, every square inch made of ascenite, the surrounding air cold and metallic.

The walls, the ceiling, the floor, all of it glowing in a way plain ascenite did not, like the shining pearl-silver of a waxed moon.

Enchanted with a kind of embalming power to keep Lorissa viable?

Scattered around the atrium were piles and piles and piles of coins, of smelted bars, of ascenite rings and necklaces and diadems, all gambled away by the helplessly addicted citizens of Atherin. More ascenite than Saffron had ever seen in her life.