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S AFFRON FELT AS THOUGH SHE WERE STANDING IN A CEMETERY, drenched in the scarlet light of a true bloodmoon.

All around her were graves of those already fallen: those she had lost, and those she had fought to save, and those she had killed with her own hand, each headstone a solid, immovable weight upon her chest.

Neatras and Kasan. An uncle, though she knew not which. Tiernan. Her mother and father.

In the front row of the cemetery was a neat line of open graves, awaiting their bodies.

And it was up to Saffron who would claim each one.

An awful power, and yet more awful still not to wield it.

This was the final play. The last square before the Flight of the Raven was complete.

“I don’t have a wand,” Saffron muttered.

Without hesitation, Levan handed her his.

Saints. He was putting all his trust and faith in her. He was putting his life, his fate, in her hands. And it felt how it had when she’d severed his hand—a curse, a burden.

Saffron pressed her eye against the crack in the pantry door.

Beyond it, the carnage roiled on, even more bodies on the ground.

Tas was dead, as was Detective Alirrol. Lyrian, once again casting killing curses with reckless abandon, was flanked by Castian and Segal.

Castian wielded wind so powerful that the roof had blown off the shack, while Segal fired vague disarmament curses at the Silvercloaks crouched behind the bed.

But there was something wrong with Segal’s wand—the spells trickled out in pathetic tufts of mist, falling dramatically short of their marks.

Aspar and Auria, both still in gas masks, tried to strike their opponents with effigias spells. One velvine was perched on Auria’s shoulders, black-furred and arch-backed, but Aspar’s velvine lay dead on the ground, spine snapped, eyes faded from indigo to gray.

Castian gusted the bed frame into the open sky above, sending it smashing into the nearest wyrmwood.

The Silvercloaks were completely exposed.

Not a moment too soon, Saffron gripped Levan’s wand and uttered, “ Sen praegelos .”

The world stood still, and the spell felt strong.

She didn’t have much ascenite out here in the Havenwood, but she had Rasso to bolster her, and a magical well full of pain and pleasure.

From the intimacy she’d shared with Levan, and from the world-ending hurt of hearing her uncle’s murder ordered.

From the historic loss of her parents, and from the righteous sense of purpose that had fueled her since.

All of it so potent she felt it in her body and her heart, all of it churning together in one fearsome pot.

Behind her, Levan crouched perfectly frozen. The emotion in his eyes was so richly textured she couldn’t wholly parse it.

He wouldn’t see what she was doing while time was held still. Only the outcome.

She stepped into the room.

The shack was decimated. Copper pots and pans were scattered all over the floor, bent and misshapen.

Castian had blown holes in the walls, and a white owl hung suspended over the roof, as though it couldn’t resist getting a better look.

The colored starbursts of various spells streaked the air, their paths frozen with time.

It was almost festive, like strings of twinkling winter solstice lights.

On one side of the room, Aspar and Auria crouched beside Detective Alirrol’s lifeless body.

Auria’s pale face was pinned wide with terror.

Next to her, Aspar had been struck square in the chest by a spell Saffron only vaguely recognized—not the pale shimmer of sen ammorten, but rather a vicious shining scarlet, like a pool of blood.

Dread coiled through Saffron’s stomach. It would kill the captain, albeit slowly. The caster clearly planned to extract information before her demise. Information about Saffron, no doubt.

Castian had been caught by an effigias spell—turning to stone from the heart outward.

Up close, Segal’s face was the picture of wrongness.

His Risen irises were a single shade darker than the whites of his eyes, but now that he was frozen long enough to study in earnest, Saff saw that they were not blank at all, but rather churning from behind, from within .

She could not say whether the monster who had murdered her parents was still in there, or whether he had become something else entirely—could not say, with any amount of certainty, which would be worse.

Saffron closed her eyes, picturing the cemetery once more.

The open graves, the scarlet moon in the sky.

Only two possible paths forked in front of her.

She could restrain her colleagues, then extract the kingpin, as Levan wanted her to do—but had not compelled her to do. Because he wanted this to come from her. He wanted, beyond all reason, for her to choose him.

Or she could restrain the Bloodmoons, and hand the Silvercloaks victory.

It was barely a choice. She had not come this far to turn back now. No matter how she felt about Levan—lust, love, hate, anger, fascination, fear, and myriad other emotions she couldn’t name—she could not place that over the fate of Ascenfall.

The fate of her life.

She had to finish what she’d started.

All those graves could not lie full for nothing.

She unlooped the manacles from Aspar’s belt and hooked them around the kingpin’s wrists, thinking all the while of that final assessment back at the Academy.

Casting that very first praegelos had shone too harsh a spotlight on her, setting this whole doomed carriage in motion.

There was an almost pleasing full-circle feeling to it.

The great bend of destiny, always arcing back on itself.

Once all the Bloodmoons were restrained—Castian was already semi-stone, so didn’t require manacles—Saff grabbed her own wand from Castian’s waistband, then pocketed Lyrian’s weaverwick.

She took Segal’s and Castian’s wands for good measure, cold sweat pouring from her temples at the effort of holding time hostage.

Then came the hardest part.

She went back to the closet to restrain Levan, knowing that when time resumed, and he realized she had not chosen him, the already broken heart in his chest would shatter.

Dizzy from holding the moment still, she manacled his wrists together just moments before time shuddered and freed itself from her grasp.

There were a series of confused yells in the main shack, then Auria’s shouts of effigias as she incapacitated the Bloodmoons more convincingly, but all Saff could do was stare at the man she had just betrayed.

He looked down at his bound wrists, and when he looked back up at her, all the light was gone from his eyes. All that rich, textured emotion was gone, and he was as dead inside as the night she’d met him in that alley.

And then she felt it.

The uncontrollable impulse to undo the bonds and hand back his wand.

He was compelling her.

Crossing the line he had never wanted to cross.

Or at least, she thought he was. The desire to untie him sprung from deep inside herself, her heart and her bones and her soul, like the basest of all instincts. No wonder it took Lyrian so long to realize the truth.

She was powerless to resist.

But how? He had no wand. And yet her body was moving of its own accord, guided by his will. Hands shaking violently, she loosened the manacles and gave him back the wand.

He looked straight through her, as if she were nothing, and climbed to his feet, turning to enter the main shack—and undo everything she had just done to tip the raid in the Silvercloaks’ favor.

“ Sen effigias, ” she said desperately, the spell burying itself in his back, and he turned wholly to stone.

It only lasted a moment.

Almost as quickly as he’d become a statue, he became flesh once more.

He peered over his shoulder, cold amusement on his face. “After my father used debilitan on me to such devastating effect, I had Miret help me practice breaking free of such curses, over and over until I could barely stand. Then I practiced until I could do it without my wand. Nice try, though.”

The horror in Saff was a dark, pulsing thing. Levan’s magic was something monstrous and unnatural, borne from more torture than most other mages had any hope of surviving.

And she had no idea how to overcome it.

“ Ans exarman, ” Saff hissed desperately, a basic disarming spell, and his wand leapt from his hand. She scrambled to pick it up from the ground …

… only to be immediately overcome with the urge to give it back.

She gave it back.

When he’d given her his wand and said hope, it hadn’t been a risk at all. He’d always been powerful enough to undo whatever she did on the other side of that door.

Gambling isn’t reckless if you’re good at it, she thought.

“Levan,” she whispered, closing the gap between the two of them. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please, forgive me.”

She pressed her body to his chest, felt the slow, steady beat of his heart against the frantic patter of her own. She gazed up at him, trying desperately to distract him with the only weapon she had left: the way they felt about each other.

Levan shoved his wand tip beneath her chin, pushing her face painfully upward. “I always win, Silver.” His fingers wove through the blond curls at the back of her head, but it was not affectionate. She fought a yelp as he dug into her hair. “Your magic cannot best mine.”

He was right.

There was no other way.

She pressed her breathless lips to his. A surge of emotion crested through her, an existential longing, a desperate desire, and she felt it mirrored in the way his body softened ever so slightly. A subtle yield, but it meant little. She would never be able to overpower him, and they both knew it.

The kiss deepened, intensified.

Saff dug one hand into the hollow of his hip; he let out a low, rough moan.

Her other hand pressed her wand against his stomach.

“ Sen ammorten, ” she said, grief permeating every inch of her body.

The killing spell leapt, a fork of lightning, a death kiss, and Levan staggered back, as though falling into an empty grave.

He was dead before he hit the ground.