P R O L O G U E
Twenty years ago
The Killorans’ front door changed color depending upon who knocked.
Sky blue for a charming acquaintance, heart red for a lover present, past, or future. Clover green for a spiteful enemy, or a rich, jammy plum for an old friend. Mustard yellow for family and, due to a slight inaccuracy with the spellwork, traveling salesmen.
The day the Bloodmoons paid a visit, the door turned as black as the bottom of a well.
Mellora had just returned home from a long shift at Saint Isidore’s, the nearby hospital for magical maladies, to find her husband, Joran, and daughter, Saffron, giggling with glee. Joran was slowly and me- thodically turning everything in the house into sausages, including but not limited to the taps in the kitchen sink, all the cutlery in the top drawer, several house plants, the cat’s furious tail, and his own high-bridged nose.
“Good afternoon to thee,” he said earnestly, as Mellora shrugged off her violet Healer’s cloak. His tone was a little nasal, on account of having a sausage for a nose. He tapped it once with his spindly cedar wand, and his handsome aquiline features returned.
Saffron stood by his side, arms wrapped around his leg, weeping with laughter. Her wild silver-blond curls tumbled over her face. “Daddy, stop! I can’t breathe.”
Warmth swelled in Mellora’s chest. Oh, how she loved them.
The Killoran family home was a round, ramshackle building over- grown with wildflowers, and Joran had charmed every inch of it with their daughter in mind: bookshelves that never ran out of new stories, miniature stars trapped in lanterns to form tiny constellations, a kettle that whistled the Serpent’s Shanty once the tea was boiled. Carpets that took off at random and whizzed Saff around their small village, whooping and hollering with delight. Favorite of all was a spiral staircase that became a slide whenever Saffron approached the top—a not insignificant piece of conditional transmutation that would floor most ordinary mages.
Mellora was entirely more earnest than her husband—she’d always been unfalteringly sincere, even as a child—but it made her appreciate Joran’s whimsy all the more. She could not imagine a better father for her only child.
Crossing to the cabinet of honeywine, Mellora poured herself a large goblet. As the sweet, sharp nectar hit her tongue, she felt her well of magic—depleted after a long day of healing—begin to refill.
Power was a finite thing, easily drained, and could only be replenished through rich pours of pleasure. Scented clove candles were eternally lit around their home. Gentle violin music echoed in the ceiling rafters, and the walls were adorned with glorious artwork. A feast for the senses, designed to restore.
Of course, the other thing that bolstered power was pain.
While pleasure swelled the quantity of magic at a mage’s disposal, pain improved the quality. An ancient survival mechanism, one that made magical wars as brutal as they were unpredictable.
But the Killorans wanted nothing to do with pain. Not after everything Joran had been through.
“You’re wasted tinkering away on this house,” Mellora told him, as he enchanted a knife to chop vegetables into neat inch-wide chunks. “You should be in the King’s Cabinet, protecting the realm. Or lecturing at a university. Even magical cure research. I know the Academy for Arcane Ailments and Afflictions is looking for—”
“Maybe joy is enough,” he replied simply, brushing a corkscrew curl away from her face and planting a kiss on her lips. His own long blond hair was tied back with a worn leather string. Mellora had the sudden desire to run her hands through it, to seek pleasure the other way.
And then came the knock at the door. Both of them turned at once.
At the sight of the ink-dark wood, Mellora blanched, setting down her goblet with a trembling hand.
“Saff, you have to hide.”
Every word was a shard of bone in her throat.
“But Mama,” Saffron protested, big brown eyes flitting from her parents to the door and back to her parents. She was six years old and doleful as a fawn. “Who is it? I’ve never seen the door black before.”
“Please,” said Joran, hoarse as he laid down the half-charmed knife.
It skittered on the chopping block in confusion. “Please, Saffy.”
They didn’t know who was on the other side of the door, but they knew.
Another knock, more insistent this time, with the air of a final grace.
Joran took an envelope from his cloak pocket and stuffed it into the top drawer of the nearest cabinet, running a mournful finger over the cursive name on the front of the parchment. Mellora watched him, dread gnawing at her belly. Her husband was afraid enough for a farewell letter, and Joran was so rarely afraid.
“Saffron, we love you,” Mellora whispered, kissing her daughter on the cheek. Saff tasted of creamy butter and strawberry jam. “We’ll see you soon.”
Joran ushered their daughter into the corner of the room. The pantry was enchanted to conceal any Killoran hidden inside, making them invisible and inaudible to anyone but another Killoran.
For once, Mellora was glad her genius husband wasted his time tinkering with their home. It might just be the thing that saved their daughter’s life.
As the pantry clicked shut, the front door slammed open, hanging loose and frightened from its hinges. Slowly the color—the magic—seeped out of the wood, until it was once more a plain brown teak. A few inches below the silver fallowwolf knocker, the imprint of an opening spell faded slowly.
Two hulking figures stepped over the threshold, cast in a wedge of fading daylight. Their cloaks were a deep scarlet, pinned at their throats with round ruby brooches, the moon phases embroidered down the lapels in black and gold thread. Everything else was black—the knee- high boots with gold buckles, the neatly laced tunics, the billowing breeches, the look of death in their eyes.
Mellora’s stomach clenched like a fist.
Bloodmoons.
She took a few protective steps in front of her husband.
“Can we help you?” Joran said, the words cragged and uneven. “We need a necromancer,” said the shorter of the two men. He had a low, heavy brow and a scratchy voice. He twitched with a kind of fraught energy—whatever order they’d been given, haste was of the essence. And there was nothing so dangerous as desperation when it came to the Bloodmoons.
Joran squared his shoulders. “You won’t find one here.”
“Won’t we?” The taller mage narrowed his gray eyes, a kind of rapacious hunger pulling his lips wide.
They both stared straight at Mellora.
Everything inside her seized with fear. She considered casting a desperate praegelos charm, to buy herself precious thinking space, and yet what good would thinking do when the devil was already upon them? The only thing that could save them now was the teleportation spell, and such a thing had been outlawed long ago.
Joran glanced back at her in confusion. “Mellora?” His knuckles were white as he gripped his wand. “My wife is a Healer. Easy enough to prove.” He lifted his wand to his palm and made a slicing motion. “Sen incisuren.”
A cut opened—too deep, worried Mellora, he’s gone too deep—and bloomed dark red. He didn’t so much as wince.
Mellora raised her sleek willow wand and muttered, as she had a thousand times before, “Ans mederan.”
Heal.
Though her well of magic had been scantly replenished by a few sips of honeywine, the wound inelegantly knotted itself back together. It would scar, if they lived long enough.
The Bloodmoons stared disdainfully at Joran’s hand.
“Either you know as well as we do that necromancy is a sub-class of healing,” said the tall viper, “or you’re entirely as moronic as you appear.”
Joran’s pale cheeks heated with anger, and Mellora silently willed him to not throw bait at the feet of wolves, yet she couldn’t quite convince her mouth to form words, to urge him to keep his head.
True to form, he did not heed her wordless plea. He only lifted his wand.
But the Bloodmoon lifted his faster.
“Sen ammorten.”
The killing spell landed true on Joran’s chest, and he fell to the ground like a sack of bezoars.
Mellora let out a strangled cry, feeling the expectant weight of the intruders’ gazes upon her. They knew what she would do next, and so did she.
Because she could not let Joran, her Joran, die at her feet.
After decades of running and rigging enchanted gamehouses, the Bloodmoons were experts at forcing players to show their hands.
The strand linking Mellora’s mind to her body snapped.
She moved without thought, sinking onto her haunches and tearing open the fabric of Joran’s tunic. There was a star-shaped scar over his heart where the spell had struck, and when she laid a palm over it, it was ice cold to the touch, like liquid silver. Magical death had a unique scent to it—not blood and rot, but smoke and ash and something honey-sweet.
She kept one palm resting on Joran’s unbeating chest and raised her wand with the other.
“Ans visseran,” she incanted, self-hatred pluming inside her. “Ans visseran. Ans visseran.”
Revive. Revive. Revive.
A sense of utter depravity clutched at her with gnarled fingers. Necromancy was not just unlawful—it was sacrilege. It went against nature, against all the various gods and Saints upon which Ascenfall was built. Something essential of the human spirit was lost in death, and it could not be brought back through the veil between there and here, no matter how skilled the mage.
But this was Joran. She had to try.
“Ans visseran. Ans visseran. Ans visseran.”
Nothing happened immediately, but these things took time. Time to coax the heart back into thumping, time to cajole the blood into flowing. An inescapable law of physics: whether magical or not, an object in motion wanted to stay in motion, and an object at rest wanted to stay at rest.
Surely Joran’s heart doesn’t want to be at rest, Mellora thought pleadingly. Surely it bucks against its very stillness. Surely it can sense me just on the other side.
The Bloodmoons watched as she incanted the spell again and again, but there was no telltale lurch beneath her palm. Desperation surging, she bit down hard on her tongue until she tasted blood, letting the pain stab and swell in her mouth.
If pleasure worked like rest to restore magic, then pain worked like adrenaline to enhance it. A short, intense burst of energy, granting extraordinary power in the most dire of situations.
And Saints knew Mellora needed it.
“Ans visseran. Ans visseran.”
Joran’s heart remained a stone.
But it had to work. This was Joran. Saffron’s dad.
Saffron.
Mellora prayed to Omedari, the patron saint of healing, that her daughter had not witnessed her father’s murder. She was still concealed in the pantry, but if she pressed her eye right up to the keyhole . . .
Focus lapsing dangerously, Mellora’s gaze flitted up to the pantry—
—just in time to see the golden doorknob begin to turn.
No, roared everything inside Mellora, but the handle kept twisting. If the Bloodmoons saw Saff, they’d kill her too.
Mellora spun on her heels, squaring her wand. She had never cast a killing spell, but to save Saff, she would do anything.
“Sen ammort—”
Her curse was severed by the two killing spells striking her heart. The golden doorknob stopped turning.
The room rocked still.
For several moments, silence sprawled out like nightfall. Wordlessly, the intruders burned crescent moons into their victims’ lifeless cheeks, the skin bubbling a grotesque burgundy beneath the tips of their wands.
If a death did not serve its original purpose, at least it could spread fear.
When the Bloodmoons departed, they left the door hanging off its hinges like a rotten tooth.
And when Saffron Killoran finally opened the pantry door—it could have been moments later, or hours, or days—the living room smelled of charred flesh. Of smoke and ash and something honey-sweet.
She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out.
Hunched over her mother’s body were two mages in long silver cloaks, pinned at the neck with sapphire brooches. One mage drew a chalk circle around her father by hand, while the other examined the ruined door. Their wands were scrawling in notebooks suspended mid-air, and they talked in low voices.
At the sight of Saffron, one detective looked up. She was pale, narrow-nosed, thin as a spire, and for the briefest of moments, pure, unfiltered grief flashed across her face.
“Oh, sweetling,” she murmured to Saffron, shielding the corpses from view. “Come here. You’re safe now.”
Keep reading for chapter one…
C H A P T E R O N E
The Cohort
Saffron’s cloak would turn silver by sundown—if she wasn’t caught in a lie first.
A mere quarter hour stood between her and the final assessment. Twenty years of grief and determination distilled into a single sequence.
She arranged her features into a neutral expression and set down a winning polderdash card. The priestess on the front winked coltishly.
Her opponent, Gaian, groaned like a dying hog.
“A whole year of having my hide whipped, and still I take the bait.” He slid a pearly ascen over the bench, and Saffron pocketed it with a smirk. “You must have more coin than the city treasury at this point.”
Not far from the truth. Saffron had spent most of her adult life gambling rather fruitfully against her peers and countrymen. Everyone else was so bad at card games.
Shuffling the deck idly in her hands, Saffron cast her gaze around the brewing lab. Orange-gold sunlight poured through the mullioned windows, turning dust motes to fireflies. The high walls were lined with shelves holding glass jars of common tincture ingredients: herbs and spices, ash and earth, fallowwolf claws and mourncrow beaks, flesh and blood and bone. Six long wooden benches ran parallel down the middle of the lab, each topped with pewter cauldrons and an array of gilded instruments. Along the benches, two velvines stalked and purred. Slender cats with purple eyes and black fur, their satin-cool breath sent ripples of pleasure across bare skin. They patrolled the Silvercloak Academy day and night, replenishing the magical wells of drained-dry mages.
The six cadets had gathered in the lab ahead of the final assessment, so that Auria and Sebran—the only Brewers amongst them—could stopper their tinctures. Though the cohort had spent twelve months competing against one another for the top rankings, they had become unexpectedly close-knit, and though none of them would admit as much, they all wanted to make the most of their last moments together. Before they were sent to far-flung corners of the continent for their first postings, before they no longer lived in one another’s pockets.
Assuming, of course, that they all passed.
Tension hung heavy in the room. The cadets stood on the cusp of an ending and a beginning, and they all felt the knife-edge beneath their feet.
“Look alive, folks.” Auria beamed, bright and earnest, her eternal vim never wavering. “We’re all going to turn our cloaks silver tonight. I can feel it.” A velvine brushed against her arm, purring pleasure over her throat as she notched three final vials into her tincture belt.
Nissa hung out of the arched window, smoking a hand-rolled achullah. It smelled of orange and clove and an earthy type of tobacco grown in the hottest part of the Diqar desert.
“Have you ever, even once, believed things wouldn’t work out?” Nissa drawled, blowing out a smoke ring. Black hair fell to her waist in a sleek, shining sheet. “Despite all evidence to the contrary?”
Auria flashed another sincere smile. “No, not really.”
Nissa’s own lips curled. “You know, in Nyrøth they consider blind optimism a sign of low intelligence.”
“Good thing we don’t live in Nyrøth,” Auria replied cheerily.
In truth, Saffron found Auria’s sunny veneer comforting, but she didn’t say as much. Despite overcoming her six-year stretch of silence when she was twelve, she still preferred to stay quiet.
From across the room, Nissa caught Saffron’s eye with a private smile, and it felt like grabbing a fistful of gallowsweed—as though everything in her blistered at once. Saff and Nissa had been ensnared in a clandestine relationship for the last few months. It began with simple, stress-relieving fucking, and slowly bloomed into something richer, softer. A stroke on the cheek, a flower left on a pillow, I saw this and thought of you.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, Nissa had ended things. Said that they needed to focus on their futures, and the very real chance that they’d be posted hundreds of miles apart. Nissa believed that the best Silvercloaks cut off sentimentality at the root. But for Saffron, the entire reason she was at the Academy was an emotional one.
She looked away from Nissa, gathering up her playing cards and tucking them back into her white cloak.
Tiernan—a tall, uncertain Healer, mainly at the Academy to appease his father—stopped his frenetic pacing to shoot Nissa a withering look. (Well, as withering as it was possible to be, when he’d sooner perish than insult someone.)
“I, for one, appreciate Auria’s positive spirit.” Tiernan blushed, raking a hand through his pale brown curls. He and Auria were mutually infatuated, and yet both believed their feelings to be unrequited. “Her love of the game makes it easier to reconcile the fact we’re both teammates and competitors.”
He had a point. The final assessment was not just of the Silvercloak cadets as individuals, but of how they worked together as a field unit. The Academy was reserved for the best of the best, and there were only six mages in Saffron’s cohort. There was Saffron herself: stubborn, quietly cunning, relentlessly single-minded, even more relentlessly sweet-toothed, and frighteningly good at gambling. An Enchanter, in the eyes of the Academy—if not in truth.
Shy, awkward Tiernan, whose father was in the King’s Cabinet. A talented Healer, albeit a perpetually nervous one.
Auria, a bright-eyed bookworm, a rule follower, with lofty ambitions of becoming a Grand Arbiter someday. Uncommonly gifted with three mage classes—Enchanter, Brewer, and Healer—her work was precise, if not especially imaginative, and she had an encyclopedic knowledge of Modern Potions & Tinctures: Volume IV.
Nissa, the elemental powerhouse of a Wielder. She was smoking hot and smoked a lot, but only so she could wield fire at any given moment, and certainly not because she was in any way addicted to achullah. Her dragonesque command of smoke and flame was revered by everyone in the Order—even Captain Aspar.
Sebran and Gaian, each of whom held a single classification— Brewer and Enchanter respectively—but made up for their moderate magic with unfaltering bravery in Sebran’s case and a sharp, almost frightening intellect in Gaian’s. The latter had the uncanny ability to spot lies; his interrogations always yielded confessions, even without truth elixir. And yet he still couldn’t beat Saff at cards.
“You’re the competition, pure and simple,” said Sebran, stoppering a dark purple tincture that smelled of aniseed. He was broad and brawny, with dark brown skin and a close-shaven head. He never spoke of his family, his home. Nobody quite knew where he had come from, other than the military academy. “I’ll get that Pons Aelii posting even if it kills me.”
“Not a chance,” Gaian said coolly, tying his long blond hair neatly out of his face. “It’s mine.”
Nissa ran her forked tongue over her bottom lip. “Or they could give it to the actual half-Eqoran.”
The graduate assignments had been posted on the noticeboard the previous week—and there had been only five vacancies listed for six cadets.
Three were run-of-the-mill detective postings here in Atherin.
One was a stationing at a border outpost in Carduban, guarding the ascenite-rich Mountains of Promise from the lustful eyes of the neighboring Eqora. (None of them wanted this posting, since the Eqorans hadn’t made any meaningful moves toward the mines in decades, thus the mission would largely involve mediating disputes between mountain goats.)
The last was an undercover field intelligence operation in Pons Aelii, the capital of Eqora itself. Nissa, Sebran, and Gaian had waged war over the posting for days. Going undercover held a certain level of prestige—if they performed well on such a high-stakes first assignment, they’d likely go on to great things in the Order of the Silvercloaks. (Plus, it just sounded sexy.)
But Saff wasn’t interested in Pons Aelii. If she wanted to destroy the Bloodmoons who’d stolen her childhood, she had to be in the city where their roots were laid—here in Atherin.
“Are you alright, Saff?” Auria asked. “You’re quiet. More so than usual.”
Saff peered through the wide double window. The pale-stoned Academy was perched on a hill just on the outskirts of Atherin, and the capital’s skyline blurred with heat, smudging together the purple sapphire domes of Augurest temples, the towering crimson-and-gold obelisks honoring the patron saints, the carved marble pantheons with sapphire spires, the gleaming emerald tiles and pale sunbaked walls of the slouching townhouses. A sultry, jewel-toned riot of a city, built upon pleasure and violence in equal measure.
Lunes, the quaint northern village she’d grown up in, had never felt farther away. Her heart panged at the memory of overgrown wildflowers and cobbled courtyards, shabby cloaks and warm faces, the scents of rosemary and honeywine.
“Fine,” she replied vaguely. “Just mentally preparing.”
As though she hadn’t spent two decades doing just that. As though she hadn’t spent two decades planning and calculating, scheming and rerouting, overcoming every obstacle thrown at her by nature or circumstance, biding her time with the big why always in the forefront of her mind.
“That’s what’s driving me mad.” Tiernan’s teeth worked at his bottom lip. “We can’t prepare when we have no idea what the assessment entails.”
“Like real life.” Sebran had a soldier’s gruffness; there was little emotion behind his hazel eyes. “You’re hardly going to get a detailed memorandum before every dangerous situation, are you?”
“As long as I get a job at the end of all this . . .” Tiernan fiddled nervously with the strings of his tunic. “My father will decapitate me if I come home without a posting. Even Carduban would be preferable.”
“I’ll let Aspar know you volunteer,” smirked Nissa, stubbing out her achullah on the stone windowsill.
Deep down, Saff shared Tiernan’s sentiments. Though she’d rather not be a glorified border control officer, she’d still take that over missing out on a posting altogether.
After everything she’d done to claw herself here, she couldn’t fail now.
Twelve years of mage school. Four years at the Northern University of Novarin, earning her Knight’s Scroll in Modern History. Five years of patrolling Atherin on the streetwatch, as all prospective Silvercloak candidates had to do, acting as first response to gory crime scenes, rounding up robbers and crooks and killers and hauling them off spitting and cursing to Duncarzus, accumulating injuries and trauma and hard-fought wisdom, knowing all the while that whatever innocence had survived her parents’ slaughter was being slowly eroded, maturing into the understanding that evil was everywhere, so commonplace it was banal, and now that she knew this, she could never unlearn it.
And then there was the simple fact that all this experience was built on a foundation of lies and illusions.
She only had to maintain the fallacy for one more day. One more hour.
*
The six cadets stood outside the Grand Atrium, staring at the words levitating over the threshold.
Candidates only—assessment in progress.
Beneath the sign stood a pale, raven-haired professor who had drilled them endlessly in the art of combat, leaving their flesh bruised and their muscles sore. When they’d protested that they wouldn’t have to use physical strength with a wand at their fingertips, Professor Vertillon had retorted that unless their wands were surgically attached to their palms, they had to be prepared to lose them. A disarmament spell could be thrown at them at any moment, or in the heat of the skirmish, they might simply drop it out of sheer nerves and ineptitude.
Professor Vertillon gave Sebran a terse nod—the professor had trained him at the military college before accepting the teaching post at the Academy—then pressed his lips into a flat line to greet the others.
“The final assessment is upon us,” he decreed, in his low baritone. “Though we can prepare for such events to the ends of the earth, we still must take into account the slippery element of chance. A wand snapped during a raid, a tincture belt shattered on the ground, compromising injuries, and conflicting information.”
He held up six cream-colored envelopes. “As such, you will each draw a different hand for this exercise. Three of you will have no disadvantages. One of you will lose your wand. One of you will have a limb temporarily frozen. And one of you will work on different information than your peers. Cards will be drawn in alphabetical order of surname.”
Vertillon fanned the envelopes in his weathered hands, then offered Sebran the first pick. Sebran pulled an envelope, opened it, and nodded woodenly. Tiernan drew next, then Saffron.
You have no disadvantages.
It wasn’t quite true—she had her own temperamental magic to contend with—but it was a relief nonetheless.
As Auria then Nissa drew the last two envelopes, Saff looked up at Tiernan, whose foot jittered uncontrollably. The sea-green tinge to his cheeks had only intensified. He’d clearly received a disadvantage.
And he was already terrified of letting his notoriously cruel father down.
Saffron would never forget their first week on the streetwatch. A vicious gang of thieves called the Whitewings had cut the tongues out of the mouths of several children who’d accidentally witnessed a rob- bery, then burned said tongues with magical fire so they could not be reattached. Saff, Tiernan, and Auria had been first on the scene, and Tiernan had spent the first twenty minutes vomiting into a gutter.
When word got back to Tiernan’s father about his son’s weak stomach, Kesven Flane had chained Tiernan to a chair and forced him to watch vivid reenactments of torture, animated with the kind of illusionary magic Saff used to hide her secret, every night for a month.
Then Kesven had brought home an inebriated Ludder—a person born without magic—and sliced their tongue out for real, forcing Tiernan to practice healing it. Over and over and over again, until the Ludder blacked out from the pain and a small piece of Tiernan’s humanity died.
And now, during the final assessment, the last show of strength before jobs were assigned, Kesven would see his son weakened. An embarrassment to the family name, even though it was through random chance, no fault of his own. Kesven would not see it that way.
“Switch with me,” Saff whispered under her breath.
Tiernan twitched in her direction. “What?”
“Swap envelopes.”
After a split second of indecision—clearly trying to discern whether Saff was trying to pull one over on him—he slipped his envelope into her hand. She reciprocated. Professor Vertillon was none the wiser.
Saffron read her new fate.
Your leg will be frozen for the duration of the assessment.
“I have no disadvantages,” announced Auria.
“Me neither,” said Tiernan, shooting Saffron a grateful look.
“Nor me,” confirmed Gaian.
“No wand,” muttered Sebran. He rubbed at his cheek, as though checking he’d shaven well. “But I suppose I can keep these?” He patted his tincture belt, and Vertillon nodded confirmation.
“It’s a bit on-the-nose to give the foreigner false information,” muttered Nissa.
“Not false,” pointed out Saff. “The professor said different.”
“And besides, it was drawn at random, Nissa,” said Auria hotly. She took any criticism of the Academy personally, though she had no familial ties to it, just a fundamental reverence for the rules and the establishment. A future Grand Arbiter to her bones.
“What’s the information?” Gaian asked.
“Don’t know. I assume I’ll be given it during the exercise?” Nissa asked.
Vertillon nodded again.“Indeed. Sebran—I mean, Cadet Aduran— will have his wand removed as he passes the threshold of the Grand Atrium. At which point Cadet Killoran’s leg will also freeze.” He took a step to the side. “You may enter.”
“This is it,” whispered Auria, patting her tincture belt for the thousandth time, eyes glowing with anticipation. She wholly and genuinely believed everything was going to work out. Saff envied her that easy faith. The world hadn’t yet beaten it out of her.
Saffron checked her own belt. She was no Brewer, so it wasn’t notched with vials but instead with an array of weapons and equipment they always took with them on the streetwatch: ropes, manacles, a tourniquet, a baton. Matter could not be created from nothing, no matter how strong the mage, and so some things had to be analog. She also carried a rune-engraved blisblade notched in a leather holster— daggers unique to the Silvercloaks, enchanted so that even a shallow self-inflicted wound provided an enormous full-body ripple of pain-pleasure. A fast way to replenish the magical well in a pinch.
Not that it had ever worked for Saffron. Nor did velvine breath. She had to seek pleasure the old-fashioned way.
On the other side of the enormous double doors, a muffled din of chatter swelled. Who would be judging from the raised gallery on the southern side of the atrium? Captain Aspar, of course, and their other superior officers, but Auria suspected higher-ups from the King’s Cabinet were here to cherry-pick the most sparkling candidates for House Arollan’s own court.
Not that Saffron would accept any other offer. She was fated to be a Silvercloak.
That fate was her god, her faith, her church. That fate was the only reason she was still standing. It had been written in the defining moment of her life—she believed that with her whole being.
Saffron shoved open the high double doors and gasped at what lay beyond.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.