Page 21 of Silvercloak

“It’s alright to cry, you know.” Her grandfather had taken an almighty swig of bitterale, his cloak sleeves sopping with spilled drink. “You didn’t shed a single tear at the jeweling ceremony. Don’t feel like you have to be stoic for us old folks.”

Saffron hadn’t known whatstoicmeant, but nodded anyway.

“Let me tell you something about loss, sweetling.” Saff had hated her mother’s term of endearment on those ale-puckered lips. “You can either yield to grief, or you canuseit.”

Saffron had looked up at him, questioningly.

“Those are the only two choices, in the end. Grief can bury you, or it can fuel you.” He’d leaned in closer. “That’s what I’m going to do. Make those scarlet bastards pay.”

Her grandfather had died not four months later, after drunkenly ambushing two Bloodmoons on the street. But his idea had seeded itself in Saffron, and she was willing to bide her time to execute it. She would not swagger into the situation with inebriated bluster. She would think, plan, think some more, plan some more. And only then would she act.

Aspar saw that in her. Had always seen it.

The captain slid the fraudulent certificate back into Saff’s file, looking intently at her cadet. “Something happened when you touched that relic wand.”

Another sharp diversion. Saff’s knee-jerk instinct was to lie again, but what was the use in it now? All the polderdash cards were already on the table. She was about to be thrown out anyway.

“There was white mist across my vision.” Saff remembered the sheer brightness of it, like she’d been in a dark cave for years and finally emerged. “Then I saw myself … killing a Bloodmoon. I wore a scarlet cloak.”

For personal reasons, she kept the kiss to herself.

Aspar’s expression hardened, a kind of keen Augurest hunger in her gaze. Her palm drifted to the clothbound cover of the Divine Augurtures, as though about to swear an oath. “And have you ever had such visions before?”

“No. I was horrible at foreseeing in mage school. This vision felt like … it came from the wand, not me.” Saff rolled her own ugly wand in her palm, and even though it had been twenty years since Renzel had reluctantly sold her the near-useless thing, his clear disdain for her broken magic still stung. “Is the relic real?”

Aspar’s lips pursed. “That’s above your pay grade.”

Saffron came at it from a different angle. “Fine. Say it was a prophecy—are prophecies guaranteed to come true?”

The captain fixed her with a long, contemplative stare. Then, quietly, calmly, she said, “Whatever you saw in that temple will come to pass.”

Saffron disguised how unsettling she found the prospect.

She was going to kiss—and then kill—a Bloodmoon.

And if she was going to do that, it should be in service of a greater goal.

She leaned forward, forcing conviction into her tone. “Captain, couldn’t it be agoodthing that magic doesn’t work on me? I can’t be struck with a killing spell. I can freeze the world for a few seconds and dodge through it unscathed—because I’m immune to thepraegelosenchantment, like I am to everything else. Surely that makes me an asset, not a liability.”

“Praegelosis an abomination,” Aspar snapped. “Cast it again and you’ll be kicked off the force faster than you can sayTimeweaver.”

Saff gritted her teeth. Her mother hadn’t been a hallowed Timeweaver, and neither was Saff. She was just, for some Saintsforsaken reason, immune to magic.

Then her attention snagged on what Aspar had really said.

“I’m not being kicked off the force anyway?”

There was a long bolt of silence as Aspar considered her next words. Saff’s gaze went to the leather-bound spines on the nearest bookshelves. Slightly apart from the others, as though recently reviewed, wasThe Elusive Fifth Element: A Study in Lightningby Philomena Driver. There was a scorch mark on the bottom corner, the leather melted and warped around the blackened curve.

Finally, Aspar laid down her wand and said, “You might have noticed that there were only five job postings pinned last week.”

“Noticed? We were all half-demented over it.” Saff smiled, but it died on her mouth as she intuited her captain’s meaning. “There’s a sixth?”

“A deep undercover assignment. And I meandeep,not just gathering intelligence from Pons Aelii, like Cadet Villar will be.”

So Gaian had got the posting. Sebran and Nissa would be livid.

Could that mean Gaian was the Compeller, after all?

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