Page 23 of Silvercloak

A wry smile tugged at Saffron’s lips. “I heard you had eyes on the commissioner role, when Dillans retires. Being the captain who brought down the Bloodmoons would seal the deal.”

Aspar said nothing to refute the idea.

Dillans was a shriveled old mage who’d been in the Silvercloak commissioner post for longer than Saffron’s parents were alive. His biggest legacy was spearheading the campaign to outlawportari,the teleportation spell, since it had scuppered a number of critical arrests during his tenure. Saffron had spent a not insignificant amount of time wondering what would’ve happened if it had remained lawful. Would her parents have been able toportariout of their house the moment the front door turned black?

Saffron took a deep, steadying breath. “In the Bloodmoons … would I still be Saffron Killoran?”

“Yes. We’d keep your own identity intact, to minimize the risk of being caught in a lie.”

“So they’d know I trained to be a Silvercloak?”

Aspar gave Saffron a look that bordered on sympathy. “A spectacle will be made of you. You’ll be kicked out of the Academy and publicly denounced for your lies and forgery. Charged with fraud, and sentenced to some Duncarzus time, to avoid suspicion. Upon your release, you will enter a Bloodmoon gamehouse and gamble away everything. And then you will borrow more, and lose more, until nothing can save you except offering your soul and your service to the Bloodmoons.”

Saints.“Will anyone else know the truth?”

Aspar shook her head. “Nobody outside this room. You will be a Silvercloak, yes, but in my eyes and my eyes alone.”

A sour taste tanged at the back of Saffron’s throat. She hated the idea that the friends she was supposed to graduate with would think her a crook, a fraud, an embarrassment. Nissa, Auria, Tiernan … she’d lose all respect, all dignity. She’d spend weeks or months in the filthy gutters of Duncarzus.

And on the other side, she’d face the most dangerous mission imaginable.

Yet bringing down the Bloodmoons was the reason she’d lied her way into the Silvercloaks in the first place. They had destroyed everything that had ever made her feel warm and safe and loved. They had robbed her of a childhood. They had sentenced her to life in a nightmare she’d spent twenty years trying to wake up from.

And Saffron knew her decision was already made, because the relic wand had shown her as much.

Her future was written—had perhaps been written the very day she turned that doorknob—and it could not be unwritten now.

Captain Aspar offered a ring-decked hand, and Saffron shook it.

SAFFRON BLINKED INTO THE SUN. AFTER SIX MONTHS INthe dingiest of Duncarzus’s dungeons, the brightness felt like hot pokers in her skull.

The navy tunic and dark slacks she’d worn at her sentencing hearing now hung loose in tragic swaths. She’d borrowed a length of rope from the warden to loop through her trousers, but there wasn’t much she could do to disguise the collarbones jutting through the laced-up neck of the tunic. The feel of them protruding through her skin made her cringe. Fuller figures were very much preferred on the continent—a mark of power, of a well generously filled—and she was chagrined to lose the charming tummy rolls she’d been rounding all her life.

Her leather boots, polished and proud while she was at the Academy, were dusty and wrinkled from their time in storage. She looked—and smelled—like a street rat. It would work in her favor when she entered the gamehouse later that afternoon, yet shame clung to her like tar and feathers. She had spent her whole life fighting the urge to become this person, the urge to give up on herself and the world, and yet now, here she was. Tragedy manifest.

The street outside Duncarzus was deserted, and there were no carriages to be seen. Not that she was likely to hail one. Any horse with the slightest bit of pride would whinny and flee at the sight of her.

She could always take aportarigate into Atherin—while the transportation spell had been stripped out of Vallin’s wands, a series of interconnected and highly regulated gateways had been established using the same magic—but she craved the rhythmic patter of her footsteps, the sun on her bare skin after so many months confined to a cell.

There were two routes into the center of Atherin. Strolling down the wide boulevard of Arollan Mile would see her pass Clay’s Cloakery, run by the two uncles who’d taken her in after her parents died. Mal and Merin Clay were by turns flamboyant and eccentric, married in a flower-filled riverside ceremony the year Saff was born. Wealthy customers traveled from all over the continent to buy a cloak from Clay’s—and to hear the scandalous court gossip from its proprietors. Few paid much mind to the silent, wild-haired girl moving through the storerooms like a ghost, a clothbound novel tucked under her arm, its spine cracked and pages loose from over-reading.

Her uncles had attended Saffron’s sentencing earlier in the year, after she’d plead guilty to all charges. Mal had wept in the gallery, while stoic Merin had worn an unbearable expression of resignation. As though he’d always known that Saff, with her crushing trauma and frightening single-mindedness, was fated for something like this.

There was a saying in the north:misfortune begets misfortune.

She was living proof.

When she’d been led away from the gallery in shackles, Merin had whispered three strangled words:coradin se vidasi.An expression from Ancient Sarthi, roughly translated as: “my heart will not beat until I see you again.” From Mal she’d have dismissed it as campy melodrama, but from restrained, repressed Merin, it cut through her like a blade.

In Saff’s last letter to her uncles from Duncarzus, she had lied about her release date. She couldn’t bear for them to see her like this.

She chose the other route into the city.

It was early Sabáriel, the seam between summer and autumn, and the clement sunlight had a kind of buttery quality. Atherin’s streets were narrow and winding, decorated with mosaicked tiles of dark blue and forest green, grand murals painted into shallow alcoves. The palecreamstone of the buildings had settled over the centuries, the townhouses slouching into one another like common drunks. Every so often a wall would fold in on itself, offering a shaded nook in which two mages could spontaneously fuck each other senseless. The omnipresent sounds of horse hooves and orchestral music were frequently punctuated with moans of desire.

The entire city was built upon this pursuit of pleasure. Flower shops and massage parlors and pavement cafés spilled into the streets, a riot of color and scent and incense, the fresh gardenias and praline cocoa almost enough to cleanse the Duncarzus stink from Saff’s memory. Stray velvines stalked the cobbles, sipping at bowls of sweetened cream left out by grateful residents, leaping upon the shoulders of drained-dry mages and purring upon their naked throats.

Magic wouldn’t replenish itself, after all.

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