Page 1 of Turncloak

Part One

Aftermath

1

• • • •

Twenty-One Years Ago

A baby was nestled at the foot of a gnarled wyrmwood, swaddled in a navy cloak and bound at the ankles with manacles of deminite. He did not cry, but rather emanated a kind of bone-deep despair, a frequency that rendered surrounding wildlife meek, melancholic. A waxen red moon hung proudly in the sky, like the mother of all things, but even she could not save him.

There was something badly wrong with the baby, but the baby did not yet understand this. He thought only of the gnawing hunger in his tiny belly, and of the two sorrowful faces who’d abandoned him in the Havenwood mere hours ago. He did not yet possess the words for these people—mama, papa—but associated them with safety, with comfort. His heart beat with a visceral longing for the familiar sounds of their voices.

He was also very, very cold.

Winter sharpened its talons, mere moments from sinking into flesh.

Two gaunt figures emerged into the glade, arguing fiercely about matters beyond the baby’s ken. He tried to cry out, but his throat was so dry that no sound emerged. Scarlet cloaks swept along the forest floor, the figures already almost gone. They had not noticed the silent, starving bundle.

Fear darted through the baby like an arrow, sharp enough to loose a pale, rheumy wail.

The figures in red turned on their heels.

The male mage made a strangled noise, then strode over to the baby, urgent and afraid. A kind hand laid against the baby’s head, checking for heat, two fingers fumbling at the baby’s once-chubby wrists. The female mage hung back, wary, as though sensing a trap, and when the man went to undo the deminite cuffs, she muttered a low warning.

The male mage waved her off, and the cruel deminite fell away from the baby’s ankles. The man scooped up the swaddled threat and pressed him against a broad, safe chest. Some feeling washed back through the baby, warmth and pain and despair and the animal need to be loved.

Save me, the baby thought, not in words, as such, but a sort of primal plea.

And so, because the baby had commanded it, the scarlet-cloaked mages saved him.

2

• • • •

His Heart an Open Grave

The kingpin’s corpse hovered in midair beside his ruined son.

Darkness hung like a funeral shroud over the Havenwood, skeins of smoke ribboning through treetops, stars shining pale silver-gold like flakes of firelit ash. Twigs snapped beneath hurried boots as the surviving Bloodmoons fled toward the portari gate. Rasso, the pale-furred fallowwolf, pattered spectrally alongside his master.

Levan Celadon kept his dead father aloft with a levitation spell, maneuvering the body around narrow wyrmwood trunks and over snarled rabbit warrens. The dense forest rippled and echoed with the sound of frantic breaths, of unspoken words. It felt like walking through the belly of some ancient beast, dark and pulsating and strange.

Saffron strode next to Levan, panting raggedly, saying nothing, nothing at all, because what could she say?

She was a turncloak.

A silver in scarlet.

Yes, she had chosen him when it mattered. But his father had died anyway—because of her treachery, because she had led the Bloodmoons to this ambush, hoping to bring them to their knees.

And then, at the eleventh hour…

She had rewritten time itself. He would know the signs anywhere.

His lungs were clenched fists, his heart an open grave.

Silver had betrayed him, and his father was dead.