Page 130 of Turncloak

Instead, she cradled a glass of warm honeywine, the smell of which reminded her of home. She’d never particularly liked the stuff, preferring the efficient burn of flamebrandy, but it seemed preferable to the goblets of dark, frothy bitterale Miret and Relar nursed. The boy was green in the face over the dry, sour taste.

Saffron surveyed the tavern, decorated with fish-scale wallpaper, rusted anchors, and wooden boat rudders. Her radar for trouble was a finely tuned instrument, and it snagged on a straw-haired, middle-aged woman sitting alone at the bar. The black-cloaked mage shot their party furtive glances, and while it might have just been the sound of their crude Vallish she abhorred, Saffron kept an eye on her.

“How do we know the wardholders even live in Flarence?” Saffron sat next to Levan, trying not to think about how close their thighs were. She spoke loudly, slowly, intentionally, surveying the room for reactions. “They could be anywhere.”

Levan took a sip of unspiked ambertea. “Wards have to be recast regularly, or their strength fades. And they cannot be recast at a distance.”

“They could return to Flarence via portari gate whenever they needed to replenish.” Saffron injected her voice with volume, enunciating every word precisely enough that a Bellandrian with a passing grasp on Vallish might understand. “How often is regularly?”

Miret scratched at his beard, and when he spoke, his teeth were brown-black from the grotesque ale. “The Great Wards around Atherin are cast once a month, but they have thousands of casters. For a place with a handful of mages…every week? Every fortnight?”

“So we stake out the cave,” suggested Levan. “Watch for a mage—or group of mages—arriving to recast the wards, take them out before they can do so.”

At this, the straw-haired woman at the bar drained her glass, slammed it back on the counter, then slid from her stool with an inebriated stumble. She scurried to the door and fled into the frozen night, leaving behind a thick outer robe lined with pale gray fur in her haste.

“We might not have to wait that long,” Saffron muttered, abandoning her revolting honeywine and making for the door. Levan followed without a word.

Dusk was settling over Flarence, a white salting of stars dusted across the indigo north. The tavern was on a side street a few hundred yards from the village square, cobbles piled with banks of fresh snow—which made it easy enough to follow the scarpering mage’s trail. They pursued her onto the next street—a residential area, lined with neat wooden houses of peach and lemon and dusty rose pink. Saffron and Levan walked quickly and quietly until the woman’s black-shrouded back was a mere fifty yards away, the silhouette of a wand clenched in a fist. Her breath plumed in panicked puffs, though she did not peer over her shoulder, as though to see them coming would be to make it real.

Guilt clenched Saffron’s belly as she withdrew her wand. “Sen effigias.”

The curse buried itself in the black-cloaked mage’s shoulder blade.

All at once, she turned to stone.

“Can you lift her?” Saffron muttered as they closed the gap. “Carry her somewhere more discreet.”

Levan grabbed the statue by the waist and hoisted it over his shoulder. It must have been extraordinarily heavy, but he didn’t emit the slightest grunt of exertion as they slipped into a narrow alley between houses. He set the Mage Practer on her feet then went to her back, pulling a dagger from his pocket and holding it to her throat from behind.

Saffron, facing the woman with her wand raised, said, “Ans disseffigias.”

Unlike a spell that held a victim in an enchanted state, such as sen debilitan, effigias worked almost as a transmutation between human and stone, their masses perfectly equal (providing the caster was skilled enough). Just like coffee would stay hot chocolate once transmuted, effigias could be held forever without draining the caster’s well or requiring medei perpetua. It had to be actively reversed lest the recipient stay stone in perpetuity. These quirks were why the Silvercloaks preferred the stone curse to debilitan, because it was much easier to take down several perpetrators at once, only reversing the spells once they were safely in custody.

As soon as the statue became human, Saffron fired a second curse.

“Sen exarman.”

The aspen wand leapt from the mage’s clenched palm into Saffron’s. A precaution.

“You hold the ward over the cave?” Saffron asked in Vallish. The other mage was obviously proficient, if she’d heard enough in the tavern to be spooked.

The woman’s slanted gray eyes—half-Nyrøthi, if Saffron had to hazard a guess—narrowed, her thin jaw set. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her uncertain Vallish was pitted with fear.

“Our conversation in the Skarver Vau troubled you.”

The woman squirmed beneath Levan’s blade, but said nothing.

Saffron raised an eyebrow at Levan. “Can you compel her into talking?”

Chewing the inside of his cheek, Levan gave a short nod. He did not speak aloud, keeping the commands internal, but when the woman failed to crack, an expression of deep frustration broke over his face.

Saffron gritted her teeth. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she said softly, like the black-cloaked mage was a patient whose bone she was about to reset. “But I will, unless you talk.”

The woman spat a thick globule of saliva onto the snow-covered cobbles.

Saffron knew she was about to do something heinous. Everything she had been through had prepared her for this—slaying the croupier Neatras on the night she was branded, carving out the eyeball of Kasan Melian on the dock, killing Vogolan in a moment of self-preservation, slaying the Whitewing in the pleasurehouse—and yet the prospect still sickened her. Though that could be the honeywine, which sat in her stomach like oily syrup, threatening to regurgitate.

She clung to the gossamer logic that had gotten her this far: that it would all be unmade eventually.