Page 22 of Turncloak

Daylight filtered through a knife-crack in her brocade curtains, signaling that she’d once again overslept. It took so long to drift off each night, her body clenched against the coming onslaught of lurid nightmares, that few alarms could wake her come morning. So far she’d missed several briefings, a breakfast date with her mothers, and the jeweling ceremony of the dead captain.

After the discovery of Tiernan’s corpse, she’d been granted a certain amount of grace by the Order (though not her mothers). Time to grieve, to mourn, was only fitting. Her work, important though it was, could wait until the scales of her emotions had balanced. A Silvercloak acting from a place of despair was not a Silvercloak worth their salt.

But today was different. Auria could not be late.

Because today, a new captain would be announced.

Hundreds of detectives milled around the Grand Atrium awaiting the commissioning ceremony. Officers of the various Atherin precincts rubbed shoulders with professors from the Academy, while eight white-cloaked cadets from this year’s fresh intake clustered together, gossiping and speculating over who would be promoted to the hallowed seat.

Auria made polite conversation in a garnet bark daze. Sympathy was written on some faces, careful detachment on others, as though Auria’s losses were contagious. She barely heard the hushed condolences, the unsubtle needling for information on Tiernan’s possible treachery. She simply nodded vaguely, drifting from conversation to conversation, thinking how unfair it was that she had been ruined and they had not.

While she smelled great—she was wearing the last perfume Tiernan ever bought her, a rare glaciersmoke and lavender blend from the Mølda Isles—she knew, from her brief and troubling glimpse in the mirror, that she looked a mess. She’d wrangled her frizzy ginger hair into a braid over her missing ear, pinned her silver cloak proudly at the throat with a sapphire brooch. Her cobweb scars, which she ordinarily liked—they were ethereal, characterful—seemed starker than before Tiernan’s death. Her black boots were gleaming, her navy tunic and trousers neatly pressed, yet her eyes were puffed beyond recognition, a vein bulging in her forehead from the sheer hysteria of her crying fits.

Too sensitive to be a detective.

Too sensitive for the world.

Her mother’s words from several years ago drifted into her mind unbidden. She’d never been meant to hear them, had eavesdropped from the top of their palatial home’s sweeping staircase, but they had dogged her ever since.

“…was so sorry to hear of your betrothed.”

Someone else was talking to her.

Betrothed. Such a lofty word, so full of promise and tender hope.

A memory, excruciating in its vividity: the soft intertwining of Tiernan’s pinkie with hers as the tattooist needled at her skin. The halo of curls around his face, the glisten of tears in his eyes. If Auria was too sensitive for the world, so was Tiernan. Some said opposites attract, but she had always found immense comfort in the feeling of not being alone. Their hearts cleaved to the same contours, and nothing could have felt more intimate.

Because they hadn’t yet wed, his mother had won his gemstone after the jeweling ceremony. His mother, who had so little respect for him. His mother, who likely kept the pale blue jewel in a sealed box somewhere out of sight. Vathila Flane would not display the body of her second son proudly, but rather tuck it away like an unfortunate family ghost.

“Thank you,” Auria murmured blandly. “It was a terrible shock.”

Only…was it? Or had Tiernan always been fated to be prey? Was his softness always going to be exploited? Were his cowardly tendencies always going to lead him to the gallows in this line of work?

Had his mother been right all along?

Had her own?

“At least he had the good sense to die before tainting you too.”

The crude audacity of the statement yanked Auria from her reverie, sharpening the scene around her. She was talking to a tall, bespectacled man, with thin black bands tattooed around a light brown neck, a large sloping belly, and long white hair tied back in a low ponytail. Auria recognized him from her entrance interview prior to enrolling in the Academy.

“I beg your pardon?” she breathed, through a set of furious blinks. “Sergeant Karvas.” She added this as an afterthought, but there was little subordination to it. A scathing hiss of an address.

The mage clasped his hands in front of him, a bland expression on his face. “I’ll never forget your closing statement during the Academy interview process. Always so idealistic.”

Auria’s jaw clenched so hard she felt it in her temples. “Perfect scores on my entrance exam, and you almost didn’t admit me because of that statement.”

“Setting your sights on the Grand Arbitership so young…we were worried you’d let that ambition impair judgment in your policework. We must always put what is good and right before our own personal goals.”

The words impaled her like arrows loosed from a bow—only this morning she’d been weighing her potential political platform with proper police strategy.

“I have never strayed from good and right,” she replied, her practiced smoothness so at odds with the fire raging in her belly. “What better qualities could one want in a Silvercloak or a Grand Arbiter?”

“Yet should any one mage have the power to decree what constitutes good and right?”

Auria frowned, uncertain whether Karvas was arguing against the existence of one of the highest seats in Vallin, or simply trying to provoke her. “No. That is why we also have the law, written by the finest Vallish minds over the course of several hundred years.”

He peered at her down the long, freckled prow of his nose. “And the law should always be followed to the letter.”