Page 27 of Turncloak

“Call me Tené.” He sighed wearily, rubbing at his eyes. “Why the Silvercloaks, Marriosan? Dematus never wore silver. No detective in history has made that highest of offices. You might have had a more direct track to the Arbitership if you’d gone straight into the courts or taken the scholarly route. Why put yourself through five years on the streetwatch and the rigors of the Academy?”

To prove people wrong was the honest answer, although not necessarily the healthiest one.

She’d always been smart, sparkle-eyed, with a sunshiny disposition and a fundamentally optimistic outlook. Many people in her life told her they wouldn’t want to see such things beaten out of her. Her mothers didn’t want her to become jaded, her sisters didn’t believe she could handle seeing a mangled corpse without vomiting. Even her law professors worried that the dark, seedy underbelly of the world would be too much for her to bear—one had offered her an adjunct teaching position for a more sanitized environment. Somewhere to ponder the philosophy of law from a safe distance.

She wanted to prove to all of them that not only was she capable of facing down this tainted world, but also that she wouldn’t let it tarnish her.

She smiled, trying not to wince at the hammering pain behind her eye sockets. “To do good.”

Jebat looked, for the briefest moment, troubled by this. He tried to smile in return, but it was too thin, too jaded. “Then I consider it my duty not to let the likes of Vel Karvas stand in your way.”

15

• • • •

Desire Lines

“Darling, you look dreadful.”

“Thank you, Mømi,” Auria muttered, slumping exhaustedly into a chair. “Forget the startling intellect and relentless moral fortitude. I’m so sorry that I look bad.”

Auria’s mothers exchanged a dark look over her head.

The Marriosans lived in a tall, elegant townhouse on Goldendawn Avenue, a sought-after residential street near the River Corven. Every inch of the interior was vibrantly hand-painted—a mix of delicate details and bold swathes of color, gold and silver swirls with constellations of pearl-stars, stark pink sideboards, and sunny yellow ceiling roses. A droll city official had once declared it “a crime upon the senses and an assault upon the sensible mind,” which Auria’s artist mother, Lulí, had taken as an immense compliment.

The other of Auria’s mothers, Victaria, was a Royal Wardholder, having given up all the power in her well to help uphold the Great Wards of Atherin. The king rewarded the Royal Wardholders with more ascens than most mages knew what to do with—it was for this reason that the Crown was rumored to be bankrupt, but also the reason Atherin hadn’t been invaded for centuries, and really, you had to weigh these things up.

“Her betrothed just died in the line of duty,” Victaria said, shooting her Nyrøthi wife a cease-and-desist sort of expression. “Perhaps we might forsake commentary on her complexion for the time being. How are you doing, my heart?”

Auria hadn’t shared any real detail on Tiernan’s death—so much of the Silvercloak work was classified, and there was also a sense of shame over how he had died. So she focused not on the events, but the feelings, of which there were an abundance.

“Every room I enter, I expect to see him there.” Tears sprung to Auria’s eyes like her body had some sort of internal leak. “Every corner I round, every time my wand crackles with et vocos. For a splintering second, my heart believes it’s him. I grieve a thousand times over, every single day. I can’t comprehend that the future will exist without him in it. And I just—I don’t understand where he’s gone. That’s the kind of overriding feeling. A kind of frantic existential confusion. Where is he?”

“I know, love. I know so much.” Victaria’s brows crinkled in sympathy as she filled a kettle, voice fogged by her own grief. Her hand went to the new pendant around her neck—the jewel of her late father, the locally beloved Papa Marriosan. The yellow topaz gleamed as though freshly polished. “Falling in love with another Silvercloak was always going to be a risk. Such a dangerous—”

“Says the Vallish patriot who fell in love with a Nyrøthi immigrant falsely accused of spying for her country,” Auria snapped.

“Emphasis on falsely,” Lulí said sweetly. Her frizzy ginger hair, which Auria had inherited, was cropped close to her head. She held up a brown paper pouch, shaking it in Auria’s direction. Her thick, muscular arms were heavily tattooed and smattered with paint. “Cønnafyr?”

Auria nodded half-heartedly, though she really did love cønnafyr—a sweet, spiced coffee from Kylgard. She could use some more pleasure in her well, or at the very least something to ease the swell and scull of this perpetual migraine.

Lulí finished brewing the cønnafyr and laid a silver tray down on the dining table. Victaria slid in beside their daughter, stroking her cheek with her knuckles. This simple brush of affection was enough to loose Auria’s tears in earnest, a hot, salty stream spattering over the table.

Pouring cønnafyr into a cerulean-and-orange cup, Lulí sighed. “It hurts so much now, dærlin—as you know, I was married and quickly widowed back in Kylgard—but I promise, it fades. You will never stop looking for them around every corner, and you will always, always wonder where they’ve gone. But grief turns to remembrance, and the heart finds somewhere else to land.”

“I can’t imagine that ever happening for me.”

A soft smile. “Do you know how new spells are developed?”

“Of course.”

“Explain it to me as though I don’t.”

Auria scowled like she was fourteen again. “Don’t patronize me.”

“Explain it to me, Aury.”

Auria sighed. “Fine. Most think of developing spells as a research effort, an intellectual pursuit. But really, it’s a matter of perseverance and time. New spells work like desire lines. Say, for example, you have five square acres of grass, a castle at one side, and the entrance gates on the opposite side. A fancy gardener or architect might lay a meandering path curving around the outside of the lawn—one that’s more scenic, and that will preserve the grass. But left to their own devices, most people would choose to cut straight over, because it’s a faster, simpler way to their destination. Over time, if that happens again and again and again, a new path forms over the grass, eroded by all that accumulated footfall. A desire line.