Page 81 of Turncloak

Saffron moved through the kingpin’s office like a ghost haunting her own past.

Everywhere she looked, she saw her own suffering. The spot on the rug where Neatras had fallen dead at her hand. The shackles on the wall where she’d been manacled in place, the row of pokers by the sputtering hearth, all of it sending fresh fire through the skin Levan had healed back in Aredan. A curious kind of sadness curled in her belly at the thought.

He still cared. And here she was, betraying him once more.

But if evidence of Bloodmoon collusion with the Steel King existed, she needed to secure it. A card so powerful it would lead to her extraction, if she needed it to.

The minutes rolled into the dozens, however, and she still couldn’t find it—not stuffed into the desk drawers, nor tucked into any of the ledgers. She was running a palm behind the picture frames on the black-paneled walls when an awful sound echoed through the main door.

Footsteps. An unfamiliar voice, muttering, cursing.

She moved fast enough that the curtain folded around her—smelling of dust and blood and smoke—just as the door opened inward.

A shuffle of footsteps and fabric, then a thump.

Detective’s instincts firing, she peered around the drape.

An unfamiliar mage stood behind the desk, his back to Saffron, wearing the pale blue cloak of a scholar or an apothecary. Dark, shoulder-length hair was pulled back into a low bun, and an eagle-shaped earring dangled from one lobe. His frame was rangy, narrow in the wings where Levan was broad, and he stood with an uncertain stoop, muttering incoherently to himself.

On the desk sat the severed head of Sando Segal.

Levan surveyed the hospital wing with fatigued satisfaction.

He had transmuted blood and strengthened atrophied muscles. He had healed a bedsore that had been missed, and even tried to compel an unconscious mind into letting go of its cripplingly anxious thoughts, though he had no idea whether that one would take.

His well was low, but magic was heeding him once again. Not for the first time in his life, he wished he could replenish as simply as Saffron could—a hot cocoa, the silky breath of a velvine upon his throat—but when one of the purple-eyed felines tried to purr pleasure over him, it felt hollow, unearned. Little power trickled back into his well.

Yet now, observing the good he had done…

Concerning, how suddenly the pleasure gushed into him. The first joy to cut through the pain since he had lain in bed with Silver, wrist throbbing, heart softening.

With a final sweeping glance over the beds, he exited the hospital wing and began his search for the captain’s office.

He did not see the curtain around Nissa Naszi’s bed flicker and part.

Auria sat cross-legged on the floor of the Order common room, hunched over a low coffee table as she finalized her notes from that evening’s stakeout of the Whitewing drophouse. Though the string of night shifts was weighing her down, stinging at her eyes, leadening her bones, she tried to finish off her writing before she fell into bed at sunrise.

The dying coals of a fire glowed in the creamstone hearth. Several velvines curled up in crescent balls on squashy velvet sofas, and portraits of former Silvercloak commissioners adorned the walls. Arched windows encircled the entire room, and beyond them the inky dark was softening to indigo over the Atherin skyline.

A nascent migraine swelled behind Auria’s eye sockets like a palm pressed against a bruise. She frowned at her notes, painstakingly scratched out with her best quill. For the first time, she had something meaningful to report, and it filled her with dread.

A few hours prior, she had watched as a scarlet mage had been levitated, unconscious, into the Whitewing drophouse. The limp figure had been accompanied by two female mages in white and a young, lanky boy in a pale blue scholar’s cloak, often chosen by apothecaries and librarians as well as academics.

When Auria had plucked her binoculars from the windowsill and taken a closer look, she’d spotted a golden eagle earring dangling from his earlobe. The enchanted binoculars were sharp enough to pick out the exact pitch of the bird’s raised wings, the curved talons, and the keen glare on its narrow face. There was something so familiar about the shape of the eagle, but she couldn’t pinpoint it.

Not fifteen minutes later, the King’s Prophet had entered the drophouse once more. The second time she’d seen him there. He walked in dragging his heels, as though he’d rather be anywhere else, and left not long after, disappearing back down the street and out of sight—but not before staring up at the exact place where Auria herself sat. Though she’d shrunk back into the shadows, she’d been left with the disquieting sense that he knew exactly who lurked behind that window and why.

Moments later, the boy in blue left the drophouse alone, carrying a sack in one hand, a wand in the other, and a petrified expression on his face.

Auria transcribed the events with painstaking detail, but her handwriting had deteriorated over the last hour, and so she decided to redo it. If there was one thing in this world she could not tolerate, it was sloppy penmanship.

She’d just rested the tip of the quill on a fresh piece of parchment when the door to the common room opened of its own accord.

Auria would ordinarily have sighed, crossed the circular room, and pressed it shut again, but her body recognized the threat before her mind caught up. Every hair on her body stood on end, and the feeling of sharp, cold fingers raked down her back. She stood, shaking, and drew her wand.

She was not alone in this room.

A mage strode through it with silenced boots and imperfect invisibility, a smear, an outline, an interruption of light and shadow. A foreign scent, lemon and mint and leather, cut through woodsmoke and parchment like a scythe.