Page 85 of Turncloak

Dizzy from the blow to the face, he lunged out with a knife, not particularly wanting to spill blood, but at a loss for what else to do. He missed, and Nissa used the forward momentum to trip him so viciously that he dropped all three wands. Auria scrabbled for hers, successfully so, and stabbed it in his general direction.

“Sen debilitan,” she hissed, and finally, it hit true.

He was paralyzed.

Frozen.

Of course, he could break free of such things.

But they did not know as much. And perhaps he could use that to his advantage.

He was prone on the floor, invisible still, belly and face pressed against the ground, fire searing his side. He forced his breathing to steady, listening as the two silvers discussed how best to restrain him. Nissa was not equipped with her cuffs or blisblade, given that she wore a soot-streaked hospital gown, but Auria retrieved hers from an abandoned belt by her notes, handing them to Nissa.

Laying aside her wand, Nissa crouched beside him, went to grab his wrist, but she was several inches wide, fumbling around to find his invisible form.

With a surge of energy, he wrenched from debilitan and rolled onto his back in a split second, grabbing Nissa down and pulling her back against his own body, using one arm to pin hers in place and the other to hold a dagger to her tattooed throat.

“You don’t care enough about your own life to save it,” he growled at Auria, his heart thumping erratically, his breathing fraught, “but what about hers?”

At last, Auria nodded.

Saffron sat in the kingpin’s desk chair, staring at Segal’s severed head.

Questions cascaded through her mind.

Who was the boy in the blue cloak?

How had he gotten past the wards on the compound?

Why had he killed Sando Segal, and why was he bolshy enough to bring the evidence of it right into the dragon’s den?

For now, she had to move on. She likely had mere moments before Levan returned, and she still had no letter from the Steel King. Of course, there was a very good chance Levan had recognized it for the damning evidence it was and destroyed it accordingly, but it didn’t seem like the kind of action he’d take. He was obsessed with his parents’ legacy, and if that legacy involved scheming with the High North…

The correspondence was not in the desk or the ledgers, and a cursory check of the picture frames—they were always taught to search mattresses, floorboards, and frames in the Academy—yielded no results.

She had a fair understanding of how Levan’s mind worked, and such obvious hiding places would not call to him. He was more oblique than that, operating at a slant, and yet there was still a predictability to that slant. The password for the desk drawer in his own chambers was Baudry’s bitch, for Saints’ sakes.

Saffron rose to her feet and crossed to the alcoved bookshelves, lined with an array of leather-bound tomes. A cursory search of the titles garnered a potential lead in Nyrøth to Sarth: Tale of the Ages, but when she flipped through the worn, browning pages, there was no envelope tucked inside.

No other titles jumped out at her, and she was on the verge of giving up when she noticed a book less dusty than the others—as though it had been handled more recently. The Flora and Fauna of Flarence. Saffron’s pulse quickened. Flarence was a small town near the Nyrøth-Bellandry border.

There it was. The slant.

A parchment letter was tucked inside, neatly handwritten, several pages long, and signed by Vad Krønik. The Steel King himself.

Leaving the office exactly as she’d found it—with the notable exception of Segal’s severed head—Saffron slipped back to her chambers and began to read.

And a quarter of an hour later, she knew she had it at last.

Evidence of treason, damning enough to bring down the Bloodmoons forever.

Auria, Nissa, and Levan marched through the deserted corridors of the Order, Nissa still pinned back against the kingpin with a dagger to her throat. They avoided the bullpen, where a smattering of night-shift workers finished up, and steered clear of the sleeping chambers where early birds would already be rising.

They came to a stop outside the office of Captain Vel Karvas.

Everything inside Auria was a yawning hole of despair. She had already lost so much, and now she would lose her calling. Not just her current job—any future shot at working in prosecution, at winning the Grand Arbitership.

How could one person lose so much and keep breathing?