Silvercloak

1

The Cohort

Saffron’s cloak would turn silver by sundown—if she wasn’t caught in a lie first.

A mere quarter hour stood between her and the final assessment.

Twenty years of grief and determination distilled into a single sequence.

She arranged her features into a neutral expression and set down a winning polderdash card. The priestess on the front winked coltishly.

Her opponent, Gaian, groaned like a dying hog.

“A whole year of having my hide whipped, and still I take the bait.” He slid a pearly ascen over the bench, and Saffron pocketed it with a smirk. “You must have more coin than the city treasury at this point.”

Not far from the truth. Saffron had spent most of her adult life gambling rather fruitfully against her peers and countrymen. Everyone else was so bad at card games.

Shuffling the deck idly in her hands, Saffron cast her gaze around the brewing lab. Orange-gold sunlight poured through the mullioned windows, turning dust motes to fireflies. The high walls were lined with shelves holding glass jars of common tincture ingredients: herbs and spices, ash and earth, fallowwolf claws and mourncrow beaks, flesh and blood and bone. Six long wooden benches ran parallel down the middle of the lab, each topped with pewter cauldrons and an array of gilded instruments. Along the benches, two velvines stalked and purred. Slender cats with purple eyes and black fur, their satin-cool breath sent ripples of pleasure across bare skin. They patrolled the Silvercloak Academy day and night, replenishing the magical wells of drained-dry mages.

The six cadets had gathered in the lab ahead of the final assessment, so that Auria and Sebran—the only Brewers amongst them—could stopper their tinctures. Though the cohort had spent twelve months competing against one another for the top rankings, they had become unexpectedly close-knit, and though none of them would admit as much, they all wanted to make the most of their last moments together. Before they were sent to far-flung corners of the continent for their first postings, before they no longer lived in one another’s pockets.

Assuming, of course, that they all passed.

Tension hung heavy in the room. The cadets stood on the cusp of an ending and a beginning, and they all felt the knife-edge beneath their feet.

“Look alive, folks.” Auria beamed, bright and earnest, her eternal vim never wavering. “We’re all going to turn our cloaks silver tonight. I can feel it.” A velvine brushed against her arm, purring pleasure over her throat as she notched three final vials into her tincture belt.

Nissa hung out of the arched window, smoking a hand-rolled achullah. It smelled of orange and clove and an earthy type of tobacco grown in the hottest part of the Diqar desert.

“Have you ever, even once, believed things wouldn’t work out?” Nissa drawled, blowing out a smoke ring. Black hair fell to her waist in a sleek, shining sheet. “Despite all evidence to the contrary?”

Auria flashed another sincere smile. “No, not really.”

Nissa’s own lips curled. “You know, in Nyrøth they consider blind optimism a sign of low intelligence.”

“Good thing we don’t live in Nyrøth,” Auria replied cheerily.

In truth, Saffron found Auria’s sunny veneer comforting, but she didn’t say as much. Despite overcoming her six-year stretch of silence when she was twelve, she still preferred to stay quiet.

From across the room, Nissa caught Saffron’s eye with a private smile, and it felt like grabbing a fistful of gallowsweed—as though everything in her blistered at once. Saff and Nissa had been ensnared in a clandestine relationship for the last few months. It began with simple, stress-relieving f***ing, and slowly bloomed into something richer, softer. A stroke on the cheek, a flower left on a pillow, I saw this and thought of you.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, Nissa had ended things. Said that they needed to focus on their futures, and the very real chance that they’d be posted hundreds of miles apart. Nissa believed that the best Silvercloaks cut off sentimentality at the root. But for Saffron, the entire reason she was at the Academy was an emotional one.

She looked away from Nissa, gathering up her playing cards and tucking them back into her white cloak.

Tiernan—a tall, uncertain Healer, mainly at the Academy to appease his father—stopped his frenetic pacing to shoot Nissa a withering look. (Well, as withering as it was possible to be, when he’d sooner perish than insult someone.)

“I, for one, appreciate Auria’s positive spirit.” Tiernan blushed, raking a hand through his pale brown curls. He and Auria were mutually infatuated, and yet both believed their feelings to be unrequited. “Her love of the game makes it easier to reconcile the fact we’re both teammates and competitors.”

He had a point. The final assessment was not just of the Silvercloak cadets as individuals, but of how they worked together as a field unit.

The Academy was reserved for the best of the best, and there were only six mages in Saffron’s cohort. There was Saffron herself: stubborn, quietly cunning, relentlessly single-minded, even more relentlessly sweet-toothed, and frighteningly good at gambling. An Enchanter, in the eyes of the Academy—if not in truth.

Shy, awkward Tiernan, whose father was in the King’s Cabinet. A talented Healer, albeit a perpetually nervous one.

Auria, a bright-eyed bookworm, a rule follower, with lofty ambitions of becoming a Grand Arbiter someday. Uncommonly gifted with three mage classes—Enchanter, Brewer, and Healer—her work was precise, if not especially imaginative, and she had an encyclopedic knowledge of Modern Potions & Tinctures: Volume IV.

Nissa, the elemental powerhouse of a Wielder. She was smoking hot and smoked a lot, but only so she could wield fire at any given moment, and certainly not because she was in any way addicted to achullah. Her dragonesque command of smoke and flame was revered by everyone in the Order—even Captain Aspar.

Sebran and Gaian, each of whom held a single classification—Brewer and Enchanter respectively—but made up for their moderate magic with unfaltering bravery in Sebran’s case and a sharp, almost frightening intellect in Gaian’s. The latter had the uncanny ability to spot lies; his interrogations always yielded confessions, even without truth elixir. And yet he still couldn’t beat Saff at cards.

“You’re the competition, pure and simple,” said Sebran, stoppering a dark purple tincture that smelled of aniseed. He was broad and brawny, with dark brown skin and a close-shaven head. He never spoke of his family, his home. Nobody quite knew where he had come from, other than the military academy. “I’ll get that Pons Aelii posting even if it kills me.”

“Not a chance,” Gaian said coolly, tying his long blond hair neatly out of his face. “It’s mine.”

Nissa ran her forked tongue over her bottom lip. “Or they could give it to the actual half-Eqoran.”

The graduate assignments had been posted on the noticeboard the previous week—and there had been only five vacancies listed for six cadets.

Three were run-of-the-mill detective postings here in Atherin.

One was a stationing at a border outpost in Carduban, guarding the ascenite-rich Mountains of Promise from the lustful eyes of the neighboring Eqora. (None of them wanted this posting, since the Eqorans hadn’t made any meaningful moves toward the mines in decades, thus the mission would largely involve mediating disputes between mountain goats.)

The last was an undercover field intelligence operation in Pons Aelii, the capital of Eqora itself. Nissa, Sebran, and Gaian had waged war over the posting for days. Going undercover held a certain level of prestige—if they performed well on such a high-stakes first assignment, they’d likely go on to great things in the Order of the Silvercloaks. (Plus, it just sounded sexy.)

But Saff wasn’t interested in Pons Aelii. If she wanted to destroy the Bloodmoons who’d stolen her childhood, she had to be in the city where their roots were laid—here in Atherin.

“Are you alright, Saff?” Auria asked. “You’re quiet. More so than usual.”

Saff peered through the wide double window. The pale-stoned Academy was perched on a hill just on the outskirts of Atherin, and the capital’s skyline blurred with heat, smudging together the purple sapphire domes of Augurest temples, the towering crimson-and-gold obelisks honoring the patron saints, the carved marble pantheons with sapphire spires, the gleaming emerald tiles and pale sunbaked walls of the slouching townhouses. A sultry, jewel-toned riot of a city, built upon pleasure and violence in equal measure.

Lunes, the quaint northern village she’d grown up in, had never felt farther away. Her heart panged at the memory of overgrown wildflowers and cobbled courtyards, shabby cloaks and warm faces, the scents of rosemary and honeywine.

“Fine,” she replied vaguely. “Just mentally preparing.”