Chapter 6 In Cold Blood
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In Cold Blood
Saffron drank in the achingly familiar sight of Clay’s Cloakery, the shop her beloved uncles owned in the heart of Atherin.
The crisp, early winter afternoon felt oddly nostalgic: the scents of woodsmoke and mulled honeywine, the sprinkling of premature Sancsari decorations, the fogging of breath, the huddling together of cloaked bodies.
Being back in the capital felt dangerous—Levan knew Saff well enough to predict she’d come to the shop eventually—but she’d concealed herself in one of the street’s many alcoves (the walls famously folded in on themselves, to enable impromptu fornication).
She peered through a slender crack in the creamstone, expecting a swish of perilous scarlet to pass at any moment.
Rasso nuzzled his nose into her palm as she studied the cloakery. She ran the memory of Lyrian’s final orders through the loom of her mind.
“She needs to hurt for this,” Lyrian had spat, the moment he’d realized the Silvercloaks were ambushing the scarlets in the Havenwood. “Et vocos, Zirlit.”
Zirlit’s response had crackled immediately. “Fair featherroot.”
“Kill the uncle.”
“No!” Saffron had screamed, the raw force of it ripping from the bottom of her belly.
“Yessir.”
And then the wand had gone silent.
Saffron existed in a state of both knowing and unknowing, still clinging to the gossamer hope that somehow her uncle had overpowered the Bloodmoon killer. The classic thought experiment: a Saint trapped in a cave can be considered both alive and dead.
Dust sheets were thrown over the mannequins in the cloakery window—slightly askew, tossed in a hurry—and the sage-green door was bolted and padlocked with deminite chains.
For her uncles to have had time to take safety measures, there was a chance they’d gotten away.
Fled the city, traveled south to Sarosan, the coastal city Mal hailed from, and where the Bloodmoons held scant sway.
Then again, perhaps a friend had locked up the shop on their behalf.
In any case, Saffron would not try to find Mal and Merin herself, would not bring the scarlet cloaks to their door. For now, she had to forget them. For their sake, and for her sanity.
All of this left her in a strange sort of limbo, but if there was one thing she’d learned reading the Lost Dragonborn books, it was that you should never trust a death you didn’t see.
She would not allow herself to fall down the endless shaft of grief until she knew for certain her uncle was gone.
She needed her wits to survive the next few months or years, and nothing addled said wits quite like mourning.
After purchasing a quill and parchment at the shop next door, Saffron knelt to the pavement, cupped Rasso’s furry face in her palms, and, while scritching behind his ears, whispered:
“I need you to go back to the mansion, alright? Be with Levan, make sure he’s not obliterating himself with loxlure.” The fallowwolf tilted his head, eyes alert, as though to ask what about you? Saffron swallowed hard. “I’ll be back there soon enough.”
Golden Hour was one of the liveliest pleasurehouses on Broad Row, which was saying quite a lot.
The entire street was adorned with twinkling red lights and sleek black awnings, dense ivy and the perpetual scent of sex.
(Sex, in Vallin, carried no shame, no expectations of modesty or propriety—theirs was a world in which pleasure was a source of power, after all—and no currency was ever exchanged in pursuit of it.)
The pleasurehouses were largely lawless, and the Silvercloaks had long encountered difficulties prosecuting crimes committed beneath their awnings.
The lights were dim and the bodies smeared together, and moans of pleasure mingled with masochistic screams in such a manner that it was hard to separate consensual pain from acts of true violence.
Which made it perfect for Saffron’s purposes.
While no money changed hands between one sexual partner and another, there was usually a hefty cover charge. Golden Hour was particularly pricey, thanks to the open bar and complimentary achullah, but Saffron paid her forty ascens and entered the main maze of the establishment.
Golden Hour was a rabbit warren, choked with spiced smoke and bodily musk, winding corridors with endless private rooms in which to fuck and suck and hurt.
If the rumors were true, many sex-and-achullah-drunk mages had starved to death trying to get out, though Saffron supposed if you were going to die, you might as well be having an orgasm while you did so.
She wandered for a while, sweating in the stuffy heat but unwilling to remove her cloak or boots, let alone the rest of her clothes.
After she’d committed her heinous crime, she’d need to make a quick, inconspicuous departure, and her bare swinging breasts lolloping down Atherin’s main thoroughfare might be slightly too memorable.
They were, after all, stupendous breasts.
As she burrowed deeper into the warren, she finally found what she was looking for.
Or rather, who.
A Whitewing, wearing their trademark cloak and little else.
The lithe, pale-skinned mage had a crop of brown hair and an erect vock that veered sharply to the left.
He was pressed against a pillar by a female mage in an emerald Brewer’s cloak, her thick black braids rolling over tawny tattooed skin.
She worked at his vock with so much vigor it was surely rather painful.
She was a witness, but a witness was perfect.
Saffron ran a palm over the Brewer’s small, pert breasts before brushing several kisses up the thin column of her neck.
Such interjections were commonplace in a pleasurehouse, with a general prevailing attitude of the more the merrier, and before long, Saffron was writhing and moaning with them both, performing her very best approximation of arousal.
After several minutes of fondling, the emerald-cloaked woman tugged them both toward an empty private chamber.
Saffron’s chest skipped and stuttered as they collapsed onto an enormous oval bed, limbs tangled, mouths wide, the Whitewing supine beneath both women with a look of vague ecstasy on his vulpine face.
His otherwise pale cloak had strange raised shoulder pads embroidered with black wings.
Better to make it quick.
Saffron drew her wand and aimed it at the Whitewing’s temple.
There was a brief moment of internal freefall, an ephemeral hesitation, a pinprick of horror opening into a dark canyon behind her ribs.
But she had already done this, had she not? Had already taken a life in the name of the greater good—the croupier Neatras, on the night she was branded—and that had been far worse, because her victim was innocent.
This Whitewing, or at least his ilk, had tried to kill Saffron and Levan on Dubias Row, had slaughtered dozens of innocent servants in the scarlet mansion, had been part of the order of mages who’d sent Alucia into the scarlet ranks and broken Levan’s heart three years ago.
The whites represented all that was rotten in this city, and this death, albeit wrought in cold blood, would not be any great loss.
And besides, anything she did between now and winding back twenty years would disappear through the cracks of time eventually.
“Sen ammorten,” Saffron incanted, feeling very far away from her own body.
The killing spell forked into the Whitewing, and he fell still.
The pleasurehouse was so loud and choked with smoke that it took the Brewer a moment to realize what had happened. Before she could scream, Saffron was already in front of her, one hand pressed over the woman’s gaping mouth, the other holding a wand tip beneath her chin.
“Make no sound, or you will meet the same fate. Understood?”
Dark brown eyes wide with terror, the Brewer nodded. Saffron pulled down the neckline of her own navy tunic and revealed the ugly, charred seethe of the crimson brand.
“This is a turf war that need not concern you. You will leave this pleasurehouse and speak of this to no one, or you will feel the full weight of the scarlet fist upon you.”
Tears slicked down the Brewer’s face as she pulled the emerald cloak tight around her body, shielding as much flesh as possible.
Saffron crossed to the dead Whitewing, removing the pale cloak and tossing it over her shoulder. She lifted the cadaver’s arm, aimed her wand at the bone of his narrow wrist, and muttered, “Sen perruntas.”
The white hand fell free like a dead spider, and the Brewer stifled a sob. Saffron tucked the severed hand into her inner cloak pocket like a curious little souvenir, then strode toward the door of the chamber, ready to weave her way back through the mazelike hallways she’d so carefully memorized.
“Silence, hmm?” she said to the Brewer, smiling in a way that was likely terrifying.
The Brewer stared vacantly after her. Some internal shutters had fallen behind her eyes, and Saffron sensed she was no longer truly in the room.
Saff left Golden Hour without pursuit, the white cloak folded over her forearm.
Outside, night had drawn its navy curtain over the capital, and the temperature had cooled dramatically. Stomach heaving without her consent, Saffron began the long walk to the apothecary quarter, where an abandoned shop on Beakpeck Place housed a secret entrance into the Bloodmoon compound.
She was returning, of her own free will, to the mage who wanted her dead.
But first, she had a confession to write.