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Chapter 47

The Thirteenth usually ate its evening meal together, occasionally alongside the other brigades, but with Song and Tristan out tonight Angharad had elected to make other arrangements. Though she had a working truce of sorts with Maryam, she would much prefer not to eat an entire meal alone with the other woman.

Besides,...

Chapter 46

Thunder, the pistol bucked and Tristan’s hand with it.

Batting away the plume of smoke, he took a look at the target and groaned. Shoulder shot, again. That made the third in a row, and at this point they’d have to ask one of the staff to bring back more straw to stuff that poor scarecrow with.

“You have the...

Chapter Delay

Hey! I spent a chunk of the week sick and bedridden and haven't caught up as much as I'd like, so sadly the chapter will be coming up tomorrow afternoon instead of tonight. Apologies for the delay.

Chapter 45

By the third morning Song was falling apart.

Chapter 44

The gardens of the rector’s palace were an ode to decadence, though not in the way Maryam had come to expect from mornaric.

She was not looking at paving stones made of gold and jewels hanging from branches, or even the marginally subtler boast of wildly impractical flowers – Jahamai roses, Someshwari ghost orchids,...

Chapter 43

It was an odd room, Song mused.

Though the salon had been furnished in the Malani style, with colored wooden frames and stuffed leather cushions flanking polished shell tabletops, the walls and lamps were in the traditional brass-and-stone of Asphodel. By the impressed look Angharad had given the table these were genuin...

Chapter 42

To Song’s mild embarrassment, she did not figur

Chapter 41

With Wen’s impromptu torture session come at an end, they were released to stretch their legs and eat a bit before heading out to their afternoon covenant classes.

While the other instructors came to pick up their students and guide them to whatever room they’d secured for the lesson, Tristan was not so blessed. He ...

Chapter 40

The galleon cast a long shadow across the dock, all of them waiting standing within it.

It was barely three in the morning, and though Tristan was not unused to keeping night hours few of his companions shared the habit. Maryam kept leaning against him, half falling asleep on her feet, and he could only roll his eyes. H...

Chapter 39

Angharad found herself, against her will, spell

Chapter 38

Song put on her formal uniform for the hospital visit.

It was a gesture of respect, at least to her people, and she suspected that were she awake Angharad would understand better than most. Malani lived and died by appearances, after all. By now the way to the healing ward was almost painfully familiar, but she refraine...

Chapter 37

Treachery was afoot: the carrot seeds were gone.

Maryam might have been complicit in the crime, for when informed of this she offered no aid. Only profuse mockery, including some very unkind moralizing about how he who lived by petty larceny was doomed to be defeated by it. Petty. Petty! For once he was in full...

Chapter 36

Angharad should be in bed.

Safely under her sheets back in the Triangle, the door locked and trusted comrades in the rooms around hers. Or at a tavern by the docks, drowning her fear in the noise of revelry. Or even with her uncle, who had sought her company but she had forced herself to turn down with precisely spoken ...

Chapter 35

It was barely six in the morning when Maryam got back to the cottage.

She’d been bundled off to the chapterhouse last night to sleep it off, against her protests. Just because her eyes had felt hot and she had slurred her words was no reason to have her slung over some watchman’s shoulder and carried to the Meadow. ...

Chapter 34

Even with Ferranda’s help it took Angharad an h

Chapter 33

She could feel the eyes on her as she walked down the hall.

Whispers and stares, smirks and anticipation. Word of Song’s exoneration from the death of four students l had made the rounds of Scholomance like a circling vulture, first as rumor then as fact. Every single brigade patron on Tolomontera had been instructed ...

Chapter 32

Tonight was the night.

Song rose early and made breakfast: eggs, bread, bacon rashers. Not at all a meal she enjoyed, but it was hearty fare and the others seemed inordinately fond of it. Tristan stumbled in a few minutes later, his hair in no way distinguishable from usual even though he had clearly just got out of bed...

Chapter 31

Song had not thought it possible to eat an orange tauntingly before this morning, but Captain Wen Duan was expanding her horizons.

He jammed his thumb in the middle through the peel, half-ripping it open, and by the way Commander Salimata Bouare was looking at him she’d order him hung and quartered if she ever had the...

Chapter 30

Angharad clutched her saber as she strode out of the hospital.

Her knuckles all but turned white around the grip. The noblewoman’s teeth were clenched, her back straight and she ignored the smiling man by the door as she exited into the red-and-gold Orrery lights. It would have been simpler to simply be angry, but it ...

Chapter 29

Maryam stayed, as she would wish for others to stay with her in such circumstances, but it was clear Song was in no chatting mood. She seemed lost in thought, though her face was not as grim as Maryam might have expected.

Either way it was somewhat tedious to simply sit in silence, so eventually Maryam stirred herself t...

Chapter 28

The nerve, really. Like putting on his face would be all it took to trick her.

“You are the most inventive so far, I’ll grant,” Maryam coldly said, “but it is still a miss.”

The signifier’s fingers cut across the air, Gloam dragging behind as the primordial dark leaped eagerly to her command. Or so it ...

Chapter 27

As far as plans went, it had the virtue of simp

Chapter 26

It was a risk, but it had to be done.

Tristan took all the precautions he could think of: he bought rosemary branches and rubbed them on his skin until the smell stuck, brought cloth to wrap around his boots for when he reached the shrines and fixed a shutter on the cheap lantern he’d acquired earlier. It was still ha...

Chapter 25

Tristan turned in his blanket for the fourth time in ten seconds.

Eyes stubbornly closed, he turned again and put his feet against the wall. The stargazing tower was all cramped squeezes and windows, which usually the thief thought of as a selling point. Only one way up from the inside, and Tristan had undone the screws...

Chapter 24

She would have fallen asleep if not for the second pot of tea.

Song sat at the kitchen table in the quivering candlelight, not staring at Tristan’s shoddy note - it had a fresh X added at the bottom, conveying he still drew breath. Now and then she remembered to turn the page of the first volume of Univ...