Page 47 of Thief of Silver and Souls

A smile of my own touches my lips. “Julita thinks you should stop being such a prick.” Which isn’t quite what she said, but the sentiment was implied.

Stavros’s face does strange things when he’s reminded about the woman I’m hosting. He arches his eyebrows, but at the same time his jaw tightens.

He keeps his tone nonchalant. “And how do I know you’re not just making that up?”

Because he’s much better company when he’s crooning Veldunian serenades.

The corner of my mouth quirks higher. “She suggests you should do some serenading instead. Apparently you know some Veldunian songs?”

I get an even more interesting expression in answer to the light jab. Stavros’s dark eyes flare, both amused and dangerous. “It was only the one time, and—”

He cuts himself off just before he prods my shoulder in a gesture that might have been playful. If he hadn’t remembered at the last second that he’s talking to more than just the woman he shares that memory with.

In that glimpse, I can almost imagine a Stavros who isn’t an asshole. Then he glowers at me as if it’s my fault he slipped up.

The chances he’d ever really joke around with me appear to be approximately nil. I think I’ll survivethatdisappointment.

Instead, his voice turns a bit gruff. “Why don’t you get on with taking down the wretches you were so eager to destroy, hmm?”

Without waiting for my response, he turns on his heel and strides off to do some former-general-y thing I’m clearly not invited to.

As the distance between us grows, I exhale some of my tension. He has no idea about my power, and I can keep it that way.

I’ve managed not to give in to my magic’s call in nearly seven years. I’m the one in charge here.

I glance around the courtyard. A few clusters of students between classes are lounging on the stretch of lawn between the Domi and the Quadring, but none of them look particularly eager to have a stranger crash their conversations.

Maybe I need a better idea of how the investigation started before I can continue it.

I keep my voice low, moving my lips as little as possible. “Could you walk me through what you saw, and where, on the day the sorcerers made their attempt on the prince’s life?”

If you think it could help. They were touring some of the classrooms in the Quadring—the queen and both Princess Klaudia and Prince Jacos. Take that entrance to your right.

I cross the field to one of the less prominent doorways and then walk through the halls at Julita’s direction.

I was here,she says, bringing me to a halt a few doors down from one of the exits to the outer courtyard.They were saying their last farewells before taking their leave. A crowd of us from the classes that’d just been let out were watching them go. And I heard someone muttering—there were these odd words that my brother and Wendos would use. I’m not sure where they came across them.

The hall is currently empty, everyone shut away in their classrooms. “Words to go with the scourge sorcery rituals?” I whisper.

Exactly. I couldn’t make out the murmur all that well—it was only a couple of words amid a lot of chatter… And the hall was so packed, I couldn’t see who’d spoken. It unnerved me, but I thought I might have misheard it. Except that night, the prince came down ill.

“Could it have been a coincidence?”

I suppose. But after I spoke to Stavros, he reached out to people he knows on the Crown’s Watch who guard the palace. The symptoms were unusual and severe enough that they had the palace searched for possible intruders who might have poisoned the prince. It wasn’t a simple flu.

I drift back toward the stairwell. “And you’ve seen specific signs of rituals—where?”

There’s the dartling eggshell—they get it powdered and burn it. It has a very distinctive scent. One time when I was on a hunt in the campus woods, I caught a whiff of it and followed it, and found a few traces on some tree roots in a clearing. There’s no other reason for anyone to be smearing that around.

“Anything else?”

One other time in the woods before that, I came across a tree that’d been marked with the sigil of the All-Giver, inverted.Julita shudders.Borys liked to draw that too, as if it’d encourage more power to flow down into him.

I frown as I tramp down the stairs. “And that wasn’t enough proof?”

Most of the records around scourge sorcery have been destroyed to try to prevent anyone from following their footsteps. Alek hasn’t been able to find any accounts that mention the inverted sigil. And recognizing the words and the dartling egg smell is just my experience, not something anyone can confirm.

Which is why we need more proof. I worry at my lower lip for a moment before catching myself.

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