Silvercloak (Silvercloak Saga, 1) - Hardcover

Steven, L. K.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593973992 ISBN 13: 9780593973998

Verlag: Del Rey, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Our Infinite Fates comes an addictive new fantasy series where magic is fueled by pleasure and pain and an obsessive detective must infiltrate a brutal gang of dark mages—knowing that one wrong move will get her killed. . . .

The stunning first edition hardcover features teal stained edges, a designed case stamp, and full-color endpaper maps—while supplies last!

“A dazzling (and frequently sizzling) new fantasy.”—Kiersten White, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Lucy Undying

Two decades ago, the Bloodmoons ruthlessly murdered Saffron Killoran’s parents, destroying her idyllic childhood. Hell-bent on revenge, she lies her way into Silvercloak Academy—the training ground for her city’s elite order of detectives—with a single goal: to bring the Bloodmoons to justice.

But when Saff’s deception is exposed, rather than being cast out, she’s given a rare opportunity: to go undercover and tear the Bloodmoons down from the inside.

Descending into a world where pleasure and pain are the most powerful currencies, Saff must commit some truly heinous deeds to keep her cover—and her life. Not only are there rival gangs and sinister smuggling rings to contend with, but there’s also her growing feelings for the kingpin’s tortured son, with his vicious pet fallowwolf, his dark past, and the curious prophecy foretelling his death at Saffron’s hand.

With each day testing her loyalties further, Saff finds her web of lies becoming harder to spin. And when one false step could destroy everything and everyone she’s ever loved . . . the detective who’s dedicated her life to vengeance just might die for it.

Book One of the Silvercloak Saga

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

L. K. Steven is a #1 New York Times bestselling and award-winning author from the northernmost town in England. She has written several young adult novels as Laura Steven, such as Every Exquisite Thing, The Society for Soulless Girls, and Our Infinite Fates. When she’s not writing twisty SF/F and horror, you can probably find her trail running, reading chunky fantasy novels, baking cookies, venturing on Pokémon Go safaris, playing old men at chess, or ignoring her husband and son to perfect her Stardew Valley farm. Silvercloak is her adult debut.

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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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Del Rey
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593973992
• ISBN 13: 9780593973998
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 453
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Del Rey; https://www.penguin.co.uk/company/publishers/cornerstone/del-rey-uk; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar