All Chapters of CRESCENT OF DESTINY: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Three days. No sign of Farah.Safiya's people covered the merchant's street, the outer districts, every road going north and south out of the capital. She was simply gone, which meant she'd had help, which meant the network Faris had belonged to had roots deep enough to pull someone out of a locked-down city in under an hour."She's already wherever she's going," Safiya said on the third morning, standing in the training yard with her arms crossed and her expression like Farah's disappearance was a personal insult."Can we trace her contacts?" I asked."We're trying. She arrived at the palace six months ago with letters of recommendation from a minor noble house in the western province. We sent people to verify. The house exists. The noble exists. He says he's never heard of her.""Forged letters.""Good ones."I hit the practice dummy hard enough to sting my wrists."So she was placed before I arrived," I said. "Not hired after. Before anyone knew I was coming here.""Which means who

One of the captured attackers talked by evening.It took Safiya four hours, which she described as fast, and the look on her face when she said it told me she had pushed hard and he had broken under circumstances I was better off not asking about in detail.Isam was in the city. Specifically, a compound on the far western edge near the old tannery district, a property held through a chain of intermediaries that had actually been mentioned in a footnote in Faris's archive. None of us had caught it, because asLady Amara pointed out with exhausted professionalism, footnotes were easy to miss when you were reading documents at midnight under pressure."At least twenty people with him," Safiya reported. "Possibly more. He's been using the compound as a staging point for weeks.""Can we take it?" Louis asked."With enough soldiers, yes. But he'll know we're coming. He has lookouts positioned. A large force on the main streets gives him time to disappear before we arrive.""So we go small,"

Safiya was already in the training yard when I arrived, and the sky was still dark enough that the torches on the wall were the only thing between us and pitch black.She didn't say good morning. She just looked at the cut on my arm from the compound wall and nodded once, like it was a passing grade on an exam she had been waiting to hand back."Not deep," she said."No.""You went for the block instead of the dodge when the second man came at you.""There wasn't room to dodge.""There's always room to dodge," she said. "You create the room. You don't wait for it to appear." She picked up a practice sword from the rack and held it out to me. "From the beginning. Everything."I took the sword and we went.Ninety minutes. No stopping, no long rests, just the forms and then the sparring and then corrections and then again. By the end my shoulders were burning and my footwork had genuinely improved, which she acknowledged by saying nothing negative about it, which from Safiya was essentia

The market smelled like bread and spices and the particular kind of noise that only exists in a place where everyone is trying to get something done before anyone else gets there first.We moved through it in a loose formation, Safiya's six soldiers in civilian clothes spread around us at distances that looked casual and were anything but,Lady Amara at my left shoulder playing the role of companion with the easy practiced naturalness of someone who had been doing this kind of thing for years, and Louis half a step behind me on my right because he had categorically refused to be further away than that regardless of what the security plan said about drawing attention.The first person who recognized me was a woman near the spice seller's stall, old enough to have grandchildren, with a basket over one arm and flour on her hands. She looked at my face, then at the birthmark, and then she did something I had no framework for.She pressed her hand flat against her heart and bowed. Not a cou

The king was incandescently furious.He was also, as Louis had predicted in his study four days ago in what now felt like a different century, briefly so.We stood in his private sitting room at two in the morning, all five of us, still in our dark civilian clothes, Safiya with mud on her boots from the drainage passage none of us were discussing, and the king looked at us with the expression of someone deciding which specific type of displeasure to lead with.He chose a fourth option, which was to ask Safiya for a full operational report in the tone of a man who had already accepted that the operation had happened and was now focused on what came out of it.She gave it to him in four minutes. Complete, precise, nothing left out and nothing dramatized. Isam arrested. Two of his men subdued and in custody. The compound documents secured. The horses in the stable yard indicating a planned departure that we had arrived approximately forty minutes ahead of."And the runner from this after