Cursed by the Light for Loving the Dark novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: Cold Smoke

Cassian's POV

I left her sleeping at dusk and went to the study to do the thing I should have done seven years ago.

I held the paper up to the lamp and read it again.

I, Linnet, give this testimony against Cassian Dray.

It was a short page, and I knew it by heart.

I had known it for seven years, every word of it, every loop of the L.

I had never once asked what it smelled like.

I held it to my face now, because my nose is better than my eyes, and I breathed in.

Cold smoke.

It was faint and old, and it lay under the ordinary smell of paper, and I knew it at once.

I sat down hard in the chair.

The Light does not write in black.

Every seal the Light has ever sent into my halls was gold ink on white vellum.

The scribe in the Hall had read me my sentence off a page of gold, and I had stared at the glint of it the whole time, because I couldn't look anywhere else.

But the paper in my hand was black.

A copy, I'd told myself for seven years. A copy for the prisoner, made by some scribe.

I turned it over.

On the back, near the edge, there was a small gray smear where a thumb had held the page while the ink dried.

The Abyss courts dry their ink with ember-resin, so it sets black and keeps its smell.

Nobody else on any side of the gate does it that way.

The resin comes from the Regent's house, and the Regent's house has sold it to the court for a thousand years.

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