The Dagger and the Flame

One year before the story begins, seventeen-year-old Seraphine watches from her bedroom window as her mother Sylvie crawls through the garden and forces a glass vial's contents into a stray cat's mouth.

One year before the story begins, seventeen-year-old Seraphine watches from her bedroom window as her mother Sylvie crawls through the garden and forces a glass vial's contents into a stray cat's mouth. The cat convulses, swells to monstrous size, and sprouts tentacles of shadow that lash the night air. A flash of golden light follows — then silence. Mama denies everything, blaming the episode on a lost ring and serving birthday cake at midnight. But Sera spots the ring sitting in the soap dish, and something in her mother's eyes — a spark, a secret wish — terrifies her more than the beast that vanished into the dark.

A smuggler's daughter flees fire and begs thieves for shelter

Sera returns from hunting rabbits to find her farmhouse engulfed in flames and her mother's body on the kitchen floor — eyes blackened, skin grey, the unmistakable marks of a Dagger's kill. A tall figure with quicksilver eyes stands over the corpse before vanishing into smoke. Pippin, her three-legged terrier, tugs Sera's ankle and she runs. Through the midnight streets of Fantome she follows the river east toward the Hollows, clutching the golden teardrop necklace Mama gave her on Saints' Day. At House Armand, the hidden mansion of the Order of Cloaks, she gives a false name and claims plague took her mother. Madame Mercure, the keen-eyed Head Cloak, grants conditional sanctuary: one month's room and board advanced against her first theft.

The youngest Dagger stalks a girl he was told to kill

From rooftops across Fantome, Ransom has tracked Sera since she fled the burning farmhouse. He is one of the Order of Daggers' finest — a young man whose body carries the black whorls of every kill, sustained by vials of Shade that turn his eyes silver and his touch lethal. Ten years ago, Gaspard Dufort plucked him off the streets after Ransom's violent father drove his mother and sister away. Dufort gave a ten-year-old boy his first vial of Shade and watched him kill his own father with it. Now Dufort wants Sera dead and dangles the title of Second as incentive. But Ransom finds himself uneasy — she is younger than any mark he has taken, and he cannot stop wondering why Dufort burned the smuggler's house to the ground.

A stranger at the marketplace hands back her music box and her name At the Rascalle, Fantome's bustling harbour market, Sera watches her new friends Bibi and Val execute casual sleights — a ring palmed here,…