The house smelled like oil and smoke and the faintest lingering sweetness of Kieran's tea - forgotten and gone cold on the windowsill since he and Hirik had left for the night. Evie and the others would join them when they finished.
Moonlight filtered through warped shutters, falling in slanted lines across the cluttered table where their weapons, maps, and tools were scattered.
Evie tied her hair back in a slow, practised motion to tuck it away. They were very careful not to show any hint of their identities. Her hands didn't shake. They used to. Across from her, Tai was trying to figure out how to strap a Crow Snare bomb beneath his cloak without it swinging like a butcher's hook when he moved.
"Looks good," she said dryly, biting into a sliver of apple after letting her hands drop. "Very subtle. Just like a second head growing out of your side."
Tai scowled. "Well, the only space I have is up my arse, and I'm not doing that."
Evie snorted in amusement.
"That would certainly slow you down and be rather difficult if you needed to use it," Zevran added, emerging from behind the privacy curtain with all the silent poise of a man who definitely had killed people in less than half the clothes he wore now. "Could be an effective way to distract and confuse."
Tai flipped him off.
Evie started laughing. "Just bend over and launch it right out of there."
Tai burst out laughing as well while Zevran pulled a face, half disgusted, half amused.
"You would have to compose a song about it. No, paint a picture," Tai said as he adjusted the straps without complaint. "Remind me again why we're doing eight houses in one night and not, say, two? Like normal suicidal lunatics."
"Originally you wanted to do six; is there really much of a difference?" Evie said, rising to roll out the map again, "Eight is how many we can hit before sunrise if everything goes perfectly."
Zevran stepped beside her and glanced down. The houses were marked in red. Escape paths, rooftops, and blind alleys in charcoal. She'd done most of the route planning herself.
He tapped the southeast corner. "These two - if I take them, I can be in and out in under an hour. There's a back exit in both."
Evie nodded. "Then Tai takes the west end, near the river."
Tai made a face. "So I get the mouldy ones?"
"You're the mouldy one," she said. "You'll be closest to Hirik's relay point. If anything goes sideways, drop the glyph and run."
"What about you?" Tai asked, glancing up. "Which three are yours?"
Evie pointed. "The central triangle. Close quarters, higher traffic. I'll be cutting it close."
"Of course you will," Zevran muttered fondly. "I'll meet you at the third house; it's on my way to the relay point. We'll race to see who can do it first."
Her eyes narrowed playfully on him. "Challenge accepted."
They gathered up the last of what they would need, and Evie allowed herself a breath, slow and deep. This would be the biggest thing they had done since they started this. It would also be the first time both her and Tai had gone in anywhere alone. They always had each other for backup.
But this was going to work.
"When we pull this off, I'm making Kieran bake a whole lot of bloody cakes. One for each house," Tai said.
"He doesn't bake," Zevran reminded him.
"He will. He can read ten languages and explode your brain with a wave of his hand. He can follow a recipe."
Evie smiled faintly.
"I meant it," Zevran said suddenly, more quiet now. "When I said I was proud of you all. You're not children playing games. You're real thorns in the Crows' side. Dangerous ones."
Evie looked at him, then at Tai. The boy who once tripped on his own arrows now rigged traps faster than she could draw breath. She felt it too, in her bones. This might work.
"Ready?" She asked both of them.
Tai gave her a cocky grin. "Always."
Zevran sheathed his daggers with a theatrical flourish. "Mi cielo, I was born ready."
Evie blew out the lamp.
-
Evie moved like fog, weightless on the stones. Her cloak kissed the edges of buildings as she passed through shadow after shadow, every step memorised, mapped, and measured. The safehouse was tucked behind a crumbling bakery, barely distinguishable from the wreckage around it. That was the point.
Evie scaled the side with silent ease, fingers gripping the mortar grooves like she was born to it. Inside, the place stank of old blood and saffron oil - Crow scents. She crouched, unhooked the small pouch Kieran had given her, and with delicate fingers affixed the glyph disc beneath the floorboards of the central room. It fused to the wood like resin and, after she shifted the slide into place, glowed once, then dimmed.
No one woke. No one saw her leave.
-
The safehouse in Redspire was cleaner, richer. Tai entered through the skylight, a feat few could match without gear or wings. He landed soft, the padded soles of his boots muffling his descent, and paused only a moment to listen.
Two Crows were asleep on cots in the adjoining room. He could hear one of them snoring, Rhassan, if memory served. Tai crouched by the stone hearth and pried loose a decorative panel. Behind it, a hollow. Perfect.
He planted the second glyph, this one shielded in a brass case of Hirik's design, to mask its magical signature. What Hirik and Kieran created together was astounding. He pushed the slide into place; it glowed bright a moment before dimming.
In and out. No more than three minutes. He didn't look back.
-
Zevran was at the harbourside house. He moved with old, practised grace, like silk across marble, quiet as his younger self would have been proud of. The walls here were thinner, the Crows more relaxed. This safehouse had grown lazy.
Fools.
He bypassed two sleeping sentries, pausing only to give one an unimpressed look before slipping past her post. Downstairs, in the wine cellar, he set the device beside a crate labelled 'mirabelle'. He muttered something half-prayer, half-curse to the House that had once owned him.
Then he left, as easily as he'd come.
-
The five of them stood high above the waking city, atop the old bell tower near the Temple Square. Below them, Treviso stretched out in gold and shadow, not yet bustling, but stirring. The light was pink at the edges, and chimneys had begun to smoke.
Kieran could feel the magic in each of the small explosives Hirik had made and Kieran had infused. The glyph stones had been linked across miles. Kieran crouched down, his hands flat on the stones of the tower. His eyes flashed. Then a pause.
Then in perfect sequence, from every quarter of the city, pillars of black smoke erupted. One after another, eight great geysers of dark fog poured into the sky, twisting like oil fire against the sunrise. Moments later, the ravens came. Spectral, iridescent, howling through the morning air in great looping spirals.
Treviso woke.
From above, they could see figures emerging into the streets, pointing, shouting. Horses were reared, and carriages stopped. Somewhere, bells began to ring. The glyphs over each doorway flared red, burning Antivan words even the common folk recognised. Evie watched in silence, her hands clenched on the stone ledge. Tai grinned, teeth bared. Hirik looked mighty satisfied. Kieran exhaled, as if he'd been holding his breath for hours.
Zevran watched with a look that was part pride, part mourning. But beneath it, unmistakably - hope.