Chapter 2 His Heart an Open Grave
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His Heart an Open Grave
The kingpin’s corpse hovered in midair beside his ruined son.
Darkness hung like a funeral shroud over the Havenwood, skeins of smoke ribboning through treetops, stars shining pale silver-gold like flakes of firelit ash.
Twigs snapped beneath hurried boots as the surviving Bloodmoons fled toward the portari gate.
Rasso, the pale-furred fallowwolf, pattered spectrally alongside his master.
Levan Celadon kept his dead father aloft with a levitation spell, maneuvering the body around narrow wyrmwood trunks and over snarled rabbit warrens.
The dense forest rippled and echoed with the sound of frantic breaths, of unspoken words.
It felt like walking through the belly of some ancient beast, dark and pulsating and strange.
Saffron strode next to Levan, panting raggedly, saying nothing, nothing at all, because what could she say?
She was a turncloak.
A silver in scarlet.
Yes, she had chosen him when it mattered. But his father had died anyway—because of her treachery, because she had led the Bloodmoons to this ambush, hoping to bring them to their knees.
And then, at the eleventh hour…
She had rewritten time itself. He would know the signs anywhere.
His lungs were clenched fists, his heart an open grave.
Silver had betrayed him, and his father was dead.
Levan’s life rolled away from him in all directions, the aching canvas of his past, the unfathomable expanse of his future as an orphan.
The only thought tethering his mind to the present, to the next few steps in front of him, was the ascenite crypt holding his mother.
He needed to get Lyrian to that crypt. Preserve him, in perpetuity, until Levan found another necromancer to raise them both from the dead.
That Levan felt so obliterated by his father’s death was a curious thing. The two had clashed for so long, steel against stone. And yet, after all the dead kingpin had wrought upon his son, tortured him and branded him and turned him from boy to monster—
—don’t think. Don’t grieve. Just act.
It took both a palmful of seconds and a sprawling eternity to reach the portari gate.
The structure shimmered in the glade, sculpted axelmares hewn from marble-like ascenite into four arches, the lambent internal magic eddying like moonlight over whorls of fog.
This particular gate was the site of Levan’s worst childhood memories; the gate through which his mother’s corpse had returned to the Havenwood, the gate where his life had become a before and after.
Levan ushered his surviving mages through one by one, until only the turncloak remained.
“Levan,” Saffron whispered, the name cracking like a bone.
Hands shaking, Levan gritted his teeth and averted his gaze.
“Later.”
Back at Bloodmoon Mansion, something was wrong.
The scarlets cloistered in the creamstone room where their unregistered portari gate was housed, wands and faces drawn.
There was a charge to the air, a crackle, a thrum, like the aftermath of a thousand overlapping spells.
A stink of smoke and ash and something honey-sweet.
Rasso’s hackles were raised, white fur standing on end as he growled low and coarse.
Levan’s jaw was set like granite as he stepped from beneath the arches, one palm on his wand handle, the other on his dead father’s floating shoulder. “What is it?”
“We don’t know,” muttered Castian, whose veins ran black from loxlure. “We’re awaiting your command.”
Your command.
It hit Levan for the first time, then, that he was the new kingpin.
The heir to the empire. A title he never wanted to inherit.
His life had been dedicated to installing his late mother on the throne of her birthright—not taking any sort of rule for himself.
But now she was gone, and his father too, and the legacy had been passed on to him like a cursed family heirloom.
The transition would be far from seamless. In theory, the scarlets would obey Levan’s word without question, thanks to the loyalty brand—an ugly charred crust across every heart, sealed with magic that would kill them the moment they betrayed the scarlets.
Except Saffron. The one mage in the world immune to magic entirely.
All magic…but his.
Levan tightened his grip on his elm wand, then lowered his father’s corpse to the flagstones, dropping the levitation spell.
“Segal, wait here with the body.” The kingpin’s right-hand mage had been robbed of his magic when he’d been Risen from the dead by a necromancer, thus he wouldn’t be altogether useful in a wand fight.
“The rest of you, on your guard. We move as one.”
Crimson cloak rippling around his ankles, Levan climbed the creamstone stairs, swallowed his bilious fear, and pulled the door open.
In the hallway, the charge to the air was a thousand times stronger, the burnt-honey smell thick enough to coat his tongue. Rasso’s growling intensified. Levan strode down the dark red carpet runner, henchmages trailing behind him like a virile shadow.
They hurried toward the main atrium of the mansion, down curved black marble staircases and past creamstone walls hung with dragon battle murals, through corridors both deserted and silent.
The microbial sensation from the Havenwood—of walking through the belly of an ancient beast—only grew more potent.
Soon they found the source of the charged thrum, the sense of wrongness.
In the atrium, gilt chandeliers lay shattered on the black marble floor, crystal teardrops turned to shaved ice.
Lyrian’s favorite tapestry—a lavish depiction of the Saints at the First Feast—had been burned to ash, as had most other paintings and murals in the cavernous room.
The coffered ceiling was choked with black soot.
A row of elemental slot machines from the very first gamehouse was smashed and stooped, old enchantments leaking out like oil from a lantern.
But that was not the worst of it.
Nor were the scattered bodies, dreadful though they were. Dozens of them, all in scarlet cloaks. Mostly servants, many of them wandless—Ludders turned addicts, willingly branded by the old kingpin in exchange for access to loxlure.
No, the worst was the set of white wings carved into the center of the dark floor. The sigil of their rival gang, who had been making violent moves against the scarlets for months.
The surviving scarlets descended into chaos.
Rasso stalked the atrium with a hungry prowl, on account of his dietary preference for fresh hearts.
Castian sank to her knees in despair, while others moaned, muttered, sobbed.
Clutched one another with fear, their sense of safety and sanctuary decimated in an instant. The violation of it.
Failure—and disbelief—bludgeoned Levan’s chest.
The Whitewings had historically been a nuisance, a neighborhood pest, but never a real threat.
This attack should have been impossible on so many levels.
The wards of the scarlet compound were famously impenetrable, since only mages with a Bloodmoon brand were able to pass through the protections.
The sole loophole was a Crown-issued search warrant.
Unless, of course, the wards had dropped entirely.
To Levan’s knowledge, there were half a dozen henchmages dedicated to maintaining the defenses.
Racking his brain, he realized with a sickening lurch that he had not laid eyes on any of them in weeks.
Had the Whitewings picked off the wardholders prior to this grand finale?
Levan thought of the ambush on Dubias Row a few weeks prior, how random it had seemed.
He’d slain the three white-cloaked mages without questioning their assault in any real sense.
Perhaps those whites had attacked him because they believed he was a wardholder.
Anger was a far easier emotion to feel than grief, and Levan surrendered to his rage. Rage toward the Whitewings, who had sent Alucia to break his heart three years ago, who toyed with him still. Who would not stop, it seemed, until they destroyed everything he held dear.
“Lindelan, Castian, Benvornan—search the mansion for any stragglers.” Levan was surprised how steady his voice sounded.
There was none of his father’s brittle fury, his spitting impatience.
“The white scum have deserted the scene, but before we recast the wards, ensure we don’t trap any inside with us. ”
The three mages nodded grimly, Castian climbing unsteadily to her feet.
Levan felt Saffron’s stare upon him.
Did she do this? asked an ugly part of his mind, forged through decades of torture and betrayal. Is she in league not just with the silvers, but the whites too? It didn’t make sense, of course, but paranoia flowed through him like poison, cold and dark and taunting.
“Our first order of business must be reestablishing the wards. Long-term we’ll find a slew of addicts to donate their wells for access to the black, but for the foreseeable future, none of us leave the compound.
Not with the Whitewings lying in wait. Six of you will surrender your magic in the interim.
If none volunteer, I’ll choose names out of a hellsdamned hat. ”
More muttering, a disgruntled undertone to it now, a nascent ire.
“When you say you don’t want us leaving the compound…?” asked Benvornan, a lank, hook-nosed mage Levan had never liked. His face was perpetually fixed in a rotten sneer.
“We need to regroup, fortify. Bury our dead, then retaliate.” Levan looked at the nearest corpse—a young, pretty servant with creamy Bellandrian skin and dark veins spidering her slender throat. A juvenile horror jumped up inside him. “But for now, yes, I’m placing everyone under curfew.”
At this, the simmering displeasure blew wide open, like a flame catching spilled bivkar. Everything in Levan clenched at the sound, at the feeling of control slipping away.
What would his father do at a moment like this?
Well, his father was demented, so he’d probably kill one of them to bring the rest into line. But their numbers were already diminished, and Levan needed as many mages as possible to rebuild the wards.
“You have your orders, like them or not.” He rose his voice over the din without allowing any heat into it.
“To breach them will be a breach of the brand, and a breach of the brand will mean certain death.” He swept his golden hand around the room.
“Clear this mess. We sleep only when all trace of the Whitewing assault has been wiped clean and the wards have been reestablished.”
Saffron looked at him questioningly, as if to say: What about me?
It angered him, that look of disbelief, that assumption she was above the rest of them because she’d tricked her way into his bed. She was right, in many ways. She was something other. And she had to be dealt with differently.
“Killoran. With me.”
He strode up the sweeping ascenite staircase, not bothering to look behind him. He knew Saffron would follow; she had to keep cover with the rest of the scarlets, and cover meant pretending the brand worked on her the same way it did on them.
Rasso pattered after her, tense and alert. It rankled Levan to see the beast fall into step by the traitor instead of him. The fallowwolf had always doted on her, and Levan finally understood why: because the creatures were historic allies of the Timeweavers.
As they walked in charged silence, Levan’s highly trained body thrummed with paranoia, the sense that she would plunge a dagger into his chest and run, the fear that lingering Whitewings were waiting around every corner.
The cloying scents clung to his cloak: burnt honey, acrid smoke, the airborne weapon deployed by the Silvercloaks in the forest. He felt dirty, violated, almost insane with the desire to wash it all away.
But first he had to take care of her.
Saffron Killoran was a cancer to the scarlets, a malignant black tumor with roots spreading deeper and broader by the minute.
Time to cut her out.
“Where are we going?” she asked at last.
He said nothing.
Those eyes, a shining hazel, large and doe-like, pleaded with him.
They rounded a final familiar corner, toward the cell where Levan himself had been locked less than a week earlier.
“No,” Saffron whispered.
Rasso loosed a strange growl-whimper, a sound of confusion and protectiveness, as he glanced between the two mages he loved most.
Saff turned to flee, managed several steps. Levan’s hand twitched as though to grab her by the wrist, his thighs lurching as though to tackle her to the ground, but he didn’t need to do that. Had never needed to.
Follow me, he thought.
And so, because the kingpin had commanded it, she followed him.