Chapter 3 Mercy to Be Found
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Mercy to Be Found
“Levan.” The scarlet cloak hung wrinkled and false from Saffron’s shoulders. “Levan, I’m so sorry.”
A laughably small word, given the situation.
“Yes, I was undercover.” She spoke calmly, taking a step toward him as though to prove she was not afraid.
Her white-blond curls spiraled in all directions, and she still reeked of smoke and ash and burnt honey.
“I confessed as much. But I chose you in the Havenwood. You watched me choose you, choose the Bloodmoons.”
In the version of reality that stuck, yes.
But what of the version she had rewritten?
At first, the great reshuffling of wands had eluded Levan, like the street entertainer’s game in which a player had to figure out where the prize hid after all the cups had been rearranged.
But as his brain retroactively parsed it, he realized that Saffron had repossessed his father’s weaverwick wand between one timeline and the next.
Had Lyrian not been without that wand, he would have been able to defend himself.
The death curse might not have found him.
He could have parried, blocked, shielded.
Not only had Saffron leaked their location to the Silvercloaks, but she’d actively killed his father with her actions in the Havenwood.
Grief flared into anger once more, a safer emotion, easier to thrust outward. He thought then, with a child’s simplicity, that he might hate her.
“That choice was too late.” On the other side of the door, Rasso scrabbled and sniffed at the frame, whining intermittently. “Your betrayal cost my father his life.”
He should lay the Timeweaving accusations bare at her feet. Tell her he knew the truth of her power, the way she had wielded it against him and his kin. Yet some na?ve, spiteful part of him wanted her to confess it of her own accord.
“Levan, I—”
“There is mercy to be found,” he said slowly. “If you’re honest with me. About everything.”
The air around them seemed to sharpen, to hold its breath.
Her baleful fawn eyes studied his, narrowed slightly, as though searching for just how much he knew.
There was something, then, a flint, a clash of internal swords, that made Levan think she understood, all at once, the depths of his terrible knowing.
He did not know what he would do if she confessed. Whether he would spare her, or whether it would give him more reason to destroy her.
In the end, it was a redundant calculation.
“I have been honest,” she said at last. “About everything.”
There it was. A palm reached out across a crevasse and not taken. A card kept pressed to her chest, even when death raised its sickle over her head.
“Then I think you know,” he replied, voice low, desolate, “that I have to kill you.”
Saffron did not flinch. Despite it all, respect swelled inside him. That brazen nihilism, that unfaltering fearlessness, all of it underpinned by a ruthless intelligence. This was a chess line she had already calculated.
“No, you don’t,” she said plainly. “Because you’re a Compeller.”
Some ancient, self-loathing instinct reared inside him. “Why should that matter?” Then, as an afterthought, “I meant what I said in the Havenwood. I’ve never compelled you. Not until I ordered you to follow me into this cell.”
Saffron’s eyes blazed. “Maybe not consciously. But in the week or two after we first met, I kept…slipping. Revealing information about my former cohort. At the time, I thought maybe it was because…Saints, because I was attracted to you. But I can keep a polderdash face against the fiercest of opponents, can withstand torture and prison and the death of those I love without uttering the wrong thing. So I think there was something more at play. A coaxing hand in my mind. A gentle push of encouragement.”
Dread simmered in his belly, black and noxious as loxlure. “I did not consciously compel you. I’d have discovered the truth about your assignment a lot sooner if I had.”
“But unconsciously…Perhaps your power is so great that it spills over.”
“Or you were just sloppy.”
“I’m a lot of things. Sloppy is rarely one of them.” Saffron lifted her chin, pale curls spilling like the silver cloak she was born to wear. “But your compelling…it’s your best weapon against me. You can compel me to obey you. Compel me to reveal everything you think I’m still hiding.”
Some part of him soared at the thought.
Maybe he did not have to kill her. Maybe there was another way.
He could allow Saffron Killoran back into the scarlet ranks under his absolute command. The other Bloodmoons did not know the extent of her treachery—as far as they understood, the brand would’ve felled her for leaking the Havenwood operation to the Silvercloaks.
He could compel her into obeying, into revealing the crawling underbelly of whatever rocks remained unturned.
Treat her like a henchmage, a foot solider, nothing more and nothing less.
She could do his bidding inside the Silvercloaks if necessary, could keep the scarlets one step ahead, one street ahead when it mattered.
Yet Saffron was a Timeweaver, able to rewrite all of reality.
How could he let such a cataclysmic thing walk free?
For now, compelling worked on her. But for now was not a great comfort. This was a slippery mage, riddled with strange magical quirks and immunities. If anyone could chart a path around his commands, it was her.
Then there was the obvious problem that, as a living Timeweaver, Saffron Killoran could hold a greater claim to the Vallish throne than his own mother.
There had been an era in Vallish history when every Timeweaver wore a Highcloak.
Saffron was, in some distant past, nobleborn.
Perhaps even an ancestor of the Nivezans, the aristocratic rivals of the Rezarans all those centuries ago.
The Nivezans should have been slain upon the Palace steps following the Dreadreign, but then again, so should the Rezarans.
The Fourth Augur, Emalin, even predicted, in his world-shaping prophecy, that multiple lines of Timeweavers would slip through the cracks.
Perhaps the real reason Saffron would not confess the truth of her power was because she knew how far Levan would go to protect his mother’s claim.
Because if it came down to a young, powerful mage in full possession of her weaving, or a Risen, empty-welled queenpin of a cruel criminal empire, one contender for the crown would be infinitely stronger.
All things considered, Levan knew he should do the safest thing. He should kill her. Yet the very thought was a clawed fist grabbing the pulsing pink organ of his heart.
For several long moments, he stood at a dreadful impasse.
Anger warred with hope and despair and loss.
Feelings of na?veté, idiocy, of being a hellsdamned fool who never learned, a little boy in a too-big cloak, stepping into boots he did not have the strength nor desire to fill.
Crests of fury raised his wand, and then that calculating strategic mind, like Saffron’s very own, stayed his hand, searched for a better move, a better line.
At some point, Saffron sank to the floor, weak from overcasting. The pail of water she’d used to clean his impaled body still stood in the corner of the cell, still carried the faint scent of citrus soap oil.
Only days had passed.
The irony of the situation struck Levan with all the force of a physical blow.
Less than a week prior, his father, who had believed Levan to be a traitor, pinned his son in place with deminite because he could not bring himself to do what needed to be done.
Some pale vestige of love kept him from dealing the killing blow, from cutting the tumor out of the organ.
All Levan’s life he had railed against his father’s monstrosity, and now he faced the very same dilemma.
How could he kill Saffron? How could he not?
The decision was too permanent, and he could not make it yet.
When he left the cell and bolted it from the outside, she did not call after him, did not plea or beg, and he grudgingly respected her composure. Little wonder she was such a menace in the polderdash hall. Little wonder she had hidden her true colors for so long.
Rasso looked up at him with wide, betrayed eyes, then nuzzled at the door, jabbing the wood pointedly with the tip of his snoot. Levan couldn’t help but think that the fallowwolf had performed no such sorrow when it was Levan locked inside.
He rolled his aching wrist and thought of his severed hand hitting the cell floor. How much effort it had cost him to hold back the scream, and how the roar had trembled the very walls when he finally loosed it. If he listened very carefully, he thought perhaps he could still hear its echo.