Chapter 4 The Pale Crypt #2
His mother had never wanted the ruinous empire built on loxlure and pain, the drive for wealth, wealth, always more wealth.
No, that had come after her death, once her late husband realized just how much ascenite was required to keep her corpse viable.
Twenty years they had been searching for a necromancer, and still Lorissa was a corpse.
Now her late husband had joined her, and the crypt needed more ascenite still.
Next to the queenpin, Lyrian Celadon’s lifeless form was crooked, frail, marred with wrinkles and liver spots and spidery red blood vessels. White hair, pale brown skin, the brooch of his cloak pinned in the hollow of a papery throat. Levan could barely look at him.
He sank shakily to the tiled ground of the crypt, leaning back against the ascenite wall.
Letting his exhausted eyes flutter closed, he thought again of those final moments in the Havenwood.
The glitch in time as Saffron flickered from calm and wandless to fraught, gasping, tearful—and holding both wands.
The yawning pit in his belly as he realized what she’d done.
And then older memories, silver-blond curls spilling over his bare, branded chest, how it felt to have her sleeping against him, feeling some young and hopeful part of him swell back to life.
Stult. You’re a na?ve, hopeless stult.
Nobody could love you for real.
“It happened again,” he whispered. “I fell for someone who was only ever using me. I know I should kill the rat and be done with it—it’s the cleanest option. The safest. But perhaps there’s a better play here.” A rueful, self-loathing laugh. “Then again, perhaps I’m just weak.”
He hadn’t planned to tell his mother this, but the words spilled regardless, like a jar whose contents had thus far been contained through the centripetal force of constant spinning. This was why he could rarely abide stasis. Everything poured out.
Lorissa, of course, did not respond, although Levan imagined how she might.
His mother was a noble mage, a just one, opposing gratuitous violence and never killing unnecessarily, but Saints save any mage who harmed her son.
After what Saffron had done to her family, Lorissa would not show the turncloak mercy.
Especially not when said turncloak could steal the throne from beneath Rezaran feet.
Levan knew in his bones what he had to do, but he was not quite ready to do it. Yet the greater cruelty would be to keep Saffron alive and suffering in limbo, as he had been while pinned to that table. Better to put the trapped animal out of its misery.
As he climbed to his feet, an incongruous image snagged his gaze—a dark shape beyond one of the vault arches, a slice of black where there should be none.
A boot heel.
Cold washed through him as he found the source.
The body of Tiernan Flane, the Silvercloak he’d turned, the meek detective he’d compelled into taking his own life the moment he was discovered.
Saffron must have stashed the corpse in the crypt, driven by the same fevered hope that kept Levan upright.
She could find a necromancer. She could bring her friend back.
Levan’s hollow pity sharpened into a calculated blade. He would not allow himself to feel sympathy or kinship with the mage who killed his father. And he certainly would not allow the Silvercloaks to believe they held any power over him.
They had sent Saffron to destroy him. She would be the last.
He lifted his wand tip to his lips. “Et vocos, Sando Segal.”
“Yes?” came Segal’s gruff response.
“There’s a silver body in the crypt. Dump it outside the precinct. And leave a note.”
Levan usually strode—with purpose, with a straight back and a high jaw, crimson cloak billowing and snapping around his ankles.
But as he made his way to the cell holding Saffron Killoran, he ambled, pace slow and dragging, reluctance stooping his spine and tucking his chin down to his clavicle, cloak neither billowing nor snapping but rather drifting despondently.
He wished with every fiber of his being that it had not come to this, that Saffron had been true and genuine, that his father had not died and the loxlure retrieval had gone without a hitch and he was spending this evening with wild pale curls spilling over his bare, branded chest. He ached with the sheer force of that wish, and with the reality of what he now must do.
The cell block arrived too soon.
Because his chin was tucked low, because he was lost in the shadowy corridors of his mind, it took his several beats to register that the door was already ajar, the deminite bolt slid free.
Horror staked through his belly as he entered the vacant cell.
Spinning wildly on his heel, all casual gait vanished now, his breath hitched between his collarbones, and he tried to make sense of it, to figure out how this could have happened, who would dare to free her.
Because someone had freed her.
The deminite bolt had been opened from the outside.
Yet nobody in this place was loyal to her—hells, nobody even knew she was here in the first place. Even if they did, none of them would risk the brand’s deadly retribution to free a rat.
Then he saw the unmistakable dusty prints on the floor, illuminated by a single sconce.
Paw prints.
Levan went to the door, studied the outside. Matching prints were stamped halfway up, as though the beast had climbed onto his hindquarters to coax the bolt loose.
Rasso.
His mother’s own fallowwolf had freed Saffron Killoran.