Chapter 7 Stone by Stone
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Stone by Stone
Ears ringing profoundly, Saffron walked through the Bloodmoon mansion, wand drawn, expecting to be jumped at any given moment.
The compound, however, was far quieter than usual, the scarlet numbers diminished, and with the survivors placed on glorified house arrest, there was little reason for anyone to come or go through the atrium.
In the center of the black marble floor, the carved white wings were still starkly engraved. She had no idea what magic they’d used to make the sigil so impossible to remove, only that it must be torturing Levan.
Levan. Levan.
The name beat through her like a pulse as she arrived at his bedchambers, but when she knocked on his door, there was no answer.
Patting her cloak to make sure the severed hand hadn’t fallen out, Saffron made her way to the other place he was likely to have sequestered himself in the ruinous aftermath of her betrayal.
The library’s interior still took her breath away.
It was three stories tall, with tens of thousands of books lining its walls and alcoves, mezzanine floors and wooden bridges, sliding ladders and antique writing desks, a vast stained glass mural casting blue and green and bloodred light over black marble tiles.
And there Levan was, perched in the velvet banquette beneath the window, washed in jewel colors and sitting so still he might have been a statue.
For several moments, she saw him before he saw her.
She drank him in.
The kingpin wore a neatly pressed scarlet cloak, moon phases embroidered down the lapel in gold.
Dark hair fell to his jaw in waves, a scar bisected his lower lip, and the ridge of his jaw could cut through glass.
The only minor imperfection was a smudge of navy ink on his temple, as though he’d been thinking particularly hard while writing in his journal, but Saffron actually considered this the exact opposite of an imperfection.
Her emotions grew new layers, tucked away inside one another like a Tarsan nesting doll.
There was the obvious outer shell—love, lust, desire.
Inside that, guilt and shame over the cruel game she’d played with his affections.
Inside that, dread over the coming reckoning.
Inside that, a hot animal fear, a primordial instinct to run.
She would never forget the version of time she’d rewritten in the Havenwood—how effortlessly and completely he had overpowered her.
She had been a puppet, a doll, a plaything.
An object of his will and only his will, all her agency stripped away to nothing.
He had commanded her, without words, and her body had obeyed.
She who was supposedly immune to magic.
She who prided herself on her strong-mindedness.
The enormity of his power had been borne from a childhood of torture, sen doloran, sen doloran, sen doloran, cast over and over again until his magic mutated beyond all recognition. Inside Saffron’s fear was also an aching sadness, the desire to protect him, to make everything alright.
As she stepped into the vast library, the movement finally registered in the periphery of Levan’s vision, and he startled. He stood abruptly, tall, proud, his spine a sword, his blue eyes searing as a fever, but did not make to close the gap between them. He simply drew his wand.
“I almost respect the audacity.”
His words echoed in the cathedral-like space.
Saffron gave him a wry smile. “That’s my sweet spot.”
She tossed the white cloak onto the dark floor, then reached into her pocket and casually chucked the pale severed hand on top of it.
“What—”
“I killed a Whitewing on Broad Row. There was a witness, who is silenced for now, but who would testify against me if you applied the slightest bit of pressure. The cloak and the hand represent two pieces of physical evidence tying me to the crime”—she dug once more into her inner pocket, pulling out the parchment she’d purchased earlier—“as well as a handwritten and signed confession, which states that I was not acting upon higher command but rather my own twisted desire for vengeance.”
Shock wiped Levan’s face blank. “I don’t understand.”
“If I ever betray you again, you can have me sentenced to life in Duncarzus. Where the food is terrible, by the way. They don’t even serve hot chocolate, can you imagine?”
Levan seemed to be taking great efforts to bridle his breathing. He stared down at the dismembered hand, haunted. “You got out. You were free. You could have gone anywhere, done anything.”
Saffron badly wanted to tell him the full truth: that for now, they both wanted the same thing. Together, if they accumulated enough ascenite, and if he was willing to relinquish his mother’s weaverwick wand, she could turn back the decades and save not just her parents but his too.
Yet there was every chance he’d slay her where she stood for all she represented.
“The only place I want to be is here,” she said carefully.
“Because by my side is where you have to be in order to secure evidence.” A small head shake, both soft and furious. “Do you think me a fool?”
“If I so much as tried, you could destroy me for the murder I just committed.”
Levan started to pace, as though physical movement would jostle loose his critical thinking. The stained glass cast strange shapes and colors over his face and cloak. “The Silvercloaks would pardon you. If you brought down the Bloodmoons, they’d forgive every crime performed while in scarlet.”
Saffron leaned against the nearest mahogany bookshelf.
“My handler is dead. There is nobody left to pardon me, nobody who knows about my assignment.” A slight untruth—there was Nissa, who was in a coma, and who Saffron would not endanger by naming.
“And even if the thread of my case was somehow picked up by the new mage-in-command…A lot of the old-timers in the Order are sticklers for the law. They sentenced me to six months in prison for lying about my mage classification. You really think they’d let me off the hook for a cold-blooded murder that was not sanctioned by the kingpin, that wasn’t necessary to keep cover?
That actively compromised the investigation by leaving a trail of witnesses? ”
Levan’s jaw clenched hard enough to grind his teeth to dust. “This is a play. I know it is.”
“True,” Saffron admitted. “But the only end goal is getting you to trust me again.”
“So you’d go dark from the Order?”
“I have little choice without a handler.”
Of course, in the version of the Havenwood she’d unmade, she’d told Auria Marriosan the full truth of her assignment.
As the two stood over Captain Aspar’s dead body, Saffron begged her former colleague to believe she was still working for the silvers, but Auria staunchly resisted.
Saffron also confessed what had happened to Tiernan Flane, Auria’s betrothed, who had been compelled into taking his own life by none other than Levan.
All of this had gone so horribly wrong that Saffron rewound those ruinous few minutes, and now Auria was once again in the dark.
Levan stopped dead, cloak swirling around his ankles. “What if I wanted you to reestablish contact? Feed them false intel?”
A small surge of victory. He was considering it. “Then that’s what I’ll do.”
His golden hand clenched, unclenched. “Why didn’t you cut and run while you had the chance? Your handler is dead, and you escaped Bloodmoon custody. You could have had a new beginning, away from the silvers and the scarlets both.”
Saffron allowed an intimate silence to swell and deepen before murmuring, “Because I want to be with you.”
And also to make great use of your apocalyptic hoard of wealth, et cetera.
To her surprise, Levan’s expression was one not of hurt or longing but of anger.
Righteous, bitter anger—though directed inward or outward, she did not know.
She imagined he was thinking of Alucia, of the stomach-drop moment in which he learned Saffron was the very same.
Guilt twinged through her like a pulled muscle.
“That ship has sailed.” The anger smoothed away as quickly as it flared. He gestured to the stack of murder evidence without a trace of emotion. “And now you’ve handed me everything I need to destroy you. Or I can kill you, cleanly, and forget you ever existed at all.”
“Shortsighted—you’re too smart for that.
The better play would be to keep me close, use me to evade and manipulate the Silvercloaks.
Reestablish contact. Let them feed me information, believing me to still be their agent.
You wanted there to be another way, beyond killing me or compelling me. I know you did. Here it is.”
Though Levan looked bland and expressionless, Saffron picked up his inner conflict in the subtle flex of his fingers, the too-stillness of his stance. He was visibly searching her proposition for the trick, the trapdoor, still snagging on the why.
“Everything between us was real, Levan.” She allowed a hairline crack in her voice, a subtle splinter of emotion. “If nothing else is true, that is. And if you no longer want me, I understand. But you can still use me.”
“Want is a complex word.” Levan’s left hand gripped his right wrist, just above the golden prosthetic.
“Does it still hurt?”
She studied his face for tension around the jaw, a narrowing of the gaze.
She searched too, for a black tint to his veins—an indicator that pain and grief had driven him back into the snarled arms of loxlure, the most potent substance in Ascenfall.
A substance to which he had once been horribly addicted.
Her swift scans came up mercifully empty.
Levan dropped his grip on the wrist. “No, it’s fine.”
Saffron chuckled softly, though there was little humor behind it. “You’re lying.”
“I suppose you’re something of a specialist on the subject.”
Though the words were designed to sting, they were not suffused with heat. More of a grim resignation, a wound over a wound, a scar reopened.
“I was doing my job, Levan. You of all people should know what it is to put your family and your duty above all else. The Bloodmoons killed my parents. Do you blame me for wanting revenge?”
“No, I don’t blame you. I don’t feel anything for you at all.”
The words were as dull as a blunt axe through wood.
“Another lie,” Saffron parried easily. “And I should know, because I’m something of a specialist on the subject.”
No smile, just that rapidly calcifying suspicion. “The Saffron Killoran I know would not abandon a lifelong desire to avenge her parents for something so petty as love.”
Something twisted in Saffron’s chest. “So you admit that it was love.”
“So you admit that it is past tense.” Levan stared at a point in the middle distance, as though committing every pane of the intricate window to memory. His face was a blank mask. Anyone else might think him numb, empty, but Saffron understood that the stillest waters ran deepest.
I feel everything at full and terrible force. I just keep it inside, where it belongs.
As though some internal decision had been made, he lifted his wand.
Fear drove down through Saffron like lightning through a rod, and it took all her strength not to let it show on her face, not to draw her own wand, not to freeze time with praegelos and flee for Nomaden.
Instead, she lifted her hand to the spot between her collarbones where her old necklace used to sit.
The wooden pendant carved from her childhood front door, which Levan had once re-enchanted back into color.
She’d bartered it away for the painmaker that had saved Auria’s life in the Havenwood.
That her palm sought its familiar comfort was not a performance.
A place for your hand to go when you’re feeling too much, Levan had once observed. He saw her do it now, and somehow, it broke through.
He lowered his wand. Inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, and then set off at a leisurely pace to the nearest bookshelves, as though idly pursuing their contents and not conducting an emotionally fraught and potentially world-ending conversation.
“Trust is a bridge that has to be built back stone by stone.”
An ember of hope sparked in Saffron’s chest.
“Thankfully, I’m an excellent mason.” No response, no mirth. She closed the gap between them until they were side by side, facing a shelf of brewery reference titles. “Come on—you make a poetic observation, I ruin it with a joke. That’s how we work.”
“There’s a new shipment of lox arriving in two weeks,” he said crisply.
“Oparling darknight. Not into the capital, but into Sorvel. A small port village overlooking Fair Firth, where the Silvercloaks won’t be watching every boat like sunhawks.
” A tight beat. “You’ll go in my stead, ensure it runs smoothly.
If anything goes wrong…” He gestured to the pile of grim evidence she’d tossed at his feet.
“Of course.” Her hand went to his forearm. “I promise—”
Levan grabbed her by the wrist and forcibly lowered her hand to her side. Finally, he met her eyes properly. The stark blue of his irises was like the surface of the Serantic Ocean, beautiful, gleaming, and yet swirling with deadly sea serpents.
“Stone by stone, Silver.”
Before she could respond, he left the library, scarlet cloak trailing behind him like a bloody shadow.