Chapter 20 No One Wants the Blood
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No One Wants the Blood
Saffron hunched over a lamplit desk in the mansion library, running a finger over the worn parchment page of From Sacred to Sacrosanct—the tome she’d stolen from Mizad’s Emporium.
The text was dense, written in a stiff, formal tone, so she skipped ahead to the final chapter, which detailed the mass evisceration of the weaverwick wands.
Collecting loose wands, however, was an altogether more complex affair, due to the small stature of the artifacts—easy to hide beneath an old floorboard or bury in a shallow grave.
In addition, it is not possible to ascertain the wick of a wand by sight alone, and though there are spells to reveal such information, it would be an unwieldy pursuit to test the millions of wands circulating in Ascenfall.
This scholar has cross-checked the records subpoenaed from wandmakers the world over with the database of wands destroyed during the Great Purge, and has drawn the following summation: as many as a thousand weaverwicks may remain in the wild, gathering dust in ancestral vaults and attracting sinister eyes in the black markets of Nomaden and Mersina.
It must be noted that one nation has remained tight-lipped in regard to the sanctioning of weaverwick wands.
Nyr?th famously offered refuge to dragonkind following the ravaging of the continent at the behest of House Rezaran, and the winged beasts are rumored to reside in the Haeldrekys Peaks.
None but the holder of the Steel Throne is privy to the terms of this agreement, but since dragonkind was integral in the creation of weaverwick wands, it is unlikely they would accept asylum from a nation who purged said wands from existence.
It is therefore the opinion of this author that the malignant artifacts still exist in the far north.
A harrowing thought, is it not? That a cabal of Timeweaving mages at the top of the world might be unwinding and rewriting reality without our knowing?
How many times has this author written and rewritten the same book?
How many times have you read and reread this very sentence?
Saffron’s mind drudged over everything she had learned. The book’s conclusion posited that thousands of unchecked weaverwicks had been hidden across the continent. The author suggested the black markets of Mersina might be fruitful, and so to Mersina Saffron would go.
Of course, there was one other known weaverwick wand in her orbit.
The former queenpin’s—used to little effect by the late Lyrian Celadon, and now presumably passed down to Levan himself.
But Saffron hadn’t seen him carrying it on his person, and she knew better than to sneak into his chambers or the crypt.
The truly torturous prospect was that there perhaps existed an heirloom weaverwick with Saffron’s name on it, tucked beneath a loose floorboard or buried in a shallow grave.
Because the fact Saffron existed meant her ancestor had to have survived, and to have survived meant they had to have hidden their wands.
Joran’s letter would contain everything she wanted and needed to know. Of that much, Saffron was certain. She thought of Captain Aspar’s scattered insights.
Once upon a time, I owed your father a great debt of gratitude.
Then, six months later, when Saffron’s mission was about to begin:
Why Dragontail?
If you come out of this alive, maybe I’ll tell you.
So many things made little sense. If Joran had been a Timeweaver, Aspar would’ve abhorred him, persecuted him.
She was a staunch Augurest whose religion decried Timeweavers as depraved sinners, as scourges on magekind, as a blight to be eradicated.
And if Joran Killoran was a powerful Timeweaver, how would the Bloodmoons have so easily bested him on that fateful night in Lunes?
None of the puzzle pieces slotted together, and it was driving Saffron quite batty. She needed that letter, but it was still in the custody of the Silvercloaks.
As she was mulling her next moves, Levan strolled into the library, two Lost Dragonborn books tucked beneath his arm and Rasso trotting at his heel. When the kingpin saw her sitting at his favored writing desk, he stopped dead.
Rasso, on the other hand, took off at a canter, leaping at Saffron, planting his front paws on her clavicle.
He licked her face as though it were covered in the delicious and life-sustaining blood of his enemies, and she couldn’t hold back her peals of laughter.
As Levan approached, she subtly slid From Sacred to Sacrosanct off the desk and into her lap, covering it with the folds of her cloak.
Levan stopped close enough that she could smell lemon and mint soap.
His face was hard and blank as a cobblestone, and she felt a sharp, clean pang of grief.
She missed the version of him she had lain with less than a month prior.
How open he had been, how raw and real. She thought of handmade matching costumes hanging unused in his wardrobe, and thought, for a short second, that the sadness might cleave her in two.
But even if she could never truly rebuild the trust, rebuild them, she could still wind back the decades and mend the things that had broken them so irreparably in the first place. The truest act of love and sacrifice she could offer him.
“Have you won Auria Marriosan over to your cause yet?” He talked to her like he would any old henchmage, bland and professional, with an undercurrent of authority.
Stroking Rasso on his bony head, Saffron matched his tone. “No. And before you suggest applying more force, that would have the opposite effect. Auria is weak with pain, true, but righteous enough to take her own life before cooperating.”
Levan shrugged. “I could compel her.”
“She’d see right through it. Know that the desire to aid a Bloodmoon could never be genuinely hers.
Why are you so hellsbent on Marriosan anyway?
If you let me establish a bridge with someone else, I could already be slipping them false intel.
She’s no longer even working the Bloodmoons. Too close to it.”
“Because the only way I can trust that you’re not deceiving me is to choose your bridge myself. And I need to ensure said bridge is pliable, if needs be.”
“Marriosan will never budge. Choose again.”
Levan tapped his scarred lower lip. Saffron thought of how he’d borne the injury—falling from a tree as a child—and struggled to imagine him playing innocently in the woods with a brother he no longer spoke of.
“I don’t buy it,” he said. “She’s already compromised, is she not?
On the night you were branded, you went to the Jaded Saint and asked her for information on Nalezen Zares.
She later delivered it, as well as the tracing charm my father demanded.
You can threaten to tell her new captain that she’s a leaky pail, dribbling classified files to known criminals. ”
Ah. It was true that Saffron originally approached Auria for the Zares intel, but she’d staunchly refused, as Auria was wont to do.
In the end, Nissa had swooped in with both the necromancer’s location and the ill-fated tracing spell.
Vogolan had learned the truth—after misguidedly slaying Auria’s grandfather in the process—but Saffron had murdered the thuggish henchmage shortly afterward.
Word had obviously never made it back to Levan.
“That was before she saw me in the Havenwood in a scarlet cloak,” Saffron said carefully. “Now that she knows I’m associated with the Bloodmoons, she’ll never cave to blackmail. She’ll kill herself before—”
“Just turn her, Killoran.”
Saffron shot him a rueful glare, trying not to wince at the way her surname had replaced the name Silver.
“I did glean some interesting intel during my last conversation with her. Several pleasurehouse deaths in the last week, all of them suspected to be linked to the Whitewings. They’re either growing more reckless or more organized. Are the scarlets still under curfew?”
Levan shook his head. “No. And many of them have not returned from their sojourns to the pleasurehouses on Laving.”
“If their deaths were retribution for the life I took, I apologize. Yet something tells me this is a far bigger problem.”
“I’ll look into it. Everything running smoothly with Tolad and Zef?”
For the last few days, Saffron had been overseeing ascenite laundering.
The Bloodmoons had several Ludders in their employ—including Tolad and Zef—whose sole mission was to deliberately lose thousands of ascens in a single evening.
Saffron chaperoned their evenings in the gamehouse, making semi-regular threatening facial expressions so that the Ludders would not be tempted to pursue a winning streak or cut and run.
It was simultaneously tedious and stressful.
“Consummate professionals, as always,” she said. “Although they said one of the dealers, Sevir, hadn’t shown up for their meeting last night. They’re almost out of ascens to clean.”
A crisp nod. “Noted. How are you finding the work?”
“Well, it’s less psychologically obliterating than carving out eyeballs, so I suppose I must be grateful.”
“Everyone wants the ascens, no one wants the blood.”
Saffron smirked. “Always with the poetry.”
Levan held up his small stack of books in his golden hand. “Guilty as charged.”
This quip was not accompanied by anything so craven as a smile, but there was a slight lift in his body language.
“Something’s changed.” Saff studied him. “Something’s happened.”
Levan set the books firmly down on the desk. “No.”
“You aren’t wearing your grief so heavily—as if someone has allowed you to shrug it off like an unwanted cloak.” A suspicion dawned. “You found another necromancer. That’s what the lift in your step is. Hope.”
“I haven’t felt hope since I was seven years old,” Levan responded emptily, but his body had stilled. “And stop trying to read me like that.”
Her intrigue charred into impatience. “Tell me, Levan. Stone by stone, remember? How am I supposed to rebuild trust without the raw materials?”
“Just make sure Sorvel runs without a hitch.” Ah, Sorvel. The purported loxlure shipment he thought she’d be stupid enough to have raided so soon after the Havenwood. An unsubtle test of her claim to no longer have a handler in the Silvercloaks. “Then maybe we’ll talk.”
So there is something to talk about, Saffron thought triumphantly, and perhaps a little fearfully. She did not especially want Levan to be successful in raising his parents from the dead—not least because both Lorissa and Lyrian had cause to execute her.
Rasso leapt down from Saffron’s lap and padded away in search of Miret, tail wagging merrily. As the animal dismounted, his hind legs jostled the book in Saffron’s lap, exposing the top corner beneath her cloak.
“What are you reading?” Levan asked, eyes narrowing.
“None of your concern.”
“Which is exactly what makes you sound concerning. Show me.”
Another heart clench, another small surge of petty victory. “No.”
Levan straightened, his voice dropping several degrees. “I’m your kingpin. That’s an order.”
“Is that a compelled order? Because unless so…”
“As always, I have no desire to compel you.”
Saffron was glad of his reluctance. She would never forget how it felt, in the version of the Havenwood she had later unmade, to watch her body obey him with so little fight.
How it felt when the instincts sprung up from deep inside her, nameless and sourceless, so that if she didn’t know any better, she wouldn’t realize she’d been compelled at all.
“Then you’ll have to take it from me by force.”
Watching the battle play out in his body was an interesting spectator sport. His hand went to his wand, then fell away again. A muscle feathered in his jaw. His weight shifted from one foot to the other—and then he turned and walked away.
“Rasso, here,” he called.
The fallowwolf heeded the command, trotting after the kingpin—but unhappily so, casting glances back at Saffron, making sad little whimpering noises in her direction.
“Levan,” Saffron called thickly after him. He paused, but did not turn. “Why does your magic work on me?”
He did not reply, but the air between them grew taut, crackling.
“Is it only because you’re so powerful? Or is there something more?”
Levan stood perfectly still for a few moments, his hand curled into a fist at his side.
And then he was gone.
Saffron let the breath seep out of her slowly, slowly, then all at once.
“I think the problem is,” came a kindly old voice behind her, “that you made him want to be better.” Miret peered after his surrogate grandson.
“You made him believe that it was possible to exist in this dark crack of humanity while maintaining some semblance of morality, and whatever happened between you shattered that belief.”
Several emotions stirred in Saffron at once, too blended together to separate and name. “Does it trouble you, seeing the things he does? Knowing it isn’t him, that he’s just blindly trying to resurrect two people who never deserved to call him their son?”
Miret blinked hard three times, pushing his half-moon spectacles up the bridge of his nose.
He smelled faintly of moth-eaten wool. “It ruins me.” He turned to walk away, back to the safety of his bookshelves.
Then he hesitated mid-stride. “Please, do not betray him again. I fear for what he might become if you do.”
Skip Notes
* Destroying a single wand is an intense and costly process, and to purge so many required the full wells of many thousands of dedicated government officials.
Accounts detailing the exact nature of this operation are few and far between, though a private journal displayed in the Museum of Verdivenne describes one civil servant’s fraught relationship with magic following their work during the Great Purge.
Magic itself seemed to riot against the Enchanter, as though it had quite suddenly and violently developed free will.
The civil servant was never able to get it back under control, and they eventually slew their entire family in a dreadful housecleaning accident.
This testimony may, of course, be an elaborate fabrication designed to reduce their prison sentence.