Chapter 21 Miraculously and Fatally Sober
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Miraculously and Fatally Sober
Levan studied Sorvel from above. A crooked village curving around Fair Firth, Sorvel mostly comprised a simple spired Saints hall—its red-and-gold obelisk old and faded—and a smattering of creamstone houses strewn haphazardly around a small harbor, as though a giant had thrown down a palmful of rocks just to see where they might land.
The night was starry, with a gentle bite of salt on the breeze. Claps of laughter echoed around the village as the locals piled into taverns after their evening worship. Levan sat halfway up the low spine of hill cradling the village, and beside him sat Harrow Claver—rogue, rascal, Royal Prophet.
Harrow was a short, slight mage with freckled skin and deep auburn hair swooping past his ears in waves. It was quite difficult to tell what color his irises were, on account of the fact that his pupils were always dilated by wine.
Tonight was no exception. He’d swaggered up the hill from the small portari gate outside town, swigging merrily from a bottle as he approached Levan. As he’d drawn nearer, bronze Foreseer cloak glowing like a furnace in the moonlight, his brow pulled together in a rather sloppy frown.
“You look thinner,” Harrow announced, flopping down next to Levan on a patch of lightly damp grass. “Food is pleasure, and pleasure is a full well, my darling.”
The problem was that for Levan, pleasure in its simplest form had never been all that effective.
He had learned from a young age that most joy was too good to be true, and so whenever he experienced a simple animal pleasure, his higher mind waited for the other shoe to drop.
The inevitable punishment for daring to feel a scrap of contentment.
Everything that had happened with Alucia and Saffron only carved the grooves of this knowledge deeper into his conscience.
Pleasure was fool’s gold. Only pain could be relied upon.
Yet pain was more complicated still, because the returns were diminishing.
Levan had spent so much time on the extreme end of the scale—torture curses and self-flagellation, amputated limbs at the hand of the woman he’d loved—that the tamer forms of it did not ameliorate his magic as they might for others.
The idea that he’d feel more powerful from using a snapping band—a popular type of rubbery bracelet flicked against the soft skin of the wrist for a mild stinging sensation—was laughable.
So no, he hadn’t eaten.
But he had run, a lot, his muscles burning, his bones aching.
And he had found a sick sort of pleasure in the hollow hurt of his stomach, in the head rush whenever he stood.
The brutal sensations in his hand, alternating between stabbing and fizzing.
That precarious balance of pain and pleasure, discomfort and satisfaction.
Harrow popped a cork on a fresh bottle of cherrywine, took an almighty swig, and offered it to the kingpin. Levan shook his head.
“So there isn’t really a loxlure shipment tonight?” Harrow asked.
“There is not.”
“May I ask why you no longer trust Killoran?”
Levan had explained the vague shape of the ruse, but not the reasons behind it.
“She was undercover,” he replied flatly, staring out across the water to the distant twinkling lights of Brasden. “Claims she is no longer, that her only handler died at my father’s hand. It would appear the loyalty brand has no effect on her.”
It has no effect on anyone anymore. But he couldn’t let the King’s Prophet know that Lyrian’s death had compromised the whole operation.
Harrow gaped at him. “And you let her live?”
“A long story. She gave me leverage to use against her should she betray me again, and there are strong reasons for keeping her around. Playing the Silvercloaks, staying several steps ahead. But she’s too smart, too strategic, and I’m worried there’s a chess line I haven’t calculated. Hence the traps ready to spring.”
“Hells. I should’ve foreseen all of this.”
“That’s why I dragged you up here.” Levan rolled his aching wrist. “Do you know whether she’s going to betray me again?”
A sigh, a head shake. “I haven’t had any prophetic visions in weeks. The King wants to ban me from drinking—thinks the alcohol is addling my inner sight. A rotten killjoy and a raging hypocrite.”
“He might have a point.” Levan studied Harrow intently, the subtle aversion of his gaze, the shiftiness to his posture. “You’re keeping something from me.”
“I’m keeping many things from you, as I suspect you are from me.” A coy smile coaxed Harrow’s purple lips wide. “I’ll trade you, darling. A secret for a secret.”
“You first.”
A musing pause. “When I was a little boy, my parents sold me to the Queen of Bellandry. I was stolen from her by the Vallish throne while on the cusp of manhood, though I think the Bellandrian Crown believe I’d simply grown tired and departed of my own volition.”
“That must have been difficult. Being sold.”
“On the contrary, it’s given me a very high sense of self. I am worth tens of thousands of ascens, and I am also worth risking war to possess.”
The words were cavalier, but there was something sour beneath them.
“That word, possess. Doesn’t it make your skin crawl?”
Harrow took an indecently long drink of wine.
“Not really. I could walk away if I wanted to, but I rather enjoy meddling in the affairs of the powerful. Royals, generals, kingpins. You’re all so delightfully messy.
I am quite simply never bored. Here’s a fun little bonus secret—two for the price of one. I asked to be sold.”
“You—what?”
“I had delusions of grandeur from a very young age, and, truthfully, my own sights set on a throne. Any throne, I wasn’t fussy.
I thought if I could just enter the royal arena, by whatever means necessary, a path to the crown would emerge eventually.
Does it make me sound monstrous, to willingly leave behind my family for such a thing?
Honestly, Levan, it was all so dreadfully prosaic in my village. I was made for more.”
A dull ringing echoed in the deep caverns of Levan’s mind.
My own sights set on a throne.
“Do you still wish for such a thing now?”
“The ambition has blunted with age—or perhaps wine. But I’ve spilled too many secrets. Your turn.”
I’m a Compeller.
Saffron Killoran is a Timeweaver.
My magic is disobeying me.
I want to raise my mother from the dead and install her on the very throne you covet.
Harrow knew, in vague terms, that the Bloodmoons had their sights on the crown—but not that the body of the lost Rezaran queen lay in a crypt of ascenite. Not that Saffron Killoran’s line might rise again and ruin everything.
“Whenever I feel overwhelmed, I pretend I’m Aymar Wevelren from The Great Adventures of the Lost Dragonborn. I imagine gliding over the moors and mountains on dragonback, all of reality far below me. Wind in my hair, cold air in my lungs. Distance, freedom.”
“Adorable, but your being an enormous nerd is hardly a secret.”
“True.” Levan surveyed the village below with a hawkish intensity. “Though you’ve never known with quite such specificity.”
There was a sort of resonant silence, a thousand unsaid things hovering between them like fireflies. Harrow rested a palm on Levan’s knee, and the touch sent a small curl of pleasure into Levan’s well.
“You fell in love with her, didn’t you?” Harrow said plainly, without his usual frills and affectations.
Levan gave a short grunt. “Fool that I am.”
“Tsk. I don’t like to share you.”
Levan cocked a brow. “And yet I share you with countless others.”
“Quite, but I don’t enjoy them like I enjoy you.”
Setting down the honeywine bottle, Harrow let his other hand drift almost idly up the inside of Levan’s thigh.
“I—argh.” Levan pulled away, swallowing hard. “Not now. Not here. I have to steel myself for what might come.”
If Harrow was stung by the rejection, he didn’t show it. He shrugged and lay flat on his back, cupping his palms behind his neck. “If Killoran shows up…”
“I’ll have to execute her.”
Execute. Such a blunt, callous word.
“But you don’t want to.”
“Of course not.”
It was true, and yet there was a complicated texture to the not-wanting. Something spiteful, something small and humiliated. Some part of him craved a clean cut. The hand amputated, instead of left to fester with a malignant shard inside it.
Yet wasn’t it a good thing that Saffron had the opportunity to prove herself loyal, to switch sides into true scarlet?
Alucia had not been afforded the same chance.
Levan had discovered the truth one night in his chambers—a careless honeywine-fueled slip, a reference to a key Whitewing player she shouldn’t have known anything about, and when he’d applied the slightest bit of pressure, she’d fled into the night.
Levan had gone straight to his father, aired his suspicions, and Lyrian had sent Vogolan after her.
The henchmage had returned a couple of hours later, smattered in blood and with frothy spittle around his lips, that gleam in his eyes he always got when he’d made a fresh kill.
In his more troubled moments, Levan wondered if he’d been right to go straight to his father. What if, given the chance, Alucia might have chosen him, after all? Perhaps this was why he’d been persuaded to give Saffron something resembling a fair trial.
He thought of her question in the library: why his magic worked on her, the mage who should be immune. The truth was that he didn’t know, and that was infinitely troubling.
On the hillside, Harrow grew so unnaturally still that he might have fallen asleep. But when Levan looked over at his supine companion, the King’s Prophet was staring up into the stars—unblinking, unmoving, yet transfixed, as though a scene were playing out across the vast canvas of the night.
“What is it?” Levan whispered, the hairs on the backs of his arms standing on end.
No response.
Several minutes passed. Time dilated, blew wide open.
The air around them grew taut, brittle.
Then, finally, Harrow came back into his body—looking deeply troubled.
“Harrow,” Levan muttered, trying not to let his urgency show. “That was a prophecy if I ever saw one.”
The ghost of something terrible passed over Harrow’s face. All at once, he looked miraculously and fatally sober. “I drifted off for a second.”
“You’re lying.”
“Fine, a vision. But it didn’t pertain to you.”
A blatant lie. Harrow could not meet Levan’s gaze.
“I still want to know,” Levan urged.
“What you want is hardly my concern.”
Levan recoiled from the blade-edge in Harrow’s retort. The sharpness was a surefire indicator that there was something of pressing importance in the prophecy.
Possibilities spiraled through Levan’s overactive mind.
He could compel Harrow, or at least try—he hadn’t successfully done so since the destruction of the weaverwick.
Yet compelling was a line he rarely crossed with those he genuinely cared about; some pale semblance of a moral code.
Perhaps he really was losing his edge, his killer instincts. But he couldn’t do it.
Beside him, Harrow lifted a goldenjade pocketwatch from the breast pocket of his doublet. “Five minutes after darknight. Looks like the turncloak hasn’t betrayed you.”
Something bright and hopeful surged in Levan. He wasn’t sure whether he’d really believed Saffron would fail the test, but it was a relief regardless.
“What now, Levan?” The Bellandrian only ever seemed to bleed into Harrow’s accent when he said his lover’s name. Lay-van instead of Leh-van.
Levan breathed out long and slow, the crisp air pluming around his mouth.
Something told him he was still a fool, still being played.
And it gnawed at him, that he could never know for sure until it was too late.
That even once the bridge of trust had been built back, he would still have to walk over it, believe that it would bear his weight.
He lifted his wand to his face. “Et vocos, Aviruna Castian.”
The answering voice was bleary. Lox-addled, most likely. “Levan?”
“I want you to follow Saffron Killoran.”