Chapter 28 His Body Remembered
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His Body Remembered
Levan turned cold and still at Castian’s words.
I think she’s going to die.
Impossible. Someone so vibrant and alive as Saffron Killoran couldn’t die.
“What happened?” he croaked, feeling the heat of Segal’s and Zamorin’s stares. Rasso woke suddenly, as though he sensed his beloved Silver was in danger.
Castian’s voice was panicked, uneven. “I followed her to a black market in Mersina, and—”
“Mersina?”
“She bought a wand from a Wielder with dagger-tattooed cheeks, then got jumped in an alleyway a few streets over. I fought them off—mostly Ludders masquerading as Wielders—but not before six knives found her body. None struck her heart, but there are two nasty ones in her belly and one in her thigh that I don’t like the look of.
She’s unconscious, bleeding far too much. Shall I find a Healer?”
Fear burst into flame then, his very skin alight with it.
“No,” he said, hoarse, striding toward the door. Rasso trotted to his heel, whining and wheedling. “I’m the only one who can help her.”
It was true, wasn’t it? Ludder healing—stitches sewn and flesh knitted back together by hand—would not be fast enough. And for reasons neither of them understood, she was immune to all magic except his.
His magic, which no longer obeyed him.
“Can you portari all the way down to Mersina?” Castian asked hurriedly.
Ordinarily, maybe—it was a damn long way, but Mersina didn’t have border control wards. Yet with his magic in rebellion? He couldn’t risk ending up in Sarosan or Teyet or Ni Lahi, completely depleted of power and with no way to cover the rest of the distance.
“Get her to Aredan. I’ll take the portari gate down there. There’s an inn next to the southeastern gate called the Fallen Foe—ask for Darin. He’ll set you up with a room and a bed.”
Castian’s voice sank an octave. “I don’t know if she’ll make it that far.”
“She will. Both of your lives depend upon it.”
Levan’s hand found the door handle, but before he twisted it, he hissed to Segal, “If I find out you’ve killed the boy in my absence, you’ll never breathe again.” He stooped slightly to pet his overly intelligent fallowwolf. “And mind Rasso, will you? He’s hungry—needs some fresh hearts.”
As the door slammed shut behind Levan, he heard Rasso wail and slam against the wood, claws scrabbling to follow his master—or to find his mistress.
But Levan knew how devastated Rasso had been by the death of Lorissa Rezaran, how the wolf had screamed over her fresh corpse, and he did not want to put the beast through the same thing twice.
He sprinted to the marble dragon statue on the third floor, heart threatening to detonate in his chest.
The bedspreads at the Fallen Foe were drenched with blood by the time Levan arrived. Saffron’s face was the approximate hue of freshly fallen snow, and her breaths came irregularly, shallowly. She was still fully clothed, stuck with knives like a pincushion.
Levan remembered something Perant, the Rezaran camp Healer, once told him: “Healing is the only magical art worth a damn. Mages believe they need all the lazy practical shortcuts and fancy enchantments, the pleasure on a whim, the ability to wield fire and rain, to make wine from water, but all those frivolous wants are stripped away when there’s a wound in your belly and you’re bleeding out. ”
Castian wrung her hands by the window, looking out to the sea she’d crossed with a dying mage beside her in the boat—not as uncommon as one might think, in Assassin’s Bay.
The Wielder looked just as terrible as Saffron, her skin pallid and sweat-slicked.
Her eyes were bloodshot, but since her blood ran black, the vessels looked like spiders’ legs across the whites.
“She has minutes,” she said. “Maybe less.”
Levan sank to his knees beside the bed, quickly examining the wounds. The thigh was the most lethal. He wrenched the dagger out of the leg as cleanly and smoothly as he could, loosing a tremendous spurt of burbling blood, then raised his wand.
What if it doesn’t work, what if it doesn’t work, what if what if what if—
“Ans mederan,” he uttered, tone calm despite the pulse roaring in his ears, the depth of his want pulling magic from the very bottom of his well, drawing on a lifetime of pain, of hurt.
And slowly, miraculously, the flesh and muscle and skin knitted itself together.
Relief surging through him, Levan repeated this process five more times, healing abdominal organs and bruised bones and punctured lungs, the magic flowing from him so easily the trust might never have been broken, until there wasn’t a mark left on Saffron Killoran’s body—none except the brand over her heart.
Levan laid his palm over the thick crust, feeling for a heartbeat beneath it.
There, but barely. The flap of a moth’s wing, the slightest tremor on the surface of a lake.
“Saints, she’s lost so much blood. Perhaps too much.” Levan ran his palms over his face, one pale, one gold, both so slick with Saffron’s blood that he left streaks of it down his cheeks. “What in all the infinite hells was she doing in Mersina?”
But he already knew—or at least suspected.
She bought a wand from a Wielder with dagger-tattooed cheeks.
He would bet any amount of ascenite that the wand was a weaverwick.
“Damned if I know.” Castian peered at the pale form on the bed.
“Why the Vari Merkt, of all places? She has a perfectly functioning wand. Not the prettiest, by any stretch, nor the most powerful for a mage of her caliber, but there are plenty of wandmakers in Atherin she might have gone to for a replacement.”
“The wand she bought—do you have it?”
Castian shook her head. “She dropped it when she was wounded. I was too focused on saving her to pick it up.”
“I want you to take a boat back to Mersina, and I want you to find that alleyway, and I want you to retrieve that wand. And then I want you to toss it in the deepest part of Assassin’s Bay and never speak of it again.”
Castian gave him a curious, exhausted look, but didn’t question the order. She turned to leave.
Levan studied her shaking hands, the veins on the back raised and dark. “Once it’s done, you have my permission to find the most obliterating lox Mersina has to offer and lose yourself to it.”
She bowed her head and left the room. It was only once Levan was finally alone with Saffron Killoran that the emotion came crashing through him.
There was the relief—and copious amounts of confusion—that he’d been able to heal her at all. His magic had responded, thank all the Saints in the sky.
But why now? Why, after weeks of erraticism and unpredictability, had it heeded his command?
He thought of everything he’d tried to do since the destruction of his wand, searching the attempted spells for a pattern.
It wasn’t hard to discern one: almost everything he’d tried and failed to do since breaking his relationship with magic began with the prefix sen.
Dishonorable intentions. Magic designed to hurt.
Until now—until he’d employed arguably the purest form of magic there was. Magic designed to mend, to restore, to make better.
It made an oddly perfect sort of sense that the way magic wanted him to heal the relationship was to heal the world around him too.
There was a childlike rightness to it. Healing magic had been his very first manifestation of a power, the very first thing he’d learned how to do.
He would have to find his way back to that innocent boy—the version of him his mother had so adored—in order to find his way back to magic.
But how the hells could he do such a thing when his entire life was dedicated to hurting?
Hurting others, and hurting himself.
After his last conversation with Saffron in the library, he’d hung back outside the library doors long enough to hear what Miret had said to her.
“I think the problem is that you made him want to be better. You made him believe that it was possible to exist in this dark crack of humanity while maintaining some semblance of morality.”
His almost-grandfather was right. Meeting Saffron, falling in love with her, had made him want to be different. The kind of mage worthy of her love.
It wasn’t that he thought any less of her now—yes, she’d been undercover, but for good reason. And it was hardly her fault that she possessed the Timeweaving gift he so desperately coveted. Hardly her fault that her blood may be noble enough to challenge his mother’s claim to the throne.
It was only that she had betrayed him. That she had made time and then unmade it. And that in the other version, Levan was fairly sure she had not chosen him.
Of course she didn’t, you fool.
Why would she turn her back on her life’s purpose for a mage so cruel-blooded and broken?
All at once, the hatred he felt toward her swiveled inward, like a compass swinging from north to south. It was so sudden, so severe, that he felt it like a physical thing, a brick jammed into his belly, a stake thrust through his heart.
It was too much to bear. Physical pain, he could handle. Could lock himself away from, or lock himself into. But the sheer force of his self-loathing was not something that could be easily dammed.
The desire to follow Castian to the seediest underbelly of Mersina, to melt it all away with loxlure, was all-consuming.
It was always there, this desire, waiting beneath the surface for a moment of weakness into which to sink its claws.
Even when his mind did not think of it, his body remembered. His body wanted.
Worse than hunger, worse than thirst. Worse than staying awake for seven days and seven nights and still not allowing yourself sleep.
It’s what you deserve, said a voice in his head he recognized from the darkest days of his compulsions.
Not the release—no, not that. You deserve to be utterly annihilated.
You deserve to spend your every waking moment crawling on your hands and knees toward the cruel god of loxlure.
You are a blight on the world, and death would be too kind.
Any happiness you have ever felt was a grave mistake.
He teetered over the edge of a cliff, gravity pulling at him like a hungry monster, the wind in his hair, the swoop in his belly, the tug toward the ravine of nothingness below.
Only the sight of the silver-haired, silver-hearted mage on the bed kept him from falling.
Pulling the neckline of her tunic down and across, he lifted his golden palm and rested it over her heart. Over the scar his father’s poker had torched into her perfect skin. With his other hand, he raised his wand.
“Ans mederan. Ans mederan. Ans mederan.”
Magic heeded him once more. The scabbed flesh shifted beneath his touch, melting and re-forming, warming and cooling, until finally, it felt like any other part of her body.
Pale, smooth, unmarred. Untainted by the rot that was himself.
It was difficult to tear his hand away; the feel of her heart beating, of her fading warmth, felt like the only real thing in the world.
Downstairs, there was a kind of commotion—an overlapping of sounds, a familiar yowl, and then soft, clawed footsteps scrabbling up the stairs.
Before Levan could register what was happening, the door flew off its hinges and Rasso exploded over the threshold, panting severely, eyes wide and something worryingly crimson around his jowls.
Seeing Saffron supine on the bed, soaked in her own blood and barely breathing, barely living, he let out another strangled howl and leapt onto the bed beside her, licking at her neck and face, whimpering and nuzzling and sniffing, before lying down beside her, face pressed into her shoulder, moaning softly.
The fallowwolf had traveled hundreds of miles through the portari gate to be with another mistress as she took what could be her final breaths.
All of it was too much to bear, the dreadful parallels to how Levan’s mother had died—both in search of weaverwick wands, both in pursuit of power in a world that had made them feel so powerless.
None of it should have happened. His mother’s ancestors should never have been slain, and she should never have grown up in hiding, and she should never have had to right that wrong, because it was that very quest that led to the death of Saffron’s family.
Levan dropped his wand to the floor, rested his own forehead on the soft slope of Saffron’s belly—the ragged folds of her tunic still dense with blackening blood—and tried very, very hard not to cry.