Chapter 29 An Ordinary Wound
· · · ·
An Ordinary Wound
Saffron awoke, hurting, to the sound of the sea, the crash of waves and the caw of gulls.
Peeling open her gummy eyes, she saw a small, unfamiliar room with a low raftered ceiling, whitewashed walls, dark wooden floorboards topped with a threadbare rug. A square postcard window was cracked open, letting in the tangy scents of brine and salt-fish.
She lay in a narrow bed with a brass frame and a flimsy mattress, the sheets and blankets crusted with maroon stains. Her whole body ached, though she couldn’t say for certain why, couldn’t name a specific source of the hurt.
Levan sat propped up against the far wall, his face streaked with old blood, his chin tucked to his chest in slumber.
Rasso snoozed with his head in Levan’s lap, but as Saffron stirred, the fallowwolf’s sharp ears pricked up.
Saffron smiled weakly at the beast, and the beast’s tail thumped happily against the floorboards, rousing Levan.
“Where are we?” Saffron croaked, as Levan’s head lifted. Memories came to her in smudged patches. “I—oh, I got stabbed. I got stabbed so much.”
Levan snapped from sleep to wake with no bleary in-between, standing to his feet with alarming velocity.
His blue eyes were wide and shining, blood smeared over his cheeks in clear finger strokes.
“Castian found you bleeding out in Mersina. She took down the assailants and brought you to Aredan. You’ve lost a lot of blood, and you’ll be weak and dizzy for a while.
” A slightly ragged breath. “But you’re awake. ”
Saffron propped herself up on her elbows, the room swooping around her.
Lifting her wand felt like a godly effort, as though gravity had tripled and her muscles had atrophied entirely.
Realizing she could barely hold her torso upright, she leaned back against the headboard and focused very hard on not vomiting.
How much blood had she lost?
How much power had Levan poured into saving her?
The thought was strangely intimate, as though he had replaced her blood with his own—which of course was not the case, but Saffron could’ve sworn she felt some of his essence inside her, as though she had been stitched back together with the very fibers of his being.
Then again, she was desperately in love and still mourning their relationship’s tragic demise, so it was possible she was projecting.
As she winced, Levan studied her, concern pulling his dark brows together. “Are you in pain?”
“A little. I’m dizzy, weak, but you’ve done a remarkable job of healing my—oh.” She’d been roaming her hands over her recently stabbed torso when her palm found a swath of smooth, clean skin over her heart. “The brand is gone.”
Levan’s jaw twinged. “It served no purpose.”
Emotion moved through Saffron like a physical thing. “Why don’t you do the same for yourself?”
He crossed to the open window, sweeping his gaze across the choppy blue-gray waters of Assassin’s Bay. “Because there’s magic inside mine—magic that cannot be healed. Yours was just an ordinary wound.”
Saffron swallowed. “If you ever wanted to turn your back on the Bloodmoons, could you? Could you walk away? Or would your brand kill you for the desertion?”
She had asked him this before, when they’d barely known each other.
He’d been evasive, combative. Insisted that it was irrelevant, because he’d always choose his family anyway.
But she still harbored a thousand questions about the precise bounds of the brand, over what constituted a betrayal, over just how trapped inside this life Levan Celadon really was now that Lyrian was dead.
He ran his golden palm over the dust-and-salt-coated windowsill. “If I ever stop trying to resurrect my mother, my father’s enduring magic will end me.”
There was a strange texture to his words that Saffron couldn’t parse, almost as though he was reassuring himself of this immutable fact. She sensed that the conversation was making him uncomfortable, sad, even, and so she hustled on to a more gently antagonistic tack.
“You say Castian found me. Which means you had me followed.”
“You’d be dead if I hadn’t.”
“That’s not the point. Stone by stone, you said, and I’ve been laying stones. I killed a Whitewing, gave you ample evidence to use against me. And I didn’t betray you at Sorvel—I passed your little test. There was no shipment.”
“No.”
She shook her head, trying to look serious as Rasso licked at her jaw. “Is it always going to be like this? Laying traps, having me tailed?”
“Why were you in Mersina? Why the Vari Merkt?”
“I wanted a new wand,” she replied blandly. “Mine is an embarrassment and an abomination.”
“There are countless wandmakers in Vallin you might have frequented instead.”
Saffron lowered her voice, letting it soften and tremor. “When I was younger, my parents hauled me around every wandmakery in the north, and none of them would sell me anything decent. They thought me weak, underpowered. I didn’t want to face that same experience again as an adult.”
Trying to read Levan’s expression was like searching for meaning on a brick wall. “I’m giving you another chance to tell me the truth here, Silver. To lay another stone.”
He didn’t believe her.
Why didn’t he believe her?
“I am telling the truth.”
A head shake, his hair falling around his face in salt-tangled waves. “Whatever you say.”
For several moments, they sat in the rubble of silence.
Levan’s face had darkened, and she still was not altogether certain why.
But when he turned to face her, as though to say something, the ferocity of his pale blue gaze shocked her.
Rapping his fingertips on the windowsill in a rhythmic pattern, his lips parted, and he took a deep inhale—
—and then Saffron’s wand crackled in her palm.
“Et vocos, Saffron Killoran.”
A familiar voice, lightly accented, soft and feminine yet gritty with the sand of the Eqoran desert. A familiar voice, backlit with a flame of anger that never went out.
Not for the first time that morning, emotion seared through Saffron.
“It’s Nissa Naszi,” Saffron whispered to Levan, her pulse quickening, her heart somersaulting. “Another chance to reestablish contact. It’s not Auria, but…Do you trust me?”
The seconds it took for him to reply sprawled into eternity. Saffron could almost hear the internal war rage, the scales trying to balance themselves, his ruthlessly calculating mind unable to settle on an answer.
Then, finally, a nod. Crisp, unconvincing, and yet permission nonetheless.
“Nissa,” Saffron breathed. “Can we meet?”