Chapter 35 An Exercise in Wild Conjecture
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An Exercise in Wild Conjecture
“I don’t understand why breaking into the Order is necessary,” the kingpin said, from the other side of his late father’s desk. His golden hand lifted a cup of clove tea to his mouth.
“Sneaking in might be a more apt description,” Saffron replied dryly.
She thought Levan looked dramatically older than he did a month ago.
The vaguely hopeful lift she’d picked up on in the library had sunk once again into a sort of bleak resignation, and his eyes were bloodshot with exhaustion.
She craved another reality in which she could comfort him, make sure he was eating and sleeping.
Ask him softly, as they lay together, what was on his mind.
That other world is possible, she thought longingly, determinedly. You just have to make it so. Undo all the things that broke us, write it all anew.
Levan laid down his mug, shot her a hard glare. “If you’re trying to make me suspicious of your intentions, you’re doing a fine job. Reestablishing the Silvercloak bridge could easily be done via wand, with far less risk, and in a way that enables me to be privy to it.”
A fire crackled and spat in the hearth, and a bead of sweat formed at the base of Saffron’s neck. She reached into her inner cloak pocket.
“Ah, but then I wouldn’t be able to plant these.
” She held up a pair of tiny enchanted conch shells, bought from the Cherrymarket that morning.
“Listening devices. I’ll leave one by Naszi’s bedside.
Marriosan has been reassigned from the Bloodmoons, but Nissa hasn’t.
Whatever briefings she receives while still laid up in the hospital wing, we’ll hear. ”
A calculated pretext; a play within a play.
Saffron also wanted to break into the Order because she’d just been handed a second chance at reclaiming her father’s letter.
Nissa had helped her before, with the intel on Zares, with the tracing spell.
She might be willing to help with this too, especially if she saw how badly Saffron was hurting, how much danger her former lover was in, how much solace this lost correspondence might bring her.
Levan studied the conch shells. “And if you’re caught?”
The temptation was strong, then, to say, lend me your mother’s weaverwick and we won’t have to worry about that. But the time still wasn’t right; he did not yet trust her enough to conduct a single conversation without his presence, let alone grant her a wand powerful enough to unmake his world.
She shrugged. “I’ll weather that storm if it breaks.”
“How?”
“You remember my little trick with the mattermantic illusions? I’ve spent the day filling my well. If worse comes to worst, I have enough power to escape.”
A hooked brow. “And how, exactly, did you refill your well?”
Pleasured myself while picturing you pinned to a table with a shard of deminite.
“Hot chocolate.”
As though to torment her, he stretched his arms over his head, joints crunching and clicking in the usual manner of a thirty-something.
The movement lifted his black tunic high enough to expose a tight strip of stomach.
Saffron tried and failed to avert her gaze, wondering, not for the first time, why all the danger and subterfuge made her so hellsdamned aroused.
She would have immense difficulty not immediately straddling Nissa upon arrival.
“Are you nervous?” Levan asked, oblivious to her plight. “It’s the first time you’ve returned to the Order since your unceremonious dismissal.”
“Only about getting caught.”
Another half truth. She was most afraid that Nissa would refuse to help.
Not in terms of handling Saffron’s case going forward—the dragonesque Wielder would want to ensure her former lover’s safety—but in terms of searching for Joran Killoran’s letter.
Without Nissa, Saffron would be out of avenues, both to hear her father’s parting words and to potentially uncover the location of an heirloom weaverwick.
Without that letter, she’d have to find a weaverwick another way, though she certainly wouldn’t be returning to Mersina or the Vari Merkt anytime soon.
Unfortunately, the Silvercloaks were good at shutting down black markets on home soil, but other nations might be fruitful.
Certainly not Bellandry, a country of devout Augurests who loathed Timeweavers more than was strictly necessary.
And likely not the Eastern Republics—they curved around the outside of Bellandry like a crone’s bonnet, and the religion’s influence had long since seeped across their borders.
Nyr?th held more promise, if From Sacred to Sacrosanct held any muster, but Vallish citizens did not have the right to travel there, and the Steel King tended to execute trespassers on sight.
The icy ruler was something of an enigma, his motivations known to very few on the continent, his correspondence scant and—
Wait.
His correspondence.
Several things coalesced in Saffron’s mind at once.
The first time she’d set foot in this very office, terrified of Lyrian Celadon and the branding poker in his crooked hands, she’d noticed a handwritten letter on the squat mahogany desk—signed by the Steel King of Nyr?th.
At the time she had written it off as a forgery, but what if the Bloodmoons really were in contact with the tundral north? Relations between Vallin and Nyr?th had been hostile ever since the Dreadreign, since the dragons fled the continent for the Haeldrekys Peaks.
So why would Lyrian Celadon, of all people, have an open line of communication?
As Levan lectured her on necessary precautions, Saff surreptitiously scanned the office for any sign of that old correspondence.
Levan had cleared the desk of eyeballs and envelopes when he’d taken over, and she had no idea where he might have stashed his late father’s letters.
Her pulse quickened, mind reeling, a sense of significance taking shape.
The Steel King had something the Bloodmoons wanted: access to the dragons who’d turned their backs on the Rezarans centuries ago.
The former kingpin had been so besotted with the beasts that he’d frequently cast illusions of them in his office, and the hallways of the mansion were adorned with murals of dragonback battles.
She thought of a passage of From Sacred to Sacrosanct:
The winged beasts are rumored to reside in the Haeldrekys Peaks to the east of the tundral nation. None but the holder of the Steel Throne is privy to the terms of this agreement.
A cold, prickly sensation spread from the base of her neck to the hollow between her shoulder blades.
It was a common tavern theory that the winged beasts were biding their time in the far north, plotting with the Steel Throne to take the southerly lands by force, but such worries had been popular for several centuries with little in the way of evidence.
Yes, the Steel Throne had a brutal and fast-growing military.
Yes, they had the dragons on their side.
But would those things be enough to conquer such an enormous swath of land? Bellandry stood between Nyr?th and Vallin, but Bellandry was a peaceful, pious country under the rule of Queen Vune—not too difficult for a wielder corps and a dragon infantry to ravage.
And once they had Bellandry…
The border between Bellandry and Vallin was long, porous, mostly unmanned, almost entirely blanketed by the Havenwood.
The Nyr?thi could cross en masse without much resistance.
The Great Wards of Atherin, however, were all but impenetrable.
King Quintan had almost bankrupted the throne to make it so.
All at once, it became very clear what the Bloodmoons might have to offer the Steel King: the power to destroy Atherin from the inside while external forces laid siege to the wards.
The ice trickling down Saffron’s spine intensified.
Perhaps it didn’t quite make sense. The Bloodmoons wanted the Vallish crown for themselves, to install the late Lorissa Rezaran in her purportedly rightful place, so why would they cede it to the Nyr?thi?
Unless the Nyr?thi didn’t want the throne, but rather to ensure its holder’s interests aligned with their own.
Though this might simply be an exercise in wild conjecture—Lyrian could have been conversing with the Steel King about their favorite brands of bivkar—Saffron’s blood hummed with adrenaline.
If she could prove the Bloodmoons were colluding with a foreign power against their own throne… forget organized crime.
This was treason. Enough to destroy the scarlets forever.
Would she expose such a thing, if she had the opportunity? If she found that letter from the Steel King, would she hand it over to the Silvercloaks and let the Bloodmoons burn?
Until a few weeks ago, nothing would have given her greater joy. Yet in doing so, the Bloodmoon fortunes would be seized by the government. She would lose access to the vast quantities of ascenite that would make it possible to wind back the decades and save her parents.
All the threads of possibility braided and knotted together.
Maybe she could seize the letter from the Steel King and take it back in time with her.
That way she could save her parents, then take down the Bloodmoons in that alternate version of reality.
If she did it before Levan came of age, became involved in their affairs, he might well be spared. Taken into care. Saved.
As she rose from her chair, tucked the conch shells into her pocket, and nodded farewell to the new kingpin, her vision pitched sideways, vertiginous from lingering blood loss and the scale of the decisions ahead of her.
What started as a personal vendetta was quickly spiraling into a series of events that could shape wars, could skew the fate of the world.
And truth be told, she enjoyed the feeling of power at her fingertips.
Saffron’s break-in plan depended upon three assumptions.
First, that Nissa’s condition was precarious enough to still be in the hospital wing.
Second, that the first thing she would’ve done upon waking was demand a freshly rolled achullah, which the Healers would expressly forbid.
Third, that this would fuel Nissa’s ire to such a severe degree—hers was an anger quick to flame and hard to douse—that the Healers would eventually relent, under the condition that the window remained propped open and Nissa hung out of it to smoke, so as not to fill the lungs of the other patients.
As Saffron arrived outside the hospital wing in the dead of night, she couldn’t help but smile at the sight of the window standing ajar.
Levan watched Saffron enter the precinct from a hundred yards away.
Grimly, he lifted the third conch shell to his ear.
He’d pursued Saffron to the Cherrymarket that morning—had been compulsively watching her ever since the Vari Merkt, partly in case she needed his protection, partly because he still did not trust her.
After she’d left the stall selling the enchanted shells, he’d paid the merchant an unsaintly amount of ascens to cast the same magic on another conch, to link it with the two he’d just sold the silver-haired mage.
Through its ear-like shape, Saffron’s quickened breathing was crisp and clean and unmistakable. Whatever happened in that hospital wing, he would be listening.