Chapter 37 Triple-Crossing
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Triple-Crossing
As Levan tailed Saffron back into the city center, the crypt-silence of night making way for tavern brawls and moans of pleasure, the blue shroud of darkness making way for ruby and sapphire and gold, he felt his conviction slip.
She would have to die.
He would have to kill her.
But Saints, he did not want to.
He should have done it the second she emerged from that window, should have slit her throat outside the Order and left her corpse for her former—current?
—colleagues to find, but he couldn’t force his body to move the way he needed it to.
Knowing that his faltering magic meant he’d have to do it by hand, by blade and blood, made the act seem altogether more horrifying.
Segal’s cutting assessment drifted back to him.
Your fool’s instincts almost cost us everything with Alucia Martou, and you have learned nothing since. Saffron Killoran is proof of that.
There was a wound at the very heart of him, a wound borne from his mother’s death, from his brother’s departure and his father’s years of torture: the desire to be loved.
Cared for, made human. And this wound had festered for so long that it might never heal, might always represent weakness, might always offer his enemies a place into which to drive a dagger.
Time to cauterize it.
There was barely another soul on the streets as they entered the apothecary district, where an entrance to the Bloodmoon compound was concealed in an abandoned shop on Beakpeck Place.
The Temple of Augur Amuilly towered pale and purple to their right, a neat row of old shops notched to their left.
A trickier place to leave a dead body, more suspicious than the debauched Broad Row or Jewel Boulevard.
They were approaching Beakpeck Place too quickly. Levan had to pounce on Saffron now—he couldn’t kill her too close to Zamollan’s. The Silvercloaks were staking it out around the clock.
He sped up suddenly enough, loudly enough, that Saffron spun on her heel at the sound of his footsteps, wand outstretched, confusion painted on her beautiful, infuriating face.
Levan grabbed her by the outstretched wrist, yanking it behind her back and shoving her into an alley just off Velclaw Street. He slammed her against a rough creamstone wall and pressed a dagger against her pale, vulnerable throat, thinking of their very beginnings in an alley just like this one.
“It’s over, Silver,” he said, pinning her in place. “This ends here.”
To her credit, she swallowed hard against the nip of the blade but held her nerve. “What are you talking about?”
His teeth were grinding together so hard he felt it in his temples. “You told Naszi I’d found out about your assignment—that I wanted you to slip her false intel. You would not have done that were you truly loyal to me.”
Fear flashed in her eyes. “You were listening.”
“And I was right to do so.” Levan pushed the knife more deeply into her throat, the flesh almost but not quite parting.
“Sen vertigloran,” she hissed, her wand pressed against his hip bone.
He staggered back, dizzied, grabbing for a wall and failing to find it, knee slamming into the cobbles.
And he couldn’t use his magic to fight back.
If he was going to kill her, the knife would have to find her throat, her temple, her heart. All that work saving her in Aredan just to cut the same fate into her a week later.
Kicking out a boot in search of her shin, he found plain air as she incanted, “Et esilan.”
Her boots sprung up like jack-in-the-boxes, and she sailed over his head, landing behind him and jabbing her wand against the back of his skull.
“Sen debilitan.”
The spell landed true, and his body froze, paralyzed, rooted to the spot.
Levan focused all the intention in his magical well on breaking free, the way Miret taught him. It was deeply costly to do so, everything in him straining against the magical bonds holding him in place, but soon they dropped. At least he could still do that.
He spun on one foot faster than Saffron could parry, jabbing his dagger upward in search of flesh. She spun away from the attack, throwing up a shimmering spellshield. Her arm trembled, as though holding up armor too heavy for her frame.
Clambering to his feet, Levan’s mind whirred with the effort of deciding his next move.
Saffron studied him like a curiosity in a museum.
He flung his dagger at her face. She dodged it in a split second, and the blade found the alley wall behind her.
“Why aren’t you casting back?” she demanded. “You could just compel me to stop. If you really wanted me dead, I already would be.”
Saying nothing, he circled, forcing her to turn on her heels, to keep the shield lifted in front of her body. A few seconds later, he’d rotated far enough around to rip the dagger from the wall.
Saffron looked afraid now, realizing that the next time he hurled it in her direction, she might not be fast enough to dodge. “Levan, why would I betray you when I’ve already given you evidence of my own murderous activities? The second you turn all that over, I’m in chains.”
“You must take me for a fool,” he seethed.
While watching Saffron descend from that open window, Levan had finally figured out her long-term play. She was going to secure evidence against the Bloodmoons, then she was going to turn back time to before she murdered that Whitewing and wrote her confession letter—taking the evidence with her.
But she didn’t have the requisite weaverwick wand yet, which was why he had to slay her before she could secure one, before she could unmake everything. Again.
“Take you for a fool? What—”
He raised the dagger. “This ends now, Silver.”
Saffron let out an argh of frustration, dropped her mattermantic shield, and lunged for Levan—an elbow hooked toward his temple, sharp and fast but easy to spot a mile off.
He slammed up a forearm to block it, and she used her other hand to grab his wounded wrist—hard.
So hard it felt like the bone had been pulverized to dust, like a thousand bolts of lightning fired straight into the stump.
He dropped the knife, and a gasp wrenched loose without permission. The magic in his well swirled, pulsed, became pure, metallic, strong enough to heal the most mortal of wounds.
Yet he still could not use it to kill her.
“Sen debilitan,” she incanted once more, and his body stilled, but she was diminished now, and the shackles of the spell were easier to shake free from.
She used the split seconds of his struggle to talk.
“If you were listening, you already know the truth of why I was willing to say anything to get Nissa to pity me. Because there’s a letter from my father. For me.”
Levan knelt to retrieve the knife, stood tall again.
Said nothing.
“My dad left it in Aspar’s custody, but she perished before she could tell me where to find it.
Whether it’s under the care of the new captain, or whether it’s rotting in some distant vault.
I thought Nissa might be sympathetic enough to my cause—trapped in a criminal organization whose kingpin knows me to be a turncloak and thus wants me dead—that she’d help me retrieve it. ”
“You knew doggedly pursuing this letter would endanger your life.” Levan clenched the handle of the dagger so hard his knuckles stretched white. “That it would cast suspicion over your movements, give me ample reason to doubt you.”
Those doe-like eyes were still wide and shining with fear, but also with something else, something sad and young and lost. “You wouldn’t do the same, if you knew your mother had written you such a letter?”
The painful twist low in his chest confirmed as much.
He thought of how it felt to stand over his mother’s fresh corpse, his brother weeping and pleading, his father forming ruinous plans to slip over the border and threaten Mellora Killoran into raising the body from the dead.
He thought of the fact that after that night, Saffron did not speak again for over half a decade—not until she read the Lost Dragonborn books, the story that had saved him too.
He thought of his own mother telling him, as she prayed over her Saints stones, that he was everything she wanted this world to be.
He thought of how far he had strayed from that.
He thought of what it would mean to him to have a letter from her, of how it might have kept him from this ruinous path.
He thought of slumping over Saffron’s blood-soaked body in Aredan, begging her to wake.
“Levan,” Saffron whispered, sensing his faltering resolve, the cracks in his armor carved by the matching contours of their pain. “I just want to hear his voice one last time.”
Levan’s thoughts spun like the symbols on the gamehouse’s elemental slot machines. “And if this letter made it into your possession,” he said slowly, “you’d stop with the double-crossing?”
“I think it’s triple-crossing at this point,” she quipped, unable to quell her sarcasm even with daggers flying.
“Are the Order headquarters warded?”
She shook her head. “They rely on the strength of their guards.”
“Seems like an oversight.”
“Wards are costly, and the number of mages willing to give up their wells to hold them is shrinking every year. My uncle Merin would say this level of self-interest and lack of national pride is evidence of a decadent civilization, that the fall of Atherin is nigh.”
At the reference to her uncle, the jocular tone slid out of her voice. She hitched on his name, and by the end of the sentence, her throat seemed to have clammed up.
Levan lowered the knife, his breath steadying at last. “I’ll get you that letter.”
Maybe they could mend this, after all, and she wouldn’t have to die, and he wouldn’t have to cauterize the wound inside him.
Or maybe Segal was right, and his fool’s heart would be the end of the Bloodmoons.
The prospect seemed, at that moment, too abstract to be troubling.
The only real thing was the shine of Saffron’s grief-stricken eyes.
But at the suggestion, Saffron visibly hardened with suspicion, as though he were playing a cruel trick on her emotions. “Why?”
“You have lost so much because of me.” He dropped the dagger entirely, its hilt clattering to the flagstones. “Because of my family.”
She stared and stared, searching him for the but, then, when it did not come, she softened slowly, eventually nodded.
“The truth is that I’m keeping things from you still—things that will forever change the way you see me.
Things I’ve been waiting to share with you, because our trust is still so fragile.
But I don’t think it can wait any longer.
” She swallowed hard, wiping away the tears beading along her lashes.
“If you bring me that letter, I’ll tell you everything. ”