Chapter 38 Two Letters #2
He still cared. And here she was, betraying him once more.
But if evidence of Bloodmoon collusion with the Steel King existed, she needed to secure it. A card so powerful it would lead to her extraction, if she needed it to.
The minutes rolled into the dozens, however, and she still couldn’t find it—not stuffed into the desk drawers, nor tucked into any of the ledgers. She was running a palm behind the picture frames on the black-paneled walls when an awful sound echoed through the main door.
Footsteps. An unfamiliar voice, muttering, cursing.
She moved fast enough that the curtain folded around her—smelling of dust and blood and smoke—just as the door opened inward.
A shuffle of footsteps and fabric, then a thump.
Detective’s instincts firing, she peered around the drape.
An unfamiliar mage stood behind the desk, his back to Saffron, wearing the pale blue cloak of a scholar or an apothecary.
Dark, shoulder-length hair was pulled back into a low bun, and an eagle-shaped earring dangled from one lobe.
His frame was rangy, narrow in the wings where Levan was broad, and he stood with an uncertain stoop, muttering incoherently to himself.
On the desk sat the severed head of Sando Segal.
Levan surveyed the hospital wing with fatigued satisfaction.
He had transmuted blood and strengthened atrophied muscles. He had healed a bedsore that had been missed, and even tried to compel an unconscious mind into letting go of its cripplingly anxious thoughts, though he had no idea whether that one would take.
His well was low, but magic was heeding him once again.
Not for the first time in his life, he wished he could replenish as simply as Saffron could—a hot cocoa, the silky breath of a velvine upon his throat—but when one of the purple-eyed felines tried to purr pleasure over him, it felt hollow, unearned.
Little power trickled back into his well.
Yet now, observing the good he had done…
Concerning, how suddenly the pleasure gushed into him. The first joy to cut through the pain since he had lain in bed with Silver, wrist throbbing, heart softening.
With a final sweeping glance over the beds, he exited the hospital wing and began his search for the captain’s office.
He did not see the curtain around Nissa Naszi’s bed flicker and part.
Auria sat cross-legged on the floor of the Order common room, hunched over a low coffee table as she finalized her notes from that evening’s stakeout of the Whitewing drophouse.
Though the string of night shifts was weighing her down, stinging at her eyes, leadening her bones, she tried to finish off her writing before she fell into bed at sunrise.
The dying coals of a fire glowed in the creamstone hearth.
Several velvines curled up in crescent balls on squashy velvet sofas, and portraits of former Silvercloak commissioners adorned the walls.
Arched windows encircled the entire room, and beyond them the inky dark was softening to indigo over the Atherin skyline.
A nascent migraine swelled behind Auria’s eye sockets like a palm pressed against a bruise. She frowned at her notes, painstakingly scratched out with her best quill. For the first time, she had something meaningful to report, and it filled her with dread.
A few hours prior, she had watched as a scarlet mage had been levitated, unconscious, into the Whitewing drophouse.
The limp figure had been accompanied by two female mages in white and a young, lanky boy in a pale blue scholar’s cloak, often chosen by apothecaries and librarians as well as academics.
When Auria had plucked her binoculars from the windowsill and taken a closer look, she’d spotted a golden eagle earring dangling from his earlobe.
The enchanted binoculars were sharp enough to pick out the exact pitch of the bird’s raised wings, the curved talons, and the keen glare on its narrow face.
There was something so familiar about the shape of the eagle, but she couldn’t pinpoint it.
Not fifteen minutes later, the King’s Prophet had entered the drophouse once more.
The second time she’d seen him there. He walked in dragging his heels, as though he’d rather be anywhere else, and left not long after, disappearing back down the street and out of sight—but not before staring up at the exact place where Auria herself sat.
Though she’d shrunk back into the shadows, she’d been left with the disquieting sense that he knew exactly who lurked behind that window and why.
Moments later, the boy in blue left the drophouse alone, carrying a sack in one hand, a wand in the other, and a petrified expression on his face.
Auria transcribed the events with painstaking detail, but her handwriting had deteriorated over the last hour, and so she decided to redo it. If there was one thing in this world she could not tolerate, it was sloppy penmanship.
She’d just rested the tip of the quill on a fresh piece of parchment when the door to the common room opened of its own accord.
Auria would ordinarily have sighed, crossed the circular room, and pressed it shut again, but her body recognized the threat before her mind caught up. Every hair on her body stood on end, and the feeling of sharp, cold fingers raked down her back. She stood, shaking, and drew her wand.
She was not alone in this room.
A mage strode through it with silenced boots and imperfect invisibility, a smear, an outline, an interruption of light and shadow. A foreign scent, lemon and mint and leather, cut through woodsmoke and parchment like a scythe.
“Sen effigias,” Auria hissed, shooting a statue curse at the intruder, but the shape kept moving toward her.
Fear seized her, a sharp, hot shock straight to the veins.
The migraine aura warped and eddied the common room around her, streaking the red and gold and blue into an oil painting, and as the intruder stepped through the layers of depth and color, Auria felt as though she’d stepped into a fever dream. A vivid, surreal hallucination.
She took several steps back until her spine pressed against a portrait of the late Captain Mathar Wilsat, who very closely resembled a badger.
Willingly shoving her own back against a wall was pure idiocy—she should’ve found cover, ducked behind a couch, but all her physical training deserted her. It had never been her strong suit.
Although in truth, it wouldn’t have been enough to save her.
Within moments, the heat of a body entered the airspace directly in front of her.
The sharp edge of a blade found her exposed throat.
A male voice, deathly quiet, said, “Tell me where to find the office of Captain Vel Karvas.”
Fear hardening into resolve, Auria took a deep, steadying breath, felt the air swell in her lungs, knowing that it might be the last time.
“No.”
The head of Sando Segal was a grotesque thing, severed magically from the neck so that the stump was perfectly smooth and bloodless.
His eyes were peeled wide with shock and fury, the dull whites spidered with blood vessels, and his rodent-like mouth hung slightly open.
Once-ruddy skin was pale and empty, and a smear of dried blood streaked along his cheekbone like a wound.
Saffron felt nothing.
This was the mage who’d killed her parents. This was the mage who’d caught her snooping through a ledger and almost killed her too. This was a mage who’d already died and Risen, a mage who’d been privy to the worst moments of her life.
And she felt nothing.
Not gratification, not horror or revulsion.
She watched with an outsider’s detachment as the intruder ceased his muttering and crossed to the fireplace, glaring at the instruments on the poker rack. He was shockingly young—a smattering of acne, a brightness to the complexion, the feeble beginnings of a beard.
His chestnut-brown eyes narrowed as he plucked two of the instruments from the rack: the branding stamp and a long poker. He crossed back to the desk, rolled Segal’s head so that the dead man looked up at the ceiling, then jammed the poker through an eye socket with a sickening squelch.
The intruder tucked the branding stamp into a burlap sack, then left the office without a backward glance at the brutalized head of Levan’s right-hand mage.
Levan could not fathom the idea that Auria Marriosan, who had failed torture training, who was not known for her courage, would defy him under threat of death. The refusal was so unexpected that it took him several seconds to understand the word no.
“You know what the scarlet rot are capable of,” he muttered darkly. “What I’m capable of. What happens to people who say no.”
“No,” repeated Auria, a shining dignity to her stare. Bravery layered over grief, desperate sadness layered over a moral code so rigid that neither blackmail nor mortal peril could bend it.
And that was fine. Victims often held their head high and refused a command, even at the cost of their own life, but quickly caved when their loved ones were threatened. Auria had two sisters, two mothers, and a grandmother she cared for deeply. Those were the strings to pull.
Yet before he could pull anything, there was another voice at the open door to the common room.
Female, smoky, murderous.
“If you’re going to sneak around under the guise of an invisibility elixir,” purred Nissa Naszi, “you might want to use a milder soap.”
Shock peeled Auria’s shiny-marble eyes wide. “Nissa, who is this mage?”
“Levan Celadon.” Nissa stood just over the threshold into the common room, barefoot, feral-faced.
“The one who tried to kill me on the docks—and the one who, by all accounts, brought me back from the brink.” She smiled coyly in Levan’s vague direction.
“I enjoyed all the healing you did back in the hospital wing. Paliran will be so pleased to learn of their redundancy. Do you often atone for your sins prior to committing them?”