Chapter 39 Dragontail
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Dragontail
Not long after Saffron returned to her chambers with the Steel King’s stolen letter, there was a knock. Stuffing the pilfered correspondence hastily into the trunk at the end of her bed, she padded to the door and opened it.
Levan stood on the other side, still filmy from the invisibility tincture, holding her father’s letter in his golden hand.
The envelope read For My Darling Saffron.
Tears sprang to her eyes, hot and sudden, and she threw her arms around Levan.
“Thank you,” she murmured into the crook between his neck and shoulder, letting the warm, salty tears fall onto his bare skin, and though he was stiff beneath her, she heard the rapid beat of his heart before she pulled away. “Read it with me?”
Levan’s now-empty hand clenched at his side. “Are you sure?”
“Well, let me read it myself first. But…stay with me. You deserve to know, to understand, after you risked so much to bring it to me.” A gulp of dread. “How did it go? Was anyone—”
“No casualties.” He grimaced, and she only just noticed the fragile way he was holding himself, one hip higher than the other, his heels tentative on the ground. “I got—Naszi burned me. Nothing I can’t heal once I’ve refilled my well.”
So Nissa had been there. Saff didn’t know whether to feel relieved that her former lover was alright, guilty for putting her in harm’s way, or angry that she’d actively attempted to keep the letter from Saffron.
“I don’t like that you’re hurting because of me,” she said softly.
A dark, deep emotion roiled behind his eyes, and Saffron thought maybe he was thinking of all the other ways she had wounded him, but all he did was take a step into the room, close the door, and rest his head back against it.
“Read your letter,” he muttered, fatigue weighing the words down. It was past dawn, and neither of them had slept. “I’ll be right here.”
Heart thumping manically, Saffron crossed to her bed, perched on the very edge, and opened the long-sealed envelope. At the sight of her father’s handwriting, an old pain swelled behind her ribs.
My Darling Saffron,
If you’re reading this, it means I’m gone. And I’m so sorry for that, but in truth, I’m also relieved.
Becoming a parent means agreeing to spend the rest of your life afraid.
Nothing terrifies me more than the prospect of losing you—of having to live without you.
Selfishly, I am glad you have outlived me.
It is the proper order of things. But I also know how much you adore your mother and me, and I know it must be so painful for you to have to say goodbye.
Though it is never truly goodbye, my darling.
I am there in every beat of your heart. I am you, and you are me. You will never be alone.
Saffron’s body reacted to the words even as her mind was still processing, and she fought the urge to whimper like a little girl.
Still, there is much I never told you—much you were too young to know. I trust that this letter has been withheld from you until the right moment, that the mage I entrusted it to knew that moment when it arrived.
So let us start there, shall we? With the mage who held this letter, and all the myriad ways our lives and fates were intertwined—but also perpetually at odds.
Before either of us emigrated to Vallin, Elodora Aspar and I were part of an ancient order in the Bellandrian region of Tourden. This order was dedicated to the retrieval of the Fifth Prophecy, which was rumored to have been lost in the Old Forest.
Most of Sarcane’s Order was comprised of Augurests dedicated to eradicating Timeweavers, to serving their foreseeing ancestors.
Elodora Aspar was one such mage, always so devout, always so hungry for that Fifth Prophecy.
But I wanted to find the Fifth Prophecy for a very different reason: because I was a Timeweaver myself.
There it was. Her father, not her mother.
The Fourth Prophecy, cast by the Augur Emalin, foretold that the Augurests would succeed in eradicating most of my kind, but that a few Timeweavers would slip through the cracks.
That the Augurests would have to remain vigilant for centuries after their initial conquest, awaiting the second uprising.
My ancestral line was one that slipped through such cracks.
But there were rumors from scholars of old that that Fifth Augur, Sarcane, foretold that the few remaining Timeweavers would prevent a world war, saving many millions of lives, and would therefore be redeemed.
One scholar even posited that the Augurests of several hundred years ago willingly destroyed the Fifth Prophecy to justify their continued slaughter of my kind.
You can see, then, why I wanted so badly to recover it.
The Order labored in vain, for the most part, and was eventually disbanded for political reasons I won’t bore you with.
I met your mother and moved to northern Vallin, while unbeknownst to me, Elodora Aspar also emigrated south of the border.
She worked as a missionary, at first, to spread the good word of the Augurs to the secular and the Saints-inclined, but after witnessing a spate of violent crimes against fellow Augurests, she moved into policing, so that she could create a safer country for any Augurest to thrive in.
The two of us were reunited in Atherin a few years later, when your wonderful mother was nominated for the Vallish Distinction Prize.
Aspar attended the ceremony in her silver cloak, and over several bottles of honeywine (long after your mother retired for the night), we confessed we were still haunted by the location of the Fifth Prophecy, if indeed it endured.
We plotted to keep searching for it in secret.
Aspar fed me leads from her police work, her missionary practice, and her remaining contacts in Tourden, and I used my dual citizenship to cross the border into Bellandry and pursue said leads.
We even had code names—I was Dragontail, and she was Velclaw.
On one occasion she accompanied me on a mission, and a pack of ascenite bandits almost killed her for her earrings.
She was badly wounded, but I got her back to Lunes in time for your mother to heal her.
After that I worked alone, and it was perhaps for the best, given our conflicting reasons for wanting the Fifth Prophecy in the first place.
Over the course of a decade, I gathered close to a hundred relic wands, but never the Fifth Prophecy itself. Yet the contents of those relic wands…that is why I am writing to you today. Because many of those relic wands contained prophecies about you.
Imagine my shock, when I saw my daughter in a scarlet Bloodmoon cloak—older, but unmistakably my Saffron.
Imagine my shock, when I saw you kneeling over the dead body of Elodora Aspar.
Imagine my shock, when I saw you fire a killing curse at King Quintan himself.
I kept many of the most incriminating relic wands from Aspar, of course. But those images haunt me, Saffron. I have to trust that you were doing all of this for a greater purpose. That the fate of the continent, the fate of Ascenfall, was in your hands. That you had no other choice.
What I never told Aspar was that I did find the Fifth Prophecy—or at the very least, its last known location.
I knew that going after it could cost my life, and look, call me a coward, but you’re six years old right now, and you’re curled up on the couch under your mother’s knitted blanket, and in your patchy slumber you’re making these soft snuffling sounds.
And tell me, honestly, how I could give up such wonder for something so trivial as the fate of the world?
My love for you has made a coward of me, it’s true. But it has also, I hope, protected you.
I know two things have tortured you over these last few months. The first is your perceived lack of magic, the way the old wandmaker shunned you. You have magic aplenty, Saffron. It’s just the kind our world had been taught to abhor.
The second is your curious magical immunity.
A gift from me—perhaps the most important one I’ll ever give.
I sacrificed most of my own well to grant it to you.
Those fateful words of medei perpetua were both the easiest and hardest I’ve ever cast. In an instant, I became half as powerful and twice as happy.
And now, instead of running dangerous missions over the border and risking leaving you without a father, I use what’s left of my well to enchant our little house in a thousand delightful ways.
Because seeing your joy gives me immense pleasure, and in turn replenishes my own well.
The most glorious cycle. Parenthood is a superpower, in that sense—your child’s joy returns to you a thousandfold.
All any parent ever wants is for the world to be kind to their child.
If you’re reading this, that hope has failed.
But I also hope that the protection I have granted you—the magical immunity you so resent—keeps you that little bit safer.
Because though my passing will mean the severance of my medei perpetua, will mean that my protection falls, the magic will transfer to another.
Another who’ll willingly sacrifice his own magic to protect you from ill.
Which brings me to the final thing I need to tell you.
I want you to retrieve the Fifth Prophecy, Saffron, because I believe it’s about you. I want you to redeem our kind and prevent the world war Sarcane once foretold.
And isn’t this just the most outrageous exercise in hypocrisy and contradiction you’ve ever read?
I would stop at nothing to keep you from harm’s way, yet here I am, ushering you off on the dangerous mission I myself shied away from.
But I already know you go on this mission, because I have seen it.
I have seen you take drastic action against the Crown.
I have seen you journey through the Forest of Lost Souls in search of this final wand.
I already know that trying to talk you into a safer life would fail, and so the best I can do is equip you for the quest.
The Fifth Prophecy is hidden in a tidal cave off the Cinereal Sea, notched in the bay overlooked by the northernmost Bellandrian town of Flarence.
Ancient wards protect the entrance, but I was never able to locate the corresponding wardholders.
It is possible to succeed, though. Sarcane wouldn’t want the prophecy never to be found, since it’s an important piece in the great puzzle of saving the world.
No, he would want it to be found by the right mage.
And so I’m hoping that when you get there, you’ll know what to do.
I don’t want to end this letter, darling girl.
I don’t want you to run out of words from me.
I don’t want to leave you behind in this world, and I certainly don’t—oh, Saints, I’m weeping on the parchment now, but I cannot start over, and so you’ll have to forgive the smudged ink.
You’ll have to touch the place where the words have smeared and the parchment has gone thin, and you’ll have to know that there lies proof of your father’s love for you.
Because I love you, Saffron. More than anything, and no matter what.
Yours always,
Dad
Saffron could barely see through the hot salt of her tears.
There was so much to take in, too much, the fate of the world and the slaying of the king and the resolution of a major religious quandary, the origins of her magical immunity and the confirmation that her weaving had been her father’s, and yet all Saffron could think was Dad, Dad, Dad.
It’s you, after so long. Come back to me, Dad.
“Are you finished?” Levan asked, now sitting beside her on the bed, not peering over at the letter but staring intently at her face.
And suddenly, there was nothing she wanted to do more than tell Levan everything. She needed to discuss all of this with someone, and so why not him?
She had been keeping the Timeweaving from him because she didn’t know how he’d react, and because she didn’t want him to figure out that she’d originally betrayed him in the Havenwood.
She didn’t want him to perceive her as a threat to his mother’s birthright throne, and she didn’t want him to eviscerate her accordingly.
But now it was all so much bigger than that.
If her father was right, Timeweavers were pivotal to the prevention of a world war.
So what if she became not just Levan’s enemy, not just a lover, but an ally? Someone who wanted exactly what he did: redemption for Timeweavers, for his mother, and for herself. Someone who wanted to save Ascenfall in the process.
If they worked together, Levan could come with her to Bellandry—Saints knew she’d need the support, if the mission was so dangerous even her experienced field agent of a father was apprehensive about fulfilling it.
They could find the Fifth Prophecy together, figure out how to move forward—or rather backward.
Perhaps Levan, who’d had trouble finding a necromancer willing to even try to raise his parents, might agree that the best plan of action was to unwind all the way back to the night their parents died and change the course of history.
Perhaps that was how she saved the continent.
Perhaps they were already heading for the brutal world war, and the only way to prevent it was to redo the last twenty years.
There was much the letter did not reveal, of course.
Saffron had been hoping for details of her lineage—was she indeed highborn, a true contender for the throne?
Had her father’s ancestors slipped over the border into Bellandry generations ago, forsaking their Vallish claim in the name of survival?
—but her father had remained vague on the subject.
And if Joran Killoran knew of an heirloom weaverwick hidden beneath some unassuming floorboard, he had not shared it with his daughter.
Flarence was a stone’s throw from the Rapier, a narrow blade of land leading up to Nyr?th. Perhaps Saffron could slip over the border and find a weaverwick while hunting down the Fifth Prophecy. Kill two ravens with one rock.
Saffron’s heart fluttered as she looked up at Levan.
Their goals and purposes, which had always chafed against each other, now clicked into alignment.
And if it all went south, she had the letter from the Steel King.
Providing the kingpin didn’t kill her between one minute and the next, she could take it to the Silvercloaks, have herself extracted from the Bloodmoons, and pursue the Fifth Prophecy on her own.
Two possible paths, both risky, both arduous, with ravines on either side so steep that if she fell off course, she would die. But two paths nonetheless.
Saffron wiped her salt-streaked face on the arm of her cloak and handed Levan the letter.