Chapter 40 Brittle as Glass
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Brittle as Glass
Levan had never read anything so raptly as that letter.
When he finished, a kernel of raw emotion glowed hot inside him—hot enough that the savage burn on his side paled in comparison.
The traitorous mage who had upended his life might very well upend the fate of the world, and he had no idea how to process such an idea.
Yet Saffron had handed him the truth on a platter.
Unvarnished, untampered with, unobscured.
That meant something.
“I need you to come with me,” she said quietly. Her hazel eyes were bloodshot and sore. “To Flarence, to the warded cave off the Cinereal Sea.”
“Why?” The mattress felt unstable beneath him.
“As my father said, it’s likely to be highly dangerous. You’re the most powerful mage I’ve ever met.”
Levan snorted. “A glorified bodyguard.”
But instead of meeting his snark with her usual chirpy sarcasm, Saffron shook her head slowly, meaningfully. “You think that’s all you are to me?”
He bowed his head, unable to meet her gaze.
Of course he would go with her. He needed to know what that Fifth Prophecy said—it was relevant to his mother’s line too, after all, and could spell redemption for all Timeweavers.
It could smooth the path to Lorissa’s rule, as could Saffron herself.
After all, Joran Killoran had seen her fire a killing curse at King Quintan.
What if she was critical to the coup that would win back the throne for his family?
Excitement and dread mired together, sucking like quicksand in his gut.
He didn’t want to need her. His pride could not handle such a thing.
“Levan…” She spoke softly, but not sweetly.
There was a charged darkness beneath the words.
“There’s something else. I learned I was a Timeweaver only a few weeks ago, in your father’s office.
He discovered that I murdered Vogolan, started firing killing curses at me—I used praegelos to try to flee, but Rasso kept whining at the golden hourglass.
I finally slotted it together and unmade time far enough to rewrite the conversation and keep my cover.
“Ever since then…I’ve wondered if there might be a better way to bring both of our parents back.
That’s why I returned after Rasso freed me from the cell.
That’s why I’ve genuinely switched allegiances from silver to scarlet.
Because I need all the ascenite I can get if I’m going to save my family.
Your family.” Her voice was honeyed with emotion.
“And isn’t it better this way? It’s too late for mine to be Risen—they’re already jewels—and I think deep down you don’t want that for yours either.
The permanent draining of the magical well, the inability to feel pain or pleasure or anything else that makes them human. ”
Levan’s mind wheeled. “You’re saying…no. Surely it’s not possible.”
Saffron leaned forward, a chilling fervor in her eyes.
“I am powerful, Levan. More so than I ever imagined. And with all the ascenite in the Bloodmoons’ possession, with Rasso at my heel…
maybe that’s what the Fifth Prophecy relates to.
I stop a world war by unmaking the timeline that was hurtling toward it.
And in doing so, I save both of our parents. ”
Longing yanked through him like a rope, like they were playing tug-of-war with their greatest hopes and she was winning. “It’s been twenty-one years. No mage’s well can run that deep.”
“But what if it could?”
Levan rapped out the repetitive rhythm on his knuckles, slightly afraid of the clenched feeling in his chest. “The night my mother died, my brother followed her to a bank raid in Almere. His presence distracted her at the wrong moment and cost her her life. All it would take is making sure he didn’t pursue her over the border and…
Saints. We could save them all. My brother included. ”
“Would you want that? To start all over again, knowing what you do now?”
The tapping intensified. “You and I would likely never meet. You would never feel driven to join the Silvercloaks, never needle your way into my heart while undercover.”
“Maybe our paths would cross anyway. Maybe you’d become a literature academic, a Healer. Something else entirely.”
Again, a pang of yearning behind his breastbone.
Levan shook his head. “If my mother lived, the Bloodmoons would still seek the throne. Though we may not resort to organized crime—we only did that to yield enough ascenite to power a crypt—there would still be bloodshed. A coup, perhaps a violent one.”
Although…if the Fifth Prophecy did redeem the Timeweavers, would his mother need to seek the throne at all?
Would she still want to rule, when she was free to simply exist?
Perhaps not. Perhaps she would devote herself to the Saints, and his father would make board games, and they would be happy and at peace.
This thought carried an undercurrent of longing strong enough to wind him, but he did not share it with Saffron yet. He needed to examine it further, turn it over in his palm like a precious stone, seek any imperfections before believing in its value.
“Then maybe I will join the Silvercloaks anyway,” Saffron said, still breathing with great effort.
“Maybe I will needle my way into your heart while undercover. Only neither of us would be orphans. Would we fall in love even without that shared pain? The shared trauma that led to the shared obsession of Lost Dragonborn?”
Levan stood abruptly and began to pace, unable to tolerate the vulnerability, the proximity, the sheer raw force of his wants.
“I went by my office on the way here. Found Segal’s severed head on my desk.
” The sight had been shocking, but not particularly unwelcome—Segal had been challenging his command for weeks, after all.
But as for how it had happened…infinitely more troubling.
“For this to have happened inside the wards, it had to have been a Bloodmoon. And the only Bloodmoon not bound into service by the brand is you.” A tactical misdirect.
Of course he knew the brands were no longer active, but Saffron did not, and he hoped to pin her in a lie.
“You killed him as you did Vogolan. He killed your parents, and you finally got your revenge.”
He presented this last part as fact, even though it was simply a working theory, and finally looked at her. He’d have to meet her gaze if he wanted to pick out the tics and twitches of a lie on her perfect polderdash face.
Her face scrunched into a frown. Shock, or confusion, or both.
Seemingly genuine. “No—I swear it. Why would I have waited so long?” A vehement head shake.
“I promise, Levan. No more lies. Though I did see an unfamiliar boy wandering the corridors with a burlap sack. He wore a pale blue scholar’s cloak, seemed far too young to be here. ”
A cold finger ran down Levan’s spine, suspicion crystallizing inside him. “What did he look like?”
As Saffron described Relar Zamorin in perfect detail, Levan’s belly curled into a hard fist. His refusal to brand the boy had cost Segal’s life, and though he would not mourn the rat-faced mage who’d never respected him, this was another loose thread to tie up.
“You know him?” Saffron prodded.
“Segal brought him in to be branded. Whitewings had turned his grandmother—an apothecary—and they had the boy, Relar, on far-flung expeditions for rare ingredients.”
“Saints.” Her pupils flickered as she parsed this information. “I wonder if the Whitewings are developing a new substance to rival loxlure.”
The hairs on the back of Levan’s arms prickled. “What makes you say that?”
“They’ve been trying to break open the Bloodmoon operation for months.
Years. Take it over by force—but they’re not winning.
Yes, there are more dead and mutilated scarlets than usual.
Yet they don’t seem close to taking the gamehouses, to bringing down the distribution channels.
Even to hijacking the lox at the source.
If I were them, I’d be looking to build my own operation. ”
An astute assessment. “I’ve heard they’re growing more organized.
New leadership, new premises. What you’re suggesting—hmm.
It makes sense.” He crossed to the door, tiredness fogging his mind like the mist that clung to Assassin’s Bay all winter.
“I have some affairs to get in order. We’ll leave for Bellandry in a week. ”
Saffron’s face lit up like a child’s, like sunlight had just washed her in gold.
“You’re coming with me?”
He paused with his prosthetic hand on the doorknob. “How do you know that if we unmade time by two decades, we wouldn’t make things infinitely worse?”
Her hazel eyes were wide and warm enough to fall into.
“Hope,” she murmured.
The same word he’d used back in the Havenwood rendered him momentarily speechless.
“I don’t have to use your mother’s weaverwick,” she added. “Not if it makes you feel strange. We can find another.”
For a moment, Levan considered telling her he’d destroyed his mother’s weaverwick wand right after the Havenwood. But that would mean admitting he’d known of her powers all along, and everything was still so tentative between them that he simply said, “Thank you.”
“I meant it when I said I wasn’t undercover anymore, Levan.
” Saffron climbed to unsteady feet. She closed the gap between them slowly, slowly, then all at once.
“The Silvercloaks cannot give me what I really need: enough ascenite to turn back twenty-one years.” A hitch in her breath, at once seductive and raw.
“I want what you want. And I’ll stop at nothing to get it. ”
In truth, Levan found this equal parts hot and terrifying, which he supposed was historically Saffron’s sweet spot.
With only a few inches between their bodies, she lifted a hand and rested a palm on his chest—where his old brand warped and discolored his skin, where his heart beat frantically underneath. At the confirmation of his rapid pulse, a subtle curl of a smile plucked at her lips.
Desire flooded him as he felt the heat from her dramatic curves, as the low light made a halo of her pale hair, as he thought about everything this mage was, powerful and smart and funny and stubborn and ruthless and, deep, deep down, a soul whose trauma mirrored his own.
When she kissed him, he did not stop her.
He let himself melt into it, her lips soft as rose petals and just as sweet, and for several glorious moments the simple animal of his body took control.
Her hands roamed his chest, his stomach, his lower back, leaving a spreading warmth behind them.
When her fingertips grazed the fresh burn on his side, he hissed and bit down on her lower lip, which only seemed to spur her on.
Pushing her back toward the bed, he fought the inane urge to laugh as her calves met the trunk and she stumbled into a clumsy seat on its wooden lid. She peered devilishly up at him through long, pale lashes and unbuckled his belt.
Everything in him came alight at once, the anticipation raw and heady like the moment before the loxlure hit his system, but like the loxlure, there was an underpinning of dread, the feeling of impending doom, a warning bell tolling deep inside his body.
He thought of trick steps and false bottoms, of the exact moment he realized he’d been lied to, the sick drop of it, the self-loathing, the fortress of mistrust growing higher with every betrayal, and he knew he could not do it.
Saffron felt the moment it shifted, stilling her hands.
The air between them turned brittle as glass.
He took a step back. Two, three.
“I’m sorry, Silver.” Levan rebuckled his belt, fighting the absurd swell of anger inside him—the sense that she had manipulated his basest urges for her own end. “I can’t.”