Chapter 47 A Better World
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A Better World
At the sight of Levan in a violet Healer’s cloak, something in Saffron splintered.
It seemed prudent to travel to Bellandry in their regular cloaks rather than the conspicuous crimson, and though Saffron had wondered what color Levan would wear, she wasn’t emotionally prepared for the reminder of what he truly was beneath all the violence and hurt.
“Always reminds me of my mother,” she murmured, traipsing down the stairs into the chamber beneath the dragon statues.
Levan stood by the portari gate, one arm pressed against the carved axelmares, one foot hooked around the other ankle.
Rasso sat patiently by his side—until he saw Saffron, at which point the beast leapt up as though struck by lightning, bounding over to her and almost knocking her over with the force of his excitement.
Levan hastily stuffed a small book into his inner cloak pocket, and Saffron recognized the lilac leather of the fifth volume in the Lost Dragonborn series.
With a sad pang, she remembered the costumes he’d made back when they still thought it was possible for them to attend the Erling Tandall signing together.
Long gold cloaks, pearlwillows clumsily stitched on the breast pockets.
She yearned to see him in those costumes, to see the childlike glee in his eyes as they met their hero.
All at once, she was overcome with the desire to wrap her arms around him, hold him close.
But then the memory of his romantic rejection slapped her afresh, and she shrugged away the pathetic urge.
“What reminds you of your mother?” he asked, frowning.
“The violet cloak.” She gave a wistful smile as Rasso thoroughly cleaned the palms of her hands with his rough tongue. “She was burned in hers.”
Levan studied her as she approached. He was freshly shaven, his hair recently washed and trimmed, the cords of his black tunic neatly tied over his muscled chest. “When you rewrite time, she won’t be burned at all. Not until she dies in her sleep at the ripe old age of a hundred and eight.”
Warmth spread through Saffron’s chest at his words. It felt so good that Levan knew the truth, that he was behind her on her quest. That they could finally work together for real. Some semblance of trust had been rebuilt.
Despite the letter from the Steel King in her cloak pocket.
Despite the fact she could still tear down everything he had so painstakingly built.
“Shall we go?” She gestured to the gate. The week since reading her father’s letter had passed in a stubborn trudge, and impatience snapped inside her like a riding crop.
“We have a few more members of the party to wait for.”
“Who?” Saffron asked, confused.
“Miret, first of all—he’s studied the Augurs, the Timeweavers, and the lost prophecy in immense depth over the years.”
“Can’t he stay in the safety of the library? Contact us via vocos?”
“Daft old bastard has a habit of leaving his wand lying around in rooms he is not inhabiting. Occupational hazard of a distractible scholar, I suppose.”
Saffron didn’t see the need to refute this. She’d always liked Miret, always enjoyed watching his grandfatherly relationship with Levan. “Who else?”
“Harrow Claver.”
Saffron blinked, sure she’d misheard. “The King’s Prophet?”
“We might need a Foreseer. Your father believes that the Fifth Prophecy pertains to you, and thus that you’ll be able to see it when the time comes. But if that isn’t the case, and it requires a Foreseer to channel it, we don’t want to be stymied.”
“Alright. Anyone else?”
A terse nod. “Relar Zamorin.”
Now Saffron really must be suffering from moderate aural hallucinations. “The apothecary who killed Segal? I assumed he’d already be dead. Why is he coming?”
“Keeping an eye on him—and the Whitewings. I didn’t brand him, so I can’t trust him fully, but I offered his family protection. The whites have him searching the continent for spinebark, and I can’t allow that to happen.”
Saffron’s detective’s instincts stirred. “Spinebark? Saints.”
“If they find it, loxlure will be the least of this city’s worries.”
But the mention of the highly addictive ingredient was not the part Saffron snagged upon. “You didn’t brand him?”
A curious emotion passed over Levan’s face. “No.”
“Have you branded anyone since you took over as kingpin?”
A head shake.
“Why?” Saffron said softly.
He shrugged, yet it was anything but ambivalent. She could see how much he cared about this in every line of his too-straight body, in the aching depths of his clear blue eyes. “I want there to be a better way.”
Miret’s words from a few months ago came back to her. “You made him believe that it was possible to exist in this dark crack of humanity while maintaining some semblance of morality.”
Pride flooded her, warm and bright. “If anyone can find a better way, you can.”
The very corner of Levan’s mouth pulled up.
Bashful, almost, still gazing at her. He so rarely looked at her these days.
At least not like that. The air between them hummed and crackled, but Saffron thought of how badly she’d misread that hum and crackle on the night she’d shared her father’s letter and forced herself to look away.
A few moments later, the other members of their strange party appeared.
First Miret and Relar—both wearing pale blue scholar’s cloaks—then Harrow Claver, looking distinctly unruffled in his bronze Foreseer cloak.
Beneath the bronze he wore a plain black tunic and trousers, since his royal attire would attract even more attention than Bloodmoon scarlet.
Once everyone had assembled by the portari gate, Levan shared their plan.
“We cannot take a gate directly into Bellandry, so we’ll have to portari up to Lunes then cross the border on foot.”
“Lunes?” Saffron breathed, gripped with an excruciating clutch of homesickness.
Homesickness not just for the place where she’d grown up, but the people who once inhabited it.
The people all of this was for. She hadn’t been back to her beloved home village since her parents’ funeral.
Her hand went to the pendant around her neck, but, of course, she had traded away the piece of their old front door, the jeweled bodies of her mother and father.
Levan watched this movement—he knew it was her tic—and for the briefest of moments, emotion flickered behind his eyes. “Will you be alright? Going back there?”
Saffron nodded, more confidently than she really felt, and tried to focus on the logistics. “There’s an axelmare breeder in Lunes—Donan Trilmere. Perhaps we could hire steeds? It’d get us through the Havenwood a lot faster.”
“Stealth is more important than speed. We ideally don’t want to leave a trail, and if we rent axelmares, Donan Trilmere becomes one more witness.”
“Witness?” Miret frowned. “You assured me this was an academic excursion.”
“Yes,” Levan replied, sort of patiently, “but if the excursion goes wrong, and curses are fired…we want to make it impossible for the Silvercloaks, or indeed the Vergard, to build a case against us. If we hire steeds near the border, that’s evidence of our movements.”
“So we traverse the Havenwood on foot.” Saffron knelt to ruffle the spot behind Rasso’s ear that he loved to have scritched. “There’s no way you can just portari us all there with your imported wand?”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “I could try, but I might perish.”
“A sacrifice I’m willing to make,” she quipped, before quickly adding, “Joking.”
Lunes was almost exactly as Saffron remembered it, filled with overgrown wildflowers and cobbled courtyards, shabby cloaks and warm faces, the scents of rosemary and honeywine.
Parts were different, of course. Certain shops and taverns had closed, become other things.
New houses had cropped up around the village green.
Renzel’s Wandery had expanded dramatically, swallowing up the buildings on either side—how was there so much demand for wands in such a small place?
—while the Saints hall had been renovated, its ramshackle wood replaced with immaculate creamstone, the crimson-and-gold obelisk taller and grander than before.
The shape of Lunes might have changed, but not the feel, not the heartbeat.
All at once Saffron was six years old again, flying through the streets on a rug her father had enchanted for her.
Memories lurked around every corner, her parents’ merry laughter ringing outside the Sleeping Wolf like clinking glasses.
The village had a neat little portari station on the High Street, its walls strewn with framed famous newspaper headlines, its vaulted ceiling corniced with silver and mahogany.
As she stood just over the threshold of the gate, Saffron swallowed the lump in her throat, willing the tears not to come.
“Silver,” came a voice beside her, Levan standing just behind her in the quiet station.
“Hmm?” murmured Saff, lost in her memories.
But then something was being lowered over her head from behind, and for a petrifying moment Saffron thought he might be garroting her, of all things, which would have been a very pedestrian and anticlimactic way to be murdered, but then his hands fell away, and she looked down, and she could not fight the gasping sob at the sight of what he had given her.
Her parents’ necklace.
“How?” she choked, her palm going to the familiar wooden oval as she turned to face him. The pendant was warm, as though it had been pressed against his body for a long time.
His expression betrayed very little, apart from the subtle indent in his scarred lower lip that told her he was biting the inside of it. “Saw it at Artan’s Antiques. Bought it back for you.”
Saffron could not find the words to thank him.