Chapter 49 The Tall Order of the Knight in Black
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The Tall Order of the Knight in Black
Levan might have heard the cascade of revelations from the King’s Prophet if he’d pressed his ear up against the narrow wall separating them.
Only Levan was not listening to the dim murmurings next door, because Saffron Killoran was naked a handful of yards away, and the blood in his ears was roaring too loudly to hear much else.
The clawfooted brass bathtub stood merrily in the middle of the bedroom.
Lying on his back in the middle of the bed, head resting on his palms, Levan averted his gaze as Saffron stepped out of her forest-bedraggled raiment, though the corner of his eye snagged on the creamy white outline of her curves.
Swallowing hard, he unhooked an elbow from behind his head and adjusted his trousers in an entirely ineffectual way.
Saffron’s moan as she slid into the warm, clean water did not help matters.
She fiddled with the countless taps and spouts on the basin, playing with the different temperatures of water before finally settling on one hot enough to scald a dragon.
Once she’d added both bubbles and oil to the tub, the subsequent steam and white froth were opaque enough to blur the precise contours of her body.
She sighed into it, resting her neck against the back of the tub and closing her eyes.
“Fuck camping,” she said blearily, a smile spreading across her face as pleasure swirled into her well.
Why did magic have to be so hellsdamned intimate?
“Honestly, even Duncarzus was preferable. A real roof over my head, no need to walk twenty miles a day through several feet of snow. True, it was cold and dark and damp, and the ground hurt to sleep on, and the food was much worse than yours. But still.”
“Mmmph,” Levan said uselessly.
She was naked in a bath.
“This is what I’m built for,” she went on, oblivious to his turmoil. “I’d stay in the bath forever, if I could.”
“I knew our similarities had to end somewhere.” Levan had never been one for a bath, in the same way he’d never been one for hot chocolate.
On a certain level, he didn’t feel he deserved a pleasure so simple, so indulgent.
Perhaps that was why the particular discomforts of camping—cold lungs and hard earth to sleep upon—so appealed to him.
“Although it’s frustrating not to be able to go straight to Flarence, I can’t say I’m too distraught over a night of pure pleasure replenishment.” She stiffened, registering the implications of what she’d said. “Not like that.”
Levan gnawed at the inside of his cheek, then changed the subject so abruptly that it mostly killed the blood flow to his lower belly. “You seemed rattled by the protesters at the portari gate.”
“It’s one thing to know in an abstract sense that a large sect of the population wants you dead. It’s quite another to see a physical manifestation of it.”
“I know. I grew up in a dilapidated settlement in the Havenwood for that very reason.” Levan rolled his wrist while she wasn’t looking.
The cold had made the shooting pains sharper, the penetrative ache deeper.
He wished he could temporarily remove the golden hand, wrap the stump in bandages infused with whiteroot.
Then again, the pain had a purpose. It always did.
“What was it like?” Saffron asked. “A childhood in a place like that, with parents like that?”
“More ordinary than you might think. My brother and I played board games my father made. We climbed trees and made dens in the woods, studied maps and fantasized about the adventures we might go on someday. I didn’t realize how unusual my childhood was until I came to the city.
Discovered how everyone else had been living all this time. ”
Saffron let silence mingle with the steam for a few moments. “You never talk about your brother.”
“No,” Levan replied, with the force of a full stop.
Saffron, however, wasn’t perturbed. Was she ever?
“What happened to him?”
Levan closed his own eyes, remembering that terrible night in the Havenwood. How the moonlight had draped over his mother’s corpse, how snotty his brother’s sobs had sounded. The scent of cold, damp earth all around. “My mother died because of him. Which means yours did too.”
Another pause, this one tauter. “How?”
“He followed her on a raid in…well, here. Almere. She broke into the bank, believing there was another weaverwick in one of the vaults. When my brother’s invisibility tincture wore off, she got distracted, and that moment of distraction cost her life.”
Saffron blew air out through her lips. “Are you alright? Being so close to where it happened?”
“I’m always alright.”
Or he never was, which was a very similar thing.
“You don’t fool me, Levan.” Saffron’s voice took on a low, foggy quality.
“I see you holding your wrist when it hurts. I see the way your limbs twitch whenever the topic of loxlure comes up. I see the longing on your face when you look at Relar—how much you wish you had been allowed to become a young mage like that, instead of what did happen to you.” She swallowed.
“It can happen. In the timeline we remake, you can be just like him.”
Levan said nothing. What could he say, to the mage who already knew everything about him? Who knew everything about him, and who was still here. A miracle, in so many ways.
“You know I’ll have to find a weaverwick wand?” she asked, refilling some of the bathwater with the hottest of the taps. It squeaked and croaked as she turned it. “In order to save our families. You’ll have to trust me enough to allow that to happen—to help me, even.”
“I know.”
And he did. He just didn’t like to think too deeply about it.
It was an immense amount of power for any one mage to possess.
A power that triggered wars and founded world religions, that inspired fear and hatred and genocide.
Could he really allow her to wield such a thing?
Could he cede so much control? Was it possible to trust anyone that much, let alone a mage who had betrayed him so badly in the past?
“I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately,” she sighed, in a murmur that suggested she was on the very verge of nodding off.
Levan snorted. “Camping isn’t for everyone.”
“Ha, that too. I just…I might have to do some heinous things in the pursuit of this goal. Saints, I’ve already done heinous things, and my conscience is not yet calloused against it.
And I know that it’ll all be undone once I unmake time, but…
what if I fail? If I fail to unmake time, all the pain and suffering I’ve caused becomes permanent. Real.”
“It’s real already, Silver.” The logic was so flawed he couldn’t help but point it out. “It’s real because we’re feeling it now.”
Even if she did manage to unmake twenty-one years, would some part of him always know that he’d been tortured by his own father in another version of reality? Would those ghosts follow him through time itself?
“I know.” Saffron opened her eyes forcefully, as though to keep from drifting off, and rubbed her upper arms with a bar of soap. “How do you cope with the guilt? The shame?”
Levan smiled darkly, looking over at her. “Could you really call carving kill marks into my arm and then obliterating myself with loxlure coping?”
Saffron studied him, her pale curls pulled dark and straight by the water, the tired patches under her eyes beautiful, somehow.
Only her clavicles were visible above the deep waterline, somehow more intoxicating than seeing everything.
The shine of oil along her collarbone, the way her parents’ pendant nestled so neatly between the ridges, with those whorls of orange and red and brightest gold. The steam all around her.
“When was the last time you used loxlure?”
A stake of shame pierced his belly, and he turned away again, staring not at her but at the ceiling. He loathed that he was an addict, how dirty it made him feel. “Two years ago, or thereabouts. There was a yearlong downward spiral after Alucia.”
Water swilled as Saffron washed herself. “You’re a strong person, you know. To have wrestled free of it, gone so long without it.”
“Far from strong. I still think about it all the time. Miss it, in a way.”
“You miss it?”
“The thing about addiction is that it gives you a default response. Bad day? Wash it away with loxlure. Good day? Celebrate with loxlure. Frustration, pain, guilt, shame, grief, hate, longing. All of it can be obliterated with a single sip. Now I have to sit with those things, sip at my ridiculous anguish tea, trying to ignore the screaming animal inside my body, the hunger that seems to gnaw all the way to my marrow. It never goes. Not truly.”
Saffron laid down the soap, combing through her hair with her fingers. “During my long stretch of silence as a child, my uncles sent me to a mind doctor. And they said that it didn’t matter that my coping mechanism was destructive, as long as I was coping. As long as it kept me alive another day.”
Levan didn’t have a response to this. He understood this as a justification other people might find solace in, but some part of him believed he should be stronger than that. Able to cope through his own strength of will.
Saffron seemed to realize her borrowed wisdom hadn’t landed, and so when she stood from the tub, so fast Levan almost didn’t turn away in time, she said with a smile, “Perhaps we both need to go back to basics. Did I see a copy of Lost Dragonborn tucked into your rucksack?”
“Book five,” Levan said, the words distant, because she was once again standing naked just a few yards away. “The Tall Order of the Knight in Black.”
“Nooo,” Saffron groaned, mercifully wrapping herself in a dark green towel. “The book where Baudry Abard dies.” The wise old mentor’s death was a crushing one.
“The worst. I cried endlessly over it when I was a kid.”
Steam pluming from her bare skin, she lay down beside Levan on the bed. “I can’t imagine you crying, even as a boy.”