Chapter 49 The Tall Order of the Knight in Black #2
Levan shrugged, thinking of how close he’d been when she’d almost bled to death in Aredan.
“Emotions are funny things. Never cried once over the torture curse, never cried once over my failed attempts to resurrect my murdered mother, but the death of a fictional character? Floodgates opened. Inconsolable.”
“You didn’t cry when you were tortured?”
“No, but I did piss myself quite a lot.” He said this with the cadence of a joke, before realizing just how unfunny it was. Hopefully Saffron, who’d always enjoyed gallows humor, would find the light in the—
“Levan…” Saffron whispered, laying a hand over his tally-scarred forearm.
All at once the conversation became unbearable, as though he’d accidentally torn away not just old scabs but a fresh layer of new pink skin.
The palm resting on his forearm seemed to press against that exposed flesh, and even though he knew it would wound Saffron’s pride, he had to pull himself away.
He didn’t hate that the stones of the bridge between them were being relaid.
He didn’t hate that they were close enough to feel the heat of her body, smell the strawberry-rosehip soap.
It was that he didn’t want his past to bleed so staunchly into his present, didn’t want that hellforsaken pity to widen her pupils and soften her gaze.
Yet did he pity her, when she talked about her past? The loss of her parents, her long stretch of self-imposed silence, her time in Duncarzus?
No. He simply understood.
Levan had never properly talked about that part of his childhood—not even with Miret, who had long ago stopped asking. Yet Saffron knew the darkness that existed in the cracks of their world, and she would not flinch to hear he had lived inside it.
He shifted on the bed, discomfort crawling through him like ants under his skin.
“When most people hear the word torture, they probably think of the pain. And of course, there was that. Plenty of that. Physically, I’ll never be the same.
It’s permanently warped my perception of pain, my ability to regulate it.
But the effect on your mind—it’s difficult to describe. ”
Beside him, Saffron had gone utterly still.
“It happened at different times every day, and so I spent my life on a knife edge wondering when it would be this time, how bad it would be. But what that uncertainty also did was…hells, it sounds fucked up, but it made me crave it too. Because only once it was over could I ever truly relax. The sooner it happened, the better. So I woke up every day wishing for the pain to come.”
A storm drew in behind Saffron’s eyes.
“There’s also a kind of…mundanity? It’s strange how quickly these things become monotonous.
I once went to see a performance of Enemy Lines at the Royal Theater, and there was a torture scene with all this dramatic lighting and music, a full orchestra singing the victim’s pain.
But in real life, it’s not like that. It’s a silent cabin, ordinary daylight filtering through the window. The same thing over and over. Mundane.”
Still rigid as a board, still visibly fighting to control her anger, Saffron whispered, “It sounds lonely.”
“Yes—like you’ve been abandoned by the world. By the old gods and Saints and Augurs, by the rest of humanity. You are apart, in some way. Something other. Even now, I don’t believe any other person can truly know me, because they weren’t there.”
Saffron tilted her head toward him, cheeks still pink and dewy from the bath. He thought she was maybe the most beautiful woman in the world.
“I want to know you,” she murmured.
No, you don’t, muttered the scarred mage he’d become, but something far younger inside him responded to her words.
That raw, exposed feeling was still there, still intolerable.
But there was also a slightly lifted feeling in his chest, as though a great stone had been crushing him for years and someone had begun to lift it off.
Not all the way, but enough to ease the pressure.
He cleared his throat. “I was going to read.” He swiveled on his side to grab the book from the bag discarded next to the bed. “Would you—shall I read aloud? It might help you sleep.”
Saffron’s hazel eyes shone. “You’d do that?”
“It’s only reading.”
“No, it’s not.” A sweet, sleepy smile. “But thank you.”
He chose a nice, safe chapter at the beginning of the novel, before Baudry Abard’s death, before Aymar Wevelren’s dark night of the soul. A delightful scene in which Aymar rode his dragon over the mountains, reveling in the freedom of the wind in his hair.
Less than four paragraphs in, Saffron fell asleep to the sound of his voice, an errant curl draped over her relaxed face, her hands curled up at her chest, her full pink lips slightly parted.
Her towel slipped around her waist, and Levan wrapped her in the downy blankets Harrow had raved about, not wanting her to catch a chill with her wet hair and her distinct lack of clothes.
Next to her, Rasso snored obnoxiously and incessantly, all four paws dangling above his belly.
Outside the window, the sun set and the city came to life, taverns filling with patrons, glasses clinking, and laughter crackling like wood on a campfire. Levan felt like a different sort of person to them entirely, removed from humanity not just by a windowpane, but in some fundamental way.
He tucked his favorite bookmark—cracked brown leather, etched with the Lost Dragonborn world map—inside the book, laid it on the bedside table, and tapped his wand to the lantern to extinguish the light inside the room.
But when he rolled over to get some rest, Levan found he was the one who could not sleep.