Chapter 55 The Wardholder #3
And yet when Saffron looked at this weeping mage, she saw her own mother. Mellora Killoran had died to protect her daughter, and Archatel had just resigned herself to the same fate.
“There has to be a better way,” Saffron whispered. “She sacrificed her life to save her daughter—and I’m sure that love flows both ways. I would have died for my parents, even at six years old. And I know you would too.”
Shadows gathered behind Levan’s eyes as Saffron lifted Archatel’s asper wand to her own lips.
“Et vocos, Ary Archatel.”
The shape of the Bellandrian name felt unfamiliar on her tongue.
“Oul,” came the terrified response, the daughter obviously recognizing the Vallish as the source of whatever threatened her family.
“We have your mother,” Saffron said, her own voice shaking now. “If you and your father come to us willingly, she’ll live. You all will. If you don’t, she’ll die painfully, and we will find you anyway.”
A long, pregnant silence. Then, in far cleaner Vallish than her mother’s: “Where are you?”
Saffron described their location. “And if you attempt to alert the Vergard, your mother will still die painfully.”
“I’ll be there in a quarter hour,” Ary whispered. “With my father and no one else.”
“Nie, Ary,” the captive mother wailed, but the link between the wands was already dead.
Archatel slumped to the snowy ground, pressing her face into the blanket of frigid white, weeping like the newly bereaved. Death of honor, death of duty. Those things mattered to the Nyr?thi, and here, at the foot of the Rapier, it was clear the attitude held similar weight.
“What do we do once they drop the wards?” Saffron asked, talking low and fast, smudging her words together so that the Bellandrian wouldn’t be able to see the exact shape of them.
“Because they will. Love is more powerful than duty, especially when your family has long ago forgotten what said duty is for.”
“I think you know what you have to do,” Levan said, smoothing down the front of his violet cloak.
Saffron hated that she’d asked him to use his healing for such ills, then wondered why she felt such a way.
Hadn’t he done these things of his own volition countless times?
But lately…she’d gotten the sense that he did not truly want this.
Any of it. Was it really that his broken magic would not allow him to wound or kill?
Or was it a subconscious phenomenon, the child at the heart of him resisting now that there was no father to force the issue?
“Will you think less of me for doing it?”
A muscle twitched in his jaw. “I’d be an almighty hypocrite if I did.”
“That’s not a real answer.”
He shrugged. “I hate that either of us have to do these things. I hate that our families have left us with the weight of the world on our shoulders, with birthright thrones and doomed quests to the edge of the continent.”
Still not a real answer.
At Saff’s feet, the straw-haired woman wept and moaned, her head snapping up at every nearby sound, clearly petrified of what would happen when her beloved family arrived.
“We could restrain them,” Saffron suggested, somewhat desperately. “Hold them somewhere with Miret and Relar guarding them. Bound and wandless, but alive and unhurt. And then after we have the relic wand, we…”
“Let them go, so they can tell the Vergard everything? The Vergard will escalate it to the throne. And Queen Vune, who is already facing scrutiny for her weakness on upholding Augurism, will become known as the regent who allowed the hallowed Fifth Prophecy to be stolen from her own country by Vallish thieves. Wars have been fought for far, far less.”
He was right, and Saffron loathed that he was.
“And yet it still feels like it’ll be the death of me.” Her hand found the warm wood of her pendant, his eyes following the movement. “To become the evil that killed my own parents.”
Two sets of hurried footsteps approached down the residential street.
“Sel ammortier,” came a shrill scream from the mouth of the alley, where two shadowy figures had appeared.
“Ans clyptus.” Saffron threw up the mattermantic shield as soon as Ary’s mouth formed the sel sound, and the killing curse buried itself in the glimmering wall of raw magic.
Levan stooped to haul Archatel up by the armpits, placing the dagger at her throat once more. For a few split seconds, Saffron thought he meant to threaten the woman’s family, to shout that if they didn’t stop firing killing curses, their wife and mother would die.
But then Levan dragged his blade across the pale skin of the woman’s throat, and as she slumped dead, Saffron realized what he intended to do.
“Levan…” she murmured, as screams of rage and grief overlapped and echoed around the alley. The daughter, Ary, launched herself at her mother’s body, but her father held her back, petrified, muttering in twisted Bellandrian.
“I’m already a monster,” Levan said, lowering the blood-slick dagger to his side, then striding toward the daughter and husband with an expression of cold, dark determination on his face. “But you don’t have to become one. Not like this.”