Chapter 56 Fields of Black
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Fields of Black
Pressing a single petal of nightpoppy to his tongue would melt it all away.
Back at the inn, after killing three innocent wardholders one by one—with a dagger, no less, a cowardly weapon, an insulting death, as though their lives were not worth draining his magic for—and tossing their bodies into the Cinereal Sea, Levan carved the three new tallies into his arm.
Saffron had been grateful, of course.
He had saved her this hurt, and that was the only thing keeping him from leaping off the nearest cliff onto the shards of rock below.
There could be honor in dishonor, if you looked hard enough.
He only hoped that the end would justify the means.
That in killing those three wardholders, they would secure the Fifth Prophecy and somehow avert a world war.
Long after Saffron fell asleep, however—incense burning by the bedside, its coarse smoke causing her to snore lightly—Levan lay flat on his back beside her, wide awake and in deep, deep turmoil.
He trembled violently, limbs folded around his belly like a babe in a womb.
Thoughts of loxlure obliterated all else, until, after an hour of resisting, resisting, resisting, he stuffed his feet into his boots and shuffled down the corridor toward Miret’s bedroom, bent at the waist from the intensity of the craving.
His knock was pathetic, even to his own ear.
The kindly old scholar appeared behind the door, fully dressed in his pale blue cloak and brown tunic, earthen skin deepening into bronze in the low light.
“Sorry to wake you,” Levan muttered, still in his slate-gray nightclothes.
“I’nar nilaq,” Miret replied airily—a common Eqoran expression meaning it’s nothing, which they sprinkled throughout their speech like confetti. The Eqorans were a nation of people who needed you to know how unbothered they were. “The old don’t need as much sleep as the young.”
Miret’s chamber was almost identical to theirs—worn rug, rickety desk and patched chair, threadbare blankets over a wobbly brass bedstead—only far neater, since Saffron was an agent of chaos who scattered her belongings around like a sweetblossom tree shedding its spores.
Without the incense, the scent of nightpoppy was stronger, overlaid with the undeniable smell of old man.
“I killed tonight,” the kingpin muttered. “Three innocents—man, woman, grown daughter. Wardholders.”
“Ah,” Miret replied softly.
Though Miret’s response was not overtly damning, it was still charged. “The disappointment in your voice kills me.”
Miret sat down cross-legged on the threadbare rug, surveying his set of colored Saints stones.
“Well, it would be disingenuous to imbue my tone with any other emotion. I want better for you, and you know that.” Hovering a palm over the stones, he murmured something inaudible in his mother tongue, then said, “So we’re closer now. Without the wardholders.”
Levan nodded, trying not to relive the way their gossamer skin had parted beneath his blade.
The spurt of blood, the wails from the last victim—the daughter, watching her parents slain, which seemed kinder than the alternative.
“We can’t be sure they were the only ones, but we should go to the caves as soon as dawn rises.
See if you can still pick up a frequency. ”
Miret gathered the stones into their black velvet pouch. “I’m not especially busy right now.”
Levan looked at the old mage as though he’d gone quite mad. “It’s the middle of the night.”
The scholar’s twinkling gaze was almost warm enough to thaw the cold grasp of addiction. “Are you unfamiliar with the miracle of torchlight?”
Saffron awoke to the call of a frostowl and an empty bed.
Fear hooked through her, and she sat bolt upright.
After killing the three wardholders, Levan had been silent for the rest of the night.
The trembling had returned at full force, and this time, it could not be so easily dispelled with incense.
She’d watched him heat the dagger to sterilize it before carving the new kills into his arm, feeling a grim sense of defeat borne from knowing nothing she said could convince him not to do it.
She could not judge the ways he found to cope, especially when he was only in this situation because of her reluctance to do what needed to be done.
She was grateful to him—immensely, feverishly so. He’d absorbed the guilt and shame so that she didn’t have to, and in the moment, all she’d felt was relief.
But now…
He’d already been struggling.
What if her hesitation tipped him over the edge of relapse?
Saffron knew how deep the addiction ran in him, like a poisoned artery, like a toothache that had rotted the nerves all the way to the bone. She plucked her wand from the neat wooden holder on the bedside table.
“Et vocos, Levan Celadon.”
No response.
Before she had a chance to think about what she was doing, she shrugged her black cloak over her lilac nightclothes and padded down the corridor to Miret’s room.
No response there either.
The disquiet in Saffron only spread, blackened.
The animal sense that something was happening just beyond her periphery.
For lack of anywhere else to turn, Saffron knocked on the door on the other side of the shabby wooden corridor, its blue-gray wallpaper peeling, its waist-high paneling worn and splintered.
“No,” came a disgruntled call from the other side of the door.
“Harrow,” Saffron hissed. “It’s about Levan.”
The disgruntled call transmuted into reluctant footsteps, an open door.
Harrow seemed even shorter than usual, as tall as Saffron’s shoulder, and she realized that he must wear slightly heeled boots the rest of the time. His auburn hair was disheveled from sleep, though his emerald silk nightclothes were immaculately pressed.
“What is it?” He peered over his shoulder into the bedroom, where Relar still snored. Saffron’s detective instincts insisted she treat the snoring as feigned.
She kept her voice low, blurry. “He was already struggling with the smell of nightpoppy drifting over from Laudon. We told you earlier that we’d found and killed the wardholders, but what we didn’t say is that I was tormented by the prospect, so Levan did it for me.
A dagger swiped across three innocent throats, quick and brutal and self-loathing. I’ve just woken up to find him gone.”
Harrow’s creamy, freckled face remained perfectly neutral. “After everything he and his family have done, he balked over three pedestrian kills?”
Saffron felt an acute missed-step lurch. She’d thought Harrow would share her concerns. “He’s never found it easy.”
Still with that oddly bland look, Harrow leaned against the doorframe, hooking one ankle around the other. “And you understand him better than I do?”
Was Harrow…jealous? In a world of murder and betrayal, sin and addiction and world-shaping prophecies, could it really be something as ordinary as that?
“I think you make a point of not understanding anyone,” Saffron said, matching his placid tone.
In the predawn silence in the remote north, both of their voices echoed eerily.
“I think you’re a flake and a drifter and coward with no real loyalty or purpose, and Levan shouldn’t trust you as far as he can throw you. ”
Harrow’s lips quirked in amusement. “Did you come here in the middle of the night just to hurl insults?”
“No,” Saffron snapped, but quietly. “I thought you might care. A mistake, it would appear.”
She turned, ready to storm away, until the cool marble of Harrow’s next words rooted her to the spot. “Do you really think this world would be better with the Bloodmoons on the Vallish throne?”
Again, that missed-step lurch in her belly, the sense that the whole world had tipped off-kilter.
“It’s where all this is headed,” he continued. “And you’re walking the path willingly.”
“That doesn’t mean the path will never diverge.”
“I don’t understand why he trusts you—knowing you were undercover. Knowing you were Alucia in a different color, a different font.”
Saffron had the sudden acute urge to smack him in the face.
“He doesn’t trust me. Not all the way. But that doesn’t mean we can’t strive toward mutual goals, and it certainly doesn’t mean we can’t care about each other.
” She folded her arms across her chest, somewhat petulantly.
“Are you going to help me find him or not?”
He smoothed his wild auburn hair with his palm, face still completely unruffled. “I’m a flake and a drifter and a coward, with no real loyalty or purpose. I think I’ll let this play out as it may.”
Saffron simply shook her head and walked away.
But not before Harrow added, as a flippant afterthought, “The opening and shutting of doors woke me twenty minutes ago. I went to the window and saw him leave the village on foot with Miret. It looked like they were heading for the cliffs.”
The dread on Saffron’s periphery sharpened into focus.
What if Levan’s departure wasn’t about nightpoppy at all? What if he and Miret were stealing the Fifth Prophecy from under her nose?
“You’re thinking exactly what I did,” Harrow said softly, almost triumphantly.
Realizing she’d been toyed with, a stormy anger broke through Saffron. Yet she didn’t have time to loose the thunder on Harrow. Not if Levan was going for the Fifth Prophecy without her.
After hastily grabbing her boots, Saffron raised her black hood and slipped out into the moonlit night, wondering if she’d been a fool to mend the bridge with Levan, and hoping beyond hope that she was not too late.
The northern moors of Bellandry were beautiful in the starlight.
The clouds had parted and snow hadn’t fallen for hours, though the rolling hills and jutting crags were still shrouded with blue-white. Levan was surprised how bright it was with the moon shining overhead; they barely needed the torch spell Miret lit on his wand tip.