Chapter 64 FightFreedom
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Fight or Freedom
Levan laid the fragile body of his beloved mentor on a tavern bed.
Miret, who had been drifting in and out of consciousness on the bitterly cold journey back to the inn, sighed as his head hit the cushion.
Levan couldn’t look at the hole in the old man’s side—he knew enough about anatomy to know that the scarshark hadn’t gouged any major organs, but the right-hand ladder of Miret’s abdominal muscles had been torn away like meat from a bone. A hunk of rib too, no doubt.
The old man, however, showed no pain. Rasso leapt up next to him on the bed, curling his warm body into the scholar’s unwounded side.
Miret patted the beast’s head absently, though it seemed to cost him an immense amount of effort, and there was little affection to it.
Muscle memory, plain and simple. Levan found himself more devastated by Miret’s psychological state than his physical wounds.
The kingpin cupped his palms around a lantern, warmth washing through his hands, his arms. The sensation was slightly painful as his frozen flesh thawed, like tiny icy shards piercing his skin, but this worked to his advantage—the rich pleasure-pain combination trickled a small amount of magic back into his well, which he used to evaporate the water from Miret’s clothes, but Levan left his own raiment cold and wet.
The sensation was making him suffer, and the longer he could bear suffering, the more potent the rush of pleasure when said suffering finally ended.
Somewhat unbelievably, it was still light outside. For a few moments, the clotted winter clouds parted, despite the enduring snowfall. Streaks of low, buttery sunlight washed through the window, turning snowflakes into fireflies so bright Levan had to turn away.
He looked instead at his mentor, the pallor of his skin, the limpness of his body. Turmoil brayed inside him, and he could not help but give voice to it.
“What am I supposed to do?” Levan asked, voice low and hoarse.
He was very thirsty from all the salt water he’d accidentally swallowed, and yet such a concern felt so small, so meaningless, in light of what he’d just learned.
“I knew when I met Silver that she was going to be the beginning and end of everything. I just thought the stakes were a little more personal than the end of the world.”
Miret smiled emptily. “She has an apocalyptic energy to her, does she not? Ruq a’l valqamin, we call it in Eqora. The air of the end days. Usually a compliment to describe a mage who feels like a force of nature, but this is rather more literal.”
“Do you believe in predestiny?” Levan restlessly stalked Miret’s room in a bid to keep his teeth from chattering, his limbs from trembling. “That everything is already written.”
Miret drew his Saints stones from their velvet pouch in his inner cloak pocket, spilling the small painted rocks into his wrinkled palm. He frowned at them, a look of betrayal on his face, as though he’d been expecting them to bolster him and they’d fallen short.
“Once, I believed in the guiding hand of the Saints in all things. I believed in our own power to do what is right, in accordance with the will of the Sixteen, no matter what has been previously ordained by prophecy. I believed that the Saints’ light was powerful enough to guide us through anything, to bend magekind along the arc of goodness through magic and faith.
” Miret shook his head, as though trying to dispel a ringing in his ears.
“Now I have seen the truth. There is nothing out there but us. No court, no arc. Magekind has always been alone.”
Something in Levan dropped. “Before your brush with the void, did you believe that the Augurs were…what? Fraudulent?”
“Far from it.” Miret ran a desolate thumb over the bronze stone that represented Evisusari, the patron saint of Foreseeing. “I believed the act of prophecy foretold what would happen if magekind continued along its current path. But I also believed it was possible to change that path.”
Magekind’s current path was abhorrent—yet, in Miret’s eyes, preventable.
The images Harrow described from the prophecy came back to haunt Levan, corpses piled up like sandbags, baby shoes and Saints stones bobbing along the surface of the drowned streets, like the slowcrabs and opalfish in that hellish cave.
Levan’s hands shook violently. He’d almost drowned, and though his brain was trying to forget this fact, his body wasn’t quite so quick to move on. “So you believe that if I follow the Saints’ light, I can prevent the Fifth Prophecy.”
Oh, the irony. His mother had been so certain that the Saints would bring peace to their world, and yet he’d abandoned his belief the night his father cast the first torture spell.
Miret stared blankly at the ceiling, as though he could see the sky through it. “I don’t believe anything at all.”
The kingpin gazed into the flickering orange diamond of the nearest candle flame, imagining it to be the fire of a Wielder corps just beyond Atherin’s city walls.
“Levan?”
“Yes?”
“Will you kill me now?”
A missed step feeling in Levan’s belly, a horrible lurching jerk. “What? No. Of course not.”
Miret’s vacant eyes drifted closed. “Without faith, I am nothing. This is the true meaning of soul death—death of belief. The Saints have abandoned me, and now I am lost.”
And then Miret was asleep. Rasso pressed closer to the old man’s lithe body, rested his furry white chin on Miret’s chest, and fell asleep too.
Levan watched them for several moments, his body cold and empty, his mind a cascade of terrifying calculations. Horror pressed in on him from all angles, not just over Miret’s newfound despondency, but over the decisions he would soon have to make.
He might be able to save Saffron from herself, and the world from Saffron.
Then again, he might not. He might just walk away entirely.
Saints or Augurs.
Head or heart.
Fight or freedom.
Too big a decision for right now. And besides, there was a loose end he needed to tie up.
Reluctant to leave his beloved mentor, he slipped out of Miret’s room and back to the chamber he shared with Saffron, lighting lanterns and candles by the bedside.
As the rusted faucets of the crooked white bath started running—he knew he’d be no use to anyone with his well as depleted as it was, and so the simple animal pleasure of warming frozen bones would have to suffice—he lifted his wand tip to his mouth.
“Et vocos, Relar Zamorin.”
For a few seconds, there was no response, and then the sound quality filtering through the wand changed. No voice, no acknowledgment, but the hard breathing of a fast-moving body, the crackle of frozen undergrowth beneath pounding boots.
Relar was on the run.
Instead of accusing him of cutting the rope and leaving them all to die, Levan simply said, “The Whitewings killed the protection I left?”
“Yes,” Relar gasped. “Which means my grandmother is likely dead too.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“You’re—what?”
“I wanted to protect you, and I couldn’t.”
“Why in the world did you want that?” Relar said, partly bitter, partly disbelieving, as though anticipating vicious recourse for his stunt with the rope.
“Because you’re who I wish I could have been,” Levan said simply.
The sound of running footsteps stopped abruptly, though Relar kept breathing hard. Levan wondered how far he’d made it, where he was running to, but found that he didn’t truly want the answer.
After a few minutes of raspy silence, Relar ground out, “If you want to protect me, you’ll leave me alone. You’ll let me run, let me start a new life, and you won’t follow.”
Levan found himself envious, of all things. Relar’s break would be so clean. A bone snapped in two, not fractured into a thousand small shards that could never functionally heal.
“You have my word.”
A hitching breath. “Thank you—for that, and for not branding me.”
“I’m just sorry you were caught up in this at all.”
Relar did not respond right away, and for a moment, Levan thought that they would part without a goodbye. But then, fear simmering under every syllable, the apothecary’s grandson muttered:
“You can’t trust the King’s Prophet.”
Something inside Levan lurched horribly. “Harrow? Why?”
But the line was already dead.
Saffron had intimated something similar, and now she and Harrow were on that frozen clifftop, scheming over hells knew what. Perhaps he shouldn’t have left them, shouldn’t have given them such an opportunity to make moves behind his back. The prophecy foretold their joint rule, after all.
So many missteps, in the last few hours, the last few days, the last few years.
Miret thought the Saints could guide Levan onto a new path, but some subconscious part of him suspected he was too far gone.
He could walk away, of course. But perhaps, after all the ill he had inflicted upon the world, it was his moral duty to prevent Saffron and Harrow from destroying everything.
As Levan shrugged out of his soaking clothes and lowered himself into the steaming fir-scented water of the bath, he tried not to look down at his own body—the harsh ridges of rib, the fresh cuts on his arm, the betrothal tattoo, and the ugly, ugly brand—but instead focused on the magic pouring back into him, and the life-defining questions in his mind.
Just as he’d started washing himself with a bar of pine resin soap, a key turned in the lock of the bedroom door.
Saffron Killoran, the Timeweaver, the world-ender, stepped over the threshold.