Chapter 71 A Steed Slain
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A Steed Slain
The scene outside the portari station was a bloodbath by the time Saffron arrived. Six Whitewings lay dead on the village green, hearts and throats ripped out by Rasso, who was licking his bloodied chops in the manner of a very good boy.
“Are you alright?” Saffron asked Levan, who was dizzy, wandless, barely upright.
But he did not answer, only fell to his knees beside the corpse of the Whitewing who’d almost taken his life. Saffron had never seen such an expression on his face, as though he was simultaneously feeling nothing and everything.
The perished mage wore black wings on her shoulders that implied importance, but other than that, Saffron failed to see why her death would elicit such a response.
“Levan,” she said, soft yet firm, urgent. “We need to get out of here. I’ll drop back to get Miret, then—”
Inside the portari station came the echo of overlapping footsteps.
White cloaks moved behind shattered windows, pouring from the gate like a melting bank of snow.
“Saints,” Saffron hissed. “Levan, with me, now.” She offered him a desperate hand up onto the steed, ready to flee deep into the Havenwood—
—but Levan stayed on the ground.
Staring. Bewitched, entranced. Horrified on some existential plane.
The Whitewings filtered out of the station in an angry knot of bodies, and at the sight of their fallen leader, their fallen friends, they bellowed and opened fire.
Saffron—not even halfway replenished after battling the Sordai—threw a shimmering spellshield in time to block three killing curses.
The word ammorten wrenched the kingpin from his reverie.
He pulled his dagger from the dead woman’s back and climbed to his feet, slowly and yet somehow fast, smooth. Deliberate. Terrifying.
And then he became someone else—something else.
Less a man or a mage than a machine made for killing and killing alone.
He sliced through the Whitewing reinforcements like they were nothing, cutting throats and shredding chests, Rasso feasting and gorging.
The Whitewings’ spells, whether defensive or offensive, were no match for the graceful spin of the kingpin’s body, the fluid twists of his torso as he arced a blade through a wrist, a cheek, a belly.
Saffron didn’t know whether to be impressed or afraid.
But he was only one soldier, and white cloaks were bleeding through the portari gate like a wound that could not be stanched. Several moved around the skirmish, unwilling to fire a killing curse into the fray lest they fell a fellow white, and toward Saffron instead.
She couldn’t best a dozen enemies, but nor could she abandon Levan.
“Sen effigias,” she incanted, blasting off two or three statue curses, but while one found its mark, too many bodies were coming toward her, all firing killing curses.
Of course they couldn’t hit her, thanks to her magical immunity, and yet…
what if one of them was powerful enough, somehow?
Levan could breach the walls she once believed impenetrable.
Levan.
A blur of death, an affront to the violet cloak he wore.
Too many were crowding around him, and she had to draw them away.
She threw up a spellshield, dug her heels into the axelmare’s sides, hauled the reins, and went, galloping away from the station, away from Levan.
A glance over her shoulder showed that several whites followed on foot, sprinting across the green behind her, cloaks billowing, casting curses that lit up the night like fireworks.
She angled her shield to cover her back, pressed her belly lower on the saddle, felt the axelmare’s strong body shift and work under her ribs as the night blurred around her.
She was nearly to the Saints hall when she saw it.
A short, sharp flash of silver cloak, and then a gush like a burst dam.
Familiar faces streamed from Renzel’s Wandery and cast a flurry of statue spells at the Whitewings on Saffron’s tail. White-clad bodies turned to sudden stone.
The Silvercloaks were here, and Levan had just slain so many Whitewings they’d be able to arrest him. Fear cracked over Saff’s heart like a belt buckle, but a Whitewing was still firing on her—and on her horse.
An ammorten curse found the axelmare’s haunch.
Saff was hurled from the saddle onto the flagstones outside the Saints hall, her wrist snapping in two as she tried to break her fall with her palms. She heard only the sound, knowing the pain would come, but shock and adrenaline kept it from her like a secret.
Behind her, the black beast lay slain, and behind its dead body, a battle between white and silver raged.
“Sen effigias,” she gasped, firing the statue curse at the white who’d killed the great black steed.
It landed true.
Pain broke up her arm like a storm, left hand hanging limply from her wrist, bolts of agony shooting all the way into her jaw. She staggered to her feet, and a Silvercloak’s stray effigias curse flew wide of its target and buried itself in her belly.
For the first time in her life, she turned to stone.
The next thing she knew, she was inside the Saints hall, newly reanimated and collapsing to the ground. Her broken wrist slammed into the tiled floor, and the bone sharded through her skin in a spurt of blood and agony. She felt the pain in her scalp, in the arches of her feet.
Vomit rose in her throat, but she gulped it back down.
The sheer panic, however, was harder to suppress.
She had spent all her time at the Academy casting illusions to make it appear as though she’d been turned to a statue during drills, because her magical immunity made such a thing impossible.
Until now.
The rogue spell hadn’t been cast by Levan, the only mage she knew to be strong enough to overpower the gift from her late father. Her immunity had faltered.
Though my passing will mean the severance of my medei perpetua, will mean that my protection falls, the magic will transfer to another. Another who will willingly sacrifice his own magic to protect you from ill.
Fear and grief and confusion blurred together as Saffron scrabbled to regain her breath, her mental footing. Did this mean that the other mage who’d sacrificed his own magic to hold the protection had perished too?
Surely her father had a long line of succession planned to keep the immunity in place. Surely—
But then she remembered something terrible.
Back in the Havenwood, she’d used a saqalamis to summon immense amounts of pain in the dying minutes of an already-lost battle. A final resort, a nothing-left-to-lose play. Saffron had used it to wind back time—her well almost entirely depleted—and save Auria’s life.
It had wrought the most world-ending pain Saffron had ever experienced—worse than the loyalty brand, worse than anything her mind could ever comprehend, terrible enough to turn the dregs of power left in her well into liquid gold. Drawing from some unseen place, a sense of perilous overreach.
Auria had lived because of it.
But in the aftermath, Saffron had felt like a claw, a husk, a mangled mass of broken bones. As though the painmaker had done something terrible and permanent. And in the weeks that followed, she felt…bruised somehow. Damaged in some fundamental way. Altered.
Perhaps it had obliterated the gift her father had left her—his last act of love.
The thought was as agonizing as the painmaker itself.
Maybe she was wrong. She racked her brain, trying to remember whether she’d been hit with any other spells since then, whether any left a mark that shouldn’t have, but she came up empty. Even the knife-cheeked assailants in Mersina attacked her with daggers instead of wands.
All these thoughts happened between one moment and the next, closely followed by another internal question:
How had she gotten inside the Saints hall?
Who had rescued and then reanimated her?
Her vision clearing slowly, vague smears of color and light and shade resolving into solid shapes, she peered up.
Above her, wand trained sharply at Saffron’s forehead, was a mage cobwebbed with scars from her own time as a statue. Frizzy ginger hair, missing ear, glasses askew on a pretty, pale face.
Auria.