Page 108 of Turncloak

Saffron nodded, more confidently than she really felt, and tried to focus on the logistics. “There’s an axelmare breeder in Lunes—Donan Trilmere. Perhaps we could hire steeds? It’d get us through the Havenwood a lot faster.”

“Stealth is more important than speed. We ideally don’t want to leave a trail, and if we rent axelmares, Donan Trilmere becomes one more witness.”

“Witness?” Miret frowned. “You assured me this was an academic excursion.”

“Yes,” Levan replied, sort of patiently, “but if the excursion goes wrong, and curses are fired…we want to make it impossible for the Silvercloaks, or indeed the Vergard, to build a case against us. If we hire steeds near the border, that’s evidence of our movements.”

“So we traverse the Havenwood on foot.” Saffron knelt to ruffle the spot behind Rasso’s ear that he loved to have scritched. “There’s no way you can just portari us all there with your imported wand?”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “I could try, but I might perish.”

“A sacrifice I’m willing to make,” she quipped, before quickly adding, “Joking.”

Lunes was almost exactly as Saffron remembered it, filled with overgrown wildflowers and cobbled courtyards, shabby cloaks and warm faces, the scents of rosemary and honeywine.

Parts were different, of course. Certain shops and taverns had closed, become other things. New houses had cropped up around the village green. Renzel’s Wandery had expanded dramatically, swallowing up the buildings on either side—how was there so much demand for wands in such a small place?—while the Saints hall had been renovated, its ramshackle wood replaced with immaculate creamstone, the crimson-and-gold obelisk taller and grander than before.

The shape of Lunes might have changed, but not the feel, not the heartbeat. All at once Saffron was six years old again, flying through the streets on a rug her father had enchanted for her. Memories lurked around every corner, her parents’ merry laughter ringing outside the Sleeping Wolf like clinking glasses.

The village had a neat little portari station on the High Street, its walls strewn with framed famous newspaper headlines, its vaulted ceiling corniced with silver and mahogany. As she stood just over the threshold of the gate, Saffron swallowed the lump in her throat, willing the tears not to come.

“Silver,” came a voice beside her, Levan standing just behind her in the quiet station.

“Hmm?” murmured Saff, lost in her memories.

But then something was being lowered over her head from behind, and for a petrifying moment Saffron thought he might be garroting her, of all things, which would have been a very pedestrian and anticlimactic way to be murdered, but then his hands fell away, and she looked down, and she could not fight the gasping sob at the sight of what he had given her.

Her parents’ necklace.

“How?” she choked, her palm going to the familiar wooden oval as she turned to face him. The pendant was warm, as though it had been pressed against his body for a long time.

His expression betrayed very little, apart from the subtle indent in his scarred lower lip that told her he was biting the inside of it. “Saw it at Artan’s Antiques. Bought it back for you.”

Saffron could not find the words to thank him.

Instead, she looked down at the colors swirled around her parents’ gemstones. Gone was the clover green that once painted Levan as an enemy, and so too was the pale pink that suggested a burgeoning relationship; they were past that now, for better or worse. All that remained were vibrant orange, for someone trustworthy, heart-red, for a lover past or present, and a streak of purest gold.

“What does the gold mean?” Levan asked.

“I have no idea,” Saffron tried to say, but the words snagged on the shard in her throat.

It was the truth. She didn’t know. But she suspected.

Levan’s warm pinkie brushed her own, and for a moment, her panging heart stilled. She longed to rest her head against his shoulder, to lace her fingers through his, to show him all the places she had loved as a girl. There was so much in that brush of skin against skin.

But then Miret and Relar arrived behind them, chattering about their favorite types of beak to use in tinctures, and then Harrow stepped through, tutting at their provincial destination, and Levan pulled his hand away so fast it might never have been there at all.

The walk through the Havenwood was long, cold, arduous. Snow fell in flurries, at first, and then in great white drifts, and it was only Levan’s excellent sense of direction that prevented them from straying off course. He seemed to come with a built-in compass.

“How do you know which direction we’re traveling in?” Saffron muttered, during a particularly vicious downfall of snow. She was trying to be polite, because he’d brought her parents’ necklace back to her, but the cold was transmuting her into something of an ornery goat.

Levan looked at her bemusedly, as though she’d asked how he knew that the sun would rise each morning. “How do you not?”

After the first two days, Saffron’s feet blistered, and though Levan was quick to heal the sores, she was still rather childishly irate at the whole thing. What was the point of possessing magic if you still had to hike almost a hundred miles on foot?

Not to mention the camping.

It was an unfathomable hardship. She missed walls, ceilings. Hot baths.