Page 109 of Turncloak

Harrow shared her ire, and threatened to go home approximately every quarter of an hour.

Levan, on the other hand, was giddy about the whole thing.

The brooding, dangerous kingpin. Giddy.

In a canvas backpack, he’d brought them each a tent, enchanted to collapse down to palm-size when not in use, and rolled-up bedspreads enchanted for warmth. When the food he’d brought from Atherin ran low, he lit campfires and cooked foraged sustenance—small forest animals, winter roots, a freshly caught midnight squid from the half-frozen river splicing through the forest, as well as several mushrooms confidently identified by Relar as non-poisonous.

The kingpin took the apothecary’s grandson under his wing, teaching him how to trap and humanely kill wild game (Saffron noted, with mild curiosity, that Levan never cast the killing spells himself), introducing him to the Lost Dragonborn books he and Saffron doted upon, discussing the latest research on tolrus tusks in the cure of roughscale.

There was a purity to Levan’s conversations with Relar—at least from his side. Occasionally Saffron noticed the boy looking sidelong at the kingpin, with fear or distrust or something of a similar texture.

Relar regularly kept his grandmother abreast of their movements, his voice tender and worried whenever they spoke, though Levan repeatedly assured the boy she was well-protected. If the Whitewings paid her a visit, the scarlets would move in swiftly and ruthlessly. She was safer now than she’d been in months.

As the days wore icily, painfully onward, the kingpin gained more color. They were so far removed from laundered ascens and loxlure-spiked drinks, gambling and gamehouses and tortured witnesses, necromancers and crypts and all that usually weighed so heavily upon him. And as Saffron watched him day after day with the apothecary’s grandson, she finally understood why he had not branded the boy who had killed his right-hand mage.

Because Relar Zamorin was exactly like him.

Once she’d made the comparison—the awkwardness, the tendency for fewer words, the love of books and learning, the deep affection for his family—she couldn’t help but feel horribly sad. Was this who Levan would have been had he not been tortured and branded by his own father?

Little wonder he wanted to save Relar from the same fate. She just had to hope his mercy on the boy would not come back to bite them.

On the fourth day, when Saffron’s morale was especially low—they had traveled so far and had only just arrived on Bellandrian soil—Levan made hot chocolate. The others had retired to their tents early, leaving Saffron and the kingpin sitting alone around the campfire.

“How much do the others know about what we’re doing?” Saffron rubbed her hands together in a futile bid to keep them warm. Levan had provided her with a set of leather gloves, but they weren’t enough to stave off the bitter winter cold.

Levan was heating a copper saucepan of snow over the fire. “Harrow and Miret know we have a lead on the Fifth Prophecy, and that it likely pertains to you. Neither knows you’re a Timeweaver, nor that we want to wind back over two decades and rewrite the night we lost our parents. Relar knows nothing.”

“You like him. The apothecary’s grandson.”

The orange-gold flames of the fire danced in his pupils. “I do.”

“You think he can be trusted without a brand?”

“I’m hoping decency and kindness will earn his loyalty.”

Wincing at the ache in her legs, Saffron shifted on the felled tree trunk she was using as a bench. Levan perched on the stump opposite her. “If you had to kill him, for whatever reason…because he betrayed you, compromised you. Could you do it?”

“A dark question.”

“We lead a dark life.”

The kingpin peered out across the moonlit forest. “Do you think I’m weaker than when we met?”

“Why would I think that?”

“On the night our paths crossed, I amputated the wrist of a Brewer I knew to be innocent, then killed him when he proved unfruitful. A few weeks later, in the Havenwood raid, you watched me falter and fail to sever a detective’s hand. It was shortly after I lost my own, and I chose to compel him instead, even though it revealed my secret to you. That was weakness.”

“Deciding not to inflict pain upon another human is not weakness.”

He shrugged stiffly, still not looking at her. “I didn’t do what needed to be done.”

“You did—just differently. Isn’t that what you’re trying to do? Rule differently than your father?”

Levan did not respond for several moments, simply gazed into the spitting embers of the fire, lost in thought.

“Tell me something about your mother,” Saffron murmured. “I want to know her.”

He raked a hand through snow-dusted hair, looked up at the vast whale-belly sky. “I think that if she hadn’t been raised in hiding, she would have been a Hand of the Saints.”