Page 110 of Turncloak

This surprised Saffron—Hands were pastors, of sorts, pillars of the community who delivered sermons and prayers in Saints halls. They comforted the bereaved and the hopeless, offered their own homes to the homeless, fed the hungry and nursed the sick and held the hands of the dying as they transmuted from consciousness back into raw magic. All Saffron knew of Lorissa Rezaran and her dogged pursuit of power did not marry with any of it.

She left a soft silence, let Levan expand his idea.

“My mother was the most devout mage I’ve ever met—even more so than Miret. She believed so wholeheartedly in the Saints, in their doctrine, in their ideals. Magic as a force for good, something that heals and mends and makes new. The great cycle of the world. She found so much peace and comfort in faith, and whenever I watched her share that with others—telling parables over campfires, leading prayers over caskets, letting the kids in the settlement play with her Sixteen Stones—she glowed from within. It’s exactly how I feel when I’m Healing.”

The soft orange light on his face, the susurrating fire, the misted reverence in his voice…all of it made Saffron feel almost nostalgic, as though she had stepped back into a simpler time. “So why didn’t she become a Hand?”

“She couldn’t risk embedding herself in a real-world community. If anyone discovered who and what she really was, if they found the hourglass or the weaverwick, if they heard her speak of time in any sort of unnatural way, if they realized she prayed first and foremost to Aevari…our whole family would be slaughtered.”

“And she couldn’t have hidden her weaving? Buried the hourglass and wand, prayed to the Sixteen equally?”

A head shake. “She believed that the Saints granted her the power of Timeweaving, and to turn her back on Aevari, to conceal and deny her magic, would be to spit on their gracious gift. She knew the only way to make Vallin safe for her family was to rise to power, change the law, and exonerate the Timeweavers.”

Saffron let these insights wash over her, felt a bud of sympathy for the fallen queenpin take seed in her chest. “Little wonder you were so keen to accompany me on this quest. If I can exonerate the Timeweavers with the Fifth Prophecy…”

Finally, his flame-lit eyes found hers. “Maybe my mother will never have to take the throne at all. She can become a Hand, and I can become a Healer. We can wind back twenty-one years, and live the lives we should have lived all along.”

Saffron sighed. “I want that very much.”

Levan prodded at the fire with a long stick. “Over the last few days, I’ve realized the necromancer path was always the wrong one. My mother would be horrified to know we kept her teetering on the cusp of life and death all these years. We did not allow her body and soul to return to the endless current of magic—that which she always believed to be the proper order of things. We did not honor the Saints with her passing. We made her sacrilege.” He peered into the saucepan, dipping his wand into the pooled liquid. “Ans calococar.”

Saffron grinned. The same transmutation spell he’d used after she’d been branded. She’d asked for hot chocolate instead of coffee, and he’d obliged. Her first real insight into the plunderous depths of his power—and also a damn fine cocoa.

He poured the dark, creamy liquid into a metal camping cup and handed it to her. It was hot enough to warm her palms, even through her leather gloves, and though her first sip almost scalded her tongue, it was the first real pleasure she’d felt in days. Magic swirled and glittered into her well, and she stifled a moan of joy.

Levan watched her drink, an impenetrable expression on his face. When he spoke, it was somehow both soft and rough. “I’m sorry for—the night you showed me your father’s letter.”

Saffron stared down at the ash-flecked snow between her boots. The memory was still embarrassing—though not half as shameful as running out of a pleasurehouse in tears because her partner was not him.

“No,” she mumbled, feeling as though she were fourteen years old and speaking to her schoolyard crush. “I’m sorry for coming on so strong.”

A long silence, into which an owl hooted. He poured himself a cup of hot chocolate, even though he wasn’t especially fond of it, and then raised it over the campfire.

“To a better world.”

Saffron smiled and clinked her own cup against it, a thousand emotions barreling through her.

“To a better world.”

48

• • • •

The Heretical North

Harrow Claver was ready to commit a series of violent crimes in exchange for a proper bed. Levan, to his credit, had provided the King’s Prophet with a steady flow of honeywine throughout their arduous hike, but Harrow had never had a blister in his life.

How unseemly. How unbefitting of a Highcloak.

Almere was just as he remembered it; a smattering of rain-slicked cobbles and stone bridges, cream-brown buildings and green-and-gold awnings, mossy balustrades and pooled lamplight, wide boulevards and narrow streams and a ravenous forest threatening to swallow the city whole.

All the same as it had been in his childhood—except for the crowd of protesters huddled around every portari gate in the city.

When the hodgepodge crew of Bloodmoons, prophets, and apothecaries reached the first portari gate, a few streets over from the Banq T’el Almèrue—a building Levan regarded with a curious amount of vitriol—they stopped dead in their tracks.

Several Augurests with shaven heads and tattooed eyelids had bound themselves to the carved axelmare arches of the gate, humming and chanting in eerie unison. Another two dozen Augurests circled like vultures, echoing the frenzied chants of the manacled.

Harrow discerned a clear theme to their chorus: that Queen Vune was a heretic who’d turned her back on the good word of the Augurests, who did not hold their warnings in high enough regard, who did not go far enough in ensuring Augurism was upheld as the state religion. They demanded more funding for the upkeep of Augurest temples, more rigorous education around the doctrine of the Divine Augurtures, a harder line on Saints missionaries slipping over the border into the Augurest motherland. Criminal convictions for the blasphemous, mandatory head shavings and facial tattoos for the most heretical of them all—including Queen Vune herself.