Page 113 of Turncloak

“Good.” Harrow stood pointedly, sweeping a hand toward the door. “Now go away, will you? I need to wrench my feet from these ruined boots, and it’s not going to be pretty.”

49

• • • •

The Tall Order of the Knight in Black

Levan might have heard the cascade of revelations from the King’s Prophet if he’d pressed his ear up against the narrow wall separating them. Only Levan was not listening to the dim murmurings next door, because Saffron Killoran was naked a handful of yards away, and the blood in his ears was roaring too loudly to hear much else.

The clawfooted brass bathtub stood merrily in the middle of the bedroom. Lying on his back in the middle of the bed, head resting on his palms, Levan averted his gaze as Saffron stepped out of her forest-bedraggled raiment, though the corner of his eye snagged on the creamy white outline of her curves. Swallowing hard, he unhooked an elbow from behind his head and adjusted his trousers in an entirely ineffectual way.

Saffron’s moan as she slid into the warm, clean water did not help matters.

She fiddled with the countless taps and spouts on the basin, playing with the different temperatures of water before finally settling on one hot enough to scald a dragon. Once she’d added both bubbles and oil to the tub, the subsequent steam and white froth were opaque enough to blur the precise contours of her body. She sighed into it, resting her neck against the back of the tub and closing her eyes.

“Fuck camping,” she said blearily, a smile spreading across her face as pleasure swirled into her well. Why did magic have to be so hellsdamned intimate? “Honestly, even Duncarzus was preferable. A real roof over my head, no need to walk twenty miles a day through several feet of snow. True, it was cold and dark and damp, and the ground hurt to sleep on, and the food was much worse than yours. But still.”

“Mmmph,” Levan said uselessly.

She was naked in a bath.

“This is what I’m built for,” she went on, oblivious to his turmoil. “I’d stay in the bath forever, if I could.”

“I knew our similarities had to end somewhere.” Levan had never been one for a bath, in the same way he’d never been one for hot chocolate. On a certain level, he didn’t feel he deserved a pleasure so simple, so indulgent. Perhaps that was why the particular discomforts of camping—cold lungs and hard earth to sleep upon—so appealed to him.

“Although it’s frustrating not to be able to go straight to Flarence, I can’t say I’m too distraught over a night of pure pleasure replenishment.” She stiffened, registering the implications of what she’d said. “Not like that.”

Levan gnawed at the inside of his cheek, then changed the subject so abruptly that it mostly killed the blood flow to his lower belly. “You seemed rattled by the protesters at the portari gate.”

“It’s one thing to know in an abstract sense that a large sect of the population wants you dead. It’s quite another to see a physical manifestation of it.”

“I know. I grew up in a dilapidated settlement in the Havenwood for that very reason.” Levan rolled his wrist while she wasn’t looking. The cold had made the shooting pains sharper, the penetrative ache deeper. He wished he could temporarily remove the golden hand, wrap the stump in bandages infused with whiteroot.

Then again, the pain had a purpose. It always did.

“What was it like?” Saffron asked. “A childhood in a place like that, with parents like that?”

“More ordinary than you might think. My brother and I played board games my father made. We climbed trees and made dens in the woods, studied maps and fantasized about the adventures we might go on someday. I didn’t realize how unusual my childhood was until I came to the city. Discovered how everyone else had been living all this time.”

Saffron let silence mingle with the steam for a few moments. “You never talk about your brother.”

“No,” Levan replied, with the force of a full stop.

Saffron, however, wasn’t perturbed. Was she ever?

“What happened to him?”

Levan closed his own eyes, remembering that terrible night in the Havenwood. How the moonlight had draped over his mother’s corpse, how snotty his brother’s sobs had sounded. The scent of cold, damp earth all around. “My mother died because of him. Which means yours did too.”

Another pause, this one tauter. “How?”

“He followed her on a raid in…well, here. Almere. She broke into the bank, believing there was another weaverwick in one of the vaults. When my brother’s invisibility tincture wore off, she got distracted, and that moment of distraction cost her life.”

Saffron blew air out through her lips. “Are you alright? Being so close to where it happened?”

“I’m always alright.”

Or he never was, which was a very similar thing.