Page 114 of Turncloak

“You don’t fool me, Levan.” Saffron’s voice took on a low, foggy quality. “I see you holding your wrist when it hurts. I see the way your limbs twitch whenever the topic of loxlure comes up. I see the longing on your face when you look at Relar—how much you wish you had been allowed to become a young mage like that, instead of what did happen to you.” She swallowed. “It can happen. In the timeline we remake, you can be just like him.”

Levan said nothing. What could he say, to the mage who already knew everything about him? Who knew everything about him, and who was still here. A miracle, in so many ways.

“You know I’ll have to find a weaverwick wand?” she asked, refilling some of the bathwater with the hottest of the taps. It squeaked and croaked as she turned it. “In order to save our families. You’ll have to trust me enough to allow that to happen—to help me, even.”

“I know.”

And he did. He just didn’t like to think too deeply about it.

It was an immense amount of power for any one mage to possess. A power that triggered wars and founded world religions, that inspired fear and hatred and genocide. Could he really allow her to wield such a thing? Could he cede so much control? Was it possible to trust anyone that much, let alone a mage who had betrayed him so badly in the past?

“I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately,” she sighed, in a murmur that suggested she was on the very verge of nodding off.

Levan snorted. “Camping isn’t for everyone.”

“Ha, that too. I just…I might have to do some heinous things in the pursuit of this goal. Saints, I’ve already done heinous things, and my conscience is not yet calloused against it. And I know that it’ll all be undone once I unmake time, but…what if I fail? If I fail to unmake time, all the pain and suffering I’ve caused becomes permanent. Real.”

“It’s real already, Silver.” The logic was so flawed he couldn’t help but point it out. “It’s real because we’re feeling it now.”

Even if she did manage to unmake twenty-one years, would some part of him always know that he’d been tortured by his own father in another version of reality? Would those ghosts follow him through time itself?

“I know.” Saffron opened her eyes forcefully, as though to keep from drifting off, and rubbed her upper arms with a bar of soap. “How do you cope with the guilt? The shame?”

Levan smiled darkly, looking over at her. “Could you really call carving kill marks into my arm and then obliterating myself with loxlure coping?”

Saffron studied him, her pale curls pulled dark and straight by the water, the tired patches under her eyes beautiful, somehow. Only her clavicles were visible above the deep waterline, somehow more intoxicating than seeing everything. The shine of oil along her collarbone, the way her parents’ pendant nestled so neatly between the ridges, with those whorls of orange and red and brightest gold. The steam all around her.

“When was the last time you used loxlure?”

A stake of shame pierced his belly, and he turned away again, staring not at her but at the ceiling. He loathed that he was an addict, how dirty it made him feel. “Two years ago, or thereabouts. There was a yearlong downward spiral after Alucia.”

Water swilled as Saffron washed herself. “You’re a strong person, you know. To have wrestled free of it, gone so long without it.”

“Far from strong. I still think about it all the time. Miss it, in a way.”

“You miss it?”

“The thing about addiction is that it gives you a default response. Bad day? Wash it away with loxlure. Good day? Celebrate with loxlure. Frustration, pain, guilt, shame, grief, hate, longing. All of it can be obliterated with a single sip. Now I have to sit with those things, sip at my ridiculous anguish tea, trying to ignore the screaming animal inside my body, the hunger that seems to gnaw all the way to my marrow. It never goes. Not truly.”

Saffron laid down the soap, combing through her hair with her fingers. “During my long stretch of silence as a child, my uncles sent me to a mind doctor. And they said that it didn’t matter that my coping mechanism was destructive, as long as I was coping. As long as it kept me alive another day.”

Levan didn’t have a response to this. He understood this as a justification other people might find solace in, but some part of him believed he should be stronger than that. Able to cope through his own strength of will.

Saffron seemed to realize her borrowed wisdom hadn’t landed, and so when she stood from the tub, so fast Levan almost didn’t turn away in time, she said with a smile, “Perhaps we both need to go back to basics. Did I see a copy of Lost Dragonborn tucked into your rucksack?”

“Book five,” Levan said, the words distant, because she was once again standing naked just a few yards away. “The Tall Order of the Knight in Black.”

“Nooo,” Saffron groaned, mercifully wrapping herself in a dark green towel. “The book where Baudry Abard dies.” The wise old mentor’s death was a crushing one.

“The worst. I cried endlessly over it when I was a kid.”

Steam pluming from her bare skin, she lay down beside Levan on the bed. “I can’t imagine you crying, even as a boy.”

Levan shrugged, thinking of how close he’d been when she’d almost bled to death in Aredan. “Emotions are funny things. Never cried once over the torture curse, never cried once over my failed attempts to resurrect my murdered mother, but the death of a fictional character? Floodgates opened. Inconsolable.”

“You didn’t cry when you were tortured?”

“No, but I did piss myself quite a lot.” He said this with the cadence of a joke, before realizing just how unfunny it was. Hopefully Saffron, who’d always enjoyed gallows humor, would find the light in the—