Page 118 of Turncloak

But it was finally time to come clean. To tell Tarth everything.

And so he did.

Then, when he was finished, he added, breathless, “Maybe that’s what I should do with my life. Stop things like that from happening. The thievery, the murder. To make the world a little bit better for my presence.” His voice hitched. “Not worse, as it has been.”

Tarth let the revelations roll over him, draining the last of his tea and pouring himself another cup.

“Crime prevention. I can see that.” A genuine smile. “The Silvercloaks, hmm? There’s only one problem—the Academy recently changed their entry requirements. Applicants require a specialist mage classification to join their ranks. And since you intentionally wrote off your compelling exam…”

The boy’s chest sank, sensing a dead end approaching, but there was a twinkle in his mentor’s eye.

“As you know, I lecture at one of the hallowed institutions in Novarin. But it is not one of the universities, as you have likely assumed all these years. It is the military college. I teach during term time, spend semester breaks conducting immersive exercises for the cadets. Though I’m mostly retired from active duty, I’ve been deployed twice in the time you’ve known me.” Tarth cleared his throat. “I do prefer the Professor moniker to Colonel, however. Less ostentatious, don’t you think?”

Something fluttered behind the boy’s ribs. “Why are you telling me this now?”

“There is another way into the Silvercloak Academy—the military track.” A loaded shrug, as though something he had long hoped for was finally coming to pass. “My name goes a long way. I could get you onto it in a heartbeat.”

The boy considered this. There had been little in the way of war on the continent in the time he’d been alive, so he’d be very unlikely to actually fight. He could pass through the military academy, spend however long he needed in active service, then transfer to the Silvercloaks.

“Would you tell the military about my compelling?”

Tarth shook his head. “Not without your blessing. The way you ride a steed is enough to get you into the axelcavalry.”

“Maybe the infantry. I think if an axelmare was slain beneath me, I’d perish of sadness there and then.”

“Very well. The infantry, then.”

There were a few moments of amiable silence, the library scented with old books and the north’s favorite tea. The boy studied his mentor—the now wrinkled face, the sprays of gray in his black hair, the gold-rimmed reading glasses—and finally allowed himself to feel the rush of gratitude and affection he’d suppressed for so long.

The love he’d always suspected was a trap.

“Thank you, Tarth,” he whispered, a little choked. “For everything.”

“Now, Sebran. You’re about to enter into my scholarship, are you not?” A warm smile, shot through with pride. “You’d best start calling me Professor Vertillon.”

51

• • • •

Flarence

Saffron found herself oddly sad to say goodbye to Almere, because she felt her father’s presence so strongly. Bellandry was his homeland, and he lived on in every lilting snatch of conversation she overheard, in every glass of warmed honeywine, in every crop of golden-brown hair she passed on the street.

He was here—and so was Levan.

For the first time since her betrayal in the Havenwood, she felt a subtle opening in him. A book that had been padlocked shut sighing free of its bounds, allowing her not to read its chapters, exactly, but at least to brush her thumb over the edges of its pages. The camping had helped, as had their conversation about his childhood. Hearing about it had made her want to reach back through the bounds of time and space and destroy the people who had done it to him—though, of course, they were already destroyed. She couldn’t say, with any amount of truth, that those deaths haunted her.

I woke up every day wishing for the pain to come.

If she had another chance, she would make both Vogolan and Lyrian suffer far more than they had.

Two days after arriving in Almere, their odd traveling band packed their things, departed Meraude’s Inn—Saints, Saffron would miss that bath—and arrived at the portari gate, now clear of shrieking Augurests, though Saffron still saw the afterimage of those bound figures, wrists stretched wide and bound to the ascenite axelmares, shaven heads and tattooed eyelids, chanted litanies echoing through the streets.

A larger picture of the continent was emerging. The skirmishes Nissa reported on the Eqoran border, the unpoliced protests against Queen Vune’s rule in Bellandry, the collusion between the Bloodmoons and the Nyrøthi Steel King. The world had been at peace for decades, and yet that peace felt fractured, uncertain.

As a modern history scholar, Saffron had learned to recognize the patterns that preceded major conflict. Was this how it felt to live in the prelude to the Six Wars? The War of Eight Mountains? Feeling tensions simmer and crackle, with the acute sense that one more unfortunate incident could trigger devastating hostilities?

What if she was that unfortunate incident?