Page 131 of Turncloak

This woman would experience immense pain now, and it would, as Levan pointed out, still be real—just like his own torture could never truly disappear from the world. But after Saffron retrieved the Fifth Prophecy, after she found a weaverwick wand and wound back the decades, the black-cloaked mage would not know what terrible ills had befallen her in another life.

Not true absolution or redemption, but it was all Saffron had.

“Hold her arm up,” Saffron muttered.

Levan obliged, gripping the woman’s forearm with his golden palm. As he realized what Saffron was about to do, she saw the emotional shield thrown up behind his eyes.

Saffron pressed her wand tip to the stranger’s wrist. “Sen perruntas.”

A pale, bony hand fell to the snow, and the woman’s wail cut through the twilight like a scythe.

“Reattach it for me?” Saffron asked Levan lowly, knowing she was asking him to do something terrible, something he had not been able to do for himself, but he was a far more gifted Healer than she, and they needed the woman to know that unless she cooperated, the suffering would go on forever.

Swallowing hard, Levan pressed his own wand to the stump of the mage’s wrist. “Ans annetan.”

The hand leapt from the snow and clamped onto the stump, skin and flesh and bone sewn back together. Tears of agony poured down the mage’s cheeks, her whole body trembling in Levan’s grasp.

“It won’t end,” Saffron said. “We can do it all night—in all the time I’ve known him, his well has never run dry of power. Or you can answer our questions, and keep your hands.”

The woman muttered something in rapid-fire Bellandrian, but it was a strange, twisted accent, braided with Nyrøthi influence.

“ ‘You’ll kill me as soon as I answer your questions,’ ” Levan translated.

Saffron shook her head. “All we want is to breach those wards. If you allow us to do that, you’ll live.”

The woman shook her head once more, but Saffron sensed the weakening of her will—an instinct she’d honed over years of practice police interrogations. “Are you currently holding a ward over a cave mouth in the Cinereal Sea?”

After several shaky, whimpering moments, the woman looked down at her now immaculate wrist and nodded. Straw-colored hair fell into her tear-streaked face.

“Why? The person who concealed something in that cave died a thousand years ago. Why continue to hold the ward?”

The woman answered in that alloyed accent, and Levan translated.

“ ‘It’s the pride of my family. Enchanters since the dawn of time, powerful enough to hold a ward to prevent the world’s end.’ ”

A ward to prevent the world’s end.

So she knew how critical her role was. She hadn’t just inherited a task that her family had long since forgotten the purpose of. She didn’t resent the duty that cost her her magic, which would make it all the more difficult to convince her to betray it.

“If I did kill you now, would the ward fall?” Saffron asked. “Or do you have children of your own also upholding it?”

At the very mention of the word children, the woman shook her head so passionately that Levan had to peel back the blade so as not to cut her. He didn’t bother to translate, but from context—and the recognition of the word fante, for girl—Saffron would have guessed her to be pleading: “Please, not my girl—please. Anything, I’ll give you anything.”

“Anything,” Saffron said, barely recognizing the cool timbre of her own voice. “So you’ll let the ward drop? Let the world end?”

“Oul, oul, abien-cor.”

Yes, yes, of course.

How many parents would let the world end to save their children?

“And how do I know you won’t recast the ward when we leave?”

The woman spoke, and Levan translated, a darkness to his tone, a bitter bite to the edges of his words. “ ‘Take my tongue if you must. Just leave my daughter alone.’ ”

Doubt and shame warred in Saffron’s mind, in her heart. She knew that to get to the Fifth Prophecy, she’d have to do this. Kill or maim, threaten or hog-tie.

And yet the woman seemed too ready to give up the ward, especially when she had acknowledged the weight of her duty.