Page 135 of Turncloak

Before she had a chance to think about what she was doing, she shrugged her black cloak over her lilac nightclothes and padded down the corridor to Miret’s room.

No response there either.

The disquiet in Saffron only spread, blackened. The animal sense that something was happening just beyond her periphery. For lack of anywhere else to turn, Saffron knocked on the door on the other side of the shabby wooden corridor, its blue-gray wallpaper peeling, its waist-high paneling worn and splintered.

“No,” came a disgruntled call from the other side of the door.

“Harrow,” Saffron hissed. “It’s about Levan.”

The disgruntled call transmuted into reluctant footsteps, an open door.

Harrow seemed even shorter than usual, as tall as Saffron’s shoulder, and she realized that he must wear slightly heeled boots the rest of the time. His auburn hair was disheveled from sleep, though his emerald silk nightclothes were immaculately pressed.

“What is it?” He peered over his shoulder into the bedroom, where Relar still snored. Saffron’s detective instincts insisted she treat the snoring as feigned.

She kept her voice low, blurry. “He was already struggling with the smell of nightpoppy drifting over from Laudon. We told you earlier that we’d found and killed the wardholders, but what we didn’t say is that I was tormented by the prospect, so Levan did it for me. A dagger swiped across three innocent throats, quick and brutal and self-loathing. I’ve just woken up to find him gone.”

Harrow’s creamy, freckled face remained perfectly neutral. “After everything he and his family have done, he balked over three pedestrian kills?”

Saffron felt an acute missed-step lurch. She’d thought Harrow would share her concerns. “He’s never found it easy.”

Still with that oddly bland look, Harrow leaned against the doorframe, hooking one ankle around the other. “And you understand him better than I do?”

Was Harrow…jealous? In a world of murder and betrayal, sin and addiction and world-shaping prophecies, could it really be something as ordinary as that?

“I think you make a point of not understanding anyone,” Saffron said, matching his placid tone. In the predawn silence in the remote north, both of their voices echoed eerily. “I think you’re a flake and a drifter and coward with no real loyalty or purpose, and Levan shouldn’t trust you as far as he can throw you.”

Harrow’s lips quirked in amusement. “Did you come here in the middle of the night just to hurl insults?”

“No,” Saffron snapped, but quietly. “I thought you might care. A mistake, it would appear.”

She turned, ready to storm away, until the cool marble of Harrow’s next words rooted her to the spot. “Do you really think this world would be better with the Bloodmoons on the Vallish throne?”

Again, that missed-step lurch in her belly, the sense that the whole world had tipped off-kilter.

“It’s where all this is headed,” he continued. “And you’re walking the path willingly.”

“That doesn’t mean the path will never diverge.”

“I don’t understand why he trusts you—knowing you were undercover. Knowing you were Alucia in a different color, a different font.”

Saffron had the sudden acute urge to smack him in the face. “He doesn’t trust me. Not all the way. But that doesn’t mean we can’t strive toward mutual goals, and it certainly doesn’t mean we can’t care about each other.” She folded her arms across her chest, somewhat petulantly. “Are you going to help me find him or not?”

He smoothed his wild auburn hair with his palm, face still completely unruffled. “I’m a flake and a drifter and a coward, with no real loyalty or purpose. I think I’ll let this play out as it may.”

Saffron simply shook her head and walked away.

But not before Harrow added, as a flippant afterthought, “The opening and shutting of doors woke me twenty minutes ago. I went to the window and saw him leave the village on foot with Miret. It looked like they were heading for the cliffs.”

The dread on Saffron’s periphery sharpened into focus.

What if Levan’s departure wasn’t about nightpoppy at all? What if he and Miret were stealing the Fifth Prophecy from under her nose?

“You’re thinking exactly what I did,” Harrow said softly, almost triumphantly.

Realizing she’d been toyed with, a stormy anger broke through Saffron. Yet she didn’t have time to loose the thunder on Harrow. Not if Levan was going for the Fifth Prophecy without her.

After hastily grabbing her boots, Saffron raised her black hood and slipped out into the moonlit night, wondering if she’d been a fool to mend the bridge with Levan, and hoping beyond hope that she was not too late.