Page 155 of Turncloak

There was an almighty tug of current, and at first Saffron thought that was it, the furious wave that would smash her into the cliff, but then she was above water, gasping, spluttering, and she realized it had been Levan’s arm hauling her up.

After the salt water cleared from her vision and several gulps of frigid winter air reinflated her lungs, she peeled open her eyes to see a few distinct shapes.

Levan, still holding Miret.

A rope.

A cliff.

And Harrow Claver’s anxious face peering over the top.

“Go first.” Levan’s teeth clenched with the effort of holding both her and Miret.

Saffron’s body moved of its own accord, hauling up the cliff with the new rope, her cut palms transcending pain into a cold white numbness, and then Levan was climbing behind her, Miret still flung over his shoulder, and then, somehow, impossibly, they were all slumped in the snow on top of the cliff, gasping, gasping, but alive.

Rasso was there, panting, licking, wheedling at Miret’s wounded side.

“Harrow,” panted Levan, flat on his back with the heels of his hands pressed into his eye sockets. “What in all the hells happened?”

“Relar cut the first rope,” Harrow replied, breathless and leaning back against the tree trunk the rope was tied around. “After I…fled…I was waiting behind the tree line for you to reappear. Relar dashed out of the woods, didn’t see me. The rope was cut before I realized what he was doing.”

“You didn’t think to stop him?” Saffron tried to snarl, but instead erupted into a waterlogged coughing fit. She had never been as cold or as exhausted, her entire body both hard as ice and clumsy as jelly.

“I tried,” Harrow snapped back. “But he was frantic, feral. Tear-stricken, beside himself. Said the Bloodmoons protecting his grandmother were dead and soon his grandmother would be too, no matter what he did next. He fled, muttering something about letting us all destroy one another. I ran the whole way back to Flarence to buy another rope. You’re welcome, by the way.”

“Welcome?” Saffron stared at him incredulously. “You abandoned us to fight an ancient foe and then—”

“The Bloodmoons protecting the apothecary are dead?” Levan interrupted, clearly more perturbed by this news than the King’s Prophet’s cowardice. “Whitewings. It must be.”

At the mention of the name, Harrow’s face blanched—which was impressive, when it was so pale to begin with. “Levan, there’s something I need to tell you about the Whitewings. About their leader. It—”

“Not now,” Levan muttered, forcing his depleted body up off the snow to examine Miret. He pressed two fingers to the scholar’s throat, feeling for a pulse, and grimaced at what he found. “Weak. Watery. Far, far too cold, and I’m out of magic. We need to get him back to the inn. I don’t know how to begin healing him—whether this can be healed.”

For the first time, Saffron looked at the hole the scarshark had left in the old scholar’s body. It started just above the hip bone and ended just below the ribs, everything in between missing in a perfectly smooth semicircle. There was something uncanny about the lack of blood, the lack of a visible wound.

“If we can get him to Tålun,” Saff whispered, “maybe he could…”

Do what, she didn’t know.

“I’m less concerned about the wound than whatever that Sordai did to him.” Levan laid his golden palm on his surrogate grandfather’s chest, a brief but intense pain cresting on his face. “Miret? Miret, can you hear me?” He kneeled lower, forehead resting atop his hand. “Please, wake up. Please. Or I’ll send a necromancer to raise you, and I know how little you want that.”

Miraculously, Miret’s eyes drifted open. The goading worked, and yet there was a sort of emptiness to the scholar’s gaze. An awful blankness.

“Can you describe what you’re feeling?” Levan sat upright, talking more urgently. “What the Sordai did?

Miret closed his eyes again. He didn’t seem to have noticed his gigantic torso wound. “My magic—it’s gone. Not just an empty well, but…the well entirely. It stole it from me. As the legends say. They steal a well, then drink the magic of other mages to fill it. And I find that I do not care. I do not care about anything, truthfully. I could die right now and not overly mind.”

Saffron recalled how close she had been to relinquishing her own soul, her own will, and felt violently ill. Shivering rather extremely, she muttered to Levan, “Do you think the Sordai drowned in the cave? Or do you think it managed to get out?”

Levan shook his head. “I have no idea.”

“Saints.” She let her own eyes fall closed. “We might have just released a Sordai back into the world. That’s…terrifying.”

“It is. But we also got what we came for.”

Levan pulled the relic wand from his waistband.

Harrow’s eyes widened, breath hitched.