Page 160 of Turncloak

The sound of running footsteps stopped abruptly, though Relar kept breathing hard. Levan wondered how far he’d made it, where he was running to, but found that he didn’t truly want the answer.

After a few minutes of raspy silence, Relar ground out, “If you want to protect me, you’ll leave me alone. You’ll let me run, let me start a new life, and you won’t follow.”

Levan found himself envious, of all things. Relar’s break would be so clean. A bone snapped in two, not fractured into a thousand small shards that could never functionally heal.

“You have my word.”

A hitching breath. “Thank you—for that, and for not branding me.”

“I’m just sorry you were caught up in this at all.”

Relar did not respond right away, and for a moment, Levan thought that they would part without a goodbye. But then, fear simmering under every syllable, the apothecary’s grandson muttered:

“You can’t trust the King’s Prophet.”

Something inside Levan lurched horribly. “Harrow? Why?”

But the line was already dead.

Saffron had intimated something similar, and now she and Harrow were on that frozen clifftop, scheming over hells knew what. Perhaps he shouldn’t have left them, shouldn’t have given them such an opportunity to make moves behind his back. The prophecy foretold their joint rule, after all.

So many missteps, in the last few hours, the last few days, the last few years. Miret thought the Saints could guide Levan onto a new path, but some subconscious part of him suspected he was too far gone. He could walk away, of course. But perhaps, after all the ill he had inflicted upon the world, it was his moral duty to prevent Saffron and Harrow from destroying everything.

As Levan shrugged out of his soaking clothes and lowered himself into the steaming fir-scented water of the bath, he tried not to look down at his own body—the harsh ridges of rib, the fresh cuts on his arm, the betrothal tattoo, and the ugly, ugly brand—but instead focused on the magic pouring back into him, and the life-defining questions in his mind.

Just as he’d started washing himself with a bar of pine resin soap, a key turned in the lock of the bedroom door.

Saffron Killoran, the Timeweaver, the world-ender, stepped over the threshold.

65

• • • •

A Prayer, an Elegy

Levan’s entire body clenched at the sight of Saffron. Her wet hair slicked to her face and collarbones like tendrils of seaweed. Beneath her sodden black cloak, her tunic clung to every curve and slope, revealing the whitebeam relic wand tucked into her waistband.

“Levan.”

The word had a strange, haunted quality. Like a prayer, or an elegy.

“I’m surprised you’re here.” His voice sounded far away. “I thought you’d already be halfway across the Rapier in pursuit of a weaverwick. There’s a throne with your name on it, after all.”

His words were petulant, yet the day had been long, and his life even longer, and his restraint was failing him.

Shivering violently, Saffron crossed to a lit lantern and cupped her hands over it. Levan was surprised to see the steady fall of tears down the pink apples of her cheeks.

“I don’t want any of what we just saw,” she whispered. “You know I don’t. I don’t want the throne, to wage wars, to decide the fate of the country or the world. I don’t want to rule alongside Harrow, of all people.” A sad sniff; she sounded so young. “I just want my parents back. I want my parents back, and I want you.” Her eyes were red raw as they finally met his. “And I still think that by turning back those twenty years, we can avert the utter hell Harrow and I foresaw.”

The naïve little boy inside him—the one who’d allowed himself to fall prey to the schemings of Alucia, and then Saffron herself—longed to comfort her, to scoop her into his ruined arms, to warm her and soothe her and reassure her. But he thought of what Harrow had described, a burning city littered with the drowned bodies of innocent children, and had to smother his foolish desires.

“Perhaps the crown is what will allow you to turn back those twenty years.” He wrested his tone back into something detached, stripping out the bitterness and dread he truly felt. “That throne room filled with ascenite. My worst fears were right—you do represent a direct threat to my mother’s claim.”

Saffron’s eyes fluttered shut. “She can have it.”

Her speech was slurred, slightly, as though she’d been drinking plentiful bivkar. Levan’s Healer brain kicked in. She’d been out in plummeting temperatures in soaking-wet clothes, and now she looked drowsy, disoriented. Her breathing came fast and shallow, and though her cheeks were pink from cold, the rest of her face was bone white, almost blueish around her lips.

Early signs of deepcold.