Page 175 of Turncloak

It was something he’d considered many times before, as both a language enthusiast and someone who’d experienced so much trauma, that to be in pain was the correct preposition. Pain turned your body into a cage, a box your mind couldn’t escape from, a—

The agony ended as suddenly as it began, Rasso tearing the heart from the chest of the Whitewing who’d cast it, but as Levan’s vision turned from white to red to truth, he realized he was pinned back against the wall of the station with a wand tip at his throat.

The last thing he ever saw would be Alucia’s twisted face.

He hurt in every way it was possible to hurt.

“Goodbye, Levan,” Alucia murmured, teeth gritted with the pain of her knife wound, single eye alight with hatred and greed and a feral, bladed hunger. “Sen ammort—”

But then the clop of hooves, which had been growing louder and faster, manifested into a blur of black bones and white-blond curls.

“Sen ammorten,” Saffron snarled, and the killing curse forked cleanly from the end of her knobbly beech wand and buried itself in Alucia’s temple.

71

• • • •

A Steed Slain

The scene outside the portari station was a bloodbath by the time Saffron arrived. Six Whitewings lay dead on the village green, hearts and throats ripped out by Rasso, who was licking his bloodied chops in the manner of a very good boy.

“Are you alright?” Saffron asked Levan, who was dizzy, wandless, barely upright.

But he did not answer, only fell to his knees beside the corpse of the Whitewing who’d almost taken his life. Saffron had never seen such an expression on his face, as though he was simultaneously feeling nothing and everything.

The perished mage wore black wings on her shoulders that implied importance, but other than that, Saffron failed to see why her death would elicit such a response.

“Levan,” she said, soft yet firm, urgent. “We need to get out of here. I’ll drop back to get Miret, then—”

Inside the portari station came the echo of overlapping footsteps.

White cloaks moved behind shattered windows, pouring from the gate like a melting bank of snow.

“Saints,” Saffron hissed. “Levan, with me, now.” She offered him a desperate hand up onto the steed, ready to flee deep into the Havenwood—

—but Levan stayed on the ground.

Staring. Bewitched, entranced. Horrified on some existential plane.

The Whitewings filtered out of the station in an angry knot of bodies, and at the sight of their fallen leader, their fallen friends, they bellowed and opened fire.

Saffron—not even halfway replenished after battling the Sordai—threw a shimmering spellshield in time to block three killing curses. The word ammorten wrenched the kingpin from his reverie. He pulled his dagger from the dead woman’s back and climbed to his feet, slowly and yet somehow fast, smooth. Deliberate. Terrifying.

And then he became someone else—something else.

Less a man or a mage than a machine made for killing and killing alone.

He sliced through the Whitewing reinforcements like they were nothing, cutting throats and shredding chests, Rasso feasting and gorging. The Whitewings’ spells, whether defensive or offensive, were no match for the graceful spin of the kingpin’s body, the fluid twists of his torso as he arced a blade through a wrist, a cheek, a belly.

Saffron didn’t know whether to be impressed or afraid.

But he was only one soldier, and white cloaks were bleeding through the portari gate like a wound that could not be stanched. Several moved around the skirmish, unwilling to fire a killing curse into the fray lest they fell a fellow white, and toward Saffron instead.

She couldn’t best a dozen enemies, but nor could she abandon Levan.

“Sen effigias,” she incanted, blasting off two or three statue curses, but while one found its mark, too many bodies were coming toward her, all firing killing curses. Of course they couldn’t hit her, thanks to her magical immunity, and yet…what if one of them was powerful enough, somehow? Levan could breach the walls she once believed impenetrable.

Levan.