Page 180 of Turncloak

Fifteen yards.

Ten.

The statue slipped from his slick grip and fell to the floor, the stone-hewn mage snapping at the waist.

Out of the corner of his eye, Levan spotted the fork of a death curse just in time. He ducked out of the firing line and kept running, pulse roaring in his ears.

Five yards from the gate, his boots slipped and skidded in a bloody puddle. He fell forward onto the ground, knees and palms bearing the brunt of the impact. He dropped his wand but snatched it back quickly, almost blind with adrenaline.

He was close enough to the gate to drag himself there on his screaming knees.

Four.

Three.

Two.

Planting his wand-bearing golden palm on the floor of the gate, he thought, for a luminous moment, that he was going to make it.

A hand closed around his ankle, hauled him back. A glance over his shoulder showed a snarling Whitewing face, standing with her wand pointed down at Levan’s face. Levan compelled her to let go, and she let go. He compelled her not to kill him, but the curse had already left her mouth.

Then—a Silvercloak ran at the Whitewing.

Then—a soft thud as a new mage arrived beneath the portari arches. The sole of a richly polished boot slammed down on the back of Levan’s golden hand.

Levan looked up, and the whole world ceased to turn.

His brother.

Emotion crashed down onto Levan like a crumbling temple.

Laris was alive, Sebran was alive, he was alive.

Shortly followed by the fear.

He was alive, but he was here, in the violent chaos.

Everybody except Sebran Aduran—stop. Stay back.

The dozens of silver- and white-cloaked bodies in the room froze at once. All the sound died with a strange echoing taper.

“Brother,” Levan breathed.

Every broad peak and shallow valley of Sebran’s face was hard with hatred. “No. Look at all you have wrought.” Sebran swept a horrified hand around the slaughterhouse of a station, the mutilated bodies, countless stab wounds. Levan was the only mage carrying a dagger. Blood still dripped from its tip to the tiles, and his clothes were drenched crimson-black. “I take back what I said. You are fundamentally broken, Levan. And there is no redemption, whether you want it or not.”

Sebran raised his wand, silver cloak shifting on his thinner frame, all the brawn he’d painstakingly built atrophied during his time in cell six. Levan could take him down physically, if he wanted to.

But he no longer wanted to. The fight was leaving him, the red-eyed animal who slew all these mages now mortally wounded, cowering in the undergrowth and waiting to die. Casting a gaze once more around the carnage he’d created, at the gleaming cloaks of silver and white soaked in patches of ruinous blood, Levan knew at once that—

No. Not all silver and white.

A pale blue scholar’s cloak had appeared in the doorway atop a skeletal black axelmare. The rider was mild-faced, almost disinterested, and missing a chunk of flesh from his torso, but still searching the room for something. Someone.

Miret too was frozen in place by the compelled command to stop, but he could still see, hear, understand what was happening. Levan did not want that, did not want him to have to watch his surrogate grandson perish.

Levan looked desperately back to Sebran. “Are you going to kill me?”

“You do not deserve such a mercy,” Sebran spat, a vein bulging in his forehead. “Throw me your wand.”