Page 181 of Turncloak

If Levan thought his own compelling was powerful, it was naught by comparison with Sebran’s.

The command was hard, absolute, unflinching, both surgically precise and as strong as a hurricane, and as Levan tossed his wand at his brother’s feet, he could not help but marvel at how the boy from the woods had grown into his ability. He could command the world entire, if he so wanted. How easily Levan might have been overpowered in the watchtower, had his own power not surged and broken first.

With a frighteningly steady hand, Sebran unlooped a set of deminite manacles from his belt and threw them at Levan’s feet. “Clasp these around your ankles.”

A perfect mirror of what had been done to Sebran on the night of Lorissa’s death.

Levan’s own hands shaking, reality dawning, the sudden and terrible knowledge that he was caught at last, the kingpin crouched to one knee and restrained himself.

As the cold deminite met his skin, the compelled command holding the room hostage fell, and the station descended once more into chaos. Shuffles and yells and incantations, a blur of color and sound.

Fear pulsing through him white and cold, Levan did not look up at his brother, but rather across at Miret, his anchor, his safe haven, the port in the great storm of his life. Surely the old mage could do something. Fix this, without necessarily hurting Sebran.

Miret’s warm eyes met Levan’s cold blue ones.

“Mil,” he murmured, my child, and something soared in Levan then, because the word was imbued with emotion, and surely someone truly soul-dead could not feign such depth of feeling, but then—

—a spell leapt from a Whitewing wand toward a Silvercloak.

The Silvercloak ducked, and the scholar did not.

Miret Tomazin, the mentor, the surrogate grandfather, one of so few people who had ever seen the good in Levan, fell lifelessly from the axelmare’s saddle to the blood-soaked ground.

The roar Levan let out was louder than thunder, than an earthquake, than a dragon’s furious scream. A scream from the very cellar of his soul.

Twice the pain of his mother’s death, his father’s, the suddenness lending an unreality to it, and yet Levan’s body knew, his heart and his throat and the mind beneath his mind knew…that this one was permanent. Miret had wanted this, had asked for as much. To take him to the crypt and beg Halant to bring him back would be a disservice.

Miret was gone.

“No,” he moaned, though he wasn’t sure any sound left his mouth. He was a little boy again, the killing machine of the previous minute vanished somewhere deep inside. “I can’t keep losing everyone. I can’t, I can’t…”

As Levan continued to howl his despair, Sebran knelt and took into custody the last Rezaran wand—and with it the possibility of all the lives his brother might have chosen instead of this.

74

• • • •

Death Penalty

Saffron sat on the floor of a holding cell, shivering profoundly.

She had not yet been stripped of her cloak, her own clothes, but she was wandless, hopeless. It was cold in the cell, yes, and had been cold in the winter-bitten north, but the shivering was borne more of an ingrained trauma, an involuntary bodily response to captivity. She hadn’t thought her time in Duncarzus had affected her—until she had been cuffed, chained, locked in once more. The deminite bars filled her with a feeling of profound emptiness, of dark numbness.

“You were right—King Quintan has passed the death penalty,” Auria said softly through the bars of the cage, leaning back against a creamstone wall on the other side. Her pink, dewy face looked recently scrubbed clean, the cobweb scars starker than usual. “He heard the Bloodmoon kingpin had been arrested. Wants to make an example.”

“What are the charges?” Saffron croaked. Her throat was dry, and bizarrely enough, she was yet to be offered hot chocolate. “Surely nothing organizational. You don’t have enough to bring down the Bloodmoons entire. That’s why you’re here.”

“The kingpin committed sixteen counts of murder, for a start.” Auria rolled the back of her skull on the wall, then peered through the bars at her disgraced former colleague. “And no, that’s not why I’m here. I’m here because I don’t want to see you die for this. I know you were always willing to, that you wouldn’t have taken the job otherwise. But—”

“I meant what are the charges against me.” Saffron’s teeth were gritted in a feeble attempt to control her trembling. “Yes, I killed a Whitewing, but it was self-defense. Well, Levan-defense. And—”

“Treason, Saffron.” Auria’s voice was gentle, terrible. “The charge is treason.”

The floor fell out from beneath Saffron, but she tried not to let her fear show. “How is this treason? The Bloodmoons are a criminal organization, yes. You might get them on ascenite laundering, murder, but treason? No.”

They had their sights on the throne, true.

But the Silvercloaks should not know as much.