Page 4 of Turncloak

Saff turned to flee, managed several steps. Levan’s hand twitched as though to grab her by the wrist, his thighs lurching as though to tackle her to the ground, but he didn’t need to do that. Had never needed to.

Follow me, he thought.

And so, because the kingpin had commanded it, she followed him.

3

• • • •

Mercy to Be Found

“Levan.” The scarlet cloak hung wrinkled and false from Saffron’s shoulders. “Levan, I’m so sorry.”

A laughably small word, given the situation.

“Yes, I was undercover.” She spoke calmly, taking a step toward him as though to prove she was not afraid. Her white-blond curls spiraled in all directions, and she still reeked of smoke and ash and burnt honey. “I confessed as much. But I chose you in the Havenwood. You watched me choose you, choose the Bloodmoons.”

In the version of reality that stuck, yes.

But what of the version she had rewritten?

At first, the great reshuffling of wands had eluded Levan, like the street entertainer’s game in which a player had to figure out where the prize hid after all the cups had been rearranged. But as his brain retroactively parsed it, he realized that Saffron had repossessed his father’s weaverwick wand between one timeline and the next.

Had Lyrian not been without that wand, he would have been able to defend himself. The death curse might not have found him. He could have parried, blocked, shielded. Not only had Saffron leaked their location to the Silvercloaks, but she’d actively killed his father with her actions in the Havenwood.

Grief flared into anger once more, a safer emotion, easier to thrust outward. He thought then, with a child’s simplicity, that he might hate her.

“That choice was too late.” On the other side of the door, Rasso scrabbled and sniffed at the frame, whining intermittently. “Your betrayal cost my father his life.”

He should lay the Timeweaving accusations bare at her feet. Tell her he knew the truth of her power, the way she had wielded it against him and his kin. Yet some naïve, spiteful part of him wanted her to confess it of her own accord.

“Levan, I—”

“There is mercy to be found,” he said slowly. “If you’re honest with me. About everything.”

The air around them seemed to sharpen, to hold its breath. Her baleful fawn eyes studied his, narrowed slightly, as though searching for just how much he knew. There was something, then, a flint, a clash of internal swords, that made Levan think she understood, all at once, the depths of his terrible knowing.

He did not know what he would do if she confessed. Whether he would spare her, or whether it would give him more reason to destroy her.

In the end, it was a redundant calculation.

“I have been honest,” she said at last. “About everything.”

There it was. A palm reached out across a crevasse and not taken. A card kept pressed to her chest, even when death raised its sickle over her head.

“Then I think you know,” he replied, voice low, desolate, “that I have to kill you.”

Saffron did not flinch. Despite it all, respect swelled inside him. That brazen nihilism, that unfaltering fearlessness, all of it underpinned by a ruthless intelligence. This was a chess line she had already calculated.

“No, you don’t,” she said plainly. “Because you’re a Compeller.”

Some ancient, self-loathing instinct reared inside him. “Why should that matter?” Then, as an afterthought, “I meant what I said in the Havenwood. I’ve never compelled you. Not until I ordered you to follow me into this cell.”

Saffron’s eyes blazed. “Maybe not consciously. But in the week or two after we first met, I kept…slipping. Revealing information about my former cohort. At the time, I thought maybe it was because…Saints, because I was attracted to you. But I can keep a polderdash face against the fiercest of opponents, can withstand torture and prison and the death of those I love without uttering the wrong thing. So I think there was something more at play. A coaxing hand in my mind. A gentle push of encouragement.”

Dread simmered in his belly, black and noxious as loxlure. “I did not consciously compel you. I’d have discovered the truth about your assignment a lot sooner if I had.”

“But unconsciously…Perhaps your power is so great that it spills over.”