Page 41 of Turncloak

Several emotions stirred in Saffron at once, too blended together to separate and name. “Does it trouble you, seeing the things he does? Knowing it isn’t him, that he’s just blindly trying to resurrect two people who never deserved to call him their son?”

Miret blinked hard three times, pushing his half-moon spectacles up the bridge of his nose. He smelled faintly of moth-eaten wool. “It ruins me.” He turned to walk away, back to the safety of his bookshelves. Then he hesitated mid-stride. “Please, do not betray him again. I fear for what he might become if you do.”

Skip Notes

* Destroying a single wand is an intense and costly process, and to purge so many required the full wells of many thousands of dedicated government officials. Accounts detailing the exact nature of this operation are few and far between, though a private journal displayed in the Museum of Verdivenne describes one civil servant’s fraught relationship with magic following their work during the Great Purge.

Magic itself seemed to riot against the Enchanter, as though it had quite suddenly and violently developed free will. The civil servant was never able to get it back under control, and they eventually slew their entire family in a dreadful housecleaning accident. This testimony may, of course, be an elaborate fabrication designed to reduce their prison sentence.

21

• • • •

Miraculously and Fatally Sober

Levan studied Sorvel from above. A crooked village curving around Fair Firth, Sorvel mostly comprised a simple spired Saints hall—its red-and-gold obelisk old and faded—and a smattering of creamstone houses strewn haphazardly around a small harbor, as though a giant had thrown down a palmful of rocks just to see where they might land.

The night was starry, with a gentle bite of salt on the breeze. Claps of laughter echoed around the village as the locals piled into taverns after their evening worship. Levan sat halfway up the low spine of hill cradling the village, and beside him sat Harrow Claver—rogue, rascal, Royal Prophet.

Harrow was a short, slight mage with freckled skin and deep auburn hair swooping past his ears in waves. It was quite difficult to tell what color his irises were, on account of the fact that his pupils were always dilated by wine.

Tonight was no exception. He’d swaggered up the hill from the small portari gate outside town, swigging merrily from a bottle as he approached Levan. As he’d drawn nearer, bronze Foreseer cloak glowing like a furnace in the moonlight, his brow pulled together in a rather sloppy frown.

“You look thinner,” Harrow announced, flopping down next to Levan on a patch of lightly damp grass. “Food is pleasure, and pleasure is a full well, my darling.”

The problem was that for Levan, pleasure in its simplest form had never been all that effective. He had learned from a young age that most joy was too good to be true, and so whenever he experienced a simple animal pleasure, his higher mind waited for the other shoe to drop. The inevitable punishment for daring to feel a scrap of contentment. Everything that had happened with Alucia and Saffron only carved the grooves of this knowledge deeper into his conscience.

Pleasure was fool’s gold. Only pain could be relied upon.

Yet pain was more complicated still, because the returns were diminishing. Levan had spent so much time on the extreme end of the scale—torture curses and self-flagellation, amputated limbs at the hand of the woman he’d loved—that the tamer forms of it did not ameliorate his magic as they might for others. The idea that he’d feel more powerful from using a snapping band—a popular type of rubbery bracelet flicked against the soft skin of the wrist for a mild stinging sensation—was laughable.

So no, he hadn’t eaten.

But he had run, a lot, his muscles burning, his bones aching. And he had found a sick sort of pleasure in the hollow hurt of his stomach, in the head rush whenever he stood. The brutal sensations in his hand, alternating between stabbing and fizzing. That precarious balance of pain and pleasure, discomfort and satisfaction.

Harrow popped a cork on a fresh bottle of cherrywine, took an almighty swig, and offered it to the kingpin. Levan shook his head.

“So there isn’t really a loxlure shipment tonight?” Harrow asked.

“There is not.”

“May I ask why you no longer trust Killoran?”

Levan had explained the vague shape of the ruse, but not the reasons behind it.

“She was undercover,” he replied flatly, staring out across the water to the distant twinkling lights of Brasden. “Claims she is no longer, that her only handler died at my father’s hand. It would appear the loyalty brand has no effect on her.”

It has no effect on anyone anymore. But he couldn’t let the King’s Prophet know that Lyrian’s death had compromised the whole operation.

Harrow gaped at him. “And you let her live?”

“A long story. She gave me leverage to use against her should she betray me again, and there are strong reasons for keeping her around. Playing the Silvercloaks, staying several steps ahead. But she’s too smart, too strategic, and I’m worried there’s a chess line I haven’t calculated. Hence the traps ready to spring.”

“Hells. I should’ve foreseen all of this.”

“That’s why I dragged you up here.” Levan rolled his aching wrist. “Do you know whether she’s going to betray me again?”

A sigh, a head shake. “I haven’t had any prophetic visions in weeks. The King wants to ban me from drinking—thinks the alcohol is addling my inner sight. A rotten killjoy and a raging hypocrite.”