Page 6 of Turncloak

Whenever Levan thought of the rival gang, he felt a hot, humiliated anger. Anger not just at the way the Whitewings snapped at scarlet ankles like disobedient pups, but at himself. He had not taken their threat seriously—distracted, perhaps, by Silver’s seduction, or by his own messy history with one of their number—and had missed how deadly they were becoming.

No more. He would learn everything about this city, the way Lyrian had. He would be the ruler the Bloodmoons needed in a time of open war.

By the time he returned to the dragon statue on the third floor, dawn streaked rose-gold light through stained glass windows. Exhaustion burned his eyes like salt, but there was still one pressing matter to attend to.

In the room housing the portari gate, Segal slumped against a creamstone wall, staring despondently at Lyrian’s corpse. The sight of the empty body cut Levan to the bone, the pain of it bright and shocking, but he could not let that show.

“Kingpin,” Segal muttered without rising, his eyes raw with exhaustion and perhaps, Levan thought, grief. He had been loyal to Lyrian Celadon for decades, and now, in the span of weeks, he had lost both his magic and his oldest friend. “What happened?”

“Whitewing assault. The wards fell, and the white bastards pounced. Killed twenty-odd servants, carved their sigil into the floor. Wards are back in place now, the carnage cleared.”

“Saints.” Segal stabbed his thumb toward the corpse. “What is your order?”

The gravity of it all threatening to fell Levan, to choke the voice from his throat, he uttered the only words he was able to.

“Take him to the crypt.”

Lorissa Rezaran died at twenty-nine years old. Her son was now thirty years old, which meant that when he looked at his mother—preserved on a raised platform of purest ascenite—he saw a woman younger than he was.

Thin hands were clasped over a brittle chest, a chestnut brown braid plaited down the heart-side of her rib cage. Thick black lashes, lilac lips. The scent of roses and earth, mingled with something cool and metallic. Her scarlet cloak was stark against the white surroundings—a domed atrium of raw ascenite, smooth and glowing like the inside of a pearl. The floor tiles were seven-pointed stars spiraling in concentric circles, and silver sconces flickered blueish light over the entire chamber.

When Levan looked at his mother, he saw not a ruthless, power-hungry monster, nor a jilted queen. He saw the woman who used to sneak into his bedroom at night, while he was pretending to sleep, and perch on the edge of his bed. She would stroke his cheek, his hair, warm tears slipping onto his bare arm. She would climb under his covers, wrapping her long body around his tiny back, and whisper into his fluttering throat, “You are the light of my days, and I will stop at nothing to give you the life you deserve.”

She had never wanted power for power’s sake. She just didn’t want her family to have to hide in the woods forever, in exile, as something dirty and damned. And she believed the only way to do that was to take the throne and pass laws to pardon and protect Timeweavers.

Yes, she also held grand aspirations for Vallin as a country, once that crown was hers. Levan had been too young to properly understand her manifestos when she was alive, but his father had spoken of her ideologies many times since her passing.

She wanted to eradicate Augurism—for obvious reasons, since the prophecies of old had justified the genocide of Timeweavers—and reestablish the patron saints as the true national religion. Through faith, she wanted to bring order back to a decadent population. There would be emphasis on community, on piety, on abnegation and togetherness. The Saints represented a purity of magic, of spirit, of being. It always galled her that they had fallen out of vogue over the past century or so, because without them, magekind would not exist.

There were other tenets of her vision, Levan knew, but this was the facet that stuck with him—because he himself had not prayed to the Saints in over a decade. They’d abandoned him the night his childhood torture began, and he wanted nothing more to do with them.

He wondered what his mother would think when she finally returned. Whether she would shun his faithlessness, or understand his faltering as a product of unimaginable grief.

A memory came back to Levan, crisp and clean as a teardrop of rain.

Late one night, when he was a young boy, he had not been able to sleep. Elsewhere in their rotten cabin, he heard a low muttering, a soft litany, an almost elegiac chant. He slipped out of the bedroom he shared with his brother and sought the source of the sound.

His mother sat cross-legged on the floor of the kitchen, alone, humming a prayer over her ancient collection of Saints stones, each of the Sixteen painted a different color to represent their corresponding deity. Levan watched for several moments before her eyes peeled open, and she smiled so softly he realized she’d known he was watching.

“Do they ever answer?” he asked, sitting down beside her. The slatted wooden floor was so cold beneath his pajamas that it felt damp.

“It’s not about being spoken to.” Another gentle smile. “It’s about being heard.”

“I don’t understand.”

She ruffled his already messy hair. “No, of course not. But you will, I hope. If I do my job as mother right—and as queen.”

As it always did, her mention of regency sent a pang of juvenile dread through him. He did not want to share his mother with a whole nation; he wanted her all to himself. Eyes blurring, he looked down at the stones. “You want everyone to worship the Saints like you do.”

A nod. Her dark hair fell around her shoulders in waves, and her face was shadowed in the light. “The world would be better if they did—like it was a thousand years ago. The Saints represent magic as a pure force, a healing force, as potent and rich as love itself. It is where we spring from when we’re born, and where we return when we pass. None of us can truly die, you see. We’re simply made new. That’s why it’s so important to use magic for good, because inside it is the soul of everyone we’ve ever loved.”

This seemed quite abstract to Levan, who had not known death yet, and therefore didn’t care too much for its various theologies. Instead, he focused on her wrist, which was striped with a nasty cut, the flesh around the scab red and angry. “You’re hurt.”

His mother glanced at the wound as though she’d forgotten its existence. “A little. But it’s not your job to worry about that.”

Levan’s brow furrowed. He pulled out his recently acquired wand, which was yet to cast anything—children in exile were hardly able to attend mage school, and the elders on the encampment always seemed too preoccupied to teach him. “I can fix it, I think.”

“You’re too young,” Lorissa replied, laughing sweetly.