Page 7 of Turncloak

But there was a tugging, gnawing feeling just behind his breastbone, something primal, instinctive. He knew what to do. “Please let me try?”

After a tentative beat, his mother shrugged and offered her arm. Levan uttered the words he’d heard so often from the camp Healer, tugged on that instinct in his chest like a loose thread, harnessed all his worldly want and hope into this single action, drew from some internal well he had never noticed until now. The wand felt too big in his hand.

“Ans mederan.”

The words sounded wrong from his mouth, young and clumsy, fraudulent somehow. But they worked. The scab melted into nothing, and the inflamed skin faded to pale cream, and the flesh knitted together with an almost cosmic sigh.

Staring at his work in wonder, Levan felt at once utterly drained and completely alive, both empty and alight, properly awake for the first time, as though he had passed over some critical precipice, one far more significant than child into man.

To his immense surprise, his mother’s eyes shone and then spilled. Shaking her head in reverence, she beheld him like the first mage witnessing some divine miracle. She kneeled forward, cupped his small jaw in her palms, kissed his forehead, folded her arms around him so that he was warm and safe and loved. Then she whispered into the crown of his head:

“My boy, you are everything I want this world to be.”

Now the memory cleaved through Levan like a rapier. It was not his lack of faith that would devastate his mother, but rather who he had become in her absence. How far he had strayed from the little boy who only ever wanted to heal.

He had suffered through a childhood of torture just so he might revive her with his deep, dark, corrupted power, had become an adult so single-minded about her resurrection that it had scorched him from the inside out. Sometimes it occurred to him, in perfect and fleeting clarity, that he wanted her back not to install her on the throne, but to return to the version of himself she had once known and adored.

His mother had never wanted the ruinous empire built on loxlure and pain, the drive for wealth, wealth, always more wealth. No, that had come after her death, once her late husband realized just how much ascenite was required to keep her corpse viable. Twenty years they had been searching for a necromancer, and still Lorissa was a corpse.

Now her late husband had joined her, and the crypt needed more ascenite still.

Next to the queenpin, Lyrian Celadon’s lifeless form was crooked, frail, marred with wrinkles and liver spots and spidery red blood vessels. White hair, pale brown skin, the brooch of his cloak pinned in the hollow of a papery throat. Levan could barely look at him.

He sank shakily to the tiled ground of the crypt, leaning back against the ascenite wall. Letting his exhausted eyes flutter closed, he thought again of those final moments in the Havenwood. The glitch in time as Saffron flickered from calm and wandless to fraught, gasping, tearful—and holding both wands. The yawning pit in his belly as he realized what she’d done.

And then older memories, silver-blond curls spilling over his bare, branded chest, how it felt to have her sleeping against him, feeling some young and hopeful part of him swell back to life.

Stult. You’re a naïve, hopeless stult.

Nobody could love you for real.

“It happened again,” he whispered. “I fell for someone who was only ever using me. I know I should kill the rat and be done with it—it’s the cleanest option. The safest. But perhaps there’s a better play here.” A rueful, self-loathing laugh. “Then again, perhaps I’m just weak.”

He hadn’t planned to tell his mother this, but the words spilled regardless, like a jar whose contents had thus far been contained through the centripetal force of constant spinning. This was why he could rarely abide stasis. Everything poured out.

Lorissa, of course, did not respond, although Levan imagined how she might. His mother was a noble mage, a just one, opposing gratuitous violence and never killing unnecessarily, but Saints save any mage who harmed her son. After what Saffron had done to her family, Lorissa would not show the turncloak mercy. Especially not when said turncloak could steal the throne from beneath Rezaran feet.

Levan knew in his bones what he had to do, but he was not quite ready to do it. Yet the greater cruelty would be to keep Saffron alive and suffering in limbo, as he had been while pinned to that table. Better to put the trapped animal out of its misery.

As he climbed to his feet, an incongruous image snagged his gaze—a dark shape beyond one of the vault arches, a slice of black where there should be none.

A boot heel.

Cold washed through him as he found the source.

The body of Tiernan Flane, the Silvercloak he’d turned, the meek detective he’d compelled into taking his own life the moment he was discovered. Saffron must have stashed the corpse in the crypt, driven by the same fevered hope that kept Levan upright. She could find a necromancer. She could bring her friend back.

Levan’s hollow pity sharpened into a calculated blade. He would not allow himself to feel sympathy or kinship with the mage who killed his father. And he certainly would not allow the Silvercloaks to believe they held any power over him.

They had sent Saffron to destroy him. She would be the last.

He lifted his wand tip to his lips. “Et vocos, Sando Segal.”

“Yes?” came Segal’s gruff response.

“There’s a silver body in the crypt. Dump it outside the precinct. And leave a note.”

Levan usually strode—with purpose, with a straight back and a high jaw, crimson cloak billowing and snapping around his ankles. But as he made his way to the cell holding Saffron Killoran, he ambled, pace slow and dragging, reluctance stooping his spine and tucking his chin down to his clavicle, cloak neither billowing nor snapping but rather drifting despondently.