Page 78 of Turncloak

Saying nothing, he circled, forcing her to turn on her heels, to keep the shield lifted in front of her body. A few seconds later, he’d rotated far enough around to rip the dagger from the wall.

Saffron looked afraid now, realizing that the next time he hurled it in her direction, she might not be fast enough to dodge. “Levan, why would I betray you when I’ve already given you evidence of my own murderous activities? The second you turn all that over, I’m in chains.”

“You must take me for a fool,” he seethed.

While watching Saffron descend from that open window, Levan had finally figured out her long-term play. She was going to secure evidence against the Bloodmoons, then she was going to turn back time to before she murdered that Whitewing and wrote her confession letter—taking the evidence with her.

But she didn’t have the requisite weaverwick wand yet, which was why he had to slay her before she could secure one, before she could unmake everything. Again.

“Take you for a fool? What—”

He raised the dagger. “This ends now, Silver.”

Saffron let out an argh of frustration, dropped her mattermantic shield, and lunged for Levan—an elbow hooked toward his temple, sharp and fast but easy to spot a mile off. He slammed up a forearm to block it, and she used her other hand to grab his wounded wrist—hard. So hard it felt like the bone had been pulverized to dust, like a thousand bolts of lightning fired straight into the stump.

He dropped the knife, and a gasp wrenched loose without permission. The magic in his well swirled, pulsed, became pure, metallic, strong enough to heal the most mortal of wounds.

Yet he still could not use it to kill her.

“Sen debilitan,” she incanted once more, and his body stilled, but she was diminished now, and the shackles of the spell were easier to shake free from.

She used the split seconds of his struggle to talk.

“If you were listening, you already know the truth of why I was willing to say anything to get Nissa to pity me. Because there’s a letter from my father. For me.”

Levan knelt to retrieve the knife, stood tall again.

Said nothing.

“My dad left it in Aspar’s custody, but she perished before she could tell me where to find it. Whether it’s under the care of the new captain, or whether it’s rotting in some distant vault. I thought Nissa might be sympathetic enough to my cause—trapped in a criminal organization whose kingpin knows me to be a turncloak and thus wants me dead—that she’d help me retrieve it.”

“You knew doggedly pursuing this letter would endanger your life.” Levan clenched the handle of the dagger so hard his knuckles stretched white. “That it would cast suspicion over your movements, give me ample reason to doubt you.”

Those doe-like eyes were still wide and shining with fear, but also with something else, something sad and young and lost. “You wouldn’t do the same, if you knew your mother had written you such a letter?”

The painful twist low in his chest confirmed as much.

He thought of how it felt to stand over his mother’s fresh corpse, his brother weeping and pleading, his father forming ruinous plans to slip over the border and threaten Mellora Killoran into raising the body from the dead. He thought of the fact that after that night, Saffron did not speak again for over half a decade—not until she read the Lost Dragonborn books, the story that had saved him too.

He thought of his own mother telling him, as she prayed over her Saints stones, that he was everything she wanted this world to be. He thought of how far he had strayed from that. He thought of what it would mean to him to have a letter from her, of how it might have kept him from this ruinous path.

He thought of slumping over Saffron’s blood-soaked body in Aredan, begging her to wake.

“Levan,” Saffron whispered, sensing his faltering resolve, the cracks in his armor carved by the matching contours of their pain. “I just want to hear his voice one last time.”

Levan’s thoughts spun like the symbols on the gamehouse’s elemental slot machines. “And if this letter made it into your possession,” he said slowly, “you’d stop with the double-crossing?”

“I think it’s triple-crossing at this point,” she quipped, unable to quell her sarcasm even with daggers flying.

“Are the Order headquarters warded?”

She shook her head. “They rely on the strength of their guards.”

“Seems like an oversight.”

“Wards are costly, and the number of mages willing to give up their wells to hold them is shrinking every year. My uncle Merin would say this level of self-interest and lack of national pride is evidence of a decadent civilization, that the fall of Atherin is nigh.”

At the reference to her uncle, the jocular tone slid out of her voice. She hitched on his name, and by the end of the sentence, her throat seemed to have clammed up.