Page 39 of Turncloak

Once upon a time, I owed your father a great debt of gratitude.

Then, six months later, when Saffron’s mission was about to begin:

Why Dragontail?

If you come out of this alive, maybe I’ll tell you.

So many things made little sense. If Joran had been a Timeweaver, Aspar would’ve abhorred him, persecuted him. She was a staunch Augurest whose religion decried Timeweavers as depraved sinners, as scourges on magekind, as a blight to be eradicated. And if Joran Killoran was a powerful Timeweaver, how would the Bloodmoons have so easily bested him on that fateful night in Lunes?

None of the puzzle pieces slotted together, and it was driving Saffron quite batty. She needed that letter, but it was still in the custody of the Silvercloaks.

As she was mulling her next moves, Levan strolled into the library, two Lost Dragonborn books tucked beneath his arm and Rasso trotting at his heel. When the kingpin saw her sitting at his favored writing desk, he stopped dead.

Rasso, on the other hand, took off at a canter, leaping at Saffron, planting his front paws on her clavicle. He licked her face as though it were covered in the delicious and life-sustaining blood of his enemies, and she couldn’t hold back her peals of laughter. As Levan approached, she subtly slid From Sacred to Sacrosanct off the desk and into her lap, covering it with the folds of her cloak.

Levan stopped close enough that she could smell lemon and mint soap. His face was hard and blank as a cobblestone, and she felt a sharp, clean pang of grief. She missed the version of him she had lain with less than a month prior. How open he had been, how raw and real. She thought of handmade matching costumes hanging unused in his wardrobe, and thought, for a short second, that the sadness might cleave her in two.

But even if she could never truly rebuild the trust, rebuild them, she could still wind back the decades and mend the things that had broken them so irreparably in the first place. The truest act of love and sacrifice she could offer him.

“Have you won Auria Marriosan over to your cause yet?” He talked to her like he would any old henchmage, bland and professional, with an undercurrent of authority.

Stroking Rasso on his bony head, Saffron matched his tone. “No. And before you suggest applying more force, that would have the opposite effect. Auria is weak with pain, true, but righteous enough to take her own life before cooperating.”

Levan shrugged. “I could compel her.”

“She’d see right through it. Know that the desire to aid a Bloodmoon could never be genuinely hers. Why are you so hellsbent on Marriosan anyway? If you let me establish a bridge with someone else, I could already be slipping them false intel. She’s no longer even working the Bloodmoons. Too close to it.”

“Because the only way I can trust that you’re not deceiving me is to choose your bridge myself. And I need to ensure said bridge is pliable, if needs be.”

“Marriosan will never budge. Choose again.”

Levan tapped his scarred lower lip. Saffron thought of how he’d borne the injury—falling from a tree as a child—and struggled to imagine him playing innocently in the woods with a brother he no longer spoke of.

“I don’t buy it,” he said. “She’s already compromised, is she not? On the night you were branded, you went to the Jaded Saint and asked her for information on Nalezen Zares. She later delivered it, as well as the tracing charm my father demanded. You can threaten to tell her new captain that she’s a leaky pail, dribbling classified files to known criminals.”

Ah. It was true that Saffron originally approached Auria for the Zares intel, but she’d staunchly refused, as Auria was wont to do. In the end, Nissa had swooped in with both the necromancer’s location and the ill-fated tracing spell. Vogolan had learned the truth—after misguidedly slaying Auria’s grandfather in the process—but Saffron had murdered the thuggish henchmage shortly afterward. Word had obviously never made it back to Levan.

“That was before she saw me in the Havenwood in a scarlet cloak,” Saffron said carefully. “Now that she knows I’m associated with the Bloodmoons, she’ll never cave to blackmail. She’ll kill herself before—”

“Just turn her, Killoran.”

Saffron shot him a rueful glare, trying not to wince at the way her surname had replaced the name Silver. “I did glean some interesting intel during my last conversation with her. Several pleasurehouse deaths in the last week, all of them suspected to be linked to the Whitewings. They’re either growing more reckless or more organized. Are the scarlets still under curfew?”

Levan shook his head. “No. And many of them have not returned from their sojourns to the pleasurehouses on Laving.”

“If their deaths were retribution for the life I took, I apologize. Yet something tells me this is a far bigger problem.”

“I’ll look into it. Everything running smoothly with Tolad and Zef?”

For the last few days, Saffron had been overseeing ascenite laundering. The Bloodmoons had several Ludders in their employ—including Tolad and Zef—whose sole mission was to deliberately lose thousands of ascens in a single evening. Saffron chaperoned their evenings in the gamehouse, making semi-regular threatening facial expressions so that the Ludders would not be tempted to pursue a winning streak or cut and run. It was simultaneously tedious and stressful.

“Consummate professionals, as always,” she said. “Although they said one of the dealers, Sevir, hadn’t shown up for their meeting last night. They’re almost out of ascens to clean.”

A crisp nod. “Noted. How are you finding the work?”

“Well, it’s less psychologically obliterating than carving out eyeballs, so I suppose I must be grateful.”

“Everyone wants the ascens, no one wants the blood.”