Page 142 of Silvercloak

Levan looked at the hand with a strange expression on his face—somewhere between horror and reverence. “If Tålun doesn’t receive the Vallish Distinction Prize for this work—just because he’s Nyrøthi—I’ll burn the Palace to the ground myself. I’ve never seen magic like it. It … I can feel everything.” He ran a golden fingertip down the wooden frame of her door, then lowered his golden hand, cerulean eyes searching hers. “Zares is gone.”

Trying not to skip a beat—and trying not to betray anything on her face that might hint toward what happened with Tiernan—she replied, “I didn’t think you were going to survive. And the thought of your father getting hold of her … you made it sound like he couldn’t know.”

Levan pinched the bridge of his nose with his regular hand. “Hells. It cost us so much to bring her in.”

“Are you angry?”

“Not with you.”

“Your father? For what he did to you.”

Levan’s eyes darkened. “No. I understand it.”

“You aren’t going to punish him?”

“When my mother returns, she’ll want him in one piece.”

They stared at each other for several long moments, a thousand unsaid words hanging in the warm, citrus-sharp air. Somewhere behind Saffron, Rasso snored obnoxiously.

“Will you lie with me?” she whispered, nodding her head toward the book-scattered bed.

For a moment, Levan stopped breathing.

And then he followed her into the room.

He surveyed the considerable chaos with something like amusement on his face. There were books everywhere, not carefully arranged like his own but rather strewn facedown on top of her trunk. Crumpled piles of clothes lay in various heaps on the floor. Empty mugs of hot chocolate sat on her ring-marked desk, and the faucet in her sink was trickling for no particular reason.

“You’re sort of messy,” Levan remarked, raising a single brow.

Saffron shrugged. “Always seems to be something more pressing going on.”

He took in the rumpled mess of her bed, topped with leather-bound volumes and single sheets of paper with scrawled notes. “It’s quite unclear where I’m supposed to lie, exactly.”

“Fine,” Saff grumbled.

With a muttered levitation spell and a flick of her wand, Saffron stacked the books on her bedside table, then lay on her side, head resting on the pillow.

Levan perched uncertainly on the opposite edge and slowly, painstakingly, unlaced his boots. He shrugged off his scarlet cloak, then folded it precisely and laid it on top of the trunk at the end of the four-poster bed. When he finally lay down next to her, the mattress sank beneath his weight, but he kept almost a foot of space between their bodies, as though he had no idea how to look at her.

Saff took Levan’s hands in hers. The golden hand was as cold as marble.

War waged behind his eyes as he looked down at their interlaced fingers. “Will you ever look at me the same again?”

Saff almost laughed. She’d thought the exact same thing when she’d left that cell, but in reverse. “How do you think I look at you?”

“I don’t know.” He pulled his golden hand away and rubbed the back of his head. Saffron remembered how soft the hair was there and longed to stroke it again, but supposed he had put distance between their bodies for a reason. “It’s my first time being looked at like this.”

“What about Alucia?”

He flinched as though she’d struck him. “How do you know about Alucia?”

Saints.She knew about Alucia because of his journal.

Think fast, Killoran.

“Harrow mentioned a life partner,” she replied quickly. “And then you used that name with your father, the night I was hiding in your wardrobe. I put two and two together. Then the holly on your ribs …”

With a bitter twist of his lips, he laughed unconvincingly. “Alucia betrayed me, in the end. It was never real to her. I was just a piece on a board game.”

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