Page 167 of Silvercloak

Some innate part of Saffron recoiled at the idea, but she could not find any sympathy for the man who had slain her parents. And besides, his wallowing gave Auria ample time to escape into the Havenwood, to rally the surviving Silvercloaks and regroup back at the Order.

Saffron had saved someone.

She had saved someone, but there was something badly wrong with her body. She felt like a claw, a husk, a snarled mass of mangled bones. Thesaqalamishad done something permanent, something terrible, though she couldn’t put her finger onwhat.

There was still pain, and for that she was grateful. Without it, she’d have feared the same fate as a Risen.

“Please,” Levan moaned, grabbing fistfuls of Lyrian’s cloak. “Please. Come back. Come back.”

A tear slicked down Saffron’s cheek, and then another.

Twenty-one years ago, Levan had knelt over his mother’s body, begging her to come back to him. Now, because of her, because of the woman he had trusted against all his better judgment, his father had fallen to the same fate.

Both times she had unwoven and rebraided the strands of time, Levan had suffered in her stead.

“Ans visseran, ans visseran, ans visseran,” he pleaded, but the necromancy spell still would not heed his command.

“We can take him to the crypt,” Saffron murmured, louder than before but still notloud,and she didn’t know if Levan heard her. “We can bring him back when we bring your mother back.”

But Saff didn’t believe it. Not really.

Surely there wasn’t a magical well deep enough to bring Lorissa back to life after twenty-one years. Not even as perfectly preserved as she was. And it could be several more years before they found a necromancer skilled enough to even attempt it.

Besides, now they knew that to rise from the dead was to never feel pleasure or pain again. It was to be, for all intents and purposes, powerless.Empty.There was a slim and distant chance that a necromancercould revive them, yes, but they would not be as they were, as they had been.

Levan seemed to realize this too, his horrified gaze slicing between his father and Segal, slowly coming to understand that, in so many ways, his parents’ deaths were more permanent than he had ever been willing to accept.

He did not cry, but his breathing was ragged, his shoulders shaking, and Saffron knew that pain so well, what it was to be an orphan, what it was to have your life carved into abeforeand anafter,and in that moment, she would have done anything to take the grief away. To mend it, and to mend her own. To mend the world.

But perhaps …

No. Surely it could not be done.

And yet …

Words likebeforeandafterno longer held the same weight. They were a tide, a force of nature so powerful they were seemingly absolute, and yet a gifted enough Wielder could alter the flow of the sea. And so it went with time.

She’d just unraveled several minutes withoutanyascenite around her.

The desire had been so intense, so raw, and the belief so unwavering, that time had obeyed her regardless.

What if …

What if time could be unmade not by minutes or hours or days, but by years?

House Rezaran had done it, during the Dreadreign. Unwritten and rewritten the same decades over and over until they unfolded exactly as they wished. They’d done it so ruthlessly and so often that the very fabric of the world had eroded, running time back and forth through the loom of reality until it was so gossamer thin that patches began to fray and disappear.

Unmaking time so significantly was terrible, but it was possible.

And it therefore followed that it was possible for Saffron.

Could she unwind the world until she was once again six years old?

Could she save her parents?

Could she save Levan’s?

Could she go back andnotturn that Saintsforsaken doorknob?

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