Page 135 of Silvercloak

“Silver,” he said, a hoarse murmur, and it raked down her back like nails.

His hair was damp, his face clean shaven. A bucket of soapy water sat on the floor beside him, a cloth resting over the edge. The clean tang of citrus soap oil hung on the otherwise stagnant air.

“I know why you’re doing it,” she replied softly, pressing the door closed behind her.

“Why I’m …?”

“Hoarding ascenite like the mountain dwellers inLost Dragonborn.Obsessively tracking down necromancers.”

As ever, he held his features perfectly still.

“I found the crypt. Your mother.”

Levan’s face remained impassive, but his eyes weren’t as cold and empty as they usually were. They churned with anticipation. “So then, from the date … you know the truth about yours.”

She hadn’t noticed a particular date. “What do you mean?”

A fraught pause, in which Levan clearly realized he’d said too much. “No. Nothing.”

Saffron’s limbs had been heavy with tiredness, but a sudden chill shook the exhaustion off her like leaves from a winter tree.

“The truth about my … mother?”

Her heart pounded, as though her body knew something her mind did not.

Levan shook his head, freshly washed hair gleaming in the low lantern light. “Forget it.”

“Wouldyouforget it?” She took one step toward him, then another, planting her palms on his broad, firm shoulders and forcing him to look at her. The warmth of his body spread up through her hands like she was holding them to a hearth. “Tell me, Levan.”

Averting his gaze, he carefully studied his pinned hand. “Twenty-one years ago, my mother died during a heist in Almere. Just over the Bellandrian border. Segal had a scroll of all the registered necromancers in Vallin. A few villages away, in Lunes—”

“Was my mother,” Saff finished, with a thunderclap of understanding.

“They came to your door in desperation.”

“How do you know?”

“Segal told me, when he saw we were getting closer. Your parents died because my mother did.” Levan looked up at her through dark eyelashes. “Ever since I found out … it’s felt like our fates have always been braided together.”

At the very moment she was hunched over her parents’ bodies, weeping and pleading with the world to undo it, a young Levan was doing the very same just a few miles away.

She had always felt it: a shared grief, a shared pain, a shared fate.

If she hadn’t turned that doorknob, her parents would still be alive.

And so would Levan’s mother.

It was a revelation so enormous that Saffron couldn’t hold it in her head. She didn’t know whether to turn and run from this room, this house, this life, far, far away until she couldbreatheenough to process it, until her ribs knotted themselves back together again—or to giveherself away to the pain, to run straight into Levan’s arms, the way the prophecy foretold, the way destiny had written it from the beginning.

“You genuinely believe you can bring your mother back?” she asked gently. “After all this time?”

“That belief is the only thing that keeps me upright.”

The image of Lorissa Rezaran lying motionless in that crypt burned blue-white in Saff’s mind, and she thought that maybe his conviction was not so misguided.

Levan shifted uncomfortably in his wooden chair. “Can I ask a favor?”

She nodded, ears ringing, dimly aware that her palms were still upon him.