Page 140 of Silvercloak

“It could be cauterized.”

A vehement head shake. “Then I’m left with a seared stump. I know a Healer who specializes in enchanted prosthetics—Tålun. He used to be a bartender at the student union, when he was doing his Knight’s Scroll in Modern Medicine. He worked on the prosthetics for those children who lost their tongues a few years ago. I’ll find him afterward. He owes me a favor.”

Saffron sighed with disapproval. “You can’t just go around threatening people into helping you and call it afavor.”

“Oh ye of little faith.” A curious smile, though he showed no teeth, no dimples. “I saved his life, actually. The union kitchen caught fire and I went in to rescue him. Burned myself up pretty badly, but I healed us both once we were out.”

Saffron stared at him. “You’re a very complicated person.”

But he wasn’t—not really. His moral code made a brutal kind of sense to Saffron. He would only hurt or kill if he believed it would help him bring his mother back. Or in self-defense, like those Whitewings on the first night she’d met him.

“You have to do it, Silver.” His face was pale, but if he felt any fear, he gave none away. “And it has to be now. The gray is spreading too fast.”

A vise closed tight around Saffron’s stomach. “Would lox help? For the pain.”

“No,” he muttered quickly, resolutely, before softening his tone. “It took too much for me to stop. Harrow locked me in an empty room for a week. Even now, the claws are still in me, ready to pull me back under the surface.” He swallowed. “Let’s just get this over with.”

Saffron’s mind went to the prophecy, trying to recall whether he’d been one-handed or not. If he’d been in possession of both, that would surely indicate that they’d been knocked onto another timeline, that her unmaking of the world had rendered the prophecy meaningless, that maybe in one world she would have killed him, but not this one, not after she’d taken his hand. But everything was bleary, confused, and she couldn’t conjure the exact image of the vision.

Reluctantly, she withdrew her wand from her waistband. “Are you sure?”

“I’ve done this to countless victims,” he said through clenched teeth. “I’d be a fucking coward if I said no.”

“Not a coward. Human.”

She hesitated, wand suspended in midair. Mere moments ago, she’d relished in how much control she had, how the situation was entirely in her hands, and yet now that power felt tainted. A curse, a burden. All at once, she wanted to give back the reins.

“There’s not all that much that can go wrong,” Levan said gently, trying to reassure her. “The worst thing you can do is hold back, or you’ll only sever it halfway. Better to go too hard and send the hand smashing into the opposite wall. I’d rather this didn’t take multiple attempts.”

Her mouth was as dry as dust. “Do I need to make a tourniquet first?”

“No. The magic seals it immediately. I won’t bleed out.”

“Levan …”

She’d been prepared to experience infinite brutalities in the Bloodmoons, but this was not one of them.

“Do it now,” Levan said, in a way that suggested he had steeled himself, but it wouldn’t hold for much longer.

She cupped his face in her hands, and something raw and fearful fleeted behind his eyes. She didn’t know what she wanted to do: to kiss his lips or his forehead, to stroke his cheek, to comfort him or to bolster him, to say sorry or something entirely more ruinous.

Instead, she gave him a single stoic nod and raised her wand. Her heart in her mouth, she rested the tip just below the protruding bone of his wrist, and she knew that if she didn’t do it now, she never would.

She’d been able to carve out an eye with a letteropener while the victim begged for mercy. Surely she could do this. The horrors she’d experienced had inadvertently prepared her.

“Sen perruntas.”

The magic shot from her wand as a silver-white blade, and the knife-edge was through the wrist in a flash so fast it was almost invisible to the naked eye.

In fact, she might not have been sure it happened at all, were it not for Levan’s suppressed roar, teeth clenched, the sound ripping from his throat but bitten down before it could escape fully formed.

He yanked his freed wrist away from the table, clutching his forearm to his chest, panting raggedly, eyes pressed shut.

Sure enough, the wound was clean, sealed over with something remarkably skin-like.

Pinned to the table, the severed hand was still as stone. Chest scudding, Saffron took a deep breath and pulled the shard from it—because maybe, if she acted quickly enough, she could reattach the hand.

But as soon as the shard was loosed, the hand did something no hand could ever recover from. It withered and crumpled like a crushed tin can, all remaining blood seeping into the deminite, taking with it clumps of flesh and muscle, frayed skin and wet strings of ligament. Soon the shard was a dark crimson, the hand a mangled collection of bones.