Page 94 of Silvercloak

“I don’t know,” she said, and it was the truth.

Because it wasn’t just that the mission required her to take him alive. It was something innate, the same instincts that drove her to kill Vogolan before the thought had even fully formed. And it troubled her, that these instincts had now overridden her careful strategizing not once but twice.

Levan tapped out the familiar rhythm on his knuckles. “After what you said before, that I wasn’t human, I—”

“I didn’t say that,” she snapped. “I said the exact opposite, in fact.That I wanted to remind myself that youarehuman. A reminder means to reiterate something already known.”

Although after what she’d seen him do to Zares, she wasn’t quite so sure. His ability to compartmentalize cruelty was … monstrous. And yet didn’t she do the exact same thing, albeit for different reasons?

Levan sighed. “You’re rather pedantic.”

“And you’re rather belligerent.”

He shook his head, hair falling around his face in dark brown waves. “Why did you save me?” he asked again, and this time it was soft, almost pleading. She got the sense that he badly needed to understand this.

And yet Saffron herself did not understand. Not one bit.

Saff gazed over Levan’s shoulder at the map of the continent, lost in thought. “You know in the climax ofLost Dragonborn,when Aymar saves the villainous wyvern who tried to kill him at the Battle of Tearfall? And Baudry asks Aymar why, and he can’t answer, but deep in his chest he feels this kind of golden strand of light. An inherent goodness. It seems oversimplistic to say he did it because it was right, but it’s true. He did it because it was right. Same with saving you. With stopping to help the lox addict in Atherin. With sneaking out to end Tenea’s suffering. These things are just … ingrained in me. From my parents, I think. They were good to their bones.”

Levan looked as though he was turning this over in his mind, like tilling a garden before letting the idea plant its seed. “So how do you reconcile that with what you did to Neatras? To Kasan?”

Saff’s insides clenched. “I don’t. Life is rarely that simple.”

Levan perched on the edge of the desk, laying down his wand and instead picking up a dragon statuette. It was forest green with bronzed ridges. “Who was your favorite character inLost Dragon—”

“Baudry Abard,” Saff said confidently. This conversation was safe ground. It was not severed hands and bodies hanging like moths preserved in amber.

“The wise old mentor.” Levan smiled, and Saffron was astonished to see he had dimples. It was almost comically incongruous with theman she knew. “Why do you think I’ve warmed so much to Miret over the years?”

“He does feel like a Baudry figure.” Saff paused before adding, “Did you know that Erling Tandall is at the Vallish Arts Festival next weekend?”

He looked up at her, surprised. “I thought Tandall didn’t do public events anymore. I heard he has the fading disease.”

“The sign outside Torquil’s Tomes professed rather proudly that he’d be there.”

Something passed over Levan’s stubbled face. “Do you want to … never mind.”

Saff’s chest twinged. “Do I want to what?”

“Go with me.” He rubbed the back of his neck with his palm, looking bashful, of all things. “To the festival. On the night I enchanted your necklace, your uncle mentioned that you liked … actually, never mind. Forget it. Please. If I could timeweave, I would undo these last few seconds.”

Was he …babbling?

In the tightly wound spool that was his self-control, there emerged the very tip of a loose thread, begging to be pulled.

The realization exhilarated Saff in more ways than one.

On a Silvercloak level, the invitation felt like the first step toward uncovering his true motive. It felt like something grand and inevitable, a cart rattling along the predetermined tracks of the prophecy. A sense of fate rushing to meet her.

And on a human level … it was a fundamentally compelling thing, to relate to someone, to see your passions and your flaws reflected in them. Not justLost Dragonborn,but that traumatized quietude, that stubborn streak, that questionable moral code, that unfaltering determination in pursuit of a goal. A tendency to bury feelings deep, deep down. A kind of jaded, cynical worldview, born from both childhood tragedy and the kinds of lives they led. She had never met someone whose emotional contours cleaved so closely to her own.

Her uncles—so wildly different from each other—had always told her that opposites attract.

So why did her similarities with Levan feel so intimate?

Enough,she scolded herself.Enough of the murky emotions. What’s the right strategic play here?

It was obvious. She should go with him to the festival, if only to lower his defenses enough to slip behind them.