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“Number one, we don’t wear scarlet cloaks. I don’t want to spoil it for all the other fans. They’ll run in the opposite direction if they see us.”

“Fine. Number two?”

“You answer one question truthfully.”

He smirked. “I thought you’d gotten all the invasive questions out of your system when I was addled with truth elixir.” Levan studied her with interest, the same way she imagined him searching for an obscure word’s meaning in the Lost Dragonborn glossary. “But go ahead.”

Saffron had many to choose from.

Why do you need a necromancer?

Who did you love and lose?

How did your mother die?

What does your father want ?

But she found that none of these were what needled at her most. What needled at her most was him.

How he could be so ruthless, so cruel, without breaking a sweat.

Did it come from his own whims and desires, or from the brand?

Was Lyrian pulling the puppet strings? Did Levan hunger for violence, or was he fulfilling a fate dealt to him at birth?

Eventually, she settled on, “Do you want to be a Bloodmoon? Do you truly want this life? Or are you only here because of the brand?”

He gave her a pointed, displeased look. “That’s three questions.”

Saff snorted. “And I’m pedantic?”

“We both are. It’s why we get along.”

“Alright, let me rephrase. Do you have a choice but to be a Bloodmoon?”

His expression darkened. “That’s not something I often think about.”

Saff used her tried-and-tested technique: she said nothing, in the hopes he would fill the silence.

“No, I suppose I don’t have a choice,” he said finally. “But even if I did, I would still choose my family.”

Another notch in the similarity column.

Everything Saff had ever done, good or bad or downright heinous, had been for hers.

The riverboat canted suddenly over a current, and she threw out an arm to steady herself.

She felt a little faint then, and leaned back against the wall for support, her vision vignetting at the edges.

Now that the adrenaline of the encounter with the necromancer had faded, the effects of her overcasting hit her at full force.

A light tremble started at her fingertips and spread to her shoulders.

She pressed her eyes shut, trying to right herself.

“Are you alright?” Levan asked, and it was far less wooden than the first time he’d asked her that, hours after she’d been branded. A soft emphasis on the final syllable.

“Just depleted. I cast too much. I’ll have to refill once we’re back.”

He sighed. “Me too.”

There was a strangely loaded pause, in which they considered what each other might do in the pursuit of pleasure.

Her breath hitched slightly as their gazes met, and there was a sort of crackle, a spark, a scintilla of something that Saffron did not trust .

His cerulean eyes, no longer so flat and lifeless, raked over her halo of silver-blond curls, down to the place where they ended at her waist.

For a few beats, the truth of who and what they were fell away. A fading mist, a dropped drawbridge, the vines around their ankles melting into the earth.

In that moment, they were just two mages in need of power.

Feed me, said the empty well inside her, feed me now, because it will feel so good.

She tried to shake away the troubling instinct, but once she finally allowed herself to imagine what she and Levan could do in the name of pleasure, she had immense trouble unimagining it.

Levan clearly waged the same internal war—and lost.

And she sensed that he did not often lose the battle against his own mind.

He pushed off the desk and crossed the room to where she stood.

Breath failed her. He was so close . She felt his body’s heat, smelled the leather of his belt and the lemon-mint of his soap.

She remembered the sight of him rebuckling his belt over his hard, pale stomach after his dalliance with Harrow, and everything in her tightened.

Slowly, so slowly, he tucked a stray curl behind her ear, his touch so gentle it sent a shiver down her spine, then cupped her jaw in both hands.

Pleasure trickled into her well, down her spine, deep into her belly, so much more powerful than a mere stroke along the cheekbone should be, and with it came a fresh pouring of magic.

He looked at her as though she had saved him, which she had, and as though she would be the death of him, which she would.

“Thank you,” he said again, and there was a simplicity, a purity to the words.

“For saving your life?” she murmured, her voice strangled, uncertain, and she was thinking about the vast complexity of him, but also about what it might feel like if she gave into this temptation.

“For reminding me I’m human.”

His cerulean eyes glittered. For a long, taut moment, she thought he was going to kiss her. They both needed pleasure, after all, and kissing was a convenient place to find it.

Her heart stilled in her chest.

Was this the prophesied moment? Her wand was in her hand, and because of the way his body was pressed against hers, it could very well be the moment she foresaw with that relic wand.

No. It couldn’t be. She’d just saved his life.

Why would she murder him less than an hour later?

Saints. Those eyes looked brand-new. As though she was seeing an intimate, forbidden part of him.

She found herself caught up in the intensity of his gaze, surprised by the stirring of emotion in her chest. Her hand went absently to the pendant resting on her clavicle. Everything was muddled and confused, as though someone had turned her upside down and shaken her like a snowglobe.

She should not feel what she was feeling.

She should not find him so beautiful.

She should not long to grasp the invisible string that bound them together and pull with all her might.

The moment sprawled out a beat too long, and Levan misread the frantic parsing flicker of her eyes as fear, dropping his feather grip on her chin.

Her skin felt cold with the absence of his hands, and there was an unbearable tingling speckled over the surface of her skin.

Her ridiculous animal body urged her forward, urged her to lace her fingers through his hair, to—

Stop, she snarled at herself, and she pulled back at the last moment.

Disappointment played out over Levan’s face—and too in her own stomach.

He gave her one final look of pained gratitude and left the room.

Saffron felt dizzy, disoriented, intoxicated. A little like she’d felt after inadvertently taking lox. Bright and new.

But the swelling behind her ribs was bittersweet.

According to the ledger she’d found that morning, the lox shipment was happening several days before the festival.

Either Levan would be in Duncarzus by then, or he’d know beyond all doubt that she was leaking information to the Silvercloaks and eviscerate her accordingly.

No matter what happened, they would not be meeting Erling Tandall together.

Maybe in another world, another timeline. But not this one.

She had to pull herself together.

When she was sure Levan was gone, she brought her wand tip to her mouth, hands shaking from overcasting and overfeeling.

“Et vocos, Elodora Aspar.”

A short pause, then her captain’s crisp voice. “ Aspar.”

“Dragontail.”

The word was an enchantment, a curse, a promise, a death sentence.

Another pause. A shuffling sound. “Rising.”

They could speak.

“The next lox shipment arrives on Elming, around darknight,” Saffron whispered, only just loud enough for Aspar to hear. Her heart thundered against her rib cage. “At the docks on Sun Bank.”

Aspar inhaled sharply, and when she spoke again, it was tinged with something like respect.

“We’ll be there.”