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L EVAN WAS DYING, AND NOBODY, NOT EVEN SAFFRON, COULD stop it.

She tugged her tunic back over her head, both sweating and cold to the bone, though her well of magic was full and shimmering once more. “Has your father been back since that first night?”

“Once,” Levan replied, still breathing unevenly. “He tried to undo it, to tear the magic out of the shard. Didn’t work. He even brought Miret along, but not a single book in that enormous library had any better ideas.”

Saffron blew air through her lips. “So there’s no way to free yourself?”

“Only one.” His mouth twisted into a grimace. “But it’s terrifying.”

“What is it?” Saff asked, but judging by the clench in her guts, some part of her already knew.

He raked his free fingers through his fluffy, freshly washed hair. “I think I have to lose the hand.”

“Levan …”

“There’s no other way, is there? I’ve thought about two things on a constant loop since I’ve been here. How to survive this. And, well, you.”

The sweet ache of the second part barely registered over the horror of the first. “You can’t lose your hand.”

“The longer I wait, the more of the arm it’ll leech away, and the worse it’ll be.”

“Do you think you’ll be able to reattach it afterward?” Saffron gnawed at the inside of her cheek. “You’re rather good at that.”

He shook his head. “It’s beyond salvation. The second the shard is removed, the hand will wither and die.”

“Saints.” Such an inadequate response, and yet what else could she say?

He leaned his head against the back of the chair, letting his eyes flutter closed. “During my literature degree, we—”

“Literature degree?” Saff blinked in surprise.

He looked bashful for a moment. “I got my Knight’s Scroll at the University of Atherin.

Nobody here knows. But we studied the Lost Dragonborn books in immense detail.

I wrote my dissertation on all the small ironies of Aymar’s redemption journey.

And this feels like that, doesn’t it?” A bitter laugh.

“The first night we met, you watched me cut off a man’s hand over and over again in the pursuit of my own interests.

And now, in order to survive long enough for those interests to come to pass, I’ll have to endure the same. ”

Saffron found the thought too horrendous to comprehend. “How will you do it? I rescued your wand from your room, but with the deminite shard physically inside your body …”

“You’ll have to do it for me.”

Everything in her bucked against the notion. “I can’t.”

He opened his eyes. They were bleary with exhaustion, all the sensual charge gone. “It’s that or watch me die.”

“We can ask Miret, or Segal, or Castian. Your father, even.”

Yet Segal was Risen, and Castian was a lox addict, and Miret … well. Miret’s head seemed to largely reside in the clouds.

Something vulnerable passed over Levan’s face. “I don’t trust any of them like I trust you.”

Irony, indeed.

“Not even Miret?”

“I trust his character, but not his abilities. He rarely uses magic. Only cares for books.”

“He could use a blade.”

“Not as clean. Magic seals the wound immediately.”

“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—T?lun.

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 a favor. ”

“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 meaning less, 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.

Saffron dropped her wand and rushed to Levan, who wasn’t making a sound but trembled violently, his remaining hand clamped around the other wrist. There was only the faintest tint of ash gray near the stump.

“Are you alright?” she asked stupidly, but what else was there to say?

“Just go, Silver.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“Please.” The word was serrated. “I don’t want you to see me like this.”

“No, Levan. I need to help you to—”

“ Go. Now.”

Horror churning in her stomach, she fled the cell, wondering whether he would ever look at her the same way again. Would he always associate her with this? With one of the most painful moments of his life?

She left the deadbolt hanging open, so that he could leave, and just as she reached the end of the corridor, she heard Levan’s earth-shattering roar.

It cost her everything she had not to go to him.

Back in her chambers, Saffron knew that there was so much she needed to do.

She had to find a weaverwick wand, for her own protection.

She needed to harangue Segal for his scroll of necromancers, so that Tiernan might rise again.

She needed to make contact with Aspar, to come up with alternative plans after the botched raid, to let her know about the now-deceased rat in her ranks.

But all she could think about, all she could see in her mind’s eye, was Levan.

Levan hurt. Levan alone.

Levan studying literature, poring over old texts and discussing them with Miret.

Levan practicing ancient languages until the sound was just right on his tongue.

Levan wielding the most complicated and beautiful magic she’d ever witnessed.

Levan running for miles and miles, sparring and brawling, until his body was slick with sweat, exhaustion sinking into his bones.

Levan enchanting her necklace. Levan bringing Nissa back, because he could tell how much it meant to her.

Levan grieving his lost love, Levan growing addicted to the very substance he’d brought into the city, Levan suffering his way out of it in a sealed room.

Levan mourning his mother. Levan hunched over Lorissa’s body, pleading with his own magic to bring her back, and his magic refusing to rise.

Leaving him in that cell caused a physical ache, a knot of pain between her ribs.

And she knew then, in her heart of hearts, that she had to have nullified the prophecy when she unmade time. She had to have thrown them onto a different path, because right now, nothing in the world could make her want to kill him.

Yet … House Rezaran had unmade time over and over again during the Dreadreign, and still the first four Augurs’ prophecies had come to pass.

There was a feeling in her chest—a gathering snarl of certainty and dread—that these events concerned themselves with the fate of the world, somehow.

It all felt so fucking significant. She was no Foreseer, and yet, somehow, she knew that she and Levan were at the center of something enormous and devastating, something that would end in mutual ruin.

Something that would not just unmake them both—it would unmake everything.

Of course, it was very possible she was just in love.