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She shot him a wry smile. “At least we can agree on Lost Dragonborn. ”

“I suppose that forgives you the other sins.”

“My favorite childhood memory … there are a lot.” Saffron didn’t know why she was saying all of this.

Maybe because sharing true things made her feel less horrible about the myriad lies.

“My dad once enchanted a scarecrow with an entire personality. Jickety Snoot, his name was, and he was an absolute crank. I still don’t understand how he did it.

My dad’s magic … it was like nothing else I’ve ever known.

” Except yours. “Jickety Snoot once made my honeywine-drunk mother laugh so much she peed herself.”

Levan stroked her rib with his thumb, and it made it hard to breathe.

“My father used to be playful like that too. He would invent elaborate board games for us to play together. Spend hours making tiny figurines for me to paint. Write up the rules in formal scrolls, carve wooden chests to keep the board and pieces in. He even sold a few of them—Flight of the Raven did pretty well up north.”

There was a lurching sensation in Saff’s stomach. “Holy hells. We played that.”

Another of the infinite ways their lives had been braided from the start.

And yet this time, it did not fill her with rightness, but a kind of sickly dread.

How could her parents have not known how interwoven they already were with the Bloodmoons?

Mellora had been watched for years for her necromancy, and Lyrian’s board games had found their way into the Killorans’ enchanted family home.

The tendrils had snaked around their ankles without them ever realizing, until the knock that turned their front door black.

Then again, maybe her parents did know. Maybe there was more to that fateful night than she would ever understand.

But Levan smiled at the revelation that they had played the same game as children, that his father had a legacy beyond brutality.

“Small world. And my mother—she was formidable, but she was also … I know you probably think everyone here is fundamentally evil, but she was good, Silver. She helped people more often than she hurt them. When I was five, she and I helped evacuate an entire flooded village. She wound back time a few minutes and saved a family from drowning, even though it ruined her for weeks afterward. That’s all she ever wanted to use her weaving for.

To help people. But it wasn’t strong enough, no matter how much ascenite she gathered.

I think you’d have liked her.” A wistful smile.

“She would’ve made a good queen, and she knew that.

She knew she’d been robbed of the throne. ”

A warning bell tolled in the back of Saff’s mind. “She had her sights set on the throne?”

His jaw steeled. “Every coup needs an army. The Bloodmoons were hers.”

The conversation she’d overheard between Harrow and Levan came back to her.

“I see a bloody uprising. The head of King Quintan on the Palace steps. Just as the pulps depicted.”

“A Bloodmoon boot at his throat?”

“I don’t know, darling.”

“When is it happening? This bloody uprising? Can you discern a season?”

“Darkest winter, at a guess.”

“How accurate a guess?”

The hope in Levan’s voice … it all made sense. He thought Harrow was confirming Lorissa’s return. No wonder he wanted to know when. No wonder he needled for all the detail he could get.

“And she’ll still want that?” Saff asked. “If you bring her back?”

“She’ll want to resume her coup, yes. Though losing Zares is a blow.” He shifted his weight, and a mattress spring squeaked. “But I’m not angry with you, Silver. What you did in the cell meant a lot.”

“I was hardly doing that to make you feel better,” she laughed, assuming he meant the sex and not the amputation. “I had entirely selfish motivations.”

She tilted her head, and found he was looking at her with a sleepy, reverent gaze. It reminded her of how he looked when they were talking about Lost Dragonborn —animated, but also at peace.

“You weren’t just tossing a dying man a literal bone?

” he asked, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, the slightest dimple forming.

The scar through his lower lip seemed less stark than usual, but there was a shaving nick on his cleft chin that he hadn’t bothered to heal.

It was surreal to be so close to him. So close she could see every pore on his slightly crooked nose, every hair in his thick brows, the tiny flecks of teal in his eyes.

“I don’t pity you. Not now, not ever.” Saffron traced a fingertip over the back of his golden hand despite herself.

She lifted the cuff of his cloak, stroking the ridged scars he’d carved with his own wand.

The place where the golden hand met his own arm was seamless, somehow.

“Just like I hope you don’t pity me after seeing me branded. ”

His eyes fluttered closed, as though the lure of horizontal sleep was too strong to resist. “There are a lot of ways I feel about you, Silver. Pity isn’t one of them.”

Then his hand went slack on her stomach, his lips parted slightly, and his shoulders rose and fell steadily in slumber.

As she lay beside him, the magnitude of her betrayal sat on her chest like a tombstone. She had let him feel safe enough to sleep beside her. She had tilled the tender earth between them, and watched as they had both sown seeds. And she had done this knowing what she would soon do to him.

Sleep did not find her quickly. Instead, she lay with his hand upon her, breathing gently against his palm, gazing at the sharp lines of his face, and slowly, impossibly, terribly, her magical well began to fill.

Pleasure not from any physical touch, but from his mere presence, from the mere thought of him.

Saints, she was in trouble.

They both were.