“Okay,” she says, nodding, face tight. “And best case?”
“We fix the bug,” I say. “Rewire the system so it stops searching for one Prime and starts distributing power across all four Lords. Four anchors instead of one. Four load-bearing beams instead of a single point of failure.”
“Redundancy,” Jules breathes. “Like rerouting grid power across multiple substations.”
“Exactly.” My heart is pounding. “Idris won’t be able to hijack the stream anymore because there won’t be a single stream. Just a network.”
Phoebe looks from me to the crown and back again. “And how do we reroute?”
“First, we get the crown.”
Chapter 25
Alina
The Barrow
First of all, trying to leave an enchanted chamber when your viyen is the Lord of Earth who magicked the place to begin with—yeah, it’s not easy.
So, I don’t bother trying to get through the wards Dagan and his blood brothers placed on this room.
Instead, I use my connection to him, to his powers, and I look at the place where I just saw the crown.
I close my eyes and I let my powers search through The Barrow, past stone, and clay, rock, and dirt—and I find it.
And I lift.
At first, The Barrow rejects my plan. It doesn’t want to do this.
But I coax and I command, and eventually, I feel the sand shift.
The weight lifts and I drag my hand from the floor to the air as if lifting something—and when I hear them all gasp, I open my eyes.
And there it is.
“Holy fuck,” Delia mumbles.
“She did it!” Phoebe claps.
“Milady, that’s the crown,” Clarisse whispers.
“Of course, she did it. She’s a badass,” Jules says, and I hear the smile in her voice.
I try to catch my breath and just look at the thing.
At the way its glow flares a little whenever one of the men’s power surges through the bonds.
At the way it dimmed when Aurel fell, Dagan told me, and never quite woke again.
“Okay, so tell me the plan and use small words because baby brain is real, ladies,” Jules says.
“It’s built to respond to a Prime,” I say quietly. “To one ruler. One head. One will. We have four. It doesn’t know how to divide itself.”
“So we teach it,” Delia says simply.
My gaze snaps to her.
“How?”
