Along with my own fear, I sensed something else, not courage precisely, but the unwavering determination that emerges after making a firm decision.
Malric pressed his mouth to the top of my head.
Then he stepped back.
“Arms,” he said.
The word was practical and necessary, and it moved us from holding each other to moving, which was what it needed to do.
Thane had a short blade at his belt that he checked and resettled. He also had his hands, and the sky, and the quality of controlled damage that his weather magic was capable of when he wasn’t suppressing it.
Malric had a longer blade and the tower’s defensive architecture alive in his awareness. His cold, strategic mind,which had been running a rebellion for two years on depleted power, was now, for the first time, operating without the binding’s interference.
I thought about what I had.
My power, incomplete and untrained, and almost entirely theoretical. The bond. The tower itself, built by my mother with her knowledge, her love, and her understanding of what I would someday need. And my understanding of my father.
I straightened my spine.
“I need to change,” I said.
Thane looked at me.
“I’m not speaking to him in a shift,” I said. “If I’m going to tell my father that I am done and he has lost, I’m going to do it dressed.”
Thane grinned almost proudly.
I went upstairs.
I dressed with a mind toward the presentation of the moment, knowing my father and his opinion on image. I took out the deep blue dress I’d had for years, well-made, the one I’d always worn when my father visited, because something in me had understood, even then, that I needed armor and this was the closest I had. I pinned my hair back from my face and studied myself in the mirror. I thought about the woman my mother had been, who had stood between her daughter and what was coming and not stepped aside. I hoped she would be proud of me.
I opened the door, and Malric was waiting. We stepped out onto the balcony to see the approaching troops. Malric gripped the stone of the balustrade, his eyes on the tree line. He scanned the forest, seeing the waves in the trees moving as the forces marched through them.
“Ready?” he said.
“No,” I said. “But we’re doing it, anyway.”
Thane
The wind was strong, as if it had a mind of its own.
I’d been managing them for the past twenty minutes, keeping the upper currents from doing what they wanted to do, which was to merge around the tower’s peak and announce to everyone within two miles that something was building. Subtlety was not weather magic’s normal style. I’d spent years learning to work against its grain.
Today I needed it ready but quiet—a banked fire rather than a lit one.
I stood at the northern parapet and watched the tree line, while I kept my breathing slow and my hands loose at my sides. I did not think about the last time I’d stood somewhere elevated watching men move through a landscape below me.
I thought about it anyway.
The campaign had been three years ago. A border dispute that was not a border dispute, dressed in the language of territorial sovereignty to justify what it actually was, which was the king demonstrating to a reluctant provincial lord what reluctance cost. I’d been brought because I was the most efficient way to demonstrate that.
They’d kept me without sleep for four days before the engagement. I understood now that this was deliberate. Sleep deprivation destabilized the boundary between intent and instinct, made the magic more volatile and more responsive to external pressure. At the time, I’d told myself it was logistics.Poor planning. The oversight that happened in campaign conditions.
It wasn’t oversight.
They’d marched me to a ridge above the provincial town and told me to make it stop raining.
I’d made it stop raining.
