And then the lightning had come, because weather magic didn’t operate in isolated systems and I was running on four days without sleep. Someone had been applying pressure to the edges of my control for weeks, and the lightning had not been targeted. It had not been strategic. It had not distinguished between the provincial lord’s guard and the people who had nothing to do with any of it and happened to be outside.
The king had called it acceptable losses.
I had called it something else and not out loud, because by that point, I understood what happened when you said the wrong thing out loud within earshot of the king’s guard.
I stood at the parapet and memory tried to take over my mind with the screams, the smell of burned flesh, and the horror of that day. I breathed through my nose, kept my hands loose, and watched the forest.
The shapes were more defined now. Forty men in tight formation, moving with the practiced efficiency of people who knew exactly what they were doing and had done it before. The king would be in the center, protected, the guard distributed around him in the distinct pattern I’d memorized from intelligence reports.
I sensed the instant the tower’s defenses detected them. A low hum through the stone beneath my feet, the defensive architecture Malric had activated, responding to the approach of something that intended harm. Unlike before in the tower, this experience felt distinct—keener, more focused, and more conscious.
The wind fought me, wanting to slip its leash. I held it.
The bond was warm in my chest, both of them present: Malric’s focused steadiness and Aveline’s calm presence.
Footsteps on the stairs.
I didn’t turn around. I knew her step by now, the cadence of it, slightly quicker than you’d expect from someone who had spent years in a tower with nowhere to go.
She stood beside me at the parapet.
For a moment, she just looked. I watched her take in the formation below, read the distance and the direction, and absorb the fact of it. She was dressed in a blue dress, her hair pinned back, her spine straight, and she looked resolute, determined.
“So my father chooses violence,” she said. “To force me back.”
“Yes.”
“That tells me everything I need to know about him.” She said it quietly, without heat, with no emotion.
I would have been angry, sad, or looking for revenge if I were in her position, knowing my father didn’t care about me except as a weapon. Though technically, I suppose my father was the same, selling me to the king for a few coins to be trained as a magic-user, knowing full well that I was in for a lifetime of abuse. I’d forgiven him a long time ago. He had not been in a position to argue. He was a small landholder who couldn’t control my power and couldn’t fight the king’s orders. If he’d tried, he and my entire family would have been tortured and put to death. It was survival for them. I was the sacrifice.
I looked back at the tree line.
She was watching me in my peripheral vision with the focused attention that meant she was reading something below the surface. The bond gave her access to the emotion of what I was feeling, and I had not been doing anything to smooth it.
“You’re afraid,” she said.
“Anyone who goes into battle and is not afraid is either stupid or crazy. I am neither.”
“Thane.”
I exhaled. “Not of them. Not of the fight.” I kept my eyes on the approaching column. “Of myself.”
She waited.
“The last time I was in a situation like this, people died who shouldn’t have died. I was pushed past the point of control, and the magic did what it does when there’s no one steering it.” My hands clenched painfully on the stone, and I relaxed them. “I’ve told myself since that it was the circumstances. The sleep deprivation, the pressure, the systematic dismantling of everything that kept me stable.” I paused. “I have better circumstances now. I know that. But the magic is the same magic.”
“What did he do to you?”
The question was simple and direct, and she asked it without flinching, without pity and that undid me.
So I told her.
Not everything. Not the full seventeen days that Malric also knew parts of and that I had never spoken about in their entirety to anyone. But the campaign. The ridge. The four days without sleep and the pressure applied with surgical patience by people who understood exactly how to dismantle a person’s self-governance without leaving marks that could be testified to.
The lightning that hadn’t been targeted.
The people it had found anyway.
