I told her and I watched the column below. The entire time, I kept my breathing even and waited for the shame to do what it always did when I took it out and looked at it, which overwhelmed me and would drive her away.
Her arms came around me from the side.
She was smaller than me by a significant margin, which meant the hug was her face against my arm and her arms around as much of me as they could reach. It should have been insufficient, but it wasn’t. I sensed her in the bond—not pity, not the managed sympathy people offered when they didn’t know what to do with something difficult. Something cleaner than that. A clear-eyed grief on my behalf, and underneath it a steadiness that I recognized.
It was Malric’s quality. That groundedness. She had it too, differently—less structured, more innate.
Shame attempted its usual expansion and stop.
“That was not your fault,” she said into my arm.
“I was the one who?—”
“He built the conditions deliberately. You said it yourself. He stripped everything that kept you stable and then pushed you into an impossible situation and then called it a tool performing its function.” She pulled back enough to look at me. “You were not a tool. You were a person being tortured into acting against your own nature, and what happened is his fault, not yours.” Her eyes were steady. “The same way what happened to my mother is his fault. He does this. It’s what he does.”
The wind pushed against my hold on it.
I breathed.
“I’m afraid of losing control today,” I said, because the complete truth was important. “I’m more stable than I’ve ever been. I have the bond. I have Malric. I have you.” I looked at her directly. “And I’m still afraid.”
She held my gaze without flinching.
“Call on me,” she said. “Through the bond. If you feel the edges going, call on me and I’ll anchor you.” Something in her expression was entirely certain. “That’s what I’m here for. Not just to be protected. I won’t let what happened before happen again. I will be your rock.”
The words grounded me, holding me steady.
Not because they solved anything, not because the fear disappeared or the memory changed. But because she meant it with a quiet confidence that only Malric had ever said to me.
My eyes burned, and I let them fall instead of blinking them back, letting them cleanse me of my past.
She put her hand on my arm and stood beside me and didn’t say anything else, which was exactly right. Below us, the column was closer now, the shapes fully individual, the king’s guard moving with the precise, ugly efficiency of men who were very good at something I had no admiration for.
The wind built against my hold, responding to the threat, ready, but calmer, waiting for my signal.
I breathed once more and the bond pulsed, both of them in it. Malric below, managing the tower’s defenses with the steady focus I could feel from here. Aveline, beside me, warm and solid and exactly what she had said she would be.
The magic was steady.
I was steady.
“Go to Malric,” I said. “Take your position on the balcony.”
She squeezed my arm and didn’t let go immediately. I looked at her and she looked at me and the bond moved between us with the warmth of something settled and true and not going anywhere.
Then she released me.
“Call on me,” she said again. Not a request.
“I will,” I said.
She went down the stairs.
I turned back to the parapet, the wind in my hands and the bond in my chest and the tower alive and defended beneath my feet.
When the king’s guard reached the edge of the thorn barrier, I would be ready.
I breathed out slowly and let the storm wake up.
