Chapter Twenty
MALRIC
The first lightning strike hit at noon, almost as if we timed it that way.
The tower vibrated with a deep tremor from its base to its top, the wards detecting Thane’s power surge. Large. Immediate. He wasn’t warming up. He was making a statement.Don’t come any closer or die. It was the only warning they would receive.
Good.
From the balcony, I had the sight line I needed. The king’s guard had reached the edge of the forest twenty minutes ago and had spent those twenty minutes assessing the clearing and the thorny barrier. They had exited the tree line for several minutes, using magic to test the wards and defensive spells. I kept the tower magic offline to keep them from discovering what defenses we had. When they sent tendrils of magic toward the thorns, even I was surprised to see a volley of thorns sent toward them like arrows. One man was struck and he fell, screaming and writhing in pain. After a moment, he went still, rigid and unseeing in death.
The king was nowhere to be seen, probably in the back, protected for now. They’d pulled back to regroup and discussnext steps. Then finally, with shields held in front, they advanced. That was when Thane had sent a warning volley to force a retreat. The lightning came down in the space between the tree line and the advancing troops.
Not indiscriminate. Targeted, controlled, a series of strikes that walked a line across the forward edge of the formation and sent the front ranks backward into the men behind them. It was precise. Not designed to kill. Thane would resist doing that until he had no other option. I sensed him in the bond. The battlefield’s frantic intensity I’d witnessed from Thane three years back was absent—he now seemed focused and emotionless. He was steering it. Every bolt went exactly where he sent it.
The rain followed the lightning, which was how his magic worked. The electrical discharge drew moisture. The atmosphere reorganized itself around the energy he was putting into it. Within minutes, the approach to the tower changed. Visibility down, footing compromised, the guard’s formation disrupted by the strikes and the instinctive human response to standing in open ground during a lightning storm.
I touched the balcony doorframe and sensed the wards.
They were holding. The outer layer, the hardened barrier I’d brought fully online this morning, was doing its work. The tower’s sentinel constructs at the corners had activated and were tracking movement at the perimeter. The deterrent architecture was running, and I could feel where it was being tested. Two locations on the eastern approach had someone with magical training pushing against the ward boundary with a disciplined patience that told me the king had brought specialists.
Not just a guard. Mages.
I’d expected that. I’d hoped to be wrong.
The attacks on the tower wards were subtle at first. Probing, careful, the kind of methodology that meant experience. Theyweren’t trying to break through directly. They were mapping the architecture, identifying the structure, looking for the approach that would cost the least to exploit. I could sense their movement near the ward’s edge, much like feeling for a door by pressing fingers against a wall.
I pushed back.
The wards responded to my attention quickly. Ten years of the binding had not prepared me for the power that I had, and what I was capable of was still unfamiliar, a tool I hadn’t finished learning how to manage. I used it carefully, reinforcing the sections under pressure, rotating attention across the boundary, staying ahead of where the probing was thickest.
Above me, the storm intensified as the soldiers tested him.
Thane was running at full capacity now. I could feel it through the bond—not distress, but focused intensity. Thane knew he had to do this to protect those he loved, despite hating what he was capable of. He was now targeting anyone who came close to the tower. The rain had become a downpour, turning the ground into rivers of mud. The wind was moving the treetops at the forest’s edge in patterns that weren’t natural. Lightning continued to fall in controlled sequence, and from the sounds reaching me through the storm, I could tell it was finding targets.
Then they went after him directly.
The first attack came as a focused beam of suppressive magic aimed at the tower’s upper level, and it hit the ward boundary above me like a fist hitting a door. The tower shuddered. I pressed harder against the doorframe and pushed the ward back up to full intensity, and the effort strained at my power.
The second attack came from a different angle, lower, targeting the parapet itself rather than the ward. Stone magic, which meant a second specialist. They were coordinating.
I held.
The third came at the same moment as the second but from the east, three-pronged now, designed to split my attention across three points simultaneously and find the gap between them.
The ward thinned at the eastern corner.
“Not yet,” I said to no one, and pushed everything I had into the gap. Aveline placed a hand on my lower back and fed me some of her power.
The ward held.
The storm overhead was building in intensity beyond anything I had seen Thane do, except for that day when he had lost complete control. I couldn’t see it from the balcony, but I felt the pressure of it through the stone. Thane poured everything he had into the sky, the tower vibrating with the displaced energy of weather magic at the scale he was running it. A sound reached me through the rain that I categorized as a significant lightning strike at very close range. Then another. Then a pause in the coordinated ward attacks told me at least one of the mages had found something more immediately pressing to deal with.
I breathed.
The break lasted perhaps ninety seconds.
Then the ward attacks resumed, harder, less patient, the careful method of the attacks abandoned in favor of force. They’d assessed the architecture and decided that precision wasn’t going to work before Thane took the rest of them apart. The boundary was absorbing immense power, with the ward bearing its full brunt, and I, in turn, bore the ward’s full burden.
