My teeth were clenched.
I could hold this. I could hold it for a while longer. But my capacity was coming close, and the strain was too much for me. Thane above me was burning through his reserves at a rate that a full heat and three days of sleep deprivation hadn’t helped. Wewere two people defending a position against forty, and at some point, the math asserted itself regardless of the variables.
The storm shifted.
Not in the way it had been shifting—Thane directing lightning, managing rainfall, controlling airflow. Something larger. But a pause in the constant output, a gathering, the storm pulling breath before something significant.
Then the thunder and the ward attacks stopped.
Complete cessation. Everything went quiet except for the heavy rain that pounded the stone and ground. I stood on the balcony in the silence and tried to understand what had just happened.
The lightning had found the mages.
I scanned the ward boundary—nothing pressing at any point. The deterrent constructs at the corners were still active but no longer responding to an active threat. The outer ward was intact, damaged in two places but functional, holding.
I looked at the approach.
The king’s guard had fallen back to the tree line. The formation was broken, the coordinated assault interrupted, and men regrouped in the inadequate shelter of the forest edge. The ground between the thorns and the trees was churned and scorched and empty.
I let out a sigh of relief.
Then movement at the tree line.
A single figure.
He walked out from the trees without the guard. Without escort, without concern for the churned ground or the continuing rain or the fact that his assault force had just been significantly reduced by a storm that was still running overhead. He walked with the deliberate pace of a man who had never in his adult life been required to hurry toward anything, because things had always waited for him.
The king.
He reached the thorn barrier.
I watched him raise his hands.
The thorns moved.
Not the way they had for us when we’d arrived—that had been the tower making a decision, a slow, reluctant parting. This was different. This was the thorns responding to something he was doing, a working I couldn’t feel clearly from this distance, but could see the effect of. They drew back from him in a corridor wide enough for one man, bending away from his path as if bowing to his authority.
He had said he built this tower. Maybe that wasn’t true, but he may have built some of the surrounding landscape and it responded to him. And maybe he had corrupted the tower’s wards.
I reached for the tower protections and realized he had overtaken the lower level as if nothing was in his way. Ice settled in my stomach.
Aveline. He was coming for her.
I was already moving before the thought finished.
She was not on the balcony. She had been there. Had lent me her power through physical touch. But somewhere between that and seeing her father, she had left. I had been so focused on the ward boundary that I hadn’t registered her absence and now I did, with a cold clarity that moved through the bond like a current. I could feel her in the bond—present, real, not the absence of someone taken. She was in the tower, somewhere below.
But the king was inside the thorn barrier and the tower was welcoming him.
I crossed the balcony in three strides and went through the bedroom and hit the stairs at speed. Behind me, I heard Thane’s footsteps from above, heavy and fast, the storm above the towerdropping in intensity as he pulled his attention back to where it was needed.
I took the stairs two at a time.
Thane was four steps behind me.
Neither of us said anything.
There was nothing to say.
