Malric. Thane.
Not words. Something more direct than words, the full impact of what was happening, pushed through the bond like a signal flare, and then the pull intensified and my vision went gray at the edges. I held onto the bond the way I’d held onto the nest furs three days ago, with both hands, with everything I had, because it was the only thing in the room that was mine and not his.
“Come home,” my father said, above me, his voice gentle, coaxing. “You’ll understand, eventually. You always do.”
The gray spread inward.
I held on.
Help me.
Chapter Twenty-One
THANE
The tower moved under my feet.
It wasn’t the low hum I’d been experiencing since Malric activated the defenses. Not the resonant vibration of the wards under pressure. The stone beneath me shifted with the violence of a structure failing. I hit the wall with my shoulder and grabbed the staircase rail and heard Malric do the same two steps below me.
Dust from the ceiling—a sound like stone falling from the top of the tower and smashing into the ground.
“What—”
“She’s fighting him,” Malric said. His voice was strained, his knuckles on the rail white. “The tower is reacting.”
I reached for her in the bond.
Fear, but not the fear of someone who had surrendered to it. The fear of someone fighting through it, pushing against something that was pushing back harder, and underneath the fear, something that was pure refusal. Aveline, who had spent years in this tower learning to survive in a small space, was not going quietly.
Keep fighting, Aveline. We’re coming.
The tower shook again.
A stone came off the wall above us and hit the stairs and broke into pieces that scattered past my feet. I looked up and saw a crack running through the stone of the staircase ceiling that had not been there this morning.
“It might destroy us all,” I said. “The tower is going to tear itself apart.”
“Then we move faster,” Malric said, and raced down the stairs, not caring about the risk.
I followed.
A feeling of wrongness surrounded our bond, but its source eluded me. Present but thinning, the warmth of her in it was going gray at the edges, almost as if she were dying or being drained. I understood that. That feeling of self-immolation, of being hollowed out from the outside, I’d recognized it on the ridge three years prior. At the time, I would have welcomed that, welcomed death as a salvation, but it wasn’t to be. And I hoped Aveline fought until we could save her.
“He’s draining her directly.”
“I know.” Malric hit the ground floor landing, and I was right behind him.
The entry came into view.
She was on the ground.
One hand against the stone, her head down, her hair loose around her face. The blue dress puddled around her. She was on the floor of her own tower on her hands and knees, and her father stood above her with his hands raised and his expression composed and unhurried, the expression of a man conducting a routine task, not a father with his daughter.
The rage that moved through me before I could stop it, and the storm answered, completely under my control, waiting for direction.
That surprised me. I had expected the storm to unleash, had expected the old instinctive surge of lightning looking for atarget without any control. Instead, I felt a new sense of cold, clarity, and focus.
The king’s eyes came to us.
