“Stay back or I will not be responsible for what happens to her,” he warned.
The gentleness in his voice was the worst part. He spoke as if he were bored, just finishing a mundane task. Reasonable. Patient.
“Step back from her,” Malric said.
“You’re welcome to try to make me do that.” He looked between us with calm assessment. “Ahh, my long-lost weather mage. A pity you walked away from my training. But then again, you always had a history of catastrophic loss of control. You’re currently depleted from a sustained magical engagement, so you’re no threat to me. And you, Malric, a ward-reader whose power was bound by your mother. Even I could not break the binding, and I tried, as you well know.” His eyes moved to Malric’s wrist, uncovered and unmarked. “Interesting. No longer bound. That will have to be addressed.”
Aveline’s hand on the floor was shaking.
Through the bond, she registered our presence—a brief surge of warmth through the grayness, the realization that she was no longer alone and her fear that her father would harm us. She was still fighting. I could feel her resistance against the pull, weakening her.
The tower shook, its own form of resistance.
Violent this time, not a tremor but a genuine structural event, and all of us went to our knees. Malric caught himself on the wall. I hit the floor with both hands and the stone cracked beneath my left palm. From somewhere above us came the sound of a significant collapse, masonry giving way, and a cloud of dust rolled down the staircase like smoke.
The king recovered first.
He looked up at the ceiling with the expression of someone mildly inconvenienced by circumstances.
“You’re tearing the tower apart, my dear,” he said. His voice had shifted into something softer. “Every time you resist, it pulls harder. The tower is responding to your distress.” He looked down at her. “Your alphas are in this tower. The men you bonded. The men you chose.” A pause, perfectly executed. “The more you fight me, the more stone falls on them. You will kill them the more you fight me.”
Aveline’s head came up.
I saw the anguish in her face.
“Don’t,” I said. “Aveline, don’t believe him?—”
“She knows I speak the truth. She knows that she only causes death to whomever she touches. I am offering you a choice, my daughter,” the king said, still to her, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Come with me quietly. Stop fighting. The tower stabilizes, no one is harmed, and your alphas walk out of here alive.” He lowered his hands slightly. “You will no longer be imprisoned here. You will come with me and take your rightful place at the palace. I take no pleasure in these actions. You are my daughter. I want you safe.”
“He’s lying.” I pushed myself upright. My legs were not reliable, but I got them under me. “He has lied to you every day of your life. He told you that you killed your mother. He built a drain in the floor and told you it was the tower caring for you. He has never once told you a true thing when a lie served him better, and he is lying to you right now.”
He waved his hand, a small motion that I barely saw, but it hit me like a wall. A targeted magical attack caught me in the chest and sent me backward into the wall hard enough that the stone cracked at the impact point and the air left my lungs completely.
I slid down the wall.
Malric’s shield came up between me and the second strike, which hit the shield and dispersed, and it cost him. I felt the drain through the bond and understood that the shield had taken something he didn’t have to spare. Her power was being siphoned. The bond ran through her. We were all running on a diminishing reserve, and the king knew it and was spending accordingly.
I pulled air back into my lungs and struggled to my feet.
“Enough,” the king said, still patient, still gentle. He looked at Aveline. “Look at them. Look at what fighting me is costing them.” He crouched down to her level, and the gesture was something he had clearly done many times, the tactic of a man placing himself at the height of someone smaller to make the power differential feel like care. “I will spare them. Both of them. I will let them walk out of the Wyrdwood and return to their rebellion and live out whatever time they have left in this war.” His voice dropped. “Come with me. Stop fighting. This doesn’t have to be the last thing that happens in this tower.”
The bond was very quiet.
Malric, against the wall, met my eyes. His face told me what the bond already had. He had nothing left. We were pinned. Depleted. The tower was still trembling, small continuous shudders now, the sound of occasional stone on stone from the upper floors a constant reminder of what her resistance was costing the structure.
Aveline looked at us.
I saw what was in her face and I knew what she was going to say before she said it, and I wanted to scream at her, No. I wanted to reach for her through the bond and hold on, but the bond was thin enough now that what I sent through it was warmth rather than words.
She looked at her father.
“All right,” she said. Her voice was steady and confident in her decision. “All right. I’ll come. Just leave them alone.”
“No,” I said.
“I’ll come,” she said again. To him. Not to us.
The tower quieted.
