I could feel it through the bond—Malric’s reserves, Thane’s, mine. What I was pulling back through the connection was real, but the drawing took time, and the king’s reserves, evendepleted, were deeper than ours, and the tower could only hold what we could sustain.
Thane stepped forward.
I sensed his intention a split second before he acted, the complete absence of the old shame and the old fear. He looked at my father calmly, with no hesitation, no fear, no shame.
The king saw his expression and made a motion with his free hand, the same strike that had thrown Thane into the wall sixty seconds ago. Malric’s shield came up and took it. Thane didn’t break stride.
“You’re finished,” he said to my father.
“You’re a burned-out weapon with nothing left,” my father said. “I watched you exhaust yourself on the approach. I know what it cost you. You have nothing that reaches me.”
Thane looked at me and I understood what he was asking.
I released the pull on the connection, releasing my father’s hand, and put everything I had left into the bond instead, pushing it toward Thane the way I’d pushed it toward Malric in the ward, the way I’d been told to, the way my mother had built this tower to allow. Not my power alone. The amplification, what the array had been harvesting, turned toward the person standing in front of me instead of the drain beneath my feet.
The bond blazed.
Thane looked up.
The storm that came through the tower ceiling was not large. It didn’t need to be. A single working, precise and final, drawn down from the sky Thane had been managing all morning, through the stone of the tower, into the space between my father and the warded door.
Not indiscriminate but focused.
The lightning was white.
It hit my father the moment he turned toward the blocked door, the moment his attention moved from us to the exit, at themoment the ward Malric was holding compressed around him and left him nowhere to go.
The sound was enormous and immediate, and then gone.
The light was everywhere, blinding us momentarily, and then nowhere.
There was a smell of ozone, sharp and clean, the smell of weather magic running pure, and then the working ended with a sound like a soap bubble—a small, incongruous pop that was nothing like the scale of what had preceded it.
The entry was silent.
The candles, which had been blown out by the pressure of it, relit themselves one by one in the tower’s patient way, starting nearest the door and moving inward.
I stood in the center of the entry floor and looked at the space where my father had been and saw only a scorched mark with a crown lying to the side, undamaged. He was gone, completely. The door remained closed to the outside. We would never be trapped here again.
The tower was very quiet.
Malric’s hand found my shoulder from behind.
Thane stood where he’d been standing, his head slightly bowed, his breathing audible in the silence. I watched him for a moment—the set of his shoulders, the evenness of his breath, the absence of the old shame that used to follow anything like this.
He looked up.
Met my eyes.
I crossed to him and put my arms around him, and he clung to me, his face in my hair, his breathing slower now and steadier.
Malric’s arms came around us both from behind.
The three of us stood in the entry of my mother’s tower in the silence of something that had finally ended, and the candles burned at their steady heights. Outside the door, the thornbarrier was still and the Wyrdwood was quiet, and the bond between us was warm and unbroken and entirely present.
It was over.
Chapter Twenty-Two
