My mother’s foundations held.
I had not been surprised.
The omegas had started arriving four months ago. The first one was a girl of perhaps sixteen who had walked forty miles through autumn cold after someone told her there was a place in the Wyrdwood that would take her in—that had wards that recognized omega distress and responded to it—and was run by people who understood what it was to have your nature used against you. She had arrived at the thorn barrier in the middle of the night and the thorns had opened for her the way they had never opened for anyone but us.
We’d expanded the upper floors to receive her.
Now there were eleven, with more coming. Malric’s network had been quietly spreading the information through the provincial territories, the rebellion’s infrastructure repurposed for something that didn’t require a war to run. Each one who arrived settled something in my chest that I was still trying to understand. Grief for what they’d been through. Something fiercer than gladness that the tower existed to receive them.
My mother had not built it only for me.
I understood that now. She had built a sanctuary, and I was the first person it had been built to protect, and the work of the past six months had been learning how to extend that protection outward. Malric had named the people training as wardens with his characteristic precision, had developed a protocol for their education that was thorough enough to have been a military curriculum in a previous life, which it essentially was.
He was in the tower now, probably. He split his time between the castle and the Wyrdwood with an efficiency that impressed everyone who watched it, and that I recognized as Malric simply being incapable of doing anything at less than full capacity. The new council took most of his mornings. The tower took his afternoons. I took whatever was left and he gave it without reservation, which was more than it had been at the beginning.
Thane was in the forest.
He had claimed the Wyrdwood in the quiet territorial way of a weather mage who had found a landscape that suited him, which was to say he walked its paths every morning and knew every tree in it. The forest had responded to him. The Wyrdwood was calmer than it had been in the memories of the oldest people in the nearest village. Yet nobody who meant harm had made it past the tree line in six months.
I could feel him out there now, through the bond. The warm frequency of Thane in the morning, at ease, unhurried, the weather magic running at its natural level rather than suppressed or weaponized or burning itself out against impossible odds. He had been sleeping through the night for two months. That had not been true, he’d told me once, in the past three years.
I turned from the window.
The old war room had been partially converted. The map table was still there. Malric had kept it, argued persuasively that it was a useful piece of furniture, and that its history didn’t determine its function. But the maps on it now were different. Provincial territories marked not for military deployment but for resource distribution. The locations of safe houses, sanctuary towers in the planning stages, the network of people who had fought a war and were now learning how to build something new.
On the smaller table near the window, a book.
NotA History of Omegas, which I had read so many times that the pages had gone soft at the corners. This was a blank book, or had been. I had been filling it for three months with everything I remembered from my mother’s memory spell and everything I had learned since, and everything I was still learning about what my omega power was and what it could be when it wasn’t being suppressed or siphoned or controlled by someone else.
Future reference. For the girls arriving at the tower who deserved to know who they were before someone else decided for them.
I would not let that happen again.
The door behind me opened and the bond shifted before I heard him. Malric’s focus with warmth underneath it, the combination I had learned to recognize as him moving between his working mind and his present one.
“The morning council finished early,” he said.
“That never happens.”
“Caerwyn’s representative finally agreed on the eastern territorial boundary.” A pause. “It turns out agreeing is faster than arguing.”
“A revelation.”
He came to stand beside me at the window, and his hand found the small of my back in the easy way it did now, without cautiousness of the early days, and I leaned into it without thinking about it, which was its own kind of milestone.
We looked at the forest together.
“Thane found another path through the northwestern section,” Malric said. “He says it cuts two hours off the route from the second village.”
“He was up before dawn again.”
“He always is.”
The bond carried Thane’s warmth from the tree line, steady and unhurried, and Malric recognized it at the same moment I did, the slight easing in him that happened when all three of us were present and accounted for. He would not admit that this was something he checked. He checked it continuously.
I pressed my hand against the windowpane.
The morning light was coming up cool over the forest, the cool winter sky turning toward spring, the same light I had watched from the other side of glass my entire life. Different from here. The same sky, different because I was choosing to stand under it.
