I moved to the far end of the room, where the light from the wall sconces didn't reach as cleanly, where the shadows collected under the edge of the large rug that covered most of the dining room floor.
Something caught my eye.
A gleam. Wrong color for stone, wrong angle for reflected candlelight. I crossed to it and crouched and found the edge of the rug and peeled it back.
Runes.
Cut into the stone itself, not painted or inlaid, but carved with the kind of deliberate depth that required tools and significant time. I pulled the rug back further, revealing more, and then I stood and put my shoulder into moving the table—it was heavy and it scraped against the exposed stone in a way that felt like a violation of something—and then the rug came up entirely and I had the full picture.
A circle. Eight feet across, maybe nine. The runes ran the outer edge in two concentric rings, the inner ring a continuation of the outer, both carved with identical depth and precision. Inside the circle, at the cardinal points, four secondary marks I recognized as anchors—the kind used in ritual magic to fixsomething in place for long-term effect. Not a one-time working. Something designed to sustain.
At the center, worn smoother than the rest from years of contact, a single large sigil that I had seen before.
I stood over it and ice settled in my chest.
I had seen this configuration. Not this exact circle, not these runes, but this architecture—the anchor points, the concentric containment rings, the central sigil of the type the king's court magicians used for power regulation. I had seen it in fragments, in partial diagrams, in the margins of texts my mother had left behind that my father had given me after she died because he couldn't look at them anymore.
I had seen it in the research I'd done in the two years before the rebellion, when I was still embedded in court and still trying to understand what the king was actually doing versus what he said he was doing.
This wasn't a containment circle for a dangerous person.
This was a siphoning array. Built into the foundation of the room. Built, I now understood, to always be ready, to be activated at a moment’s notice. And, since it was always active, it would passively drain anyone within the perimeter, storing the magic until it was absorbed.
She had been eating over a drain the entire time she had been imprisoned.
Every meal in this room. Every time she'd sat here with her father and accepted his version of events and his version of her. She'd been sitting in the middle of an array designed to strip and collect, and she hadn't known, and neither had I until this moment, and the cold feeling in my chest turned to a deep, burning anger.
My mind was already running ahead.
The book. Third shelf from the top in the library, on the left side—I'd clocked it the second day because the binding waswrong, too old for the subject matter on the spine, which meant it had been rebound to obscure what was actually inside it. I'd marked it for closer examination and then Aveline's second spike had begun, and I had not gone back to it.
I went to it now.
I was moving fast down the stairs, faster than I usually let myself move because speed implied urgency and I preferred to imply control. But the dining room was above me with its exposed circle and its anchor points and the central sigil that meant what I thought it meant, and I needed the book.
Because if I was right—and I was putting a high probability on being right—the circle upstairs wasn't just a record of what the king had done to her.
It was a record of what she was capable of.
The siphoning array only worked on a source that had something worth siphoning. The scale of the runes, the depth of the concentric rings, the number of anchor points—this had been built to handle an enormous, sustained output. Not a trickle. Not the ordinary magic of an ordinary omega.
Something that required nine feet of carved stone and two decades of continuous operation to manage.
And the king had been using it to make himself stronger.
I thought of what Thane had said. We already suspected she made the king stronger. Imagine if she were our bonded mate.
He'd been thinking about power, about what it would mean for the rebellion.
I was thinking about something else entirely.
I was thinking about a circle carved into the floor of a dining room where a girl had eaten breakfast every morning for years, and the size of the sigil at its center, and what category of being required that kind of containment.
We had come here looking for a weapon. What if we had misunderstood what kind?
I pulled the book from the shelf, opened it on the library table, and found the page I needed in under a minute, because I was good at finding things and because some part of me had already known this was here and had simply been waiting for me to catch up.
I read the first paragraph.
