Then I sat down, slowly, and read it again.
The cold in my chest was gone.
What replaced it was something I had considerably less experience managing.
Aveline
Iwas almost asleep when the gong sounded.
Not the deep unconsciousness I’d fallen into after the heat spike broke, but a regular rest, secure in my safety once Thane returned to me. His arm was around me, his breathing slow and even at my back, and I had been lying in the warmth of the nest, cataloging the unfamiliar sensation of feeling safe and trying to understand what to do with it. I was still angry with Malric, hurt that he had rejected me, but we weren’t done. Not as long as Thane was sticking close to me.
The gong rang through the tower once, twice, three times.
Dinner. My stomach rumbled. I hadn’t eaten much of anything for the past few days. Nibbles of food here and there since Malric and Thane had come. The bread and cheese from the bath hadn’t been sufficient; more like an appetizer.
Thane stirred behind me, his arm tightening briefly before he loosened it.
“Hungry?” he asked.
“Yes.”
We dressed without ceremony, which was its own strange intimacy—moving around each other in the dim nest, finding clothes, the ordinary domestic choreography of two people sharing a space. I pulled my hair back, but didn’t look at the door and tried not to think about whether Malric would be downstairs or whether he would still be wherever he’d gone after I’d asked him to leave.
I thought about it anyway.
Thane’s hand found the small of my back as we reached the stairs, brief and warm, not steering me, just present. I didn’t say anything about it. I was finding that Thane communicated a great deal through contact and very little of it required a verbal response.
I stopped in the doorway, taken aback.
The table had been shoved to the far wall, not neatly, at an angle that suggested haste or at least impatience. The large rug that had covered most of the floor since before I could remember—the one with the worn patch in the center that I’d always assumed was age—had been folded back entirely and pushed aside. In the middle of the exposed stone floor, something carved caught the candlelight in a way that made the hairs on my arms stand up.
The table itself still held food. Set for three, dishes covered, candles lit. The tower attended to its business regardless of what had been exposed beneath the rug it usually covered.
Thane moved in front of me without making a production of it.
“Stay here,” he said.
He crossed the room and crouched at the edge of what I could now see was a circle—large, spanning most of the floor’s center, its edges carved with marks I didn’t have a name for. Hemoved around the perimeter slowly, not touching, examining. His expression looked carved from stone.
I watched from the doorway and something cold spread through my body.
I had eaten in this room every day of my life, never suspecting what lay beneath.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Runes. Old work. Deep.” He stood and looked back at me. “Very deliberate.”
I’d taken two steps into the room before I realized it, my feet moving ahead of the rest of me toward the circle. The carving was precise, two concentric rings of symbols I didn’t recognize running the outer edge, and inside them at four equidistant points, marks that looked like knots—tight, complex, anchored into the stone with a depth that would have required hours of work. At the center, worn slightly smoother than the rest, a single large symbol that I had never seen in any of the books the tower had given me.
I had read a great many books.
“Aveline,” Malric called from the doorway.
I looked up.
He stood at the threshold with a book under his arm—old, its cover worn, the spine cracked along its length. His expression was carefully blank, the one that meant he’d already processed whatever he was about to say and had decided how to present it. But underneath that, in the set of his jaw, something else. Something that looked almost like anger held at a very careful distance from its source.
“I figured it out,” he said.
