Thane straightened slowly. “Tell us.”
Malric came into the room and set the book on the corner of the displaced table and looked at me in a way that told me he wasabout to say something I needed to be ready for. I was already as prepared as I could be.
“The circle is a siphoning array,” he said. “It’s built into the foundation. Passive operation. It doesn’t require an active caster to function. It runs continuously.” He paused. “It was built to draw from whoever occupied this room on a sustained, long-term basis.”
The cold in my stomach spread outward.
“He built it into the dining room,” I said flatly, the reality sinking in slowly.
“Yes.”
“Because I eat here. Every day.”
“Yes.”
I looked at the circle on the floor, at the two concentric rings of runes. At the anchor points carved at the cardinal positions, like something had been nailed in place and the nails had been made of stone. I looked at the worn patch at the center, where some repeated contact had smoothed the carving slightly, and understood with a sudden nauseating clarity that the worn patch was worn because I had been standing on it for twenty years.
Every meal. Every time I ate with my father, every time he embraced me, telling me I was dangerous, his careful management of every piece of information I’d ever been given about myself. The exhaustion after his visits that I’d always attributed to his siphoning through touch. Every time he was taking from me.
He hadn’t needed touch at all.
He’d built the drain into the floor and let me stand on it.
“The book,” Malric continued, opening it to a page he’d marked, “confirms the sigil at the center. It’s a collector array. Not just a drain—a collection mechanism. Whatever it pulled from you, it stored and transferred.” He turned the book towardme. “This is the king’s mark. Here, at the outer ring. He built this himself or had it built to his design.”
I looked at the page. The diagram matched what was carved in the floor in enough detail that my vision went slightly strange at the edges.
Thane had moved to my side without my noticing. He wasn’t touching me, but he was close enough that I could feel his warmth.
“What does it mean?” I asked. My voice was still doing the flat thing. I recognized it as the voice I used when my body understood something before my mind had finished catching up. “What was he taking?”
Malric closed the book. “Your power.”
“I don’t have power. I’ve never been able to produce a single successful spell. Every book on magical theory, every exercise I attempted—nothing ever answered.”
“Because it was being drained before it could consolidate,” Malric said. “Your power doesn’t have access to itself. It generates and this array strips it before you can use it.” He met my eyes. “What reaches you is the residue. The portion the array can’t catch efficiently.”
I stared at him.
“So who am I?” The question burst out, fueled by frustration. “What is it that he’s been taking? What power do I actually have?”
Malric and Thane exchanged a glance over my head. I felt it happen and didn’t look up at either of them.
“We don’t know the full extent,” Thane said carefully. “Because it’s never been allowed to develop.”
“But we have indications. The way the tower responds to you. The way your presence affects ambient magic—mine, Thane’s. The book describes this array being used historically in one context.” Malric picked it up again, found the passage, andread without inflection. “‘Arrays of the collector type, anchored with four-point cardinal binding, were used exclusively in the suppression of amplifier-class abilities, most commonly associated with omega bloodlines carrying the amplifier trait.’”
The word sat in the room.
Amplifier.
“Your power isn’t destructive,” Thane said quietly. “It’s connective. You strengthen what’s around you. You make other power more stable, more complete.” He paused. “We thought you might have made the king stronger. We were right. He’s been running partly on what this array collected from you for years.”
I thought about my father’s hands on my face. His careful questions about whether I was unwell. His consistent management of my diet, my sleep, my emotional state—I thought it was because he cared about me. I couldn’t have been more wrong. He’d been monitoring the source. Managing his asset.
“He told me I killed my mother.”
Neither of them spoke.
