“He told me my power was destructive. That it drained life from people who got too close. That my mother came to me during a surge and I killed her.” Anger burned inside, continued to fuel my words. “He built this circle into the floor and told me I was the dangerous thing.”
“Aveline—”
“He made me afraid of myself. He made me afraid of anyone getting close to me. He made me believe that isolation was the only way to keep people alive, and the entire time—” I stopped. “The entire time he was draining me.”
Something moved in the air of the room.
I sensed it before I understood it—a shift in temperature, a pressure change, like the moment before a storm commits. Thecandles on the table flared simultaneously, their flames jumping three inches before pulling back to double their previous height and staying there, burning too bright.
My scent surged, not like in heat, not the warm and sweet that I had become accustomed to. It turned sharp, electric, dangerous. It saturated the room in the space of a breath.
The stone beneath my feet vibrated.
Not violently—but a deep, sustained tremor, a frequency rather than a shake, like the tower had found a note and was holding it. The carved runes in the circle began to illuminate from within. A cold, pale light pushing up through the cut lines, the concentric rings brightening from the outside in.
Thane made a sharp sound beside me.
I looked at him. His eyes had gone wide, and the air around him had changed quality. A pressure built between us, between all three of us, that hadn’t been there a moment ago, a gathering. The candle flames bent toward him and then corrected, and his jaw was tight with the effort of something.
“My magic is—” He exhaled hard. “It’s surging. I’m not doing that.”
Malric had moved closer without my noticing, the way he did things. He grimaced, his jaw clenching with pain. He reached for his left wrist with his right hand. He pressed his fingers over something there and he gritted his teeth.
“The mark,” he said tightly. “It’s burning.”
The vibration in the floor intensified. The runes were fully illuminated now, all three rings of them, the light running through the carved lines with a cold precision. The central sigil pulsed.
Outside the window, the vines that had covered the lower tower walls for as long as I could remember, thick old growth, woody and dense, threaded through the mortar, shifted audibly.I heard it through the stone itself, a cracking and a loosening, the sound of roots releasing their grip.
Thane’s hand caught my arm. Not restraining, anchoring. His fingers pressed into my skin and his magic moved against mine like two weather systems meeting. The sensation was overwhelming, like suddenly being able to hear something that had always been just out of reach.
Malric stepped in on my other side, his wrist still pressed to his opposite hand. His shoulder touched mine. The burning mark on his wrist—I could feel the heat of it from where I stood, a sharp warmth—seemed to ease fractionally at the contact.
The wind whipped through the room. A long, low movement of air, warm and purposeful, circling the exposed circle in the floor before spreading outward. The light in the runes flared once, bright enough that I had to close my eyes, and when I opened them, two of the carved lines at the innermost ring had fractured. A crack running through the stone itself, splitting one of the anchor marks cleanly in two.
I was shaking.
Not with cold. Not with heat. With rage.
“I never gave permission,” I said.
“He took it anyway,” Malric said. He was very close, his voice low. “Without your knowledge. Without your consent. For years.”
The candles flared again. The stone trembled. The crack in the inner ring spread another inch with a sound like a finger drawn across a taut string. The light went out on the runes.
Thane’s grip on my arm tightened.
“Aveline.” His voice, careful and steady, the voice he used when the storm in him was running high and he needed something external to fix on. “I need you to breathe.”
I was breathing.
I was also, I understood distantly, doing something to the room. Something I had never been able to do before, because the floor had always been there beneath me, with the drain always running and the residue had never been enough to reach the surface.
The array was cracked.
And something that had been contained for more years than I knew was answering back.
Chapter Thirteen
