It was her.
I stood with my palm against the activation point and pushed, because I did not accept resistance as a final answer. I had defeated every resistance in over two centuries of rule and I was not going to begin tonight. The portal strained against whatever was blocking it. The strain traveled from my arm to my chest as my reserves kicked in, drawing on the array’s stored energy before the portal closed.
Not collapsed. Shut from the other side.
I lowered my hand.
The east wall looked back at me, stone and mortar and the blank indifference of inanimate material. The hanging swayed slightly from the movement of air the failed portal had displaced and then went still.
I stood in the quiet of my private rooms and processed what had just happened with the methodical attention I applied to all tactical problems, because that was what this was. A tactical problem. An unexpected variable. Something that had changed in my absence and required assessment and response.
The array had been interrupted. The portal had been blocked.
The blocking had come from within the tower. Which meant someone was in the tower.
The only people who should have been in the tower were the tower itself and Aveline. Aveline did not have the power to block a portal of that construction because Aveline had never had access to her power in sufficient quantity to do anything more than occasionally make the candles flicker when she was distressed.
Someone had found her.
Someone had gotten through the wards, past the thorn barrier, past the sentinel constructs I'd placed at the perimeter, past every layer of protection I had designed specifically to prevent this. They had reached her and they had apparently done something to her that had disrupted a century of carefully maintained infrastructure.
The sound that came out of me was not something I allowed in front of other people.
It moved through the room, which caused the candles on the war table to go out, the marking pen to roll off the edge, and the maps to shift in the displaced air of it. I stood with my hands at my sides and let the rage move through me, and then I pulled it back in, contained it, and began to think.
Someone in the rebellion knew about the tower. That was the first implication, and it narrowed the field considerably. The tower’s location was not secret the way a buried document was secret, but it was not advertised, and reaching it required specific knowledge of the forest paths through the Wyrdwood, which had been unmapped by design. Either there had been a breach in my inner circle, or someone had been very patient and very thorough.
I moved back to the war table, looked at the maps, and understood that the campaign I had been planning was no longer the campaign I needed to run. Aveline was my priority. I had to secure her. The rebellion could wait.
For now.
The northeastern corridor was still relevant. Caerwyn's forces were still a tactical problem. But the order of operations had changed entirely, because the rebellion's purpose had shifted the moment they'd found the tower. They had not been looking for a fight. They had been looking for her.
They had found her.
Which meant they now had access to something that changed the military calculus so completely that the maps on my table were temporarily irrelevant.
I lit the candles again with a gesture that was sharper than necessary.
I needed to speak to Commander Voren, and I needed him in the next hour. The eastern deployment would accelerate—not by two days but by four. The artillery placement I'd marked for the ridge would need a third position added. And I needed my personal guard assembled before morning, because I was no longer directing this campaign from the war room.
I was going to the Wyrdwood myself.
I pulled the hanging back across the east wall and looked at the blank stone behind it for one moment.
She was on the other side of that wall, unreachable, with people who did not understand what she was or what she was capable of or what she would become if allowed to develop without management. She had been safe in the tower. She had been contained, stable, and safe, and I had kept her that way for years because I understood what unchecked amplifier-class power did in the hands of someone who had no training, no context, no comprehension of the scale of what they carried.
I had not imprisoned her.
I had protected the world from a catastrophe she would never have forgiven herself for causing.
They would undo all of it. They would tell her whatever served their purposes—the rebellion's version of events. This sympathetic reframing painted me as the villain in a story that was considerably more complicated than villainy. They would push at the bindings I'd spent years maintaining. They would think they were liberating her and they would not understand what they were releasing until it was already loose.
I turned back to the war table.
The marking pen had left a smear across the eastern flank when it fell. I picked it up and looked at the smear and thought about Aveline's face the last time I had visited—the way she had asked how we knew she was still dangerous, the question she'd been working up to for longer than she'd realized, the first small sign that the conditioning was beginning to thin.
I had told myself I would reinforce it on my next visit.
