“It’s compromised,” Malric said. “A clean circle is a closed system. Once the integrity breaks, the draw stops. Whatever was running through it has been interrupted.”
“So he can’t—” I stopped. “He lost access.”
“Tonight, he lost access. Which means tonight, for the first time, he felt it go.”
The room went cold.
Not the gradual cooling of an evening, not the natural drop in temperature I’d grown accustomed to in the upper floors when the wind shifted. This was immediate and complete, as if the warmth had been lifted out of the air between one breath and the next. The furs around me registered it, my skin registered it, the small hairs on my arms rising in unison.
The candles went out.
Every one of them, simultaneously, the way they would if someone had covered them all with cupped hands at the same moment. The nest went dark. In the adjacent bathing chamber, the small lamp that always burned died with the rest, and the darkness became total.
“Malric,” Thane said. Not panic—a warning.
I heard Malric move, heard his boots on the stone as he crossed to the window. The tower made a quiet, continuous humming sound that was new to me in the silence, similar in pitch to the vibration I’d felt in the dining room when my anger had passed through it, yet distinct in its character. Less like a voice and more like something bracing.
Thane pulled me in against his side. I let him, because my body had decided that was the correct response and my mind agreed.
The vibration deepened.
The stone at my back was ice cold in the floor through the furs beneath me, and the cold sharpened into something with a direction—not ambient chill but pressured cold, like air being pushed through a small space at force. The window rattled in its frame. Outside, the trees moved as though a storm approached, though we hadn’t heard anything.
“Someone is trying to come in,” I said.
“Where?” Malric gritted out, from the window, his voice sounding like the military commander he was.
“I don’t know. I can’t—” Pressing my hand through the furs to the floor, I felt the tower’s movements and tried to grasp what it was doing. “It’s trying to stop something. The tower. It’s pushing against something.”
“Has this happened before?” Thane, close to my ear.
“The tower has never done this before.” I listened to the vibration change pitch, rising slightly, the way a voice rises when pressed. “It’s holding.”
“For now,” Malric said.
I knew before I meant to say it. The knowledge surfaced from somewhere that wasn’t quite thought, wasn’t quite instinct, was something in between that I didn’t have a word for yet.
“It’s my father,” I said, the realization coursing through me as if the tower had spoken to me.
The cold spiked. The window Malric stood beside went white with frost, intricate branching patterns spreading from the edges of the glass inward, and Malric stepped back from it.
“He’s using a portal,” he said. “A fixed portal. He’s had one.”
“I’ve never seen him arrive any other way. He’s always in the dining hall when I come downstairs. I assumed he traveled through the forest. I never questioned it, I didn’t know?—”
“Where?” Malric was already moving.
“The dining hall. He’s always in the dining hall. He has never gone anywhere else in the tower.”
He was gone before I finished the sentence. I heard him take the stairs at speed, no longer measured, nothing deliberate about it, just the rapid descent of a man who was going to protect us at all costs.
Thane stood, keeping me between him and the door.
The tower’s vibration held its pitch for what seemed like a long time. The cold pressed against the walls, against the glass, and I felt the stones of the tower resisting it with something that wasn’t quite magic and wasn’t quite will but was some combination of both, something old and oriented completely around me, and I now understood that the tower had always been doing this.
Not containing me. Protecting me.
Then the cold broke.
