Neither of them spoke.
“I’m done,” I paused, “being the thing he comes to retrieve. I am done being the source he returns to when his reserves run low. I am done being the story he told himself to justify yearsof—” I stopped and shook my head. “This ends. Not when he decides it ends. Now.”
Thane’s expression had gone blank.
Malric studied me carefully, not as a mate, not as a stranger, but as a partner.
“We confront him. Here. On ground my mother chose.” I pressed my hand flat against the stone wall of the bathing chamber, and the tower hummed under my palm. “He has never been in this tower when I wasn’t alone and suppressed and drained. He has never met me with my power intact and my mates beside me.” I looked at Malric. “He doesn’t know what he’s walking into.”
A silence.
Then Malric said, “No. He doesn’t.”
“So we let him come,” I said. “And we meet him.”
Thane gave a low, rough sound. His hand found the back of my neck briefly, a small, deliberate pressure, and released.
Malric crossed to the door and stopped with his hand on the frame, and looked back at me.
“You’ll want to get dressed,” he said. “And eat more than a fig and some bread and cheese.”
“I will.”
He looked at me for a moment longer, then, with a firm nod, he exited.
I exhaled shakily and turned to Thane, who had dressed in pants and his tunic.
“You know this is going to be dangerous,” Thane said.
“I’m ready.”
“And you’re not afraid.”
I considered that honestly. The bond was warm in my chest, both of them present inside it, and the tower hummed under my bare feet, and outside the narrow window, the morning light wasthe ordinary gray-white of a day that didn’t know yet what it was going to hold.
“I’m afraid. But I’m choosing, anyway.”
He smiled and gripped the back of my neck, pressing his forehead to mine.
“Good,” he said. “Get dressed. Let’s end this.”
Malric
The garden was dying gracefully.
That was the only way to describe the top level of the tower in late fall. The climbing plants along the stone walls had gone brown and amber. The herbs in their carved troughs reduced to woody stems. The small fruit trees bare-limbed and patient in their containers. In summer, this would have been beautiful and peaceful. Now it was skeletal and quiet and offered an unobstructed view in every direction that nothing lower in the tower could match.
Which was why I was here.
I stood at the northeastern parapet and watched the Wyrdwood.
They were perhaps two hours out. Maybe less, depending on their pace through the forest paths. The king’s guard moved differently than a standard military column—tighter, faster, the kind of formation that sacrificed supply sustainability for speed. He hadn’t brought siege equipment. He hadn’t brought a logistics train. What he’d brought was approximately forty men who were very good at their function, which was not warfare in the broad sense but the controlled retrieval of targets.
He’d built them for exactly this.
I’d known about the king’s personal guard for years, had gathered intelligence on their composition and capabilities, and had factored them into strategic assessments with the rebellion forces. Knowing about them abstractly and watching them move through trees toward a tower containing the people I was responsible for were different experiences.
Forty men. Hardened, well-equipped, personally loyal to a man who had been running partly on amplified power for years. And I didn’t know how many magic-users the king had brought, for I suspected he had at least one.
