I checked. Traced the architecture of the entrance wards, the same wards that had sealed behind us when we arrived, and found what I expected—a mechanism that responded to intention. It had sealed us in to protect Aveline. Now that I was inside the system, I could see the nuance of it. It was not a lock without a key. It was a conditional seal.
“It will let us out. The condition was never about keeping us here. It was about keeping her safe.” I looked at him. “It will follow her lead.”
Which meant we needed Aveline to make a clear decision, and we needed the tower to understand it was her decision, and then the question of exit would answer itself.
“She’s already made the decision,” Thane said, reading my expression.
“I know.”
He looked at the tree line again. The movement in the forest was more visible now, the suggestion of a column resolving into the first identifiable shapes of men on foot. Still far. Not far enough.
“So we have a fortress with active defenses. And your power back. And whatever she can do.” He paused. “And forty men led by someone who has been running on stolen power for years and is going to arrive expecting to collect a suppressed omega.”
“Yes,” I said.
“That’s better odds than we had twenty minutes ago.”
“Considerably.”
He turned from the parapet and looked at me directly. The wind moved through the dead garden between us and neither of us spoke for a moment.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
The question was personal in the way Thane always checked in. He wasn’t asking about the tactical situation.
I looked at my wrist. Clean skin where ten years of grinding suppression had been. I flexed my hand and felt nothing but my own fingers responding, my own circulation, my own unburdened body.
“Ask me again tonight,” I said.
He accepted that.
“I’ll get her,” he said, and moved toward the stairs.
I turned back to the parapet and watched the Wyrdwood. The tower hummed around me with its woken defenses, and below me, somewhere, Aveline was putting on her boots and deciding what she was going to say to her father. The bond was warm in my chest with both of them present inside it, and I stood in the cold garden and did what I did with the time before engagements.
I planned.
Chapter Nineteen
AVELINE
Iate everything on my plate.
That was new. Three days of the heat made food a negotiation, and now my body had swung the other direction entirely, and I couldn’t seem to eat enough, and the tower obliged. I finished the bread, the cold meat, and the preserved fruit the tower set out for us, and reached for more bread without thinking about it.
Thane watched this with a smirk.
“Don’t,” I warned him.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
He put the satisfied expression away and handed me the bread, along with some of the herbed soft cheese I liked.
The dining room seemed altered once the circle was no longer covered. I had decided I wasn’t going to let it drive me out of the room indefinitely. It was cracked through, its function destroyed, and avoiding it gave it more power than it deserved. So we ate at the table pulled back to the side of the room, away from the center, and I kept my eyes my attention on the food and the two men across from me and the conversation we needed to have.
The table had been reset by the tower with the automatic attentiveness it brought to meals, as if the exposed circle and the cracked stone and the approaching king’s guard were not its concern. Three settings. Hot food. A lit candle in the center.
