He almost smiles. Not quite. "Yes," he says, and I hear the effort it costs him to keep his voice even. "I'll add it to the list." He turns and looks at the treeline, the cleared sky, the empty grounds. His hands are at his sides now, the death magic fullyrecalled. "We need to report this. The wraith numbers, the ward failure, the timing."
"The bond," I say.
He doesn't respond to that immediately. "The wraith numbers and the ward failure," he repeats. "The rest requires more careful handling."
"You're not going to tell anyone about the partial bond."
"I'm going to tell the appropriate people through the appropriate channels when I've had time to understand what we're dealing with." His voice is flat again, the classroom voice, the one that doesn't give anything away. "Until then, you don't discuss it."
"I wasn't planning to."
"Good."
We stand on the empty grounds with the bond humming between us and the sky finally going dark overhead, the real kind of dark that follows actual sunset rather than wraith-driven atmospheric collapse. My absorption is still running quiet, still sated in that way that feels wrong because it shouldn't be sated from another person's magic, it should be running neutral, it should be mine and only mine.
"Does it hurt you?" I ask. "The partial bond."
He doesn't answer fast enough, which is an answer. "I'm managing it."
"That's not what I asked."
"Angelic." He says my name in the tone that means he's done with this line of conversation. Not cruel, just closed, the wall going back up brick by brick in real time. "Go check on your friend. Get off the grounds. Don't come out here alone again until the ward situation is assessed."
"You need to be checked for overextension," I say. "The amplification pulled more from you than a normal fight would. Your magic is running thinner than it should be."
"I'm aware of my own reserves."
"I pulled from them. I'm the one who knows how far they went." I take a step toward him. He doesn't move back, which costs him something, I can see it in the set of his shoulders. "You need rest and you need to eat something with caloric density in the next hour or your magic is going to bottom out before morning."
A beat. Then: "Is that what you do? After you've been drained?"
"That's what works," I say. "Your body can't regenerate magical reserves if it doesn't have physical resources to draw on. Basic biology."
"I know the biology."
"Then act on it." I hold his gaze for a moment and the partial bond does something I'm going to categorize as irrelevant, a warmth, a pull, the door-pushed-open sensation intensifying briefly before I put a wall up on my end and it levels out. "I'm going to check on Sage. You're going to eat something and sleep."
He looks at me with the expression he gets when I've done something he didn't predict. He gets it more often than he'd like, probably. "You're giving me orders."
"I'm giving you medical advice. You can choose to ignore it. But you won't."
"Why won't I?"
"Because you're too practical to dismiss good information just because you don't like the source." I pick up my belt pouch from where it fell during the fight and sling it back across my hip. "And because the bond is a two-way connection, which means if you bottom out tonight I'll feel it, and I'd like to sleep without that particular experience."
Something shifts in him. Fast. Gone before I can name it. "You'll feel it if I bottom out."
"Through the bond. Yes. Presumably." I keep my voice practical. "So eat something. For entirely selfish reasons."
He's quiet for a moment. Then he says, "The amplification. What you did with my magic. Has that ever happened before?"
"Not like that." I don't elaborate. He knows what my absorption does. He's seen it documented in enough reports to fill a filing cabinet. "The combination of contact and the shared draw under that kind of pressure made it different. More controlled than usual."
"More controlled," he repeats, and something about the way he says it makes me wonder what he felt on his end when the amplification hit, what it was like to have his own power come back at him doubled and directed.
"You should write it up," I say. "For whatever report you're filing. The amplification mechanics might be relevant to the ward failure analysis."
"I intend to."
