I move past the two soldiers. They don’t matter to me. The one on the right decides that is a mistake he would like to correct, and I put him into the seawall hard enough that the stonework cracks. The second one assesses the situation and makes the wiser choice. He drops his sword and starts running in the opposite direction.
Vaedrin raises the relic.
The light that comes out of it hits me across the chest. I feel it, which is more than I expected. Old magic burns through it. It was built when gargoyle wardens were the thing people designed defenses against. It slows me one step. Then two.
By the third step, I am through it.
I get my hand around his throat and lift him off the seawall. Vaedrin Sael, noble enforcer, bloodline hunter, architect of a century of quiet murder, drops the relic to grab my wrist with both hands and makes a sound that has nothing composed in it at all.
“Wait.”
Selah’s voice. She’s not afraid, and she’s not asking.
I don’t let go. Vaedrin’s feet are not touching anything.
“We said together.” She moves into my peripheral. I can feel her through the tether, her heartbeat calm and steady.
Vaedrin’s hands are losing their grip on my wrist. His pale violet eyes are panicking as they look wildly around as if he issearching for something, anything, to save himself. I watch it happen and feel nothing gentle about it.
“He killed many. Even children,” I say.
“I know.” She doesn’t flinch. “Put him down.”
I release him. He hits the seawall and slides and stays where he is, one hand already reaching for the relic where it fell against the stone.
Selah gets there first. She picks it up and holds it out to me. Her hands are steady.
After everything. After weeks of watching her hold herself together with both hands and sheer stubbornness, her hands are steady.
I close my fingers over the relic beside hers, and the old magic in it pushes back. The gargoyle magic and her bloodline and the thing the tether has made us together push back harder. When the relic cracks, it doesn’t crack quietly.
Pain erupts up our arms, searing through our veins like a bolt of lightning. It thunders through even inch of us and in the air around us. Each crack brings another level of torment until light begins to seep through the gold of the relic.
The light releases and moves outward across the harbor in a wave I can feel in my teeth and the stone beneath my feet. Everywhere it touches, something unravels. The kind of unraveling that happens in records, in bloodlines, in the carefully constructed architecture of lies that took five generations to build. I don’t know exactly what is being exposed or to whom. I know it is moving toward every noble house that used this artifact as a weapon. I know it is not going back.
The relic comes apart in our hands in pieces that turn to ash before they hit the ground.
Vaedrin makes a desperate, rough sound. He is already moving toward where the ash is settling, both hands out, and heis not looking at us. He is not looking at the seawall edge two feet to his left.
He doesn’t look at it until it is too late.
The explosion from the lower docks takes out the seawall supports in a rolling concussion of heat and stone. I grab Selah by her shoulders and pull her back, getting us both away from the wreckage as it collapses.
The section beneath Vaedrin goes sideways and then down. He goes with it. Still reaching. Still looking at the ash where the relic was, like something in it might still be salvageable.
The water takes him. The water takes the ash. The harbor burns on without him, indifferent, and Selah stands where the wall was and looks down and says nothing.
When she turns to me, I reach out and take her hand. The tether settles. It no longer hurt, and I fell into a world that no longer had any use for me.
It has one use now.
It has her.
15
SELAH
Gullhaven’s people are practical, as coastal people always are. They do not wait for someone to tell them what to do.
