17. THE BEAST UNLEASHED
Chapter seventeen
THE BEAST UNLEASHED
LEON
The bond is dark on one side and I go into the palace like a man walking into the sea that already took him once.
I do not remember the gate. I do not remember the courtyard, or the stairs, or the men who must have stood in the doorways between me and her, because the wolf has the wheel now and the man is riding behind its eyes, and the wolf does not keep souvenirs.
What I remember is the pull. Even torn, even screaming, the bond is a compass, and I follow the broken needle of it down through the palace the way water finds the lowest floor.
Every soldier who steps into that line of pull learns, fast, that there is a worse thing in Dragonia tonight than the storm in the sky.
I am at the edge of becoming the thing they wanted.
I can feel it. The Havoc overhead leans down toward me, delighted, yes, yes, give it to me, all that grief makes such good fuel, and some clean cold splinter of me knows that if I let the rage all the way in I will be exactly the weapon Kael needs.
A mindless engine feeding the very storm I came to stop.
Ferb's voice, from a firelit study a lifetime ago.
A king who only does what his wolf wants is a weapon other people aim.
I hold the splinter. Barely. I am a man holding the leash of a wolf that has just been told its mate is dead, and the leash is fraying in my hands strand by strand, and I keep walking anyway.
Because the only thing louder than the rage is the faint, stubborn, refusing-to-believe-it thread of her still reaching back down the torn line, fainter than it should be if she were truly gone.
That thread is the only reason I am still a person when Keith catches me on the landing.
He does not try to stop me, which is wise, because the wolf would go through him.
He falls in beside me instead, matching my pace, and he says the one thing that can reach me, which is not calm down and not think, but, "She's not dead, son.
You'd know. You of all creatures would know.
That bond doesn't lie even when everyone in this building does. "
And he is right. The wolf hears it before the man does. The thread is there. Frayed, buried, drowning, but there. Not the silence of a cut line. The static of a muffled one.
"Then where," I get out, and my voice is barely a voice.
"Down," Keith says grimly. "Everything here runs down. We finish this together, like I said. But you do not give that storm what it wants. You hear me? You walk in there as her mate, not as its fuel. That's the only version of you that gets her back."
A runner reaches us on the next landing, one of Ferb's people, gray and out of breath, and the news he carries lands like a second blow stacked on the first. Ferb is failing.
Not poisoned, not struck, only old, only out of time, his body finally calling in the debt the last months have been running up.
The message is three days old by the time it crossed the gate, which means it is already a lie, which means the old king who pulled me out of the sea and gave me a name and a crown and a reason might already be gone while I am a continent away in a poisoned country chasing a different grief.
The runner says Ferb's last clear instruction was bring my son home before the end, and bring the girl, all of it has to be in one room before I go.
Two fathers. The one whose blood I share, walking beside me into a war he did not have to come to. The one whose name I wear, dying alone in a palace I cannot reach. And the woman the storm wants me to grieve so loudly I burn the world down for it.
The Havoc leans closer. So much. So much grief. Give it to me.
I do not.
I take all of it, the two fathers and the torn bond and the small lost warmth I felt gutter through the link, and instead of letting it out I fold it into the one shape that does not feed the storm, which is forward.
Not rage. Purpose. There is a door at the bottom of these stairs and she is behind it, and I am going to open it as the man she steadied in a ruined street, not the beast that street nearly made of me.
The chamber doors are black stone and they do not want to open.
They open anyway. Keith takes the left, I take the right, and the wolf and the alpha move through the last of the guards like one animal with two bodies.
The chanting cult-noise breaks and scatters.
The ember-light dims where my fury crosses it, and the storm overhead loses, for one moment, its grip on the room, because I refused to be its hands.
And there she is.
She is on the cold floor in the center of it, wrists in scorched-silver cuffs, her gown dark with the night she has had, and she is so still that the man behind the wolf's eyes stops breathing entirely.
But the thread pulls. The bond, even muffled, even half-drowned, tugs toward her and is answered, faintly, and that faint answer is the most beautiful thing I have felt in my life.
Alive. Broken, emptied, somewhere very far down inside herself, but alive.
I am across the room and on my knees and I have the cuffs off her, the metal shrieking as the wolf's strength does what her own fire cannot while it touches her, and I gather her up against me. She is cold. She who runs like a furnace is cold, and that frightens me more than the blood.
"Portia." I say it into her hair. Her name. The name I was never given and have always known. "I'm here. I've got you. Look at me. Please look at me."
Her eyes open. They find mine. And there is nothing in them.
That is the part I am not ready for. Not tears, not fear, not even the ice. Nothing. A house with the lights off. She looks at me the way you look at weather through a window, present and absent at once, and when she speaks her voice comes from the bottom of a well.
"I can't feel the coal," she says. "Kael showed me.
Ash. He said it was quick." Her hand drifts to her own middle, and the gesture is so careful, so emptied of hope, that it nearly finishes me.
"I can't feel it. I can't feel anything.
The bond, you, the fire, all of it, it's just," her voice does not break, which is worse than breaking.
"Gone quiet. Like the rest of this country. "
I do not tell her she is wrong. I do not tell her the thread is still there, that I can feel the muffled stubborn warmth of her even now, that grief is a liar and Kael is a worse one and ash proves nothing.
She is not ready to hold hope, and hope handed to someone who cannot hold it just becomes one more thing they drop.
So instead I do the only thing I have ever known how to do for her.
I hold her, and I let the bond carry what words cannot, and I press my own steadiness down the torn line the way she pressed hers into me in the ruined street.
I'm here. I'm here. I'm here. Not asking her to feel it.
Just leaving it there for whenever she can.
Over her head, Keith stands guard at the broken doors with the storm-light flickering behind him, and his eyes meet mine, and he does not say we have to move, though we do, though the chamber will not stay ours for long.
He gives me the moment. One father giving his son one moment before the next impossible thing.
"We're getting your father back," I tell her quietly.
"And we're going home. Ferb needs us. And Portia, listen to me, because I will only say it once and then I will wait as long as it takes for you to believe it.
" I tip her chin up so the dead eyes have to meet mine.
"Kael lies. Ash is just ash. Don't you grieve one second longer than the truth demands, because we don't have the truth yet. We only have his."
Something moves, very far down, behind the dark in her eyes. Not hope. Too soon for hope. But the splinter of the strategist, the part of her that did not believe him even as she shattered, hearing itself spoken aloud by someone else, and recognizing it.
It is not much. But it is a light coming on in one window of a dark house, and I will take it, and I will build the rest of the night around it.
Dearest Readers,
The storm wanted him mindless. It leaned down over that palace and it offered him every excuse a grieving man could want, and it whispered that rage and justice are the same thing.
They are not. They have never been. And the last clear thought she had before the dark took her was a prayer that he would not become what they wanted, not even for her, especially not for her.
He never heard it, loves. He could not. The bond was torn.
And he answered it anyway.
But she is looking at him now with nothing behind her eyes, and a house with the lights off is a harder thing to walk into than any burning palace.
How do you reach someone who has stopped being in the room?
Turn the page.
Your author.