Chapter Twelve #2
I was thinking about something else entirely.
I was thinking about a circle carved into the floor of a dining room where a girl had eaten breakfast every morning for years, and the size of the sigil at its center, and what category of being required that kind of containment.
We had come here looking for a weapon. What if we had misunderstood what kind?
I pulled the book from the shelf, opened it on the library table, and found the page I needed in under a minute, because I was good at finding things and because some part of me had already known this was here and had simply been waiting for me to catch up.
I read the first paragraph.
Then I sat down, slowly, and read it again.
The cold in my chest was gone.
What replaced it was something I had considerably less experience managing.
Aveline
Iwas almost asleep when the gong sounded.
Not the deep unconsciousness I’d fallen into after the heat spike broke, but a regular rest, secure in my safety once Thane returned to me.
His arm was around me, his breathing slow and even at my back, and I had been lying in the warmth of the nest, cataloging the unfamiliar sensation of feeling safe and trying to understand what to do with it.
I was still angry with Malric, hurt that he had rejected me, but we weren’t done.
Not as long as Thane was sticking close to me.
The gong rang through the tower once, twice, three times.
Dinner. My stomach rumbled. I hadn’t eaten much of anything for the past few days. Nibbles of food here and there since Malric and Thane had come. The bread and cheese from the bath hadn’t been sufficient; more like an appetizer.
Thane stirred behind me, his arm tightening briefly before he loosened it.
“Hungry?” he asked.
“Yes.”
We dressed without ceremony, which was its own strange intimacy—moving around each other in the dim nest, finding clothes, the ordinary domestic choreography of two people sharing a space.
I pulled my hair back, but didn’t look at the door and tried not to think about whether Malric would be downstairs or whether he would still be wherever he’d gone after I’d asked him to leave.
I thought about it anyway.
Thane’s hand found the small of my back as we reached the stairs, brief and warm, not steering me, just present. I didn’t say anything about it. I was finding that Thane communicated a great deal through contact and very little of it required a verbal response.
I stopped in the doorway, taken aback.
The table had been shoved to the far wall, not neatly, at an angle that suggested haste or at least impatience.
The large rug that had covered most of the floor since before I could remember—the one with the worn patch in the center that I’d always assumed was age—had been folded back entirely and pushed aside.
In the middle of the exposed stone floor, something carved caught the candlelight in a way that made the hairs on my arms stand up.
The table itself still held food. Set for three, dishes covered, candles lit. The tower attended to its business regardless of what had been exposed beneath the rug it usually covered.
Thane moved in front of me without making a production of it.
“Stay here,” he said.
He crossed the room and crouched at the edge of what I could now see was a circle—large, spanning most of the floor’s center, its edges carved with marks I didn’t have a name for. He moved around the perimeter slowly, not touching, examining. His expression looked carved from stone.
I watched from the doorway and something cold spread through my body.
I had eaten in this room every day of my life, never suspecting what lay beneath.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Runes. Old work. Deep.” He stood and looked back at me. “Very deliberate.”
I’d taken two steps into the room before I realized it, my feet moving ahead of the rest of me toward the circle.
The carving was precise, two concentric rings of symbols I didn’t recognize running the outer edge, and inside them at four equidistant points, marks that looked like knots—tight, complex, anchored into the stone with a depth that would have required hours of work.
At the center, worn slightly smoother than the rest, a single large symbol that I had never seen in any of the books the tower had given me.
I had read a great many books.
“Aveline,” Malric called from the doorway.
I looked up.
He stood at the threshold with a book under his arm—old, its cover worn, the spine cracked along its length.
His expression was carefully blank, the one that meant he’d already processed whatever he was about to say and had decided how to present it.
But underneath that, in the set of his jaw, something else.
Something that looked almost like anger held at a very careful distance from its source.
“I figured it out,” he said.
Thane straightened slowly. “Tell us.”
Malric came into the room and set the book on the corner of the displaced table and looked at me in a way that told me he was about to say something I needed to be ready for. I was already as prepared as I could be.
“The circle is a siphoning array,” he said. “It’s built into the foundation. Passive operation. It doesn’t require an active caster to function. It runs continuously.” He paused. “It was built to draw from whoever occupied this room on a sustained, long-term basis.”
The cold in my stomach spread outward.
“He built it into the dining room,” I said flatly, the reality sinking in slowly.
“Yes.”
“Because I eat here. Every day.”
“Yes.”
I looked at the circle on the floor, at the two concentric rings of runes.
At the anchor points carved at the cardinal positions, like something had been nailed in place and the nails had been made of stone.
I looked at the worn patch at the center, where some repeated contact had smoothed the carving slightly, and understood with a sudden nauseating clarity that the worn patch was worn because I had been standing on it for twenty years.
Every meal. Every time I ate with my father, every time he embraced me, telling me I was dangerous, his careful management of every piece of information I’d ever been given about myself.
The exhaustion after his visits that I’d always attributed to his siphoning through touch. Every time he was taking from me.
He hadn’t needed touch at all.
He’d built the drain into the floor and let me stand on it.
“The book,” Malric continued, opening it to a page he’d marked, “confirms the sigil at the center. It’s a collector array.
Not just a drain—a collection mechanism.
Whatever it pulled from you, it stored and transferred.
” He turned the book toward me. “This is the king’s mark.
Here, at the outer ring. He built this himself or had it built to his design. ”
I looked at the page. The diagram matched what was carved in the floor in enough detail that my vision went slightly strange at the edges.
Thane had moved to my side without my noticing. He wasn’t touching me, but he was close enough that I could feel his warmth.
“What does it mean?” I asked. My voice was still doing the flat thing. I recognized it as the voice I used when my body understood something before my mind had finished catching up. “What was he taking?”
Malric closed the book. “Your power.”
“I don’t have power. I’ve never been able to produce a single successful spell. Every book on magical theory, every exercise I attempted—nothing ever answered.”
“Because it was being drained before it could consolidate,” Malric said. “Your power doesn’t have access to itself. It generates and this array strips it before you can use it.” He met my eyes. “What reaches you is the residue. The portion the array can’t catch efficiently.”
I stared at him.
“So who am I?” The question burst out, fueled by frustration. “What is it that he’s been taking? What power do I actually have?”
Malric and Thane exchanged a glance over my head. I felt it happen and didn’t look up at either of them.
“We don’t know the full extent,” Thane said carefully. “Because it’s never been allowed to develop.”
“But we have indications. The way the tower responds to you. The way your presence affects ambient magic—mine, Thane’s.
The book describes this array being used historically in one context.
” Malric picked it up again, found the passage, and read without inflection.
“‘Arrays of the collector type, anchored with four-point cardinal binding, were used exclusively in the suppression of amplifier-class abilities, most commonly associated with omega bloodlines carrying the amplifier trait.’”
The word sat in the room.
Amplifier.
“Your power isn’t destructive,” Thane said quietly.
“It’s connective. You strengthen what’s around you.
You make other power more stable, more complete.
” He paused. “We thought you might have made the king stronger. We were right. He’s been running partly on what this array collected from you for years. ”
I thought about my father’s hands on my face. His careful questions about whether I was unwell. His consistent management of my diet, my sleep, my emotional state—I thought it was because he cared about me. I couldn’t have been more wrong. He’d been monitoring the source. Managing his asset.
“He told me I killed my mother.”
Neither of them spoke.
“He told me my power was destructive. That it drained life from people who got too close. That my mother came to me during a surge and I killed her.” Anger burned inside, continued to fuel my words. “He built this circle into the floor and told me I was the dangerous thing.”
“Aveline—”
“He made me afraid of myself. He made me afraid of anyone getting close to me. He made me believe that isolation was the only way to keep people alive, and the entire time—” I stopped. “The entire time he was draining me.”
Something moved in the air of the room.
I sensed it before I understood it—a shift in temperature, a pressure change, like the moment before a storm commits. The candles on the table flared simultaneously, their flames jumping three inches before pulling back to double their previous height and staying there, burning too bright.
My scent surged, not like in heat, not the warm and sweet that I had become accustomed to. It turned sharp, electric, dangerous. It saturated the room in the space of a breath.
The stone beneath my feet vibrated.
Not violently—but a deep, sustained tremor, a frequency rather than a shake, like the tower had found a note and was holding it. The carved runes in the circle began to illuminate from within. A cold, pale light pushing up through the cut lines, the concentric rings brightening from the outside in.
Thane made a sharp sound beside me.
I looked at him. His eyes had gone wide, and the air around him had changed quality. A pressure built between us, between all three of us, that hadn’t been there a moment ago, a gathering. The candle flames bent toward him and then corrected, and his jaw was tight with the effort of something.
“My magic is—” He exhaled hard. “It’s surging. I’m not doing that.”
Malric had moved closer without my noticing, the way he did things. He grimaced, his jaw clenching with pain. He reached for his left wrist with his right hand. He pressed his fingers over something there and he gritted his teeth.
“The mark,” he said tightly. “It’s burning.”
The vibration in the floor intensified. The runes were fully illuminated now, all three rings of them, the light running through the carved lines with a cold precision. The central sigil pulsed.
Outside the window, the vines that had covered the lower tower walls for as long as I could remember, thick old growth, woody and dense, threaded through the mortar, shifted audibly. I heard it through the stone itself, a cracking and a loosening, the sound of roots releasing their grip.
Thane’s hand caught my arm. Not restraining, anchoring. His fingers pressed into my skin and his magic moved against mine like two weather systems meeting. The sensation was overwhelming, like suddenly being able to hear something that had always been just out of reach.
Malric stepped in on my other side, his wrist still pressed to his opposite hand. His shoulder touched mine. The burning mark on his wrist—I could feel the heat of it from where I stood, a sharp warmth—seemed to ease fractionally at the contact.
The wind whipped through the room. A long, low movement of air, warm and purposeful, circling the exposed circle in the floor before spreading outward.
The light in the runes flared once, bright enough that I had to close my eyes, and when I opened them, two of the carved lines at the innermost ring had fractured.
A crack running through the stone itself, splitting one of the anchor marks cleanly in two.
I was shaking.
Not with cold. Not with heat. With rage.
“I never gave permission,” I said.
“He took it anyway,” Malric said. He was very close, his voice low. “Without your knowledge. Without your consent. For years.”
The candles flared again. The stone trembled. The crack in the inner ring spread another inch with a sound like a finger drawn across a taut string. The light went out on the runes.
Thane’s grip on my arm tightened.
“Aveline.” His voice, careful and steady, the voice he used when the storm in him was running high and he needed something external to fix on. “I need you to breathe.”
I was breathing.
I was also, I understood distantly, doing something to the room. Something I had never been able to do before, because the floor had always been there beneath me, with the drain always running and the residue had never been enough to reach the surface.
The array was cracked.
And something that had been contained for more years than I knew was answering back.