31
Kason
Ossendrei's blade found my ribs in the same instant I finally broke through his guard, both of us landing wounds neither would fully recover from, and I understood, feeling the wolfsbane already spreading fresh fire through a second injury, that whatever remained of this fight would be decided in the next handful of seconds rather than through any prolonged exchange.
"You fight like a man with something left to lose," Ossendrei said, breathing hard, his own wounds mounting significantly faster than his weathered composure let on. "I envy that, Your Highness. I stopped having anything left to lose a very long time ago."
"Then yield. This doesn't have to end in a grave for either of us."
"It has to end, Kason Draguvane. That much was decided two centuries before either of us drew breath." He came at me one final time, everything he had left behind the strike, and I met it with the last of my own strength, my blade finding the gap his exhaustion had finally opened.
He fell without further words, the old grievance that had driven three generations of the Unbound finally, permanently silenced, and I stood over him a long moment, breathing hard through my own wounds, before the sound of Ilinca's ragged, uneven breathing across the chamber cut through everything else and sent me running toward her with whatever strength I had left to spend.
I found her swaying over the ritual circle's final lines, her carving knife shaking so badly in her grip that she'd begun to miss the pattern's careful geometry, blood loss and poison both claiming her by visible degrees, her wolf-bright eyes gone glassy and unfocused in a way that terrified me more than Ossendrei's blade ever had.
"Ilinca." I reached her side, catching her before she could collapse fully, my hands finding hers to help steady the knife's final strokes. "Look at me. I'm here. Whatever this costs you, I'm not letting you finish it alone."
"Almost done," she managed, her voice slurred with the poison's advancing grip. "One more line. I can't— my hands won't—"
I felt her control fracturing beneath my palms, her wolf rising unbidden and uncontrolled toward a surface she no longer had the strength to properly manage, and understood, with a certainty that arrived from somewhere considerably older than conscious thought, exactly what she needed from me in this single desperate moment.
"Stay with me." I said it low, my voice dropping into the register I'd used only twice before in my entire life, both times for her, both times at the exact edge of losing her to something larger than either of us could face alone. "Little blade. Stay with me long enough to finish this."
I felt it land the way I'd felt it land twice before — not in her ears, but somewhere beneath them, her wolf settling instantly under a command that reached past the poison's fog and steadied, for one final crucial moment, hands that had begun to fail her.
She finished the line.
The ritual circle flared to sudden, brilliant light, ancient stone responding to a bloodline's completed touch with a power that hummed through the entire chamber, through my own bones, through every surface the old carved script had ever marked.
I felt something shift in the world itself, distant and enormous, a threat two centuries in the making finally, permanently sealed away behind wards that would hold, I understood with absolute certainty, for as long as Frostmark blood remained to renew them.
Ilinca collapsed the instant the light faded, her strength entirely spent, and I caught her before she hit the ancient stone floor, cradling her against my chest with a desperation that had nothing careful left in it at all.
"Ilinca. Ilinca, stay with me—"
Her eyes fluttered, finding mine with a faint, exhausted focus. "Did it work?"
"It worked. You did it. Whatever that curse was meant to unleash, it's sealed now, permanently, because of you." I pressed my lips to her forehead, holding her as close as her wounds allowed. "Now stay with me. That's all I need from you right now. Just stay."
"I'm trying," she whispered, and closed her eyes, her breathing shallow but steady, alive, saved by a bond that had reached her one final time exactly when she needed it most.
I gathered her carefully into my arms and carried her from that ancient chamber, past Costin Drell's fallen body and Varak Ossendrei's, past the last of the Iron-Guard securing what remained of the compound.
Teodor met me in the corridor, his own report already assembling itself in the clipped shorthand he used for good news he didn't want to slow down to celebrate properly.
"We found more cells further in. Six captives, including a woman who says she's been held nearly four months — Sela, she gave us.
She asked after Ilinca by name the moment we broke her door open, before she'd even asked her own rescuers who they were. "
"She's alive?"
"Alive, and noticeably tougher than four months in that place should have left anyone.
She's already organizing the other captives into some kind of order, from what I saw.
" Something that might have been the ghost of a smile crossed his exhausted face.
"I have a feeling your wardsmith is going to want to see her the moment she's strong enough for visitors. "
"Make sure she's given whatever she needs.
All of them." I shifted Ilinca's weight carefully against my chest, relief moving through me at one more small mercy in a night that had cost so much already.
"Ilinca will want to know she made it out.
I'd rather be the one who tells her that, once she's strong enough to hear good news properly. "
I carried her out into a night that had finally, mercifully, begun to quiet around us.
The healers took over the moment we reached the camp Teodor had established outside the valley's walls, and I stood watch over her through the remainder of that long night, refusing every suggestion that I rest myself, understanding that whatever came next — the Wardstone's full mechanism, the Council's reaction, the considerable political work of formally ending two centuries of grievance — none of it mattered more than the simple, steady fact of her continued breathing beside me.
She would live. Whatever else this night had cost either of us, she would live, and I intended, watching over her through those long dark hours, to spend whatever remained of my own life making certain she never again faced a danger like this one without me standing fully, completely beside her.