Valen
Istep in front of her, my arm up. I’ve taken a beating before. I know how a body gets ready for one. Chin down, shoulder turned in, everything braced for the part where it lands and I find out how much of me still works after.
Faelan’s light comes at me flat and fast. It goes straight through me and out the other side. No burn. No blow. Nothing.
Behind him the Council is straining. Five of them in a line with their wings locked out at angles nothing living holds on purpose.
Bancroft’s arms are shaking. Whatever it’s taking to keep this realm from coming apart, they’re spending every bit of what they have on it, and not one thing on Faelan. He’s already coming again.
Nyxiana is on my left, close enough that I can put a hand on her without turning my head. In any other room I’d have the doors counted by now. This one has no walls to put a door in. What I’ve got instead is her, me, and the distance between us.
She kissed me in that yard in front of her pack and I have had it in my mouth ever since. Of all the things to be carrying in here.
The second one lands the same as the first. Nothing.
I could call that luck. Bad angle on his part, he pulled it, or I moved half a step and my body got there before my head did.
One of those would hold for one strike. The third one comes at my chest square on and I can’t call it luck anymore. It arrives. There’s no pain afterward.
Under my skin the hum goes off. It comes up harder than it ever has, harder than in my dark cabin last night with her name on my lips. What’s different this time is where it starts. Every other time it’s been under my ribs. This time it’s coming up out of the floor I’m standing on.
Nyxiana told me what I am a few nights ago.
A living lock. Built by the founders. Divine-blooded, put where they wanted, made to hold their seal shut and to close it when it opened.
I’ve carried those words around since she said them.
Nights on the perimeter, four hours of sleep at a time.
They stop being words now. Heat comes up from behind my sternum, out along both arms into my hands, my chest lighting from the inside with nothing burning anywhere.
There’s a charge behind my eyes with it.
It gathers, it’s gone, it gathers again.
Nothing else in me is doing anything like it.
Every time I go after it, it stops. Whatever it is, it’s mine, and I can’t reach it any better than I’ve ever reached anything else about myself.
I open and close my hands to be sure they still work.
They do. I find Nyxiana across the space between us.
She’s already looking at me, hands full of white flame.
The top of her shoulder is torn open where she stepped in front of the first one, the cloth is gone, and the skin under it is trying to close on its own.
Her eyes are on my face instead of on Faelan.
If this place takes me apart in the next minute, I know I’ve had two days with a woman who looked at me the way she’s looking at me right now, and I’ve lived long enough to know exactly what that’s worth.
I could say that to her out loud. Or I could get her out of here first and say it after.
I want the second, badly enough that my hands steady.
“Are you hurt?” she calls across the chamber.
“No.”
Faelan comes again and puts more behind it, testing.
Two of his went into me and did nothing, he wants to know whether that was his failure or mine.
This one does nothing either. His eyes narrow.
He’s been in this chamber all night like a man reading the last page of a book he wrote himself.
That’s the first crack in it. So he stops throwing at me and goes at the room instead, puts both hands out and pulls.
The chamber tears open in front of him. It runs twenty feet before it stops.
The light bleeds out through the gap and goes somewhere it has no business going.
Bancroft’s wings snap wider and the floor steadies under my boots.
It takes something out of them. I can hear it.
There’s a low sound coming off the five of them now that wasn’t there a minute ago.
Then pieces start coming off the edges of the tear.
They come off the way wet plaster comes off a wall, in slabs, and they don’t fall.
They hold their shape in the air. Three of them first. Each one is about the size of a man, has an edge on it, and throws a shadow across the color on the floor.
Then they start moving on their own, without Faelan looking at any of them.
Constructs. Pieces of this realm, torn off it and walking.
They go at her. All three. She’s already moving.
Her hands come up and the white flame goes out ahead of her in a sheet.
The first one hits it and stops existing.
She’s turning for the second before the first has finished coming apart.
Her hair’s come loose, it’s silver-white with the flame going up behind it.
Her eyes have gone gold the whole way across the violet.
She’s still bleeding down her arm from the shoulder.
She takes the second one at the edge and it comes apart wrong, in halves, and both halves keep coming.
I go for the near one. It opens my forearm from the wrist halfway to the elbow.
So that’s the rule. What he throws out of himself goes through me.
What he tears loose is a solid thing, and a solid thing cuts me the same as it cuts anybody.
I get both hands on the other half and put it into the floor.
It comes apart under me. My blood runs down my arm and off my fingers onto a floor made out of light.
I don’t move off her. Faelan tears the chamber again. It runs longer this time. More pieces come off it. Then his own strike arrives on top of all of it, full force, everything he’s got, aimed at ending this. It hits me in the chest and doesn’t touch me.
Faelan stops. Whatever he built his work on for centuries has just come apart in front of him and he’s looking at me like a man looking at a door that opened on its own.
I can hold this down. Keep it in, keep working, be the useful one, get her out of this chamber and let somebody else work out what I am afterward.
That’s what I’ve done with every hour of my life and it has kept me alive.
Or I can let it up. I don’t know what it does, don’t know what it takes out of me, whether it puts me on the floor, or whether the man standing here at the end of it is the same one who walked through that door this morning holding her hand.
There’s nobody in here who can tell me. The five who might know are forty feet off holding a room together with everything they have.
She’s on my left with her shoulder open, hands full of flame, and there’s a man in front of her who’s been getting ready for tonight since before her parents met. So I stop holding it. I open my hands and I let it come.
It comes up through the floor, into both legs, through my chest, out along my arms. Nothing in me fights it.
There’s nothing left in me that’s trying to.
The heat goes past what a body ought to be able to carry.
My hands come up. I put myself between Faelan and her and the chamber answers.
Every column of light in it turns toward me at once.
It comes at me from every direction and it comes fast.
“Valen.”
Nyxiana’s voice, from my left, cutting through all of it.
Faelan hits me again and it does nothing. He does it twice more, faster each time, and none of it touches me. He’s stopped saying anything at all. There’s something coming up in me and it isn’t finished.
I stand where I am with my hands out and my feet planted and I let it keep coming.