Chapter 45
Nyxiana
Neither of us is winning.
He’s using himself up, so are we. He’s got centuries behind him.
We’ve got whatever’s left in us right now.
We’re holding him, matching him. Two people fighting hard next to each other, each of us watching our own side and the other one’s when needed.
That isn’t the same as winning. Either one of us could be dead in the next four seconds. So I go to him.
There’s a construct between us. I take it down on the way past without slowing.
I don’t have anything ready to say. I’ve never walked up to a person without knowing how the whole conversation was going to run.
I go anyway. Valen is closing a fresh tear when I reach him, one hand out, the light bleeding back into the seam and stopping.
Neither of us stops fighting to make room for this.
There’s no room to be made. He’s still furious with me.
I can see it on him between one strike and the next.
The gash that opened him from the collarbone out is knitting itself shut.
It was down to the muscle when it happened, now it’s a red line closing while I watch.
He’s closing himself the same way he closes the tears.
I’ve always known what he is, tonight is the first time I’ve ever seen it work.
There’s dried blood at his temple, more of it in his hair where it’s stuck to his forehead with sweat.
His eyes come to me, gray, giving me nothing.
“Valen.”
He turns his head. I open my mouth and catch myself working out how much of it to give him.
Not this time. A construct comes at the two of us from the left.
We take it together without a word. His hand goes out, my flame goes through the opening he makes and the thing comes apart between us before it lands. The second it’s down, I start again.
“I knew what you were the first day I saw you.”
“I’m aware.”
“I’m not telling you as news. I’m telling you because you’ve only ever heard it from me once, I said it badly, and I’ve never given you the rest.”
Another tear rips open behind us. He seals it without taking his eyes off my face. “And you picked now.”
“We might both be dead in a minute.”
Something crosses his face that isn’t anger. It’s gone before I can put a name on it. “Say it, then.”
He wants it straight and he wants it now. “I’d do it again.”
I don’t soften it and I don’t look away from him while I say it. “You weren’t ready. If I’d told you that first week it would have taken the only thing you had, which was believing you were a wolf who couldn’t shift. You’d have had nothing left to stand on.”
He doesn’t move. “I’m not going to stand here and tell you I was wrong, because I don’t think I was. And I’m not asking you to tell me I was right.”
That’s all of it. I have nothing else to give him and nowhere to go if he turns away.
Nothing in my life has ever taken what that did.
His fury doesn’t move. His eyes give me nothing, just as they haven’t every day since the first night he came out of those trees.
The silence after I stop talking runs long.
Faelan opens a tear behind us that runs half the length of the chamber.
Valen closes it and comes back to me. The silence is still running.
Through all of it I’m sure I’ve just lost him, still I don’t take any of it back.
I could make it easier, tell him I was afraid, or how many times I nearly told him.
Both are true, both of them would soften what I just said.
I don’t say either. Then he reaches for me.
He does it first. In the middle of all this, with his other hand still up against whatever Faelan sends next, he puts his hand out and takes mine.
I don’t think it changes anything tonight, or this week, or possibly at all about his fury.
His hand is warm, there’s blood on it that isn’t his. It closes around mine anyway.
“It was a betrayal,” he says looking straight at me.
“You made a decision about my life without me. For months you knew and I didn’t. I don’t know what to do with that yet.”
“I know.”
“And it was a gift.” His grip stays exactly where it is. “You gave me months of being a man with a wolf he couldn’t reach instead of something somebody built and left in the North Range for later. I got to have those. Some of them were the best of my life.”
He takes a strike across the forearm and doesn’t slow down.
“Both of those are true. I’m not picking one of them to make this simpler for you.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“I know you’re not. That’s most of why I’m still holding your hand.”
He chooses me with all the anger still in him, he lets me see all of it while he does it.
The two of us have spent our long lives being the ones who stand in front.
He’s done it in every pack that never kept him.
I’ve done it in every room I ever walked into, deciding what people could hold and holding the rest myself.
Neither of us has ever handed a piece of that to another person and trusted them to carry it.
We do it now, in the middle of a chamber coming apart, with a man throwing everything he has left at us.
Then our power runs together. There’s no start to it, that’s the first thing I notice, nothing in me has to make room for anything.
I’ve worked next to other people who carry magic my whole adult life.
Lyanna and I have layered a ward together a dozen times.
Every one of those occasions was two people handing work back and forth across a join you could put a finger on.
There’s no join in this. The white flame goes out from my hands and comes back with his sealing in it.
His repair goes out into a tear and my reading goes with it.
The tear is shut before either of us has decided which is shutting it.
It doesn’t work like two things put together.
It works like one thing that got split a very long time ago and has finally been allowed to move the way it was meant to.
The flame has never done what it’s doing now.
It goes further and cleaner. There’s a section of corrupted architecture off to my right that would have taken me a full minute two hours ago and it burns off in one pass.
Every signature I’ve ever had under my hands was its own separate thing.
His and mine aren’t two signatures with a bridge between them right now.
They’re one, running through both of us, and I can’t find the place where I stop.
Faelan’s face changes. There’s fear now, real, and all at once.
I’ve never seen fear on that man. He finally knows what he’s looking at.
He’s been inside the founders’ work longer than I ‘ve been alive.
If there was ever a line in it about what a lock and a convergence point do standing on the same ground, he found it before anybody.
What he built, he built across centuries, against people who could be taken apart one at a time.
The founders made this entire architecture to keep a lock and a convergence point from ever standing together.
Nobody designed anything to survive the two of us choosing each other.
He throws. It comes at both of us and lands like it’s hitting one person.
What comes back at him takes it apart in the air.
He tears. We close it together without dividing the work.
He drives a construct into the edge of an opening and it comes loose before he’s finished setting it.
The architecture answers Valen. The corruption on it burns off in my flame.
Neither of those happens second. Then the fight turns.
He’s been driving us the whole night, now he’s the one giving ground.
The tears shut faster than he can open them.
The constructs come apart before they finish forming.
The Council has been holding the far end of this chamber since we walked in and some of the strain goes out of them.
Bancroft’s wings come down out of the angle they’ve been locked at. Not far, just enough to see.
I hold on to Valen’s hand through every part of it. It isn’t finished. Faelan isn’t finished either. There’s a man in front of us who’s been getting ready for tonight longer than my parents have been married, and there are three women I love realms away with his hands still in their marks.
None of that is settled. I don’t have a plan for any of it. I’m holding on to him anyway. For the first time since the day I met that man, holding on isn’t something I have to manage.