Chapter Twelve
MALRIC
Ididn't go upstairs.
I stood in the library for a long time after Thane left, listening to his footsteps climb, listening to the tower settle back into quiet around me, and I forced myself to stay where I was even as the tug of the bond urged me up to the nest. It was a technique that worked on battlefields.
It worked in negotiation rooms when the other party was waiting for you to fill the silence with something they could use. It worked in most places.
It wasn't working particularly well here.
Come when you're ready.
The problem wasn’t that I wasn’t ready. I had been ready since the moment I heard her voice through the tower wall, low and careful and trying to sound unafraid, asking Thane what he wanted from her. Something had happened in my chest in that moment that I had spent three days refusing to examine.
I knew what a bond felt like. I had one with Thane, worn thin at the edges now but still present, still mine.
I understood the significance of someone else’s presence in your mind, how they filled a part of you without a physical or logical basis.
I'd had that with Thane for three years and I'd learned to carry it, learned to live alongside it without letting it become a liability. It was comfortable, important.
What I felt when I was near Aveline was not the same.
It was larger. That was the only honest word for it.
Like the difference between a candle and the thing that made candles possible.
When she was in the room, my control came easier, not harder.
My thoughts moved in straighter lines. The constant grinding effort of keeping myself functional and strategic and present, the effort I'd grown so accustomed to that I'd stopped noticing it as effort—it eased.
As if something that had been pulling against me my entire life had briefly let go.
That terrified me more than anything else about this situation.
I knew what a bond could do. Not in the abstract, not from books. I had watched my father come apart from the inside out, and that knowledge terrified me.
My mother had been an omega.
She had been an omega—brilliant and particular—with a laugh that I remembered more clearly than her face.
She had bonded to my father in the way true mates bonded, completely, irrevocably, in a way that had no middle ground.
He had loved her with the totality of a man who had never learned to love in portions.
The king had wanted her. Had decided, with the casual acquisitiveness of power, that she would be more useful to him than to my father.
She was a seer—could see the future—which is why she marked me to bind my power until I found my true mate, my own omega.
She didn’t want the king to take me. But when the king came for her, to break her bond with my father and take her for his own, she had made a choice.
She had made it before anyone could stop her, before my father could find her, before I was old enough to understand what I was watching.
My father had lived for eleven more years.
I used the word lived loosely.
I had spent my entire adult life making sure I would never be that exposed.
I had built my control stone by stone with intention and redundancy and the understanding that the structure was only as reliable as the foundation it sat on.
I had learned to want things in proportion to how much losing them would cost me.
I had accepted Thane, accepted the bond with him, because Thane was like me in the ways that mattered.
He understood the mission. He understood what we were both here for, and his continued existence was something I could take practical steps to ensure.
Aveline was in a tower her father had built specifically to contain her.
She was at the center of a conflict that would resolve one way or another in the next two months.
She was an omega in full heat, surrounded by a king who had been siphoning her power for years and who would not stop wanting her simply because we had inconveniently arrived.
Loving her completely would be handing someone a knife and asking them to be careful with it.
I pushed off the window and moved.
If I stayed still, I would think in circles, and that was not productive. What I needed was information. What I had always needed, in every situation that had tried to overwhelm me, was something concrete to put my hands on.
I went down.
The ground floor first. I'd done a cursory search the day after we arrived, but cursory wasn't the same as thorough, and I was more attentive now than I'd been then.
I moved through the entry, checking the walls methodically, pressing the stones at the junctions where mortar met edge.
Nothing. I checked the floor along the baseboards.
The usual stuff of old stone buildings—dust at the edges, the faint impression of foot traffic in the center, nothing that shouldn't be there.
I climbed past the library, having already explored it the previous day. Next on my path was the dining room.
The table was long enough to seat twelve, which told me something about the theater of this place—a king who imprisoned his daughter in a tower still needed her to feel, on some level, like a household.
Like a normal life with larger furniture.
The chairs were real wood, heavy, not decorative. Nothing unusual about any of it.
I crouched and checked under the sideboard. Stone floor, the slight unevenness of age, a gap where the mortar between two flags had worn down.
I moved to the far end of the room, where the light from the wall sconces didn't reach as cleanly, where the shadows collected under the edge of the large rug that covered most of the dining room floor.
Something caught my eye.
A gleam. Wrong color for stone, wrong angle for reflected candlelight. I crossed to it and crouched and found the edge of the rug and peeled it back.
Runes.
Cut into the stone itself, not painted or inlaid, but carved with the kind of deliberate depth that required tools and significant time.
I pulled the rug back further, revealing more, and then I stood and put my shoulder into moving the table—it was heavy and it scraped against the exposed stone in a way that felt like a violation of something—and then the rug came up entirely and I had the full picture.
A circle. Eight feet across, maybe nine.
The runes ran the outer edge in two concentric rings, the inner ring a continuation of the outer, both carved with identical depth and precision.
Inside the circle, at the cardinal points, four secondary marks I recognized as anchors—the kind used in ritual magic to fix something in place for long-term effect.
Not a one-time working. Something designed to sustain.
At the center, worn smoother than the rest from years of contact, a single large sigil that I had seen before.
I stood over it and ice settled in my chest.
I had seen this configuration. Not this exact circle, not these runes, but this architecture—the anchor points, the concentric containment rings, the central sigil of the type the king's court magicians used for power regulation.
I had seen it in fragments, in partial diagrams, in the margins of texts my mother had left behind that my father had given me after she died because he couldn't look at them anymore.
I had seen it in the research I'd done in the two years before the rebellion, when I was still embedded in court and still trying to understand what the king was actually doing versus what he said he was doing.
This wasn't a containment circle for a dangerous person.
This was a siphoning array. Built into the foundation of the room. Built, I now understood, to always be ready, to be activated at a moment’s notice. And, since it was always active, it would passively drain anyone within the perimeter, storing the magic until it was absorbed.
She had been eating over a drain the entire time she had been imprisoned.
Every meal in this room. Every time she'd sat here with her father and accepted his version of events and his version of her.
She'd been sitting in the middle of an array designed to strip and collect, and she hadn't known, and neither had I until this moment, and the cold feeling in my chest turned to a deep, burning anger.
My mind was already running ahead.
The book. Third shelf from the top in the library, on the left side—I'd clocked it the second day because the binding was wrong, too old for the subject matter on the spine, which meant it had been rebound to obscure what was actually inside it.
I'd marked it for closer examination and then Aveline's second spike had begun, and I had not gone back to it.
I went to it now.
I was moving fast down the stairs, faster than I usually let myself move because speed implied urgency and I preferred to imply control. But the dining room was above me with its exposed circle and its anchor points and the central sigil that meant what I thought it meant, and I needed the book.
Because if I was right—and I was putting a high probability on being right—the circle upstairs wasn't just a record of what the king had done to her.
It was a record of what she was capable of.
The siphoning array only worked on a source that had something worth siphoning. The scale of the runes, the depth of the concentric rings, the number of anchor points—this had been built to handle an enormous, sustained output. Not a trickle. Not the ordinary magic of an ordinary omega.
Something that required nine feet of carved stone and two decades of continuous operation to manage.
And the king had been using it to make himself stronger.
I thought of what Thane had said. We already suspected she made the king stronger. Imagine if she were our bonded mate.
He'd been thinking about power, about what it would mean for the rebellion.