Chapter Fourteen
AVELINE
Icouldn’t go back in there. Maybe never. I’d rather starve first.
I stood in the doorway of the dining room for approximately three seconds, long enough to see the circle still glowing faintly at its cracked edges, and then I turned around and went back up the stairs without saying anything to either of them.
Thane caught up with me on the second landing.
“Aveline—”
“I’m not eating in there.” I kept moving. “I don’t care what the tower has prepared. I’m not sitting at that table.”
He didn’t argue. He fell into step behind me and that was the end of it.
By the time I reached the nest, I was steady enough on the outside and nowhere close to steady on the inside.
I sat on the edge of the furs and pressed my hands between my knees.
As I stared at the wall, I tried to do what the past two days had been teaching me, which was to breathe through the feeling rather than pretend everything was okay.
It was harder without the heat occupying all my attention.
The heat had been immediate, physical, something my body demanded I deal with immediately.
This was different. This was a violation.
Something I had been subjected to over however many years I had been here, without my permission or knowledge, done to me by someone I should have been able to trust.
Thane stood there for a long moment, staring at me.
Then he abruptly turned and went back downstairs.
I heard murmuring faintly in the distance, but it didn’t matter.
I wasn’t going back down there. Nothing they said could persuade me otherwise.
Then I heard footsteps—Thane’s lighter, almost cautious movements, followed by Malric’s measured, deliberate ones—as they advanced up the stone stairs.
They appeared in the doorway of the nest with trays piled with food from the dining table—meat, cheese, bread. My stomach rumbled in response. I was grateful I didn’t have to test how far I would have to go to prove my point.
“We thought we could eat up here,” Thane said. “We brought what we could from the table.”
“Thank you.”
Thane shook out a thin blanket and laid it in the center of the floor.
They set the food on the blanket and I gathered pillows around the outside for us to sit on.
We settled in and began to eat. I didn’t expect to be so hungry, even though my stomach had been rumbling, and we ate quietly for a while until our hunger was satiated.
Then my thoughts, that had been circling inside my brain, taunting me with nightmares of what had been, came tumbling out of my mouth before I could stop them.
“I supplied him,” I said, my gaze fixed on my hands twisting in the robe I had slipped on after the bath.
Neither of them responded immediately. Thane’s hand found my knee, not squeezing, just resting. Malric looked at me, waiting quietly.
“Everything he did,” I continued. “Every terrible thing. I was above that floor, making him stronger while he did it.” I set the bread down.
“The rebellion, the people he’s had killed, whatever he’s done to the provinces—I made that possible.
My power. Running through that circle straight into him. ”
“No,” Malric said.
His voice was flat. Not unkind, but without any softening in it, which was somehow more effective than gentleness would have been.
“You were a child when that circle was built. You had no knowledge of it. No access to it. No ability to prevent it.” He leaned forward and peered at me intently, as if willing me to listen to his words and believe them.
“My father made choices that supported the king for years before I understood what I was watching. He believed he was maintaining stability. He was wrong, and those choices had consequences, but I have never once considered them my crimes to carry.” He paused.
“Your father chose to build that array. Your father chose to stand in this tower and feed you a lie with every meal while the floor beneath your feet stripped what was yours. He chose to take all those actions against his own people. That is his accounting, his crime. Not yours.”
I looked at him, tears blurring my vision.
He held my gaze with the steadiness that I now understood was not coldness but was Malric being completely serious and honest. Thane would always support me and give me the comfort I needed, but Malric would give the truth, no matter how painful. Right now, I needed the truth.
“You weren’t a weapon,” Thane said quietly beside me. “You were a source. There’s a difference. Weapons choose to cut.”
I picked the bread back up and ate. Thought about the distinction and let it settle into the place where guilt had been gnawing at me.
It didn’t resolve anything. It didn’t make the circle in the floor disappear or return the years I’d spent above it.
But it shifted the guilt, moved it from my chest to somewhere I could live with it, carry it, and that was enough for now.
“The crack in the circle,” I said. “What does that mean?”
“It’s compromised,” Malric said. “A clean circle is a closed system. Once the integrity breaks, the draw stops. Whatever was running through it has been interrupted.”
“So he can’t—” I stopped. “He lost access.”
“Tonight, he lost access. Which means tonight, for the first time, he felt it go.”
The room went cold.
Not the gradual cooling of an evening, not the natural drop in temperature I’d grown accustomed to in the upper floors when the wind shifted.
This was immediate and complete, as if the warmth had been lifted out of the air between one breath and the next.
The furs around me registered it, my skin registered it, the small hairs on my arms rising in unison.
The candles went out.
Every one of them, simultaneously, the way they would if someone had covered them all with cupped hands at the same moment. The nest went dark. In the adjacent bathing chamber, the small lamp that always burned died with the rest, and the darkness became total.
“Malric,” Thane said. Not panic—a warning.
I heard Malric move, heard his boots on the stone as he crossed to the window.
The tower made a quiet, continuous humming sound that was new to me in the silence, similar in pitch to the vibration I’d felt in the dining room when my anger had passed through it, yet distinct in its character.
Less like a voice and more like something bracing.
Thane pulled me in against his side. I let him, because my body had decided that was the correct response and my mind agreed.
The vibration deepened.
The stone at my back was ice cold in the floor through the furs beneath me, and the cold sharpened into something with a direction—not ambient chill but pressured cold, like air being pushed through a small space at force.
The window rattled in its frame. Outside, the trees moved as though a storm approached, though we hadn’t heard anything.
“Someone is trying to come in,” I said.
“Where?” Malric gritted out, from the window, his voice sounding like the military commander he was.
“I don’t know. I can’t—” Pressing my hand through the furs to the floor, I felt the tower’s movements and tried to grasp what it was doing. “It’s trying to stop something. The tower. It’s pushing against something.”
“Has this happened before?” Thane, close to my ear.
“The tower has never done this before.” I listened to the vibration change pitch, rising slightly, the way a voice rises when pressed. “It’s holding.”
“For now,” Malric said.
I knew before I meant to say it. The knowledge surfaced from somewhere that wasn’t quite thought, wasn’t quite instinct, was something in between that I didn’t have a word for yet.
“It’s my father,” I said, the realization coursing through me as if the tower had spoken to me.
The cold spiked. The window Malric stood beside went white with frost, intricate branching patterns spreading from the edges of the glass inward, and Malric stepped back from it.
“He’s using a portal,” he said. “A fixed portal. He’s had one.”
“I’ve never seen him arrive any other way. He’s always in the dining hall when I come downstairs. I assumed he traveled through the forest. I never questioned it, I didn’t know—”
“Where?” Malric was already moving.
“The dining hall. He’s always in the dining hall. He has never gone anywhere else in the tower.”
He was gone before I finished the sentence. I heard him take the stairs at speed, no longer measured, nothing deliberate about it, just the rapid descent of a man who was going to protect us at all costs.
Thane stood, keeping me between him and the door.
The tower’s vibration held its pitch for what seemed like a long time.
The cold pressed against the walls, against the glass, and I felt the stones of the tower resisting it with something that wasn’t quite magic and wasn’t quite will but was some combination of both, something old and oriented completely around me, and I now understood that the tower had always been doing this.
Not containing me. Protecting me.
Then the cold broke.
Not explosively. It didn’t shatter or release. It simply withdrew, the way water pulls back from the shore. The pressure against the walls eased. The vibration in the stone dropped, eased, and then disappeared. The frost on the window stopped forming and slowly thawed.
The candles burst into flame, casting the room in a yellow glow.
One by one, not all at once, starting with the small one on the shelf nearest the nest door and moving outward, each flame igniting at exactly its previous height, as if the tower were methodically restoring what had been interrupted. The warmth returned more slowly, but it came.
Thane exhaled.
I realized I’d been gripping his shirt with both hands and made myself release it.
Malric’s footsteps came on the stairs. His pace was even again, measured, not frantic. He appeared in the doorway and looked at me first, then at Thane.