Chapter Eighteen
AVELINE
The water was the perfect temperature. Not too hot. Not too cold. Just right.
It was always the right temperature. The tower attended to this as it attended to everything, but today I was grateful, as every part of me was sore and dirty.
I sank up to my shoulders and let the heat of it work into muscles that had spent three days doing things muscles were not typically called upon to do, and the sound that came out of me was not dignified.
“That bad?” Thane asked.
“Don’t. Don’t comment.”
He suppressed a smile and handed me the cup of water instead.
I drank it without argument, which said more about my current state than anything else could have.
I was past the point of being stubborn. Every muscle from my shoulders to my knees had opinions, and all of them were complaints, and the bath was the first thing in days that had addressed this directly, and I was going to stay in it until the water cooled.
Though, since the tower would not let the water cool, I was going to stay in it indefinitely.
Malric sat on the low bench beside the basin quietly.
He had cleaned and dressed while I had rested, leaving me with Thane after my heat broke.
I was still adjusting to having two presences inside of me—the additional layer of information, the way I could feel their emotions—and something was bothering Malric.
I could feel the tension through the bond, never mind see the way he was stiff and silent on the bench.
Thane, beside me in the bath, was quiet but was a warm and comforting presence, like home, while Malric was my shield.
Thane clearly knew something was bothering Malric by the way he kept glancing over, but I filed it and let the bath continue its work on my protesting body.
“Eat,” Thane said, and held out a piece of bread with soft cheese on it.
I ate it. He looked slightly startled by the lack of resistance, and I couldn’t blame him. I’d been difficult about food for the past few days, and I probably owed him an apology, but I was too sore and too hungry to bother with the ceremony of it. He loaded another piece, and I took that too.
Malric handed me a fig without looking at me. I ate it and felt a warm flicker through the bond, an acknowledgment, before he went back to his wall.
“You both look terrible,” I said.
“Thank you,” Thane said.
“I meant it constructively.” I looked between them.
Several days of broken sleep and heat cycles had left marks.
They both had lost weight from not eating and expending a lot of energy.
They had tiny bruises around their necks and torso where I had tried to bite them.
And their eyes had dark circles from lack of sleep.
But they were mine and looked incredible.
If only Malric would tell me what was bothering him.
I finished the bread. Accepted more water. Leaned my head back against the stone rim of the basin and looked at the ceiling, and cataloged the state of myself.
Sore everywhere. Hungry as if I couldn’t get enough, yet I couldn’t handle a lot of food at once.
Tired in my bones. And underneath all of that, in the place where the fear and the grief and the years of lies had been living, I felt clean again.
Not healed. Not resolved. But cleared, the way a storm clears, and the air afterward is different.
The bonds sat in my chest like a second heartbeat—two of them, distinct and warm and real.
I pressed my fingers to the mark on my neck and Malric’s attention sharpened.
“Does it hurt?” he asked.
“No.” It was tender the way any healing thing was tender. “Do I get to mark you?”
He gave a slight smile. “You could try, but your teeth aren’t made to cut through our skin.”
I pouted. I wanted my mark on them so everyone knew they were mine, too. It wasn’t fair.
Thane leaned forward and tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. “Everyone will know we’re yours. Our scents mingle together.”
I sniffed his neck area and could smell his hearth and ember scent, and thought I detected a honey scent. I gestured for Malric. He obliged me and I inhaled, smelling his cedar and woodsmoke, and my honey and silver blossom scent. My omega settled, content that others would know they were mine.
We were quiet for a moment. The water shifted softly around me as I settled against Thane. Malric reached out and handed me another fig, and I ate it, but knew this bubble couldn’t last.
I looked at Malric.
“So,” I said. “What’s next?”
He didn’t answer immediately. That was answer enough.
“Malric.” I sat up slightly, the water moving with me. “Whatever you’re turning over in there, say it.”
He looked at me then. His jaw was set, which meant he had information he had been deciding how to present.
“Say it plainly,” Thane said. “We need the truth.”
“I went to the top of the tower while you were resting. Before the bath.” A pause. “The king is coming.”
The water was still warm. The tower was still quiet. Outside the narrow window above the basin, the light was the gray-white of morning, ordinary and unhurried.
“How many?” I said.
“Not his full army. Not a campaign force.” His eyes remained on us. “The king’s guard. A small, mobile unit. Fast and well-armed.” He paused. “He’s not coming to wage a war. He’s coming to retrieve something.”
“He’s coming for me,” I said.
“He’s coming for you,” Malric confirmed.
Thane stood and grabbed a towel, drying himself. The warmth in the bond had shifted into something with more edge to it, as if he was preparing for war.
“He’s got to go through us,” Thane said. “Have you heard from the rebellion?”
Malric held his gaze. “I received a pigeon this morning. They’re aware of the king’s movements, but they’re preparing for the big assault. They’ll try to send a smaller force, but can’t promise anything.”
“So, we’re on our own,” Thane stated flatly.
“What are our options?” I asked. I suppressed the spurt of fear. I wanted to confront my father, but we couldn’t win against the king’s guard.
He stood up and moved to the window, looking out at the angle of light.
“We could run. Use the time before he arrives to move through the Wyrdwood toward the rebellion’s nearest position.
If we move fast and he doesn’t know we’ve left, we might have a chance.
” He stopped. “Honestly, we’re probably too late for that.
He’s too close for us to escape, assuming the tower even lets us go. ”
“And if we stay?”
He turned from the window. “The tower has done more than I expected it to do. The portal block, the cold, repelling whatever he pushed through the other night.” He looked at me directly.
“But I don’t know if it can hold against a physical assault.
Against armed men with battering equipment and a king who has years of knowledge about this tower’s construction.
” A pause. “I’m not certain it can protect us. Not indefinitely.”
The water had not cooled.
I sat in the basin my mother had built for me, in the tower my mother had built for me, with the two men my mother had built the tower to find, and I thought about my father’s voice.
All the versions of it. The gentle version, explaining why I couldn’t leave.
The careful version, explaining how I’d killed my mother.
The smooth version, handing me a lie and watching me swallow it, and adjusting the dosage for next time.
I thought about the circle on the dining room floor. Years of meals eaten over a magical drain.
I thought about my mother in a small stone room, leaving a piece of herself in a memory spell for a daughter she wouldn’t get to raise, knowing what was coming and standing in the way of it anyway.
I stood up.
Water sluiced off me. I stepped out of the basin and took the linen from the rail, wrapped it around myself and looked at them both, one and then the other.
“No running,” I said.
Neither of them spoke.
“I’m done,” I paused, “being the thing he comes to retrieve. I am done being the source he returns to when his reserves run low. I am done being the story he told himself to justify years of—” I stopped and shook my head. “This ends. Not when he decides it ends. Now.”
Thane’s expression had gone blank.
Malric studied me carefully, not as a mate, not as a stranger, but as a partner.
“We confront him. Here. On ground my mother chose.” I pressed my hand flat against the stone wall of the bathing chamber, and the tower hummed under my palm.
“He has never been in this tower when I wasn’t alone and suppressed and drained.
He has never met me with my power intact and my mates beside me.
” I looked at Malric. “He doesn’t know what he’s walking into. ”
A silence.
Then Malric said, “No. He doesn’t.”
“So we let him come,” I said. “And we meet him.”
Thane gave a low, rough sound. His hand found the back of my neck briefly, a small, deliberate pressure, and released.
Malric crossed to the door and stopped with his hand on the frame, and looked back at me.
“You’ll want to get dressed,” he said. “And eat more than a fig and some bread and cheese.”
“I will.”
He looked at me for a moment longer, then, with a firm nod, he exited.
I exhaled shakily and turned to Thane, who had dressed in pants and his tunic.
“You know this is going to be dangerous,” Thane said.
“I’m ready.”
“And you’re not afraid.”
I considered that honestly. The bond was warm in my chest, both of them present inside it, and the tower hummed under my bare feet, and outside the narrow window, the morning light was the ordinary gray-white of a day that didn’t know yet what it was going to hold.
“I’m afraid. But I’m choosing, anyway.”
He smiled and gripped the back of my neck, pressing his forehead to mine.
“Good,” he said. “Get dressed. Let’s end this.”
Malric
The garden was dying gracefully.