Chapter Nineteen
AVELINE
Iate everything on my plate.
That was new. Three days of the heat made food a negotiation, and now my body had swung the other direction entirely, and I couldn’t seem to eat enough, and the tower obliged.
I finished the bread, the cold meat, and the preserved fruit the tower set out for us, and reached for more bread without thinking about it.
Thane watched this with a smirk.
“Don’t,” I warned him.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
He put the satisfied expression away and handed me the bread, along with some of the herbed soft cheese I liked.
The dining room seemed altered once the circle was no longer covered.
I had decided I wasn’t going to let it drive me out of the room indefinitely.
It was cracked through, its function destroyed, and avoiding it gave it more power than it deserved.
So we ate at the table pulled back to the side of the room, away from the center, and I kept my eyes my attention on the food and the two men across from me and the conversation we needed to have.
The table had been reset by the tower with the automatic attentiveness it brought to meals, as if the exposed circle and the cracked stone and the approaching king’s guard were not its concern. Three settings. Hot food. A lit candle in the center.
My mother had built this tower.
She had thought of everything.
Malric ate with the focused efficiency of someone fueling a machine, not tasting anything particularly, working through what was on his plate because his body needed it and he had accepted that.
He’d been this way since we came downstairs, present but focused inward, the bond carrying the low, sustained frequency of active planning.
I was more comfortable with him and his silences now that the bond showed me what was going on under the surface.
It was Malric doing what Malric did, which was protecting us.
He set his fork down.
“The plan,” he said.
We both looked at him.
“Thane takes the top level. The garden.” He looked at Thane. “The weather magic needs open sky and range. From up there, you can see the full approach, and if it comes to it, you have the widest operational scope.”
Thane nodded once.
“I’ll be on the balcony.” He meant the one off the bedchamber, the level just below the garden, the one that faced the Wyrdwood with the longest sight line.
“The tower’s defensive wards are active now.
I need to stay in contact with the stone to maintain them at full capacity if he pushes against them.
” He paused. “I don’t yet know the capacity of what I can hold.
I’m not going to find out in the middle of an engagement.
Staying close to the source keeps the margin higher. ”
“And me,” I said.
“With me on the balcony.” He held my gaze. “You speak to him.”
I considered that.
“From the balcony,” I said.
“It keeps stone between you and his guard. It keeps you elevated, visible, in a position of address rather than confrontation.” He turned his cup in his hands.
“You say what you need to say to him. Make it clear that you are no longer what he left here. Make it clear that the tower is no longer accessible to him and that what he came to retrieve no longer exists.” Something moved in his jaw.
“Hopefully he looks at the situation—the active defenses, Thane on the roof, the broken portal, the failed siphon—and he makes a tactical decision.”
“A tactical decision,” I said.
“To withdraw.”
The candle between us burned at its steady height.
“Do you believe he’ll turn around?” I asked.
Nobody said anything.
Thane looked at the table. Malric looked at me without adjusting his expression, which was its own answer. He wouldn’t insult me with a reassurance he didn’t believe.
“No,” I said, for all of us. “Neither do I.”
He had not turned around from anything in his life.
He had decided I was a resource, and he had spent years molding me into a tool for him to use.
He was going to arrive at the edge of this tower and look at his daughter on a balcony and only see a weapon that belonged to him, not a daughter.
He was going to be angry. I could use that.
I needed to speak to him, needed to say my piece. That was the part Malric had understood without my having to explain it. Not because I expected it to work. Because it needed to be said, clearly, on my terms, before whatever came next came next.
I needed him to hear it from me.
“All right,” I said.
Malric pushed back from the table.
I don’t know which of us moved first. I think it was Thane, who stood and crossed to me, took my face in his hands, and pressed his forehead to mine for a long moment, not saying anything, the bond warm between us. I gripped the front of his shirt and we both breathed together.
Then Malric was there.
He stood at my back and his arms came around me from behind, his hands covering mine where they held Thane’s shirt, and for a moment, we were simply together.
The three of us in the dining room with its cracked circle and its tower-lit candle and the sound of morning outside the windows, held together in a moment of people who have said what needs saying and are now waiting for what comes next.
I could feel both individuals as part of the bond. Thane, warm and resolved, his fear present but subordinate to everything else. Malric, steady and focused, the planning quieted now into something simpler and more direct.
Along with my own fear, I sensed something else, not courage precisely, but the unwavering determination that emerges after making a firm decision.
Malric pressed his mouth to the top of my head.
Then he stepped back.
“Arms,” he said.
The word was practical and necessary, and it moved us from holding each other to moving, which was what it needed to do.
Thane had a short blade at his belt that he checked and resettled. He also had his hands, and the sky, and the quality of controlled damage that his weather magic was capable of when he wasn’t suppressing it.
Malric had a longer blade and the tower’s defensive architecture alive in his awareness. His cold, strategic mind, which had been running a rebellion for two years on depleted power, was now, for the first time, operating without the binding’s interference.
I thought about what I had.
My power, incomplete and untrained, and almost entirely theoretical. The bond. The tower itself, built by my mother with her knowledge, her love, and her understanding of what I would someday need. And my understanding of my father.
I straightened my spine.
“I need to change,” I said.
Thane looked at me.
“I’m not speaking to him in a shift,” I said. “If I’m going to tell my father that I am done and he has lost, I’m going to do it dressed.”
Thane grinned almost proudly.
I went upstairs.
I dressed with a mind toward the presentation of the moment, knowing my father and his opinion on image.
I took out the deep blue dress I’d had for years, well-made, the one I’d always worn when my father visited, because something in me had understood, even then, that I needed armor and this was the closest I had.
I pinned my hair back from my face and studied myself in the mirror.
I thought about the woman my mother had been, who had stood between her daughter and what was coming and not stepped aside. I hoped she would be proud of me.
I opened the door, and Malric was waiting. We stepped out onto the balcony to see the approaching troops. Malric gripped the stone of the balustrade, his eyes on the tree line. He scanned the forest, seeing the waves in the trees moving as the forces marched through them.
“Ready?” he said.
“No,” I said. “But we’re doing it, anyway.”
Thane
The wind was strong, as if it had a mind of its own.
I’d been managing them for the past twenty minutes, keeping the upper currents from doing what they wanted to do, which was to merge around the tower’s peak and announce to everyone within two miles that something was building.
Subtlety was not weather magic’s normal style.
I’d spent years learning to work against its grain.
Today I needed it ready but quiet—a banked fire rather than a lit one.
I stood at the northern parapet and watched the tree line, while I kept my breathing slow and my hands loose at my sides. I did not think about the last time I’d stood somewhere elevated watching men move through a landscape below me.
I thought about it anyway.
The campaign had been three years ago. A border dispute that was not a border dispute, dressed in the language of territorial sovereignty to justify what it actually was, which was the king demonstrating to a reluctant provincial lord what reluctance cost. I’d been brought because I was the most efficient way to demonstrate that.
They’d kept me without sleep for four days before the engagement.
I understood now that this was deliberate.
Sleep deprivation destabilized the boundary between intent and instinct, made the magic more volatile and more responsive to external pressure.
At the time, I’d told myself it was logistics.
Poor planning. The oversight that happened in campaign conditions.
It wasn’t oversight.
They’d marched me to a ridge above the provincial town and told me to make it stop raining.
I’d made it stop raining.
And then the lightning had come, because weather magic didn’t operate in isolated systems and I was running on four days without sleep.
Someone had been applying pressure to the edges of my control for weeks, and the lightning had not been targeted.
It had not been strategic. It had not distinguished between the provincial lord’s guard and the people who had nothing to do with any of it and happened to be outside.
The king had called it acceptable losses.