Chapter Nineteen #2
I had called it something else and not out loud, because by that point, I understood what happened when you said the wrong thing out loud within earshot of the king’s guard.
I stood at the parapet and memory tried to take over my mind with the screams, the smell of burned flesh, and the horror of that day. I breathed through my nose, kept my hands loose, and watched the forest.
The shapes were more defined now. Forty men in tight formation, moving with the practiced efficiency of people who knew exactly what they were doing and had done it before.
The king would be in the center, protected, the guard distributed around him in the distinct pattern I’d memorized from intelligence reports.
I sensed the instant the tower’s defenses detected them.
A low hum through the stone beneath my feet, the defensive architecture Malric had activated, responding to the approach of something that intended harm.
Unlike before in the tower, this experience felt distinct—keener, more focused, and more conscious.
The wind fought me, wanting to slip its leash. I held it.
The bond was warm in my chest, both of them present: Malric’s focused steadiness and Aveline’s calm presence.
Footsteps on the stairs.
I didn’t turn around. I knew her step by now, the cadence of it, slightly quicker than you’d expect from someone who had spent years in a tower with nowhere to go.
She stood beside me at the parapet.
For a moment, she just looked. I watched her take in the formation below, read the distance and the direction, and absorb the fact of it. She was dressed in a blue dress, her hair pinned back, her spine straight, and she looked resolute, determined.
“So my father chooses violence,” she said. “To force me back.”
“Yes.”
“That tells me everything I need to know about him.” She said it quietly, without heat, with no emotion.
I would have been angry, sad, or looking for revenge if I were in her position, knowing my father didn’t care about me except as a weapon.
Though technically, I suppose my father was the same, selling me to the king for a few coins to be trained as a magic-user, knowing full well that I was in for a lifetime of abuse.
I’d forgiven him a long time ago. He had not been in a position to argue.
He was a small landholder who couldn’t control my power and couldn’t fight the king’s orders.
If he’d tried, he and my entire family would have been tortured and put to death.
It was survival for them. I was the sacrifice.
I looked back at the tree line.
She was watching me in my peripheral vision with the focused attention that meant she was reading something below the surface. The bond gave her access to the emotion of what I was feeling, and I had not been doing anything to smooth it.
“You’re afraid,” she said.
“Anyone who goes into battle and is not afraid is either stupid or crazy. I am neither.”
“Thane.”
I exhaled. “Not of them. Not of the fight.” I kept my eyes on the approaching column. “Of myself.”
She waited.
“The last time I was in a situation like this, people died who shouldn’t have died.
I was pushed past the point of control, and the magic did what it does when there’s no one steering it.
” My hands clenched painfully on the stone, and I relaxed them.
“I’ve told myself since that it was the circumstances.
The sleep deprivation, the pressure, the systematic dismantling of everything that kept me stable.
” I paused. “I have better circumstances now. I know that. But the magic is the same magic.”
“What did he do to you?”
The question was simple and direct, and she asked it without flinching, without pity and that undid me.
So I told her.
Not everything. Not the full seventeen days that Malric also knew parts of and that I had never spoken about in their entirety to anyone.
But the campaign. The ridge. The four days without sleep and the pressure applied with surgical patience by people who understood exactly how to dismantle a person’s self-governance without leaving marks that could be testified to.
The lightning that hadn’t been targeted.
The people it had found anyway.
I told her and I watched the column below. The entire time, I kept my breathing even and waited for the shame to do what it always did when I took it out and looked at it, which overwhelmed me and would drive her away.
Her arms came around me from the side.
She was smaller than me by a significant margin, which meant the hug was her face against my arm and her arms around as much of me as they could reach.
It should have been insufficient, but it wasn’t.
I sensed her in the bond—not pity, not the managed sympathy people offered when they didn’t know what to do with something difficult.
Something cleaner than that. A clear-eyed grief on my behalf, and underneath it a steadiness that I recognized.
It was Malric’s quality. That groundedness. She had it too, differently—less structured, more innate.
Shame attempted its usual expansion and stop.
“That was not your fault,” she said into my arm.
“I was the one who—”
“He built the conditions deliberately. You said it yourself. He stripped everything that kept you stable and then pushed you into an impossible situation and then called it a tool performing its function.” She pulled back enough to look at me.
“You were not a tool. You were a person being tortured into acting against your own nature, and what happened is his fault, not yours.” Her eyes were steady.
“The same way what happened to my mother is his fault. He does this. It’s what he does. ”
The wind pushed against my hold on it.
I breathed.
“I’m afraid of losing control today,” I said, because the complete truth was important. “I’m more stable than I’ve ever been. I have the bond. I have Malric. I have you.” I looked at her directly. “And I’m still afraid.”
She held my gaze without flinching.
“Call on me,” she said. “Through the bond. If you feel the edges going, call on me and I’ll anchor you.” Something in her expression was entirely certain. “That’s what I’m here for. Not just to be protected. I won’t let what happened before happen again. I will be your rock.”
The words grounded me, holding me steady.
Not because they solved anything, not because the fear disappeared or the memory changed. But because she meant it with a quiet confidence that only Malric had ever said to me.
My eyes burned, and I let them fall instead of blinking them back, letting them cleanse me of my past.
She put her hand on my arm and stood beside me and didn’t say anything else, which was exactly right. Below us, the column was closer now, the shapes fully individual, the king’s guard moving with the precise, ugly efficiency of men who were very good at something I had no admiration for.
The wind built against my hold, responding to the threat, ready, but calmer, waiting for my signal.
I breathed once more and the bond pulsed, both of them in it. Malric below, managing the tower’s defenses with the steady focus I could feel from here. Aveline, beside me, warm and solid and exactly what she had said she would be.
The magic was steady.
I was steady.
“Go to Malric,” I said. “Take your position on the balcony.”
She squeezed my arm and didn’t let go immediately. I looked at her and she looked at me and the bond moved between us with the warmth of something settled and true and not going anywhere.
Then she released me.
“Call on me,” she said again. Not a request.
“I will,” I said.
She went down the stairs.
I turned back to the parapet, the wind in my hands and the bond in my chest and the tower alive and defended beneath my feet.
When the king’s guard reached the edge of the thorn barrier, I would be ready.
I breathed out slowly and let the storm wake up.