Chapter 13
The cold seeped into his awareness first. It wasn’t the ambient chill of the study, since the house was warm enough, heated by the residual energy of one hundred and two artifacts humming behind their containment wards.
No, this was a cold that came from inside, radiating outward from a place deep in his body where his magic had been.
He’d felt this before. In the void, there had been days when the cold had become so absolute that his body seemed to forget it had ever known warmth, when the distinction between himself and the gray nothingness around him had narrowed to a margin so thin that he’d had to recite the periodic table to confirm he was still capable of actual thought.
This was that kind of cold, the kind that meant something deep inside him was failing.
Somehow, he was sitting in his leather chair, although he wasn’t sure how he’d gotten there.
He knew where he was because the shape of it was familiar even without opening his eyes — the worn arms beneath his hands, the angle of the back, the way the cushion had long since molded itself to the contours of his body.
Roslyn’s hands were on his chest, and their position — left hand over his sternum, right hand lower against the scarred tissue where his magical channels converged — was the placement she used when the damage was serious enough to require her to work on his magic directly.
Her healing power moved through him with a steadiness that he thought was remarkable, given the circumstances.
The Van Horns had breached the outer wards, broken down the front door, set fire to the entryway, and driven them into this room like animals into a corner.
His own magic was nearly spent, and the study wards, while stronger than the perimeter defenses, weren’t anything close to infinite.
Outside these walls, five of Victoria’s best offensive talents were regrouping for a second assault.
And yet, Roslyn’s hands weren’t shaking.
He opened his eyes. The study was dim, lit only by the lamp on the desk and the faint ambient glow the artifacts produced when they were agitated.
The curtains were drawn, and he couldn’t see any light through the heavy fabric, which meant it was still deep night.
The muffled sounds of the assault had stopped — no more fireballs hitting the walls, no crack of lightning, no concussive impacts he could feel resonating through the floor.
The silence was far from comforting, however. It only meant that the Van Horns had pulled back, and the Van Horns didn’t pull back unless they were regrouping for something worse.
“They’ve stopped,” he said, his voice sounding thin and weak in his ears.
“About twenty minutes ago.” Roslyn’s tone was the one she used during difficult healing sessions, calm and focused, stripped of everything except professional attention.
She didn’t look up from her work. “I think they expected to get through the study wards on the first try. When they didn’t, they backed off. ”
That made some sense. “They’ll be assessing the ward structure, looking for weaknesses in the independent layer.
” He tried to sit up straighter, and the movement sent a flare of pain through his left side that made his vision blur at the edges.
Now he could feel the burns, the tight, damaged skin pulling across his ribs and shoulder, the deeper tissue beneath still hot with the kind of injury that would take days of healing to address properly.
“Karl will be probing. He’s patient enough to take his time, and his gift is better suited to analysis than brute force. ”
For the first time, Roslyn’s calm mask slipped, and her mouth compressed. “Stop talking about ward analysis and let me work.”
He subsided, mainly because the effort of forming sentences was far more difficult than he’d expected.
His magic was failing. The channels Roslyn had spent weeks rebuilding were fraying under the strain of the fireballs and the lightning and the desperate, reckless output he’d poured into defending the threshold.
The scarring around his heart had tightened again, compressing tissue she’d so carefully loosened over dozens of sessions, and the compression was restricting the flow of magical energy through him in a way that his body was interpreting as a slow, systemic shutdown.
It appeared he was dying. Not in the dramatic, immediate way that made for good stories, but in the incremental failure of systems that had been pushed past their capacity too many times, the gradual dimming of something that had never been given enough time to recover.
This same progression had occurred in the void, when the days had stretched into weeks and the weeks into months, and his body had begun its slow retreat from functionality.
He recognized the pattern well enough, just as he might recognize a route he had traveled before.
The difference was that in the void, he had been alone.
Roslyn’s magic found the tightest knot of scarring and began to work it loose.
The sensation was peculiar; not exactly painful, but deeply uncomfortable in a way that resisted description.
It felt like someone was carefully unsticking two surfaces that had been pressed together too long, a slow separation that required patience and care and an intimate knowledge of how the tissue was supposed to function.
She had this knowledge. Over three weeks and dozens of sessions, she’d learned his magical architecture so thoroughly that she understood it better than he did in some places, had found the self-taught patches and the improvised workarounds and the places where necessity had produced solutions that were either brilliant or foolish, depending on one’s perspective.
He closed his eyes again and let her work.
The first time he slipped, he didn’t even realize it was happening.
One moment, he was in the study, conscious of the chair beneath him and Roslyn’s hands on his chest and the quiet hum of the artifacts in their containment.
The next, he was somewhere else — not the void, but a memory that had the void’s same quality of cold and isolation.
The transition between the two states was so seamless that there was no boundary to hold onto, no moment where he could have said, Here is where I stopped being present and started being elsewhere.
“It was so cold in the void,” he said. The words slipped out without him thinking about them, spoken in a voice that sounded distant even to his own ears.
“People visualize darkness when they think of such places, but it wasn’t dark.
It was gray. Gray and cold, and the cold didn’t come from outside.
It came from the absence of everything that produces warmth.
No sun, no friction, no chemical reaction.
Just the void, and me, and the shard in my hand. ”
Roslyn’s magic didn’t falter. He could feel it moving through him with the same steady rhythm.
Some part of him registered that she was listening, but the part that was talking wasn’t the part that cared about being heard.
It was the part that had held these things in silence for so long that the silence itself had become a kind of pressure.
“I counted the days,” he went on. “Three hundred and seventy-two. I scratched marks into the non-surface of the void with the edge of the shard. I knew that was an entirely irrational behavior, since the void had no surface to scratch and the marks disappeared within hours. But I made them anyway because the alternative was to stop counting, and if I stopped counting, I’d have to acknowledge that time in the void wasn’t time at all but a kind of ongoing present tense from which there might never be an exit. ”
He paused. During that pause, he could feel the boundary between the study and the memory thinning, the way a dimensional barrier thinned under sustained pressure.
“I kept my suit buttoned the entire time,” he said.
“Three hundred and seventy-two days in a place where there was no one to see me and no reason to maintain any standard of appearance, and I kept every button fastened. The waistcoat, the jacket when I still had it. The jacket went first, used as a pillow, which was a concession that took me forty days to make, but the waistcoat stayed buttoned. I told myself it was discipline. I told myself that a man who allowed his standards to slip in one area would find them slipping in all areas, and that the void was merely a test of character I intended to pass.”
Roslyn’s hands shifted position, moving from his sternum to the burned tissue on his left side.
The change in her magic’s focus — from the deep scarring to the surface damage — pulled him partially back to the present.
He blinked, and the study reassembled itself around him in fragments…
lamp, desk, bookshelves, the dark shapes of the curtained windows.
“It wasn’t discipline, though,” he said, his tone quieter now. “It was the only thing I could still control.”
She said nothing. Her magic continued its careful work on the burns, and the silence she offered wasn’t the empty kind, not the silence of someone who had nothing to say or the silence of someone who was waiting for him to finish so they could respond.
It was the silence of someone who understood that what she was hearing required no commentary, only a witness.
He closed his eyes and let the memory take him again.
The next time he surfaced, the light in the study hadn’t changed, which meant either very little time had passed or the curtains were doing their job too well.
Roslyn was still working. Her magic had a slightly different quality now; it seemed thinner, more careful, the way a surgeon’s touch changed when the tissue being repaired was delicate enough to be damaged by too much force.