Chapter 17 #2
A pair of fireballs hit the yard simultaneously, one from the north and one from the east, and the crossed impacts sent a shockwave through the grass that knocked Roslyn off her feet.
She landed hard on her hip, and for a moment, the yard spun around her — orange light, green light, the white-blue flash of lightning, the dark shapes of the fighters outlined against the glow.
Somehow, she managed to get up. Her hip ached, and her hands were shaking, and her magical reserves were now so low that the next healing session was going to cost her far more than she could afford to give.
But someone was going to need her. They always did. So she stayed on her feet and moved toward the sound of the fighting.
Malachi watched her through the study window, and he understood all too well what was happening.
The understanding arrived as a slow, building recognition, the way his resonance gift recognized an artifact’s properties through sustained proximity rather than a single flash of insight.
He’d been watching Roslyn move between the McAllister fighters for the better part of an hour, and what he saw was a woman doing exactly the same thing he’d done for the past seventeen years.
She was trading herself for the people she loved.
The currency was different, of course. His had been isolation and solitude, the slow erosion of every human connection he’d once possessed in the service of keeping one hundred and two dangerous objects contained.
Roslyn’s was her magic, the healing power she was pouring into other people’s bodies at a rate he knew wasn’t sustainable.
He could feel her signature dimming through the wards, the bright, clean frequency that had defined her since the day the compass brought her to his door growing thinner with each repair, each deployment of a gift that was consuming her as surely as the void had consumed him.
She knew what she was doing. That was the part that made it difficult to watch.
Roslyn Campbell wasn’t reckless, and she certainly wasn’t na?ve.
She knew that each healing session was drawing from reserves she couldn’t replenish in time, knew that the tremor in her hands was a warning her body was sending, knew that the gray at the edges of her vision meant she was approaching a threshold beyond which recovery became uncertain.
She knew all of this, but she continued anyway.
The alternative would be to stop and take shelter in the house, and that would mean watching the people she loved take damage she could have prevented.
He understood that calculation. After all, he had made it himself, over and over, for far too long — the decision to sacrifice something personal for the preservation of something larger, a trade that looked noble from the outside and felt like slow suffocation from within.
The wards or his health. The collection or his relationships.
The objects or the man. He’d always chosen the objects, always chosen the duty, had always told himself that the sacrifice was worthwhile because the alternative was worse. The logic had been sound.
The logic was always sound. He had told Roslyn that same thing during the night when his defenses had crumbled and the words had come without his permission.
The logic is always sound. And she’d listened and hadn’t contradicted him, and then she’d said, I know, in a voice that told him she understood exactly what that kind of commitment cost.
Now he was watching her pay it.
She’d just healed Connor for the third time, and when she stood up from the crouch she’d been working in, she swayed.
That moment of unsteadiness was brief, maybe half a second, and she caught herself immediately, bracing one hand against her own thigh until the vertigo passed.
No one else seemed to notice. Angela was engaged with the Van Horn frontal assault, Connor was testing his repaired hand, and Levi was somewhere on the eastern perimeter doing his quiet, devastating disruption work.
Belshegar was still advancing on the northern line, and the Gibsons were holding the bluff edge.
The battle continued, and no one saw the healer sway.
But Malachi saw it.
He saw it, and he wanted to rage at the helplessness that kept him trapped in here rather than out there and fighting by her side.
With his magic at barely fifteen percent and his left arm burned, his heart scarred and his body held together by the work of the woman who was currently exhausting herself on a battlefield he couldn’t reach, there was literally nothing he could do.
He’d spent his entire adult life being the one who solved problems, the one who assessed threats and allocated resources, and made the hard decisions that kept the collection safe and the wards intact. He had always been the man in control.
But he wasn’t in control now, and the loss of that control wasn’t, as he might once have expected, the worst part.
The worst part was knowing that Roslyn was doing what she was doing because she was him.
Not a copy, not a mirror, but a version of the same deep-seated impulse, the person who couldn’t stop, who wouldn’t stop, who would spend every last ounce of what she possessed to keep the people in her care alive. That was who she was.
Malachi had recognized this about her early on, perhaps as early as that first night when she had knelt beside his chair and begun healing him despite every reason not to.
He’d seen it in the steady competence of her hands and the clinical focus of her gaze, in her absolute refusal to walk away from a patient who needed her, regardless of what that patient had done or who that patient was.
At first, he’d labeled her behavior as stubbornness, then professionalism, and finally integrity.
Those words fit within his existing taxonomy of human behavior and didn’t require him to examine his own reflection too closely.
But it wasn’t stubbornness or professionalism or even integrity, not really.
It was the thing that lived at the center of her, the warm, steady core of her gift that she’d described to him once during a late-night conversation, the power that had first manifested when she was twelve and had mended a bird’s broken wing without understanding how she could do such a thing.
It was the part of her that couldn’t pass someone in pain without stopping, the part of her that would pour itself out until there was nothing left because the alternative — standing by while someone suffered — wasn’t an alternative at all.
It was, he realized then, love. Not the romantic kind, or at least, not only that, although the romantic kind was there, too, tangled up with everything else in ways he was too weary to sort through right then.
It was the broader, fiercer, more fundamental kind of love, the kind that had sustained her through three weeks of healing an enemy, through a night of listening to a dying man’s confessions, through a battle she couldn’t fight but could endure by giving everything she had to the people who could.
He’d spent seventeen years collecting objects because he believed they needed him. She spent herself on people because she knew they did.
Outside, a fireball struck the yard and sent up a spray of sparks that lit the study windows for a moment, and in that light, he saw Roslyn moving toward Angela’s position again, her hands already raised, her magic already reaching for the prima’s injury before she’d closed the distance.
Her steps were unsteady now. Her magical energy was so thin that he had to strain to feel it through the wards, a thread of bright light where there had once been a steady flame.
She wouldn’t stop. He knew this with absolute certainty, the same certainty he’d once reserved for his assessment of ward structures and artifact properties.
No, she would keep healing until her body gave out, and when that happened, she would try to heal while lying on the ground.
Then the cold would come, and the consciousness would go.
Her magic would begin to cannibalize itself, and there would be nothing he could do about any of it from this chair.
Outside, the yard burned, and Roslyn moved toward Angela’s position again, her hands already rising.
He wouldn’t look away.
He owed her that much.