46. Valerian
Valerian
The book answers her now like the throne did, like the realm does, like I do, if I’m honest with myself, which I try not to be too often.
We lay the Arcane Tome open on the spell room table, and where a month ago it was a dead weight of old paper that fought my every attempt to read it, now it wakes under her hand like it’s glad to see her.
The pages turn themselves. The realm’s whole history, all its power, every scrap of magic the Sorcerers folded away three centuries ago, all of it flowing up out of the Tome into its claimed Queen.
“First the lives,” she says. “Then Gav. The war can wait ninety seconds.”
“The war can wait exactly ninety seconds,” I agree, and I show her how.
It’s not complicated, in the end. That’s the thing about true power, real power, the kind she’s grown into.
The desperate scrabbling magic of the frightened is complicated.
This is simple. She lays her marked arm over the open book, the three black claw-marks stark against her skin, and she reaches into the Tome with the realm’s own power, and she takes back what death took from her.
The claw-marks fade. All three. I watch them go, one by one, the tally of her deaths erased, and underneath them I feel the deeper thing mend, the frayed places in her soul where each dying frayed her, knitting closed, whole, sealed.
Nine lives again. And more than that, a soul that won’t fray so easily now, a claimed Queen who doesn’t bleed her strength into the dark with every fall.
“The bleeding’s stopped,” I tell her, and my voice isn’t as steady as I’d like. “The countdown’s gone. You die now, you come back the way a cat should, whole, no ground lost, no ghost to gain it, because there’s no ghost. It’s over, little kitty. That part’s finally over.”
She lets out a breath that shakes, and I realise how long she’s carried it, the arithmetic of her own dying, the knowledge that every fall cost her more than a life.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay. Now Gavriel.”
He’s been standing by the door, arms at his sides, shield at his hip, watching all of this with that stone face of his that gives nothing away and never has. He knows what’s coming. I warned her he’d argue.
“You don’t have to do this,” he says, right on cue. “My Queen. The link is what I am. A Guardian dies when his charge dies. That’s not a curse, it’s the whole of me. I don’t want to be freed from it. My place is to fall when you fall.”
“Tough,” Tabby says. “You’re outvoted. It’s a monarchy, actually, and I’m the monarch, so it’s not even a vote, it’s a decree.
” She crosses to him, and she takes his big scarred face in her small hands, and she makes him look at her.
“Gav. Listen to me. You’ve given me everything.
You died for me because a shield stuck you to my soul before you ever had a say in it.
You’ve gone into the dark every single time I have, three times now, not knowing if you’d come back.
You never once got a choice.” Her eyes are wet.
“I’m giving you the choice back. Your death is yours.
Not mine. You want to guard me? Guard me.
Stand at my shoulder in every fight from here to the end of the realms, I’d have no one else.
But you do it as a man who gets to live when I fall, not a man chained to my dying.
That’s not me freeing you from me. That’s me loving you enough to let you keep your own life.
Now stop arguing and let Valerian work before an army of ice ghosts arrives and makes this awkward. ”
Gavriel looks at her for a long moment. Then, gruff, wrecked: “You’re not funny.”
“I’m hilarious. Val. Do it.”
So I do it. It’s the hardest working I’ve done in three centuries and I’m still half a husk from the death-hauling, but she pours the realm’s power into me through the bond, steadies me, holds me up, and I reach into the Auric Shield and I change its shape.
From a chain into a shield in truth. I unpick the reciprocity, the lethal both-ways of it, the part that drags him into the dark whenever she goes, and I leave only the protection, the finding, the guarding.
When I’m done, the shield glows a clean steady gold at his hip, no longer pulsing wrong, no longer reaching two ways.
“There,” I say, and I have to sit down, because that took the last of me.
“It’s done. You guard her. You find her.
You protect her. And if the worst ever comes for her again, Gavriel, you live.
You live, you avenge her, you bring her body somewhere safe, and you wait for her to come back, because she will now, whole, every time.
But you don’t die when she dies. Never again. ”
Gavriel puts his hand to the shield, and feels the difference in it. His stone face cracks, just once, just for a second, and he has to look away.
“Thank you,” he says, very low. To her. To me. To all of us. “I’ve been dying with her since the day she arrived. I didn’t know how heavy it was until it lifted.”
“Yeah, well.” Tabby scrubs at her eyes. “Group hug later. Big cold army now.”
Because she’s right. The moment the shield settles clean and gold, the whole spell room goes cold, and the light through the high windows shifts from crimson to that wrong clean white. The realm shudders around us, its Queen and all her subjects feeling it at once.
The Sorcerers have reached the border.
The war’s here.
I haul myself up off the chair by sheer will, the way I’ve hauled myself up for a year now, for her, and I follow my Queen out of the Palace to meet a world’s army at the gates.