Droza
The tether goes cold. Cold like decision, like something closing. I have felt every shade of Selah’s fear since the night her blood woke me from stone, and this is not fear. This is resignation, and it hits me harder than any blade has in a century.
I am still in the harbor square when it happens.
Three of Vaedrin’s soldiers are between me and the inn, and I remove them from that position with the efficiency of something that stopped caring about restraint an hour ago.
The gold light bleeding through the cracks in my skin has not dimmed since the fighting started. I don’t bother trying to bank it.
Around me, Gullhaven is burning in patches.
The market stalls near the eastern dock are gone entirely, eaten by chaos magic from an assassin Rennic put down twenty minutes ago with a gutting knife and an expression of absolute terror on his face.
Corvin’s people are still moving civilians through the cellar routes.
Ilyra is somewhere near the north wall. The gargoyle merchants have closed off the harbor road.
We are winning.
And I can feel Selah standing still somewhere behind me, radiating the quiet of a woman whose mind has been made up.
I don’t finish the thought. I turn.
The inn’s back door is still hanging open from where Vaedrin entered. I go through it the same way, which means part of the doorframe does not survive my wings clearing the threshold. The kitchen is empty. The cellar hatch is closed.
She is gone.
The tether pulls me toward the harbor cliffs before I can think past it. It is sharp and urgent, a wire drawn taut through my chest. I follow it through the smoke and the wreckage of the square, past two of Vaedrin’s soldiers who take one look at my face and decide the smart thing is to run.
I find her on the path above the docks.
She is moving fast for someone who spent half the night trying not to be seen, her dark curls loose, the shape of the relic visible beneath her coat. She is heading for the cliff edge and the drop to the water below, and she is absolutely planning to take the relic with her when she goes.
She stops and doesn’t turn.
“You can’t stop me.” I step closer in four strides.
When I get in front of her, she finally looks at me.
I read her face the way I’ve learned to over these past weeks.
I know the set of her jaw, the deliberate steadiness in her green eyes that she only uses when she’s terrified but has decided not to show it.
“It’s the only way to guarantee it ends,” she says. “Vaedrin told me what it carries. Every hidden bloodline in Protheka. As long as it exists, they will keep coming.”
“We destroy it here.”
“We don’t have enough—”
“We find a way. You do not go over that cliff.”
She shakes her head, and there is something so exhausted and so certain in the motion that it cracks something open behind my ribs.
“People have already died tonight, Droza. Corvin’s people. Gullhaven’s people. And they will keep dying because of me. Because of what I carry and what I am. I’m not doing this to punish myself. I’m doing it because it’s the only ending that stops the bleeding.”
I spent a century in stone. The years passed over me like weather I could not feel, and I came out with nothing.
There is no world I recognize, no one left alive to remember my name, nothing but the terrible weight of all that lost time pressing against the inside of my chest with nowhere to go.
I told myself it didn’t matter. I told myself I had done what I was built to do and the rest was irrelevant.
That I was stone. That I had always been stone and always would be.
Then her blood hit the runes, and I opened my eyes and she was standing there in the rain, half-dead and furious and more alive than anyone I had met in the entirety of my long and exhausting existence.
I am not going to watch her walk off a cliff.
“I love you.” The words come out flat and immediate, the same way I would report an enemy’s position.
I watch her face change. “I have spent a hundred years not being able to feel anything and I am not—” I stop.
Force it out straight because this is not a moment for anything to be unsaid.
“I would rather burn this entire harbor to the ground than watch you die. You understand me?”
The wind is coming off the water and the smoke from the burning market stalls is moving through the square below us. Gullhaven is still fighting at its edges but up here it is only the two of us and the sound of the sea.
Her expression softens. She reaches up and traces over the rite markings, over the gold light still bleeding through the cracks in my stone skin. I cover her hand with mine.
“Can we destroy it together?” she asks. “Gargoyle magic made it. That means gargoyle magic can unmake it.”
She must be right. If Selah’s bloodline was what awakened me, and the tether is live between us, and I drive every remaining fragment of the stonebound rite through the artifact at the moment of her bloodbinding, it should shatter. It would take most of what I have left tonight to do it.
“It will hurt,” I tell her.
“Okay.”
“Both of us.”
“That’s okay, too.” She pulls her hand back and straightens, and the resignation in her face has shifted: the stubborn, reckless determination that made me want to shake her senseless the first night she fired back at me and hasn’t stopped being the most infuriating and essential thing about her since.
“Show me what to do.”
Below us, in the harbor square, someone screams Corvin’s name.
We both look down. Vaedrin has him on his knees in the center of the square, one hand fisted in the back of Corvin’s collar, a conjured blade pressed to the side of his throat.
The fighting around them has gone still.
Vaedrin’s remaining soldiers have formed a perimeter.
Whatever is left of Gullhaven’s defenders has stopped moving.
Vaedrin’s voice carries up the cliff face, calm and precise as a blade drawn across stone.
“Bring me the girl,” he says, “or I take his head in front of every person left in this square.”