Page 13 of Fierce Highland Guardian

It was good advice. It was the best advice I owned. I’d built a whole self to give it.

“Fiona.” Craig’s voice, wrecked, barely his. He’d got one hand on the plinth, and the dragon was clawing up through him, scale breaking over his knuckles, his eyes gone to slit and silver. He wasn’t reaching for me. He was reaching for the Stone—to break it himself, I understood, to end it before Locke could have it, and take himself out with it.

He turned his ruined face to the passage behind me. To the open door.

“Run.”

And there it was. The exit, behind me, exactly where the sensible part of me had already mapped it. A clear run up into the and the gulls and the rest of an ordinary life.

My body had that move by heart. It had been making it for ten years—the quiet retreat, the going-small, the leaving before leaving could cost me anything.

I stood at the mouth of the passage, and, for the first time in a decade, I didn’t take the step.

CHAPTER TEN

Freely Given – Craig

Ithrewmyselfatthe circle and my own wards threw me back.

Three hundred years I’d built them, and Locke had turned them inside out with chalk and salt and a dead man’s grammar, and they flung me into the far wall like I was the intruder. The Stone shrieked. The ground I’d guarded since before this woman’s country had a name split down its length, and the sea came in through the wound, cold and black and patient, and the dragon tore up through me because the bond that held my shape was coming apart.

Fine. Let it.

If I could not break the circle, I could break the thing inside it. Reach the Heartfire, close my hand, and end it—the Stone, the bond, the three hundred years, all of it in one crack of light. Locke would have nothing. She would have the stair.

That was the whole of my plan, and I want it set down plainly: I chose it gladly. I’d given her the open door already, roared her toward it, and the last gift I meant to give the world was a clear run for one small fierce woman up into the morning. My deathfor her ten minutes. I have never in three centuries made a better trade.

I got a hand to the plinth. The crimson beat under my palm, wrong and shrieking, and I gathered what was left of me to shatter it.

And I listened, past the noise, for the sound of her boots going up the stair.

They weren’t going up.

They were coming down.

I turned, and she was walking into the dark—toward the circle, toward the Stone, toward me—white-faced and shaking and utterly certain. Reeve lunged for her, and his hands went off her like water off oiled wool, sliding, finding nothing, the little thistle at her throat blazing.

“Get out,” I said. Or tried to. “Fiona. The door—”

“I saw it.” She reached me. “I know what breaking it does to you. I read the whole wall, Craig. I know.”

“Then you know to run.”

“No.” She put her hands on the Heartfire. Beside mine. Small and scraped and steady, choosing it with her eyes wide open. “You don’t get to do the noble thing alone. Not this time.”

And the Stone stopped shrieking.

It went through her first—the Heartfire reaching, the way it had reached for me alone for three hundred starving years, and finding a second hand that had come to it freely, wanting nothing, giving everything. For one breath the bond flung wide open and I was in it with her, and I felt what she felt come across the join: not fear—I braced for fear and there was none—but a fierce, terrified gladness, a woman who had spent a decade making herself small feeling herself, for once, choosing to be exactly as large as the thing in front of her.I’m not leaving,the feel of her said, wordless, straight into the middle of me.I lookedat the whole of it, and I’m still here. Let me carry the half you were never meant to carry alone.

And she felt me in return—I know she did, because I felt her feel it: three hundred years of a weight I’d never once been able to set down, and, under it, worse than the weight, the certainty that no one would ever offer to take an edge of it, because offering was how the iron got in. She took that too. She took the whole grim arithmetic I’d lived by and she did the sum again in front of me and got a different answer, and the answer wasboth of us, then,and I felt the old cruel law of my line crack clean across and fall away into the dark under the cradle where it belonged.

The Heartfire had refused Locke down to the root because Locke came to take. She came to share. That was the difference, and it was the only lock the thing had ever had. This is what it had been dying for three hundred years to be given: not a keeper, but a second heart, chosen and choosing, the weight halved between two who wanted it. A bond, freely made. The oldest magic there is, and the simplest, and the one thing iron can never force.

The red went gold. The wrong note fell out of the song.

And the drain—gods, the drain I’d carried so long I’d stopped calling it pain—eased. Lifted. The weight of three centuries of dying-by-inches slid sideways off me and settled across the two of us, halved, bearable, shared. I drew a breath all the way to its bottom for the first time since before she was born.

The wards came home. Tous—to the pair of hands on the Stone—and they snapped outward through the chamber like a struck sail, and Locke’s men went into the western wall. The fire the ritual had called and couldn’t hold turned back on the ones who’d raised it. I heard Reeve reach the foot of the stair. I heard him not go further.