Page 70 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

Bancroft’s wings shift once. “You will stand down.”

“No.” Faelan’s voice doesn’t rise. “I’ll give you something better than standing down. Tell them yourselves. All of it, every realm, in your own words, before I do it for you. It will go easier for you coming out of your mouths than out of mine, and I’d rather have it that way.”

Not one of the five moves. The air gets heavier until I can feel it pressing on my skin. Then he turns his head and looks at me.

“I asked you to stand aside.” The chamber does nothing. No air moves. His voice goes out and stops.

“You put your hand on my throat and told me I was right about the crime, wrong about what to do with it.” He says it the way another man would remind you of the time. “You never said no to me. You’ve had days to notice that. I don’t believe you have.”

He doesn’t give me room to answer. He turns his back on the Council, the first thing he’s done in here that looks like violence, and takes hold of the light. The realm’s own light, the thing that decides what has a right to stand in here. He gathers it the same way I gather flame, turns it, and it comes at the two of us. I step in front of Valen. Part of it catches me, goes across the top of my shoulder, through the cloth, into the skin under it. White-hot. My arm goes dead from the joint down for as long as it takes me to get my feet back under me. The cloth is gone. What’s under it is open, already trying to close.

Bancroft’s wings snap wide. The whole chamber goes bright behind him, I’m certain the Council is about to put Faelan down where he stands. They hold. The wings come back down. Not one of the five moves out of the formation they arrived in. Samuel’s face is turned toward me. What’s on it comes as close to an apology as anything I’m going to get. Then I work out why they’re standing there, and it’s worse than them being cowards. Their power is the seal. It isn’t something they use. It’s something they are. Every one of them is holding a piece of this realm together by standing in it, and the second Bancroft throws any of that at Faelan, the piece he’s holding lets go.

Faelan has known that longer than I have been alive. It’s why he came here to do it in front of them. Nobody is coming for us either. Ash Hollow is a realm away with its own perimeter to hold, and the door we came through is behind me and closed. So it’s this. We fall back, and he goes on tearing at the seal until there’s nothing left standing between him and the three women at Ash Hollow with his marks in their skin. Or we take him now, here, with my shoulder open, neither one of us has ever having fought anything like him.

I move first. I put myself square between Faelan and Valen with flame coming up both hands. Faelan’s attention settles on me and stays. His face changes. It isn’t anger, isn’t satisfaction. It’s the look of a man who suspected something and has just had it confirmed. What he’s confirmed is that I will put my body in front of Valen every time, whatever it takes out of me. He keeps it. He lets me see him keep it.

Then Valen moves. He comes past my shoulder and puts himself in front of me instead. Light comes out of him. Out of his arms, his back, the ends of his fingers, all at once. It’s white and has no sound, every column of color in this room bends toward him while it’s happening. Then it stops. He’s standing there the same as he was a second ago. In all the months I’ve known this man he’s never done one thing that wasn’t ordinary. He can’t shift, doesn’t carry magic. I’ve read him a hundred times and gotten his nature and nothing else.

I don’t know what I just watched come out of him but Faelan has stopped moving. Everything he’s done since he walked into this chamber has been unhurried. He arrived without arriving. He put the realm’s own light through my shoulder without changing his expression. He’s looking at Valen now, and he’s gone entirely still doing it.

Chapter 41

Valen

Istep in front of her, my arm up. I’ve taken a beating before. I know how a body gets ready for one. Chin down, shoulder turned in, everything braced for the part where it lands and I find out how much of me still works after.

Faelan’s light comes at me flat and fast. It goes straight through me and out the other side. No burn. No blow. Nothing.

Behind him the Council is straining. Five of them in a line with their wings locked out at angles nothing living holds on purpose. Bancroft’s arms are shaking. Whatever it’s taking to keep this realm from coming apart, they’re spending every bit of what they have on it, and not one thing on Faelan. He’s already coming again.

Nyxiana is on my left, close enough that I can put a hand on her without turning my head. In any other room I’d have the doors counted by now. This one has no walls to put a door in. What I’ve got instead is her, me, and the distance between us.

She kissed me in that yard in front of her pack and I have had it in my mouth ever since. Of all the things to be carrying in here.

The second one lands the same as the first. Nothing. I could call that luck. Bad angle on his part, he pulled it, or I moved half a step and my body got there before my head did. One of those would hold for one strike. The third one comes at my chest square on and I can’t call it luck anymore. It arrives. There’s no pain afterward.

Under my skin the hum goes off. It comes up harder than it ever has, harder than in my dark cabin last night with her name on my lips. What’s different this time is where it starts. Every other time it’s been under my ribs. This time it’s coming up out of the floor I’m standing on.

Nyxiana told me what I am a few nights ago. A living lock. Built by the founders. Divine-blooded, put where they wanted, made to hold their seal shut and to close it when it opened. I’ve carried those words around since she said them. Nights on the perimeter, four hours of sleep at a time. They stop being words now. Heat comes up from behind my sternum, out along both arms into my hands, my chest lighting from the inside with nothing burning anywhere. There’s a charge behind my eyes with it. It gathers, it’s gone, it gathers again. Nothing else in me is doing anything like it. Every time I go after it, it stops. Whatever it is, it’s mine, and I can’t reach it any better than I’ve ever reached anything else about myself.

I open and close my hands to be sure they still work. They do. I find Nyxiana across the space between us. She’s already looking at me, hands full of white flame. The top of her shoulder is torn open where she stepped in front of the first one, the cloth is gone, and the skin under it is trying to close on its own. Her eyes are on my face instead of on Faelan.

If this place takes me apart in the next minute, I know I’ve had two days with a woman who looked at me the way she’s looking at me right now, and I’ve lived long enough to know exactly what that’s worth. I could say that to her out loud. Or I could get her out of here first and say it after. I want the second, badly enough that my hands steady.

“Are you hurt?” she calls across the chamber.

“No.”

Faelan comes again and puts more behind it, testing. Two of his went into me and did nothing, he wants to know whether that was his failure or mine. This one does nothing either. His eyes narrow. He’s been in this chamber all night like a man reading the last page of a book he wrote himself. That’s the first crack in it. So he stops throwing at me and goes at the room instead, puts both hands out and pulls. The chamber tears open in front of him. It runs twenty feet before it stops. The light bleeds out through the gap and goes somewhere it has no business going.

Bancroft’s wings snap wider and the floor steadies under my boots. It takes something out of them. I can hear it. There’s a low sound coming off the five of them now that wasn’t there a minute ago. Then pieces start coming off the edges of the tear. They come off the way wet plaster comes off a wall, in slabs, and they don’t fall. They hold their shape in the air. Three of them first. Each one is about the size of a man, has an edge on it, and throws a shadow across the color on the floor. Then they start moving on their own, without Faelan looking at any of them.

Constructs. Pieces of this realm, torn off it and walking. They go at her. All three. She’s already moving. Her hands come up and the white flame goes out ahead of her in a sheet. The first one hits it and stops existing. She’s turning for the second before the first has finished coming apart. Her hair’s come loose, it’s silver-white with the flame going up behind it. Her eyes have gone gold the whole way across the violet. She’s still bleeding down her arm from the shoulder. She takes the second one at the edge and it comes apart wrong, in halves, and both halves keep coming.

I go for the near one. It opens my forearm from the wrist halfway to the elbow. So that’s the rule. What he throws out of himself goes through me. What he tears loose is a solid thing, and a solid thing cuts me the same as it cuts anybody. I get both hands on the other half and put it into the floor. It comes apart under me. My blood runs down my arm and off my fingers onto a floor made out of light.

I don’t move off her. Faelan tears the chamber again. It runs longer this time. More pieces come off it. Then his own strike arrives on top of all of it, full force, everything he’s got, aimed at ending this. It hits me in the chest and doesn’t touch me.