Page 91 of Unveiled

“On my life. Mine to protect,” Connor said for the third time, and the pattern liked threes. “From this night until the last.”

The rend slammed shut. Not fully, not sealed, but pulled tight as a wound bandaged against infection. The clearing lurched. The remaining entity tore lengthwise like a shadow cut by noon sunlight and shredded to nothing. The last of the light retracted under the earth, leaving a perfect circle of rimed grass and a smell like old temples after rain.

Silence fell.

Adrian swayed. Connor caught him, finally touching the mark because he had to, and hissed at the heat. He didn’t remove his hand.

Irial lay curled on her side, her hands clawed in frigid mud, her lips blue under a smear of blood. Max reached her first, cautious, slow, staying clear of the circle. Fraser came over with a blanket.

“Boss?” Max’s voice came from far away. “We clear?”

“For now,” Adrian said wearily. “Although I feel like death.”

Irial coughed, the sound feeble and angry. She lifted her head, squinted at Adrian, and bared her teeth like a feral cat. “Don’t you dare,” she rasped. “Don’t you dare die. I did not come through all that to explain it to Piper.”

Adrian choked on a laugh that turned to a sob and then back again to a laugh. It hurt. It also helped. Connor eased him down until he could sit without tearing the world. He didn’t let go of the mark.

“Can you walk?” Connor asked Irial.

She considered the question. “Not with elegance.”

“None of us are elegant tonight,” Adrian murmured.

Irial’s gaze flicked to the circle, then to his hand on the charm. “You anchored.”

“I tried.”

“You succeeded,” she said. “I will not begin to tell you what that cost you, because then you will try to do it again to even the ledger.”

“That’s a hurtful assessment of my character,” Adrian said. “Accurate, but hurtful.”

Irial managed the ghost of a smile that looked more like baring teeth to pain. “They will come back. You know that.”

“I’m counting on it,” Connor said without warmth.

Max looked up sharply. “Are you now?”

“So we’re ready next time,” Connor finished, as if that were what he had meant from the start.

Wind moved through the trees like someone exhaling. Connor eased his hand from Adrian’s chest by careful degrees. The brand under Adrian’s skin still felt hot enough to scorch, but it no longer burned through flesh into air.

The tether, thin and invisible, remained. But there was something new braided through it now. A vow spoken three times, the echo of a circle turned to a knot, and the memory of a girl’s hand slipping across a line.

“Up you get,” Connor said at last, his voice low.

“Up I get,” Adrian echoed, and obeyed because he was exhausted and because the voice that asked him to stand felt like a place where he could.

He did not quite fall when the world tilted. Connor’s arm was there. It would be again, Adrian realised with a kind of terrified relief. He didn’t know what to do with that knowledge.

He filed it away next to the ache of the mark and the certainty that the Council had learned something important tonight: they had found the Valours. And the Valours had found each other.

Behind them, frost melted along a perfect seam where the rend had been pulled shut. It left a thin, dark line in the earth like a scar that would never fade.

Irial looked at it once and then looked away. “We should leave before it remembers us.”

“Aye,” Fraser said. “Let’s go while going’s good.”

They went in a ragged cluster, Max carrying Irial under one arm with infuriating gentleness, Fraser ranging out and back. Shoulder to shoulder, Connor kept the centre with Adrian’s, their breath traded, and heat hoarded against the cold that had nothing to do with weather.