Page 46 of Blood & Ash

Eric turned toward the door.

Chapter 13

The ritual chamber held the wreckage of the unbinding. Ash smeared the stone floor in broken circles. Dried blood darkened the rune lines where Del’s hand had pressed. The iron candle stands stood askew, their candles burned to stubs guttering in their own wax.

Eric stood a few feet from the altar stone. His body was wrong. The skin too tight, the joints stiff, like a limb that had gone numb and was only now remembering how to move. His jaw worked. Closed. Opened. Closed again. The taste of his own name sat at the back of his throat. He swallowed it down.

Aislinn sat on the cold floor. Her palms pressed flat against the stone. Her brown eyes were open.

Eric watched her eyes.

They moved. Actually moved. Left to right across the hearth, pausing on the ledger open on the worktable, the cracked spine visible from where she sat. They found the iron stands. Tracked the dying candle flames. Found Eric’s boots and rose to his face and held.

His name came back to him in stages: first the syllables, then the weight of them, then the architecture: the redundancies Arrow had missed, the fail-safes built into sorcerer names that a mage, even a dark one, couldn’t fully map without the original architect present. Eric had built those fail-safes himself, centuries ago, when names were still things a man could shape with his own hands. Arrow had taken the name but not the blueprint. The difference had saved him.

Aislinn’s eyes didn’t waver. They held his across the ash-smeared floor, the blood-dark runes and the space between them that was suddenly, violently full of something neither of them had expected to find here.

“Your sight didn’t fail,” Eric said.

The words came out flat, with no preamble and no cushion. He watched her face and delivered the fact as he delivered all facts, clean and precise.

“Somebody took it. The same hand that took my name.”

Ash settled on stone. A candle guttered. The smell of burnt sage and dried wormwood pressed against the walls.

Aislinn’s breath went out of her. One long exhalation that sounded like it had been waiting inside her lungs for years. Her fingers pressed harder into the stone. The chalk anchor circles around her (grey now, almost invisible) pulsed with a single involuntary tremor. The ash stirred. Settled.

She didn’t speak.

Eric watched her work through it. The arithmetic happened behind her eyes. Every year she had spent doubting her own power. Every vision that had gone dark or come back wrong. Every time she had second-guessed herself and deferred to someone else’s certainty. All of it reframed. All of it recalculated against a single fixed point: her gift hadn’t abandoned her. It had been stolen.

Her jaw set. The line of it was sharp. She looked at the floor between them, at the dissolution-and-return rune Del had drawn in ash and blood, and her voice when it came was unsteady, but her mouth didn’t waver.

“How long?”

Eric didn’t look away from her face. “Years. Before the demon war. Before the pack lost Kiera.”

The candle nearest Aislinn flickered. The flame caught a draft from the half-open door and went out. The wick smoked. The wax pooled dark around the iron base. The loss of light threw half her face into shadow. The half that remained caught what little illumination reached it from the dying candle across the room: her cheekbone, the corner of her mouth, one eye, brown and steady and holding something Eric recognized from very old memories.

She got to her feet.

Her knees shook. She placed one hand against the altar stone and pushed. Her arm trembled. She didn’t ask for help. She stood on her own strength, her weight balanced, her shoulders square under the wool sweater that had gone threadbare at the elbows. The blanket Eric had laid across her legs fell to the stone. She didn’t bend to pick it up.

Her eyes found the ledger on the worktable. The open page. The dissolution-and-return diagram Del had copied from memory. Aislinn’s fingers brushed the edge of the paper. The page was yellow with age. The ink had faded to brown.

“Del knew this shape.” She said it as a fact, and her voice had steadied. The unsteadiness was gone, burned out of her somewhere between the floor and standing.

“Yes,” Eric said.

“Does Gabriel know?”

“I don’t know what Gabriel knows.”

Aislinn’s hand came away from the ledger. She turned and looked at the rune on the floor: the blood-and-ash spiral, the outer ring of name-lock geometries, the anchor point where Del’s palm had pressed and Eric’s spine had arched and something had broken that needed breaking.

“He blinded me through you,” she said.

“Yes.”