I press myself against the ritual stone and keep my hands flat against the carved surface. The residue on my palms reacts with the stone's energy in a low, sustained interference. Enough to buy seconds. I need Draekir to have seconds.
Malrec turns to face the column. Both hands raise in the configuration of a command ward, the kind designed to redirect enormous quantities of raw energy. He is trying to recover control of something that has already decided it doesn't belong to him.
The wildspont doesn't answer. He tries again, louder in the motion, more of his own energy feeding the construct, and for one breath the column wavers. Then it resumes, faster than before. The chamber floor has begun slanting in all four directions simultaneously.
He can't stop this alone. He never could. He built something that required everything to go correctly, and too many things haven't.
The carved lines beneath my boots are no longer warm — they are burning, the heat traveling through the leather, and I lift one foot and then the other and understand there is very little time left before this floor becomes untenable. The collapse is eating itself alive, and when it reaches the point of full rupture it will either implode and take the surrounding forest with it, or it will explode outward and take Duskmire.
I look at the roots. Still growing, still pale at the tips where they haven't reached the corrupted energy yet. Still alive.
My hands hurt. The residue on my palms has reacted until there's nothing left of it, the interference it provided has run its course, and the carved anchor at my back pulses with a heat I can't maintain contact with much longer.
I need more. I need him to get here. Malrec is still fighting the column, his construct burning through his own reserves at a rate I can see in the set of his shoulders and the shaking at his wrists. He knows he is losing. The knowledge has not made him stop. That is the part that frightens me most.
The chamber screams again. Lower this time. The sound of something vast and foundational giving up its last attempt to hold. I press my bleeding cheek against the cool root tip pushing through the stone, close my eyes, and hold on.
Get here, I think, in the direction of the outer ruins, in the direction of whatever sound he is making that I cannot hear over the collapse. I have held everything I can. Get here now.
The wildspont answers with another pull, and the floor tilts, and I hold.
26
DRAEKIR
The chamber is already dying when I reach her. Stone splits along ritual lines scored into the floor. The wildspont's energy tears at the walls in ribbons, peeling carved stone away in long strips.
Then I see Malrec standing over Elowen, and every instinct I have ever cultivated goes completely quiet. She's on the ground. Her arm is braced beneath her, blood darkening the stone where her palm presses flat, fighting to push herself upright. Her face turns toward Malrec with an expression that is not fear — it is fury, cold and defiant — which is the only reason I do not completely lose myself. Malrec turns at the sound of my entry. He does not look surprised. He looks triumphant.
"I wondered how long you would take," he calls over the noise around us. "She's more difficult to break than expected."
I cross the chamber in a run, and Malrec does not wait for me to reach him.
He's faster than a man his age has any right to be — wild magic floods his limbs, pulsing visibly beneath his skin where the corruption has eaten further into him than I realized. He drives into me with a blade charged with unstable energy, andthe impact sends both of us crashing into the stone. Pain flares through my shoulder. I register it distantly. I catch his wrist before he can strike again and twist until bone pops, and the blade clatters against the fracturing floor.
He doesn't stop fighting. That is the difference between Malrec and Zevrik. Zevrik was precision. This is desperation wearing ideology as armor.
"You think this ends here?" he shouts, driving a knee into my ribs when I force him back. Magic surges through the floor and I move sideways before it erupts upward in a column of corrupted light. "You are not even the real target, Draekir. You were never the point of this. You were the obstacle. Remove you, destabilize the region, and every noble house that has spent forty years chafing under Mournhold's shadow walks through the door you leave behind."
I get my forearm across his throat and drive him into the wall.
"Tell me something I have not already pieced together."
"Did you piece together which houses?" His voice is strangled but his eyes burn with the satisfaction of a man who believes he has already won even while losing. "Did you puzzle out which of your allies spent the last decade sending letters to my office? Which noble-born signatures sit on documents promising Mournhold the moment you fell?" He bares his teeth. "This wasn't a scheme born in my study. It was built in the courts you thought supported you. You have no idea how many of them wanted you gone."
A shockwave rolls through the chamber and throws us both sideways. I hit the ground and roll to my feet while a section of ceiling collapses behind Malrec, filling the air with dust. Through the debris —
Elowen is upright. She's pushed herself to standing using the edge of a broken pillar, her left hand pressed to her ribs whereshe is clearly hurt, but her eyes move fast across the chamber. She meets my gaze across the wreckage.
"The anchors," she calls, her voice steadier than it has any right to be. "He lost control of three when you came through. There are still four holding. The herbs—" She lifts her hand. The leather pouch at her side is torn but intact. "I need you to get me close to each one. I can't sustain the pressure long enough alone."
Malrec lunges for her before I finish processing the words, I move faster.
My fist connects with his temple and drops him, and I step between him and Elowen. The chamber shakes again. A ritual line detonates, the backlash punches through the air like something physical — hot and metallic against my skin.
"Draekir." Her voice cuts through the noise. "Look at me."
I do not want to look away from Malrec.
