The obvious conclusion arranged itself without my permission.
She’d attacked him. He’d been performing his duty, and she’d attacked him. The evidence was written across his face in three bleeding wounds and across the room in every shatteredand frozen thing. Galahad was many things, but he was first and foremost a knight of the realm, and she was a prisoner whose magic should have been locked down to nothing.
The ice cracked louder. A fissure split the far wall, hairline thin, running from floor to ceiling in under a second.
The guards in the corridor behind me didn’t move, but I couldn’t blame them. None of us moved.
Inside the room, she was losing it. Whatever thread she had on the power, it was unraveling. The water pressure was building: I could hear it in the way the stones groaned, the way the air tasted metallic and cold. If she didn’t stop...
Help her,the dragon said, and for once it wasn’t claiming; it was urgent.She is drowning.
I knew that much was true. But I also knew that if I crossed that threshold, the dragon would stop asking and start taking... And I was very aware of what it wanted to do to every living thing in this room that wasn’t her...
Go. Quickly.
She isn’t in danger. We are in danger from her, I told the beast, but it only responded with a growl that shook me from the feet up.
Footsteps sounded from behind me. I turned to watch as Tristan stopped at my shoulder. He took in the room the way he took in everything: completely, quietly, without the small flinch most people wouldn’t have been able to suppress. His dark eyes moved from the spinning debris to the cracked wall to Galahad, who was still pressed against it, to the girl at the center of the storm.
He didn’t ask permission. He simply walked past me and into the room.
I let him, though I didn’t know why I let him. Perhaps I figured her magic was no match for his death magic, or perhapsI didn’t even think about it but just knew someone had to try to dismantle her. To stop the havoc she was wreaking.
Tristan walked into the maelstrom like it was simply weather he’d decided not to mind. The water pushed at him: I watched his coat press flat against his chest, watched his hair whip sideways, but he kept moving. Toward her. He was speaking. I couldn’t hear what he was saying over the sound of the room tearing itself apart, but his mouth was moving in something low and steady, and his hands came up slowly, palms out, the way you’d approach something wild.
His power rose. I felt it the way you feel a drop in pressure: a subtle wrongness in the air, a heaviness that settled over the skin. Death magic. Where her power was storm, chaos, and the violent release of pressure, his was absence. Stillness. The held breath before the last one.
The two magics touched.
The maelstrom didn’t collapse. It quieted slowly. The suspended objects began to descend: the cup first, then the stool. Soon, the water retreated from the ceiling and fell in ordinary rivulets down the wall. The ice stopped spreading.
Her eyes came back to violet. It happened gradually: the white receding, the violet returning, the focus arriving like someone surfacing from deep water. She was shaking. Even from the doorway, I could see it. Both hands at her sides, she was trembling badly, and she was looking at Tristan and not at anyone else.
He said something else, and she took his outstretched hand, closing her eyes.
The last of the water settled.
It was then that Mordred arrived at my left shoulder. He was breathing slightly harder than usual, which for Mordred meant he’d come quickly. His mismatched eyes moved throughthe room with the systematic thoroughness of a man reading a report.
“I don’t understand,” he said quietly. Not to anyone in particular.
“The wards.” I didn’t look at him.
“Yes.” A pause. “The binding I placed on her: the strength of it was considerable, my lord. I used three anchor points and a suppression lattice tied specifically to her elemental channels. For her to break through that—” He stopped. Started again. “I don’t know how she did it.”
The ice crackled as it melted. Galahad was still breathing too fast against the far wall, a hand pressed to the cuts on his face.
“Her power was obviously stronger,” I said simply, because it was the truth.
Mordred said nothing. His crystal pendant caught the dim torchlight and held it.
In the room, Tristan had put his hand on her shoulder. She was still shaking, but less. She looked like something wrung out and left in the cold to dry.
Remove him!
I unclenched my hands from the doorframe and noticed that the wood had split under my grip. I looked at the raw, splintered marks my fingers had left, then I looked away.
“Get Galahad a physician,” I said, and I didn’t know how it was possible, but my voice came out even.
