Page 76 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

“And it was a gift.” His grip stays exactly where it is. “You gave me months of being a man with a wolf he couldn’t reach instead of something somebody built and left in the North Range for later. I got to have those. Some of them were the best of my life.”

He takes a strike across the forearm and doesn’t slow down.

“Both of those are true. I’m not picking one of them to make this simpler for you.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

“I know you’re not. That’s most of why I’m still holding your hand.”

He chooses me with all the anger still in him, he lets me see all of it while he does it. The two of us have spent our long lives being the ones who stand in front. He’s done it in every pack that never kept him. I’ve done it in every room I ever walked into, deciding what people could hold and holding the rest myself. Neither of us has ever handed a piece of that to another person and trusted them to carry it. We do it now, in the middle of a chamber coming apart, with a man throwing everything he has left at us. Then our power runs together. There’s no start to it, that’s the first thing I notice, nothing in me has to make room for anything.

I’ve worked next to other people who carry magic my whole adult life. Lyanna and I have layered a ward together a dozen times. Every one of those occasions was two people handing work back and forth across a join you could put a finger on. There’s no join in this. The white flame goes out from my hands and comes back with his sealing in it. His repair goes out into a tear and my reading goes with it. The tear is shut before either of us has decided which is shutting it.

It doesn’t work like two things put together. It works like one thing that got split a very long time ago and has finally been allowed to move the way it was meant to. The flame has never done what it’s doing now. It goes further and cleaner. There’s a section of corrupted architecture off to my right that would have taken me a full minute two hours ago and it burns off in one pass. Every signature I’ve ever had under my hands was its own separate thing. His and mine aren’t two signatures with a bridge between them right now. They’re one, running through both of us, and I can’t find the place where I stop.

Faelan’s face changes. There’s fear now, real, and all at once. I’ve never seen fear on that man. He finally knows what he’s looking at. He’s been inside the founders’ work longer than I ‘ve been alive. If there was ever a line in it about what a lock and a convergence point do standing on the same ground, he found it before anybody. What he built, he built across centuries, against people who could be taken apart one at a time. The founders made this entire architecture to keep a lock and a convergence point from ever standing together.

Nobody designed anything to survive the two of us choosing each other.

He throws. It comes at both of us and lands like it’s hitting one person. What comes back at him takes it apart in the air. He tears. We close it together without dividing the work. He drives a construct into the edge of an opening and it comes loose before he’s finished setting it. The architecture answers Valen. The corruption on it burns off in my flame. Neither of those happens second. Then the fight turns.

He’s been driving us the whole night, now he’s the one giving ground. The tears shut faster than he can open them. The constructs come apart before they finish forming. The Council has been holding the far end of this chamber since we walked in and some of the strain goes out of them. Bancroft’s wings come down out of the angle they’ve been locked at. Not far, just enough to see.

I hold on to Valen’s hand through every part of it. It isn’t finished. Faelan isn’t finished either. There’s a man in front of us who’s been getting ready for tonight longer than my parents have been married, and there are three women I love realms away with his hands still in their marks.

None of that is settled. I don’t have a plan for any of it. I’m holding on to him anyway. For the first time since the day I met that man, holding on isn’t something I have to manage.

Chapter 46

Valen

It hasn’t stopped.

Whatever ran together between the two of us back there is still running. I stretch out a hand, what comes off it is hers as much as mine. The columns of light are the same ones I walked in under. Gold, green, a blue. They come down through this chamber, go up past where my eyes can follow, into brightness too thick to look into. Eleven of them I can count and more past those. These are the anchors. Every one of them is founders’ work, holding this realm in the position they put it in, they all have a black split running the whole length of them.

That’s Faelan. Centuries of him, worked into the grain of the place like rot coming up through old wood. Out at the edges the Council is still holding. Five of them, wings spread wide, locked. They’ve been in that position since we walked in and not one of them has thrown anything at Faelan. If one of them lets go long enough to hit him, the whole place comes down.

Nyxiana stands beside me her wings open at full span. There’s nothing in the light in here that ought to make a color and it comes off them in one anyway. Her hair is moving in a wind that doesn’t touch my skin. Beautiful is the first word I reach for and it’s too small for her. So is every one that comes after it. Magnificent. Terrible. The kind of thing men used to build churches for. None of them fit her. I’ve been alive a long time and I’ve never had to find a word for a woman before.

There’s no good reason to be looking at her in the middle of this but I look a moment longer than I have any use for. Then I put my attention back on the columns.

Faelan wrenches a construct out of the warped air between two of them and sends it at us fast and low. My hum goes out to meet it in the same instant her flame catches the other side. The thing buckles between them, comes apart in pieces that stop existing before they land. The column nearest us flickers while that happens. The split in it thins and the light behind it runs clean for about a second. Then it closes over again.

Killing what he throws won’t finish this. I could stand here and take every construct he makes for the next hour and those columns would still be his at the end of it. The moment either of us goes down he starts again with a realm’s worth of architecture in his hands. I have to take the columns off him, at the same time, instead of one at a time in front of me. That means dropping every barrier I have.

I’ve had a hand on this thing since the fight started and I’ve got no idea what it does without one.

Nyxiana’s eyes have gone gold. Not at the edges. All the way through, both of them, dragon fire with no violet left anywhere in it. She sets her feet beside mine and puts her hands out. Then looks at me and nods. I haven’t said a word about any of it nut she knows and I open all of it at once. It spreads out of me in every direction. Down through the floor, out across the chamber, up past the top of the columns where I can’t see. It’s the most natural thing I have ever done.

The nearest column takes it first. The black split in it closes from the bottom up and the light behind it comes back clean. Then the two past it. Then six more. It runs the whole length of the chamber faster than I can follow it, every split closing as it passes. Faelan feels every anchor lock against him. He throws the last of what he has, three constructs at once, all of them at me, aimed to arrive before the seal finishes running. Nyxiana takes all three. Her flame goes out in three directions at once, wings spread wide behind her, and all three burn down to nothing before they cover half the distance.

The last column seals and e very anchor in this realm locks into place underneath me at the same moment. I have all of them. The hum under my sternum goes quiet for the first time since it woke up. The Council eases. Bancroft’s wings come down a fraction. Samuel’s stance comes off the brace he’s been holding for hours. Faelan is still standing in the middle of the chamber but there’s nothing left in his hands. Every column in here belongs to me now, he has no hold on any of them.

The light in the columns nearest him starts leaning his way. He holds still and lets it come.

“The founders were criminals,” Faelan says. His voice carries the length of the chamber and he isn’t in any hurry about it. “That part was always true. Whatever the two of you decide to tell yourselves after tonight, it will still be true in the morning.”

There’s no doubt in that man anywhere. I kept waiting for him to break. To look at what he’d done and back off it. He’s going out of this world exactly as certain as he came into it.