Page 155 of Zenith Court

For the first time, her concentration shifted fully from the water to me. “Do you?”

“My mother knew enough to refuse your seat.”

“Your mother refused to choose at all.” Pain sharpened the First Chair’s voice. “She left this for whoever followed her. For me.”

“And now for me?”

“Someone still has to choose.”

“Sadie asked for her door to be opened. Marta asked for her arm back. That is all I have the right to touch.”

The First Chair looked down at the water.

“Then walk away,” she said. “Let the rite finish. Learn enough to change one suppression at a time.”

“And leave you holding every key.”

Her jaw tightened. “Until you can reach one person without touching the next.”

A body struck the stone behind me. Delphine called Jonah’s name. He answered immediately, breathless but standing. The First Chair’s gaze flicked toward the fight and returned to me.

The seam above the overflow channel pulsed again when the basin rose. The founder’s release ran around the field, not through the Marks inside it.

“I’m not opening their Marks,” I said. “I’m opening the field around them.”

The First Chair looked toward the third wall, then back at me.

“The suppression keeps the lines contained,” she said.

“It keeps the choice from them.”

The braid of water had thinned to half its width. The First Chair followed my gaze to the seam.

She tried to lift one hand from the basin. The braid tightened around her wrist and pulled it back hard enough to strike bone against stone. Her breath broke.

Survive, my mother had carved beneath a table nine years ago.

I ran the last steps to the basin and reached for the unfinished braid between her wrists and the stone.

44

Astra

The unfinished braid struck my palm and drove my hand against the basin ring. Beneath it, the seam opened.

The suppression had been built to resist force. Every time I pushed against it, it pressed back and left me sealed inside my own skin. The join above the overflow channel offered something else: two edges laid one over the other, meant to be lifted apart. I stopped pushing. I slid my hand between them.

Sound returned first—the strike of steel, Kieran’s ragged breath, the rite-guards chanting beyond the far threshold, where Delphine held them. Then heat flooded my wrists. Marble, apple, and leather snapped back into place so quickly that my sight blurred.

I was on my knees at the basin. The First Chair stood across from me with both arms caught in the rising braid, her face gone gray with effort. The current pouring from her wrists had thickened until light filled the basin’s throat. Each pulse shook the ring beneath us.

Kieran still held the near opening. Blood darkened one side of his jaw, and he kept his burned arm tight against his ribs while he fought with the other. Jonah guarded Caspian’s back at the first walkway. Delphine braced the far threshold, boots sliding on wet stone as the three guards in the channels tried to force their way through her.

Caspian knelt beside the ring with his fingers wedged beneath a square of dull metal. He pulled until the plate’s top edge showed above the floor. A Court seal covered its face. Blood smeared the metal around his fingers.

A hairline crack had begun across the stamped face.

He looked past me to three matching plates set where the other walkways met the ring—four anchors, one at each walkway. He braced one boot beside the exposed plate.