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The backlash threw Del back a half-step. Her boots scraped stone. She kept her palm on the anchor point. Her teeth were clenched. Her jaw locked. The light built to a brightness that hurt and then went out all at once, like a switch thrown.

Silence fell.

Eric drew a breath.

The sound was ragged and too deep, lungs that had been still for over a year finding their range again. He drew a second breath. This one caught. He coughed. Once. Twice. A wet, tearing sound that ended in something that might have been a word if his throat had been working.

His eyes focused.

He took in the rune on the floor first: the blood-and-ash spiral, the outer ring, the anchor point darkening where Del’s palm had pressed. The cut across her left palm was still bleeding, the blood running down her wrist and soaking the cuff of her sleeve. The ledger lay open on the worktable, its diagram visible from where he sat: the dissolution-and-return, hand-copied in brown ink that had faded with age.

He looked at Aislinn.

She was still on her knees in the center of the room. Her hands pressed flat against chalk circles that had gone grey. Her head was bowed. Her brown hair hung around her face. She was breathing. That was the only thing Del could be sure of from where she stood. Aislinn was breathing.

“How long,” Eric said.

His voice was cracked, barely above a whisper: a demand for a number.

Aislinn lifted her head. Her face was grey. Her lips were dry. She looked at Eric across the room and said, “One year. Three months. Sixteen days.”

The numbers landed. Eric’s expression didn’t change. His blue eyes held steady on Aislinn’s face. He closed his eyes for three full seconds. His chest rose and fell. When he opened them again, his voice was already settling back into its formal register. The cracks were still there, but underneath them was the precision Del remembered from the two times she’d met him before: each word placed, each syllable measured.

“Arrow took my name in order to blind you,” Eric said. “He succeeded.”

Aislinn’s anchor circles went dark.

The chalk lines dropped from grey to nothing in the space between heartbeats. Aislinn folded. Her body hit the stone floor before Del could fully close the distance. The sound was hollow, stone against bone, with no cushion and no give.

Del caught her shoulders on the way down. She took Aislinn’s weight and went with it, her knees hitting stone, one hand still bloody, the other cradling Aislinn’s head before it struck. She got Aislinn’s head into her lap. Aislinn’s body was limp. Her arms fell to her sides. Her eyes were closed.

Del pressed two fingers to the pulse point at Aislinn’s throat. The skin was cold. The pulse was there: thin and fast, racing under her fingertips like something trying to outrun itself. Del held her fingers there and counted. One hundred and twelve beats in sixty seconds, too fast but present, steady in its thinness.

Eric got to his feet without assistance.

His movements were stiff. He placed one hand against the wall and pushed himself upright. He stood for a moment with his weight on both feet, testing, then stepped away from the wall. He crossed to the worktable. His gait was uneven. One foot dragged slightly. He reached the table and picked up the ledger.

He read the open page: the diagram of the dissolution-and-return, the name-lock geometries, the annotations in brown ink that detailed blood measures and anchor protocols. His blue eyes moved down the page. He turned it, read the facing page, and set the ledger down.

He looked at Del. “You knew this shape.”

It was a statement that required no answer. His voice was flat and formal, already cataloging what he’d found on his way back from somewhere dark.

Del gave him no answer. She kept her fingers on Aislinn’s pulse. Her eyes stayed on the floor. Her jaw was set. Her bleeding hand had left a dark smear on Aislinn’s sleeve where she had caught her. The blood was drying and turning brown at the edges.

Eric moved to the hearth. He picked up a blanket folded on the stone bench and brought it back. He didn’t hand it to Del. He laid it across Aislinn’s legs himself, his movements careful, measured. The blanket was wool. Old. It smelled of sage and woodsmoke.

“The binding was flawed.” Eric stood over them, his shadow falling across Del’s knees and Aislinn’s still face. “Arrow took the name, but he didn’t understand the architecture. Sorcerer names have redundancies. Fail-safes. He missed one.”

Del looked up at him. “Can you fix what he did to her?”

Eric’s expression didn’t change. His blue eyes held hers across Aislinn’s unconscious body.

“I don’t know,” he said.

The ritual room was cold. Stone floor and stone walls surrounded air still holding the chemical wrongness of magic that had been pushed too hard. The iron candle stands had gone still. One candle was out. The other burned low, its flame steady now, throwing amber light across the rune on the floor, the two women on the stone, the man standing over them with a sorcerer’s eyes and a name that had been stolen and returned.

Del kept her fingers on Aislinn’s pulse. The beat continued, thin and fast and present.