Page 166 of Zenith Tower

“That must be devastating.”

“I’ll have to be heroic in less strenuous ways.”

His fingers were warm around mine. No fever. No failing pulse beneath the bond. The green-gold line at my wrist rested quiet beside the other two.

I had spent so long fearing the moment his body would begin to lose its fight that I did not yet know what to do with proof that it had stopped.

Kieran understood before I found words for it. His thumb moved over the side of my hand.

“I’m here,” he said.

I nodded and ate before the eggs went cold.

Caspian was on the porch when I finished, wrapped in a borrowed coat with one arm held close to his ribs. Mist lay over the lower field, brightening where the sun reached it. He shifted on the step to make room for me but did not try to stand.

“How badly are you hurt?”

“One cracked rib. Two bruised. My dignity remains beyond repair.”

“Rev carried you into the cart.”

“I remember. She seemed pleased about it.”

I sat on his uninjured side. The porch boards had warmed in the sun, though cold still rose from the wet grass beyond them.

For a while we listened to Lior speaking softly inside the house. Delphine answered him in fragments. A cupboard opened. A chair scraped. Each small sound carried the careful awkwardness of two people trying to cross years neither of them had chosen.

“You could have changed Marrow,” Caspian said.

My hands tightened in my lap.

“I nearly did.”

“What stopped you?”

I looked across the field. Rain clung to the fence wire in bright beads, and the woods beyond it were dense enough to hide a road, a rider, an army.

“He was afraid of me. I wanted him to stay afraid.” The truth tasted ugly, but Caspian had never asked me to make myself easier to love. “I could feel the whole shape of his Mark beneath my hand. Not only the damage. Everything. I knew where to press if I wanted to hurt him, and for a moment I wanted to.”

Caspian’s expression did not change. “But you let go.”

“That doesn’t erase wanting it.”

“I didn’t say it did.” His hand covered mine. “You let go. That matters too.”

The three lines at my wrist had given me access to something the Council had spent generations trying to prevent. Kieran and Caspian and Hale had opened the power, but it did not end with them. Marrow’s Mark had yielded beneath my hand as readily as Delphine’s. Any Mark might.

I could heal what had been damaged. I could also damage what had been whole.

“They were right to be afraid of what I can do.”

“They’re right that it’s dangerous. They’re wrong that danger gives them ownership of you.” His thumb moved across my knuckles. “You had every reason to hate him, and he walked away with his Mark unchanged. I trust that more than I would trust someone who claimed the temptation never existed.”

I leaned against his shoulder, careful of the binding beneath his coat. He pressed his mouth to my hair.

His hand stayed over mine while the voices inside the farmhouse rose and fell behind us.

By midday the copied pages had dried. Rev sealed one packet for Aldric’s annex while Cosima wrote a second address in cramped, slanting script. The farmer had already sent his eldest daughter to move the courier horses from the south pasture, where they could not be seen from the road.