Page 159 of Zenith Court

She looked at Caspian’s arm around her, Hale’s hand over hers, then my palm against her face. “Yes.”

The answer did not warm the missing line, but my grip on her eased.

Behind us, water drained through twelve broken channel-mouths. The basin had stopped throwing light and lay dark inside its cracked rim. Stone dust floated across the surface. One overturned lamp hissed where the last of its oil met the flood.

The guards had stopped fighting. The man nearest me rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling as though he had never seen it. Another sat in the channel with both hands open on his knees, his silver cord soaked and clinging to his wrist. Delphine collected their blades and pushed them beyond reach.

Nobody was dead. I checked twice because the first answer seemed too generous for the room we had made.

The guard I had taken down had a swelling above one ear and coughed water onto the stone, but he breathed without help. Hale rolled him onto his side. Delphine used a strip of gray sleeve to bind the cut on another guard’s thigh. Nobody thanked us. Nobody tried to stop us.

My own injured wrist had begun to throb beneath its wet bandage. The burn Astra’s power had left in the passage now circled the bone in a raised white line. I flexed my fingers. All five moved, slowly.

Astra saw the movement. “Your hand.” Her voice scraped on the two words.

Relief hit hard enough to make me stupid. “Still attached. I checked.”

Her mouth moved without quite becoming a smile. I took it anyway.

Hale shifted his palm from her wrist to the side of her neck. “Any numbness?”

She considered before answering. “Only where they were.”

Caspian’s jaw tightened. “The lines are spent.”

“Not severed?” I asked.

He looked at the unmarked skin of her wrist. “A severing leaves damage. There is none I can see.”

“You cannot see beneath the skin,” Hale said.

“Neither can you.”

“No.” Hale kept two fingers against her pulse. “So we do not promise what we cannot prove.”

Caspian accepted the correction without the fight I expected. Magnus had been dead only a few hours. His last word to his son had been Maybe, and Caspian had carried it down every stair beneath the Court, then put both hands into lead and stone because Astra needed the basin opened. Only when Hale refused to promise did Caspian’s hands begin to shake against her sleeve. He tucked them closer before she could see.

Astra’s gaze dropped to her own hand. She pressed her thumb where the three lines had met, tested once, and stopped. “They’re gone.”

“Quiet,” I said.

Caspian glanced at me. “That is not a medical distinction.”

“Good. I’m not a physician.” I kept my hand against the back of her neck. “I know what gone feels like. This isn’t it.”

The words sounded less certain outside my head. Astra studied me, not asking for proof I did not have. After a moment, she leaned a fraction more of her weight into Caspian and left her hand beneath Hale’s.

Caspian looked at Hale. Hale did not look away.

When Caspian shifted his arm higher behind her shoulders, Astra startled. He stopped at once. “Here?” he asked, showing her where his hand would go before he moved it again.

“Here,” she said.

Hale told her before he changed fingers at her pulse. I moved my thumb away from the scrape near her jaw and waited until her eyes came back to mine. None of us had needed those pauses yesterday. We needed them now.

Delphine came over with her captured blades bundled in both hands. Blood had soaked the bandage high on one forearm. “Can she stand?”

“Eventually,” Caspian said.