Page 165

He follows.

The bond draws tight around that shared cadence, and the devourer’s force crashes into it like a flood striking a channel cut through stone. It still hurts. It still burns. Corin’s body trembles under the strain, and the gold beneath his skin flares bright enough to turn the rain around us into sparks.

But he remains standing.

I step closer until my shoulder presses against his side.

“Isolde,” he warns through clenched teeth.

“I am aware.”

“You are touching a man full of devourer energy.”

“Yes.”

“That should alarm you more.”

“It alarms me a reasonable amount.”

“That is not comforting.”

“I am not here to comfort you.”

Despite everything, a breathless sound tears out of him, halfway between a laugh and a growl. The bond steadies again, stronger this time, and I feel his structure pull back from the dangerous edge by a fraction.

Vaerith’s voice lashes across the courtyard. “You see how it clings to her. The stabilizer bloodline is compromised.”

I turn my head enough to look at him.

The folio under my arm is soaked, but the copies inside are sealed. The correspondence. The breeding documents. The proof that he looked at generations of my family and saw a tool he could preserve until useful.

“My bloodline is not yours to cite,” I call.

His mouth curves with cold satisfaction. “It exists because my house preserved it.”

The words strike as intended.

For one second, the courtyard, the devourer, the storm, and even Corin’s heat fall away beneath a sickening echo of the archive page. Preserve. Preserve. Preserve. My mother. My grandfather. My great-grandmother. Every survival reclassified as strategy by a man who thinks ownership retroactively makes him god.

Corin feels the blow through the bond.

His hand covers mine against his chest, grounding me even as he shakes under the devourer’s pressure.

“No,” he says, voice low enough that only I hear. “He doesn’t get that.”

The simple certainty steadies me.

I look back at Vaerith. “Your house preserved nothing. It hoarded people it did not understand and called that stewardship.”

Syrenya’s voice rises from behind the broken ward shield. “That one should go in the minutes.”

Lady Othrel snaps, “It will.”

The devourer roars.

The sound is not loud in the ordinary sense. It moves through marrow, through stone, through the thin membrane of the world itself. The hollow chest flares open, and the force of its hunger begins drawing loose energy from Vaerith’s own circle. Red sigils rip free of the ground and spiral toward the creature.

Vaerith’s expression changes.