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“When I say,” he said quietly.

She nodded.

He drew her with him to the threshold, the invisible line where the ward’s pressure was the strongest. Even standing beside him, she could see the slight tension that moved through him as he neared it, the ward registering his proximity and pushing back.

He looked down at her. “Together,” he said.

Maia closed both hands around the shard. Caelith placed one hand over hers.

The light that answered was immediate. Silver and violet threaded together, brighter than either of them had produced alone. The ward flared in response, the markings on the walls igniting along their carved lines, and the pressure in the room spiked hard enough to make Maia’s ears ring.

She held on.

She felt it in her palms first, then up through her wrists, her arms. Something adjacent to pain but not exactly, it was more like a pressure that wanted to find a way through her. Beside her, Caelith’s jaw was locked, the glass veins beneath his skin flaring white.

The threshold shuddered.

“Now,” he said through his teeth.

He moved forward. The ward slammed back.

The force of it hit Maia like a physical blow, the shard burning white in her hands before the light extinguished entirely. Caelith was thrown sideways, catching himself hard against the wall. Neither of them moved.

Julen swore quietly from the doorway.

“Again,” Maia said, before she had finished deciding it.

Caelith pushed himself upright, breathing hard. “The frequency was wrong. I pushed too early - before the resonance had fully established.” He looked at her. “We need to hold it longer before I move. Can you sustain it?”

“Yes,” she said. She wasn’t certain, but certainty wasn’t available.

He came back to her side. She raised the shard again. This time when their hands closed around it together, she felt him consciously slow. Feeling for the rhythm of the ward rather than fighting against it.

The light built more slowly this time. Steadier.

The pressure came differently too, more like a rising tide, building with terrible patience. Maia’s arms shook. She locked her elbows and breathed.

It wasn’t enough.

The ward found a seam in their power before Caelith could move - some small imperfection in the way their two currents met. Hers still ragged from exhaustion, his still weighted with three, now four, prior failures.

It drove them back at once. A pulse of pressure threw Maia to her knees and tore a sound from Caelith she’d never heard him make before.

“Caelith—”

“I’m all right.” But he wasn’t.

Blood - silver, thin, welling along a hairline crack on his temple, tracing down toward his jaw. He wiped it away without looking at it, the gesture automatic. The gesture of someone who had done it enough times to stop being surprised by his own blood.

Julen crouched beside Maia, hauling her upright.

“That’s twice.”

“It only has to work once,” Maia said, though her voice was shaking.

Caelith looked at her for a long moment, at the exhaustion visibly cording through her arms and the shake in her muscles she couldn’t hide anymore. “If you can’t hold the third—”

“I can hold it.”