The Sword She Chose to Become

"Move," I said.

Seraphine did not.

The first white beam struck her back. Her armor vanished beneath it. Skin opened along her shoulders, exposing a lattice of dark light where her power held the body together.

She pushed me behind her with one arm.

I caught her wrist.

"I said move."

"I heard you."

"Then listen."

She looked back at me, and I saw the old woman from the village gutter: wounded, stubborn, incapable of admitting she could no longer stand.

"Help me," I said instead.

That reached her.

I set my palm against her uninjured side and drew a circle of foxfire around us. Her shadow met it. The next beam hit both powers and slowed, grinding against them with a sound like stone under a millwheel.

"There," I told her. "We can do this together."

Blood ran over her lip.

"For a little while."

The eye widened. Its light pressed harder.

Across the hall, Aurelia dragged herself toward a broken pillar, using it to rise. One horn remained as a jagged stump. Her dragon body had collapsed back into human shape, and gold blood covered her mantle.

"The outside guards," she gasped. "I can call them."

"Keep them outside," I said. "They can't stand beneath this."

She looked at the eye and understood.

The servants had escaped. The courtiers who remained crouched beneath tables or tried uselessly to pray. Their prayers made the eye brighter.

"Stop feeding it," I shouted.

Some obeyed. Others prayed harder.

Seraphine's hand shook within mine.

The life oath was gone, but I remembered the feeling of her pain crossing into me. I had never needed her to say she was frightened. I had known it in my bones.

Now I could only watch.

"How long?" I asked.

"Not long."

"Can you retreat into shadow?"

"It has closed the paths."

The Wayfarer confirmed it. Every passage in the hall led back to the eye's authority. My eighth seal could oppose that authority, but the ninth required a sovereign source strong enough to complete my claim.

The broken pillars had brought me almost far enough.

Almost was a cruel distance.

Seraphine heard the explanation through the remnant connection between our souls. Her gaze moved toward the sword in her hand.

I saw her understand before I did.

"No," I said.

She looked at me.

"You don't know what I'm thinking."

"I know you."

The words struck us both.

For a heartbeat, everything between us stood in that admission: a century, a furnace, five hundred empty years, a leather vest stitched badly because I had never expected love to require good craftsmanship.

Her eyes filled.

"Yes," she whispered. "You do."

The light broke through her chest.

She folded forward, still holding the barrier. I caught her beneath the arms. Her body felt impossibly cold.

"Sera."

The old name escaped before I could stop it.

She smiled with such naked relief that it hurt to see.

"Don't let that mean more than it does," I said.

"I won't."

This time, I believed she tried.

The eye spoke above us.

"You destroy yourself for a creature who has rejected you."

Seraphine lifted her head.

"He was never a creature to be used."

"You learned that late."

"I know."

She released my hand and drove her sword into the floor.

Lines of black flame spread around it.

I recognized the pattern. I had seen it from inside a furnace while Lucien's sword waited above me.

My stomach turned.

"Don't use that."

"The rite isn't his," she said. "He used it to steal. That isn't the only thing it can do."

Her lower body began dissolving into dark sparks. She looked down without surprise.

"A willing soul can choose its vessel. A sovereign soul can give the vessel its crown."

"You'd lose your body. Your throne."

"I'm losing the first already. The second was a road to you."

"That doesn't make it worthless."

She met my eyes.

"No. It makes it mine to spend."

For once, she was deciding only what belonged to her.

I hated how late that lesson had come. I hated that I could not find another answer quickly enough.

"Will you stay conscious?"

"If I bind myself rather than let another bind me."

"And if I don't take the sword?"

Her voice softened.

"Then it waits. It cannot command you."

The eye gathered its light. Cracks opened through our joined barrier.

Seraphine stepped into the circle.

Flame rose around her. The wounds vanished beneath it, not healed but consumed. Her dark hair lifted as her body broke into the same light that had once torn mine apart.

I could smell burning leather. The old scent brought back a winter when we had sat too close to a cottage fire, drying our clothes after walking through sleet. She had fallen asleep with her head in my lap. I had stayed awake because moving would wake her.

I had loved that ordinary weight.

There was no weight left now. I could see the ruined steps through her knees, the flame through her fingers. She watched me remembering and did not try to turn the memory into permission.

That restraint was new. I wished she had learned it while there was still a body I could have chosen to hold.

I reached toward her.

She caught my fingers one final time.

"I thought making you unable to leave would keep us together," she said. "I know what I destroyed."

My throat closed.

"You don't get to make this a bargain."

"It isn't."

"I can't promise to love you again."

Tears moved down a face already becoming translucent.

"I know."

She let go.

The remaining flame entered the black sword.

One side of the blade turned white. The other deepened into a darkness that held moving stars. Its edge grew bright enough to hurt my eyes.

A figure formed above it: Seraphine, whole in outline, clothed in shadow.

She knelt.

The eye recoiled, and the hall's frozen air loosened. I could breathe again.

Seraphine lifted the hilt toward me.

I remembered reaching up from the marble while she stood over me. I remembered the sword waiting to make me someone else's tool.

Now her hands trembled beneath the weapon she had chosen to become.

"Once," she said, "I tried to turn you into a blade I could keep."

She bowed her head.

"This time, I will be yours."

I did not forgive her.

I did not let the eye take either of us.

I reached down and closed my hand around the hilt.