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“I’m fine.”

Valene looked at her side. “You are bleeding.”

“Later.”

Valene made a sound that communicated an extensive range of objections in one syllable. She stepped into the gap in the ward line and held it with both hands, the relevant action.

Not the Rift. Below the Rift. Deep in the water beneath the cliff boundary, in the old containment sequences she’d seen described in Drayce’s cave photographs and in the writing that predated the founding families by centuries.

Something old noticed her.

It didn’t attack. It didn’t speak. It did what ancient things did when they became aware of a change in the landscape they’d been monitoring: it turned its attention toward her and held it there for one long, cold, patient moment — like a hand pressing flat against a window from the outside, not through, not yet, but knowing the window was there—knowing who was on the other side.

The Drowned King.

She noticed it again. She held the ward line. She logged it as extremely concerning — revisit when not actively bleeding. She had a tab for this. She’d been accumulating tabs since she arrived in this town.

The ward lines she was holding pushed back against the Rift’s pressure, and the Rift’s pressure eased. Not because it was defeated. Because the balance had shifted, and it had noted this the way it noted everything: with patience, and patience, and patience.

The breach closed by degrees.

The creatures withdrew. The cold pressure from below the Rift lessened as the ancient awareness folded back into wherever it lived when it wasn’t paying attention. The ward line under Althea’s hands shifted from emergency-running to steady-running, then to the low, warm hum she’d been learning to read all autumn as its baseline.

The standing stones along the cliff boundary brightened as the magical pressure peaked and then resolved — the phosphorescence running the full line of containment runes, a pale, cold light she’d never seen at full strength before. It was not beautiful in the decorative sense. It was beautiful in the sense of something functioning as it was supposed to for the first time in a long time.

She kept her hands on the anchor stone until Bexley said it was over.

“All positions holding,” Bexley confirmed. “Breach closed. Eastern section at full strength. Northern anchor—” a brief silence Althea had learned to read as Bexley doing rapid mental arithmetic. “Nominal.”

“Nominal,” Althea repeated.

“It means everything’s running the way it should.”

“I know what nominal means, Bexley.”

“You sounded uncertain.”

“I was savoring it.”

“That’s fair,” Bexley conceded.

The wolf shifted back.

She watched it happen from twenty feet away — the wolf’s mass resolving back into the man’s, Drayce standing at the cliff’s edge, putting on loose-fitting clothing, apparently indifferent to the fact of public nakedness. She was considerably less indifferent than she intended to admit. She’d also been holding her left side with her free hand, hoping no one had noticed.

Then he found her.

He crossed to her, and his eyes went straight to her hand, pressed against her left side. She’d watched him assess an injury this fast and this thoroughly before, and she’d apparently become a variable he automatically ran the assessment on.

“Don’t.”

He moved her hand, looked at the claw mark, and went still — the stillness that meant he was hauling the wolf back by force. She watched him do it. His shoulders went rigid, his hands on her careful and controlled at once.

“It’s not deep.”

“No.”

“You’ve been worse.”