The rest of the guards stopped fighting at that point, allowing Wren and Leo to hastily disarm them. They bound and gagged all four, then dragged them into the cell at the end of the hall. They’d be discovered eventually, but Wren hoped it wouldn’t be until the guard shift changed.
She removed the captain’s key ring but was crestfallen to see that the one for Julian’s cell was missing. She crouched before the captain and tore his gag free.
“Where is it?”
“Lord-Smith Vance has it,” he said with an inordinate level of satisfaction.
“Of course he does,” Wren muttered, shoving the gag back in place.
“Now what?” asked Leo from behind her.
Hands shaking slightly, she faced Julian’s cell.
“I…，” she began, voice tremulous, but Julian ignored her. He was tugging off the black glove on his left hand… a glove she’d never seen him remove before. And underneath…
There were black lines sprawled across his hand, wrapping around the musculature like tendons or veins.
It was iron. Shards of iron embedded in his skin. Wren thought of what he had told her about amplifiers, about the combination of material, blood, and living matter.
There was bright-red scarring where metal met skin, and Wren flashed back to their kiss in the spring, when her fingertips had trailed over raised ridges across his shoulder, the contact causing him to hastily pull away.
The lines of iron disappeared under his sleeve, confirming that the implants likely went all the way up his arm.
Avoiding their stares, Julian crouched before the lock. Like the bars, it was made of steel—iron in nature, but an alloy, and therefore untouchable to his magic.
He couldn’t manipulate or reshape the lock, but apparently, with iron reinforcement, he could crush it with his bare hand. Wren recalled the wooden shelf in the closet in Caston, the fact that he had accidentally crushed it to splinters suddenly making sense.
The metal screeched as his hand squeezed, damaging the lock beyond repair and peeling it away from the frame. Wren marveled at the intricate control involved to make the iron implants bend and twist and function within his living hand.
The door swung wide, and he strode through it, drawing his glove back over his hand.
He made directly for Wren.
She backed up until she bumped into the cold stone wall, then had no choice but to stand there and meet his gaze, his fury, head-on.
He looked slightly deranged, his hair askew, his eyes sparking dangerously. Despite how effortless it had looked, he was sweating from the exertion of crushing that steel lock. He kept shaking out that hand as if there was pain as well as fatigue.
He came to a stop bare inches in front of her. She raised her head. “I’m sorry.”
His lip curled, disbelief etched across his features. She couldn’t blame him. She had betrayed him willingly, however difficult it had been.
“He would have killed you. I couldn’t let him.”
“He. Your father,” he said, speaking the words with careful deliberation. She regretted he’d had to find out that way, but it was relatively low on her list of sins, so she decided against apologizing again.
“You were right,” she said instead. His expression flickered, and she couldn’t tell if he was surprised that she had admitted as much or annoyed that the words were so insufficient. “We never should have come here. And we need to leave. Now.”
He continued to stare at her, hard, and then a rueful smile twisted his mouth. He chuckled darkly and stepped away, giving her space. A part of her lamented his absence.
She glanced around, then pointed to a locker on the far side of the room. “Your armor and weapons,” she said. He stalked wordlessly toward it.
“I think that went well,” Leo said brightly. “For me, anyway.”
She glowered at him.
“What are you up to, little bird?”
Wren froze. Slowly she turned toward the stairwell, fear pinning her to the spot. Her father stood in the doorway with half a dozen of his personal guard ranged on either side.
Leo and Julian had also paused, and now both their heads swiveled to face her.
She swallowed. “I’m leaving,” she said, her voice tight. “We’re leaving.”
“I see. I know you’ve been through a trying time—all three of you. And high-pressure situations like that can cause a certain… bond… to form between the unlikeliest of people.”
Wren did not appreciate his condescending tone. “Like between you and my mother?”
He sighed, but in an indulgent—though still slightly frustrated—way. “Wren, your mother and I—”
“Enough,” she cut in. “I don’t want any more lies from you.”
For the first time, her father’s confident facade faltered. “I’m not sure what—”
“No. More. Lies.”
He didn’t know that she’d been eavesdropping on his conversation with Odile, but he could tell she’d discovered something she wasn’t meant to.
“What did Odile say to you?” he asked, trying to figure out what she knew without exposing himself.
“She didn’t say anything to me, but she said a good deal to you. I won’t wind up like him. Like Locke. Odile was right. We have to destroy it.”
Wren felt everyone’s eyes on her, particularly Julian’s. He knew nothing of her plans or what else she had discovered that night, but he undoubtedly knew she was talking about the well.
Vance’s eyes fluttered closed, and he cast a surreptitious glance over his shoulder at his guards. “You don’t understand—”
“I understand better than you!” Wren burst out. “I saw, okay? I saw the result of what happened that day. Hundreds of bodies, crushed to dust. Their souls forever trapped. I felt it when I touched the magic. I felt the danger. We can’t—”
“Look around, Wren! The Dominions are safe and at peace, and that is also the result of what happened that day. Think of what else we could accomplish together! All this means”—he withdrew the ring as he slowly walked toward her—“is that you are more powerful than you thought. Capable of more than you can imagine. More than Locke. It means you are different. Special.”
“I don’t want to be,” Wren said, staring at the ring.
“I know. But it doesn’t change anything. You are still a bonesmith. And you are still my daughter, Wren, in all the ways that matter. I have loved you as a daughter, and so my daughter you will always be.” His voice was constricted, his expression sincere, and it caused tears to fill Wren’s eyes.
She reached for the ring, and he let her take it, thinking he had won. He tilted his head at his guards, directing them to apprehend Leo and Julian. The prince was unarmed, and Julian had yet to make it to the storage locker. Ironheart would not be enough.
But the instant Wren’s fingers touched the ring, she felt the well’s power within her stir. Apparently it was an amplifier, as Julian had guessed. She just hadn’t noticed before with the well’s power fresh and foreign and coursing through her. But now, with the passage of time and distance, she felt the way it reared up again, awakened by the ring.
She understood then what it might have been like to be Locke. To have what you needed right there at your fingertips.