Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 134 of 619

Ajax stayed on the cliff after the woman vanished. Elara did not move. The sea went on under them. He turned his father's blade over in his lap and thought about the seven days and the one casting waiting in the band on her wrist. "Tell me what you can build," he said. "Not heal. Build. Something that stays." Elara looked at the band. The light in it had settled to a slow pulse. "I've never spent this much at once. But it will hold shape if I set it right. Stone. Light. A line I draw in the ground." "How long does it last." "If I bind it to something already here, it lasts as long as the stone does. If I hang it in the air, it goes when I go." He thought about the gate. The opening the mason was cutting for it. The gnome-forged iron that would hang there in six days. Whatever came through would come through that. "A wall of light across the gate," he said. "Everything alive stops at it." "Then anything with a heart can't pass. Including us." She shook her head. "And she'll turn sideways and go over the cliff. It only buys the front." "Then not that." Elara pulled her knees up and set her wrist across them. "Bind it to the gate itself. Into the iron. Anyone who crosses without your blood in the ground first burns from the inside. One step, two at most." "Us," he said. "Your blood is already at the seat. I tie the ward to it. You, and whoever you name at the setting. Six names, no more. After that the ward won't know them." He counted in his head. Grayson. Chalam. Marco. Tucker. Asher. Elara. Six. "Permanent." "As long as the gate stands.“ "The gnome iron won't break." "No." He turned the blade again. "What does it cost you past the band." "All of the light I have stored. I’ll be well after it’s done." "When." "The night the gate hangs. Before dawn, with all six there and your palm open on the threshold." He looked at her. She was not selling it. She was telling him what it was. "Do it," he said. "When the gate hangs." She nodded once. The band pulsed slower, as if it had heard him. She lowered her wrist and closed her hand over it. "Then I sleep now," she said. "I need every night I have left." She stood and walked back down the path. Ajax stayed on the lip of the cliff with his father's blade across his knees and the shape of the thing decided. Six days until the iron came. Seven until the dark moon. A ward set in blood on the threshold, and the woman who hunted him would walk into it first.