It hurt.

  Not immediately — there was a second, maybe two, when I raised the Sealstone and opened myself all the way and it didn't hurt yet and I thought maybe Lyra had been wrong and it wouldn't be as bad as she said.

  Then it hit.

  Seraphine's destructive force was cold. Not temperature-cold — absence-cold. The cold of something that had been draining warmth for four hundred years. It came into me like a tide of grey nothing and it was heavy in a way I can't describe except to say it felt like grief. Pure, concentrated, four-century-old grief.

  I pulled.

  This was the part I'd been practicing. Not fighting it — the opposite. Receiving it. The way you catch a wave by swimming into it instead of bracing against it. I felt it hit the mark on my wrist, felt the Sealstone go bzing hot in my hands, felt my knees hit the ground — didn't notice falling — and I just kept pulling.

  I thought about Lyra: ride the wave.

  I thought about Dren: fme on, fme off, twenty times, same size each time. Trust what you know.

  I thought about Tam, who had tracked me across three countries with a repaired pack and called me an absolute idiot and been right.

  I thought about Seraphine, saying do it before I change my mind.

  I thought about a child in a vilge somewhere who'd had something break loose and gotten no help and ended up here, four hundred years ter, grey and empty and exhausted.

  I didn't fight it. I took it in. I held the cold grief of it and I changed it — the way you change any raw material, any crude thing, into something that can be used differently. I took the hunger and I tried to give it rest.

  The Sealstone bzed white.

  The mark on my wrist threw light like a small sun.

  And then the binding took it.

  The stone channeled everything I'd absorbed — the vast grey cold of four hundred years — into the ttice of time and memory beneath the ruins, the structure Orvaine had built and that Seraphine's own power had helped crack and that could now, with enough force, be whole again. It spread outward like light from a ntern, settling into the ley-lines, sinking into the earth.

  A door closing.

  Gently.

  Just — closing.

  "Kael."

  Two voices. Both familiar. Both coming from somewhere above me, which meant I was on the ground, which — yeah, that tracked.

  I opened my eyes.

  Tam was crouched in front of me. His face was doing something complicated that I hadn't seen it do since we were seven and my mom died. Lyra was beside him, notebook closed for the first time in eleven days.

  "Are you okay?" Tam said.

  I ran a check. Hands present. Eyes working. A deep ache in my chest, my arms, my palms. Nothing broken. Everything used-up in the way that good hard work leaves you used-up, where the tiredness itself is proof of something accomplished.

  "Yeah," I said. "Yeah, I'm okay."

  I looked at where Seraphine had been.

  She was gone. Not ash — not violently. Just — absent. The binding had taken her as it reformed, and she was somewhere in the ttice, in the compressed time, contained.

  Resting. I hoped.

  "Did it work?" Dren asked from somewhere to my right.

  Lyra opened her notebook. Looked at whatever only she could read in the air above the fountain.

  "The ley-lines are restabilizing," she said. Her voice was quiet and certain. "The expansion is retracting. All of it." She looked up, and her eyes were very bright. "It worked."

  Dren sat down on the edge of the dry fountain and put his face in his hands.

  He didn't say anything for a while. None of us did.

  Sometimes there's nothing to say. Sometimes things just nd where they need to nd and you let them.