Page 236 of The Robin on the Oak Throne

She reached for it. This vengeance was her own. She could tap into their sacred tree the way that Ethan and Genhad. She’d join their triskel, and she would exact revenge upon him for ever thinking he could do this to her.

But when she touched her magic, there was…nothing.

Her hand went to her chest. She could feel the thrum of her connection with Lorcan, no longer a thread but a wide open, live cable, a completed bridge. Like she could walk straight across it into his heart and soul.

Deeper into the well, there was emptiness. A long, vast stretch of desolation where her magic had once lived. She could sense that her powers wereon—her absorption was definitely there, in a neutral on position. But she could no more switch it off and on than she could before the spell had been broken. She reached for her slow motion and found a complete block. There was no magic she could access to turn the dial on her time manipulation. She held her hand out for the tree,hersacred tree, and still nothing happened. Her hand went to her ears. They were pointed. Her glamour had been stripped from her at some point, and now she was fully on display. It was just gone.

“What have you done?” she whispered in horror.

“I’m protecting you,” Lorcan said.

“And who is protecting her from you?” Graves asked, low and deadly.

“You fucked with her mind.”

Graves looked unimpressed. “Are you actually trying to justify forcibly binding her against her will and seizing control of her magic?”

Kierse clung to her white dress as panic set in. She hadn’t wanted this binding, but this was so much worse than she had ever imagined. Just when she had begun to come into her own with her powers. When she was pushing herselfto her limits and coming out on the other side. Now it was like she’d never entered this world at all.

“I can’t glamour,” she said. “I can’t hide my ears.”

“You don’t have to hide who you are with me,” Lorcan told her.

Graves snorted. “There’s no fucking way she’s staying here with you.”

He lunged for Lorcan. Lorcan was stronger on the solstice, his powers amplified by the longest day of the year, and he had unfettered access tohermagic. But Graves had the spear and his rage, and Kierse didn’t know who would win this time.

“Stop,” she whispered as another wave of panic struck her in the heart.

She should have been able to get between them. To make them see reason. But there was no reason here. Her knees buckled, and she fell back to the moss-covered ground, shaking. She fought the binding. She fought with everything she had. Reached for the sacred tree, the Oak Throne, anything that would listen to her, but all she heard in her mind was tortured silence.

And then a voice.

Fighting me won’t work, Lorcan told her.

She jolted in horror at the sound of him bridging their connection to speak directly into her mind. All that bullshit about Graves fucking with her head, and now he was speakinginto her mind, and he didn’t see the hypocrisy of it all.

Get out of my head!she screamed back down the line.

Lorcan flinched. In that moment, Graves sliced through the magic he was building and buried the spear into Lorcan’s shoulder.

Lorcan tumbled backward onto the ground. Graves wrenched the spear free and raised it overhead. He was ready to finish it all, finally. She should have let him that night he’d said he was going to fix his mistake with Emilie. She should have let the showdown happen, but she’d thought she was saving him. She’d never thought Lorcan would resort to this. That was her mistake.

“If you kill me, it kills her,” Lorcan told him.

Graves halted. He visibly strained at the threat. “It didn’t kill you when Saoirse died.”

“Our magic was connected, not entangled. Right now,I’mholding her magic, and if you sever it, she dies,” Lorcan told him. “I’ll come back after the solstice. We’re connected that way.Shewon’t.”

For a moment, Kierse thought that Graves would do it anyway. That he was so mad at Lorcan and the fucking audacity of the situation—the horrible ordeal he was now going through asecondtime—that she thought he might just kill him and get it over with. Even if the Oak and Holly cycle would keep bringing them back, continuously. But then Graves whirled the spear and buried it into the ground between Lorcan’s legs.

It was then that the solstice roared through Graves, the Holly King coming fully into his own. His arms spread wide as the surge of magic rushed up from him and blasted forward into Lorcan, reducing him from the height of his power to his weakest.

Graves fell to one knee at the end of it, drained to the bone. The Holly King had returned to his reign. A chill ran through the room. A promise of winter to come.

At the head of it all, Niamh sat down on the Oak Throne.

Chapter Seventy

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