The Blessing lit, and for one half of one breath, the passenger and I were the only two things in all the worlds that mattered, because in that instant it could take me, and in that same instant I could cut it loose, and only one of us would move first.
The Wend had given me the cut in seven words, at the border, and made me repeat them until they lived in my bones. I release what was not freely given.
That was the whole of it. That was the blade. Because the passenger had latched to me through the unfinished harvest, and a harvest is a taking, a thing done to a soul without its yes. And the one power a lit Blessing holds that no working can answer is the power of a Luna's freely given word. I had refused the crown freely. I had been claimed freely. And now, in the half breath the Blessi
