I broke Zereth's grip before I decided to.
There was no calculation in it, no weighing of costs the way Noa Genesis liked to lay them out for me in neat columns. One heartbeat I was standing on the rampart watching a hammer wreathed in captured starlight begin its fall, and the next I was already gone, the stone under my boots replaced by open air and then, an instant later, by the cracked flagstones of the gate courtyard itself.
I caught the hammer's head an inch above Malrik's sternum.
The force of it should have driven my arm through my own chest. Instead it drove a crater into the stone beneath us both, a perfect circle of shattered granite radiating out from where Noa Genesis's black-and-rainbow plating had closed around blessed steel like a fist closing around a wasp. Ser Cadmon's eyes—the first real expression I'd seen on him—widened just slightly before he found his composure again and set his weight to wrench the hammer free.
It didn't move.
