Claim

The bond did not open like a door.

It came back the way water comes back into a dry riverbed: all at once, from upstream, filling every part of a shape that had been sitting there empty and waiting for sixty-one days. Cassian made a sound. The burn under his shirt went out — not faded; went out, in an instant, the way a lamp does — and he sagged forward into her hands, and she held him up, an unranked girl in a borrowed coat holding the alpha of Blackthorn on his feet in the King's hall.