Page 108 of Renegade Kingdom
He’d learn that. When I was standing in front of him with ice in my veins and his lies frozen in his throat, he’d learn exactly what he’d built.
Something better than he deserved.
Something that was made to destroy him.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Tank
Rhidian walked like a man who hadn’t decided yet whether he was glad to be alive.
Not in any obvious way. He kept pace, didn’t complain, took his turn on watch without being asked. But I’d spent enough time around soldiers to know the difference between a man moving forward and a man going through the motions while his head was still somewhere else. Every so often his gaze would fix on nothing, and his hand would drift to his side where a sword hilt should have been, and he’d check himself and look away.
He hadn’t asked for a blade. And no one had offered one yet. That was probably something we needed to sort before we arrived.
We were on the edges of the Wildling Forest and a day out from Spring when he fell into step beside me.
Fizzle was perched on his shoulder, which was an unusual choice given that Fizzle usually claimed mine or Alyssa’s shoulder or the nearest high point with a clear view of everyone. I hadn’t asked why. The small creature fixed me with one dark eye and said nothing, which meant he was listening.
“The men who fought at Ice Falls with me,” Rhidian said. “How many made it out?”
I thought about the question before I answered. Not because I was deciding whether to tell him, but because I wanted to get it right. “We didn’t have a clean count in the chaos. But we brought back more than we lost.” I paused. “The ones who held the line longest took the worst of it. Some of them are at Spring now. Some didn’t make it.”
He received it the way soldiers receive these things. Still, without visible reaction, absorbing the weight of it somewhere internal. “I gave the order to hold that line. They were following my command.” A beat. “And I was already dead when they followed it.”
There wasn’t much to say to that. I didn’t try to find something.
“That’s a strange thing to have to live with,” he said.
“It is,” I agreed.
Fizzle made a sound that might have been a sigh. “Guilt is a very inefficient use of life.”
Rhidian looked at him sideways. “Were you always like this?”
“Yes,” Fizzle said, without remorse. “Your men made a choice. Honour it by doing something useful with the life you’ve been handed. Moping will not improve the situation.” He paused. “And eat something when we arrive. You’ve barely eaten since the Fifth Court. Annoying.”
He nodded once. He’d asked the question because he needed to know the answer, not because he wanted to be managed. I guess some people appreciated Fizzle’s brutal form of honesty.
We walked in silence for a bit. The forest was doing the thing it had been doing for two days now, opening up ahead of Alyssa’s path, branches lifting out of the way, undergrowth thinning. Fizzle watched a bird land on a low branch nearby and regarded it with what I’d come to recognise as thoughtful disdain.
“She shouldn’t be here,” Fizzle said eventually, to no one in particular.
I glanced at him. “Alyssa?”
“The bird.” He flicked one small claw. “Too far east. Migration’s off.” He resettled his feathers, which was a thing Fizzle apparently did now when he was uncomfortable with a conversation but unwilling to leave it. “The land is recalibrating. It will take time.”
Which was about as close as Fizzle came to explaining anything directly. I filed it away.
We came over the ridge before midday, and the smell of Spring hit before the sight of it. Green and dense and growing, the kind of scent that got into your chest and settled. I felt the bear ease for the first time since the Fifth Court, the territory recognition unwinding something that had been coiled tight since the scout at the border.
Then I saw the palace and the easing stopped.
When we’d left, it had been full. Now it was something beyond that. The sound reached us before the sight did, a low continuous hum of too many people in too much proximity. Figures moved on the upper balconies. Firelight in every window. Voices and the smell of cook fires coming from directions that told me people had spread into the outbuildings and the courtyards, anywhere with a roof and four walls.
Fizzle clicked his beak. “The courts have been emptying for months. People go where there is a chance of safety.” A pause. “Whether or not that chance is actually better.”
I counted what I could see from the treeline and quietly revised every supply calculation I’d just settled on. There was no possible way we could sustain these numbers.
