Page 109 of Renegade Kingdom
Alyssa hadn’t slowed her pace. I watched as her gaze roamed over the palace as she catalogued the changes, but still she walked on. These were our people now. Having them herewasn’t a problem, keeping them safe, keeping them fed, it was a problem that was our honour to solve. Because the Spring Court was alive again.
We continued forwards, and the sentries spotted us before we reached the gates.
The reaction when people spotted us was immediate. Shouts rippling outward, movement coalescing into a crowd. Alyssa’s presence did what it always did now, the Spring Court magic surging in a way that everyone on the grounds could feel, the light of her moving through the air like warmth before a fire. Damon beside her with shadows trailing from his fingers in easy spirals, no longer a prisoner, no longer a threat they had to calculate, just a man walking freely through a camp that had last known him in chains.
And then someone recognised Rhidian, and the crowd noise changed.
I moved before I had time to think about it, putting myself between Rhidian and the swell of people pressing forward, not hostile, just shocked, the overwhelming fact of a dead prince walking among them too large to process quietly. Fizzle made a sound like a kettle reaching the boil and several people stepped back without being sure why.
“He’s alive,” I said, loud enough to carry. “That’s all you need to know for now. Give him room.”
It wasn’t subtle. It worked.
We were inside before the doors had even fully opened. There was no time to linger.
Ezra met us in the main corridor, and the relief on his face when he saw Alyssa was the particular kind that people try to contain and can’t quite manage. There were dark shadows under his eyes that hadn’t been there when we’d left. He carried the look of someone who’d been making decisions at the edge of his competence and knew it.
“Thank the realm,” he said. Then his eyes moved over the group, counting, cataloguing. When they landed on Damon, something shifted in his expression. He recovered quickly. When they landed on Rhidian, he went very still.
“Later,” Alyssa said, and her voice had something in it that hadn’t been there before. Quiet, but final. “Get everyone in the war chamber. Everyone who has a right to speak for others. Now.”
Ezra moved.
The war chamber was a room off the main hall, stone-walled and low-ceilinged, with a table that had been cleared of whatever had been occupying it and now held a spread of maps I didn’t recognise. I couldn’t help but wonder what it had been before it had been repurposed into this. Before it had witnessed the meetings and panicked strategies of a world under attack. Someone had been tracking movement. Arrows marked in what looked like charcoal, supply lines and patrol routes and positions that told a story about how bad things had gotten in the courts while we were in the Fifth. How had everything changed so much, so quickly?
We waited in silence. All of us pouring over the maps, mentally taking notes of what we’d missed. Arik was moving and he was better organised than I’d hoped for. It was almost like he’d known this was what we were going to do, but then, it probably was obvious because what other choice had we had?
It didn’t take long for people to start pouring in. Commanders of the freed Endless who’d proven themselves capable of leading. The senior fae who’d come over from the other courts and earned their place in the planning. Rhidian’s surviving men, or the officers among them, standing at the back of the room with the particular stillness of soldiers waiting for orders they could actually follow.
Fizzle arranged himself on the window ledge and appeared to go to sleep. He wasn’t asleep.
Alyssa stood at the head of the table and looked at the maps for a moment. Just a moment. Then she looked up.
She told them everything. Not every detail, not the private things, but the shape of it. The Fifth Court. What Nymeria had told her. What Damon was now, the shadow magic, what it could do, and what it meant that a fifth court existed and was claimed. And Arik. His endgame laid out plainly, not to frighten them but because they deserved to know what they were fighting and why.
The room was very quiet while she spoke.
I stood to her left, close enough that my arm nearly touched hers, and I watched the faces around the table. The fear that moved through the room when she described what Arik intended to do. The way that fear shifted when she explained what they had now, four courts claimed, a fifth potential king standing in this room, and a shadow magic that had never been seen since Nymeria herself. But we didn’t have everything we needed. Not Winter, not yet. But we had so much more than we’d had at the Ice Falls, and I had to believe that mattered.
“He knows we’re here,” she said. “He sent a scout to the Fifth Court before we left. We don’t know his timeline, but we have to assume he’s moving.” She looked at Ezra. “What’s your read on the palace’s defences?”
What followed was forty minutes of the most efficient planning I’d witnessed outside of a battlefield. She asked the right questions. When the answers contradicted each other she held both possibilities and didn’t force a resolution before she had enough information. When someone tried to argue past the evidence she cut it short without being unkind about it. When Rhidian offered his knowledge of Arik’s tactical preferences, she listened with the same attention she gave everyone else in theroom, and I saw the officers at the back stand straighter because their prince was being treated as someone whose voice counted.
She’d always been capable of this. The difference now was that she knew it.
At some point I stopped monitoring the room for threats and just watched her. The light that lived under her skin these days pulsed steadily in the low lamplight, the Spring Court magic responding to her presence the way it had been responding since we walked onto the grounds. The table, the maps, the people, the weight of everything coming, she held it all without flinching. Not because it wasn’t heavy. Because she’d decided she could carry it.
The bear settled in my chest for the first time since the Fifth Court.
When the meeting broke up I stayed as the others filed out, talking in low voices, moving with the particular purposeful energy of people who’ve been given something to do with their fear. Ezra lingered to ask a follow-up question. Rhidian’s officers clustered briefly around him the wonder of seeing him again apparent on all their faces. Fizzle dropped from the window ledge and padded out without acknowledging anyone.
Alyssa looked at the maps for a moment after the room emptied. Just the two of us. Then she exhaled, slow and controlled, and some of the composure she’d been holding loosened slightly at the edges.
I put my hand on her back. She leaned into it.
“That went well,” I said.
“They’re still scared.”
