Page 113 of Renegade Kingdom
“No.” He sounded almost surprised by his own answer. “I feel like it should. It was part of me for my entire life. The Summer Court’s magic, the royal marks, the connection to the land. I should feel hollow without it.” He paused, and when he continued there was something wondering in his tone. “Instead I feel lighter. Like I’ve set down a pack I’d been carrying so long I’d forgotten it was there.”
“The crown?”
“The crown. The duty. The performance.” He looked at me, and the openness in his expression made my chest ache. “I was so busy being the prince that I never figured out who Rhidian was underneath it. Now I don’t have a choice. I never wanted it. All it did was bring me pain. This is the second chance I needed Maddox. I know you feel guilty and there’s a part of me that feels like an ass to be happy in this situation because I know I asked too much of you. I know the burden you carry now is because of me.”
The guilt stirred in my stomach. It always did when I looked at him, a reflexive clench that saidyou killed himfollowed immediately by the memory of Damon’s voice sayingbring back Rhidianand the blinding golden light that had poured from Nymeria’s dying form.
“Stop,” Rhidian said gently.
“Stop what?”
“Whatever you’re doing in your head right now. I can see it on your face.” He turned to face me fully. “Maddox, I died protecting this world. I made that choice. I’d make it again. And Damon brought me back, which was his choice. The only person in this story who didn’tchooseanything was you. You followed orders. You fought a war that wasn’t yours to begin with and yet you still picked up a sword because it was therightthing to do.. And you’re carrying guilt for a death that I walked into with my eyes open. Besides, dying was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“You make it sound simple.”
“Itissimple. The complicated part seems to be convincingyouof that.” He bumped my shoulder with his. The gesture was so casual, so utterly devoid of princely reserve, that it startled a rough laugh out of me. “I’m free, Maddox. Genuinely, completely free. No magic, no crown, no court expecting me to be something I was never sure I wanted to be. When this fight is over, I’m going to walk out of here and find out what that freedom looks like.”
“The sea,” I said, remembering what he’d told Alyssa.
“The sea.” He smiled again, and this time it reached his eyes fully. “The western coast. The Nymerian Sea. Places I was never allowed to go because the Summer Prince had responsibilities, and then I couldn’t leave until I’d helped the people who were suffering here. But that suffering started in the summer court long before Arik came along.” He said the last word with a gentle mockery that held no bitterness. “I want to see what’s out there. I want to stand on a cliff and look at a horizon and know that I can walk toward it without anyone needing me to be somewhere else.”
The guilt didn’t vanish. It wasn’t that kind of weight. But something in its texture changed. The sharp edge that had been cutting me since Ice Falls dulled a fraction more, worn down bythe simple, undeniable evidence of a man who was at peace with what had happened to him. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t grieving. He was planning an adventure, and the light in his eyes when he talked about it was brighter than any Summer magic I’d ever seen him wear.
“After the fight,” I said. “You finish this with us first.” Not because we needed him to, but because I knew Rhidian so much better now, and I knew he needed to see if all come to an end.
“Obviously.” He clapped my shoulder as he stood. “I didn’t come back from the dead to miss the ending.”
He walked off toward the command area where Tank was doing whatever Tank did with maps and logistics. I watched him go and let the guilt settle into its new shape. Not gone. But changing. Becoming something I could carry without bleeding.
I sat on the log and let the afternoon sun warm my face, and that was when I felt it.
Not through my eyes or ears or any of the five senses. Through the bond. A pull, deep and insistent, like something tugging at the threads in my chest. All five of them at once. The sensation was disorienting, as if every bond was straining toward a single point, trying to close a circuit that hadn’t been completed.
I’d been feeling it since the Fifth Court, a low background hum that I’d attributed to the new bond with Damon settling in. But sitting here, in the Spring Court’s saturated magic, with the Summer fire burning quietly in my veins, the hum had sharpened into something I couldn’t ignore. The bonds weren’t settling like they had before. They were building. Gaining intensity. Like five instruments warming up for a performance, each one finding its note, but the conductor hadn’t given the downbeat.
The magicwantedsomething.
I closed my eyes and focused. Felt along each thread. Tank’s bond hummed with earth and growth, content in itshome territory but vibrating at a frequency I hadn’t noticed before. Dean’s bond was cold and bright and straining toward something just out of reach, the Winter magic in him reaching for a throne it hadn’t claimed yet. Ryder’s bond crackled and swirled, Autumn storms contained in a bottle, pressure building. Damon’s bond was the newest and the strangest, shadow and light intertwined, pulsing with a rhythm that didn’t quite match the others but was trying to.
And Alyssa. At the centre. The point they were all pulling toward. Her bond was... vast. Vaster than it had been even a week ago. The realm’s magic was pouring into her, filling spaces she hadn’t known existed, and the five bonds attached to her were being pulled apart by the scale of what she was becoming. Not breaking. Stretching. Being asked to carry more than they’d been designed for.
They needed to merge. The thought arrived fully formed, so clear and so obvious that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before. Five separate connections, five individual channels, each carrying a single court’s magic. That had been enough before. Itwasn’tenough now. The magic wanted to flow as a single current, all five courts woven together, a combined stream instead of five parallel rivers. Woven together they’d be stronger. Unbreakable.
We’d tried this before without even realising what we were doing. The night before the battle at Ice Falls, we’d started something then that we couldn’t have finished because we didn’t have Damon’s bond then. The magic had been reaching for it and Nymeria’s voice on the wind had been a warning not a call. But the magic was reaching harder now. Straining even. It knew what it needed to be complete. To give Alyssa the power we all knew she was going to need if we were making it out of this alive.
I stood up too fast. The log rocked behind me. A patch of wildflowers burst into bloom at my feet where the Summermagic surged with my sudden emotion, red and gold petals unfurling in seconds. I’d been doing that for days now. Everything I walked past seemed to grow faster, bloom brighter, lean toward me the way flowers lean toward sun. The Summer magic wasn’t burning here. It was building.
That mattered. That was part of this too. At Ice Falls, the fire had felt like destruction. Like grief made manifest, Rhidian’s death translated into heat and fury. But here, in the Spring Court, where the soil was rich and the magic was growth, where the man who’d given me this power was alive and free and planning his next adventure, the fire was something else entirely. It was warmth. It waslife. It was the thing that made flowers push to seeds with the promise of new life to come.
I needed to talk to Alyssa. I needed to know if she was feeling this too.
I found her in the chamber we’d claimed as quarters, sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands in her lap. The light beneath her skin was pulsing in an irregular rhythm, and when she looked up at me, her expression confirmed what I’d felt through the bond.
She knew something was building too. She just hadn’t figured out what yet.
“Something’s wrong with the bonds,” I said without preamble.
“Not wrong.” She shook her head, frowning. “But not right either. I keep feeling this pull. Like the magic is trying to do something and I’m not letting it.”
