Page 124 of Renegade Kingdom
I breathed.
The bond hummed in response to it all.
“It worked.” My voice was hoarse. “I can feel it. I can feel all of you. It… it feels so different to what my magic was before.”
“We can feel you too.” Tank’s voice, quiet. His palm on my belly rose and fell with my breath.
“What now?” Maddox asked.
I thought about it. Tried to put the shape of it into words.
“Now,” I said slowly, “we’re ready.”
Nobody answered. They didn’t have to. The bond spoke for them, five voices braided into one, and it said yes. It said we’re with you.
I turned my head. Dean’s eyes were open, watching me. Behind the exhaustion and the fresh tears, the ice had receded further than I’d seen in weeks. Whatever he was carrying, he was still carrying. But for tonight, it had been set down. For tonight, he was just mine.
“Sleep.” I brushed his cheek. “All of you. We’ll need it.”
And somehow, in the tangle of six bodies on a bed built for two, we did.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Tank
Ifound Rhidian in the armoury before dawn.
He was bent over a table covered in maps, his hair tied back with a strip of leather, fingers tracing the mountain passes between the Spring and Winter Courts. No crown. No magic. No Summer fire burning beneath his skin. Just a man with sharp eyes and a tactical mind, doing the only thing left that he could do.
“You’re up early,” I said.
He didn’t look up. “Haven’t slept.”
I understood that. The bear hadn’t let me rest either. Every time I closed my eyes, it paced the edges of my consciousness, restless in a way that had nothing to do with the usual threats. This was something deeper. A wrongness in the earth itself, like a storm building so far beneath the surface that you could only feel it in your bones.
I pulled a chair to the opposite side of the table and sat down. The wood creaked under my weight. Everything creaked under my weight these days. The Spring Court magic had been doing something to me since we’d arrived, thickening the connectionbetween my body and the land until I wasn’t sure where one ended and the other began. When I pressed my palm flat to the ground, I could feel the root systems of the trees. The slow crawl of water through soil. The heartbeat of the court itself, steady and ancient.
It should have been comforting. Instead it made me anxious. Because if the land was speaking to me, it was also telling me something I didn’t want to hear.
“Walk me through it,” I said, nodding at the maps.
Rhidian straightened. He looked tired, but there was a clarity to him that hadn’t been there in the first weeks after his resurrection. The fog of displacement had burned off, replaced by something harder. Purpose, maybe. The kind that comes when you’ve already died once and decided that the second time around, you were going to savor every second.
“The Winter Court sits in the mountain basin here.” He tapped the map. “Natural fortress. The passes funnel any approaching force into kill zones. Arik’s had centuries to fortify the approaches. Even with our numbers, a frontal assault would bleed us dry before we reached the gates.”
“What about the tunnels we used during the rescue?”
“Collapsed. Alyssa brought the ceiling down when we escaped. Even if they weren’t, Arik would have sealed every entrance after the breach.” He paused, his jaw tightening at some memory he didn’t share. “He doesn’t make the same mistake twice.”
I studied the map in silence. The Spring Court spread across the lowlands to the east, fertile and green even in this season. The forest where we’d nearly lost Dean stretched along the eastern border. To the north, the terrain climbed toward the Winter Court mountains, growing steeper and more hostile with every mile.
“The western approach,” I said. “Through the Autumn territories.”
Rhidian nodded slowly. “Longer march. Harder supply lines. But the terrain opens up before the final ascent. We could bring the full force to bear instead of feeding soldiers into a bottleneck.”
“How long?”
“Eleven days, assuming we move around the Wildling Forest and at the pace of the infantry.”
