Page 132 of Renegade Kingdom
“I’ve been everywhere, Dean. For a very long time.”
“You sent Damon to Nymeria. You knew what would happen to him.”
“It was time for the game to begin.”
The ice cracked along the frozen ground beneath my feet. “You used my brother as bait. You used my love for him to put me in her path. You engineered the whole thing.”
Arik’s eyes were old. Ancient. Full of a patience that no human face should have been able to hold. “I put you in position. What happened after that was between you and fate.” A pause that was almost gentle. “The bond is real, Dean. I didn’t create it. I couldn’t have, even if I’d wanted to. I just made sure you were standing in the right place when it found you.”
I attacked.
The fight was everything I’d trained for and nothing I’d prepared for.
Arik was faster than me. Stronger. His magic dwarfed mine the way an ocean dwarfed a river, and every blow I landed was absorbed into a depth of power that seemed to have no bottom. I hit him with ice. He melted it. I drove a frozen blade at his throat. He caught it barehanded and it shattered. I threw everything the wolf had into a lunging strike and he sidestepped with the casual efficiency of a man avoiding a puddle.
But he wasn’t trying to kill me.
That was the part that made me want to scream. He could have ended me six times in the first thirty seconds. Instead he deflected, redirected, let my momentum carry me past him while he turned to track me with those ancient, patient eyes. He wasplaying. Letting me exhaust myself against his defences the way a father lets a child swing at him with a wooden sword.
Because that was what I was to him. A child. A creation. A piece of raw material that he’d shaped into something useful and was now reluctant to destroy.
“You’re better than this,” he said, and the worst part was that he sounded like he meant it. “Stop fighting like a soldier. You’re not that anymore.”
“Youmademe a soldier.”
“I made you aweapon. Youlimitedyourself to being just a man.” He blocked a strike that should have taken his arm off and pushed me back with a pulse of magic that sent me skidding across the frozen ground. “There’s a difference. I wish you could see it.”
I came at him again. Harder. Faster. The ice was singing in my veins now, the Winter Court magic that had been waiting for a true king for its throne responding to the proximity of the one who currently sat on it. It wanted to be released. It wanted to flow into the vessel it recognised as its master.
I had tried to deny it, but I couldn’t any more. The ice was mine. Not his. Not the court’s.Mine. Whatever I became, whatever throne I claimed or rejected, the cold in my blood belonged to me and no one else. It had been with me for far longer than any magic had.
Arik caught my fist. Held it. The ice on my knuckles hissed against his palm and for the first time since the fight began, I saw something other than composed patience in his expression. Pain. The ice had burned him.
“Interesting,” he said, and let go.
I pressed the advantage. Two strikes, fast, exploiting the half-second of surprise. The first he blocked. The second found its mark, my frozen fist connecting with his jaw with a crack that sent a shockwave through the frozen air.
His head snapped to the side.
Silence. Or what passed for it on a battlefield. The creatures still fought. The armies still clashed. But in the small circle of dead grass where a boy confronted the monster who’d tried to change him, time seemed to hold its breath.
Arik touched his jaw. His fingers came away bloody.
He stared at the blood on his hand with an expression I couldn’t read. Surprise, maybe. Or something older than surprise. Something that looked almost like recognition. As if he’d forgotten that he could bleed and was having to relearn it in real time.
“Good,” he said quietly. And for a heartbeat, he sounded exactly like Holden praising a difficult technique executed well.
Then the mask resettled and his eyes went cold.
Arik stopped playing.
The shift was instantaneous. One moment he was deflecting my attacks with that infuriating patience. The next, the air between us compressed with enough force to crack the frozen ground and I was flying backward, skidding across the battlefield with ice shearing off my arms in sheets.
I hit something. A pile of fallen creatures, their bodies frozen where my magic had killed them. The impact drove the air from my lungs and the wolf howled in protest, scrabbling for control, wanting to shift and run and fight on four legs where two had failed.
Not yet.
I pushed myself upright. Everything hurt. The left side of my ribs felt wrong, the kind of wrong that meant something had cracked or broken, and the ice on my arms was reforming slowly, weakly, the magic drawing from reserves that were already running low.
