Page 137 of Renegade Kingdom
Ezra was there. The former Endless commander had pulled his people into a defensive crescent around the valley’s mouth, but they were being pushed back step by step. I could see the strain in their faces. These were men and women who had been freed from Arik’s control months ago. They knew what it felt like to be puppets. They knew what the Endless advancing from the east were suffering. And they were fighting anyway, for the chance that no one would ever be enslaved like that again.
“What do you need?” I asked Ezra as I reached the line.
He looked at me. Then at the fire in my hands. “Can you close the valley?”
I looked at the stream, the depression, the steady flow of creatures using it as an approach route. Close the valley. Seal the highway. Cut off the reinforcements.
“I can do better than close it,” I said.
I walked to the edge of the depression and planted my feet. The fire built in my chest, not the panicked eruption of IceFalls but a slow, deliberate gathering. The Summer Court magic drew from the sun that was struggling to break through Arik’s poisoned sky. I breathed out and the valley was consumed by flames.
Not a wave of destruction. A wall of growth. The flames hit the ground and the ground responded, the Spring magic recognizing the Summer heat and answering with everything it had. The stream boiled and the banks erupted. Grass became bramble and thorns. A living barrier of intertwined plants, each one burning with a fire that didn’t consume them but strengthened them. A wall of burning thorns, ten feet high, sealing the valley from end to end.
The dark creatures hit the wall and recoiled. The thorns burned them. The fire burned them. But the wall itself didn’t break, didn’t blacken, didn’t char. It burned and grew and burned and grew, feeding on itself in an endless cycle of Summer fire and Spring growth.
Ezra stared. His fighters stared. I stared too, if I was being honest, because I hadn’t known I could do that.
Fire and earth, working together. The wall pulsed with a warmth that I could feel even from where I stood, and through the Spring Court bond I sensed Tank’s reaction. A flicker of surprise, then approval, then something that felt like the earth itself leaning into the fire and asking for more.
Behind me, the fighters regrouped. Without the constant pressure of creatures pouring through the valley, they could breathe. Could reorganize. Could tend to the wounded and redistribute weapons and remember that they were fighting for something worth bleeding for. I watched a former Endless help another Fae to her feet, the two of them exchanging a look that held no words but spoke volumes. Survivor to survivor. Fighter to fighter.
This was what the fire was for. Not the battlefield alone, but the spaces between the violence. The moments of protection and repair and hope that made the fighting worth enduring.
I felt the tears before I understood why they were there. Not grief. Not anymore. Something that had been sitting in my chest since the moment I’d watched Rhidian die, something heavy and sharp and corrosive, shifted. Loosened. Let go.
Not completely. It would never leave completely. I would carry the memory of that moment for the rest of my life, the way you carry any scar that goes deep enough to mark the bone. But the guilt that had been wrapped around it, the conviction that I didn’t deserve his magic because I hadn’t been able to save him, was dissolving in the heat of what I’d just built.
Rhidian hadn’t given me this fire as punishment. He’d given it to me as trust. Trust that I would protect it. That I would learn from it.
I wiped my face with the back of my hand. The fire flickered in my palm, warm and patient.
“Hold the line,” I told Ezra. “Nothing’s getting through that wall.”
He nodded. Something in his expression had shifted too. Not awe. Respect. The kind you gave to someone who’d earned it in front of you.
I turned back toward the heart of the battle, where Alyssa burned like a star and the bonds hummed with the promise of what was coming next. The fire went with me, settled and sure, and for the first time since Rhidian had died, I felt like I deserved to carry it.
Chapter Forty-One
Ryder
People always thought Dean was the scary one.
It was a reasonable assumption. Dean was bigger, louder, colder. His wolf was a white nightmare that moved through a fight like a blade through silk. His ice could kill at a distance. When Dean walked into a room, people straightened up. When he spoke, people listened. When Dean fought, people got out of the way.
Nobody got out of the way for me.
Ryder was the funny one. The easy one. The one who cracked jokes in briefings and smiled when things went sideways. Deflecting questions about his feelings with a quip so well-timed that people forgot they’d asked. Ryder was the beta, back when that word had still applied. The one Holden had assigned to support roles. The one who never led a mission because Dean led the missions and Maddox provided the emotional intelligence and Damon was the strategist and Ryder was just... there. Filling a slot. Making the numbers work.
They never looked twice at me.
The thought used to cut. A blade hidden behind the smile, slipping between my ribs every time someone’s gaze slid past me to one of my brothers. I’d learned to use it as fuel, that quiet fury, channelling it into a relentless observation of everything around me. If people weren’t looking at me, I could look at them. Learn them. Map their weaknesses and their strengths while they were busy watching someone more interesting.
Holden had made me feel like a support character in my own story. Or should I say Arik? The man who’d placed us all in Alyssa’s path had assigned each of them a role, and mine had been “the one who follows.”
The Autumn Guardian had seen something different.
Fizzle, in his true form, ancient and massive and terrifying, had looked straight at me. Not past me. Not through me. At me. And what he’d found there had been enough to make a creature that had guarded a court for millennia bow his head and say, “Worthy.”
