Page 152 of Renegade Kingdom
Rhidian’s mother had held the court through the war, claiming authority she had no right to. No magic. No marks. Nolegitimacy beyond the stubbornness of a woman who had spent her life adjacent to power and was not about to relinquish the illusion of it. She called herself regent. She issued decrees. She refused every diplomatic overture we sent and barred her borders to even the ordinary fae who were beginning to flow freely between the other courts.
It couldn’t last. We all knew it. She was a dam built across a river with no foundation, and the water was already finding its way around her. People were leaving. Not in a flood, not yet, but in a steady trickle that grew wider with each passing month. Summer Court fae crossing into Spring or Autumn, drawn by the promise of something different. Something that did not require them to bow to a woman whose only claim to power was that her husband had once been a king. They never mated. She never received any marks of her own. She was just to stubborn to back down.
Maddox felt it most. The Summer magic responded to him now, the fire that Rhidian had passed through death burning steadily in his veins, and through that connection he could feel the people of Summer the way I could feel the realm. Their frustration. Their exhaustion. Their growing awareness that the world had changed around them yet their court had not.
“She’ll come around,” Maddox said one evening, standing at the window of the room we shared, his eyes distant in the way they got when the Summer bond was pulling at him. “Or she won’t. Either way, her people are already choosing.”
“But if she doesn’t?”
He turned from the window. The fire danced in his eyes, warm and steady. “Then she’ll die an old woman in an empty court, and her people will already be safe at home in the new places they find across Nymeria.”
I would not take the Summer Court through blood and sacrifice. Not after what it had cost to unite the rest. If Rhidian’smother wanted to sit on a throne with no subjects and issue decrees to empty halls, that was her choice. The people of Summer would find their way to us in their own time. I had faith in that. I had to.
We’d all known it was going to happen but it still stung. Rhidian had held on longer than he wanted to because he could see the strain behind my eyes. But as I grew stronger, as my mind settled, I could see the way his gaze always seemed to find the horizon when he got lost in his thoughts.
There was no ceremony. No grand farewell. Rhidian found me in the garden that had grown where the battlefield had been, the green thick and lush over soil that remembered blood but had chosen to grow anyway. Fizzle was on my shoulder, dozing in the afternoon sun, his small body warm against my neck.
“I’m leaving,” Rhidian said.
I looked at him. Tall and steady, the childhood friend who had saved me so many times. He carried himself with the quiet grace of a man who had died and been granted a second chance that I had no doubt was more than deserved. No crown. No magic. No responsibilities beyond the ones he chose. Just a man with a restless heart and a horizon he yearned to explore.
“The sea?” I asked.
“The sea.” He turned to the window and stared out at the horizon with a soft smile on his face and it was the most at peace that I’d ever seen him. “I’ve heard if you sail to the place where the sea meets the sky, you can fall off the edge of the realm into an ocean where universes are born.”
We stood together in the garden for a while. The silence between us was comfortable in a way it had not always been.There had been a time when every moment with Rhidian carried the weight of what he felt for me and what I could not feel for him. But that weight had dissolved somewhere between his death and his resurrection, replaced by something cleaner. Gratitude. Respect. The particular tenderness that existed between two people who had been through the worst of it together and come out the other side as something better than what they had been.
“Maddox,” I said.
Rhidian nodded. “I spoke with him this morning. We’re good.” A pause. “Better than good. He’s carrying the Summer fire the way it was meant to be carried. I’m glad it’s him.”
“And Damon?”
Something complicated crossed his face. “I owe that man my life. Literally. I’m not sure how you repay that.”
“You don’t,” I said. “You just live it.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he smiled, and it was the kind of smile that said goodbye when you couldn’t bear to say it aloud.
“Take care of them,” he said.
“Take care of yourself.”
Then he simply just walked away, without looking back. It didn’t hurt the way it would have before. It felt like the end of a chapter that had needed ending, but even now I knew it wasn’t the end of our story. This wouldn’t be the last time I saw Rhidian.
Fizzle opened one eye. Watched Rhidian’s retreating figure. Then closed the eye again.
“He’ll be fine,” Fizzle said.
“I know.”
“He was always too restless for courts and politics. The sea suits him better.”
I reached up and scratched the feathers behind his ear. He leaned into it with a reluctance that was entirely performative. An ancient guardian of Nymeria, older than the courts themselves, pretending to be a grumpy little creature perched on my shoulder because staying close was his version of love. I’d figured that out months ago but never said it aloud because naming it would ruin it.
“You’re still insufferable,” I told him.
“And you’re still stating the obvious. We make a wonderful pair.”
