Page 45 of Renegade Kingdom
I sank into the bath and let the heat seep into muscles I hadn’t realised were knotted. The water turned cloudy almost immediately, days of sea salt and grime lifting from my skin in a way that felt like shedding a second layer. I tipped my head back against the stone edge and closed my eyes, letting the warmth work its way into my bones.
My wolf stirred lazily, content for the first time in days. He’d been on edge since we’d boarded the ship. Wolves weren’t built for the ocean. We were meant for solid ground, for forests, for the feeling of earth beneath our paws and prey scent on thewind. Being back on land had settled something fundamental in both of us. The wolf stretched out in the back of my mind, yawning, his anxiety dissolving into something that felt almost like peace.
But there was something else. Something that had nothing to do with land or sea or the simple relief of standing on solid ground again.
An unsettled feeling that had been growing since we’d arrived. Not from the human part of me. Not from the wolf. From the part of me that I was only just starting to recognise as something separate from both. The magic. It shifted inside me like a living thing, restless and searching, reaching for something I couldn’t identify. As if it knew something I didn’t. As if it was trying to tell me something important and I was too thick to hear it.
I flexed my fingers beneath the water and watched tiny sparks of static dance across the surface. Lightning in miniature, beautiful and directionless. The sparks reflected off the stone walls of the bath, throwing fractured light across the ceiling. I watched them die out one by one and tried not to think about the fact that I couldn’t control when they appeared any more than I could control when they stopped.
I didn’t know what to do with this power. Not really. I could call the wind. I could summon storms. I could make the air crackle and split with electricity that would make a thundercloud jealous. But knowing how to call it and knowing how to wield it were two very different things. And in a few weeks, maybe less, I was going to have to face the Autumn Guardian and prove I was worthy of a crown.
Wonderful.
No pressure.
I scrubbed myself clean, dried off, and pulled on fresh clothes that someone had left folded on the bed. Ezra’s people, presumably. The man had thought of everything. It was anunironic moment of deja vu from the last time we’d arrived at the Spring court. Except we weren’t feeling the sting of betrayal this time, just the weight of grief. I’d have been impressed if I wasn’t so busy being intimidated by the fact that he’d essentially built a functioning military base while we’d been at sea getting followed by sea monsters and holding funerals.
The others weren’t there when I came out. The rooms felt empty in a way that made the unsettled feeling worse, like the magic was reaching for something and finding only silence. I considered picking up the journal again. Alyssa’s father’s handwriting had become familiar over the past few days, and there were sections I hadn’t finished reading. Information about the Wildling Forest. Notes about the old pathways. Passages that might hold answers about the nightmare, if I could find them buried in the dense, scholarly text.
But the restlessness in my bones wouldn’t let me sit still. The journal required focus, patience, the ability to sit in one place for more than five minutes without my skin starting to crawl. None of which I currently possessed.
I needed to move.
The corridors of the Spring Court were busier than I’d ever seen them. Ezra’s recruits and our freed Endless had merged into something that almost resembled an actual force, and they were everywhere. Training in the halls. Cleaning weapons. Talking in huddles that went quiet when I passed. I caught snatches of conversation as I walked. Plans for defence. Arguments about tactics. Someone asking if anyone knew how to repair leather armour.
They were all looking at me.
The same way they’d looked at Alyssa on the ship. Like I was something more than what I was. A saviour. A hero. Something to pin their hopes on when hope was in short supply. I saw a group of young fighters nudge each other as I passed, one ofthem whispering something that included the words “Autumn King” as if it were already fact rather than desperate speculation.
It made my skin crawl.
I wasn’t the one who found the answers. I’d never been that person. I was the sidekick. The supporting character. The one who cracked jokes while everyone else made the hard decisions and took the real risks. Dean was the warrior. Maddox was the heart. Tank was the anchor. Alyssa was the bloody queen. And I was... what? The guy who made people laugh when things got too dark? The one they kept around for comic relief?
Now I was expected to master magic I barely understood, face a creature that had existed since the beginning of time, and somehow prove myself worthy of a court that embodied everything about the power I didn’t really know how to control. Storm magic. Wild, unpredictable, as likely to destroy indiscriminately as it was to follow any kind of direction.
Sounded about right for me, actually.
My wolf whined softly, sensing my distress. I shoved the spiral down where it couldn’t reach anyone through the bond and kept walking. The last thing I needed was Alyssa or Dean picking up on the fact that I was in the middle of a crisis of confidence. They had enough to worry about without adding my insecurities to the pile.
The training ring was in the heart of the court. An open-air circle of packed earth surrounded by stone columns that were wrapped in flowering vines. The last time I’d been here, it had been crowded with Rhidian’s fighters, the sound of clashing weapons and shouted instructions filling the air from dawn until dusk. Now it was suspiciously empty.
Suspiciously, because Alyssa was in the centre of it.
I leaned against one of the columns and watched. The others had probably scared everyone away to give her space, and Icould see why. What she was doing wasn’t something that lent itself to an audience.
She moved like the magic was an extension of her body. Fire bloomed from her palms, licking up her arms in ribbons of flame that should have burned but didn’t. The firelight caught the gold of her hair and the sheen of sweat on her skin, and for a moment she looked like something out of legend. A goddess wreathed in her own power.
Then the fire shifted, becoming water, flowing around her wrists in spiralling streams before crystallising into ice that shattered into a thousand glittering fragments. The fragments hung in the air for a heartbeat, suspended by wind that whipped her hair around her face, before dissolving into nothing. Earth rose at her feet, vines climbing her ankles, and she let them before shaking them off with a pulse of energy that sent ripples across the packed ground.
She was flipping through the elements like it was effortless. Like shuffling cards. Like breathing.
It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. And also the most terrifying, because it reminded me exactly how far behind her I was.
She spotted me and the magic settled, the wind dying down to a gentle breeze that tugged at her clothes. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright, and she looked more alive than she had in days.
“Want to train with me?” she called.
I pushed off the column and walked toward her, hands in my pockets. “Depends. Are you planning to throw fire at me? Because I’ve had a rough week and I’m not sure I can handle third-degree burns on top of everything else.”
