Page 112 of Renegade Kingdom
“I am an ancient guardian of a magical realm and I am discussing the tactical applications of a magic that hasn’t existed in living memory with a human who acquired it four days ago. ‘Theoretically’ is the most honest word I have.”
Something that was almost a laugh escaped me. The wolf rumbled in my chest, amused.
Fizzle hopped closer. His head tilted in that birdlike way that used to be endearing when I thought he was just a strange little creature and was now unsettling when I knew what he actually was. “Practice,” he finally said. “Every chance you get. The shadows are a part of you, and they will learn faster than anytechnique I could teach you because they learn from what you already know. And what you know, Damon, is chains.”
He turned and hopped toward the edge of the training ground, then paused.
“For what it’s worth,” he said without looking back, “I think it is rather poetic. The man who wore the chains becoming the one who breaks them.”
Then he disappeared into the underbrush with a rustle of leaves, leaving me alone with the shadows and the wolf and the quiet, dangerous knowledge of what I might be capable of.
I stayed in the training ground until the light began to fade. Working. Not with Fizzle’s exercises, not with technique or method. With memory. I closed my eyes and let the nightmare back in, not the creature itself but the knowledge it had left behind. The architecture of forced control. The way it had threaded itself through my consciousness, sealing off sections of my mind, rerouting my impulses, wearing my body like a suit.
The shadows responded to each memory. Every time I recalled how the nightmare’s hold had felt, the magic refined itself. Testing against imaginary bonds. Practicing the art of finding seams and widening them. Learning the difference between a connection maintained by will and one maintained by force.
By the time I walked back to our rooms, the shadows moved differently around me. Less curious, more purposeful. They still responded to emotion, still drifted when I was calm and sharpened when I wasn’t. But underneath the surface patterns, something had crystallised. A readiness. The potential of a tool waiting for the hand that would wield it.
The wolf settled in my chest and the shadows settled around my feet as the silence in my head remained exactly what it was: silent. No whisper. No laugh. No mocking voice from the dark.
Just me. And the power to break every chain that Arik had ever forged.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Maddox
Icouldn’t stopfeelingthings.
That had always been my problem, according to Dean. Too much heart. Too many emotions running too close to the surface. The kind of man who felt a bruise before it bloomed, who sensed a storm before the sky darkened, who knew something was wrong in a room full of smiling people because he could taste the lie under the laughter.
But since the Fifth Court, it had gotten worse. Or better. I hadn’t decided yet.
Five bonds now, not four. Each one a thread of constant sensation humming in my chest.
I could feel them all,all the damn time, even when they were on the other side of the palace. Tank’s calm satisfaction as he reviewed supply lists. Ryder’s restless boredom as he sharpened a blade he didn’t need to sharpen. Damon’s focused intensity, off somewhere with Fizzle, the shadows in him coiling and releasing in patterns I could feel through the bond like distant music.
And Dean. Dean who felt like a frozen lake with something trapped beneath the surface.
I’d been watching him since we arrived at the Spring Court. Not obviously, because obvious watching made Dean shut down harder. Heaven forbid someone actually be concerned about him. But through the bond, I could feel the cold in him running deeper than the ice magic warranted. There was something he wasn’t saying. Something that sat behind his eyes when he thought no one was looking, a weight that had settled onto his shoulders somewhere between the Fifth Court and here and hadn’t shifted.
I didn’t know what it was. But I knew it was there with the certainty of a body that had learned to read the weather of other people’s pain.
But what gave me the right to confront him for his hidden pain? Dean wasn’t the only one who was suffering in stoic silence. The guilt still smothered me at times. It rose up at unexpected moments, reminding me of what I’d done.
I found Rhidian at the edge of camp, sitting on a fallen log with his face turned toward the sun. He looked different in the daylight. Not just alive, though that was still jarring enough to make my breath catch every time I saw him. Different in a way that had nothing to do with the resurrection and everything to do with the absence of what had defined him before.
No golden shimmer on his skin. No sense of the Summer Court’s magic humming in the air around him. No crown, no court, no title. Just a man sitting in the sun, looking peaceful in a way I’d never seen from him when he’d been a prince.
He opened his eyes when I approached and smiled. Not the careful, measured smile of the Summer Prince who weighed every expression for political consequence. A real one. Easy.
“You’re staring,” he said.
“Sorry.” I sat on the log beside him, leaving a careful distance. “It’s still strange. Seeing you.”
“Imagine how strange it is being me.” He stretched his legs out and leaned back on his hands, tilting his face toward the sky again. “I keep expecting to wake up. Or to feel the magic come rushing back. Neither happens.”
“Do you miss it? The magic?”
He was quiet for a long time. Long enough that I started to worry I’d asked the wrong thing, pushed too hard on a wound that was still fresh. But when he spoke, his voice was steady.
