Page 115 of Renegade Kingdom
Chapter Thirty-Five
Alyssa
I’d been trying for hours but the magic just wouldn’t cooperate.
The space they’d given me to work in was a clearing at the heart of the Spring Court forest, ringed by ancient oaks whose canopies wove together overhead like fingers lacing. The air here was thick with magic, the combined hum of the Spring Court’s power and my own, and it should have been the perfect environment for what I was attempting.
It wasn’t.
I sat cross-legged on the grass with my palms pressed to the soil and reached. The light that lived beneath my skin flowed outward, spreading through the ground, following the root systems that connected every tree in the court. I could feel the network. Thousands of roots, millions of threads of living wood, all carrying the Spring Court’s magic like blood through veins. And through the bond with Tank, I could sense further. The soil itself. The bedrock beneath. The deep, old pulse of the land that predated the courts and their politics and everything Arik had built on top of them.
But when I pushed further, trying to extend my reach beyond the Spring Court’s borders, trying to touch the Endless who were scattered across Nymeria under Arik’s control, I hit a wall. Not a physical barrier. A limitation. My magic could reach the edges of Spring’s domain and then it simply... ran out. Like a river reaching a cliff edge and tumbling into nothing.
I needed more range. More power. More reach.
I tried channelling through the Summer bond next. BUt it wouldn’t work. All the strands were too separate. Since the Fifth Court it felt like my magic had changed and it wasn’t as accessible as it had once been. All the strands were too separate. They were strong as individuals, but they had limits and I could already feel them starting to strain. I’d grown too powerful for what those types of bonds could contain. Maddox was right that they needed to be joined together. In fact, it made so much sense that it seemed obvious. But did I want that? Did each of them want that? It would be a significant moment, all of us linked together with all that magic flowing between us. It seemed like too much to ask of them, even if an entire world was depending on us. The fae had always cautioned against mating. We’d seen the widow haunting the hissing swamps as evidence of that cautionary tale, and yet still we’d done it. But this would be taking it so much further and what if there were consequences we couldn’t foresee?
So I tried again. Sinking deep into the Spring power that sat inside of me only to run up against the same problem. Again.
The magic collapsed inward. The reach snapped back. I was sitting in a clearing in the Spring Court with grass stains on my knees and a headache building behind my eyes. I was no closer to freeing the Endless than I’d been this morning, and every morning before that.
I pressed my palms against my face and breathed.
The Endless were the problem I couldn’t walk away from. There had to be hundreds of them still under Arik’s control, maybe more. People who’d been stripped of their will and turned into weapons and shields and scouts. People like the woman Dean had found at the Fifth Court’s border, used up and thrown away. I’d freed some at Ice Falls. Burning through Arik’s hold on each individual with brute magical force. It had worked, but it had taken everything I had for each one. On a battlefield, with Arik fighting back, trying to free them one at a time would be impossible.
And if we killed Arik while they were still bound to him, I didn’t know what would happen. Maybe nothing. Maybe the connections would simply dissolve with his death. But maybe not. Maybe the bonds were parasitic enough that killing him would kill them all right along with him. I’d seen what his magic did to the Endless he controlled. It was woven into them, threaded through their consciousness, tangled up with their vital functions in ways that looked less like a leash and more like roots growing through a wall. Pull the roots out too fast and the wall comes down.
I wouldn’t take that risk. Not with hundreds of lives.
So I had to find a way to reach them all at once and cut the bonds cleanly. Which meant I needed range I didn’t have and precision I couldn’t achieve and a mechanism for severing magical connections that I couldn’t figure out.
It all came down to more. Needing to have more power, be more of a leader, more of a warrior, just… more.
And that was the thing I’d been failing at all morning.
Maddox’s words came back to me. Five rivers running parallel instead of flowing together.
I dropped my hands from my face and stared at the grass.
He was right. I’d been trying to use the bonds as separate tools, channelling each court’s magic through its ownconnection and then combining them at the point of use. Trying to hold onto all those separate strands of power was too much to manage. But one strand? One braided rope holding all that power in one unfiltered connection to the source of every Court?
I didn’t know if I was strong enough to hold all that magic inside of me, but what other choice did we have? We were running out of time. Arik wouldn’t sit on the sidelines waiting for us to make a move. He wasn’t stupid. He had to know the connection with the fifth Court would make us stronger. His only choice now was to attack before we could figure out how to wield it. Except that hadn’t been his only choice because if we were looking at how he could win then he should have attacked before we even reached the Fifth Court. So why hadn’t he? It wasn’t like we’d been hiding from him. He knew where we were. So what was he planning that he hadn’t figured out yet?
I stood up. Brushed the grass from my knees. The headache was still there but beneath it was something else. Something that felt like potential and clarity all rolled into one.
Everything Arik was planning didn’t matter because if we could do this, if we could combine all this power together, we’d finally have the means to stop him.
It was time to find my mates.
They gathered in the chamber we’d been using as quarters. Six bodies in a space built for fewer. Damon leaned against the wall, shadows drifting. Dean stood near the door, arms crossed. Tank sat on the bed, solid and patient. Maddox settled on the floor, legs crossed, already watching me with an expression that said he knew what was coming. Ryder dropped into the only chair and stretched out like this was a casual conversation, which itwasn’t, and he knew it wasn’t, which was why he was pretending it was.
“I need to talk to all of you,” I said. “I’ve been working on the Endless problem. Trying to figure out how to break Arik’s hold on all of them at once. I can do it in a small enough group, I proved that at Ice Falls, but on a battlefield with hundreds of Endless and Arik fighting back, that’s not going to work.”
“And if we kill Arik while they’re still bound...” Maddox said.
“I don’t know what happens. And I’m not willing to find out.”
Silence.
