Page 136 of Renegade Kingdom
But standing in front of a woman I’d just pulled from the jaws of something terrible, with precise, controlled fire still warming my palms, the voice was quieter than it had ever been.
“Get to the fallback point,” I told her. “Stay low.”
She nodded and ran as I turned back to the battle.
The eastern line needed reinforcing.
I moved through the fighting with the fire as my guide, responding to every pocket of darkness with targeted, purposeful flame. Not the wildfire of Ice Falls that consumed without thought. Something better. Something that chose.
I found a knot of allied fighters pinned down by a wave of dark creatures. The fire swept through the creatures and left the fighters untouched. They stared at me as the ash settled around them, and then they picked up their weapons and followed me forward.
I found a section of the perimeter where the wards had collapsed and creatures were pouring through the gap. The fire became a wall, a barrier of burning air that sealed the breach while the fighters behind me reorganized. Not a wall of destruction. A wall of protection. The fire holding the line while the people behind it caught their breath.
Then I found a guardian, the enormous antlered stag that had fallen earlier, lying on its side with black ichor seeping from a wound in its flank. The dark creatures circled it, waiting for it to die. The fire found them and they burned and I knelt beside the stag and pressed my burning hand to its wound and felt the Summer magic do something I hadn’t known it could do.
It healed.
Not fully. Not miraculously. But the fire flowed into the wound and the flesh knitted, slowly, the ichor burning away and clean tissue forming beneath it. The stag’s enormous eye found mine and blinked, slow and wondering, and then it lurched to its feetwith a sound like a mountain deciding to stand up and lowered its antlers before charging back into the fight.
I stayed on my knees for a moment, staring at my hands. The fire danced across my fingers, amber and gold, and I thought about Rhidian. About the man who had carried this magic his entire life and never used it for violence. Who had been the heir of a Summer Court where he wanted fire to mean warmth and harvest and the long golden afternoons of a realm at peace.
He’d given me this. Through death, through pain, through the worst moment of my life. And now, months later, I finally understood why.
The fire wasn’t a weapon. It never had been. It was a gift. What I chose to do with it, what I chose to protect with it, that was the only thing that mattered.
Maddox the soldier had been terrified of the fire because soldiers saw everything as a weapon. Maddox the Summer King could finally see it for what it was.
I got to my feet and went back to work.
The bond pulled me west.
Alyssa was there. I could feel her through our connection, blazing like a sun at the centre of the battle, the magic of five courts pouring through her in a river of power that made the air around her shimmer. She’d recovered from the dark moment. I’d felt that too, felt the paralysis and the fear and then the agonizing climb back. We had pulled her out. All of us, together, our bonds the rope she’d used to haul herself from the well.
But she wasn’t just recovered. She was transformed. Something had hardened in her during the fall and the gruelling climb back. The woman I moved toward now was not the woman who had stood on the massacre grounds the night before, afraid of tomorrow. This woman had looked at the worst thing Arik could do and had decided that it wasn’t enough to stop her.
I reached her position at the same time as Damon. His shadows had been working the field independently, dark tendrils that scouted and reported and occasionally wrapped around a dark creature’s legs and dragged it into the earth. The wolf was a constant presence at the edge of his consciousness. I could feel it through the bond. Young but fierce, learning its strength through combat the way young wolves always did. When he finally shifted he’d be glorious.
“Maddox.” Alyssa’s voice was hoarse. There was blood on her face, someone else’s, and her eyes held the steady burn of someone who had moved past fear into the territory beyond it. “I need you on the western flank. The creatures are pushing hardest there.”
“What about the Endless?” I looked at the lines of controlled humans still advancing from the east. Every one of them was someone’s family. Every one of them was a person screaming behind their own eyes the way Damon had screamed. “We can’t keep fighting around them forever.”
“We won’t have to. Not for much longer.” She looked at Damon, and something passed between them through the bond that I felt as a pulse of dark and light intertwining. “But I need more time. And I need the western flank to hold.”
I nodded. The fire settled in my hands, ready.
Before I turned, I looked at Damon. He stood in his cocoon of shadow, the wolf’s silver gleaming in his eyes, and I thought about what he had done at the Fifth Court. The sacrifice he’d made. He could have been free. Could have had the nightmare ripped from his mind forever. Instead he’d turned to Nymeria and said, “Bring back Rhidian.”
For me. Because Damon had watched through his own eyes as the nightmare destroyed lives, and when he finally had the chance to fix one thing, he’d chosen to fix the thing that was breaking me.
Rhidian was alive because of this man. Fighting somewhere on this field, sword in hand, no magic and no fear, because Damon had decided that his brother’s guilt was a heavier burden than his own imprisonment.
“Thank you,” I said. I’d said it before. I’d say it again. I’d keep saying it until the words wore smooth but never lost their meaning.
Damon’s shadows shifted. The barest flicker of a smile crossed his face. “Go burn something.”
The western flank was worse than Alyssa had described.
The dark creatures had concentrated their assault here, drawn by something in the landscape that I couldn’t identify. The terrain dipped into a shallow valley where a stream cut through the Spring Court grounds, and the creatures had used the low ground as a highway, pouring through the depression in numbers that overwhelmed the fighters holding the line.
