25. Max
Max
The plates hadn’t been cleared when the aide came in.
Silver-and-blue livery, three steps into the room, and then he stopped and waited to be noticed. Aelindor gave a nod. The aide bent to his ear and spoke for about four seconds, and the warmth evaporated from the Fae heir’s face.
Caspian set down his napkin. Nikolai’s crimson eyes fixed on Aelindor. Drakken was already standing.
Ross whimpered at the change of mood in the room.
“Max?” Missy was still licking sugar off her fingers.
“Josette’s on her way, little viper. Finish your donut.”
By the time I reached the corridor, four princes had closed around me, and nobody had to say out loud where we were going.
Elenmoor sat at the northwest edge of the base. Greymantle stood at the south gate, hard against the main courtyard. Half an hour of base road between them, and none of us spent it talking.
The wards sealed behind us.
The parchment lay in the middle of the long table, elegant, spell-preserved, its broken seal in red and gold beside it.
Major General Adrian, promoted last week, read it out in a dry voice. Three paragraphs of grievance. The Zodiac Covenant had raided sovereign Haven soil. The Zodiac Covenant had stolen Haven property. The Zodiac Covenant had insulted King Xander.
Then the terms. One sentence.
“He offers peace on one condition,” Adrian continued. “That Max Morning be delivered, safe and well, to the Haven.”
Delivered.
Like a parcel. Like a collection.
An aide set a mug of coffee at my elbow without being asked.
Last time, I’d stood against the wall with the junior officers, the only cadet in the room, and no aide had offered me anything. This time there was a chair. Commander Ashcroft’s eyes flicked to it and stayed there, and Nikolai looked at him until they didn’t.
“Max sits in on every meeting that matters.” The heirs had said it once. Nobody in this room was going to make them say it twice.
Major General Adrian set the missive down and turned to the map.
“New Columbia stands with us.” He set a marker on the northern line. “President Whitmore committed this morning. He understands that if the Covenant falls, his territory is the next course at the same dinner.”
“What about the alliance between the Pallid Court and the Haven?” General Solenne asked. “Anything new?”
“They joined openly for the first time.” Adrian slid two markers into one place. “Their numbers were better than ours even before they joined forces. The Pallid Court’s breeding labs are running at speed. Batches, not litters. War mutants.”
“And we know firsthand Xander’s labs are doing the same,” Nikolai said.
The room absorbed that. No officer had anything to add.
“I brought the intel out of the Pallid Court last time.” Lady Vaelith slid a look at Aelindor, still gravitating toward him after everything, before she faced the generals.
“The White Witch’s mages have been decoding Coldiron.
They call it Foolsilver. They’ve made progress.
Our best material advantage has a clock running on it now. ”
Somebody swore.
“Every lamp, engine, and ward this kingdom owns runs on Stormglass.” Commander Lee’s finger came down on a point in the Utah district.
Crimson Ridge. My former mine. “The largest veins in the world sit right there, in her fist. She can dim half of us inside six months without casting a single spell. Nothing’s coming in to replace it. Not through the black market either.”
“Add the road-rights she bought through Xander’s stretch of New Mexico,” General Cassel said, “and now they’ve allied.”
Enemies on two fronts, and a landlord’s hand on the power supply.
“We can’t stay on the defensive,” General Solenne said, tapping the southern border. “When they come, walls don’t hold back oceans.”
“We aren’t strong enough to strike first,” Cassel countered. “Not against both of them at once. That’s suicide.”
The argument went around the table twice and came back no better than it left.
Lady Vaelith set down her cup, and everyone turned toward her.
“We’ve all seen that Cadet—Spartan Max Morning—has gained the affection of the heirs,” she said, in a cool, silky voice.
“I can see why. At her age, she’s proven herself a remarkable asset.
What I’m going to propose will be unpopular.
But someone has to say it, if we want to save the Zodiac Covenant.
” She let that sit. “We send Spartan Max back to Xander’s court. ”
The silence stretched, and she didn’t wait it out.
“We cannot afford wars with both the Haven and the Pallid Court. You’ve spent forty minutes telling each other what’s coming. We need to buy time.”
This time, around that table, more than one voice murmured agreement.
I balled my fists on my thighs. There were two melodies in what she’d said. The greater good ran on top, sung beautifully. Underneath it, Lady Vaelith had decided I was a threat, exactly the way Delia had, and she’d found a way to remove me that wore a patriot’s uniform.
The heirs had come with baggage when I stumbled into their world. Ex-lovers, girlfriends, groupies, bedmates. I couldn’t even blame the women who hated me for it. If someone took the heirs from me, I’d burn with it too.
I just wouldn’t dress my knife up as policy.
Her proposal was logical. I gave her that. It might be the best line on that map. Xander had declared war because of me, and with the White Witch closing in, the losses would be devastating even if the fortress held. One person shouldn’t outweigh a kingdom.
Not even when the person was me. Especially when the person was me.
I’d already buried enough good soldiers. And my best friend.
I could make this easy for all of them. Easiest of all for the heirs. Even if I had to swallow the poison to do it.
“I’ll go to Xander.”
The heirs went still.
The temperature in that room fell a degree and a half.
“But I have one condition.” I swept the table, face by face. “My sister stays. You keep her safe and cared for. Always. And if any harm comes to her, there won’t be a war. There’ll be me.”
“Done,” Commander Ashcroft said, too quickly.
Caspian’s head came around at his own house’s commander, slow enough that everyone watched it happen.
“If the decision’s final, I go with Max as support,” Marco said flatly. “I’m her team.”
“Same,” Frost said from the wall, where the junior officers stood. They didn’t get chairs.
Something warm pushed up through the dread. It didn’t last. No way was I letting them walk into that kingdom and get trapped again. Xander would use them against me the second he worked out how much I cared.
If I went, I went alone.
“I know this is hard.” Lady Vaelith schooled her lovely face into heartbreak. “But we’re all soldiers. Xander won’t harm Spartan Max. He regards her as his future queen, and she can serve the Covenant best inside his court.”
Xander won’t harm her.
What did she know?
The Collector had opened his own forearm in a ballroom to show that when he bled, I bled. That wasn’t a man who wouldn’t harm you.
Aelindor’s expression stayed unreadable. Beside him, Nikolai’s crimson eyes had gone glacial.
“You’re forgetting she’d have to marry that sadist fucker,” Caspian growled.
“She wouldn’t marry him.” Lady Vaelith was patient as a tutor.
“I’d wager Max knows how to delay a wedding.
She drags it out a year. Two. And buys us the time we need while she gathers intelligence no one else alive can reach.
” She turned her palms up. “She is brave, she is loyal, and she is willing. You all just heard her say so. I’ll be her handler personally, and if the situation turns, I’ll extract her myself.
Xander wants her more than anything on this earth.
He’s gone to war for her. Between his need and the marriage contract, Max stands in the one position where she can never truly be in danger. ”
I let her talk. I was making other plans.
I wouldn’t be anybody’s little spy. Espionage wasn’t my talent. But if they gave me away to the Collector, I’d find a way to end that motherfucker, and I’d go down with him under the contract’s terms.
Coldiron sheeting down over my fingers. My armored hand through Xander’s ribs, closing on his heart.
Me, for once, doing the collecting.
“I disagree.” Commander Lee didn’t wait to be recognized. “You’d be handing our best asset and our best weapon to the Collector in one parcel. Xander is no ordinary immortal warlock. He’s a mentalist. He excels at compulsion.”
How the fuck did Lee know that?
“Max resisted him, didn’t she?” Lady Vaelith’s gaze settled on me. “I watched their dances.”
Four heirs turned to me at once with the same question on their faces. I hadn’t told them. First there’d been no time, and then there’d been no words.
But she was right. Xander’s will pressing down on my skull, and my mind refusing, refusing, refusing.
“Spartan Max can do this better than anyone alive.” Vaelith pressed her advantage into the silence. “We are at war, and more is coming. The survival of the Zodiac Covenant hangs on the next few months, and in a dire hour we use every point of leverage we hold.”
Then she turned to the end of the table, to the heir who’d sat through all of it as silent as a mountain.
“I believe General Drakken can appreciate this strategy better than anyone.”
She’d done her homework.
She knew about the rift between him and me. She knew he’d interrogated me in the dungeon built to break spies. She knew he’d designed the Sorting trial that burned my disguise off me in front of the whole academy.
She was inviting him to finish what he’d started.
I sat there and waited for him to do it, already working out how I was going to keep my face blank when he agreed with her.
“You could not be more wrong, Lady Vaelith.” Drakken’s voice was cold enough to frost the table. “Not in a million years will I sacrifice her. Not for anyone. Not for any fucking kingdom.”
I stopped breathing.
Had he just said that? No demon left in my head to tell me whether my ears were lying.