25. Max #2
We confirm! We confirm! the Coldiron in my armguard jumped up and down inside the metal like a crowd at a match.
“My undying loyalty is to my brothers and to the Zodiac Covenant.” Drakken wasn’t finished. “And it stands with Spartan Max, who has proved herself worthy and loyal. No matter what blood flows in her.”
Lady Vaelith winced. One hairline crack in the porcelain.
Caspian and Nikolai traded a look, then both of them smiled. Caspian flashed Drakken a hand signal I knew from their private idiot-language, one that meant working his way toward a six. Drakken ignored him.
“Who agrees with Lady Vaelith on sending Max back to Xander?” Aelindor asked.
Hands went up. A third of the officers.
Some of them had wished me a good day in a corridor that morning.
“A minority. I’m glad.” Aelindor took in the table.
“It means we’ve got hope in us yet. If we sacrifice Spartan Max, we’re no better than Xander and the White Witch.
” His gaze came to rest on his spymaster.
“Lady Vaelith is our finest intelligence officer. On this recommendation, I disagree with her. We will not hand Spartan Max to anyone. Not now. Not ever.”
Relief hit so hard and so fast my eyes stung, and I stared at the grain of the table until it passed.
I’d meant every word of that offer. I’d have walked out of Greymantle and gone south and done it without crying about it, because that’s the job.
And the whole time I meant it, some part of me was praying someone in this room would say no.
Somebody did. I was so grateful I could have put my head on that table and wept.
Then Aelindor, in the same level voice, without a change of gear: “Do not ever again suggest sacrificing my mate.”
He’d called me that at breakfast. It landed differently here, in front of the assembled command of the entire Covenant, with his spymaster’s teacup stopped halfway to her mouth.
My blank face held. Nothing behind it did.
We confirm! Coldiron chimed in glee.
Lady Vaelith looked like he’d put a knife between her ribs.
Down the table, officers blinked. Two of them turned to check their neighbors’ faces, making sure they’d heard it right. Behind Aelindor, his aides didn’t move at all. They’d known. So had the other three heirs, who’d clearly settled this somewhere I hadn’t been.
Every gaze came back to Aelindor.
“And Max shares a bond with all four of us.” He slid his eyes to me as he said it.
Out in the open now. It felt like an ambush, and it also felt like something a long time coming. I wanted to sit down. I was sitting down.
“She’s ours,” Caspian said.
“Some of you will find that controversial.” Nikolai’s voice was silk over steel. “It’s nobody’s business but ours. We don’t give two shits what Xander’s marriage contract says. He’ll never have her.”
Every head in the room turned to Drakken. The last of the four, unaccounted for.
He looked at me, and I couldn’t read a thing in it. Of all of them, he was the one I could never read.
“I stand with my brothers’ decision.”
He didn’t elaborate.
I turned the sentence over, hunting the seam. Not a claim. Not a denial. Drakken at the fence line, on our side of it, and two things pulling me opposite ways at once.
Relief that nobody had made him lie.
And under that, an ache. He hadn’t said what the other three had said.
Ten minutes earlier he’d told a room full of generals that he wouldn’t hand me over for any kingdom on this earth. Now he wouldn’t put words to what I was to him.
“The Fourfold prophecy.” It came from somewhere down the table, barely above a breath.
Nobody answered, and the words sat there like a lit candle no one would look at.
“As for Max’s new role.” Drakken cut through it, all general again. “She’s no longer a cadet. She won’t be folded into the Spartans’ ranks either.”
The officers arranged careful expressions.
Lady Vaelith’s composure was still on her face, but it was losing.
Fae are the best in the world at reining in their features, and she’d just been ambushed twice—by what I was to Aelindor, and by Aelindor saying it out loud in front of his entire war council.
“Then what billet does she hold, sir?” General Reeves asked, frowning at his notes. “There’s no line on the org chart for a mate.”
“No.” Drakken gave him a look that could strip varnish. “I hadn’t finished, General. Spartan Max stands outside the ranking system. Nobody commands her.”
A few officers looked alarmed but wisely held their tongues.
“She commands none of you either,” Aelindor added, and the same officers nodded in visible relief.
“You’ve all seen Max serve in crucial operations.
” Drakken again. “And everyone at that ball heard Xander name her the lost heir of House Scorpio and House Capricorn. We can confirm it’s true.
Accordingly, Max will lead the Nightingale as a special unit.
Frost, Marco, and Enna stay on. The magic users the Nightingale brought out of the Haven join them.
They’ll take the missions no other unit can.
” He let a beat go by. “Those magic users have made their terms plain. They follow Max or they follow no one.”
I stared at him.
I hadn’t spoken to the rescued supernaturals since we came home. Every hour of it had gone to getting Missy settled. But the heirs and their intelligence officers had evaluated and vetted every one of them, and here it was, already decided.
An hour ago, I’d been ready to walk south and never see any of them again. Now I had a unit.
After that the council rolled on into logistics. Supply lines. Border rotations. The mutant labs. I sat inside the noise and let the new world finish landing on me.
Mate, said out loud. A unit with my name on its orders. A war with my face on its cause.
And a third of that room, good officers all, still quietly certain that the cheapest way out of this was a wagon going south with me in it.
Nikolai glanced at my empty mug and got up. He made the coffee himself and put the mug straight into my hands. Two sugars, cream to the color of river clay. Exactly how I took it.
I was still looking at him when the first swallow went down the wrong pipe, and I coughed into my fist while the whole table stopped talking to watch me do it.
Drakken’s eyes caught mine, and he winked.
Still an asshole.