Chapter Ten
Alyssa
“He was absolutely horrified,” I said, a smile tugging at my lips despite the ache in my chest. “Standing there on the bank in nothing but his underthings, staring at me like I’d lost my mind. And I was already waist-deep in the water, yelling at him to hurry up before someone caught us.”
Maddox laughed softly beside me, and the sound was like sunlight breaking through clouds. We were standing in the corridor just inside the door to the main deck. Neither of us quite ready to step outside. Not yet.
“Did he get in?” Maddox asked.
“He was so close. I swear, he was about to jump. He had that look on his face, you know the one, where he’d already decided to do something reckless but was trying to pretend he was still thinking it over.
” I shook my head, the memory so vivid I could almost smell the summer air, the warm grass, the lake water sparkling under the festival lights.
“And then the entire procession came around the bend. Fifty people. Banners. Music. His mother at the front.”
Maddox winced. “No.”
“His mother saw him first. Standing at the edge of the lake practically naked with me treading water behind him, laughing so hard I nearly drowned.” The smile on my face widened even as tears pricked at my eyes.
“He was grounded for a month. And every time I visited the Summer Court after that, his mother would give me this look. This absolute death stare that said she knew exactly who the bad influence was.”
“Was she wrong?”
“Not even slightly.”
The laughter faded into something quieter. Something that hurt in a way I wasn’t sure I’d ever stop feeling.
“Thank you,” Maddox said softly. “For telling me about him. The real him. Not just the warrior.”
“He was so much more than a warrior.” My throat tightened. “He was my friend. My first friend, really. Before everything got complicated with courts and prophecies and wars. He was just the boy who almost went skinny dipping with me at the Summer Court festival.”
I’d seen the heaviness in Maddox’s eyes when he’d come back to our cabin this morning.
I didn’t know if it was seeing Damon or the same guilt he’d been torturing himself with for days.
Either way, I knew Maddox needed to hear about the man who had chosen to give his life for all of us.
He needed the same happy memories of Rhidian that I had and there had been a soft comfort in sharing them with him.
Maddox took my hand and squeezed. “He’d have liked that being how you remember him.”
I squeezed back, drew a breath, and pushed open the door.
The deck was quiet.
Not the heavy, oppressive silence of grief, though grief was certainly there.
This was something different. Something that reminded me of Rhidian himself.
A solid presence in the air. Reassurance, almost. Like he was here with us one last time, standing watch over everyone the way he always had, making sure they were all right before he could finally rest.
My magic stirred inside me, reaching for that presence. Reaching for something just beyond my perception, something warm and familiar that hovered at the edge of my senses like a voice calling from the next room.
Then I saw him.
Rhidian’s body lay on a platform near the ship’s railing, wrapped in white cloth that seemed to glow against the grey sky. Someone had placed wildflowers across his chest. Small purple ones that grew wild along the coastline. I didn’t know who had gathered them, but the gesture made my vision blur.
The water beyond the ship was glass-still.
Not a ripple disturbed its surface, stretching out in every direction like a mirror of polished silver.
The sails hung limp, the air motionless.
Even Fizzle had gone quiet, perched high on the mast with his wings tucked tight against his body, watching the deck below with an expression I’d never seen on him before.
He and Rhidian had worked together long before I’d come back to Nymeria.
Whatever their relationship had been, the owl griffin was here to say goodbye.
But more than that, It was as if the realm held its breath, like it had stopped to pay tribute.
My mates arranged themselves around me without needing to be told. Dean at my right, Tank at my left, Ryder and Maddox close behind. I could feel their support through the bond, four steady flames burning in my chest.
The freed Endless had gathered too. They hung toward the stern, keeping to the edges of the deck but present all the same.
Some had never met Rhidian. Some had fought against him while under Arik’s control.
But they were here, paying their respects to the man who had helped to free them.
Beside them, the soldiers who had trained at Rhidian’s camp stood with their heads bowed, their grief raw and visible.
Rhidian’s crew stood in a line near the platform, their faces carved from stone. Waiting.
They were waiting for me.
I stepped forward, and every eye on the ship turned to follow.
“Most of you knew Rhidian as a captain,” I began, my voice carrying across the silent deck.
“As a leader. A fighter. A man who stood against impossible odds because he couldn’t stomach the alternative.
” I paused, letting the words settle. “But I knew him before all of that. I knew him as a boy who once nearly went skinny dipping at a royal festival because a girl he barely knew dared him to.”
A few surprised sounds from the crew. One of them might have been a laugh.
“He grew up to be so much more than any of us could have predicted. The boy I knew became a man who changed the course of this realm. He sacrificed everything to save people he’d never met because he knew it was the right thing to do.
There was never any calculation in it, never any weighing of costs and benefits.
He saw people suffering and he did something about it.
It was that simple for him. It was always that simple. ”
My gaze swept across the deck. The freed Endless. The soldiers. The crew who had followed Rhidian into hell and back.
“Rhidian set aside the idea of courts and division and laid everything on the line for those who needed him. He didn’t care about bloodlines or borders or which court you were born into.
He cared about people.” I swallowed against the tightness in my throat.
“When this is all over, and it will be over, he is the one we should all look back on as the saviour of this realm. He started it all. He stood strong when no one else would.” My voice hardened with a conviction I felt all the way to my bones.
“And now we’re going to finish what he started. ”
Silence held the ship for a long, reverent moment.
Then one of Rhidian’s crew pressed a fist to his chest and bowed his head.
Another followed. Then another. Like a wave rolling through the crowd, the gesture spread until every person on that deck stood with their fists against their hearts in tribute.
I nodded at the crew, and they moved forward to lift the platform.
That’s when my magic tore out of me.
I didn’t call it. Didn’t summon it or shape it or try to direct it in any way. It simply erupted from my chest in a wave of golden light, racing toward Rhidian’s body like a river finding the sea.
I gasped, but before I could even try to rein it in, I felt the others joining.
Dean’s magic came first. Cold and sharp, the crystalline beauty of winter frost. Then Tank’s, warm and verdant, the smell of new growth after rain. Maddox’s blazed to life next, the fierce heat of summer sun. And Ryder’s, crackling and electric, the wild energy of a storm about to break.
All of it twisted together with my own. Braiding, weaving, twining into something greater than any of us could create alone. The combined magic washed over Rhidian’s body, coating the white cloth in a gleaming layer of gold that pulsed with life.
I stared at my trembling hands and felt something tug at my awareness.
When I concentrated, I found it. Not just my mates’ magic joining mine, but something else. Something smaller, fainter. Like a hundred tiny threads of light, each one barely visible on its own but together forming something real and undeniable.
Magic was flowing from the people on the ship.
From the freed Endless, from the crew, from the soldiers. Thin, fragile streams of power that shouldn’t have existed. Not in people who’d been drained and enslaved and stripped of everything they were. And yet there it was. Faint but present. Not everything had been stolen from them.
I didn’t think any of them could feel it themselves. The trickle was so small, so faint that it would be almost unnoticeable. But it was there, reaching toward Rhidian’s body, joining the golden shell that was forming around him.
My eyes found Dean’s across the deck. He was frowning, his gaze focused on something specific. Not the general flow of magic from the crowd, but a single stream. One that was noticeably stronger than the others, brighter, more defined.
It was coming from below deck.
I knew without even touching it that it was Damon’s.
Something twisted in my chest at the realisation. Even chained in the dark, even fighting a monster for control of his own mind, Damon was here. Paying tribute in the only way he could.
The golden magic hardened around Rhidian’s body, crystallizing into a shell that caught the grey light and scattered it across the deck in fractured rainbows. The whispers started immediately. Fragments drifting through the crowd like leaves on water.
“The old ways...”
“Like in the stories...”
“Is this real?”
Everyone was staring at me. All of them, with something in their eyes that went beyond respect or gratitude. Something that looked almost like reverence.
I didn’t know what to do with that. So I did what Rhidian would have done. I focused on what needed to happen next.