Chapter Twenty-Nine
Rhidian
Ididn’t feel like myself.
That was the thought I kept circling back to as I sat on the stone ledge overlooking the chamber that served as the group’s common room.
Not that I felt wrong exactly. Not ill or incomplete.
Just different. Like a suit of armour I’d worn my whole life had been stripped away and the body underneath was a shape I didn’t recognise.
The Summer magic was gone. I’d known that the moment I’d woken up, gasping on the cold stone floor with Maddox’s face above me and golden light still fading from my skin.
The hollow space where it used to sit was strange.
Like a room I’d lived in for years that had been emptied of all its furniture overnight.
The walls were still there, but everything that had filled it, everything I’d defined myself by, was gone.
And the strangest part was that I didn’t miss it.
I should have. The Summer Court’s magic had been my birthright, the thing that set me apart, the reason I’d been groomed and pressed into the shape of a future king since before I was old enough to understand what any of it meant.
It had been as much a part of me as my blood.
Losing it should have felt like losing a limb.
Instead, it felt like setting down a weight I’d been carrying for so long that I’d forgotten it was there.
Below me, the group was gathered around a table that Tank had found somewhere in the labyrinthine corridors of the Fifth Court.
Alyssa sat at the head of it, and even from up here I could see the change in her.
The light beneath her skin, faint but steady.
The way the air seemed to shift when she moved, as if the court itself was breathing around her.
She was becoming something. Something that didn’t have a name yet but that the realm recognised even if the rest of us couldn’t.
And the men around her were becoming something too.
I watched them and felt the oddest sense of clarity. Like dying had cleaned a window I hadn’t known was dirty. Finally shedding the burden that had put a death sentence on my head and turned my entire family against me.
The prince I’d been before, the Rhidian who’d carried the Summer Crown’s weight on his shoulders and loved Alyssa from a distance that felt like drowning, that man had been a performance.
A role I’d been cast in before I could choose for myself.
The dutiful heir who would one day sit on a throne he never wanted and rule a court that had tried to kill him for the crime of being born to the wrong mother.
I’d thought that was who I was. I’d built my entire identity around it.
The restraint, the careful composure that never cracked because a prince couldn’t afford to crack.
Even loving Alyssa had been filtered through that lens.
Quiet and steady and selfless. The kind of love that looked noble from the outside but was really just another cage I’d locked myself into because I didn’t know how to want things for myself.
She’d been so free, wild in her own unique way.
How could I not have looked at that and seen loving it as a freedom I’d never get for myself?
But that man had died at Ice Falls with a sword in his chest and the name of a woman who would never love him back on his lips.
The man who’d woken up on the floor of the Fifth Court was someone else.
Someone lighter. Someone who looked at the hollow space where duty and obligation used to live and felt, for the first time in his life, the terrifying, exhilarating possibility of being free.
“You’re brooding.”
I looked down to find Maddox standing at the base of the ledge, two bowls in his hands. Steam curled from whatever he’d made this time.
“I’m thinking,” I corrected. “There’s a difference.”
“Ryder says that too. He’s usually lying as well.” Maddox held up one of the bowls. “Come down and eat. Alyssa wants to talk next steps.”
I climbed down from the ledge and took the bowl.
Some kind of stew, thick and rich, made from whatever stores this court had hidden in its depths that none of us really wanted to think about the logistics of.
Maddox watched me eat the first spoonful with the quiet intensity of a man who needed to see other people nourished.
It was his way of healing. I understood that now.
“How are you doing?” I asked him. A simple question, but the weight behind it wasn’t simple at all.
Maddox’s jaw tightened. Then loosened. “Better,” he said. “Not fixed. But better.”
He didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t push. Some conversations didn’t need to be finished in a single sitting. Some pain didn’t need to be laid out and examined every time someone else mentioned it.
We joined the others at the table. Alyssa looked up when I sat down, and something flickered across her face.
Not pity, and not the careful tenderness she reserved for her mates.
Something more honest than either of those things.
Recognition, maybe. An acknowledgment that I was here and that my presence mattered even if it didn’t fit neatly into the shape of her life.
I appreciated that more than she probably knew.
“Right,” Alyssa said, and the room settled. Even Ryder stopped fidgeting. “We need to talk about what comes next.”
“Arik,” Dean said. The word landed on the table like a blade. His arms were crossed, his back against the wall, and the ice in his eyes hadn’t thawed since I’d watched him stare at the gap where his throne should have been. “We take the fight to him before he brings it to us.”
“It’s not that simple,” Tank said from the far end of the table.
His voice was calm, measured. It was always calm and measured.
I’d known men like Tank in the Summer Court’s guard.
The ones who never raised their voices because they never needed to.
“Arik will have felt Nymeria die. He’ll know the courts have shifted.
If he’s smart, and he is, he’ll already be making his move.
We’ve given him the chance to end it all. To get what he’s been fighting for.”
“Then we need to move faster,” Dean pressed.
“We need to move smarter,” Alyssa countered. She held Dean’s gaze until the ice cooled from a blaze to a simmer. “The Endless. The ones still under his control. If we kill Arik while they’re still bound to him, will they die with him?”
Silence fell over the table. It was the kind of silence that tasted like ash. Every person in this room had seen what Arik did to his Endless. The hollow eyes, the stolen will. Bodies moving under someone else’s command.
“So we free them first,” Ryder said. He leaned back in his chair, arms folded behind his head in a way that projected casual ease and fooled absolutely nobody. “Any idea how?”
“The same way I freed the others at Ice Falls,” Alyssa said. “Breaking his hold on them one at a time. But that was during battle, in the chaos. If he’s expecting it, if he’s fortified himself...”
“He’ll make it harder,” Damon finished. He’d been quiet until now, sitting at the corner of the table like a man still getting used to being allowed to sit at tables.
The shadow magic curled around his fingers in idle patterns, dark smoke that caught the light in strange ways.
“He’ll use them as shields. Put the Endless between us and him, and dare us to fight through them. ”
“That sounds like something he’d do,” I said.
Every head turned to me. I wasn’t part of this group, not really, and they all knew it.
But I’d grown up in Nymeria’s courts. I understood how power worked here.
How cruelty worked here. “Arik doesn’t value the Endless as people.
They’re resources to him. He’ll burn through every last one of them if it buys him time.
And he’ll make Alyssa kill them just because he knows it will hurt her. ”
Alyssa’s expression hardened. “Then we need a way to break his hold on all of them at once. Not one by one. Before the fight even starts.”
“Can you do that?” Tank asked. The question was direct, but his hand found Alyssa’s shoulder as he asked it. The gesture was so natural, so unconscious, that I doubted either of them noticed.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Maybe. With the Fifth Court’s magic added to all the other four courts...” She trailed off, and I could see her mind working. Weighing what she knew against what she didn’t. “I need time to figure it out.”
“Time is the one thing we don’t have much of,” Dean said.
“Then I’ll work fast.”
The discussion continued, circling around the hundred small decisions that had to be made before they could march on Arik’s stronghold. I listened more than I spoke. Not because I had nothing to offer, but because I was watching.
I was watching Damon.
Or more accurately, I was watching the space between Damon and Alyssa.
It was a living thing, that space. Charged with something I recognised because I’d spent years drowning in a lesser version of it.
Every time Alyssa turned her head, her eyes found him.
Not deliberately. Not consciously. The way a compass needle finds north.
A small, involuntary pull that she probably didn’t even notice but that was obvious to anyone standing outside the magnetic field.
And Damon. He was worse. Every time Alyssa spoke, his body shifted toward her.
Fractionally, almost imperceptibly, like a plant turning toward light.
His hand would twitch on the table, fingers reaching for something before he caught himself and pulled them back.
And his eyes. Those newly clear eyes that I’d watched the nightmare cloud for weeks.
When they found Alyssa, they held on like she was the only solid thing in a world that kept shifting.