Chapter 34
Chapter Thirty-Four
Maddox
Icouldn’t stop feeling things.
That had always been my problem, according to Dean.
Too much heart. Too many emotions running too close to the surface.
The kind of man who felt a bruise before it bloomed, who sensed a storm before the sky darkened, who knew something was wrong in a room full of smiling people because he could taste the lie under the laughter.
But since the Fifth Court, it had gotten worse. Or better. I hadn’t decided yet.
Five bonds now, not four. Each one a thread of constant sensation humming in my chest.
I could feel them all, all the damn time, even when they were on the other side of the palace.
Tank’s calm satisfaction as he reviewed supply lists.
Ryder’s restless boredom as he sharpened a blade he didn’t need to sharpen.
Damon’s focused intensity, off somewhere with Fizzle, the shadows in him coiling and releasing in patterns I could feel through the bond like distant music.
And Dean. Dean who felt like a frozen lake with something trapped beneath the surface.
I’d been watching him since we arrived at the Spring Court.
Not obviously, because obvious watching made Dean shut down harder.
Heaven forbid someone actually be concerned about him.
But through the bond, I could feel the cold in him running deeper than the ice magic warranted.
There was something he wasn’t saying. Something that sat behind his eyes when he thought no one was looking, a weight that had settled onto his shoulders somewhere between the Fifth Court and here and hadn’t shifted.
I didn’t know what it was. But I knew it was there with the certainty of a body that had learned to read the weather of other people’s pain.
But what gave me the right to confront him for his hidden pain? Dean wasn’t the only one who was suffering in stoic silence. The guilt still smothered me at times. It rose up at unexpected moments, reminding me of what I’d done.
I found Rhidian at the edge of camp, sitting on a fallen log with his face turned toward the sun.
He looked different in the daylight. Not just alive, though that was still jarring enough to make my breath catch every time I saw him.
Different in a way that had nothing to do with the resurrection and everything to do with the absence of what had defined him before.
No golden shimmer on his skin. No sense of the Summer Court’s magic humming in the air around him. No crown, no court, no title. Just a man sitting in the sun, looking peaceful in a way I’d never seen from him when he’d been a prince.
He opened his eyes when I approached and smiled. Not the careful, measured smile of the Summer Prince who weighed every expression for political consequence. A real one. Easy.
“You’re staring,” he said.
“Sorry.” I sat on the log beside him, leaving a careful distance. “It’s still strange. Seeing you.”
“Imagine how strange it is being me.” He stretched his legs out and leaned back on his hands, tilting his face toward the sky again. “I keep expecting to wake up. Or to feel the magic come rushing back. Neither happens.”
“Do you miss it? The magic?”
He was quiet for a long time. Long enough that I started to worry I’d asked the wrong thing, pushed too hard on a wound that was still fresh. But when he spoke, his voice was steady.
“No.” He sounded almost surprised by his own answer.
“I feel like it should. It was part of me for my entire life. The Summer Court’s magic, the royal marks, the connection to the land.
I should feel hollow without it.” He paused, and when he continued there was something wondering in his tone.
“Instead I feel lighter. Like I’ve set down a pack I’d been carrying so long I’d forgotten it was there. ”
“The crown?”
“The crown. The duty. The performance.” He looked at me, and the openness in his expression made my chest ache.
“I was so busy being the prince that I never figured out who Rhidian was underneath it. Now I don’t have a choice.
I never wanted it. All it did was bring me pain.
This is the second chance I needed Maddox.
I know you feel guilty and there’s a part of me that feels like an ass to be happy in this situation because I know I asked too much of you.
I know the burden you carry now is because of me. ”
The guilt stirred in my stomach. It always did when I looked at him, a reflexive clench that said you killed him followed immediately by the memory of Damon’s voice saying bring back Rhidian and the blinding golden light that had poured from Nymeria’s dying form.
“Stop,” Rhidian said gently.
“Stop what?”
“Whatever you’re doing in your head right now.
I can see it on your face.” He turned to face me fully.
“Maddox, I died protecting this world. I made that choice. I’d make it again.
And Damon brought me back, which was his choice.
The only person in this story who didn’t choose anything was you.
You followed orders. You fought a war that wasn’t yours to begin with and yet you still picked up a sword because it was the right thing to do.
. And you’re carrying guilt for a death that I walked into with my eyes open.
Besides, dying was the best thing that ever happened to me. ”
“You make it sound simple.”
“It is simple. The complicated part seems to be convincing you of that.” He bumped my shoulder with his.
The gesture was so casual, so utterly devoid of princely reserve, that it startled a rough laugh out of me.
“I’m free, Maddox. Genuinely, completely free.
No magic, no crown, no court expecting me to be something I was never sure I wanted to be.
When this fight is over, I’m going to walk out of here and find out what that freedom looks like. ”
“The sea,” I said, remembering what he’d told Alyssa.
“The sea.” He smiled again, and this time it reached his eyes fully.
“The western coast. The Nymerian Sea. Places I was never allowed to go because the Summer Prince had responsibilities, and then I couldn’t leave until I’d helped the people who were suffering here.
But that suffering started in the summer court long before Arik came along.
” He said the last word with a gentle mockery that held no bitterness.
“I want to see what’s out there. I want to stand on a cliff and look at a horizon and know that I can walk toward it without anyone needing me to be somewhere else. ”
The guilt didn’t vanish. It wasn’t that kind of weight.
But something in its texture changed. The sharp edge that had been cutting me since Ice Falls dulled a fraction more, worn down by the simple, undeniable evidence of a man who was at peace with what had happened to him.
He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t grieving. He was planning an adventure, and the light in his eyes when he talked about it was brighter than any Summer magic I’d ever seen him wear.
“After the fight,” I said. “You finish this with us first.” Not because we needed him to, but because I knew Rhidian so much better now, and I knew he needed to see if all come to an end.
“Obviously.” He clapped my shoulder as he stood. “I didn’t come back from the dead to miss the ending.”
He walked off toward the command area where Tank was doing whatever Tank did with maps and logistics. I watched him go and let the guilt settle into its new shape. Not gone. But changing. Becoming something I could carry without bleeding.
I sat on the log and let the afternoon sun warm my face, and that was when I felt it.
Not through my eyes or ears or any of the five senses.
Through the bond. A pull, deep and insistent, like something tugging at the threads in my chest. All five of them at once.
The sensation was disorienting, as if every bond was straining toward a single point, trying to close a circuit that hadn’t been completed.
I’d been feeling it since the Fifth Court, a low background hum that I’d attributed to the new bond with Damon settling in.
But sitting here, in the Spring Court’s saturated magic, with the Summer fire burning quietly in my veins, the hum had sharpened into something I couldn’t ignore.
The bonds weren’t settling like they had before.
They were building. Gaining intensity. Like five instruments warming up for a performance, each one finding its note, but the conductor hadn’t given the downbeat.
The magic wanted something.
I closed my eyes and focused. Felt along each thread.
Tank’s bond hummed with earth and growth, content in its home territory but vibrating at a frequency I hadn’t noticed before.
Dean’s bond was cold and bright and straining toward something just out of reach, the Winter magic in him reaching for a throne it hadn’t claimed yet.
Ryder’s bond crackled and swirled, Autumn storms contained in a bottle, pressure building.
Damon’s bond was the newest and the strangest, shadow and light intertwined, pulsing with a rhythm that didn’t quite match the others but was trying to.
And Alyssa. At the centre. The point they were all pulling toward.
Her bond was... vast. Vaster than it had been even a week ago.
The realm’s magic was pouring into her, filling spaces she hadn’t known existed, and the five bonds attached to her were being pulled apart by the scale of what she was becoming.
Not breaking. Stretching. Being asked to carry more than they’d been designed for.