Chapter 37 #2
The perimeter guards were my last calling point. Rotations were holding. The wards that Alyssa had woven into the boundary still pulsed with steady light, a web of magic that would alert us to any breach. Nothing had tested them in days. That should have been reassuring.
It wasn’t.
The bear paced. It had been pacing all morning, circling the edges of my mind with a low, continuous growl that vibrated in my chest like a second heartbeat. I’d felt this before. On the night before when Arik tested our defences. The bear had paced then too. The bear had known.
I stopped at the crest of a small hill that overlooked the court grounds and pressed my hand to the earth.
It came so easily now. Without me even needing to think about it.
In some ways it felt like this had always been my life and those magicless days in the human realm were just a practice run. A rehearsal.
The land hummed beneath my palm. Spring magic, warm and alive, threading through the soil in golden veins. But underneath that warmth, something else. A vibration. Faint, like a tuning fork struck at the edge of hearing. Something pushing against the roots. Testing. Probing.
My hand clenched in the grass.
The bear stopped pacing and went very, very still. Something was wrong. I just didn’t know what.
By late afternoon, the war council had convened and the plans were set.
We would march at dawn. The western approach, as Rhidian and I had discussed.
Eight days skirting the wildling forest and then through Autumn territory, with a final push to Winter.
Alyssa would lead with the vast amount of power she held.
Dean and his ice would take point once we reached the mountain passes.
Ryder’s storms would provide cover. Maddox’s fire would clear obstacles.
Damon’s shadows would scout ahead, slipping through places where light couldn’t reach.
My role was simpler. Hold the line. Protect the people behind me. Be the wall that nothing got through.
The bear approved of that. The bear always approved of standing between danger and the people it loved.
After the council broke, the camp settled into the particular quiet of people who know they’re about to walk into something terrible. Not silence. Quiet. The difference between a room with no sound and a room where everyone is breathing as carefully as they can.
I found Alyssa on a rooftop staring out over a vast expanse behind the palace. I could feel her sorrow. Feel the way the land grieved and I knew without needing to ask that this was where it had all begun with the massacre that had Fizzle sending Alyssa to the human realm.
She was staring at the edge of the field where the first Spring Court had died.
The grass had grown back thick and green, covering the blood that had soaked into the soil.
But Alyssa’s eyes weren’t seeing the grass.
I could tell by the way her shoulders had drawn in, the way her fingers curled at her sides.
She was seeing the bodies. The violence.
I didn’t say anything. I just stood beside her, close enough that she could feel me there, and waited.
“Do you think they’d be proud?” she asked, after a while. “The ones who died here. If they could see what we’re about to do.”
I considered that carefully, the way I considered everything she asked me. Alyssa didn’t need platitudes. She needed the truth filtered through enough gentleness that it didn’t cut.
“I think they’d be terrified,” I said. “And I think they’d stand with us anyway.”
She leaned into my side. Not all her weight, just enough to feel the press of her shoulder against my arm. The bond between us hummed, warm and steady, and for a moment the bear settled.
“We’re going to lose people,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And there’s no version of this plan where we don’t.”
“No.”
She was quiet for a long time. The wind moved through the grass, and the late afternoon light turned everything gold.
“I’m not going to pretend I’m ready for this,” she said. “But I’m done waiting.”
I put my arm around her shoulders and held her against me.
She was so small. It still surprised me sometimes, how much power lived inside such a compact frame.
The realm breathed through her now, five courts of magic woven into a single current that I could feel humming beneath her skin like a second pulse.
She was becoming something vast and ancient and extraordinary.
It also terrified me though. She would have to stand at the front of this whole thing and take on the danger wielding magic she’d never had a chance to use before.
So much could go wrong and it was taking everything in me to not just focus on that and my need to smuggle her away to safety.
Instead, I focused on the here and now, on her leaning against my chest with her eyes closed. She was just the woman I loved. And I would tear the world apart before I let anything take her from me.
“Tomorrow,” I said.
She nodded against my shoulder. “Tomorrow.”
We didn’t say goodbye as we parted ways outside of the palace doors.
There were too many of us for us to shelter inside the palace now and with the villages destroyed by the forest the only choice had been to build a temporary camp outside the palace doors.
And yet even though it should have just been an overflow, almost everyone had migrated out here.
Seeking comfort in the presence of each other. .
Dean sharpened his blades in silence. Maddox sat with Rhidian by one of the fires, their conversation low and private.
Ryder made someone laugh on the other side of the camp, the sound carrying through the quiet like a bell.
Damon stood at the edge of the tree line, his shadows pooling around his feet, the wolf he’d not even met yet a steady presence at the borders of his mind.
Alyssa moved between us like the thread that held us all together.
A hand on Dean’s shoulder. A kiss pressed to Maddox’s temple.
A murmured word to Ryder that made his smile turn real instead of performed.
A long moment standing beside Damon in silence, her light touching his shadows, the two merging at the edges like dawn meeting dusk.
I watched from my usual place. A little apart, seeing the whole picture. The way I always had.
The sun set. The fires burned low. The camp settled into something that wasn’t quite sleep and wasn’t quite wakefulness. The final peaceful night before we marched to war.
I should have closed my eyes. I should have rested while I could.
Instead I sat at the edge of camp with my hand on the ground and listened to the land whisper.
It was trying to tell me something.
The bear was trying to tell me something.
I was too focused on tomorrow to hear what they were saying about tonight.
The ground shook at the first touch of grey in the eastern sky.
Not an earthquake. Not the slow, grinding shift of tectonic plates or the settling of old foundations. This was violent. Sudden. The earth lurching beneath my feet like a living thing recoiling from a wound.
I was on my feet before the tremor finished, every sense sharpening to a point. The bear surged forward, slamming against the walls of my control, and for the first time in years I let it push further than I usually allowed.
Because I could feel it. Through the Spring Court bond, through the magic that tied me to this land as surely as roots tied a tree to soil.
I could feel the violation. Something was tearing through the wards.
Something massive and wrong and hungry, ripping through the protections Alyssa had woven like paper through flame.
The ground shook again. Harder.
Screams erupted across the camp. The sound of tents collapsing, metal clanging, people scrambling for weapons they hadn’t expected to need.
I turned north. The sky above the tree line was wrong.
The grey of predawn had curdled into something darker, a bruised and sickly purple that spread across the horizon like infection through a wound.
And beneath that poisoned sky, moving through the forest with the sound of ten thousand trees breaking at once, something was coming.
Not tomorrow.
Now.
The land screamed through my bond and I screamed with it.
“UP!” I roared, and the word tore out of me with enough force to shake the nearest tents. “EVERYONE UP! WE’RE UNDER ATTACK!”
Arik wasn’t waiting for us to come to him.
He was already here.