Chapter 40
Chapter Forty
Maddox
We took one moment to look at each other, to hold onto the torrent of emotions, and then we turned silently back to the battle, each of us moving to finish what we’d come here to do.
My mind reeled as I desperately tried not to let the betrayal distract me and in response the flames inside me spluttered in uncontrollable outrage.
The fire had always scared me.
Even now, even after everything, even with Rhidian’s crown burning in my veins and the Summer Court magic responding to my call like a trained hunting hawk, the fire still scared me.
Because I remembered what it had done. How it had erupted from my hands without permission, without control, consuming everything in its path while I screamed behind my own eyes.
Rhidian had died in front of me and the fire had come and it hadn’t cared about friend or enemy or the sobbing wreck of a man who’d called it into being.
Fire didn’t care. That was the lesson it had taught me.
But the Spring Court had taught me a different one.
The battle raged around me as the fire burned in my palms and for the first time since I’d received the Summer mark, I wasn’t afraid of it.
Because here, on Spring Court soil, the fire wasn’t destructive.
It was generative. It was the warmth that coaxed seeds from the earth.
The heat that dried the rain from wounded soldiers’ clothes.
The light that pushed back the darkness pouring from Arik’s corrupted sky.
I’d learned that from walking the grounds of the Spring Court, watching in wonder as flowers bloomed faster in my wake.
As the grass grew thicker where I stood.
As the fire inside me reached into the soil and fed the roots instead of burning them.
Summer meeting Spring. Heat meeting growth.
The magic that Rhidian had carried for a lifetime, that had passed through his death and into my hands, was finally showing me what it was for.
Not destruction. Creation.
And if Rhidian’s fire could create, then wielding it in battle wasn’t the horror I’d been carrying. It was the purpose I’d been looking for.
A cluster of dark creatures had broken through the eastern line and were tearing into the support camp where the healers worked.
I saw it happen from across the field. The creatures moved with a skittering, wrong-jointed speed that made my stomach clench.
They were insectoid, roughly. Disjointed bodies the colour of old bruises, too many legs, mandibles that dripped something that hissed when it hit the ground.
Three of them had already reached the healer tents. I could hear the screaming.
The lion surged inside me and I ran.
Not the wolf’s sprint, all burst speed and predatory focus.
The lion ran differently. A loping, ground-eating stride that covered distance with deceptive ease.
The lion was built for sustained effort, for the long chase, and it carried me across the battlefield with a patience that belied the urgency pounding in my chest.
The fire came when I called it.
I’d never been able to say that before. Before it had felt like the fire had come when it wanted to.
In the weeks after, it had come when I was emotional, when my control slipped, when the grief and the guilt cracked the walls I’d built around it.
But now, running toward the screaming with the Summer magic blazing through every nerve, the fire responded to my intention like a muscle I’d finally learned to flex.
I hit the first creature with a wave of flame that wasn’t white-hot and indiscriminate.
It was focused. Targeted. A lance of fire that struck the creature’s carapace and burned through it in a heartbeat, reducing it to ash without touching the tent behind it.
The fire knew where I wanted it to go and it went there stopping when I told it to stop.
The second creature turned toward me, mandibles clicking. I threw fire again. Same precision. Same restraint. It burned and died and the healer behind it, an Autumn Court Fae with blood on her hands and terror in her eyes, didn’t feel so much as a whisper of heat.
The third creature had a fighter in its mandibles.
One of the freed Endless, a woman whose name I didn’t know, lifted off the ground while the creature’s jaws worked at her shoulder.
She was screaming. Not the high, thin scream of panic but the raw, hoarse scream of someone who had already survived worse than this and was furious that it was happening again.
I couldn’t use fire. Not with the creature’s mandibles wrapped around her body. The flames would kill her before they killed it.
The lion took over.
The lion hit the creature at full speed, three hundred pounds of muscle and fury and burning golden mane.
My jaws closed around the joint where its head met its body and I bit down with everything the Summer Court had given me.
The carapace cracked. The creature shrieked, a sound like metal tearing, and its mandibles opened.
The woman began to fall as I shook my head and the creature’s head came off in my mouth and I spat it onto the ground with a sound of disgust that was all lion and no man.
I shifted back, breathing hard, and caught the woman before she hit the ground.
“You’re all right,” I told her, which was a lie. Her shoulder was a mess. But she was alive and the creatures were dead. The fire in my veins was purring with satisfaction instead of howling with shame for once.
“Behind you,” she gasped.
I turned. Two more creatures, coming fast. The fire answered before I even formed the thought. Twin lances of precise, surgical flame that caught both creatures in the chest and dropped them where they stood.
The woman stared at me with wide eyes. Then she looked at the burning remains, at the untouched tents, and at my hands where the fire flickered and waited.
“You’re the Summer King,” she said.
The lion rumbled in my chest. Not with pride.
With recognition. The lion had always known what the fire was for, even when I’d been too afraid to see it.
The lion was a creature of the sun, of the long golden plains.
He was filled with a fierce and protective love that drove a pride to defend its own against anything that threatened them.
The fire and the lion were the same thing wearing different skins.
I hadn’t thought of myself that way. Not really.
The mark on my skin was Rhidian’s legacy.
The crown was something I’d stolen through death, not earned through worth.
Every time someone called me king, I heard the voice in my head that said you don’t deserve this, this was his, you’re only wearing it because he died.
But standing in front of a woman I’d just pulled from the jaws of something terrible, with precise, controlled fire still warming my palms, the voice was quieter than it had ever been.
“Get to the fallback point,” I told her. “Stay low.”
She nodded and ran as I turned back to the battle.
The eastern line needed reinforcing.
I moved through the fighting with the fire as my guide, responding to every pocket of darkness with targeted, purposeful flame. Not the wildfire of Ice Falls that consumed without thought. Something better. Something that chose.
I found a knot of allied fighters pinned down by a wave of dark creatures. The fire swept through the creatures and left the fighters untouched. They stared at me as the ash settled around them, and then they picked up their weapons and followed me forward.
I found a section of the perimeter where the wards had collapsed and creatures were pouring through the gap.
The fire became a wall, a barrier of burning air that sealed the breach while the fighters behind me reorganized.
Not a wall of destruction. A wall of protection.
The fire holding the line while the people behind it caught their breath.
Then I found a guardian, the enormous antlered stag that had fallen earlier, lying on its side with black ichor seeping from a wound in its flank.
The dark creatures circled it, waiting for it to die.
The fire found them and they burned and I knelt beside the stag and pressed my burning hand to its wound and felt the Summer magic do something I hadn’t known it could do.
It healed.
Not fully. Not miraculously. But the fire flowed into the wound and the flesh knitted, slowly, the ichor burning away and clean tissue forming beneath it.
The stag’s enormous eye found mine and blinked, slow and wondering, and then it lurched to its feet with a sound like a mountain deciding to stand up and lowered its antlers before charging back into the fight.
I stayed on my knees for a moment, staring at my hands.
The fire danced across my fingers, amber and gold, and I thought about Rhidian.
About the man who had carried this magic his entire life and never used it for violence.
Who had been the heir of a Summer Court where he wanted fire to mean warmth and harvest and the long golden afternoons of a realm at peace.
He’d given me this. Through death, through pain, through the worst moment of my life. And now, months later, I finally understood why.
The fire wasn’t a weapon. It never had been. It was a gift. What I chose to do with it, what I chose to protect with it, that was the only thing that mattered.
Maddox the soldier had been terrified of the fire because soldiers saw everything as a weapon. Maddox the Summer King could finally see it for what it was.
I got to my feet and went back to work.
The bond pulled me west.