She was dead.

The matebond was empty and his wife was dead and the thought landed in Maddox’s chest like a blade between the ribs and stayed there.

The only reason he was still upright was because the body keeps moving after the mind has stopped, and his body had been trained to move in exactly these conditions for exactly these reasons.

Maddox saw Ryker below.

Black armor. Blood on his face. A sword in each hand because his dragon fire was gone and the man underneath the dragon had never needed fire to be lethal. He was holding the eastern flank with a line of warriors fighting on muscle memory and adrenaline, and the line was bending.

Maddox: Ryker. I am here.

The mindlink carried for the first time. Weak. Fragmented. Enough.

Ryker: Maddox. Do you have fire support?

Maddox: Negative. Seven dragons. Fire dampened on entry.

Ryker: Then why the hell are you here.

Maddox: Because you are.

Lorens landed in the courtyard hard enough to crack the stone. Maddox dismounted before the talons had stopped moving. His dragon was gone.

Dampening wards held his dragon down like a boot on a throat, and Maddox Drakencrest stood in a battle in human form.

A guard threw him a sword. He caught it without looking.

The first man came at him from the right. Maddox killed him in two moves. Clean. Mechanical. The swordwork of a dead man’s body doing what it had been trained to do.

He cut his way to Ryker’s position in under a minute. Warriors parted as he passed, and the ones who failed to part were removed. By the time he reached the eastern flank, his sword was red to the hilt.

Ryker looked at him across the shield wall. Blood on his jaw. A gash above his left eye. His black armor dented in three places and scratched in twenty.

"You look terrible."

"Kael set the trap and left," Ryker said. "His commanders are running it. Three companies. The dark mage is holding the dampening field from inside the Keep. If we drop the mage, we get fire back."

"How many men behind the mage?"

"Two hundred. Warded door. My best warriors have been hitting it for three hours."

Maddox looked at the Keep. Then the courtyard. Then the three companies closing from the north, west, and south. Two thousand of Ryker’s men were alive, but their fire was gone, their shifts were failing, and the formation was shrinking by the minute.

Seven fresh dragons with dampened fire and a king who could not shift changed nothing.

The math was simple.

"Lorens."

"Commander."

"White banner. I am walking to the gate."

Ryker’s head snapped towards him. "What did you just say."

"I am the objective. I have always been the objective. You were the bait. I am the prize." His voice was flat. Empty. The voice of a man who had already lost the thing worth living for and was settling accounts with what remained. "The moment they have me, the siege is pointless. They pull back. The field drops. Your fire comes back. Two thousand men go home to their wives and children."

"And you go in chains."

"Yes."

"Absolutely fucking not."

"It was never a question, Ryker."

Maddox looked at him. Gold eyes steady and dead. The specific calm of a man standing past the worst thing that could happen to him, operating in the wasteland on the other side of it. There was nothing left to threaten him with. Kael could chain him, break him, kill him. None of it mattered.

"She is dead, Ryker."

The words fell out of him like stones. Ryker’s face changed.

"I felt her die." His voice cracked. "There is nothing left for Kael to take from me. So let save my people."

Ryker stared at him, his usual mask gone. What was left was the face of a man watching his best friend break in half and understanding, with the clarity of a soldier who had been in enough wars to know the difference, that Maddox was not making a strategic decision. He was making a final one.

"Maddox."

"Get them home."

"Maddox. We do not know—"

"I know." His voice was quiet. Certain. He felt his wife’s agony tear through his body at altitude and then the connection went dark, and he’d arrived at the only conclusion the evidence supported. "I know, Ryker."

Silence. Three seconds. Five. The sound of the siege filling the space between them because the words had run out.

Ryker’s jaw locked. His eyes were bright. His fists were shaking at his sides.

Then he stepped back.

Maddox handed his sword to Lorens. He walked across the courtyard alone. His boots echoed on the cracked stone. Behind him, two thousand warriors watched their king walk toward the enemy gate without a weapon, without his shift, without his fire. A man in human form crossing open ground toward an army that wanted his crown.

All saluted, fists to their chest.

Ryker: If you die in there, I will personally drag your corpse back to Drakencrest and let Blair kill you again.

Maddox did not respond.

The enemy gate opened.

Kael’s commanders met him at the threshold. Four of them. Armed. Armored. They looked at the High King of Velkaris standing alone in front of them with empty hands and dead eyes, and the hesitation on their faces was the hesitation of men who had been given orders to capture a dragon and were staring at a man who looked like he wanted them to try.

"I am Maddox Drakencrest. High King of Velkaris. Commander of the Drakencrest Army."

His voice carried across the courtyard behind him. Every warrior on both sides heard it.

"Your siege ends now. Every soldier on that field walks out of Cinderfall alive."

He held his arms out. Wrists together.

"In exchange, you get me."

The commanders looked at each other. Then at the king. Then at the army behind him that was watching their sovereign give himself away.

Iron shackles closed around his wrists.

The weight of them was familiar in a way that should not have been. Cold. Heavy. Final. The click of the lock echoed off the courtyard walls, and behind him, Ryker’s roar split the air, human and anguished and carrying enough rage to shake the foundation of the Keep.

Maddox did not turn around.

They led him through the gate. The courtyard disappeared behind stone walls. The sound of the siege faded. The dampening field held, and held, and then released in a wave that rolled outward from the Keep like a held breath finally exhaled.

Fire returned.

Two thousand dragons got their flame back in the same second. The shift pressure reversed. Warriors who had been fighting on foot with steel in their hands erupted into their dragon forms, and the sky above Cinderfall filled with wings and fire and the specific fury of an army that had just watched its king walk into chains so they could live.

Kael’s three companies broke within minutes. The battle was over before it had a chance to restart.

Ryker stood in the center of the courtyard. Human. His swords at his sides. Blood drying on his face. The gate was closed. The king was gone. The fire was back and the men were alive and every single one of them owed their survival to the man on the other side of that wall.

His coin was in his hand. He had not flipped it. His expression that held no humor and no performance and no trace of the man his army knew.

He closed his fist around the coin.

Behind the walls of Cinderfall Keep, in a room with no windows and no light, Maddox Drakencrest sat on cold stone with iron on his wrists and silence in his chest where her heartbeat used to be.

He closed his eyes.

He did not try the matebond again.