Chapter 449: The Queen And Her Glowing Student

FIVE MINUTES EARLIER - THE KING’S PRIVATE COURTYARD

The door opened onto a world that had no business existing indoors.

Octavian led the three of them into a courtyard that stretched acres in every direction, bordered by trees tall enough to be mistaken for architecture, every leaf and vine and low-hanging bloom throwing off a soft light that turned the whole expanse into a glowing oasis.

A path wound through the glow toward a center none of them could see yet.

"They are just through there." Octavian gestured down the path, then lifted both hands and rotated on his heel with the serene efficiency of a man who had no intention of standing anywhere near what was about to happen. He had read the forecast. He was choosing shelter.

Maddox was already moving.

Then three men who had spent the entire night fighting each other for the lead abruptly stopped.

Her scent punched Maddox in the chest. It was stronger than usual and smelled extra good.

Next to him, Nicholas’s nostrils flared. On his other side, Kael sniffed once. Twice.

Then all three started moving like they were possessed, following the scent down a path that curved and opened up into a glowing pool.

For the second time, all three of them stopped at the exact same moment, boots planting in the luminous grass. What they saw was going to live behind their eyes for the rest of their natural lives.

At the center was a large hot spring made of liquid gold. In the distance, a waterfall roared, also glowing gold. Steam curled off the surface in lazy gold spirals.

It was, objectively, the most beautiful thing any of the three of them had walked into, and not one of them was in the mood to appreciate it.

Guinevere sat on the ledge.

She was in a dress that Luminari culture considered ordinary and that Kael’s entire value system considered a declaration of war. The fabric cut in a way that respected the warm air and disrespected every protective instinct the young dragon had cultivated since the day he’d met her.

She was mid-sentence, hands moving as she talked, explaining something with the earnest focus of a woman who was trying to teach a man how to shift because she had accidentally given him a wolf.

Landon was in the pool.

He was on the same ledge she occupied, submerged to the ribs, glowing gold through the water, and his arm rested against her thigh.

His eyes were on her face. He was eating every word she offered like it was the first meal he’d had in days.

"—watering hole," Guinevere was explaining, gesturing at the gold around him. "Some wolves love the water and some want nothing to do with it. There’s no way to know which kind yours is until it decides for itself. You’ll feel the preference before you understand it."

"Will it know how to swim on its own?" Landon asked, in a voice pitched low enough to require her to lean in.

"If it doesn’t, my wolf can teach him."

He shifted his arm half an inch along her thigh in a gesture that said attentive and meant something else entirely to the three apex predators watching.

Maddox stood at the mouth of the clearing and processed, in real time, that his brother had not, in fact, been exaggerating.

Watering hole. The water birth analogy. His wife was, in observable fact, running a veterinary clinic for a monarch out of an outdoor bathtub, and the monarch was lapping it up with the dedication of a man who had never once in his glowing life been told no.

Nicholas dragged a hand down his face. His wolf made a baffled noise beneath his ribs, a low questioning rumble, and then, a second later, grunted something that sounded distressingly like disagreement on the matter of knowing how to swim or not. His wolf had been loud and opinionated all day and had no intention of stopping now.

Kael still had not made it past the dress.

He was stuck there, scandalized, a man watching his worldview get undressed in front of him. The longer he stared the more he hated it. Then his attention narrowed off the fabric and onto the glowing king attached to it, zeroing in with the flat, patient focus of a predator who had decided to put a king back into his coma.

Maddox recovered first.

He stormed across the clearing, leaving Kael steaming in his wake and Nicholas’s nostrils flaring behind him.

"Guinevere."

She turned at the sound, and the second she found his face her own broke open. "Maddox!"

She was up and moving before the smile finished arriving, crossing the stone and wrapping around him like a woman who had missed her husband and had no idea she was walking into a weather system.

He received her with a grunt and folded his arms around her. That did help. He felt much better now. His lips pressed against the top of her hair.

"I’m so sorry I didn’t come back right away. I—" She stopped, because the next sentence involved the marking and she’d very much hoped to deliver that one somewhere that was not three feet from the man she’d marked.

He picked her up, threw her over his shoulder, and started walking.

She blinked at the courtyard now traveling backward past her. "M-Maddox?"

"I’m aware you marked him." Maddox didn’t slow. "He seems fine. We’re leaving."

"Maddox, I think I gave him a wolf."

"He’ll be fine."

"Maddox, wait. Put me down."

"No."

Behind them, water sheeted off stone as the King of Light rose out of the pool like a king who had been designed by the gods.

Water dripped off a body that did not need to glow to make a point but was glowing anyway because the Luminari were an overachieving people and their king was the valedictorian.

Swim shorts. Abs that had abs. A glow that brightened three degrees when his eyes found Maddox.

"Drakencrest."