Jump to Chapter Recap of Between Tides & Thunder: Chapters P–12 | 13–28 | 29–41 | 42–56 | 57–70
Between Tides & Thunder Chapters 71–Epilogue Summary
This Leena Kazak Between Tides & Thunder chapter summary contains full spoilers.
Between Tides & Thunder Chapter 71
Mayah, Zev, and Sura are crammed into a carriage together after Mayah and Zev agree to go with the rebels. Zev wears shackles, which unsettle Mayah. Sura asks about Daak, and Mayah tells Sura that Daak died.
Once the carriage stops, Zev and Mayah share a brief, tense moment alone. Zev insists he only came to see what Tairna built, not for Mayah.
The Rebellion camp turns out to be surprisingly well-developed, with multi-story buildings and infrastructure maintained by different wielders. As Sura walks Mayah and Zev through it, she explains how earthwielders and waterwielders helped shape and sustain the place.
The three end up at the forge, where Mayah spots Tumaas, an old friend. Tumaas drops everything the moment he sees Mayah, and they share a warm, joyful reunion while Zev watches in rigid silence.
Tairna then suggests Mayah stay with her husband rather than bunk with Sura and Tumaas. Neither Mayah nor Zev says a word against the idea, so Sura reluctantly agrees to find them a room on her floor.
Between Tides & Thunder Chapter 72
Zev and Mayah settle into their room at the rebel camp. Zev is clearly struggling, and after some resistance, he pulls Mayah into his lap. They share a quiet, tender moment before making their way upstairs to meet Tairna.
Tairna lays out the Rebellion’s plan. The rebels intend to strike both Tundrayn and Arbinj on the same day, something made possible by a secret deal that pulled the Arbinji away from their alliance with the Volcanis. The endgame is to place Mayah and Zev on the thrones of both kingdoms.
Mayah worries her people will never accept her after she killed her own warriors, but Tairna is confident that once the truth about Tormik murdering Mayah’s mother becomes public, opinion will shift.
Tairna also drops a surprising revelation. Sauzon, someone Mayah trusted from the palace, has been her spy all along. Tairna explains that Sauzon is a “shield,” a rare capability that makes someone immune to heartwielders and truthwielders. Most shields never know what they are.
The meeting takes a sharp turn when Zev brings up his brother Lev. Zev tells Tairna what their father did after Lev died, how he mocked Lev, refused to let Zev grieve, and barred him from the funeral entirely. Zev makes clear he has no interest in Tairna’s apologies. He slams his fists on the table and walks out. Mayah follows him.
Between Tides & Thunder Chapter 73
After a tense confrontation with Zev’s mother, Mayah and Zev head back to their room. Sura appears in the hallway and pulls Mayah off to a dance being held that night. Zev doesn’t engage and disappears into their room alone.
At Sura’s room, Mayah and Sura have an emotional reunion, complete with tears and apologies. Sura lends Mayah a dress and helps her get ready.
At the dance, Sura introduces Mayah around to her friends. When Zev shows up, the whole room goes quiet. Zev doesn’t come over to Mayah. He walks straight to the bar.
Tairna finds Mayah, and they end up talking for a while. Mayah tells Tairna about Zev’s loneliness and his difficult relationship with his father. Tairna shares what she remembers about Mayah’s late mother. She then nudges Mayah to go ask Zev to dance, telling her he’s been watching her all night.
Mayah gathers herself and starts making her way across the room toward Zev. Before she gets there, Tumaas swoops in and pulls Mayah onto the dance floor. Mayah can see Zev at the bar, visibly tense, staring at Tumaas’s hand on her back. She wants Zev to come and claim her, but he doesn’t. When the song ends and Mayah finally looks for him, he’s already gone.
Between Tides & Thunder Chapter 74
Mayah arrives late to a council meeting with Tairna, Zev, and two advisers. The group is discussing the Volcan alliance and planned attacks on Arbinji military bases. When Zev mentions recent raids he assumed the Rebellion carried out, Mayah admits her father staged them to pull Zev away so she could complete her mission. The confession lands heavily, and Tairna wraps up the meeting soon after.
That night, a thunderstorm sends Mayah to Sura’s room. Zev turns up at the door, checks that Mayah is there and safe, then leaves without a word.
Once the storm passes, Sura opens up about the night Zev’s attack on her battalion left her and Tumaas among the only survivors. Sura then pushes Mayah to be honest about her feelings. Mayah admits that somewhere during her travels with Zev, she started to care for him deeply and that betraying him now hurts her more than losing Daak ever did.
Sura tells Mayah that Zev is obviously still taken with her too and raises the idea that Mayah doesn’t have to stay and see Tairna’s plan through. Mayah could just go with Zev. Sura reassures Mayah that they’ll work it out together.
Between Tides & Thunder Chapter 75
Mayah wakes up in Sura’s room to a surprise gift of fighting leathers. Mayah puts them on and sees a warrior in the mirror for the first time.
At a war meeting with Tairna, the group reviews the Volcan army’s movements and agrees to publicly execute the monarchs to secure Mayah’s rule. Mayah interrupts to claim the right to kill her father herself, and Tairna agrees to take him alive.
After the meeting, Tairna removes the cuffs that have suppressed Zev’s powers. Sura, it turns out, had approached Tairna that morning and said she was finally ready for them to come off, which catches Mayah off guard.
That night, a storm rolls in and terrifies Mayah. She stops herself from calling out to Zev, remembering how coldly Zev treated her the last time. Zev comes to her anyway and holds her through it.
Mayah breaks down and tells Zev she loves him, then explains that what Zev saw between her and Daak was her saying goodbye, even if Daak didn’t know it. Zev listens without much reaction. He then tells Mayah he can never trust her again and will keep pulling her close and pushing her away. Zev says she deserves happiness, just not with him. Even so, he stays and holds her while she cries herself out.
Between Tides & Thunder Chapter 76
Mayah and Zev jolt awake to a violent earthwielder attack. They rush into the hallway to warn the others, but when they reach Sura’s room, Tumaas and Mona answer instead. Sura is nowhere to be found.
Before anyone can process what’s happening, the building tears apart and separates Mayah and Tumaas from Zev. The structure collapses around them, and Tumaas manages to pull Mona free from the wreckage. Mona has a broken leg, which Mayah heals on the spot.
Once Mayah, Tumaas, and Mona surface, they find the camp in full chaos, overrun by Arbinji soldiers. Tumaas persuades Mayah to stop searching for Zev and focus on defending the camp and finding Sura. The three of them fight their way through the destruction to the armory, where Mayah kills the enemy stormwielder by flooding his lungs with rainwater. The battle is brutal, but Mayah, Tumaas, and Mona manage to hold their ground.
Then Mayah spots a figure sprinting toward her through the rain.
Between Tides & Thunder Chapter 77
Zev is alive. He’s cut up and bloodied, but he’s on his feet. Zev sends Tumaas and Mona to check on Sura, who’s been hidden under the children’s tent, then tells Mayah something unsettling. The Arbinji soldiers came to rescue him. Zev refuses to go with them, knowing they’d wipe out the camp if he did.
Mayah and Zev move through the camp together, pulling survivors from rubble and cutting down enemy soldiers as they go. They grab food from the kitchens and keep moving. Things get worse when a trio of Tundrayn warriors ambushes them, trapping them in frozen water before attacking. Mayah hesitates for a moment before killing the third warrior, a woman with the same deep-blue eyes as Sura. The moment makes her realize that Tundrayn is there as an enemy too.
Mayah and Zev make it to the rebel command center, where Tairna is already running the defense. Zev steps up to lead a perimeter patrol. Tairna tries to keep Mayah back for her own safety, but Zev takes Mayah’s hand and makes it clear she goes where he goes. When Zev calls Tairna mother, she breaks down briefly before pulling herself back together.
Zev gathers his team, tells them that protecting Mayah is the mission above everything else, and leads them out.
Between Tides & Thunder Chapter 78
Zev splits the rebels into teams and sends them sweeping across the camp in different directions. Mayah joins the eastern patrol, where she and her group find Tumaas and Mona already mid-fight with a group of earthwielders. They join in, and Mayah learns during the battle that Sura is safe. Once the fighting dies down, Zev shares his remaining bread with Tumaas and Mona.
A moment later, an earthwielder bursts up from the ground directly behind Tumaas. Zev shoves Tumaas out of the way and takes a sword wound to his side before killing the attacker. Mayah heals the wound completely, leaving no trace behind. Zev then sends Tumaas and Mona back to guard Sura and the children, and he and Mayah head toward the kitchens on their own.
Walking through the aftermath of the battle, Mayah thanks Zev for saving Tumaas. Zev gives a tense, halting answer that trails off before he can finish his thought. Then the ground splits open, and a mass of thick, writhing roots tears up through the soil, moving straight for Mayah.
Between Tides & Thunder Chapter 79
Mayah is captured by Faramir, who uses enchanted roots to suspend her in the air and hold her as leverage against Zev. During the standoff, Faramir admits to Zev that he killed their father and that Mayah and Zev had unknowingly made it possible for him. When Faramir starts pulling her limbs apart, Mayah taps into her waterwielding abilities and drowns him. Zev finishes the fight with his sword.
Afterward, Mayah and Zev make their way through the forest toward the camp, and she tries to check in with him about what just happened. Before they get far, four warriors ambush them. Zev takes out two immediately, but the other two are skilled fighters and give him real trouble. While Zev is occupied with one, the second sends a barrage of frozen shards toward his exposed back.
Mayah runs across the clearing and throws herself in front of Zev. She deflects most of the shards but catches two herself, one in her shoulder and one in her thigh. Zev kills the last attacker and tends to her wounds.
With Mayah injured and Zev clearly shaken, he cradles her face and starts to say something that sounds like a confession. Before he can finish, a voice cuts through the moment. The voice belongs to Mayah’s father, and his first words make it clear he’s not there as an ally.
Between Tides & Thunder Chapter 80
Mayah faces her father in the dark, injured and barely standing, with Zev close by. Her father claims he came to bring her home, but Mayah doesn’t believe him, and they fight. As they trade water and ice attacks, Mayah screams her accusations at him. He murdered her mother, lied to her for years, and shaped her into a weapon for his own use. In the chaos, Mayah’s own ice spear deflects and drives into Zev’s chest.
The sight of Zev bleeding out breaks something in Mayah. Grief and fury push her past her limits, and she discovers she can control blood, something no waterwielder should be able to do. Mayah turns this power on her father and brings him down, then runs to Zev. She heals him as best she can, stitching his wounds shut from the inside out, but her power gives out before she finishes.
Mayah is about to search for food to restore herself when Zev stops her and puts something in her hand. It’s the apple she gave him hours ago. He never ate it. Mayah presses her forehead to his and takes a bite, hoping it’ll be enough.
Between Tides & Thunder Chapter 81
Five days after the attack, Tairna informs Mayah that Zev is planning to leave for Volca the following morning without a word to her. Mayah rushes to their room and finds Zev already packing. He admits he’s going and tells her that his feelings for her don’t change anything and that he can’t stay with her. He even offers to have their marriage annulled.
Out of desperation and heartbreak, Mayah snaps that she hates Zev. The words stop him in his tracks. Zev crosses the room, takes hold of her, and kisses her. He keeps asking her to say it again, and she does, and the two end up tangled together in an armchair.
When Zev finally pulls back and holds Mayah close, his walls are down in a way Mayah hasn’t seen in a long time. He tells her there’s something he’s been hiding.
Between Tides & Thunder Chapter 82
Zev tells Mayah he’s a truthwielder, someone who physically feels it when people lie to him. He’s kept it secret his whole life because truthwielders are killed the moment they’re discovered. Mayah was different from everyone else Zev had ever known because, in all their time together, she never once lied to him, even during their journey toward Arbinj. That was how Zev fell in love with her.
Then Zev tells Mayah what broke him when he came home from the border. When he saw her kneeling over the other man’s body, grief on her face, he was convinced she had loved someone else all along. When Mayah turned her waterwielding on him right after, Zev decided his ability had failed him and that everything between them had been built on deception.
To prove it wasn’t, Mayah tells Zev a string of deliberate lies. Each lie triggers a sharp physical reaction, and that’s how Zev knows she loves him. Zev talks through the rest of his anger honestly, then tells Mayah she has to make a choice about whether she’s his, and he’s blunt about what that choice will look like going forward.
Mayah and Zev consummate their marriage. Afterward, Mayah is terrified the whole night was Zev’s way of saying goodbye. She asks him to stay. Zev goes silent, gets up, crosses to his bag, and comes back to bed. He slides Mayah’s wedding ring onto her finger and tells her he’s staying.
Between Tides & Thunder Epilogue
Three months later, Mayah and Zev prepare to leave Arbinj for Tundrayn, where Mayah hopes to formally claim her place as queen. Mayah has been working to build goodwill with her homeland through trade deals and diplomatic correspondence, but the reception stays lukewarm at best, and she hasn’t set foot there since the violent end of her father’s reign.
The journey takes about a week. Mayah and Zev stop at inns along the way and attend dinners hosted by minor lords eager to get on good terms with the new king and queen. As they get closer to the border and the landscape turns snowy, a rush of homesickness catches Mayah off guard.
When Mayah and Zev reach the palace, Sorka meets them in person. Mayah wastes no time making her position clear, telling Sorka she isn’t looking for a fight but that her claim to the throne stands. Sorka doesn’t argue. Instead, he leads them to the Great Hall, where two large, intricately carved ice thrones sit on a central dais. Sorka invites them to take their seats and formally welcomes Mayah home as queen.
Disclaimer: This is a Between Tides & Thunder summary. The original work is the property of Leena Kazak and Scarlett Press.
FUEL THE BOOK SUMMARIES
Hey, you made it to the end! Thanks for reading!
If you found this summary helpful, you’re welcome to buy me a low-acid coffee. No pressure at all.
Want more summaries like this? Enter your email below.
You’ll get a quick confirmation email first—click confirm and the next summary lands straight in your inbox.