Chapter 55
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Rhiannon died as she had lived. Quickly, with her eyes open.
The wind settled. The rain slowed.
I dropped into the grass next to the dead queen. I fell exactly as gravity carried me, straight onto my side with a view of her unmoving body. The blood seeping out of her neck was black. But she was not a wraith—she had not become one of them.
My eyes closed as the acid rain fell on me, and though I fought against it, I slipped into a tortured unconsciousness.
Pain. I dreamed of pain.
I was back in the Kingdom of Storms. One of the night guard was digging his fingers into my shoulder, twisting two of them and laughing. Another drew the edge of his blade along my thigh, back and forth until he was sawing my femur. I screamed, but my voice was muted; they didn’t stop.
Nothing stopped the pain. Not until they carried me to the old well and dropped me into it. I hit the water hard, and it was like ice.
I screamed again. My eyes opened—
“Eury, it’s okay.” Hands were on me. They held me shoulder-high in a pond, where all but my head was submerged. “Please, don’t fight.”
My eyes darted. It was still nighttime, and the moon was back out. I glimpsed a face above me, the profile lit in silver.
Dorian.
I scrabbled at the mud beneath me. My left shoulder cried out. “Let me go.”
His hands didn’t move; they were two vise grips on me. “If I let you go, you’re dead.”
The ferocity of the dream was still in me, the feeling of being overpowered. I struggled against his hold. “You bastard—”
“Curse me. Hate me.” His fingers dug in, pressing me into the water. “I’m not letting you die here.”
My struggling slowed, but my heart didn’t. Where were we? Was this some new fae torture? My eyes went on darting, seeking familiarity, until they froze.
Across the pond, on the far bank, stood the spiritstag.
It was, as ever, impossible to look at—and impossible to look away from.
I stilled. All fight left me; in place of it, I could only stare. Awe expanded my chest.
Dorian’s hands squeezed my shoulders. I sensed him getting to his knees on the bank behind me. His breath touched my ear. “You must beseech it,” he said. “Beseech it for healing.”
My voice was raw and thin. My eyes didn’t leave the stag. “Healing?” I echoed.
“Yes.” Dorian sounded wrecked, desperate. “You used too much magic, Eury.”
Too much? No, I’d used just enough. Beneath the water, my body wasn’t blackened like Rhiannon’s. It wasn’t—
I raised my good hand. As it neared the water’s surface and the moonlight gleamed over it, I sucked air in. Dark veins pulsed over my hand and forearm. Unseelie magic.
That wasn’t right. It couldn’t be. I’d barely touched the magic.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t—”
“It doesn’t feel that way when you’re in its thrall,” Dorian whispered. “It feels wonderful. Intoxicating.”
A flash of Rhiannon’s face in the storm appeared before me. Her wild eye, the sclera tar-black. Her face eaten by the acid. Another flash: of the magic pouring off me, carried up into the torrent.
Yes. Yes, it had felt like that.
Wouldn’t I have seen it on myself? Perhaps, if I had been looking. But I hadn’t been. I’d only been full of need.
Need to kill her.
Need to survive.
Need to win.
I stared at my hand. The fingers looked like they belonged to someone else. Like the hand my mother had described seeing from under a guard-drawn cart when she was a girl. “Dorian…”
His hand came around and angled my chin up until I had the stag in view again. His fingers were rough and unyielding. “Beseech it. Please, Eury. I can’t see you become—” His voice cut off; he couldn’t finish.
Ice flowed down my spine. My chest constricted until I took only shallow breaths.
I couldn’t become one of those things. Not after what they’d done to my mother, Theo, Elisabet, all those people I’d known all my life.
My gaze sharpened on the spiritstag. Before I could think of what to say, its voice resonated inside my head.
He is wrong, Eurydice Waters.
I breathed out. The voice was like balm on my ears.
A queen does not beseech.
If not beseech it, then— What is it I must do?
The stag’s head tilted, and with it the iridescent antlers. One constellation of an eye regarded me. I need only your promise.
My heart felt like it beat in my throat. Tell me.
The promise Queen Carys made. The promise that led her to the precipice.
The precipice of what?
Of peace. The stag’s hoof rose and drove into the dirt. Of breaking the wheel.
Queen Carys. For a moment, I was back in the square. I straddled the king, the dagger in my hand…
Yes, the spiritstag’s voice said into my head. You felt her. You feel her even now.
I did. I felt her in my veins, in the four chambers of my heart, in the folds of my brain. I had felt her since the trial, and it was because of her.
It was because of her I’d stood across from Rhiannon in the meadow.
It was because of her I’d pulled the arrow from my shoulder.
It was because of her I’d called the rain.
She made a promise to you. I swallowed. What was it?
A new scene washed over my mind’s eye. I hovered high above the earth, a great moonlit vista sweeping below me. Lush forest carrying forth into dark swamp, and issuing into mountains dotted with high waterfalls, and those into wide, green plains.
The four courts. These were their lands.
The lands of Feyreign.
The spiritstag was showing me all of it.
In the center of the four courts’ lands, a great white spire rose. From this height, it looked like the center of a wheel.
Why are you showing me this?
The four courts, the spiritstag said. They are cruel, corrupted, punishing. They are, all of them, as power-thirsty as Rhiannon. They must be set right.
Set the courts right. I wasn’t sure what that meant. I hadn’t set one toe in the lands of another court, hadn’t met their rulers. What promise could I possibly make?
The spiritstag didn’t answer. Perhaps it didn’t know, or perhaps…
Perhaps the answer was up to me.
Below me, the lands glinted and gleamed in the moonlight. And as I stared over all of them, I felt like two people.
Like Eurydice Waters. Small, uncertain, desperate. Desperate always to be, and to be more, and to have more.
And like Carys. Decisive, powerful, desperate. Desperate to be—to be more—to have more.
We were aligned. Perhaps we had always been aligned.
The difference now was that I had the power to choose.
My eyes closed, and all of it disappeared. I was back in the pond. My eyes opened on the spiritstag, and I gave it my answer.
It was the only answer.
That night, hours later, Dorian pulled me from the pond. He tried to carry me back to the citadel, but I refused.
I walked. Well, hobbled.
Water dripped off my sodden, torn linens into the ground. Dorian stayed close to my side, almost but not touching me.
As we neared the citadel, fae appeared. They lined the bridge and the garden paths from the spiritstag’s grove to the throne room. They stared, and while I would normally have felt self-conscious, I was too exhausted.
The whole of the Sylvanwild Court could have turned out, but all I wanted was a bed.
When I came into the throne room, a handmaiden’s face appeared in front of me. “My queen, please. This way.”
Queen. The word struck me like a serving plate to the head. She was referring to me.
I didn’t have words; it was enough to follow her, step by gods-awful step, up the grand staircase. At the landing, she tried to lead me in a different direction from where my quarters were, her soft hand on mine.
I shook my head.
“But my queen…”
“Leave her,” Dorian snapped.
The handmaiden stilled and watched as I stumbled toward my own quarters. Dorian strode ahead and opened the door for me.
I came into the doorway and sighed at the sight of my bed. My hands went to the doorframe.
Dorian went to help me, and I jerked away. I couldn’t trust him, but I didn’t have the energy to send him away. He stepped back, and I struggled toward the bed. I pulled off my wet linens as I went, staggering out of the pants and shirt with only one good arm and leg.
I looked a wreck. I didn’t care.
Finally, I climbed into the bed. I rolled the blanket over me, and I slept. I slept so long, I lost all sense of time. I dreamed a thousand dreams, all of them rolling through me like my brain could not make sense of the world without these fractals of memory.
The southern district. Green streaks through the sky.
The rain falling and a king’s throat open before me.
The high hedge of the Eldermaze and the night sky above.
The clouds rolling over the meadow. The cave and the waterfall beating in front of it.
Dorian’s face in profile, staring out of the alcove.
Theo grinning at me atop the wall. My mother’s fingers stroking down my arm. Rhiannon’s eyes, round and onyx.
The dagger in my hand, almost too cold to touch. Wisps of ice trailing from it. Power threading out.
The dagger. The dagger. The dagger.
Fate lines and promises.
“She’s waking,” a voice said.
My eyes opened. The lavender glow of the crystals lit the whorls of the great tree above. I was in my quarters, in my bed. And beside me stood Faun. It was her voice I’d heard.
Faun’s was one of the only faces I wanted to see.
She stared down at me, her eyes narrowing as they surveyed my face.
I stared back. “Well”—my voice was pitchy—“how do I look?”
“Like shit.”
A beat of silence. Then I burst into a hoarse cackle that made every part of me hurt.
Something moved at the end of my bed. My gaze shifted onto Dorian, who looked at me like I might break if he moved another step.
He looked like shit, too, his dark hair bedraggled, hollows sunk deep beneath his eyes. His mouth was a tight line.
My chest tightened. I hated you, he’d said to me before the Thorn Rite. You were my burden, my death. And I’d felt that. I’d felt it so keenly, he might as well have stabbed me with a real blade.
Murderer.