Chapter 27
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The sky threatened rain from the moment we woke, the air heavy with it, the clouds a gray bruise above the hedge.
We slept in a dead end for lack of an alcove. It worked just as well with Dorian’s cloak hung just right—the end appeared simply to continue, a trick of shadow and shape that might fool anyone passing through.
By morning I was hungrier than I’d ever been, which was saying something for a girl raised in the Dip. Our water was dwindling, even with my dew-collecting, and Dorian gave me the last of it to drink. Desperation hung between us, jaw-tightening and sour. I could almost smell it on myself.
As we neared the thornstalker corridor just after sunrise, I moved with Dorian’s strict instructions in my ears: Step on my toes. Keep to the hedge. Stay behind him. Watch for his hand signals.
When we got close enough, the air shifted. Something foul threaded into my nose, and my hand instinctively found the pommel of my sword.
Then I saw it—the corridor.
The maze opened up wider than I’d ever seen.
The hedge walls pulled back, leaving fifty paces of open dirt between us and the far side.
It stretched in both directions at a diagonal, no clear end in sight.
Narrow paths branched from it like ribs, each an entrance or exit into the rest of the Eldermaze.
Dorian looked back at me, nodded once. I nodded in return.
He crept forward, bent low, almost brushing the hedge. I followed, breath held tight. We stepped out into the corridor.
And stopped.
There were no thornstalkers. No hives. No nests. Just unbroken path in both directions, the hedge breathing softly under a low, cloudy sky.
Holy shit.
This was the center of the maze. No question of it.
Dorian had told me on our first day that the center meant life and death. I had pictured a battle, a monster, something to fight with blade or bow. But now, standing in the middle of this corridor, I understood it differently.
This was life and death. Or death and life. One or the other—but life was on the table. And I remembered Thalassa’s words:
The way out is more straightforward than you’d think.
Straightforward.
My gaze locked forward, past Dorian’s shoulder, into the distance. It couldn’t be. Not this simple. Not this easy.
I could see Theo doubled over before me, tears coming out of his eyes as he held his belly. You’d drown in a puddle trying to figure out how deep it goes, Eury.
Dorian kept moving, step by careful step. He hadn’t seen it yet. I followed, lighter than I’d ever moved.
Then—stillness.
Beside me, something shifted. My breath caught.
A pair of liquid black eyes stared from the hedge.
I didn’t blink. Neither did it.
Slowly, as though materializing from the wall itself, the creature emerged—long-limbed, black-furred, claws as long as my hands. Slender. Predatory. Taller than me. Camouflaged even as it moved.
A word formed in my mind:
Thornstalker.
It seemed to hear my thought. Its mouth opened, two rows of sharp teeth parting—
A blade sang. Dorian’s sword came down in a perfect arc and took the head clean off. Before it could hit the ground, he caught it. His fingers threaded through the fur as he turned to me, his eyes reflecting my question: Just the one?
It wasn’t.
The headless body thudded to the earth. A heartbeat later, another pair of eyes blinked open past his shoulder.
Dorian followed my gaze, dropped the head, and spun. The second thornstalker leapt. His blade caught the underside of its belly midair. The creature slid halfway down the steel, claws slashing, mouth snapping. Its shriek echoed like a scream dropped into a well.
He rammed the blade—and the creature—into the dirt. It died thrashing, arterial blood spraying the hedge.
Then came the noise.
The hedge came alive—scratching, growling, claws in the dirt, dozens, hundreds of thornstalkers waking from camouflage. This was more than a nest. More than a hive. This was their home.
If we stayed and fought, we’d die here.
“Dorian,” I said, my words low and careful. “This is the maze’s center. The end—I think it’s down there.” I pointed forward, into the endless corridor. “Life and death. Life and death.”
He yanked his sword free, eyes darting everywhere. “What?”
“‘The way out is more straightforward than you’d think.’” I grabbed his arm. “It was literal. Straight forward.”
He stared at me like I’d gone mad—wide-eyed, unblinking. But I felt it, a certainty blooming in my chest. The same feeling I had when Theo’s riddles snapped into place.
“If we fight, we die,” I said. “If we run, we might live.”
A long beat passed. I gripped his arm harder.
“I’m not ready to die yet. Are you?”
Something shifted in him. A decision settled behind his eyes.
He turned, stared into the corridor—the center of the maze, now snarling and writhing with motion. We didn’t have a choice; it was this or nothing.
“Eury, run.”
Dorian sheathed his sword and grabbed my hand, his fingers threading tight through mine. Warm. Solid. Urgent.
Together, we ran straight into the heart of the Eldermaze.
His strides were twice mine, but I pushed myself to match them. It still didn’t feel fast enough. Not for him, not to outrun them. Soon he was pulling me along, his grip steel, and the world blurred around me—brambles and wind and all those feral noises. It felt like death had come alive.
“Whatever happens,” Dorian rasped, breath sharp and juddering, “just keep running. Don’t stop.”
I couldn’t speak. I just nodded, ran harder.
Around us, the maze roiled. Above us, the sky pressed in with dark clouds.
A thornstalker lunged from the hedge on my right. I braced to stop and dodge, but the hedge reached out first. A bramble lashed around the creature’s hind leg and yanked it backward, claws dragging lines in the dirt as it shrieked.
I stared over my shoulder as the thing disappeared into the hedge. What the fuck was that?
Dorian’s grip crushed mine, and I forced my face back around.
Another creature leapt at us from the left. A gust of wind barreled in from nowhere and slammed it to the ground so hard, the thing’s tongue lolled as its head hit the dirt.
I couldn’t understand. It felt like the maze itself was alive, fighting, protecting us.
I didn’t have time to question it. Dorian pulled me left, then right, dodging another swipe. A thornstalker screamed as it was dragged into the hedge.
And I realized I was running faster. Effortlessly. The wind was behind us now, pushing me forward.
Thalassa’s words returned to me: He has a great well of power… flora, yes—but I think air, too.
The vines. The tailwind. The sudden burst of speed, the gust that deflected the thornstalker.
Not the maze.
Him.
He was doing this.
Dorian was doing it.
But hadn’t Thalassa said a male fae could only make a breeze? I hadn’t thought, hadn’t expected…
The maze parted before us, the winds clearing a path. We were unstoppable—too fast for the creatures to aim, too wild to catch. As we ran, something else Thalassa had said in her hedge home threaded back into my mind, but—
I stumbled on a root and staggered sideways. A creature shot from the hedge, and I wrenched free of Dorian’s grip to dodge. The tailwind vanished, the world suddenly heavier. The thornstalker skidded behind me, claws raking the earth, and I sprinted forward again, rejoining Dorian.
That was when I saw it.
Each time the maze acted—with each wind gust or bramble strike—Dorian’s fist clenched hard, white-knuckled. And under his collar, dark lines now climbed his neck like slender veins drawn in ink. Just like the ones I’d seen tattooing Thalassa’s slender neck.
Thalassa had warned me: Unseelie magic had a cost.
Dorian wasn’t just manipulating the maze. He was pouring his life into it.
“Faster, Eury,” Dorian barked, his voice rough, his skin pale. “Faster, godsdamnit.”
Then—there. Ahead. An opening in the hedge, wide and golden with light.
The corridor’s end. The fucking end.
My heart lurched. I ran harder.
But the creatures weren’t done. Maybe they knew we were close; they surged from the hedges, faster and fiercer.
And as we neared that end, the wind didn’t feel so strong at my back. The brambles had slowed in their reach.
Dorian was weakening. I felt it in his grip, softer now. I heard it in his ragged breath.
No, no, no.
We were ten feet away when he stumbled. He almost caught himself, then stumbled harder. He lost my hand as he went down, rolling in the dirt.
I skidded to a stop and turned.
He lay unmoving in the dirt, his chest exposed to the sky. His breathing was fast, eyes wide open. Those ink-black veins were now rooted in his jaw, in his cheeks. His magic was spent, and so was his strength.
I glanced back. The end offered itself before me like a promise, the land stretching so, so far toward the forest. It offered life.
But it also offered death. If Dorian died, I died.
And maybe that was my fate, to die. I had lost my mother, Theo, Elisabet, Isa. I had lost everyone I cared about, who cared about me. And now here I was, days from home, an offering to the gods of a court I had no stake in. I was a toy, a joke to them. A rabbit, a pettifey. Deadweight.
And yet.
Into my mind sprang the first night Dorian had wrapped himself around me.
His body behind mine, warming me from shoulder to thigh, his breath ghosting my ear.
The smell of him—deep forest, resin, smoke.
The intensity of his gaze when I’d cleaned the wound on his shoulder and back, his eyes black and full of me, only me.
Like I had strength.
Like I had power.
Like I was someone.
He’d given me almost every drop of water. He’d given me every strip of rabbit meat. He’d given me everything and left nothing for himself.
His promise, he’d said, was keeping me fed.
Lightning split the sky, briefly illuminating the hedge and the land beyond. A second later, thunder cracked above us like a divine strike.
Here, in this cursed place, the Eldermaze, Dorian hadn’t been my kidnapper. He hadn’t been my better. He’d been my partner.
If I bore one good trait, Theo had always said, it was loyalty.
And somehow, some way, loyalty to Dorian had threaded its way into my heart like one of those sharp-thorned brambles.
I couldn’t deny it, couldn’t pretend it didn’t touch my heart now with its thorns.
It had come without fanfare, without the promise of a future, without real trust in one another.
The truth settled in my chest, heavy and sure.
I couldn’t leave him.
We would pass this trial together or not at all.
At least I would die on my feet.
I turned. The thornstalkers were closing in on Dorian from every side, eyes gleaming, maws dripping. Perhaps their first and only meal in days, weeks.
I ran. I yanked my bow over my shoulder, already nocking an arrow from the quiver at my hip.
I skidded to a stop over his body, bow rising, string already taut.
And I screamed. A feral, unbroken cry. I was the girl being carried by those four guard through her bunk.
Writhing and spitting and thrashing. She would die, but she would take at least one of these demons with her.
The first thornstalker leapt from my left, not fifteen paces away. I pivoted toward it and loosed. The arrow flew into the creature’s left eye and sank deep. The thing went slack mid-leap and dropped with a skidding thud not far from where Dorian lay.
I was already nocking another, spinning right, but they were too close. Too many. Death licked at me from all sides, hot breath and teeth gnashing. The true end. I felt it expanding in my chest, a black void fizzing outward, promising nothing but pain and endless darkness.
Two more thornstalkers leapt—
And the sky split.
The rain fell in a sudden torrent, as though a blade had cleft the clouds wide open. The droplets stung like thrown sand. I was drenched at once, the world around me obscured.
But I could still smell. The smell was astringent, familiar—so fucking familiar I could cry.
The thornstalkers shrieked and bolted, diving back into the hedge. From the ground, a green haze began to rise, filling the air and making my eyes water the way it had thousands of times. I stared into it, shock swirling in me even as my bow and arrow shook in my hands.
Acid.
The rain falling from the sky was acid.