Chapter 29
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I sat on the edge of Dorian’s bed. He was awake, aware, gazing at me with those black eyes. He sounded sort of like himself, but he looked like the monster my mother had seen under that tarp as a girl.
He spoke first. As his jaw moved, the blackness in his veins shifted under the light. “It’s not as bad as it looks.” His voice sounded different—grittier, hoarser.
Haskel had left us, and now I didn’t know what to say. In the Eldermaze, things had been different between us. We’d seen each other vulnerable, in pain, hungry and thirsty. But now we were back here in the citadel, where he was a fae and I was a human. The weight of that pressed on my shoulders.
“It looks ghoulish,” I finally said.
He chuckled. Those black eyes shifted toward me. “It’ll improve with time.”
I rolled the blanket between my fingers. “You overused your magic.”
One eyebrow rose. “How do you know that?”
“Thalassa.” I pressed the duvet flat, then rolled it again. “She said your affinities are to earth and air.”
He blew out a breath. “Crazy old fae.”
“She saved us.”
He shifted toward me. “We saved us. But you, Eury…”
Nearly got us killed. I was too slow, too weak, too human. I couldn’t hear it from him right now. “Can we just pretend we don’t hate each other for ten minutes?”
“You didn’t let me finish.” He paused. “Look at me.”
I raised my eyes. It was almost painful to stare into his black eyes, like touching a bruise.
“I don’t know how you did it,” he said. “We were running, and then I fell… We should be dead.”
I didn’t speak. The answer was obvious.
“How did you…”
“I dragged you out,” I said. “How else?”
His lips pressed together. His eyebrows pulled tight. “You dragged me.”
“Not quickly, but yes.”
His hand emerged from under the cover. I had to bite back a sharp inhale; it was threaded with black veins. Just like Mama’s memory. He noticed, and left it palm-up on the blanket. “You dragged me out of the Eldermaze.”
That was awe in his voice. Pure, untainted awe. I saw it in his eyes, too, in the softness around them. He wasn’t taunting me. He was acknowledging me.
Contempt I could handle. Disdain was my language. Acknowledgment from anyone, but from him? I had no armor for this.
I straightened. “I need to know something. And I think I’ve earned the truth.”
A low chuckle sounded from his throat. “All right,” he said. “Ask.”
The veins under his skin were black as ink. “What happens if you use too much magic?”
He let out a slow breath, then said, “The creatures who attacked your kingdom that night—the ones you saw in the southern district…”
The creatures. The wraiths. The killers.
“What about them?”
Dorian only stared at me, his brow lowering.
Then I understood.
My fingers released the blanket. I stood, putting distance between us. Those black eyes suddenly looked terrifying. “You’re lying.”
Around me, I heard them. Metal on metal. Shadows shifting across the walls, faster than light. The curve of the scythe glinted, longer than me. And the screams—I heard them again. My friends, my family, everyone I’d ever known—
Dorian stayed where he was. “You deserve the truth.”
I backed toward the door. Away from those eyes, those veins. A question thrummed through me, equally urgent and unwilling to be spoken.
Will you become one of them?
I swallowed past the stopper in my throat. My hand was on the folded knife at my belt. I had brought it with me without a second thought, and now my eyes fell on his exposed neck. The nick from days ago was still there.
Dorian still didn’t move. “I won’t become one, Eury. Not this time.”
He knew. He knew my question, my fear. Even now, his palm remained open on the bed.
I opened the door and met his eyes one more time. Not this time? Not this time?
But I couldn’t speak. So I slipped out from under the weight of his shadowy gaze.
I avoided Dorian for the next two days. It wasn’t hard; he was bedbound, and I was not.
All my training I did alone or with Haskel. Riding Pettifey. Shooting. Haskel and I even sparred with swords, though he disarmed me in seconds every time we touched metal.
Our second trial wouldn’t begin until the first had ended—and the first wouldn’t end until everyone in the Eldermaze was either dead or had escaped.
Dead, most like.
In the hours that followed our return, I had heard through gossip and eventually from Haskel himself that we were the only pair to make it out. We’d done it in three days, which no one seemed able to believe. And yet here we were in the citadel, a living truth.
For the others, escape could take weeks. Months. If they lived that long.
Who could survive the Eldermaze for months? Only someone like Thalassa, who’d conjured a home for herself inside the hedge. And even she had never made it out.
Now I understood why. She had figured out the way, yes—but she hadn’t had the strength to take it. She’d needed magic, and as she told us, one drop more would have been too much. At the time, I hadn’t known what that meant.
A drop more, and she’d have become a wraith.
Meanwhile, most fae stared at me. Some were bold enough to ask how we’d gotten out, though Haskel had made it clear I wasn’t allowed to answer. We couldn’t give up the secrets of the Eldermaze. Fae society depended on their trials, it seemed—and the trials depended on secrecy.
I hated it. If I could, I would whisper the truth in every one of their ears. Why should they die because the spiritstag willed it, because of rules laid down four hundred years ago by a dead queen?
I’d looked into their faces before we began. They were alive. They wanted to stay alive.
What had they thought when the acid rain came? Had they understood? I still didn’t—not really. As far as I knew, Feyreign wasn’t a land of acid rain.
And I had no one I could ask for an answer. Haskel was a man of arms and strength. And I did not want to speak to Dorian. Didn’t want to look into his eyes. Didn’t want to feel so hinged on his approval or disapproval of me.
He’d told me the truth, and it was horrific. The wraiths were once fae. From what I’d seen, the wraiths obeyed. They were mindless, lethal. They had killed the people I loved, and they’d done it at the behest of this court. And Dorian had been there, directing them. Participating in the slaughter.
He’d almost become one of them.
Not this time, Eury.
Inside the Eldermaze, things had felt different between us. It was as though past and future were only concepts; the earth was real, the hedge was real, we were real.
Now—
Part of me still wanted to kill him. Part of me knew I could never trust him. And another part—one I couldn’t seem to silence—had risen to the awe in his voice like it was sunlight.
It had begun that first night in the maze, when I’d been too cold to sleep and he’d wrapped himself around me.
Curse the fae. Curse his warmth.
Dorian and I had to report the death of the fae who’d been torn open. Queen Rhiannon had been visiting the winter court, but upon her return she granted us an audience five days after our escape.
We stood before her as she lounged in her chambers, in her bramble chair overgrown with flowering vines. One fae brushed her hair; another knelt at her feet, tending to her toes. Her heel rested on a velvet pillow, her body draped like something half-feral, half-idle. Calculated boredom.
But I couldn’t stop staring at her cheek.
A smattering of blood ran from her hairline to the apple of her cheekbone. Bright-red, arterial, like she’d slit the throat of an animal a moment before we’d stepped in. Like she might touch it and lick it away.
“A shame,” she said of the slain fae in the Eldermaze. “But it was the spiritstag’s will. The trials are designed to cull the unworthy.”
Does she believe that?
It sounded like the pronouncements I’d heard growing up, whenever a man on the wall team slipped and cracked his skull open.
Arxius’s will, they’d say—words I’d hated since I was old enough to understand what a lie felt like.
What if it wasn’t the will of a god, but just a bad harness or an overworked crew?
We never got to ask, because once Arxius’s fucking will got involved, everyone stopped caring.
But this scene before me? It felt the same. Like a show.
It felt like Rhiannon trying to tell us something about who she was, or who she wanted to be.
Rhiannon reclined on her throne like a god herself, fingers curled against her blood-smattered cheek as she looked between Dorian and me. A god, because—
She has no advisors. Only servants.
She doesn’t trust. She only trusts in herself.
Sister-killer. A queen alone.
These truths came to me as my eyes flicked down to the handmaid at her feet. At some point, this queen had relegated everyone around her to servitude. To toe-washing and hair-brushing and nipple-sucking.
That was her mistake. Everyone needed people they could trust.
“No doubt you’ve received much attention during your time back,” Rhiannon said. “I need not remind you that discussing the trials with anyone else is forbidden.”
Beside me, Dorian inclined his head. The blackness in his veins had faded, though not fully. “Of course, my queen.”
Her gaze slid to me and waited.
She wants obedience.
I kept my jaw still. “Yes. I understand.”
She clocked my resistance. Her expression didn’t change, but something hardened in the green of her eyes, gemstone turning to weapon.
She dipped her fingers into a shallow bowl of water beside her and said, almost idly, “I do find it a wonder that the two of you escaped in such a short time. Obviously, magic was involved.” Her gaze drifted up Dorian’s arms to his throat, to his face. “A great deal of it.”
“We did what we had to,” Dorian said.
“And what,” Rhiannon said, her voice silk, “was the human’s participation?”
She was asking how heavy I’d been to carry.
How onerous it had been to pull me through the maze to safety.
And she wasn’t even asking me directly. We’d survived, which no one had expected.
And now Dorian would either fling dung on me or give me that uncomfortable acknowledgment he’d offered while bedbound.
“She was fine,” Dorian said.
That was the only answer I hadn’t expected.
Rhiannon’s eyebrows rose. “Fine?”
“She followed my lead when necessary. She ran well when she had to.”
I eyed Dorian in profile. He’s close-lipped.
There was none of the acknowledgment, the awe I’d heard in his voice that day when I came to his bedside.
Why, I didn’t know. But in the short time I’d known him, I had observed one thing for certain: he never spoke freely in front of Rhiannon.
He treated her like a sculpture one should never touch.
And he wants her to underestimate me.
For the first time, it felt like a secret existed between us.
I shifted my gaze back to Rhiannon, who stared now at me, waiting. I nodded. “He’s a good leader.”
Something in her face cooled. Her eyes shuttered—not with suspicion, but with disappointment, as though we’d failed to give her something she’d wanted.
She waved us off with a flick of her fingers in the bowl. Water sprayed at our feet. “You have earned your rest. Use it well until the next trial.”
Outside Rhiannon’s quarters, I turned toward my room. Behind me, Dorian said, “Eurydice.”
I stopped. Turned.
He approached. This close, I could see the whites of his eyes returning. “We should resume your training.”
I gazed up at him. That softness at the edges of his eyes—had it always been there? “I’ve already done that.”
“With Haskel?”
“And myself.”
His lip curved into a crooked smile. So strange to see coupled with black eyes. “Good. Better you wield a sword with that old bastard than not at all. We’ll resume together tomorrow.”
Like the first trial wasn’t still happening as we stood here. Like all was well. “While the others remain inside the maze, you mean.”
The smile slipped. “You know there’s nothing we can do for them.”
I knew that. I knew it. But knowing a painful truth didn’t make it hurt less. “So it’s back to riding and shooting and strategy and pretending they’re not dying.”
“And sparring,” he said. “With me.”
These Sylvanwild fae had a special ability to turn their faces away. I could still see it, that red-haired fae’s viscera gleaming under the Eldermaze sun. I didn’t know if it was animal callousness or put-on, but even a man fallen from the wall in the Dip got more consideration.
It lit a fire low in me.
I lifted my chin. “Tomorrow morning?”
“I’ll come to your door.”
He lingered, and so did I. His eyes traveled between mine, lips parting like he wanted to speak. I sensed he wanted to talk about something else, but he only turned and strode down the hall.
He must have waited until he believed himself out of my view. But he wasn’t. I saw. He fisted his hands.