Chapter 30
CHAPTER THIRTY
That night I stared at Thalassa’s pouch where I’d set it atop my bed. My fingers hovered over the twine, as though untying it might change something for the worse. I debated, then finally set the pouch aside.
Not tonight. I wasn’t ready for another fae surprise.
I didn’t sleep well. Faces of others haunted me. And while the spiritstag or Rhiannon might claim their suffering wasn’t in vain, I would. I would call it needless. For all the Kingdom of Storms’ wretchedness, at least we didn’t sacrifice our people every hundred years to determine a new ruler.
There had to be another way.
I turned and writhed and remained half-awake, until by almost-morning a sterling idea came to me.
Sterling—and devious.
Rhiannon would hate me if it worked. But I didn’t very much mind that.
As soon as the idea entered my head, it refused to leave. It wouldn’t allow me any other course but this one. My mother would have allowed it—she would have done it herself—and that mattered. Her opinion mattered more than anyone’s, even if she only lived in my memory now.
In the morning, Dorian’s knock came early. When I opened the door, he looked so much improved I just stood there staring up at him. The veins in his hands and neck were nearly normal, the whites of his eyes almost unbroken again.
“What happened?” I said finally.
“What? Oh.” One finger touched his cheekbone. “When the queen is in court, the grove’s power grows.”
So he visits the grove. And the grove is tied to her power.
I didn’t understand the tangle of it, but I knew now that Sylvanwild’s magic was entwined with the spiritstag, with the grove, with the queen.
Just like I knew that under the earth, trees didn’t exist alone; they formed a network of roots and fungi.
I stepped into the hallway. “The change is marked.”
The ghost of a smile touched his mouth. “Does it please you?”
My mouth twisted to one side. Even if he was teasing me, I found I’d missed it. “As long as you’re not one of those fucking things. Then I’d have to kill you.”
“I am me,” he said, “for better or worse.”
We began walking to the stables in silence. When we’d reached the empty gardens, Dorian sucked in a breath and said, “What I told you the other day—”
I stopped on a narrow path flanked by carmine blooms. Last night’s plan had eclipsed everything Dorian and I had talked about in the days before; I could hardly think of anything else. “Yes?”
He squeezed his eyes shut. His jaw feathered. “When you came to me after the trial—”
I stood waiting. For all his strength and size, right now he seemed uncertain, unpracticed. “Please just say it. The dew’s evaporating.”
“How very human of you.” His eyes opened. He exhaled in a sort of defeat. “The wraiths. I apologize for keeping that truth from you.”
The wraiths. An apology.
Something in me stuttered, unprepared. I had not yet seen a fae apologize—not to one another, and certainly not to me. And for a moment, I wasn’t standing in the gardens with an enemy or even a partner. He was just a man taking accountability.
The apology shouldn’t have mattered. But it did.
“All right,” I said, my voice quiet. I’d never been good with apologies, either. Not giving them, not accepting them. Where I came from, apologies were given in the form of food, in soft looks, in clinked steins at the pub.
But it was more than that. I was keeping something from him right now. What I had planned would buck their trials and their wraiths and all their corseted rules.
I just had to wait for nightfall.
I stepped forward. “Shall we get on with riding?”
His eyebrows lifted, as though he’d expected more. Not from me. Not right now. After a beat, he gestured for me to walk ahead of him.
The day moved in a steady, relentless current.
I cantered on Pettifey, practiced mounting her at a run; I sharpened my pull and aim with Haskel; Dorian and I studied the history of the trials in his quarters.
We came to no great conclusions, but one thing had changed between us: he waited for me to finish my sentences, and he listened when I spoke. And I did the same for him.
Respect hung between us like a gossamer thread. Fragile, but real.
Our sparring took place in the same spot I’d found him that one night high up in the citadel, battling a wraith. Except in the daylight, the tree only rustled with leaves and the clang of our swords. We began with swords as my most familiar weapon; he wanted to get to know my technique.
He quickly saw I was better on defense than offense. Of course I was—defense was how I survived, the only way I’d been able to fend off the other guards-in-training back in the southern district. I would bide my time until an opening appeared for one uncounterable strike.
But Dorian was no trainee. He never opened himself up to death.
He started by training me in ambidexterity. Apparently this was most important, though I knew it would take forever.
All the while, I wondered what he would say to me after tonight. I wondered if I would even be alive to find out.
Our sparring concluded in the late afternoon, and then we cleaned up for dinner.
We were to eat with Rhiannon and her maidens-in-court as a celebration of our success in the first trial.
The meal was lavish, the table sagged with food, and I was quiet, though I was asked many questions by the young fae girls I’d seen brushing Rhiannon’s hair and tending to her toes.
Now, more than ever, I wanted to be underestimated.
I watched Rhiannon’s smiling face as she drank deeply from her cups. Why hadn’t she asked me to share my secrets, as she apparently had with the others in the trial? It seemed she did nothing without a good reason and her silence seemed to hold its own message.
Dorian held the slack of my reticence. He laughed and offered charming repartee like I’d never seen him do, and I knew him well enough by now to understand that he was putting on a show so I wouldn’t have to.
The Dorian I knew was quieter, more thoughtful, wittier under his breath. And though it didn’t matter in the end, I preferred that Dorian—the real one I’d known at night in the Eldermaze, when the stars were out and he breathed against the shell of my ear in sleep.
Those felt like the only moments I could reconcile his two parts.
The fae who’d held a sword at my back, and the one who warmed my back.
At one point during the meal, he caught me watching him. His eyes softened—just a hair, just for me—and then he smiled at something a handmaiden said and the moment was gone. But it stayed with me, a flicker against the dark.
I thought of those moments more often than I liked.
All my life but once I had avoided men’s eyes; it was safer that way.
Yes, I had been with one of the guard during our three months of training.
But he hadn’t seemed a man in that sense.
He had been a boy—overeager and almost insistent, as though my body were his as much as mine.
After that, he’d ignored me. He’d become one of the day guard, and I only saw him in passing, his brown eyes avoiding me like I wasn’t even there.
I had expected a life like my mother’s. I barely knew who my real father was; some guard who’d died not long after my birth. And I didn’t care, just as she didn’t. Early on I’d decided men were optional, a garnish. I’d even relished the idea, like it gave me power over them.
And yet. Dorian had gone hungry so I would eat. He’d watched over me while I slept. He’d nearly consumed himself to get us out. And when he held me against the cold, I’d felt real and alive and considered.
It was during that dinner, watching him laugh with the handmaidens, that I realized how much his actions had spoken of who he was—and what he thought of me. Perhaps he thought I was worthy of awe. Was that so impossible?
After dinner, we parted for the night. I waited until the sun was so far down that the sky was lit only by moon and stars, and then I waited two hours more, listening for footsteps in the halls.
When the halls grew silent, I slipped out.
Sylvanwild’s forests were different by night. I had known they would be, but not how.
The forest felt alive with breeze-bent leaves and grass and shrieks and groans. And wraiths, I knew. But if I stayed on the path…
If I stayed on the path, Dorian had told me, I would be fine.
I wasn’t sure I could find the grove in the night, but I trusted the moon, its pale light marking a narrow walkway beyond the moat.
An hour’s walk brought me to where the grove lay, still and empty and without birdsong. The moon shone full and brilliant, reflected like a perfect coin on the pond’s surface. The silver beauty of the water and sky belied the ruthlessness of the Unseelie fae and their fall court.
I wondered if the winter court was worse, or better. Probably both, in ways I didn’t want to imagine.
At the pond’s edge, I slipped off my boots and knelt in the cool grass. I folded my hands over my heart and bowed my head. I didn’t know how the Sylvanwild showed reverence, but I knew how we humans spoke to gods: with hope, and no guarantee of being heard.
What to say? Make it like a prayer, Eury.
"My lord Spiritstag," I said, my voice loud in the stillness, "if you are near, I would speak with you. Tonight, if you’ll allow it."
Stupid, but I didn’t have better words.
I waited. All I heard was my own breathing.
I said it again, louder. And again, even louder.
No voice answered except the echo of my own. And what had I expected? This was a fae god. Not mine.
When I had waited so long my knees ached and the stillness pressed in on me, I lifted my head to rise—
—and rocked back.
Across the pond, at the far edge of the water, the spiritstag stood staring at me.