Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Across the water, a god had lowered its head to me. If Theo were alive, I could recount the entire story without a detail left out—and he would believe every word, except this one impossible part:
I had seen the crown of a god’s head.
“Tell them,” I breathed. “Tell them the way out of the Eldermaze.”
“For me to fulfill a request such as this,” the stag said, head still lowered, “there is a consequence.”
My voice came out soft, too small. “What is it?”
The stag’s antlers glinted in the moonlight, its breath fogging faintly in the air. “That is for nature to decide.”
“But…” You are nature.
“I am of nature, not the maker of it. I am its pulse, not its hand. Its witness, not its judge.”
“But you can interfere with the trials,” I said. Stars and shadows, now I was backtalking a god. “You already have.”
“Just as you can bring down a tree,” the stag said. “And even you know such an action is never without consequence.”
I did know that. Even in my kingdom, sad as it was, we cut trees. When we brought them down, the stumps rotted, the birds abandoned them, the scraggly grass died under the unfiltered acid rain. The roots died.
“Do you know,” I said, “what will become of the fae in the maze if left alone?”
The stag’s head rose. Its black eyes didn’t blink. “That future hasn’t yet chosen a shape. But nature always finds one.”
Yes—the sun followed its arc, the moon its tether, the waters their endless cycle. And yet no one besides us had escaped the maze.
The stag stared at me. “What is your decision?”
I unthreaded my fingers and opened my hands to the sky. I was just one human before a god. “The same.”
A breath passed. The night was impossibly still. Then the stag raised its head higher, those antlers tall enough to touch the trees, the sky, the moon.
“Very well, Eurydice Waters.”
Its nostrils widened and shrank. It turned and walked into the trees.
I stayed kneeling, the tears falling before I noticed them. My request was granted. What price it carried, I didn’t yet know.
I sat in silence, wondering how many of them would make it to the end. How many would hear what they needed to hear.
There was nothing more I could do.
The next morning, while Dorian and I were at breakfast, it began.
Voices echoed down the hallway—urgent, disbelieving. Figures blurred past the open door.
Dorian and I locked eyes from across the table. We stood at the same time.
From the balcony above the citadel’s central hall, we peered down. Two fae stood below, bloodied and bent-backed, the man supporting the woman. I couldn’t even recognize them from this height. Servants were already rushing to their side.
“Tethryn,” Dorian whispered beside me. “They made it.”
The truth struck like a slap. Some part of me had wondered, even as I left the grove, whether I’d dreamed the stag. The request, the assent. Some part of me had half-hoped, half-doubted.
“They escaped the Eldermaze,” I breathed, already knowing, needing to hear it anyway.
Dorian didn’t answer. He bounded down the stairs, calling out their names. Names I didn’t know. He cupped their faces one after the other, smiling so freely I barely recognized him. I had never seen him so alive.
These were fae he had grown up beside. Friends from before the trials, before me. If it had been guards from the southern district returning from the brink of death, I would have done the same—held their faces like kin, even if I didn’t know them.
Survival binds people into kinship. That was what Dorian felt now.
Warmth rose in my chest. Still, I folded my arms across my body. Maybe Rhiannon wouldn’t suspect. Maybe she would be too relieved by their return to question the timing, or the odds.
But in the days that followed, I knew that was a hope I couldn’t afford.
Two by two, they returned. One pair the first day, another the second, and two more the day after that. By week’s end, eighteen of us had made it out of the maze.
The last pair was the one I’d begun to believe wouldn’t return—the one I most needed to see.
I was sitting in the gardens, turning the pages of the book about the trials, when hooves clattered across the moat’s bridge.
Faun sat behind her partner on horseback, arms wrapped tight around his waist, her eyes flinty and fixed on me.
I froze, lips parted, the book open in my lap.
She’s here. She’s alive.
They didn’t slow. They rode past me, straight toward the citadel. Only when they dismounted did I see how badly they were hurt—blood streaked the horse’s sandy back, dripped to the flagstones. Faun landed on one foot and staggered.
I stood, snapping the book shut. “Faun.”
She turned her head. Her mouth was held so tight, her lips had gone white. She stared at me like she’d known me in another life. “I saw you, and I thought you must be a ghost,” she said. “Then you spoke.”
I took a step closer. “You escaped.”
“And you’re no ghost.”
“You’re hurt. Do you need—”
“No.” Her head turned sharply away. “I need nothing from you.”
The words caught somewhere deep in my chest, where grief and recognition sometimes share a shape.
If someone had asked, I couldn’t have said why I wanted Faun to survive more than anyone else.
The answer lived somewhere outside my brain, and I could only feel it in the tightness of my chest and the curl of my fingers into my palms.
But I felt it. I knew it had to do with what we meant to the kingdom—or didn’t. With how we had both been shaped by a loyalty that had nowhere to land.
We were more alike than different. And I understood, perfectly, why she treated me the way she did.
“You’re slow.” Dorian lunged along the wide tree branch, the point of his sword ripping through my training leathers at the center of my chest. “And distracted. Remember, the eyes are where the fight is.”
His black hair lifted in the breeze, stirred with the same restless energy that seemed endemic to this place. He had recovered completely—the whites of his eyes clear again, the sickness purged from his veins.
I leapt back, as if distance could undo the strike he had already landed. Wielding a sword right-handed still felt like learning to speak every word backward—every movement deliberate, mechanical, foreign.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He lowered his sword slightly. “Since when do you apologize to me?”
“Did I?” I drove my sword toward him. “I take it back.”
He slipped his body sideways, dodging my thrust with practiced ease. His gaze never left mine.
It had been four days since the last pair returned from the maze. Since then—nothing. Two pairs still unaccounted for.
“I found out this morning from Rhiannon,” Dorian said. “The first trial has ended. She’s calling us together tonight.”
I froze, sword still pointed at him. My chest caught mid-breath. “So the last of them…”
“They’re gone.”
Eighteen of us. Eighteen still lived.
“But,” Dorian said, “she wants a private audience with you beforehand.”
My sword wavered. I lifted my gaze to his face.
Dorian’s eyes were studious on my chin, my lips, my nose, my own eyes. When he stared at me like this—which had only started since the trial had ended—I was grateful to be holding a weapon.
“Why does Rhiannon want to see you privately, Eury?” he asked.
I couldn’t tell him. Not now. Maybe not ever. “Maybe to tell her my secrets. I don’t know—”
“And what secrets would she care to know?” He stepped closer, until our shared breath felt confidential.
His free hand, the one not holding his sword, flexed once at his side, half reaching, then stopping.
“Perhaps one relating to the maze? You figured out what Thalassa could not. What no other fae could.”
I lifted my chin, unwilling to back away but wanting to. This close, the smell of woodsmoke clung to him—earthy, feral, intimidating. “What do you mean?” I asked, though I knew.
“The way out.” His gaze swept over me—mouth, eyes, shoulders, mouth again. I gripped my sword tighter. “Rhiannon knows it was you.”
A dart of shock pierced my chest. “Me?”
“She’s known me my whole life, Eurydice. She knows what I’m capable of—and what I’m not. Rhiannon is no fool. She knows how to put pieces together. It’s how she holds her crown.”
And she wanted to see me.
“Just me?”
“Only you.”
I lowered my face, calculation and dread tangling in my gut. I would be alone in this. Alone to figure out exactly how much I could afford to say—and what had to stay buried.
Dorian’s hand moved between us. His fingers came to rest on my arm.
I nearly jerked away. Our eyes locked.
His were steady on me. Hazel, carmine at the center. Sweat touched his brow. But most of my attention was on his hand. His touch was warm through the leathers, and something low in me tightened, like a thread pulled taut beneath my ribs. My gaze flicked, unwilling, to his mouth.
Was I attracted to him?
Fuck, that’s the last thing I need right now.
“I don’t know what happened to bring the others back.” His voice had gone low. “I don’t know what you did. But I suspect.”
He wasn’t asking me to confess. He wasn’t pushing me.
So I didn’t speak. It was better not to.
“If you had any part in ending the trial,” he said, “don’t tell her, Eury.”
So Dorian could keep secrets. We could keep secrets. I lifted my brows. “And what happens if I do?”
His grip tightened on my arm. “She’ll kill you.”
“She can kill me during the trials?”
“She’ll find a way.” His throat moved in a hard swallow. “In our court, a threat cannot be allowed to live.”
That evening I was summoned not to Rhiannon’s chambers but to the throne room.
My footsteps were the only sound on the marble stairs. She sat alone atop the dais, watching me approach down the long central aisle.
Rhiannon was magnificent in her green robes and diadem, the wide sleeves trailing down to the dais steps.
A slit down the center revealed the curve of her strong calves, her bare feet pale and unadorned against the stone.
She was almost too brilliant to look upon—and I suspected that was intentional.
Across her lap she held a gnarled scepter, its wound branches sharpened into wicked points at one end. As I approached, she lowered it onto her knees and brought both hands together beneath her chin.
“Eurydice Waters, first out of the Eldermaze.” Her voice rang through the cavernous hall. Deep, resonant, unchallengeable.
In the weeks I’d spent at court, I’d learned to bow before royalty. The spiritstag had shown me the same deference when it granted my request. I lowered my head. “Queen Rhiannon.”
“How old are you, child?”
I raised my eyes. “Twenty.”
“I see why Dorian calls you rabbit.” Her blue eyes gleamed like faceted jewels. “You are flighty, aren’t you? I can practically hear your heart thumping.”
I could hear it, too, thudding against my ribs like a trapped creature. That was real. There was nothing safe to say, so I said nothing.
“And yet,” Rhiannon said, leaning forward, “you like being thought of as a rabbit.”
It was as if she had peeled back my skin and peered straight inside. She couldn’t know that. Not truly. But Dorian had warned me: she was cunning enough to know everything without needing proof.
“You’re surprised,” Rhiannon said. “More surprised, or less, I wonder, than when the spiritstag granted your request?”
I allowed my fingers to tremble. That was real, too; I usually clenched my fists against my hands’ tremble when I was nervous.
I was a rabbit. I had to be a rabbit. Anything else would get me killed.
Meanwhile, I held her gaze. If the spiritstag had told her what I’d done, it was over. But if this was a guess—if she was only fishing—
“How else,” she mused, her fingers still laced beneath her chin, “could the others have escaped the maze so quickly? Mere days after you and Dorian.”
“Perhaps they heard the commotion when we fled,” I said, “and followed the sound.”
Her index fingers tapped together. A slow, thoughtful rhythm. “Perhaps.”
“Your court is strong, Your Grace—”
“Oh, don’t pander.” Her voice lowered. “You hate us.”
I shook my head quickly. “No.”
“We are the monsters you shrinking, acid-drenched humans spend your lives fearing in the dark. And for good reason. We shattered your wall. We killed your loved ones. We stole you to this lush land where we eat cheeses and grapes and live forever while you wither in the muck.”
Her hands fell to the scepter. “Tell me, rabbit, that you wouldn’t bash my skull in with this piece of wood if you could.” Her fingers tightened over the scepter’s sharpened end like she was daring me to reach for it.
I would. Some part of me did want to strike. But it wasn’t only hatred pulling at my hand.
It was envy.
Envy, as sharp and cruel as any thorn.
And that was what Rhiannon feared most. What Dorian had warned me of.
The moment I acknowledged it, I dropped to my knees, head bowed low. I couldn’t let her see it in my face. My hands came together in supplication. “I would not dare, Your Grace. Please, you must believe me.”
Dorian considered me a shit liar. But he’d also spent a lot more time with me than Rhiannon.
There was a sound—sharp, like the sudden snap of a branch. From somewhere a breeze blew, and my hair lifted around my face. I felt it across my skin, raising goosebumps. Magic.
When I lifted my eyes slightly through my lashes, I saw that Rhiannon had shifted forward, the sharpened end of her scepter digging into the dais beside her foot.
“It’s not ‘Your Grace.’” Her voice cut through the empty hall like a blade. “I’m the queen. I don’t rule by grace.”
That only increased my envy. And, a little bit, my pity.
Sister-killer. Night-bitch.
How alone she must feel.
A long silence fell. Her eyes traced my head, my shoulders, my hands, weighing every inch of me. And I studied her back, the queen of this court who controlled the air around us.
I wondered how deep the well of her magic went. At least she couldn’t force me to confess to her like she could her subjects.
The scepter tapped the stone floor once, hard. She sat back, arms now resting on the throne.
“Go,” Rhiannon said at last, her voice softer, weary. “Prepare yourself. In a few hours, I will call upon all of you who remain.”
The second trial. She’d just revealed it would begin tonight.
I rose and turned to go.
“Eurydice.”
I froze.
“If I find out you’ve fucked me over,” she said, almost tenderly, “I will rip your flaxen head from your neck with my own hands.”