Chapter 39 #2
In my exhaustion I had given myself fully over to him. I was entirely held up by his arms, my body pressed against his. When I opened my eyes, his were lidded on me. Our breaths came fast and audible, and the two of us stared at one another in the cave.
I wanted more. Despite the pain I felt everywhere, I ached for more. “You didn’t have to stop.”
He let out a short chuckle, then a wince. I had been squeezing his injured shoulder, and it was bleeding through the makeshift bandage.
I jerked my hand away. “Oh.”
“Trying to kill me after all?”
I breathed out. “You know I prefer blunt knives.”
Another one-note chuckle. His fingers were still threaded into my hair, his other arm tight at my waist. He held me close, his eyes moving over my face. “Here’s your chance.”
I forced back a smile and tried to ignore the squeeze in my chest. Yes, I wanted to wrap myself around him, but in every other way but that. Pain was seeping in now, tendrils of it lancing me, various parts of me throbbing.
I—we—were in terrible shape.
“I might pass out again,” I breathed.
He slowly extricated himself from my hands. He took in shallow, quick breaths, then pressed himself to his feet with a groan. “Not before we get you away from this fucking court.”
That brought me back to attention. “What? But the trials—”
“You’re in danger.” He pressed his wet hair back from his forehead. “Rhiannon will soon know.”
Now I was awake. “Know what?”
“About what you’ve done here.”
I stared at him. “What have I done?”
He turned away, stooped, and took up my sword.
My hand went out to him. “What are you doing? You’ll worsen the wounds.”
He straightened with gritted teeth. “I’m getting you out of this place.”
I’d spent so long wanting to go, and now. Now…
“But why?”
He jerked around with a hiss. “Your magic, Eurydice.”
I went stiff, eyes darting between his. Something unfurled in my chest, a bud. “I don’t understand.”
His eyebrows rose. “You do.” His gaze didn’t let go of mine. “You felt it.” His eyes were luminous, knowing.
I knew exactly what his expression said.
The waterfall. At just the moment I’d needed it—at the moment I’d screamed—the water had diverted exactly where I’d needed it to go.
But it couldn’t be magic. Not mine, anyway.
I felt a need to be in motion. I got to my feet with a groan, every part of me protesting.
With slow, wobbling steps I crossed to him, took hold of my sword, and sheathed it.
“I don’t know what happened. The waterfall, it just…
” I didn’t know how to describe what the waterfall had done. It had just changed course.
“It obeyed you,” Dorian said, his voice low and even. “The water obeyed you.”
I glanced over my shoulder at him. Even now, contending with the absolute insanity of what he was saying, hope rose in me. “That’s impossible.”
He shook his head, water and blood dripping from his black hair to the cave floor. “Not for a fae.”
He wasn’t just fucking with me—he was being cruel. Anger flared in me, hot and cheek-warming. “Stop it.”
His eyes moved up the length of my body and met mine. There wasn’t a hint of humor on his face. In fact, he looked almost forlorn. “It’s undeniable, Eury. The Wild Hunt proclaimed it.”
Worthy.
And yet.
I was no fae. I was Eurydice Waters of the Kingdom of Storms. I was born there, a child of scorn from the moment I could form memory.
I was my mother’s daughter; all my life people had told me how I had her flaxen hair and eyes and nose.
We were the same height, and we had been people of the southern district for generations back.
The Waters name, cursed as it was, was an ancient name in our kingdom.
Most of all, I knew I couldn’t be fae because I was weak. I was frail by human standards, and I’d spent my whole life trying to overcome my petite frame and small bones.
And now here I was, alive in Feyreign—the fae realm—and I’d gotten this far as a human. Not a fae. Not with magic, but as the human I was and had always been.
I felt the strange impulse to run Dorian through with my blade. My lips still felt kiss-bruised, and he was fucking with me.
Dorian knelt and picked up the small purple crystal I’d dropped during the fight. He approached, placed his hand under mine, and set the crystal into my palm with the other. He closed my fingers over it. “You’ll need this.”
My fingers tightened on the crystal. “You told me fae could see at night. But I can’t.”
“Your eyes aren’t trained yet, is all.” His good hand came up to my face, thumb swiping a hot tear away. “I know you felt it,” he said, low and soft. “You felt the magic move through you.”
I didn’t feel anything but fury and fear. I felt it even now, running through my veins and heating my cheeks. I felt it in the rawness of my throat after I’d screamed. But magic? I didn’t know what magic was.
Yes you do, a small voice said inside me. You know he’s right.
Did I? I didn’t know.
But it was a hell of a coincidence for the waterfall to change its course at the moment that scream had erupted from my throat.
I moved my gaze up to his face, to those lips I’d just kissed. “I’m not fae.”
I wasn’t, couldn’t be, didn’t want to be.
But you do want magic, that voice said.
It was my own voice, the girl who’d knelt in the grove in front of the spiritstag and been offered power. The girl who’d watched Rhiannon bring a court to heel in her throne room. The girl who’d escaped the thornstalkers because of Dorian’s command of flora and air.
He stroked my cheek with his thumb and carefully pressed my hair from my forehead. “Very well. You aren’t fae. But you’re still leaving Feyreign.”
I swallowed hard. “We’ll die for that.” I didn’t know everything about Sylvanwild, but I knew that much.
“We’ll die if you stay.” Dorian’s hand slid down my arm, and he took my hand. “Rhiannon won’t let you live. Not unless you’re under her control.”
“Even if I did have magic,” I said, “so does every other fae. I saw Faun’s power, and Rhiannon’s.”
He stepped closer, voice lowering. “Neither of them could so much as touch the Wild Hunt. Do you understand what I’m saying, Eury?”
My eyes narrowed on him. I was beginning to understand his fear; it was even more insane than the idea that I was fae. “You think I’m a threat to her.”
“Not as you are. But if you were trained…” His Adam’s apple shifted in his throat. “You’re not pliant. She knows that, after what you did to free the others from the Eldermaze. And she’ll know by morning what you did here. She’ll find a way to destroy you. If not by death, then something worse.”
Not pliant. Wasn’t that exactly what these fae valued? Not pliancy but strength. Not waifishness but ruthlessness.
“She doesn’t need pliant. She needs a champion.”
Dorian let out a sharp, aggrieved-sounding breath. “In Feyreign, a queen doesn’t wait for a threat to grow teeth. She’ll cut your throat long before then.”
Not pliant, and a threat.
Ice crawled up my spine. I knew Dorian was right about Rhiannon; I had seen it in her eyes. Most of her power was in her cunning.
He squeezed my hand and led me out of the cave and into the moonlit night. His grip was firm, unignorable. He slipped something from a belt pocket, pressed it into my palm. “Pack your shoulder with this. Do it now, before you’ve bled more.”
I nodded, numb, hardly processing as my fingers closed over the thing in my hand. His words rattled in my head. Only the strongest could rule. Rhiannon was the Sylvanwild Court’s ruler because her power was unmatched. Somehow, Dorian thought I was a threat to that power.
“Eury,” he said, his voice sharp enough to bring me back.
I focused on him—on what I held. It felt mossy between my fingers. “What is this?”
“It’ll stop the pain and the bleeding.”
After a second’s breath, I lifted the moss and pressed it against the spot where my jerkin was torn at the shoulder. I grimaced wide, but Dorian said, “It has to be properly in there,” and soon his fingers were pressing the packing into the wound. I cried out, but he didn’t stop until it was done.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured when he stepped back.
Seconds after he said it, coolness spread through my shoulder and into my chest. As it did, the pain dampened. And within a minute, my mind sharpened. Whatever that herb was, it was magic itself.
I stared out over the forest before us. “It must be at least a day’s walk to get back to the gates,” I said. “We can’t possibly—”
“We can,” he said. “And we will.”
We walked the path alongside the water, and once we had gotten clear of the waterfall Dorian set a cupped hand to his mouth and let out a noise that resounded somewhere between a whistle and a cry. It was a chilling, throaty sound; goosebumps rose on my arms.
A few seconds later, the same call returned from somewhere in the moonlit forest.
“What was that?” I said on a breath out.
“No matter where you are in our lands,” he said, “the wraiths will heed the call.”
I stared into the darkness. Ice ran through my arms. “The wraiths want to kill me, Dorian.”
“Not now,” he said, his breath labored. He was struggling with his wounds. “You’ve manifested power, Eurydice. The Wild Hunt deemed you worthy.”
That word again. Worthy. I still didn’t know the shape of it—not the way the Wild Hunt and Dorian seemed to mean it.
Moments later the wraiths emerged from the gray night, from amidst the silver-limned trees. They slid over the ground like the drape of a royal cape around its monarch, but these were made of formless shadow. Five of them. And each of them held scythes.
I wanted to shrivel away from them. Everything in me hated those things.
Dorian spoke to them in a whispered language I had not heard before. A language of the lips and the tip of the tongue and nothing else, so soft it could have been the wind stirring the trees.
They spoke back in that same language. But from them, it was the sound of cursed death.
He turned to me. His hands came to my face. “They’ll take you.”
My eyes went wide on him. “Take us, you mean.”
He leaned forward, his lips touching mine with a tenderness that pained me. He set his forehead to mine. “I’d only slow them down.”
“No.” My chest pulled tight as a drum. “We’re bound by the trials. We have to go together.”
“I’ll follow.” His forehead remained pressed to mine. “I’ll follow in time, and I’ll find you on the other side of the gates. There’s a path through the trees—take it to the road. Wait for me there, where we left the wagon.”
That was a lie. Or if not a lie, then a promise he knew he couldn’t keep. But I understood the logic: he had to say that so I would go. I knew if he saw any other way for us to stay together, he would have taken it. Which meant there was no other way. This was it.
I had to go with the wraiths, alone.
“All right,” I said. I kissed him again, breathing in his scent, sliding my hand around his neck like I could anchor him to me. “On the other side, then.”
He remained close, even as he whispered a word in the wraiths’ language. Only when they had closed in, their cold forms enclosing me and lifting me from the ground, did his forehead break contact with mine.
The temperature plummeted. I gasped as the chill leached through my clothes and into my bones. Their touch wasn’t grip, but mist, insubstantial, but wherever it passed over my skin, numbness followed. Being lifted by them felt like being pulled upward by a tide with no center, no hands.
They moved like water, carrying me away, away from him. I watched over my shoulder until we crossed into the trees, and then he disappeared from my vision like a candle’s flame extinguished between two fingers.