Chapter 42
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
I dropped the journal into the dirt. A few unread lines remained, but my hands shook too much to keep the page steady.
Not the same child. The words rang in my head, a percussive clang, over and over. Not the same child. Not the same child.
I stared into the almost-darkness, unseeing, and once again I heard Theo’s riddle on the last night he’d been alive.
I am just like you, but I am not you.
Fuck off, Theo.
I rubbed my hands over my pants as though I could wick the memory away. There it was—Theo’s last riddle, and the key to my existence. I finally knew the answer.
“Changeling,” I said.
No sound returned except the whispers and scratching of the bugs in the earth. My breath sawed in and out of my nose, and somewhere far-off my mother’s words mixed with Theo’s.
Not the same child.
I am just like you, but I am not you.
I sat like that as time dilated, staring into nothing and seeing nothing and feeling my heart squeeze like it would close in on itself. The grief and shame and anger were a toxic mixture, swirling and mixing to a sludge.
I cried without sobbing. I let the tears run without wiping them away.
If I wasn’t my mother’s daughter, then who did I belong to?
If I wasn’t Eurydice Waters of the Kingdom of Storms, then who was she? And who was I?
Eventually my gaze slipped down to the journal lying open in the dirt. I picked it up, wiping it clean. I held the crystal close to the page to read the last few lines.
A mother does not choose the child she raises. But as I held you that night, I felt a love I had never known I was capable of. Not once have I ever felt a drop less than everything for you, Eurydice. Not once.
That was the end. Empty pages followed, but my mother’s entries ended—would always end—right there.
I closed the journal and wrapped both my hands around it and hugged it to my chest. I curled forward until my forehead touched my knees, then I opened my mouth and sobbed.
Not just for the secret my mother had kept from me my whole life.
Not just for this imprisonment.
Not just for the trials I had been forced to endure.
Not just for the girl who’d thought she was a human and never once had been.
I wept for my mother, who had loved me until the moment she had been crushed inside her home. Finally, weeks later, I wept for her. Because I had loved her, too, and she had been killed by the creatures I’d thought were monsters.
And I was one of those monsters.
All along, I had been one of those monsters. I had been the creature I stood on the wall to keep out.
I dropped onto my side and lay curled up like that for countless minutes—or hours. My eyes were puffy and my head ached from dehydration, and I told myself I deserved both things. A penance dealt by the priests of the wall god, Arxius.
I deserved to be in a cell. Deserved the cold earth and the stink of worms. In some way I didn’t fully understand, I sensed it was because of me my mother had died. And I deserved to suffer for it.
The ground was damp, leeching warmth from my bones; I deserved that too. A shiver ran through me, and when I tugged my cloak tighter, my hand brushed Thalassa’s pouch, still hooked on my belt.
My fingers closed over it, and my eyes opened.
I had never opened her gift to me.
I sat up, crossed my legs, and unhooked the pouch. I set it on the ground in front of me and untied the twine. The linen fell apart to reveal something I couldn’t properly see. I picked up the small crystal and held it close to the object.
Metal gleamed.
A pin.
I picked it up between two fingers and brought it closer to my eyes, turning it over. It was circular, with two smaller circles inside the largest one—
With a start, I dropped it in the dirt.
That wasn’t fucking possible. There was no way Thalassa, an elder fae in Feyreign, could have such a thing. Unless… unless she had stolen mine.
I scrabbled for it in the dirt, my fingers searching and sifting. Finally, I found it again and lifted it face-up to inspect.
This wasn’t my pin. It was a different shape, heavier, made of a different type of metal. Where mine was dulled by years of wear, this was untarnished, a brilliant ebony even in this almost-lightless cell. Ebony iron so cold that within seconds of touching it, my fingers went numb.
But the symbol was the same:
Three circles to represent three walls.
This was a guard’s pin. It belonged to the Kingdom of Storms.
I lost track of time in that cell. Hours or days, I couldn’t say, before they retrieved me.
However much time had passed, it was enough.
My grief had congealed into a hardened mass inside my chest. My longing had solidified into intent. My rage burned high and hot.
When the two handmaidens opened the root-wall to my cell and beckoned me through, I made them wait. I stood and gathered my belongings. I clipped them to my belt and slipped my mother’s journal back inside my jerkin. I flicked the dirt from my hair and banded it in a high ponytail.
Last of all, I clasped my cloak at my neck and folded the sides back over my shoulders.
Then I went with them, one handmaiden ahead of me and one flanking me.
Climbing out of the dungeon was slow. My hands went out to the dirt walls for balance, and when finally I came into real light, I stopped and covered my eyes with my hand. The two handmaidens waited for me in silence. Wherever their patience sprang from, I was grateful for it.
When the stone walls and floors of the citadel appeared around me, it felt like stepping through a portal. I had been inside the citadel all this time, but not really. I had been apart, in a world as enclosed as a womb.
We climbed what felt like endless stairs, until finally we emerged into a corridor I recognized. That was when I knew where we were going.
Of course.
This was the corridor beneath the grand staircase—one of the staircases, at least. We came out a side door—the door used by the servants—and into the throne room from under the leftmost staircase.
This was it. Now I would face her—
But the throne was empty. In the corner of the room, a lone fae swept the floor with a quaint broom. And the lead handmaiden didn’t walk toward the throne; she started up the stairs.
So Rhiannon had another trick for me. A mind-game.
Maybe she would confine me to my bedchamber for the rest of the trials. Maybe she would have her handmaidens parade me through the whole citadel before she pushed me off the topmost point of the spire so I could hit every branch on my way down.
I followed the handmaidens up the stairs. We came to the landing, and we passed down the first hallway. But our course didn’t take me to my bedchamber or up to the top of the spire.
My breath grew short as we walked the length I knew. It couldn’t be. And yet the handmaiden brought us directly there.
To the door of Dorian’s quarters.
She gave a short rap. I heard footsteps on the other side. I pulled in a quick breath when the door opened and a growing panel of light appeared.
He was there. He was there, and his eyes were on me.
Dark, shuttered, unknowable. That Dorian.
The handmaidens stepped back, and Dorian gestured for me to come inside. I didn’t understand, but my feet moved.
I crossed the threshold and stared into the empty bedchamber as Dorian closed the door behind me. It was just us two in this room. He pressed himself against the wood, both palms on it, staring at me like I would bolt if he approached.
My gaze fixed on the doorway to the adjoining room. Maybe Rhiannon had some sick plan for me to find her in there. “Is she here?”
“No.” He seemed to know instantly who I meant, who I anticipated. “Just me.”
My head jerked around. “Just you?” I didn’t believe him.
That shuttered look had left his face, replaced by something else. Trepidation? His Adam’s apple moved, but he remained planted. No greetings, no embraces, just a strangeness I couldn’t comprehend. Like he was holding back a tide with that door.
I stood there, not understanding. I had braced myself for a confrontation with a queen, imagined it from ten different angles, held my shoulders back and my head up the entire way up from the dungeon…
Now I was here, with the one person I wanted to see, and we stood alone and apart from each other in his bedroom.
Just him here. The tight band inside me couldn’t let go. “Where’s Rhiannon?”
“Hunting.”
“Hunting?”
“The queen enjoys a good hunt.” Dark hollows sat under his eyes. His hair was sleepless and wild. “And we have an overabundance of boar.”
Rhiannon wasn’t in the citadel. She was elsewhere entirely.
I turned toward him in full now, palms turning, wide and empty. “I don’t understand.” Emotion rose to my chest, up my neck. I had expected a confrontation, death, a final few words—
Dorian struck toward me. His arms came around me and he held me to him, one hand sliding up to cradle my head. “I’m so sorry, Eury. You won’t be going back down there.”
I was enveloped by him, by his heady scent. I wanted to sink into him. I couldn’t.
“So I’m your prisoner now.” My voice came muffled into his shirt. “Is that it?”
His hand stroked my hair. “No. Not my prisoner.”
“Then what?”
“She can’t hold you. Not while you’re in the trials.”
His words washed over me. She couldn’t hold me. No, of course not—the spiritstag had placed me in the trials, not Rhiannon. And a god’s power always superseded a queen’s.
She’d had to release me.
I drew back, looked into his eyes. “I don’t know how long it’s been.”
“Three days.” He seemed to flinch at his own words. “I would have got you out sooner, but—”
Three days. Only three. Without the sun and moon, it had felt like a whole life. In only three days, everything had changed.
The band around my chest finally loosened. I was here, with Dorian, and no Rhiannon. No trick, no mind-game.
Finally, I allowed myself to be with him.
“So we’re still in the trials.”
He rubbed his thumb over my cheek and his eyes searched mine. I saw relief, hope, something else. Something I couldn’t understand—pain or fear. “We’re still in.”
Of course he felt pain. Of course he felt fear. “You look like shit.”
His brows drew briefly together. Then he broke into a crooked smile. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” My eyes dropped to his lips. I remembered the shape, the feel of his mouth on mine. That night in the cave felt so long ago. “Tell me you’ve slept.”
He pulled his thumb from my cheek, and it came away dirty under the light. “Don’t ask me that. You’ve been sleeping on dirt.”
Sleeping on dirt. Reading on dirt.
My journal suddenly felt like a fresh weight against my chest.
I stepped back. “Dorian. When you came that night, to the southern district—did you know?”
His hands dropped to his sides, his face shifting to seriousness. “Know what?”
“My mother kept a journal. About me.” I reached up, slid it out from my jerkin. “When I was six months old, she woke up in the night and discovered a different baby in the bassinet.”
His brows lowered, gaze flicking to the journal and back to me. Then everything softened, opened up. His lips parted. He said, so low I could hardly hear, “Your mother was a perceptive woman.”
A stone sank in my gut. I had thought he might deny it, might say that was impossible. Some part of me hadn’t fully believed her narrative, had clung to the idea that I was Eurydice Waters, her daughter—her human daughter.
But the magic in the cave, the journal, and now this…
“Did you know?” I whispered again. “When you came to the southern district that night?”
His face remained soft. “Yes.”
I turned toward the bed, toward a stool set low next to it. I dropped onto the stool and set my fingers at the clasp of my cloak, pulling it away from my neck to breathe.
He had known. He knew I was a changeling, that I was fae all along. I wasn’t a human who had been entered into these trials—I was fae. Dorian knew it, no doubt Rhiannon knew it, the spiritstag certainly knew it.
Dorian appeared before me, dropping to his knees. His hands came up to my arms, touching there lightly. “Eury—”
I jerked away, nearly hissing. The last thing I wanted now was to be touched. Not by anyone, and not by him.
His hands fell, but he remained kneeling in front of me.
I had so many questions. So many, my one stream of thought felt insufficient. I said only, “Why?”
“Why did I come?”
I stared at him, hard.
He breathed out. “I was sent ahead of the trials.”
“To do what?”
He dropped fully to a seat. “To root out changelings.”
“Changelings? There are more?”
“Yes.” His eyes lowered. “But you were the only one we found that night.”
That night, he’d held a sword at my back. He’d told me to pray to my gods. He’d been ready to skewer me. “You weren’t going to root me out.” I paused. “You were going to kill me.”
“I…”
“Don’t lie, Dorian. I could feel it.”
His eyes lifted to me. His lips pressed together. I saw it then, a certain deep truth. A truth based in winding, brambled history. Saw it in the way his lips went white. Saw it in the drawing together of his brows.
“I was sent to bring you back.” He kept his voice even. “And I did that.”
I leaned back, straightening. Fear touched my chest, but curiosity even more. There it was, the history I’d seen on his face. But he wouldn’t delve into it.
For my part, I hadn’t just wanted to kill him. I had tried to.
That was before I’d known him.
Then wasn’t now.
“You did that,” I echoed. My gaze dropped to the journal in my lap. “You taught me one history of Sylvanwild. Now I need to know the rest.”