Chapter 48
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
For a gleaming moment, I became Eurydice. Only Eurydice.
Of course. Of course it would be Dorian atop that wall. This was a trial, after all, and I was a fool to think I wouldn’t encounter him in it.
But I’d hoped not. Especially not like this.
Up there, manacled, the sight of him made my chest tighten and expand at once.
Rage warred with ache. I hated him. A murderer.
A betraying bastard. A low-down Unseelie.
I still saw him standing there behind Rhiannon like he hadn’t held me in his arms the night before.
Like he hadn’t kissed me. Like he hadn’t been inside me.
Like he hadn’t kept his murderous mouth shut all the while.
And yet.
Maybe it was Carys’s feeling for her lover. Maybe it was that thing on his head. He was dirty, beaten; bruises peeked from under his torn shirt and blood spattered across his chest. Maybe it was the fierce, communal love I felt for the fae who fought beside me.
The longer I spent in this trial, the harder it was for me to distinguish between Carys and Eurydice. And the less I cared.
His eyes shifted down. Dorian’s eyes. They seemed to find me—not Carys, but me, Eury. And what I read there nearly ruined me.
This was no trial. For him, it was just suffering.
My heart pulled toward him. That’s Carys’s heart, not yours. I hated him. And still: I had to save him. I had to free him, to get him away from these degenerate humans.
“Queen Carys.” The king’s voice boomed, baritone; he needed no horn. “You have strayed far from your home. Far from the source of your power. That was a mistake.”
I swung the horse back around for another loop, keeping my eyes on him.
“Power? You hide behind walls and Phoros, and one now lies in rubble behind me. And your sunlit iron?” I trotted the horse toward a dead guard, bent low over the horse’s neck, and grabbed up his fallen short sword.
It gleamed with sunlit purity, untarnished and unbloodied.
I brought the horse back around, unsheathed my dagger, and set the two blades against one another. They hissed on contact, the sound animal and high-pitched. Cold steam appeared, crawled up the length of the sunlit short sword until it was encompassed.
I drew the two blades apart, one in each hand. The short sword now bore a dark hue—the same as my dagger. “Your iron—every bit of it—is mine. And if you do not yield, I shall kill you with it.”
The king scoffed, the sound harsh and echoing over the buildings. “Feyreign will never forget this day.”
He was defeated, yet he taunted me like all humans did. My horse continued pacing, and I kept my eyes on the king and Dorian through every turn. “Stand down, Rhodric. Open the gatehouse, send out my consort, and pray to your gods to build you a better wall.”
Silence fell for a beat, two—and then the king burst into laughter. His armor glinted even under cloud cover. “Pray? Pray?”
I stared up at him, a strange feeling rising in me.
The king’s helmet inclined as his face lowered, those two horns shifting toward me under the sunlight. “You have no idea what you’ve led your people into, little queen.”
He raised his fingers to his lips, set them into his mouth, and whistled.
I knew that whistle. I knew it in my bones.
The sound was returned somewhere to my left. My head jerked, seeking it out. A third whistle sounded on my right, and I swung my horse toward it. That was the call of the night guard. It was the whistle I, Eury, had failed to produce on my first night atop the wall.
It meant something to Carys, too. Though I didn’t know why.
Fear gripped my heart and held tight. My gaze shifted blurrily over the fae around me. I had to tell the archers to fire on the wall. I had to mass the soldiers.
Even as strategy floated through my head, cold reality loomed.
The outer district civilians had crowded in around us.
Children peered from alleys, and men and women stood shoulder to shoulder on paths.
They held short swords and long swords and the shields and all the other weapons of the fallen guard.
Sunlit iron. All of it.
The whistle continued on, a chain passing deep into the kingdom.
A sound of solidarity, a warning. There, at the corner of an alley, an old woman’s eyes stared back from between two veils of white hair.
Dark eyes, severe, just like my mother’s.
Not mine, but Carys’s. It was Carys who saw her, that old woman at the corner.
Except the last time she’d seen those eyes, they were softer, younger.
Thirty years had passed. Thirty years was much of a human life.
Mother, Mother, Mother.
The word struck through us, me and Carys, like a rock dropped into a well, rippling outward.
It was her, the dark-eyed mother who’d raised Carys with a harsh grip and a keen, watchful eye.
She had loved her daughter in a cautious way, perhaps always sensing Carys wasn’t who she thought, wasn’t her real daughter.
And Carys had felt that cautious love, felt it and longed for it to be uncautious.
Even now, she longed for it. Desperately. From an old woman who barely resembled the mother she’d once had.
And I understood, suddenly, far too much. I understood her fear, her feeling, why she had fought so hard to be here and why now she struggled to give a command or lift her weapon.
This was her home. The Kingdom of the Plains was where she had grown up.
Carys’s mother lived here, and some part of her would forever live with those dark, severe eyes watching her.
I blinked. The old woman was gone from the corner. Perhaps she had never been there at all.
Now I grasped the danger of allowing Carys to fill me. She was haunted by a life I hadn’t lived, stopped by ghosts I didn’t know. Her stakes were not mine—not entirely.
I was not her. I was inside a trial.
This was a fight for my life and Dorian’s.
Carys fell away from me like a skein, and I was only Eurydice. I was no queen, no warrior, no fae. I was just the girl from the Dip, the daughter of the bread-baker, the night guard who’d spent one night on the wall.
This was it. Here, now—when Carys was confused, uncertain—this was my trial. It was I who had to choose correctly, but I didn’t know the history of this battle. Perhaps this was a trial of knowledge, then. Or of fortitude, or of bravery. None of that mattered, really.
Only one truth stood: If I didn’t make the right choice, we would both be captured.
My eyes lifted and found Dorian’s. Hazel eyes, round as coins. Did he see me, or Carys? Did he still want to kill me even here, even inside this terrible memory of the past?
Had he always wanted to kill me?
“My queen?” Cirevan said. His voice was low, uncertain.
My gaze lowered, and Carys seeped back into me. Eurydice and Carys were muddled inside me, swirling, creating friction.
We had enough fae archers and soldiers to fight our way out. The archers could fire as they had done on the wall. The soldiers could slice the humans down. I could separate their limbs from their bodies.
Not thirty feet away lay a section of blown-out wall, so enormous it had flattened a building; only wooden shards remained. Just like what happened to Isa the nurse. Just like what happened to my own mother.
But one thing remained true for both of us:
Killing these people was like killing my own family.
It was wrong. In that, Carys and I were of one mind. I felt her now, vibrating with desire to speak a single word aloud. Those dark eyes were still on her from the corner, watching. She longed, longed, longed to see those dark eyes again.
The whistle continued. The people closed in, sunlit iron at the ready.
I couldn’t. I couldn’t slaughter them.
Amidst this, one fact rose from all the things Dorian had taught me in his study: Carys died in a war of the four courts. Which meant she survived this day. She survived this battle, this place, to return to Feyreign.
So I allowed Carys to speak.
“Retreat,” I whispered.
I said it again, louder, and once more louder still.
But it was too late.
The fight was quick. My people were captured, all of them who didn’t die fighting. I was surrounded, and a woman stabbed my horse in the heart with a spear.
The stallion fell, and I was pulled off it as it died.
I was thrown to the ground, met with fists and boots.
The blows came fast and merciless. My weapons were stripped from me, all of them.
Even the dagger. Amidst the beating, my eyes opened, and through the legs of the people around me, I saw a child squatting in the dirt, staring.
A little brown-haired girl, wide-eyed and shocked.
And it was there, disarmed and beaten on the ground, that I retreated inside. So deep inside that Eurydice was subsumed by Carys.
I saw a memory from her life. Carys hovered at the edge of a building in this very square, waiting for her moment.
When the street was empty, she ran along the cobblestones by moonlit night, her eyes on the high outer wall of the Kingdom of the Plains.
She would climb that wall. She would climb it and she would see what lay beyond.
Like me, her desire to see was greater than her fear.
She wanted to be a guard, to be strong and protect her people.
Her people. These were her people.
Carys had grown up here. She had grown up where I had grown up, in what would become the southern district.
A steel-toed boot slammed into my belly, and the answer came to me in a starburst of pain. She truly was a changeling. A changeling like me. Carys had been placed here as a baby, like me. And she had loved this kingdom, like me.
It was as impossible to destroy that love as it was to remove every stone from a stream. You could work forever at it, but there would still be more stones. You could become a queen, and still.
Queen—a changeling had become a queen. The fact ricocheted through me as it never had before. How had a changeling become a queen?
Another blow to the belly. One to the spine.
“Enough,” a man’s voice called. “Enough!”
The blows subsided. The pain bloomed, and my eyes fluttered as I tried to hold on to consciousness. I clung to a question: How had a changeling girl from the Kingdom of the Plains become a queen of Feyreign?
But the pain was white-hot, and unconsciousness overtook me.
When I woke, sunlight scorched my face. Voices sounded around me. Pain flooded in, and I struggled to open just one eye. The left one didn’t respond, and the right opened only a sliver.
Cobblestone dug into my knees. My arms were pinched behind my back, and iron burned into my wrists.
Sunlit iron. Every part of me felt like a wound, and Carys’s body felt like my own.
The wheeze as I breathed was my own. The sharp pain of broken ribs was my pain.
With this kind of pain, I could no longer distinguish between myself and Carys.
I had survived the beating. History had told me so, but words on the page of some old tome felt like a tenuous promise when you were the one who had to do the surviving.
“Queen of the fae,” a gravelly man’s voice said nearby. “More like queen of the cobblestone.”
Voices rang out. Angry, sharp.
My one good eye lifted. I knelt at the entry to an enormous square full of people with eyes on me and fingers curled into fists. They were waiting, all these humans whose wall had been destroyed. All these humans who had lost family, who had lost friends.
Their rage had a face now—mine.
Left of me, not a hundred feet off, stood a bone-white pillar, a behemoth. It was so wide, so bright, I had to squint. But I knew that pillar—it was one of the three spires of the Kingdom of Storms. It had stood four hundred years ago.
A hand grabbed my bicep and yanked. I bit back a cry as I was hauled upright.
“Walk,” a man’s voice said, low and terse. That was a guard, no doubt; the human military cadence had not changed in four hundred years.
I tested my weight and found my legs held. I took a step and swayed against his hold. That was just dizziness; my leg carried the weight. I took another step, and another, and soon I was crossing under the doorway and into the sunbathed square and its chorus of jeers.
At the center stood a wooden platform. Atop it stood two guard, and next to each guard knelt a prisoner, wrists bound with sunlit-iron shackles.
I stilled. Despite my impairment, despite the sun’s brightness, despite standing behind the two prisoners, despite the skullcaps they wore, I knew them at once.
One was Cirevan, and one was Dorian.
The guard thrust me forward, and I stumbled before I walked. A wet smack against my cheek—fruit, maybe. Fresh, fragrant. Another splattered on my shoulder, another on my leg. The part of me that was Eury had the surging thought: Who were these people to waste fruit?
The guard barked a command that quelled the crowd.
I was guided around to the front of the platform, and I couldn’t help but seek out Dorian’s face.
When I came into view, his eyes found mine; they were red and stricken.
He still wore whatever device covered his head and kept his eyes pried open.
His lips parted and he spoke, but I couldn’t hear him over all the noise.
All my anger toward Dorian, all my grief, burned away under a single aching truth: I longed to free him from those manacles, to pull that skullcap off his head.
No matter what he’d done, he didn’t deserve this.
I held his gaze until I couldn’t any longer.
Until I was thrust beyond him and into the center of the square, where I was made to face a dais with a throne atop it.
And on that throne sat the sunlit-iron-armored King Rhodric with his horned helm still on.
White-bearded, rosy-cheeked, a sovereign who ate too heartily and belied the shrewdness of his blue eyes with the soft smile he wore as he looked upon me.
A hand slammed my shoulder and shoved me down. The cobblestones bit through my leathers into my kneecaps, and I held back a wince.
Across the king’s lap, atop a plum cushion, sat the dagger. My dagger, glittering cobalt in the sunlight. He couldn’t touch it. Couldn’t even set it directly on his armored lap.
“Welcome, Carys”—the horns of the helm angled forward as he looked upon me—“to the inner district.”