Chapter 50
CHAPTER FIFTY
The rain was a song. The rain was my song.
I had never loved the acid rain, never appreciated its skill. But straddling the dead king of the Kingdom of the Plains, face lifted to the sky, the dagger in my grip, I relished its hiss. The pain of it washed over me like a promise.
My eyes closed. I was Eury and I was Carys, both at the same time. Daughters of scorn, changelings given over to the humans and then brought back around once we knew our birthrights.
It felt like a covenant between us: We were meant to take our power. To rip it from those who would steal, trick, betray.
Never again would I allow it to be taken from me.
All at once, the rain stopped. The screams stopped. The wind died.
The world changed, whispering around me like I had been transported. A sucking feeling pulled through me, like my stomach was pressed down and then yanked up. Nausea rose in me.
My eyes opened—both of them. Above me, purple crystals glinted with soft light, catching the lichen growing around them. They were set into the high curves of a wooden throne room built into a tree.
My breath sawed in and out of my lungs, and my balance left me.
I nearly fell, but caught myself with a hand. Around me, dozens of fae stared. I knelt on the floor of the throne room of the Sylvanwild citadel, and no dead king lay beneath me. No rain hissed around me.
I was back. I was out of the trial.
But…
My eyes scanned the room. Dorian. Dorian. Where was he? He’d been manacled, tortured—
“Eury.”
My head snapped around, and my heart gave an overlarge beat. Perfectly framed by the closed double doors of the citadel stood Dorian. And he stared back at me with those dark, haunted eyes. I could see his pupils, his irises, the white of his sclera.
My breath left me. I rose to stand, wanting to throw myself into his arms and resisting in the same motion. Lover. Murderer. “Your eyes.”
He swallowed so hard I saw his whole throat move. His smile was a bitter twist. He was looking straight at me, seeing me.
“It wasn’t real,” I breathed.
“It was real,” came a dark voice from the head of the throne room. Rhiannon. “And it seems you survived it.”
If it was real, that meant… a lot of things. Bad things. More than I could process in the middle of all these staring fae. More than I might ever be able to process.
I turned slowly toward Rhiannon. She sat resplendent on her throne exactly as she had before I’d been sent into the trial. I had no idea how much time had elapsed. “What of the others?”
Rhiannon raised a sharp finger. “Just one other pair so far.” That finger gestured toward the far corner of the room.
Near one of the staircases stood Faun and her partner. Only she gazed back at me. His eyes were closed, his face angled toward the floor.
So she’d lived. I’d wanted them all to live, but if I were deep-down honest, she was the one I’d hoped I would see when I turned around. Faun, the servant fae. Faun, who was more like me than not.
My gaze sharpened on her partner. “What happened to him?”
“The girl made a difficult decision,” Rhiannon said. “Exactly the one I would have made. But that’s not the surprise here. Why is Dorian alive—with his eyesight?”
Pieces were assembling in my mind. Faun had gone through the same trial I had. She’d been forced to inhabit the body of Queen Carys, made to watch her partner stare into the sun. But she must have made a different choice. They had both survived, but her partner’s blindness had persisted.
That was the trial. Right there in that square, facing the king.
It wasn’t just a fantasy. It was persistent. And then there was the rain—the acid rain. I had called down that rain from the sky, made it fall in buckets over the Kingdom of the Plains.
…Or was it the Kingdom of Storms?
There’s no distinction, a quiet, knowing voice said inside me.
Which meant…
A tap of wood on the dais. Once, twice, three times, until my attention was drawn to Rhiannon. Her eyes were two crystals on me. “What did you do in there, rabbit? Why isn’t he blind?”
I blinked at her. My mouth opened, and I hesitated. Tell the truth, Dorian had said of talking to Rhiannon. I hated that I heard his voice now. “I don’t know.”
“Liar.” Rhiannon stood, her furs rippling. “Deceiving changeling bitch.”
Dorian appeared beside me, stepped partially in front of me. “Enough, Rhiannon. It’s done.”
She stalked forward; the other fae made way for her like parting fish. “No fae comes out of that trial with her partner sighted. Never, not once. And now this.” A dagger slid from her robes, obsidian under the crystal light. Not cobalt like the one from the trial.
My blood coursed; would she kill me right here?
Dorian’s hand went to the grip of his sword, but Rhiannon stopped before she reached him. She thrust the dagger out, its point directed at the tip of my nose from six paces away.
“You’ll duel her,” Rhiannon snarled. “You’ll duel her for champion.”
Her? Who?
“That’s not how it’s done, Rhiannon,” Dorian said. “She cannot duel Faun.”
She would have me duel Faun for champion? If I had to duel the only other female survivor, that meant the third trial had been meant to produce only one champion pair. And if the partner was supposed to have been blinded, then that meant there was really no pair at all.
One champion. Just one. A female.
Rhiannon’s words from before the trial echoed in my head: I never said champions, my dear. I said champion.
Rhiannon’s dagger didn’t move, her hand unshaking. “I’ll have it done. Tonight—”
A creaking resounded through the throne room. A sudden, jagged noise, ongoing as the double doors opened behind us. All eyes shifted to somewhere behind me.
A strange, brilliant light appeared on the walls, on the faces around me, gleamed in Rhiannon’s eyes. But I felt wary of taking mine off her. If I did, she might gut me.
Her eyes narrowed. She slowly lowered the dagger.
Dorian turned. At once, he dropped to a knee. All the fae around me did the same—even Rhiannon, slowly, her furs pooling around her. The obsidian dagger touched the ground, and only then did I dare to turn.
I shielded my eyes against the light. In the double doorway, cast in moonlight, stood a creature of gemlike, multifaceted brilliance. I could recognize nothing except the familiar lichen-covered horns rising like a tall, many-pronged crown.
The spiritstag.
I stood staring. I could not do anything but stare, because the spiritstag was already speaking to me. Its voice came into my ears like far-off bells, faint but carrying.
“It was a terrible choice you made, Eurydice of the Kingdom of Storms.”
I gazed into the light, unblinking. Terrible? I thought. I survived.
“You, yes. But the acid is sacrilege against nature. It poisons the land, the trees, corrodes all it touches…”
The acid. The spiritstag spoke of the rain I had called. The acid rain… Is it the same rain that falls over my kingdom?
The spiritstag did not speak, but its head inclined a degree, the horns shifting, and with them fractals of moonlight issuing into the throne room. That was a yes.
My chest tightened. So did my fingers against my palms, the nails pressing as I fisted my hands.
My eyes closed, and I saw the green battlefield once more.
If it was the same rain, then the Kingdom of the Plains had been verdant with grass and trees and abundance.
And yet the shape of the land was the same as my own barren kingdom.
I knew the geography like I knew my mother’s face.
There was no question. It was my kingdom, and Carys had been real.
Her curse had been real—and it had persisted four hundred years.
Questions rolled through me. First amongst them should have been the last: How did she obtain such power? Power to change the rain. Power to curse a kingdom.
I unclenched my fist, turned my palm over, briefly opened my eyes; my fate line ran strong and untarnished. The dagger. It had something to do with the dagger.
But it was more than that.
Yes, I remembered that power like I remembered the feeling of Dorian’s body against mine. The thrill had flowed through me like a current.
But in the end, it was Dorian. It was my desire to save him that had given me the power I’d needed.
I closed my eyes again, and I saw a flash of him as he had been in that square—kneeling, manacled, his face upturned toward the sun. That had been the king’s command, his torture. It was inhuman cruelty. It was its own sacrilege.
My eyes opened against the stag’s brightness.
I made the only choice, I thought.
The spiritstag seemed to absorb this. Then, “That was what she said, four hundred years past. And now your choice thrusts you into the same fate.”
The same fate as who? Yet the answer was already clear inside me—she was the fae I had inhabited. The other changeling, Carys. So she had believed the acid rain was the only choice, too. Because of course it was.
Even as I felt a keening sympathy for the Kingdom of Storms, some part of me thrummed with the belief that the Kingdom of the Plains had deserved their curse.
What fate? I thought.
The spiritstag ignored my question. It stepped forward and the light shifted, gleaming past me. My face turned to where it shone upon Rhiannon’s bent head. “Two queens cannot rule one court. She knows it.”
Two queens?
“You have made a queen’s choice, Eurydice Waters—the choice none have made since Queen Carys. It was wrong, ruthless. And the Sylvanwild Court has been ruled by ruthlessness in the four hundred years since.”
I swallowed against the stopper in my throat. Yes, it had been ruthless. I had lived under Carys’s ruthless curse for twenty years. I had smelled the acid every day. Stepped in it, played in it. Poison dripping from the sky.
Perhaps that was why I had made the choice.
But then why, in four hundred years, if all of us changelings were raised in the Kingdom of Storms, had none besides me made Carys’s choice?
We knew. Every son and daughter of scorn knew the sacrifice of that life.
The stag’s head had already turned away, its brilliance retreating with it.
At once the throne room dimmed, almost cold, as my eyes adjusted to the low light.
I could not take my eyes off the shape of the stag’s body in profile.
It stood motionless for three seconds, framed by the citadel’s peaked doors, and then it strode out of my view as though passing out of a picture frame.
With it went light. With it went answers.
Around the room, the others began to rise. All turned toward us—me and Rhiannon. Beside me, Dorian stood and met my eyes. His were wide on me, his jaw feathering with tension. He seemed to be debating something, and then he turned toward Rhiannon.
“Not tonight,” he said. “Not on the same day she survived a trial.”
She rose with her dagger still in hand. Her thumb rubbed over the obsidian, her eyes snapping up to him. “Fuck off, Dorian.” Her voice was low, a growl.
Dorian stood close enough to me that I could feel the heat off him. “There’s no law about the ritual.”
“What ritual?” I stepped out from behind him. “What did the stag say to you?”
Rhiannon’s face turned, her eyes piercing me so suddenly I nearly stepped back. Murder. She had murder etched there. “The ritual will happen tonight and no other night. A court cannot exist with two for queen.”
Did she mean the duel with Faun? No, she said two for queen. Not champion—queen.
You have made a queen’s choice, the spiritstag said. A queen’s choice. A ruthless one. And Rhiannon was nothing if not ruthless.
Understanding rolled through me, spiked and painful. My hand lifted to my chest as though I could rub it away. “I am to duel you.”
A sneer lifted her lip, exposing teeth. Some part of me, beneath it all, felt breathless at her ferocity. “Are you ready to die, rabbit?”
I didn’t dare break her gaze. At any moment she might spring, might drive that dagger at my heart.
“Rhiannon,” Dorian said, his voice deadlier than I’d ever heard it. “You know the rule.”
She and I continued to stare at each other. Finally, without taking her eyes from me, she said, “One hour. The meadow beyond the citadel’s gardens.”
She turned and strode toward the grand staircase, her handmaidens and the gaze of every fae in the room following until she disappeared under the archway.
Finally, I breathed. My fingers unclenched with painful slowness.
Dorian turned to me. His hands came to my shoulders, and he captured me with his dark eyes. They were threaded through with ache and pain. “Come with me.”
Not likely, killer. “No.”
“Come to my quarters, Eury.”
My upper lip curled. “Why would I go anywhere with you?”
“Please.” He leaned closer, voice a whisper by my ear. “If you never believe me again, believe me in this. Let me help.”
Help? Help me like he’d helped so well before the third trial? Helped me into bed, helped me take off my clothes, helped me fuck him until he fucked me over in the morning light.
Murderer.
When he stepped back, he offered his hand to me. As if I would ever trust his touch again.
And yet I had no one else. No one else offering their hand.
“Not your quarters.” I stepped past him. “Mine.”