Chapter 27
Twenty-Seven
Cara
Fear reached my side just as the arena filled with light.
The queen.
The crowd’s attention shifted, requiring me to look at the dais rather than at him, which was the first helpful thing that had happened all morning.
I was too aware of him, as always. The warmth of him at my left shoulder, the faint scent of smoke and soap, the sense of height and solid muscle and what had once felt like safety.
I stared at the dais and thought about the bond between us and whose hands had been in my nightmares and what would keep my brother alive.
“Ander told me the queen took you.” His voice was low, pitched under the crowd noise.
“I’m fine.” I kept my eyes on the dais. The queen was alone up there. No Tay. No Lidi. No Mam. Not yet. “She knows something about Lightbringer.”
He stilled beside me.
“How much?”
I couldn’t even think through exactly what the queen had said and hadn’t. She hadn’t named Lightbringer. But she knew about a bond.
That sensation of being trapped was stronger than ever, coiled around my chest, squeezing. “She has Mam and Lidi at the castle now. With Tay.”
He did not respond for a heartbeat, then another, and both were full. I could read him by now: he was thinking fast and showing me nothing of it.
“They will be safe.” His voice was careful and certain in equal measure. “The queen has no interest in harming them. To her, they are currency to control you, and if she spends them, it’s over. My people will watch the palace. If they’re in danger, I’ll get them out.”
He might believe it. I heard that he believed it, though now I knew how well he lied to me.
He might even be right, and it still landed in me like a stone against a wall. I could not trust him.
“I hear you,” I said.
“Cara—”
“I hear you.” I pulled my strap tight on my sword harness. It hung awkwardly over my shoulder, unlike his that he summoned with his magic. “We should join Bismyth.”
I slid into the ranks besides Kiegan, which would make it difficult for Fear to reach me and continue the conversation. I needed to hide from him, so I grabbed my friend like a piece of driftwood when I was being swept downstream.
And was immediately punished for it.
“You look like a dried-out dog turd,” Kiegan told me.
“That’s unnecessarily descriptive.”
“But accurate.” He gave me a knowing look that made me feel instantly violent. “You look—”
“Tired,” I said firmly.
His mouth pressed flat in a way that meant he didn’t believe me and had decided to let me have it anyway, which from Kiegan was practically an act of tenderness.
The dragon inside me was a roil of feelings, and none of them was making it easier for me to process this in a calm, logical way. I needed to stay away from Fieran.
I clapped Kiegan’s shoulder, trying to get control over my emotions—or at least pretend to. “Come with me. Since we have to partner.”
“We do?” He frowned. “I’ll partner with Anayla.”
“You like me better,” I told him, because he was my friend, and then a second later, felt a strange beat of hurt as he gave me a meaningful look. “Ah.”
“She’s nice.”
“And you are not,” I teased him. He wasn’t, but he was loyal and good. “So how is that going to work out?”
His eyes widened, and I knew it was Anayla even before she shouldered in on my other side, pushing some enormous shifter out of her way mercilessly. “Cara, are you all right?”
“She looks like dried-out dog turd, right?” Kiegan asked.
“No,” Anayla told him, scandalized, though the worried look she swept over me suggested that it was true.
Then Fieran was at my side, and I stiffened. I didn’t even have to look to identify his presence, the sense of authority and confidence he exuded.
Besides, he was so damned tall; the way he blotted out the sun was hard to miss.
Of course Fieran wouldn’t let me escape him.
When the queen raised one hand, the crowd settled instantly.
She spoke about the Last Hunt first. The pairs, the purpose, the monsters that had been prepared.
“This is the final Hunt of our season. The Trials have served their purpose. New powers have risen. The kingdom is blessed for yet another year to be guarded by dragons.” A graceful pause, brimming with beatific wisdom as she smiled out at us.
“To celebrate, tonight, I will raise three mortals to Fae. At the conclusion of the Hunt.”
Three.
The crowd rippled with the announcement. The mortals surged with wild exultation.
“Good guess,” Kiegan told me, and I glanced at him in confusion before I realized he was referencing the partners.
I shouldn’t try to partner with him anyway. I should go with Fear.
The queen’s gaze found me, warm and molten and glimmering. Never cold. She was consuming like fire.
She smiled and gave me a little nod. Like a mother prompting a child.
Something cold and dark rolled through me. I missed whatever was said next, missed her last words before the cheering rushed through the arena.
The horns sounded, signaling the beginning of the Hunt.
The sound hit the stone walls and came back doubled, tripled, into something I felt through my chest. My pulse quickened as if I were not already anxious enough.
The floor of the arena heaved beneath our feet.
In the stands, the crowd lurched all at once in the immediate, instinctive sound of several hundred people registering a threat.
I felt it through my boots: a grinding deep in the stone just before cracks split the arena floor. I didn’t understand the way they spread—exact, engineered—and then sections of the ground dropped away, revealing dark beneath. I waited for what would emerge.
The stands, with their fracturing noise and chaos, faded away. All that mattered for now was what happened on the arena floor.
Some of the clans were already moving forward, steel drawn. Others raced toward the labyrinth entrances; there would be other threats, there would be other prizes.
Then the shadow passed over us.
Not one shadow. Many, moving.
They came down from the open top of the arena like something poured in, a dozen of them, pale wings beating. The wingspan on the nearest was easily fifteen feet, and the wings themselves were wrong, arranged along a body so elongated it was almost pure spine.
“Skein.” Fear’s voice, low, pitched only for me. “Don’t panic. They’re drawn specifically to cortisol—they hunt the fear response more than the movement. Keep your breathing level.”
“How convenient,” I said, through my teeth.
“Malachite will take the Skein!” A green-cloaked shifter shouted. Other green-cloaked shifters flooded around him, heading for the monsters; others were already transforming into their dragons.
“Stay close.” Fear was at my left shoulder. His sword was already in his hand.
“I’m with you.” My voice seemed to come from far away, as if someone else were acting in this tragedy. “Let’s go down. See if we can find where they’re coming from.”
Fear glanced at me. “A good strategy.”
Whether it was or not, I was already striding toward the labyrinth entrances.
Of course he easily matched my stride; I only had a head start for an instant. “Cara. The three raisings she mentioned. It’s not Tay and Lidi and your mother.”
“How do you always see through her tricks?” My voice was short, clipped. I did not believe him.
“I’ve survived them for a long time,” he said, and it almost softened me.
Then I remembered I had only survived his tricks for a short time, and it had already changed me. It would change me more—it would change Tay and Lidi—if I did not get free of him.
Fieran followed me, so it was just the two of us alone at the top of a descent into one of the labyrinth’s branches. It was cold, the ground slick underfoot, even with my boots and my Bismyth cloak. Perhaps I was wearing the cloak for the last time.
My fingers found the clasp at my throat, pressing the cool, engraved metal. I swallowed a lump and knew it was stupid. What did a cloak mean to me when my family was at stake? What did a clan matter?
Fear went ahead of me. He hadn’t worn his cloak; he moved with his usual mesmerizing grace, broad-shouldered and lean and quick.
The light leather armor he wore hugged his shoulders and covered only his most vital organs; the bracers on his forearms bristling with knives caught the flashes of torchlight.
A mirror reflected the flicker of a torchlight and cast it over us, catching the glints threaded through his dark hair.
The mirrors. They were everywhere in this hallway, reflecting back the two of us: the tall shifter with the handsome, chiseled face and the petite mortal with the blond hair. I barely looked at my own reflection now at any time; it was prettier, and it was not quite mine.
Lidi and Mam had recognized me. The memory of my mother catching my shoulders, the desperation in her gaze caught me again. She had been terrified and alone in her terror because Lidi and Tay were lost.
They were depending on me, and the surest way for me to fail them was to depend on him. I couldn’t say with certainty he would betray me; I couldn’t say with certainty he would not if it served his larger strategy.
I wouldn’t bargain their lives.
I kept three feet between us and my hand on my sword and my mind on the queen’s voice.
Tonight, I will raise three mortals.
The first monster found us in the second tunnel, and it was not a Skein but something else entirely, its back armored in ridged plates that caught the torchlight like wet stone.
“Rockshell.” Fear did not look at me, his eyes tracking the creature’s movement. “Aim for the throat. The joints where each leg connects to the underbody. That’s where it’s soft.”
We fought without speaking, which suited me. Fear moved with his unhurried precision. I was awkward and weak, comparatively, but powered by anger.
At any rate, the Rockshell went down, and we kept moving.
And then we were at a branch of a tunnel.