Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
We waited in the grove for an hour, then two. Cloud cover moved in and the sun’s rays became sporadic and spotted on the water. All the while I sat at the pond’s edge and watched the fish and wondered.
What else was real in this place, in Sylvanwild? What else had I thought fantastic would turn out to be real?
Strange, to feel a tendril of thrill. Of curiosity. Of wonder. I had not thought those things could coexist with my fear—definitely not with my rage. But this grove felt apart from the world, even from Sylvanwild.
It felt sacred. Maybe even safe.
At the end of the second hour, Dorian rose from his crouch. I glanced back at him and found his eyes fixed on something beyond me.
I rose, my movement slow, uncertain, eyes rapt on what had emerged from the trees.
First, the pair of horns—as long and winding as tree branches, grown over with hanging vines and lichen.
Where the flora didn’t grow the horns gleamed ivory.
And attached to them was a stag with constellations for eyes, its head rising higher than Dorian’s.
The body was lithe and powerful, but the coat shimmered when the clouds parted long enough for the sun to shine on its fur, in iridescent hues of green, gold, silver.
A god.
I had never fully believed in them, but it was the only word that felt right.
The stag gazed at Dorian, then blinked once, slowly.
I turned my head. Behind me, Dorian lowered his chin, stepped back into the trees without breaking eye contact, and disappeared amongst the foliage.
I was alone.
When I faced the stag again, it still stood across the pond from me. In the Kingdom of Storms, stags were rare and valuable; just the sight of one from atop the wall was considered a blessing from Caelara herself.
But this was no stag—not really—and I was not on the wall. The creature before me felt vast, eight feet and eight hundred feet tall all at once. Old instinct called out: Hold your knife, widen your stance, seek out the location of the thing’s heart—
But I didn’t. I couldn’t.
I couldn’t stop staring into those starry eyes.
“You are not one of them,” a voice echoed through the grove, the notes soft, dulcet, neither male nor female but pleasant. That voice was the stag’s; I knew it immediately, even though the creature hadn’t moved.
“No, I’m not.” Was I speaking? I couldn’t say if my lips and tongue moved or if I simply thought the words. The gods aren’t real. The gods aren’t…
The voice cut into my thoughts. “Dorian brought you to me because you turned toward his blade.”
I didn’t speak. Couldn’t.
“You showed courage, even though you are especially small and weak.”
I swallowed. The words didn’t feel like judgment—they felt like unchanging truth. The sun shone, and I was small and weak. My mother loved me, and I was small and weak. “I wasn’t thinking about courage.” That was a truth, too.
“What were you thinking of, child?”
Unbidden, flashes of that night replayed before me. The crater, the destruction, Dorian’s shadowed face, the last sight of—
“Your mother,” the stag said. “You were thinking of her.”
I had not chosen those memories; the stag had chosen them for me. It had entered my mind, had drawn them out of me. I should have been terrified or furious, but I was neither. The act had felt as natural and as coaxing as soft hands stroking my hair.
Tears came to my eyes. My nose prickled. A modicum of the grief I felt rose to my consciousness, and my legs began to shake.
Dead. They were all dead, and I…
I was alone. Here. With him, with these monsters.
“You would kill them,” the stag said. “Wouldn’t you?”
Them. Dorian. Rhiannon. Any one of those fuckers who had invaded my kingdom, slaughtered my people.
My teeth stayed gritted while my lips moved. A tear slipped down my cheek. Already I sensed a rule: we only spoke truths in this place. “Yes.”
“Do you wish to have that power?”
I blinked against tears. The part of me I’d kept under tight guard rose unwilling to my lips—the words I sometimes thought but never spoke. “I have no power. I’m small. I’m useless to everyone.”
“And yet…”
And yet. And yet…
“Yes,” I said, my voice serpentine and sharp. “I want it. I want that power.”
And not just because of them. Not just because of the attack, the crater, my mother. If we were speaking of truths, then here was mine:
I was a real daughter of scorn. The acid hadn’t just rained on me—it had sculpted me. For twenty years, it chiseled my hunger into something precise. Something immutable.
I had always wanted to be more. I had always wanted—wanted—wanted.
The sunlight’s warmth passed over my head, warming it like a hand set to my crown.
A pulse of heat moved through my scalp, through the bones of my skull, into the hollow of my chest. It acknowledged me.
Who I was, and who I wanted to be. It saw me like no one else had, the dark crevices even my mother didn’t know about.
It saw potential in me.
“Power is not granted. It is taken,” the stag’s voice said. “So take it.”
The words sank beneath my skin like seed into soil.
The warmth deepened, threading into sinew.
My eyes slipped shut under the weight of that invisible hand, and the tears carved hot paths to my neck.
I dropped to my knees, as I had that night in the crater.
But now, the vision sharpened: I saw both the fractured stone and the spiritstag, superimposed.
Clear water welling from rock. Smoke curling into sunlight. A world cleaved open and reborn.
Agony lanced through me. A radiant ache, like being burned and filled all at once. For a moment I forgot my name. My life. I forgot the girl I’d been, the daughter and night guard of scorn.
All that remained was the knowing:
The stag had spared me. It had offered me a choice.
A soft sigh emanated from above, from below, enveloping me. “In you resides a rare and marvelous thing. You do not see it now, but you were never meant to. When you lose what you thought was yours, then you will begin to see who you truly are.”
I didn’t—couldn’t comprehend—
“Eurydice Waters,” the stag whispered, its voice fading to nothing. “Did you ever wonder at that name?”
The warmth ebbed, and once again clouds passed over the sun. I was left with my eyes shut, breathing hard, tears wetting the neck of my tunic. The world opened up, comprehensible again.
I did not want to open my eyes. My hand found the place at my chest where the wrathful tightness throbbed—fainter now, less painful. If I lost it, then I would go back to the old me, the girl who understood nothing, who faltered and wondered. Who was powerless.
A bird cried overhead, the noise shrill and jarring and foreign.
My eyes opened, blurring. Across the pond, the grove was empty. Everything was as it had been, except for one thing.
I knew the spiritstag’s decision.
I got one foot under me, my feet touching the grass for balance. I rose and rubbed the back of my hand over my cheeks. I gave a last look at the grove, at the water and the fish, before I turned away.
I had not died here, but perhaps Dorian would wish I had.
“You, with me, in the trials?” Dorian stood with crossed arms amidst the trees outside the grove. His jaw worked as he studied me with those hazel eyes. “The stag wouldn’t say such a thing.”
He was right: it was ridiculous to put a human in their trials. Why me? And yet in the grove, I had felt the spiritstag’s feelings. They had poured through me, mingling with my own. The stag had sensed something in me, perhaps something I couldn’t even sense in myself.
And that last feeling had been the one I was left with—the offer, the choice. Now, here, I still burned with that desire. Even my tears cooled on my hot cheeks.
Maybe the venom in Dorian’s gaze helped. Maybe I didn’t mind it.
“Ask it yourself.” I pointed toward the break in the trees. “I’ll wait.”
Dorian stepped toward me, looming. “It said you would be my partner?”
My eyes wanted to dart through the forest, as though some answer sat on a branch or inside a squirrel’s hole. As long as I didn’t have to meet his hard, murderous eyes. But that was the small Eurydice. And I was already beginning to understand this man, at least in one respect:
With him, smallness got you nowhere.
I snapped my eyes up to him, lifted my chin. “Unfortunately for me.”
Daring, Eury. Let’s see if it pays off.
His knuckles whitened. We stood like that for seconds, eyes on each other, and for a moment we were not here in this forest but back in the southern district, surrounded by death. Not even a slender thread of empathy existed between us.
Then he let out a sharp breath and turned away. His shoulders angled like he might step off, but he stayed rooted, fists tight at his sides.
He’d averted his eyes first. A small win.
“What are the Sylvanwild trials?” I said, low.
He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.” He ran a hand over his face. “We’re already dead.”
“What are they?” I said, louder.
His head half-turned, that hard jaw ticking. “Tests. Of strength.”
Strength. Any bud of pride I’d carried in my chest wilted.
“To what end?” My voice came out quieter.
“Fucking pomp and dominance.” He turned away. “Queens and diadems and whose boot rests on whose neck.”
He didn’t sound angry at me. I knew that tone—disdain—because I’d felt it before. Sometimes, on acid-drenched days, I hated my whole kingdom. Hated the walls. Hated the spires. Hated the rain. Hated the glimpses of that tucked-away castle where they ate pork and bathed in clean water every day.
For the first time, I understood that Sylvanwild existed in a hierarchy. Perhaps one as strict as my own.
Dorian started through the forest back the way we had come.
I could turn in the other direction, run through this forest until I found that gate he’d brought me through.
I might be able to escape. I might even make it.
More likely I’d get lost. Most likely I’d be killed by whatever lurked in these trees.
Last night I’d nearly died to an arrow shot from one, but Dorian had pulled me aside with less than a second to spare.
It was true—he had saved me then. He hadn’t killed me that night of the attack, either. But I couldn’t reconcile that with his spite. I watched after him with glazed eyes—his long stride in the shadows of the canopy, all power and anger and contempt.
Something relentless lived in the way he moved, like the earth itself bent to let him pass. His cloak shifted with each step, brushing his boots, and I found myself watching the controlled swing of his arms, the unyielding line of his back.
Then he stepped into a shaft of light, and the forest seemed to hold its breath.
My vision sharpened. And I saw it—what I’d only felt last night, humming over my skin. The air around him shimmered, not with heat, but with something stranger. It sparked from his body like driven rain, like silver striking stone, and vanished just as quickly.
Like magic.
But he didn’t flinch, didn’t seem to notice. As if the storm dancing around him was as ordinary as breath.
Long ago, my mother used to tell me a bedtime story of creatures who lived in a deep wood. They looked like humans, but they were not; their hands wove magic, and their hearts were two. And wherever they walked, the air spoke to their grace—their magic—their wildness.
Dorian was right: I knew what he was. I knew what they all were.
Fae.
Were these really the same creatures I had spent my entire life fearing—Dorian and Rhiannon and those men sitting in the citadel gardens with their pregnant wives?
It didn’t cohere with what I’d seen the night of the attack—the destruction, the screeching of metal, the description my mother had given me of the dead beast brought into our district so many decades ago. Black-veined skin, long nails.
I knew what Dorian and Rhiannon were, but not really. I could only give them a name from a storybook. And nothing about these people or this place was as simple as a story.
I remained frozen. The spiritstag kept me from bolting toward the gates. I knew what the stag had offered; the choice had felt as real as the grass beneath me. The spiritstag believed I had something special inside me, and the feeling it had left me with was electric.
Power. Power like a rod sent down my spine. Power like the promise of a sweet, clean storm.
I needed to know what these trials were.
I followed Dorian. When I caught up to him, he didn’t acknowledge me. We walked together the rest of the way. Together we crossed the bridge and passed through the now-empty gardens. Hours had passed and the sun’s angle had changed, casting shadows and creating a chill.
We came into the citadel, into the empty throne room. Dorian stopped in the entryway; he turned to me, eyes hawklike. “Wait here.”
Under that gaze, I almost did. But the thought returned to me, quick and sharp: You win no favors with him by being small.
I forced myself to keep walking. To keep my chin up.
“I’ll accept your commands when you’re dead or deified.” I strode toward the staircase on the leftmost wall, and he followed, close on my heels.
Halfway up, he stopped me with a hand on my shoulder and turned me toward him. Strength radiated through his grip. “I said wait.”
I shrugged off his hand. “I’m not your dog, your rabbit, or your pettifey.”
“I never called you a dog. Or a pettifey.” His eyes searched mine, dark and impenetrable. “Can’t you just give me five minutes alone with the queen?”
“Why alone?”
“It’s not your concern.”
“It’s entirely my concern. You’re going to talk to Rhiannon about me.”
His lips parted. Then, with a sharp exhale, “You don’t know what you’re involved in.”
“Because you won’t really tell me.” I descended one step toward him. “But I do know one thing.”
He drew in a sharp breath as I closed the space between us—as though a woman had never stood a step above him, as though my nearness unnerved him. “And what’s that?”
I swallowed, only half certain. “Whatever power Rhiannon has, it isn’t greater than the spiritstag’s.”
I knew by the look on his face I was right.
In the Kingdom of Storms and Sylvanwild alike, nothing was more powerful than a god.