Chapter 12 #2
Dorian closed his eyes and breathed out. He stepped back, leaving unbroken space between me and the queen. She had a new gleam in her eyes, lethal and liquid. Her dagger stayed idle at her waist.
“Very well, child,” she said.
Rhiannon rose, thrusting the young kneeling woman away. Her hand lifted, fingers soft, and her gaze shifted to Dorian. I understood what came next. Every child in the Kingdom of Storms knew how a knight was made a ser.
Rhiannon stepped forward, and Dorian’s head lowered. His hands clasped behind his back. She set her fingertips to the crown of his head. “I accept your bid for the Sylvanwild trials, Dorian Crowmere.”
Dorian’s head remained inclined, though his jaw clenched.
When Rhiannon stepped to me, she paused, eyes cast down to meet mine. Whatever she possessed that these people valued, she did so in spades. Maybe she was right: I was only a human. A rabbit, a pettifey—
Enough, a voice said in my head. My throat swelled; that was my mother. Enough of that, Eury. The world will not stand for a woman who won’t stand for herself.
She was right. She always had been right.
I clasped my hands behind my back in the guard’s stance, and I lowered my head. When my eyes closed, I saw the spiritstag again, saw the blossoming vision in the grove.
And, most of all, I heard its voice:
Power is not granted, it is taken. So take it.
A resolution lanced through me, bright and ferocious. Whatever would come in these trials, I would not sit down, would not give up. Not once, not ever. Not until death.
Rhiannon’s fingers touched my scalp at the hairline, her touch a brand. “I accept your bid for the trials…” Her voice trailed off.
My eyes snapped open. She didn’t even know my name.
“Eurydice. Eurydice Waters.”
She repeated my name. On her lips, it sounded as untamed and thorny as Sylvanwild itself.
Dorian paced before me in the citadel gardens. We had found a secluded spot in the late afternoon, where two benches faced one another and yellow flowering bushes grew up alongside the gnarled armrests.
I sat. He did not. Dorian had not stopped moving since we’d left Rhiannon’s quarters.
At times he paused, stared at me, then resumed his restless stride.
We had not spoken since the ordainment, but he had met eyes with me as soon as Rhiannon had allowed us to leave.
He clearly had something to say. Or maybe he had nothing to say, but an enormity of feeling inside him. I understood that.
Theo had been that way when agitated. I just had to wait his pacing out.
So I remained silent. Here, in these gardens, I could recognize I was stuck in the numbness I’d felt since the moment I’d woken in that wagon. In each moment since, some part of me was still on my knees, staring at that crater. Only the grove had broken that spell, but that had felt like a dream.
The only proof of its realness was Dorian, my new partner. Who still paced.
After ten minutes, I finally said, “Don’t punish the grass for it.”
Dorian glanced up, brow drawn, then seemed to process my words. He stopped, glanced from the grass up to me. “What?”
I hadn’t expected him to speak. My chest tightened. “Where I come from, we don’t have grass.”
“You nearly died up there. Now you’re thinking of grass.”
“Well I—”
He swung toward me. “Rhiannon was a fiber’s twitch from drawing her dagger on you. Do you know what that would have meant?”
A fiber’s twitch. I set both palms on the bench to feel its solidity. “I’d have drawn my knife.”
He took a step closer, voice hushed. “You’d be dead before you drew.”
No smallness. “At least I’d die with the right instinct.”
He almost laughed; I saw his lips wanting to curl. “Where did you get that mouth?”
“The Dip,” I said.
“The Dip?”
My eyes flashed, chin lifting. “The section of our kingdom you destroyed.”
His jaw ticked once before he turned away, facing out toward the moat flowing by. Probably stewing on his bad luck. That was fine; he wouldn’t be the first man unhappy to be stuck with me.
“I have questions,” I said.
He swept out a hand, still facing away. “Then ask.” His voice was lower, maybe even brushstroked with penitence.
I stood. “What are the trials?”
“The trials change every time they’re held. No one except the spiritstag and the queen know what they’ll be.”
“And how often are they held?”
“Once a century.”
“And when will they start—days? Weeks? Months?”
“Once all the competitors are chosen. We’d be lucky to have weeks.” The wind caught his dark hair, blowing it toward the forest path. “Not enough time to teach you a proper sword grip.”
“I can wield a blade.”
He gave a one-note laugh, nothing else.
“I trained for months.” I stepped closer. “I was a guard in my kingdom, on the wall. I was the best in my class with an edged weapon.”
I caught the edge of his profile as his head turned. “The best of how many?”
“Thirty-five.”
“The best of thirty-five.” He turned back to the water. “We’re saved.”
I expected his words to slough off me like everything else these fuckers said about me. But not this time. If I had any martial pride, it was in how I held—swung—a sword.
And I would never allow him to know that.
Right now, Dorian’s back was a wall unto itself. And I knew a little something about walls.
A little bit of Theo slipped into me. I tilted my head, forcing my lips to curl upward. “Of course, Ser Dorian is faster than me, and stronger. I don’t doubt smarter, too, and more capable in every way. It is only he who can carry us through.”
He crossed his arms, no doubt wondering if he’d erred in not killing me that night in the Dip.
“But I know why you brought me here, to Sylvanwild,” I said, gaze still on his back. “You were obligated because I turned toward your sword. And that’s a rarity among my kind, isn’t it?”
He didn’t speak, didn’t move.
“Have you ever seen it happen? What I did that night?”
Silence again, and in that I had my answer. How many humans had been at the ends of these creatures’ swords? How many had he himself killed with their backs turned? And I remembered why I hated them. I remembered why he bore that red nick on his neck.
“Rhiannon spoke of values. Sylvanwild values bravery,” I said. “That’s why you brought me. Not as some rabbit to run from you. That was just a bit of cruelty.”
At that, he turned. I’d expected to see contempt, but those hazel eyes held surprise. “And that’s what you consider yourself to be—brave?”
Of course not. That night I hadn’t felt brave. I’d been crushed, numb. I had stood only because of my dead mother’s voice in my head. But I would never, never give this monster the vulnerable parts of me. I would never give him the truth.
“Yes.”
“And what gave you the bravery to turn toward me?” His tone carried resentment, like he wished I’d just allowed myself to be run through.
“Why did you tell me to call for my gods?” The words slipped out before I could stop them. “You could have just killed me with one thrust.”
“That’s a deflection.”
“No more than yours.”
His lips stayed closed, their vague lopsidedness even more evident now in the light. He wouldn’t give me the truth, either. But he would stare into my eyes like he owned the right to do so.
Silence fell between us, and our mutual unwillingness to give felt like a sharp line from my stomach to my head.
Somewhere a bird called through the forest, its echo resounding off the trees like a flute playing the same three notes over and over.
We had few birds in my kingdom; the acid rain had long ago rendered them as rare as flowers.
When he finally spoke, his voice was unexpected and sharp. “I should not have spoken that night.”
He wanted to pierce me even now. I let out a quick, amused breath. “Could have just stabbed me and saved yourself a wagon ride.”
“You think me savage.”
“Not just you.”
His fingers rubbed at his palms. “You know nothing of savagery.”
My eyebrows rose. “Please explain it to me, ser.”
His upper lip curled toward a sneer, but he seemed to stay himself. A breath escaped him instead. “From the moment she touched your head, our lives are bound. Do you understand what that means?”
So my guess was right. Dorian hadn’t been saving me back in Rhiannon’s chambers, he had been saving his own hide. “You die, I die?”
“Immediately and irrevocably,” he said, his eyes two pits. “Like a candle’s flame snuffed.”
Sounded like magic to me, and I didn’t believe in magic. And yet I had been healed as soon as I’d stepped through the gate into this land. Not slowly, but all at once.
Ice wrapped around my chest like a vise. A certain reality had settled.
He died, I died.
“How does that work?”
His eyes flashed. “Did you not feel it back there?”
I did. I had, though I hadn’t known what it meant at the time. Even now, the spot on my scalp tingled. “So if I were to stab myself in the neck…”
“Yes,” he said. “If you stab deep enough.”
I swallowed past the stopper in my throat. I knew the answer to my next question, knew I shouldn’t acknowledge the feeling crawling inside my chest. But the words forced themselves out: “And how do we end this binding?”
“By winning all three trials,” he said. “Or dying.”