Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I sat again on the bench, staring at the green grass and the clear water. Dorian turned to leave, but I raised a hand. “Wait.” I was surprised when he paused. “Can you just wait?”
After a moment he approached, dropped onto the bench a foot away, and stared out over the water with me. He didn’t speak, and for that I was grateful.
Our lives were entwined until we won or died. That felt wrong. I had been brought here against my will, taken in front of their queen, and then the spiritstag…
At no point had I chosen any of this.
But that isn’t true, a small voice said inside. You wanted what it offered back in the grove. You were fucking desperate for it.
And what would have happened if I had turned down the spiritstag’s offer? Did I ever really have a choice?
Maybe not. And not just because of the spiritstag.
Maybe I’d had no choice because of me. Because of who I was.
In one way, I had always felt apart from the people I loved most. I had always wanted strength—brute, martial, unignorable.
I thought of Theo, ridiculous Theo, dead now, and what he would say and do. He would probably just offer a riddle and laugh at the face I made. Even when he joined the guard, he wasn’t a serious person. The world had never been a real place to him, just an increasingly vast playground.
I thought of Elisabet. Wanting, wanting always. For her parents to return. To be holed away in her room with quill and ink. To join the archivists’ college. To be healed of her illness.
I thought of my mother and what she might tell me if she were seated on this bench next to me. Her hand would come over mine, squeezing my fingers with maternal firmness, and the index finger of her other hand would slip under my chin and lift my eyes to hers.
You know what I would say. A tiny smile touched her lips. I’d say you’re sitting, Eury.
Yes, I was. Somehow I’d found myself sitting, pitying.
You always have a choice, my mother said on the bench beside me. Certain things, no one can take from you.
Gods, I wanted her back. I would do anything to see her one more time. But all I had now was the journal and my memories.
Now wasn’t the time for this. Right now, I had leverage.
I lifted my eyes to Dorian. He hadn’t moved, but his dark gaze shifted from the water to me as though he’d been waiting.
“You killed my family. Everyone I love. I badly want to kill you,” I said. “I’ve wanted that since the moment I saw you sitting on the bench of that wagon.”
His lips twitched, but he didn’t speak. He gestured for me to go on.
“But I can’t kill you,” I said. “You’re three times stronger than me and twice as fast, and you’ve kidnapped me to this place.” I turned fully toward him. “And now you’re bound to me, and I to you.”
“And?”
“And”—I paused, let it hang—“that means you aren’t the only one with power, Dorian.”
A noise rumbled from his throat. Not a chuckle, not a scoff; somewhere in between. “The human is sadistic.”
“The human is pragmatic.” I stood, staring down at him. I liked us at this angle. “Now I can end your life as I can end my own.”
His gaze lifted, eyes shifting between mine as though seeking out uncertainty. He must have found nothing, because he said, “A wonderful start to a partnership.”
My fingers feathered over the pouch where my knife sat on my belt; I knew he saw it. “And I’m done with rabbits and pettifeys. Call me either, and I swear I’ll cut deeper next time. Even if it has to be into my own neck.”
Something unreadable flickered through his hazel eyes. Not surprise. Not fear. Interest, maybe. As if he’d misjudged the shape of me. The ghost of a smile touched his mouth; so small, I might have imagined it.
“Fine.” He nodded toward the knife at my belt. “Go ahead. Prick yourself, rabbit.”
I didn’t wait. The blade flashed as I drew it free, swicked to place. I upturned my palm, eyes locked on his, and drove the tip straight into my heart line. The pain was immediate, sharp, but my attention stayed on his face.
He didn’t flinch. Didn’t move.
Then, slowly, he raised his palm to face me. Not a drop of blood. Now he did smile, small, smug. “Doesn’t work like that.” His head tilted. “But it’s good to know you’re a woman who keeps her promises.”
Blood welled in my hand, dripping to the grass. I curled my fingers against the flow. Against the throbbing pain. I closed the knife with a jerk of my other hand.
Shame pricked harder than the wound. I felt foolish, which made the wound hurt even more. But I had learned something at least: our bond didn’t answer to scratches.
Only death.
“That would be a terrible curse, wouldn’t it?” His gaze tracked the red drops. “Like two halves of a single body.”
I stood facing him, knife in hand. “What I said still stands.”
“About cutting deeper?”
My grip tightened. “Deeper every time.”
He stood, and the two of us were close. Close enough his scent brushed over me. The sharp resin of woodsmoke, undercut with something deeper. An earthiness and the faint, unmistakable trace of something that was his alone.
He stood close enough that I had to lift my chin to meet eyes. I didn’t—wouldn’t—move as he neared.
He held my gaze and said, “When you bluff, your eyebrows lift at the center.”
Motherf—
“Nonetheless, I’ll never mock you again.” He didn’t smile this time. His face was perfectly serious. “I swear it.”
I sucked in air at the softness of his words. Of all the things he might have said, I hadn’t expected that.
Something rose and settled in me at the same time, a certain decisive change I couldn’t exactly name the shape of. Somehow, I knew he meant it.
Before I could speak, Dorian nodded past my shoulder toward the citadel. “Those men you saw last night and this morning, the ones mocking and jeering? Those are the fuckers who won’t ever stop. They’re our competition.”
Those men… There must have been at least twelve of them in that throng. All of them at least twice as large as me, and a few were huge. Dorian had muscle, but he wasn’t hulking. Perhaps he was faster, but he didn’t have their heft.
“And their partners?” I asked.
He shrugged one shoulder. “Yet to be seen. But the spiritstag always partners a man with a woman.”
Always a woman. In my kingdom that would have been helpful, but here, where queens reigned…
I didn’t know.
“So if you hate mockery”—Dorian set his fingers to the vine of a trellis by my head and plucked a fat-petaled yellow blossom—“those bastards will give you no shortage of longing to crush them.” He twirled the blossom with its face toward me, then encompassed it with his hand and closed it in his fist.
I stared at his closed hand. “Do you know how to do anything but kill?”
He unfolded his fingers, palm up; the crushed yellow blossom gleamed in the light. “I didn’t know you were such an advocate for flora.”
I swept a hand out toward the verdant gardens. “I should think you would be the advocate.”
“Sylvanwild needs no advocate,” he said. “It thrives through change, grows wild. For every flower crushed, ten buds offer themselves in its place.”
How lovely that would be for my kingdom. How little he realized his own privilege.
“Why were those men gathered there, before Rhiannon?” I asked.
His eyebrows lifted. “Guess.”
“She likes cocks.”
His mouth twisted as though he were trying to stifle a laugh. “You’re not wrong.” He paused. “But that—that was a throne-room confessional you saw. She makes everyone in the trials tell her their closest-held secrets.”
I stared. “Why?”
“Leverage.” One shoulder rose and fell. “Simple, effective.”
Yes, it was. Very. “And now she’ll make us tell her our secrets?”
“Most likely.” His eyebrow rose. “Though as you’re not part of her court, she can’t force you.”
A tendril of relief wound through my chest. Then, “She can force you?”
“When your queen gives you an order, you obey.” His eyes went distant, glassy. “There’s a reason why she’s queen, after all.”
I didn’t fully understand the shape of what Dorian was saying, but I did understand the weight of it. As I’d thought: Rhiannon had tectonic power over her subjects.
What a terrible thing. What an incredible thing to wield.
“So,” I said, “what now?”
He lowered his hand, allowing the canary petals to flutter to the grass. “We’ll almost certainly die in the first trial. But if you’re asking me for hope, Eurydice, then hold that hatred you feel for me—for all of us—close. Let it warm you.”
For the second time I noticed the fatigue under his eyes, shadows half-hidden behind the carved angles of his face. I’d first noticed it last night by the wagon, under the moonlight. His eyes were older than the rest of him.
“What of preparation?” I said. “I don’t even know you. How you fight, how you think—”
“We’ll train,” he said. “Of course we’ll train because we’ve no other choice. On the morrow, when the sun comes up. Be ready this time with more than just your bedclothes and your fruit-cutting knife.”
Cold, sharp, taunting.
He reminded me of the regiment commander. He reminded me of every man with a harsh tongue and burdens he believed he alone carried. Men like that never seemed to see the real burden—keeping themselves apart, like a statue baking alone under the sun.
Maybe fae and humans weren’t so unalike.
“I’ll be ready,” I said.
One petal clung to his fingertips. He let out a thoughtful noise from his throat, and he rubbed his fingers together, watching as it fell in a spiral to the grass, then he started past me back toward the citadel.
“Dorian.”
He paused.
“Why did you bring me out to the gardens in the first place?”
“I brought you here,” he said over his shoulder, “so that no one could see you cry.”
Little did Dorian know, I couldn’t cry.
I lingered on the bench for some time after he left, but even alone amongst this nature I could not allow myself to cry. When the sun slanted low through the trees, I returned to the citadel. But the doors were shut, and I couldn’t open them no matter how I set my palm to their surface.