Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
After the next morning’s training at the stables and the range, I found the new leathers folded on my bed.
When I put them on, they were as Mirek had promised: fine dark leather the color of chocolate, thinner, perfectly fitted.
At my insistence he’d let me keep the old guard’s belt, but he’d modified the two sides for the hip quiver and a short sword’s sheath.
On the chest in front of the bed lay my weapons. The bow, the quiver with white-fletched arrows, and a short sword three-quarters the length of my thigh. The grip was just right for my hand, the blade smooth and well-edged and light.
I wore the leathers to Dorian’s chambers. He’d left the door ajar, and I found him reading at his desk.
His eyes lifted to me, traversing all the way up to my face. His eyebrows rose, maybe without his knowing. “You got Mirek to tailor for you?”
Apparently Mirek’s style was obvious. “Haskel’s doing.”
“Haskel and his silver tongue.” He paused, eyes drifting lower before shifting off my body to what lay before him. “Sit. We’ll talk strategy.”
Had he been admiring me? Eury the pettifey?
No. Just Mirek’s work.
I sat in the chair opposite him. “How can we discuss strategy if we don’t know which trials we’ll face?”
He hefted a tome from the table between us. “Ah, but we know what trials have come before.”
The tome looked a hand’s span wide. “Is that a history of them?”
“As much as has been recorded.” He passed the book over to me. “See for yourself.”
I took hold of it with both hands, and even then its weight sank my arms halfway to the desk. “I can’t read Faerish.” Nor much of English, but that wasn’t a fact I thought it helpful to offer up.
His mouth turned wry. “It’s a children’s book.”
My eyebrows went up, and I opened it to a random page. The colorful illustration of two fae—a man and woman—inside a deep wood greeted me. They stood back-to-back, their eyes toward the canopy. There were words on the page, but they were large and few.
“Study it in the evenings,” Dorian said. “You’ll be surprised how much you can glean.”
I turned a page to find an arrow piercing the woman’s chest. Blood sprayed out her back. “Do the trials ever repeat themselves?”
“All things repeat.” He nodded to my book. “History is repetition with some variations. Fae are all the same in nature. That’s why we study it and them.”
“But,” I said, “what about uniqueness?”
Across from me, I sensed amusement creasing his eyes. “So you bristle and think, ‘But Eurydice Waters is unique.’ Right?”
He was right. I turned another page without answering.
This time, an arrow protruded from the man’s chest as well. Both of them lay on the forest floor, dead.
“Eurydice Waters is completely unique,” Dorian said. “But her thoughts and feelings have been thought and felt by many before her and will be by many after her. It’s the synthesis of all your experiences that makes you unique.”
That was the kind of philosophy Elisabet would talk about.
It was the first time Dorian had discussed such a thing with me.
Here was a creature who had read perhaps all the books surrounding me, who could write with that quill and ink, who had studied history and politics and strategy.
And I could touch none of it except with my fingers.
Yet he didn’t deride me about this picture book. He derided me about a great many things, but not this.
“I’ll read it.” I closed the book in my lap. “As much of it as I can.”
He nodded. “Consider strategy as you do. How you might fight.”
That night in bed, I opened the book of trials. Someone had gone to a great deal of effort to draw thousands of pages of history.
This historian fae must have fucking loved death.
Yes, I found stories of valor, of triumph. But they were few next to the accounting of how fae had died. Arrows, swords, halberds, rocks, drowning, creatures with tusks and horns and claws and sharp teeth.
Apparently many trials were known, even if all their participants had died. How, I didn’t know. But Dorian was right: I could understand these stories, mostly.
The trials were wide-ranging and unexpected.
Some were trials of fortitude, the competitors forced to survive harsh circumstances—terrible rains or cold or heat.
Some were trials of power, featuring battles or great beasts to be slain.
One trial showed a creature emerging from a lake, three heads towering ten times taller than the two fae who fought it…
and they died, of course. Some were trials of intellect—solving puzzles, finding hidden treasure.
And some were incomprehensible.
I turned a page and came across a trial unlike any before it. The drawing depicted a night so dark, the pages were in grayscale. A lone fae stood with a sword raised on a barren sweep of land, a vast spot of darkness looming before her.
I leaned closer. Where was the fae’s partner, and what was that darkness?
The longer I looked, the more vulnerable I felt. A chill prickled my skin, and I snapped the book shut. That was enough for one night.
Still, one thing was clear:
The trials made anything possible. They were magic. I couldn’t understand how they worked, but I had seen enough strange lands, enough monsters, enough of what I couldn’t explain in those pages to know the trials could transport me anywhere.
The next day in Dorian’s study, I set the book on the table between our two armchairs. “I have a strategy.”
He sat back, dark eyes glinting. “Do share.”
“In most cases, it’s more beneficial for you to be the one exerting yourself, whether running or fighting. I should keep hidden, attack from stealth.”
His fingers drummed the chair’s arm. He only stared at me.
“Well?” I said.
“I had expected something else.”
He’s disappointed. “And what were you expecting?”
“Some nonsense. ‘I memorize a dozen local plants and throw them at the enemy, hoping one of them causes hives.’”
My lips curved. “Not a terrible idea—the first part, at least.”
He didn’t seem to hear me; his fingers continued drumming. “What you described is overarching.”
So he wasn’t disappointed.
I tapped the book. “You were right. The trials repeat themselves, in different ways. It’s useless to talk about specific settings or enemies.”
His eyes flicked from my hand to my face. “So you listen.”
“Don’t be surprised, Dorian.” I clasped my hands with soft grace and blinked three times. “Tell me a strategy you have in mind, great ser.”
He sat forward. “I have the greater stamina and strength—we should use that. You can walk lighter, and we know from that first morning you’re not half bad at attacking from the shadows.”
He meant the morning I’d tried to kill him when he’d entered my room. My “perfect attack.” He must have noticed my neck become blotchy, because he said, “We’ll practice your subterfuge. You’ll get better at it.”
This was a different Dorian than the one who’d kidnapped me. A different one, even, than the one who’d paced the gardens and crushed that blossom.
I hadn’t met this Dorian. He was intense in a whole new way.
“Maybe next time I’ll pierce your artery,” I said.
A ghost of a smile flickered over his lips. “Then we’ll both know the joy of bleeding out.”
Now that we were at the end of this first week, I had begun to feel time pressing in on me.
At any moment the trials could begin, and I’d never even galloped a horse.
I had barely achieved thirty-five paces from a target with Haskel, and what Dorian was now describing might never come to pass if the spiritstag decided the trials should begin tonight.
“I’ll take the lead at night,” Dorian said. “I have the better vision. That means I make the calls, and you follow them.”
That was a good strategy, even if the idea of obeying him rankled. “And during the day?”
“It depends on the circumstance. My vision and hearing are better than yours even in daylight, so if it’s a matter of those two senses, I should make the calls.”
He was right. I nodded.
“You still need to learn defense against magic,” Dorian said. “Tomorrow I’ll find you a trainer to begin—”
He paused. His eyes widened, that circle of carmine at his irises’ center becoming clearer, and he gazed beyond me.
I finally said, “Dorian?”
His head turned; he seemed to be listening to something. But there was nothing except the ticking of the clock on his desk. He stayed like that for seconds.
“Dorian.”
He turned back and his lips parted. I sucked in air; the expression on his face was a mix of horror and sorrow.
It was, I realized, the same look I’d seen that night he’d held a sword pointed at me.
His eyes were like two onyx gems, flinty and cavernous.
“What is it?” I said.
He stood. “We’re out of time.”
I rose with him. “What do you mean?”
I knew what he meant. I just didn’t want to say it.
His lips pressed together, and a deep line formed between his eyebrows. Horror and sorrow; his skin had gone ashen.
My voice sounded like a reed. “The trials?”
“The spiritstag’s call just sounded.” His words were a rasp of stone on stone. “The first trial begins in the hour.”