Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The stitching was grueling.
Dorian’s screams weren’t just from the claw I forced again and again through his skin—they came from somewhere deeper.
The poison, Thalassa had told me, felt like small blades running through the veins, and I believed it.
By the time I tied off the last stitch, he lay on his stomach in a pool of sweat, fully unconscious, his back rising and falling in shallow jerks.
I was drenched, too. My thighs trembled from straddling him with shaking hands, and I wanted to cry. But it was done. All five wounds sealed. I didn’t know if Isa would be proud or horrified by my work.
Thalassa poked her head in. “I bet that built up a hunger.”
I blinked over at her, too wrung out to answer.
“Eat. It’s tasty.” Her grin cracked wide, too many teeth for her small mouth. “Well, probably. I’ve never served a human.”
Ten minutes later—after I’d wiped the sweat from my face and scrubbed Dorian’s blood from my skin with a pad of moss—I stepped into the main room and was ushered to a low stool.
How long must she have been trapped here to craft a stool from wood? Four hundred years, she’d said once. That was around the time Queen Carys started the trials. And the Eldermaze had only been in the trials one time, which meant…
She was one of the original fae, thought lost.
Thalassa’s hands, surprisingly strong, landed on my shoulders and pressed me down onto it. Beside me sat a small round table. She bustled back to the kitchen and returned with a wide bowl in both hands, which she set at the center.
She moved back and forth several more times, setting out bowls, cups, and a tall jug. Then she eased down onto the stool across from me, slow and deliberate.
When I didn’t move, she gave a sharp wave of her hand. “Tethryn. Don’t you know Sylvanwild custom?”
“I don’t suppose I do. In the citadel, someone brought food and we just ate.”
She sighed, shoulders slumping. “Bloody citadel. In Sylvanwild, when you’re a guest, you must eat before I can.”
“Oh.” I picked up the long-handled ladle and scooped out a thick orange liquid into my bowl. It reminded me of the sweet potatoes I’d eaten in the citadel, but sweeter. I had no idea where she procured food from.
Thalassa still hadn’t moved, but her eyes were buglike and luminous on me. Right. I had to eat before she could serve herself.
I took a sip. A soft sound escaped me—half sigh, half mewl.
Her grin stretched wider. “It’s very fucking good, isn’t it?”
It was. Sweet and savory all at once. It warmed me all the way down to my belly. I took another sip, deeper this time. I didn’t even care where it came from.
Only then did Thalassa begin ladling her own. She drank fast, sipping loudly.
Dorian moaned from the other room, climbing in pitch. I half rose but she waved me down. “He’s fine.”
We ate to the sound of his suffering.
“So,” Thalassa said between slurps, “the trial requires that you reach the end of this place.”
“Yes,” I said around a mouthful. “Do you know how to get there?”
“Of course I do.”
I froze, spoon suspended midair, eyes wide on her. She went on eating, unfazed.
“How?” I whispered. “How do we get out?”
“Can’t tell you that. You’re in a trial, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes met mine, glinting with curiosity and amusement. “Now that is unexpected—how did a human end up in this shit?”
The tone of her voice was almost delighted, like this was theater. As if I were tonight’s entertainment. And maybe I was. I wanted to beg her to tell me, but I already knew how far that would get me.
I took another sip of soup. “I was kidnapped.”
“No,” she said, all astonishment. “Truly?” But something in her tone told me she wasn’t surprised at all.
“I was brought before the spiritstag. The stag paired me with him.” I flicked my gaze toward the room where Dorian writhed.
“Ah, the spiritstag.” She lifted her spoon, eyes going distant. “Yes, I remember. Been so long since I visited the grove.”
I hesitated. “How long?”
“So long ago I can’t even picture it. Carys sent me when I was barely grown.”
Young. Just like the others in this trial.
“Carys,” I said. “Queen Carys?”
“Ruthless bitch, she was. Is? Gods, I hope it’s was.”
I stared at her. “She’s been dead for at least three hundred years.”
She drew herself upright. “Is that so? Must have been a hell of a fight. We thought she would be the eternal queen.”
The eternal queen. What did that even mean in this kingdom? For the first time in my life, I longed to know more about history.
“How did she die?” Thalassa asked.
I shook my head. “A war, I think.”
She chuffed. “That’s what it would’ve taken to bring that one down. A fucking war.”
I tilted my head, observing her. She reminded me, in a way, of my mother, if not more vulgar. “You were lowborn.”
Thalassa sat up straight as though affronted. “Stag chose me just like the rest.”
Definitely lowborn; she wore her ego right under the skin.
I lowered my bowl. “Were you in the first trials?”
“Aye.” Thalassa took a long, loud sip. Her affront had slid off her like a shadow. “The stag’s doing. I never did enter the great tree but once. Never seen Carys but once, inside the citadel the day she sent us here.”
I stilled. A sudden thought chilled me. “You entered the trials… and never left this place.”
Dorian groaned from the other room.
Thalassa gave a precise nod and set her empty bowl down.
I set my elbow on the table and lowered my face into my hand. Defeat slid through me like a serpent, slow and predatory.
“It wasn’t so bad,” Thalassa said, “once I figured out the secret of the hedge.”
I parted my fingers and looked at her between them. “The secret?”
She swept a hand toward the wall. “It’s not ordinary flora. You know that by now.”
“How did you do this?” I asked. “Get inside, create the riddle to gain entry?”
“Magic,” she said simply. Her eyes drifted to the soup pot. “More?”
“Please,” I said—partly because I didn’t know when I’d eat again, partly to keep her talking.
She ladled more into the bowl I held out.
“What kind of magic?” I asked.
“Feralis, of course.” She nodded toward the other room. “He has it too. Though men never form quite the same bond with it.”
“What is it?”
“Nature,” she said simply. “The four elements.”
“Earth, air…”
“Fire, water,” she said.
The four elements of nature. Autumn magic. Feralis.
Now I didn’t feel hungry. “How much greater is the connection for a woman?”
She tapped a slow rhythm on the tabletop with her long nails. “A man might be able to make the wind gust a little harder. We women can make it storm.”
A thrill crawled down my spine—threaded with something sharper, something that twisted. Jealousy. Her face was too serious for exaggeration.
“But there is a cost.” Thalassa lifted the jug and filled our cups. “And it is great.”
“A cost?”
“Unseelie magic corrupts. Unless you return to the grove to cleanse yourself, you walk a dangerous path.”
Unseelie magic. I desperately wanted to know more.
I sipped my water. “The grove cleanses the corruption?”
“The stag does it.” She paused. “You want to know why I never left the maze? I got horribly lost. And then I used what magic I had to build this place. It took me to the very brink.”
Her brows drew together. Her mouth turned down. For the first time, I saw something dark pass through her—a shadow of who she’d been.
She pressed her hair back from her neck. In the crystal’s ambient light, black threads marbled her skin, all the way down to her moss drape. They pulsed faintly with her heartbeat. I realized, with a breath in, they were her veins.
“If I’d used one more drop,” she said, voice low, “I’d have gone beyond cleansing.”
I swallowed hard. “But you said you know the way out.”
Her expression lightened. She leaned back and tapped her temple. “Now I do. Took me two hundred years, but I figured it out.” She gestured toward my cup. “More to drink?”
Two hundred years. Two hundred years to figure out how to escape the Eldermaze.
I lost my appetite, even though Thalassa offered me what she called floral delights—tiny red blooms in a bowl that smelled saccharine. She popped them between her lips like nuts.
She had been here for centuries, teetering between sanity and madness, her magic spent to carve out this place. Maybe she couldn’t leave now, even if she wanted to. Maybe she’d lost too much—her way, her strength.
Her courage.
Which made the riddle that much more poignant.
She sat across from me in her mossy shift, one ankle slung over the opposite knee, her milky eyes drifting. “Your partner—he’s got an enormous well of magic, you know. Flows off him in waves.”
I didn’t know. I wondered now if what I’d seen that first day—what I’d seen clearly in the right light—had been his magic like driven rain around him. “What does that mean, exactly?”
“It means he’s exceptional for a male fae.” She paused, touched a fingertip to her tongue, and raised it as though testing the air. “Specializes in manipulating flora, I think. And maybe air.”
I blinked at her, uncomprehending.
She leaned forward and drew a circle on the table with her finger.
“This circle is feralis—nature magic. And within it”—she carved two lines through the circle like slicing a bread round into quarters—“are the elements: fire, air, earth, and water. Every Sylvanwild fae has an attunement to one. Sometimes a lesser pull toward another.”
I followed her movements like my life depended on it. Maybe it did. When I looked up, I asked, “You said he’s attuned to flora. That’s not one of the four.”
“It’s earth. Even us lowborn know that. Where do you think plants come from?”
I bit back a laugh. She reminded me more and more of people from the Dip. “How can you tell what he’s attuned to?”
“It’s in how nature moves around him. How it listens to him.” She sniffed once, gaze sharpening. “He saved your life, you know.”
From the other room, Dorian moaned again—though I doubted he’d heard a word of it.