Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
In the morning, it wasn’t Thalassa who woke me. It was Dorian.
A hand settled on my shoulder and gripped it, firm but not rough. My eyes opened to a dim white light and the outline of him. His hair hung long, veiling his face. He was dressed, though one side of his leathers had clearly been patched.
“You’re awake,” I whispered, my voice too high, too thin.
“It’s time to go.”
I pushed up onto one elbow. “Are you all right?”
He grunted and rose. That was my answer.
I sat up and rebraided my hair in what I sensed was the hour just before dawn, when the world had turned to grayscale. Around me, Thalassa’s trinkets and weapons hung motionless in the branches—suspended in a silence that felt wistful.
She must have rooted deep into the maze to find all these belongings from her fellow fae. She’d had centuries, after all.
In that stillness, I returned to the logic of the maze. I had thought about it all night—waking, dreaming. My mind had circled it, and I was no closer to an answer.
Now we would go back in. Wanderers again.
When I entered the main room, a spicy scent met me. Thalassa sat at the table with three steaming cups. She slid one toward me without a word.
Dorian stepped out from the room where he’d spent the night, and Thalassa turned to him. “Did you find what you wanted?”
He gave a nod. She passed him a mug, and he took it. I wondered what had passed between them, but I didn’t ask. I sensed neither would tell me.
I took a sip from mine. The drink was hot, sharp, and almost unpleasant—but not quite. I drank it all, and when I set the mug down, Thalassa gave me a slow, approving nod.
“This is for you,” she said, passing me a small sack bound in twine. “Eurydice Waters of the Kingdom of Storms.”
My name had never sounded so regal in another’s mouth.
I moved to untie it, but her hand stopped mine.
“Not now,” she said. “Once you’re safe.”
“It’s time,” Dorian said, already near the exit. His footsteps moved lightly over the dirt.
Thalassa shuffled beside him. “It won’t stay open long. The hedge allows only three seconds of manipulation.” For a moment, I heard the younger fae she must have been—brilliant, sharp, not yet dulled by time or solitude.
I stepped up beside Dorian. “Thank you,” I said to Thalassa, though I wasn’t sure what I was thanking her for—the hospitality, the conversation, the sack now tied at my belt? Maybe just that one additional night of life she’d gifted us.
She spoke a word in what must have been Faerish. Her voice dropped low and the leaves began to rustle. The brambles shifted. Gray dawn broke in slivers across our feet.
The Eldermaze. There it was. It had always been there, just beyond the hedge. But inside, you could almost forget. And sometimes, to sleep even a little, forgetting was easier.
Dorian ducked and stepped through, his cloak sweeping behind him.
I followed, but as I bent forward, Thalassa’s fingers gripped my forearm. Her voice came close to my ear, rough and urgent: “The way out is more straightforward than you think.”
Then she shoved me through.
I stumbled into the maze, catching myself on my hands in the dirt. Already I felt the heat, the barrenness, the desperation.
Dorian steadied me with one arm. “What was that?”
I rose slowly and turned. Behind us, the hedge was already shifting. Leaves whispered back into place, closing the opening like it had never existed. Within seconds, Thalassa’s home was gone. Only the whorl remained.
My blood cooled. Amazing how much power a wall of thorns could hold.
“She said something to me,” I murmured.
“What?”
I looked up at him. “‘The way out is more straightforward than you think.’”
A bitter smile touched his lips. “Of course. A magic-drunk fae with her nest of trinkets and bone soup gives you a cryptic farewell.”
“It’s another riddle,” I said.
“The question is”—he blew out a breath—”how diluted it is by her crazy.”
That was the question. Her face flashed into my mind, her voice: Thalassa hadn’t been mad. Not in that moment. There’d been clarity, the kind that cuts through everything else.
She’d been trying to help. But no answer came to mind.
“Let’s walk,” he said. “I think better when I’m moving.”
So did I.
We walked the maze. The sun heated us, the sky blue, blue, blue. My mind felt on fire as I turned the riddle over, as my scalp burned. Where were the fucking clouds? Even acid rain would be better than this endless heat, this slow death.
We drank from the canteen one sip at a time. Every hour I chewed on rabbit meat at Dorian’s insistence. We kept making right turns, and we met nothing of note until midafternoon.
It was then that Dorian put a hand out to stop me.
“I smell them,” he said in a whisper.
“What?”
“Thornstalkers. More than one. It’s…” His nostrils flared. “I think this is where they sleep.”
My throat constricted to a strawhole. “How many?”
“Many.” Dorian stepped forward, slow and silent. “Stay here.”
I did. Not just because I couldn’t move like him, but because we’d agreed: when it came to the five senses, Dorian made the calls. He knew what he smelled.
He vanished around the corner, and a chill broke down my spine. I stood motionless, one hand tight on the string of my bow, breath shallow. I counted heartbeats to pass the time, but they began to blur. The hedge rustled behind me once, and I spun so fast I felt dizzy under the sun.
Nothing. Just the maze.
By the time Dorian reappeared, he’d become so much a part of the silence that I nearly lifted my bow at the sight of him.
He leaned in, his breath a whisper against my ear. “There’s a wide corridor—widest I’ve seen. It runs diagonal and goes on forever. It’s riddled with them.”
I exhaled. “Then we turn back.”
He nodded. “We avoid the corridor every time we near it.”
So we did. We walked in the other direction, keeping away from that scent every time Dorian caught it.
I could read his body now. As we walked, I sensed his wounds in his movements.
His left arm stayed stiff at his side. Sometimes he winced as he pulled out the sack of meat or handed me the canteen.
I’d ask him if he was bleeding under there, would ask to stop and check on his stitches, but I knew he’d refuse me.
Yes, he was five and twenty. Stubborn, dismissive, like young people in the Dip could be. Like I could be, or Theo, or anyone who hadn’t fully matured. For a fae, five and twenty probably felt even younger than for a human.
In that way, we were the same.
We also had a sameness of mind. Stubbornness, willful attunement to our own beliefs and desires. And yet we worked well together; we had survived this long by sticking to our strategy, to our strengths. And we shared a ribbing sense of humor.
If he weren’t an evil prick, I could like him.
We came to the corridor a second time, then a third.
Something began to nag at me—soft at first, then louder.
Every time we came near that corridor, Dorian turned us away.
And each time, the same part of the maze seemed to call us back.
Not with sound, but with pattern. With repetition.
As if the hedge itself wanted us to notice.
Or maybe I was just noticing what had always been there.
By the time we found a narrow alcove and used our cloak trick to camouflage ourselves inside it for the night, I was quiet with the weight of my thoughts.
That night, Dorian nodded at the small sack tied at my belt. “What dead fae’s toy did Thalassa gift you?”
I blinked over at him, silvered by the moonlight. I had started to wonder if clouds ever passed over this place. “I haven’t looked.”
“Why not?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I suppose I imagine she’d want me to open it somewhere safe. Outside this place.”
A pause. Then a low, one-note chuckle. “I understand that.” His voice was quiet.
I glanced over at him, eyebrows rising.
“The sack is your promise,” he said. “But you’re Thalassa’s promise.”
“Promise of what?”
“Of a future.” His face tilted to the stars, and then we were both staring upward. The starscape burned impossibly bright and vast above us. A strange reminder of open space when we were walled in by a few feet of hedge.
I understood what Dorian meant. Even Thalassa, trapped for hundreds of years in this place, needed a reason to go on. Every creature who could conceive of a future needed that.
“What’s your promise?” I asked.
For a long time, he said nothing, and I thought he wouldn’t at all. That would be like him. But eventually he pulled out the nearly empty sack of rabbit meat from his belt and handed it to me. “Keeping you fed.”
I accepted it with both hands. Across from me, Dorian’s face was once again upturned to the sky, the column of his neck long and not inelegantly wide. Days ago, I had found him strange, even ugly. Now he just looked like Dorian.
How quickly the strange became familiar.
There was nothing else to say. I ate in silence. I spread my cloak and sword for dew. And when I lay down to sleep, I dreamed again of the maze.
In the night, Dorian once again wrapped himself around me—after I’d fallen asleep, after the cold had become too much.
But this time when I woke, he hadn’t risen before me.
His deep breathing stirred the hair by my ear.
One arm lay heavy across my waist, and as I opened my eyes to the tint of dawn I saw his fingers twitching in sleep.
I must have been shivering during the night, but I couldn’t recall.
For a long while I lay still, watching his fingers. His words echoed back from last night: Keeping you fed. He had given up food and water so I could eat first. He had kept watch until I fell asleep.
And in moments like this, I felt like deadweight. If I were fae, I might have been his equal. But I wasn’t. I was human. And that meant he carried the burden of my hunger, my thirst, my fragility.
Eventually the sunlight grew stronger, painting the hedge in pale golds and greens. His breathing shifted.