Chapter 3 #2
The servant returned carrying two trays—one with fowl and potatoes, the other with rashers of ham and white cheddar. He set them on the table, lifted a knife and fork, and prepared himself small helpings of each. He ate without sitting, and only when Faun nodded did he depart.
“He wasn’t loyal to her.” Faun speared a rasher and transferred it to her plate. “But you could kill him if you like. Replace him with a new royal taster.”
I set down my knife and fork. “You’re joking.”
“Yes, and no.” She cut into the ham. “He knows too much of the citadel to be sent away. So if he displeases or betrays you, it’d be safer for you to end him.”
I swept a hand toward the tapestry. “He’s done nothing wrong.”
“Yet. But he knows how vulnerable you are.”
My appetite had left me. I sat back. “How vulnerable am I, Faun?”
She leaned toward me with knife in one hand and fork in the other.
Her voice lowered. “You’re practically a child who can’t properly harness her magic, remarkable though it may be.
You have no immunity to poisons. You can’t hit a target more than thirty paces off.
You’re a changeling who knows nothing of our court, much less of Feyreign.
You can’t even read our language. You’re a changeling. ”
She recited as though she kept an internal tally. These were all things I knew, but placed together they became a bouquet of shit. And each brought a sting, though I managed to keep my face mostly straight.
When she had finished, I said, “Thirty-five.”
She blinked. “Thirty-five what?”
“I can hit a target at thirty-five paces.”
Her hands hovered over her plate, brow lowered. Then her wolfish grin emerged. “There it is—that cheek in the face of everything. Who taught you that?”
My mother. Theo. Elisabet. Isa. The whole of the Dip.
I picked up the outermost fork set before me and stabbed it into one of the rashers. “I was raised by wolves. The worse things seemed, the more we raised our chins.”
She pointed her knife at me. “That there is why.”
“Why what?”
“Why I picked you over Rhiannon.” She flicked her napkin off her lap and onto the table and rose. “Aside from the saving-my-life part.”
I stared up at her, half a rasher still on my fork. “Going to assault more flowers?”
“Something like that.” She nodded me toward the door. “It’s time for the hollow pool.”
“I have a feeling I’d rather stay seated.”
She leaned forward, set both flat palms on the table. “The Festival of the First Light sits on the horizon, and at least one of those primped, pastel queens will absolutely shank you with her knitting needles. Now would you rather gobble your ham, or learn to see in the dark?”
Faun led me from the dining room down, down beneath the Sylvanwild citadel. We passed by the root cells—one of which I had spent wretched days in, discovering I was a changeling—and descended until the earth enclosed us like a cold, wormy hand.
She carried a purple crystal, which seemed dim until we descended so deep, we were past all other light sources from the dungeon. When my feet touched stone, I stepped back. Dripping sounded somewhere nearby, droplets falling from on high.
“Where have you taken me, Faun?”
My voice swelled, echoed, caromed back at me.
“Have you ever wondered why the water tastes so lovely?” The mischievousness of her words sharpened as they rose into the air, expanded. We stood in a vast space, the ceiling lost to shadow. “It’s because we sit atop a reservoir.”
Water. We must be near enormous amounts of it—none of which I could see. Only Faun’s fingers were visible, holding the crystal high. It bobbed forward, and I followed close behind. A stone path carried us down, around and around, until she came to a stop.
I had no idea what lay at the edges of this place, much less two paces away.
“I forgot to ask,” Faun’s voice said, “can you swim?”
“My almost-father taught me to float in a—”
The crystal moved almost as quick as Faun’s rapier in the cave behind Virellan Falls. Something hit my chest—her hands—with the force of a sledge. I stepped backward, and instead of meeting stone, my foot met air.
I fell, fell, and fell.
My back hit water, and I was submerged as soon as I registered it. A shocking chill, an absolute glove. I couldn’t breathe.
I was in the reservoir.
Instinct took over, and I clawed toward the surface. But where was that? Didn’t matter; the water seemed to buoy me, and a second later I burst into the air with a ragged gasp. I’d only been under for two seconds, but I had never been more grateful to breathe.
I still couldn’t see, but now I treaded endless black water. The crystal’s light had disappeared.
“What the fuck, Faun?”
“They call this the hollow pool.” Her voice slid through the dark, impossible to place. I jerked my head around; more inky nothingness. “Nothing sinks in it—everything floats. So there’s only one way to die in here.”
“Which is?”
“If you never find your way out.”
I could think of another way someone might die in here. When I escaped, I would pluck her hair from her scalp one strand at a time in the darkness. I would force her to wear iron corsets and wide-skirted dresses and tread this water until she begged for clemency.
“You’re no longer my second-in-command.” I spun in the water. “Go to your chamber and pack your things.”
She barked a laugh. “How would you know I’ve actually gone if you’re stuck in the hollow pool?”
“I will know, because my life’s purpose has changed.” I thrashed, pulling myself through endlessness. “I exist only to destroy you. You have no idea what kinds of torture we devised in the Dip.”
Her laughter went on and on. When it faded, her voice had gone sober.
“You didn’t pick me as your second because you wanted a sycophant, Eurydice.” The edge in her voice cut clean through the dark. “You need to learn to see. Your fingers will be pruned by the time we’re done, but there’s no quicker way.”
“I can see. Except you’ve taken away the light.”
“Now you’re being purposely obtuse. Do you want to know or not?”
“Tell me, pettifey.”
She barked a laugh. “Your tongue shapes that word like a baby learning the shape of its own thumb.” A pause. “First, you have to exhaust yourself completely.”
“Oh, fuck off.”
She didn’t answer. Maybe she had fucked off.
For a time I resolved not to speak to her again.
And so I didn’t; I only swam through the cold ink.
Each stroke dragged, awkward and slow. Hands cupped, pulled, slipped.
If I made progress, I couldn’t tell; I might have been paddling in circles.
The water got into my mouth, brackish and unwelcome.
When it burned up my nose, my cursing and sputtering echoed back at me like mockery.
I swam until my arms burned. I swam until my breath was gone.
Eventually I turned on my back and lay there because I couldn’t do anything else. The water filled my ears, closed away all sound.
My almost-father had taught me to float in a bathing trough when I was a little girl. It was one of my favorite memories with him, because he’d loved me that day. That was what I had been about to tell Faun when she’d pushed me in—at least the first part.
“Dead yet?”
My head broke the surface at Faun’s voice echoing through the cavern. I lifted my hand and blinked into nothingness. “No, but I can’t even see my fingers.”
“You’ve spent twenty years relying on daylight. Do you really expect your eyes to adjust in an hour?”
“Has it only been an hour?”
“Not quite. Give it another five.”
Five? “I detest you.”
“Your insults don’t even pierce skin, kitten.”
“I’m ready to get out.”
“I’m sure you are.”
So that was that. I was doomed to spend the rest of my life in the hollow pool.
I lowered my head back down and the water slid into my ears. Another hour passed, and I rolled over and swam again. Paddling, paddling like a child or a mongrel.
Emotions rolled through me like short storms, swelling from anger to rage, breaking into a strange grief, and finally to a clear blue. Again and again, and in the silence, flash after flash reminded me of everything I had crawled and clawed and knifed my way through in two fortnights.
Rhiannon. The maze. Virellan Falls. The ancient Kingdom of the Plains. King Rhodric’s wild eyes under the acid rain. The dagger in my hand, a shard of blue smoke.
Most of all, Dorian. Dorian like a beautiful, cruel villain, those coal eyes dancing in front of me in the darkness. Dorian who’d saved me. Dorian who’d lied to me. Dorian who, even now, I felt somewhere above me in the citadel. My body longed to be near his, but couldn’t be for a thousand reasons.
In the fourth—fifth—sixth?—hour, I went still in the water. My brow lowered. Was that something? Someone?
Not ten feet above me, Faun’s face had materialized like the faintest glowing orb from the darkness. She wasn’t more than fifty paces away, crosslegged on a ledge, hunched over something in her lap.
“Are you reading a book?”
Her face lifted. “Oh, you’re not dead.” She flipped the book shut with a clap. “And not blind. I thought I’d at least make it to the part where they kiss.”
I paddled toward her. “I need to ask you something.”
“No”—she rose with book in hand—“I don’t know where Dorian is. I don’t know where he’s gone, and I don’t know how long he’ll be gone.”
That wasn’t the question I was going to ask. But if I was honest with myself—which I so rarely managed—it was the question in my heart.