Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Eurydice
Mirek had spent the morning reshaping me.
He wove careful plaits, adorned my hair with canary blossoms, set the bramble diadem tight against my scalp.
The dress did the rest—corseted, low-necked, green and beaded at the bodice, with a train long enough to kiss the grass.
When I stepped out of the tent, the camp went silent.
Haskel crossed his arms. The handmaidens turned.
Dorian and Finch rose from where they sat, their eyes wide, almost reverent.
Mirek stepped out from behind me. “The queen is ready to meet the summer court.”
“More like the summer court is meeting her.” Haskel clicked his tongue. “They’d hate her even if she weren’t a changeling.”
Mirek leaned close to me. “The summer court relishes and hates beauty in equal measure.”
“Why is that?” I whispered back.
He touched my braid. “In Highmark, beauty is power.”
If that were so, then I would wear every dress he stitched for me.
We soon departed, and the carriage delivered us to Highmark before midday.
The wheels changed first. The soft rumble of the Queen’s Road gave way to something smoother, harder—courtyard stone, maybe, or marble.
The carriage slowed even as something reached me through the walls.
Faint, almost imagined, like a sound carried on wind from very far away.
Strings. High and bright and layered over one another in a way I’d never heard.
Then a harp, and another, and the music thickened until it pressed through every crack in the wood and filled the small space around me.
Through the narrow window, shadows passed over us in intervals, tall and regular, and I understood we were moving between walls.
The harps swelled. Other instruments joined—high, cascading, layered in a way I couldn’t follow. Voices, too, rising in unison. A welcome song, or a hymn, or a warning dressed as beauty. I couldn’t tell.
I pressed my eye to the window and caught a sliver: white stone, rising and rising. A banner, gold on blue, snapping in wind I couldn’t feel. A flash of blond hair in a crowd. Then the carriage turned and I lost it.
The air through the cracks had changed. Warm, sweet, heavy with something floral I didn’t recognize. Nothing in the Dip had ever smelled like this. Nothing in Sylvanwild, either.
The carriage slowed again, and stopped. Outside, the music softened but didn’t cease. Individual voices floated between the carriage cracks—murmurs, a laugh, the shuffle of many feet arranging themselves.
My heart slammed. I’d experienced this whole place through a slit.
Faun leaned forward and reached for the door. “Remember your marks,” she murmured—the same voice she’d used when advising me how to kill Rhiannon.
I nodded, and the nerves I’d felt all morning quieted under the weight of the recitation in my head. I had prepared weeks for this.
Her tight stare lingered, then Faun pressed the door open. Sunlight poured in, and she stepped out and down to the cobblestones. She stood at attention, back straight and hands clasped behind her.
I took a quick breath, then another. I grabbed my green dress in two handfuls, rose, and stepped through the small door.
Cheering rose. Wild, joyous, like I was a savior and not a stranger.
Daylight burned white. I squinted, half-blind. Somewhere out there, the instruments played louder and a chorus broke into new song. Someone’s hand found mine—warm, strong, comforting—and I gripped it to step down from the carriage.
Dorian’s face came into view, flanked by light. My hand lay in his. Part of me wanted to recoil; the other part didn’t want to let go.
When my shoes touched the ground, he lowered my hand and stepped back. His gaze shifted toward two lines of fae—my court, my handmaidens—who’d formed a path for me straight to the entrance of Highmark’s citadel.
Atop the steps leading up to that citadel stood a creature straight out of a storybook.
Her gold-spun hair had been arranged into dozens of delicate ringlets.
Her crown glittered white-gold, the tall spires of it rising like the turrets of her castle high above us.
Her cheekbones were high and pink, her cupid’s-bow mouth plush, her eyes as blue as the sky above.
Her dress matched her eyes, so fitted to her slender body that she might have worn water. The neck was low, tight. A hundred careful folds emerged from the bodice and draped to the stone beneath her feet.
She held a gleaming gold scepter in both lace-gloved hands, its grip and rounded top as ornate as her hair.
Queen Liora, the Dawnmaker.
A dozen handmaidens in drifting white shifts stood around her, each of them with white baskets in hand. They were equally ethereal, and probably each one of them lethal.
Liora’s lips parted into a wide, white smile. Stunning. Devastating. Under that gaze, I could hardly breathe.
“Welcome, Queen Eurydice of the Sylvanwild Court.”
Her voice was a melody, neither alto nor soprano but music itself. She was entrancing, and I never wanted to be in a trance.
With a nod from her, her handmaidens descended from the steps, reached into their baskets, and dropped pink petals over the path created by my court.
From beside me, Eleyrie pressed a wooden box into my hands. Faun whispered, “Your marks, Eury.”
I knew my marks better than my own mother’s face. I saw the ghost of myself before I moved, felt my muscles ready to fire.
I lifted the box, began my walk down the fae-made pathway toward Liora. I kept my eyes on her, even as Faun and Dorian and Haskel and Mirek and the other handmaidens fell into a walk behind me like the train of an even longer dress.
Liora’s handmaidens parted before me, dropping their blossoms. They were all of them pale and flaxen-haired like Liora. And I wondered at their likeness not just to her, but to me. Was Highmark my court—the court I had been born into and stolen from?
In my periphery, faces pressed in. Highmark fae, all of them in bright colors, cheering as loudly as ever. I might look like these people, but I didn’t feel like them. At least the Sylvanwild fae didn’t cry out for a queen they didn’t know; at least they were honest in that.
I arrived at the steps and climbed them, one hand holding the box and one lifting my dress.
Wrists straight, spine upright, chin lifted.
How many times had Mirek slapped me with his measuring ribbon in the past week?
A sting almost greater than an actual flail, coupled with the disappointment in his eyes.
Six steps brought me to where Liora stood. The summer queen was almost exactly my height, but her stature felt somehow enormous.
Remember your marks.
Before her, I lowered my head. With one hand I lifted my dress, set one foot behind the other. The phantom of Mirek’s comb slapped the crown of my head, but this time I’d gotten it fucking right. The movement felt as familiar as a parry.
I rose and set both hands under the box. I extended it toward her. “Sol’veris, queth’ana.”
Her eyes glinted in the stark light; I recognized surprise there, and not because I’d mispronounced. Because I hadn’t.
She handed her scepter to one of the handmaidens. “Droen.”
Liora reached out and touched my cheek—gentle, just long enough for me to feel the steadiness of her hand. Just long enough for my throat to tighten.
Nobody had touched me like that since my mother.
Her fingers fell away, and she accepted the jewelry box with both hands.
“May the light favor you, young queen.”