Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dorian
Come morning, Eurydice would meet Liora alone. I could have accompanied her—a queen didn’t have power to command her veyre—but if Liora was going to kill Eury, it wouldn’t be over bonbons.
It would be in the night, when all the song and revelry had quieted and she was nowhere nearby.
That first night, Faun bedded down in the smaller bedchamber adjacent to Eury’s. And Eurydice agreed, after Faun’s encouragement, to leave her bedchamber door open to the central atrium of the guest quarters.
Just before she went to sleep, I dragged one of the velvet armchairs away from the corner library, close to the door to Eurydice’s room. Not facing inward, staring over her, but toward the fountain. She deserved privacy, as much as I could give it.
I sat down, laid my sword over my lap, and prepared to watch the koi swim in the basin until dawn.
Only minutes after I’d sat, Eurydice’s bare feet padded over the rug through the doorway. Her shadowed form appeared, blond braid soft and loose for sleeping. She wore a white slip and a barely tied robe over it.
I turned my face up to her. Even in the darkness, her eyes on me made my throat constrict.
Her hand clutched the doorframe. “You’ll be up all night again.” Not a question.
“I don’t sleep much, anyway.”
“You haven’t slept at all since we left Sylvanwild.”
“I have, here and there.”
Her eyes narrowed. She knew my bluff.
Truth was, I couldn’t. What little sleep I did get felt feverish.
“Don’t ask me to sleep tonight,” I said. “Not here.” In the home of the Dawnmaker. In the court of the oldest queen alive. There was a reason she was the oldest.
Her hip touched the doorframe. “You wish I hadn’t named myself my own champion.”
I loved and hated her directness. I didn’t know where to begin, how to explain my feelings.
No queen had ever been her own champion, not since Carys. When Eurydice had announced it, her words sank like stones in my stomach. All of us there in that throne room knew what this choice meant.
Four queens would step into the bloody grass, draw their weapons, summon their magic…
Best to be simple about it. “Yes, I wish you’d refused the stag. I wish three queens didn’t want you dead.”
“They would have wanted me dead for slitting Rhiannon’s throat under acid rain.”
I shook my head. “Rhiannon was a pale simulacrum of a queen. They’d have been grateful to have her gone. You’re asking three queens to kneel in the blood like servants.”
“You think it was the wrong decision,” she said. “But a decision implies I had a choice.”
I turned fully toward her. “You did. You could have let yourself become a wraith in that grove.” I didn’t want that—not one fiber in me wanted it. But she did have a choice, and she hadn’t once acknowledged it.
Her lip curled, teeth appearing. “You think more innocents should die to the wheel. What about boots on necks and fucking diadems?”
A deflection, and an attack. “I didn’t say that. Not the first part.”
“And the second?”
I worked my jaw, averted my eyes toward the fountain.
“Well, Dorian? Are you a part of the wheel, or aren’t you?”
Every time she said my name, I felt it from crown to toe. Perhaps because it was in that accent, the one pervasive through the Kingdom of Storms. She had that lilt I’d hardly heard in twelve years.
No matter how much history I doused myself in, no matter how well I learned the fae language, how high I rose in the Sylvanwild Court… it was there. It was there on her tongue, and in my chest.
“I can’t see you be ripped apart,” I said, finally, so quiet I could barely hear my own voice. “That’s what they’ll do, Eury.”
“You think I’m already dead.”
I shifted my gaze back up to her. Beautiful, miraculous under the moonlight through the stained glass. Liora’s announcement about the trials hadn’t yet come, not until the other queens arrived for the festival. But it would, as sure as the sun would peek through the glass above us.
Once again I heard the stag’s voice: She will give her the key. Liora, the sol key. But what if she wasn’t Liora at all? What if the key wasn’t the key? What if the stag was full of shit?
My unease stretched between us.
Eury’s breath came slow, even. She said, “In case you’ve forgotten, I killed one queen already.” She turned away, disappeared from view. Her footsteps padded over the rug, and the bed creaked as she climbed into it.
She was right, but that was Rhiannon, and this was… the entire monarchy. And I was just supposed to trust in a god’s cryptic words and wait.
For tonight, all I could do was stay awake. Stay awake and watch.
The night deepened. Haskel snored. Eury and Faun slept, their breathing rhythmic. All was still, quiet—
Until it wasn’t.
The hairs rose on my nape. Goosebumps on my arms. The rims of my eyes pulsed. I heard nothing, and yet my fingers tightened around my sword.
Haskel had always told me I had more than five senses. A sixth sense, one for the uncanny—for danger. In truth, I sensed noxveil. And my instinct was, every time, spot on.
The central room sat quiet, the fountain and bookcases and tapestry all untouched, unmoving. The secret door had not opened, and nothing at all had changed. The fountain went on tinkling, the fish swimming, the moonlight shining.
The feeling came from behind… past the doorway to Eury’s room.
Before I understood why, I was in motion. I rose from the chair, blade in hand. I turned through the doorway and into the room. I set both hands on the grip of my sword, and there it was.
A mirror wraith.
I knew it before I fully saw it. The cold. The way light died at its edges. The formless dark sliding from the mirror like oil across water, pooling on the floor, seeping toward her.
It rose along the edge of her bed, stretching upward, reaching—until it came to a crouch like it had crawled there to watch her sleep.
I’d seen what these things did to a body. Two seconds more, and she would be dead.
One stride, and I leapt onto the bed, flipped the blade point-down, and drove it into the creature with both hands. The iron tip ripped through bedding, mattress, and nearly penetrated the floor beneath.
Its shriek was thin and bottomless, the wail of a night-creature.
Eury woke, eyes wide, feet already in motion under the covers to press herself away from what I knew was incomprehensible to her.
We met gazes, and I twisted my sword with a snarl.
“Gawain is here.”
All of us except Mirek gathered in Eury’s bedchamber. Faun had already dealt with Liora’s handmaiden Theia—I didn’t ask how, but the fae was no longer at her post when I checked outside our guest chamber door.
We were alone, or seemed to be. If I knew Liora at all, she had other handmaidens with ears to the walls in places we couldn’t see, couldn’t reach. It didn’t matter much; the Dawnmaker would find out, in one way or another, about the mirror wraith.
In Eury’s room, Haskel sat with crossed arms in a chair in the corner, Eury sat on the edge of her partially destroyed bed, and Faun paced.
As soon as I’d killed it, the wraith had dissipated into nothing.
The only proof of its existence was what Eury and I had seen.
Seconds later, I’d detached the mirror from the wall and brought it out into the central room.
I wanted to smash it, but Faun had stopped me.
“Best not to destroy it before we understand it.”
So it lay on the floor, reflecting the moonlight back up at the glass ceiling like a terrible black pool visible through the doorway.
Faun pointed at me. “You’re sure it was Gawain.”
I leaned against the wall, pulse still thundering. “No one else deals in mirror wraiths.”
The creature wasn’t as fast as most night-creatures. It was probably meant to fail. Which meant Gawain was testing our defenses. He wanted to see how well Eury was protected, how fast we’d respond. Whether her veyre slept in her room.
This was reconnaissance.
Even worse, he’d already weakened us. We’d sleep worse tonight, trust less. The wraith was an injection of adrenaline and paranoia straight to the veins.
Faun reached one end of the room, turned, paced back. “Sylvanwild had mirror wraiths, long ago.”
“Not in hundreds of years,” Haskel said. “And few of us ever knew the art.”
“You did?” Eury asked.
“Not I,” Haskel said with a chuff. “It was a guarded practice.”
“Court spies,” I said. “The Unseelie courts once shared their arts. It all draws from the same source, anyway.” Feralis and noxveil were two parts of Unseelie magic.
Eury had picked up her folding knife from her bedside table. She unfolded it, staring down at the blade. “Who is Gawain?”
“Maeronyx’s spymaster,” Haskel said. And much more than that.
“The mirror’s the only way to know.” I struck toward the doorway. “If it was here, there’d still be a mirror-way.”
Faun turned after her as I approached the mirror. “A mirror-way? But those are…”
Eury stepped around Faun, appearing at my side. My instinct was to reach out, to stop her, but I paused before touching her. She didn’t want me touching her, and a god had ordained only two occasions when I could—either to save her life, or take it.
She tied her robe off tight. “Explain it to me.”
I stopped in front of the mirror, staring down at it. “It’s a path between two mirrors. Permanent magic.”
Haskel rose with a grunt. “Back in your room, Finch.”
I glimpsed Finch’s peering face before he shut the door to his room with a click. I nodded at Faun. “We need a little magic to activate it.”
Faun crouched in front of her own reflection. At some point she’d tied her black hair into a tight ponytail, which slid over her shoulder. She reminded me of a fox, careful and attuned. “What happens if I touch it?”
I crossed my arms. “Just don’t fall in.”
Her fingers reached out, and magic pooled around them. Even here, in the summer court, she could draw a little on her magic. She reached her index finger toward the glass, slow and careful.
Instead of touching a hard surface, her finger passed into the glass like she’d touched the surface of a pond. She withdrew her finger quickly, shook it out with a hiss.
Yes, a mirror-way.
“Break it,” I hissed.
“How?” Eury asked.
“Shatter it,” Haskel grunted. “It may be magicked, but it’s still made of glass.”
Faun didn’t even glance my way. She rose, unsheathed her rapier, and turned it pommel-down. Eury stepped back as Faun jerked the rapier downward.
The shrillness echoed off the ceiling and shards of glass spilled over the wooden sides.
Eury stood barefoot, breathing fast. Her knife sat tight in her grip as she stared down at her sharded visage.
I had to admit, much as Faun irritated the fuck out of me, she and Eury were a perfect pair. Fearless to a fault.
Eury’s gaze flicked up to me. “And how does this mirror-way confirm Gawain is here now?”
“Unseelie magic.” I nodded toward Faun. “The imprint has to be the same on both sides of the mirror.”
Eury turned toward me, knife still out. “What if someone brought the mirror in here after his imprint was on it?”
She was quick. Always so quick.
“It’s possible,” Haskel said. “Either way, Liora allowed for this.”
“So we take it to her,” Eury said. “Tell her what happened. Insist on an investigation.”
Faun snorted. “Over a broken mirror and stabbed bedding? We’ve got nothing.”
“You’ll look paranoid,” I said.
Haskel turned toward his bedroom door. “Paranoid and weak.”
Mirek’s door opened, and his sleepy-eyed face appeared. “Could you all keep it—oh.” His gaze had found the shards of mirror. “What the fuck kind of debauchery is this?”
“Mirror wraith,” Faun, Haskel, and I said in unison.
Faun kicked aside a shard of glass. “I’m testing the rest of the food myself. Until tomorrow morning, the queen’s eating olives.”
Eury turned toward the table of food and set her knuckles against the surface, shoulders hunched, head down.
“She won’t poison you,” I said. “That isn’t Liora’s way.”
She lifted her head, studied me with narrowed eyes. “And what is her way?”
"Patience," Haskel said from the doorway. "She’ll wait until the perfect moment. When it benefits her most and costs her least."
“And a breakfast poisoning would cost her image a great deal,” I said. “She’s not poisoned anyone in six hundred years. Maeronyx, on the other hand…”
“What’s your opinion of the breakfast, then?” Faun asked me. “Testing the waters?”
I hadn’t taken my gaze off Eurydice. “She wants to see how much of a fae our queen really is. If it’s possible she did kill Rhiannon. If she’ll be any threat.”
And then there was the stag’s prophecy. She will give her the key.
Eury hadn’t taken her gaze off me, either. A certain light had come into her eyes, one I recognized by now.
A queen’s light.
I’d seen that light in her a dozen times before today. In the Eldermaze. Under Virellan Falls. When she’d walked the throne room to Mirek’s commands.
A challenge had been laid before her, and she could not help but rise to it. The keenness was as much a part of her as her blue eyes.
Would it be enough? Gawain was here, and he was already making moves.
“Is there any other threat in these chambers tonight?” she asked.
“The hidden doors,” Haskel said.
“Dorian will watch those,” Eury said. “Right?”
I nodded.
“And otherwise?”
“None that I can sense,” I said.
She drew in a breath, let it out. She flicked her knife back into its fold and turned toward her bedchamber. “Then we should sleep. The night’s waning, and Liora expects to break her fast with a queen.”