Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Eurydice
I woke to a narrow shaft of morning light pouring onto me through the slit window. A stray feather floated through the brightness—a remnant from last night. Dorian had driven his sword through the mattress.
Left of me, in the smaller bedchamber, Faun’s bed was empty but made. And the main door to my bedchamber had at some point been shut, though the sounds of voices penetrated the wood.
Faun, Mirek, Haskel, Finch. All of them were up.
Someone had thought to give me privacy. Or wanted to keep me from overhearing.
I unclenched my fingers from around the knife I’d held in my sleep and set it on the bedside table. It was probably as useless now as it had been last night, but I’d found a certain bravery in holding it since the day I’d entered Feyreign.
I wasn’t someone who would go easy toward death. The old guard’s knife reminded me of that, even when my thinking brain forgot it.
The spot where the mirror had been stood empty. If not for the hole in the bed near my feet and the floating feathers, I could almost have put it off as a dream.
Mirror wraiths. Mirror-ways.
The longer I spent in Feyreign, the more I was humbled by it. What I knew about this world was the size of a pin’s head next to what I didn’t know.
But danger was universal, undeniable. I felt it always in my chest, in the tingle of my fingers.
I wasn’t safe here, and I never would have been.
The festival, the diplomacy, the pretty dresses—they were all theater.
Mongrel or human or fae, the truth of life always resided in the sharpness of your teeth.
A knock on the door. “My lady Eurydice.” Mirek.
“I’m up,” I said, sounding hoarse. Mirek was worse than my own mother. No, not worse. At least my mother hadn’t pricked me with needles and tittered at her own clumsy hands.
I rose and washed myself. When I emerged from the bedchamber, the others were seated at the dining table, breaking their fast around a fresh spread of food. All except Dorian.
The mirror was gone from the floor, as were the shards.
Mirek set down a steaming mug and stood. “Thank the wildmother. We’ve only got a quarter hour, you know.”
I didn’t move. “Where’s Dorian?”
“Struck off early this morning.” Haskel ripped off a piece of bread. “Didn’t say why or where. Never does.”
I wrapped my arms around myself; my robe felt suddenly thin. It was the second time he’d disappeared since becoming my veyre. I hated that I was counting.
“You look worse for wear,” Faun said, and bit into a pink pastry.
“Not every day a fresh-crowned queen faces a mirror wraith,” Haskel said. “Girl probably slept not even one wink.”
Mirek struck off toward the dais and lifted a lacy canary dress. “In the morning, Highmark fae wear yellow. It represents their gratitude for the dawning of another day.”
“You should have no trouble with gratitude this morning,” Faun said while chewing.
Mirek turned toward the wall and snapped his fingers. He said a loud word in Faerish. Seconds later the tapestry moved, and I stepped back as the door behind it opened.
Eleyrie the handmaiden appeared, her chestnut hair loose and wavy around her head. She only had eyes for me. “Yes, my queen?”
“A braided bun,” Mirek said to her. “Make it high.”
Eleyrie gestured for me to take a seat at the small vanity area beside the tailor’s dais.
I sat. My reflection stared back at me, and then Eleyrie’s as she began to work on my hair.
Faun came to stand beside me, a mug between both hands as we met eyes in the mirror.
“About last night.” Her voice was confidential; no doubt Theia had resumed her post outside our guest chambers. “We’ve still no real idea who was behind the wraith,” she said. “Gawain, sure, but someone in this court facilitated the mirror’s magic.”
“And I’m to nibble on danishes with Liora and pretend my bedding isn’t in pieces.”
Faun shrugged one shoulder. “Queens have been trying to off each other for centuries.” She sipped from her mug. “This is what they call your shadow coronation. Not all survive it.”
I’d only survived because of Dorian. Eleyrie caught a snarl in my hair just as my chest tightened, and I flinched.
“Dorian won’t let anything happen to you. Not while he lives.” Faun tapped her thumb on the mug. “Now, which spoon is for stirring your coffee?”
Twenty minutes later, I was coiffed, dressed, and freshly educated on utensils. Faun and I emerged from my chambers to find Theia standing there just as she had been last night, her eyes on the blank wall across from her as though she hadn’t had her ear pressed to the door half the night.
What had she heard? What hadn’t she?
When we came out, she bowed her head. “Good morning, my queen,” she said in a breathy voice. “Allow me to escort you to the Dawnmaker’s solar.”
My first real meeting with the Dawnmaker awaited. I knew what I wanted from her: this sol key Dorian and Haskel kept speaking of. The key to the “eternal cell,” where Carys’s dagger waited. But wanting and having were two worlds apart.
Theia led us down the hall. Our steps were loud—mine heeled, Faun’s booted—but Theia’s were soft, unassuming. Faun had warned me of this—that a handmaiden would escort or follow me everywhere outside my chambers with one ear always bent toward me.
Theia took us on a winding path of turns, stairs, and halls. I had no memory of any of this, despite yesterday’s tour. This castle was its own maze.
We arrived before a door, and Theia knocked three times quick.
“Enter,” came Liora’s musical voice, but pitched lower than yesterday.
Theia opened the door; a rectangle of intense light flooded through, and she stepped into it. “Queen Eurydice, Your Grace.”
Your Grace. Rhiannon had hated that term.
“See her in.”
Theia stepped aside for me with a soft gesture of the hand.
Faun let go of my arm, but not before she squeezed it. “I’ll remain outside.” Her vigilance was impeccable.
I closed my eyes, took a breath. When I stepped into the light, my eyes were overcome. I squinted and raised a shielding hand to my brow.
“Good morning, my young queen.” Liora’s voice came from somewhere inside that brilliance. “A marvelous dawn, is it not?”
Light poured through a stained-glass window on the far wall, so bright it took a moment for the rest of the room to exist. The panes were tall as temple windows—like the shrine to Arxius I’d peered inside once or twice as a girl.
This felt religious, too. The dawn hawk’s wings spread through the stained glass, yellow on white, black eyes open.
Beneath that window sat Liora, in a pale yellow dress fitted to her slender frame with tailored precision.
High lace covered her chest where the bodice did not, almost to her throat.
She sat back straight, hands in lap, before a round dining table much smaller than what I’d expected.
The dark wood had four chairs around it, with only one occupied.
One lace-gloved hand rose, her elbow found the table, and her chin rested atop that hand. “Aren’t you a picture.”
Around Liora, the room bore decadence. A dark-wood credenza against one wall, the golden sculpture of an arch-backed naked woman atop it.
A sideboard groaned with pastries, fruits, and meats enough to feed a southern district family for a month.
Golden platters. Silver tongs. A single pat of butter shaped like a swan.
The door shut behind me. We were enclosed.
“Sit,” Liora said. “Unless you prefer to stand.”
Faun’s instructions about etiquette surged to mind, all of them blended—greetings, chairs, utensils, phrases.
Instead, I did what Eury would do: the first thing that felt right. I approached, pulled out the chair closest to me, and sat. An empty lace placemat lay in front of me.
“Thank you for the invitation to break my fast with you, Your Grace.”
Liora studied me, then gestured with an upraised finger. A handmaiden I hadn’t noticed materialized from her spot against the wall, only to open a side door and disappear through it.
Moments later, trays clinked. A plate of food was set before me, and an array of utensils laid on either side of it. Pale liquid was poured into a cup. Liora’s eyes didn’t leave mine, even as the handmaiden’s arm sometimes blocked her view.
Before me sat a round dish with a crisp brown top. Steam rose from it; the smell was sweet and divine. When the course was laid out, Liora said to the woman, “Leave us.”
The handmaiden curtseyed and disappeared through the side door. We were alone, truly this time.
Liora lifted a small spoon, the first on her left. She tapped the top of the dish. “What do you think of bread pudding?”
I followed her motions. My spoon broke through the surface of the dish, revealing a creamy, sweeter-smelling center. Mirek would have advised me to say I adored it. “I’ve never tried it.”
One eyebrow canted. “It’s my favorite.” She placed a spoonful in her mouth. Her blue eyes speared me again. “Even though it’s considered crude.”
I took a bite. The taste was exquisite—raisins and cream and bread. The mycelial knot didn’t so much as twitch. She wouldn’t poison you at breakfast. “Crude?”
“It’s a simple dish often made by the lowborn. Which I was, in another life.”
My eyebrows rose.
“The road you rode in on—the Queen’s Road, they call it—runs near the village I grew up in. I often watched horses and carriages go by and wondered what it might be like to pass through the trellis gate into the castle.”
A lie? Could be, but it didn’t feel like one. I took another bite of the bread pudding and pictured the longing child she’d once been. Liora went silent, and I wondered at the queen who sat before me now. Intimate, vulnerable, her voice different. Not as high, melodic, as fairy-tale benevolent.
Not like Rhiannon. Nothing like Rhiannon.
I trusted that less.
When I didn’t speak, Liora said, “I imagine you’re wondering how I knew where to place the invitation.”
The invitation—? She meant the one I’d found tucked into the mirror. My gaze sharpened on her. A faint smile curled her pink lips.
“A mirror is irresistible to the lowborn,” she said. “In my village, we didn’t have mirrors. Glass was far too expensive, too fragile a thing.”
I might have been insulted. Mostly, I was awed.
This queen perceived. Maybe too much—definitely too much.
If she was six hundred years old, she had the wisdom of both lowborn and royal, of real coronations and shadow coronations, of a tapestry of court politics so long it rolled into the distance in my mind’s eye.
I lowered my spoon. Faun’s and Mirek’s advice floated forward; I tamped it down. I knew the kind of person I sat before. “I was attacked last night, through that same mirror.”
Liora had just pressed her spoon into her dish. She paused. Her gaze rose to me, and I saw genuine interest there.
“A mirror wraith,” I said.
“Really.” She took a bite, swallowed. She knows. She already knows. “Curious of you to bring a root system to light, especially to your host queen.”
A root system—?
She read my face. “A scheme. A plot. Was it your dark-eyed veyre who stopped it?”
So she was surprised not by the wraith, but by the fact I’d brought it up. I nodded.
She sat back, breaking her perfect posture for the first time. “I suppose you think it was me.”
“Actually, I don’t.” For the first time, I was certain I didn’t. Liora’s gaze had been unmistakable, unless she was a master performer. And while I believed she was very good at masks, I didn’t think that had been one.
Her eyebrows arched. “And why not?”
Better to be honest with a six-hundred-year-old queen. “The way you’re sitting right now. The lowborn—it’s written all over you.”
She stared at me for a beat, two. Then she burst into a laugh. It was one of the most beautiful sounds I had ever heard, low and guttural. “The absolute cheek of you.”
I said nothing. I didn’t know what to say.
“In you come like a skittish mouse, not knowing which way is forward or back, which chair to take, which spoon to hold.” She gestured up and down at me. “And within five minutes here you are, assessing me.”
I set my hands in my lap. “Your Grace—”
“No, no. We’ve passed that. You’re a lippy bitch, and you’ve spoken true. I can only imagine how Rhiannon felt. The only thing more frightening to a ruthless cunt like her is an even more ruthless cunt.”
I stared. Something rose in my chest, though I didn’t know whether it was fear or thrill.
Her head cocked to the side. “I heard you killed her with acid.”
I hesitated, then nodded. Though the acid had hardly felt like a part of me.
“Heard you slit her throat.”
I closed my eyes, shook my head. Put like that, I did sound like a ruthless cunt. “Yes, but not like that.”
Liora sat forward. “Not like what? Out of spite? Anger? Rage? You passed the blade across her carotid, did you not? Speak true.”
My eyes opened. “I didn’t want her to become one of those things.”
“The Unseelie wraiths?”
“Yes.”
Her lips curled. Her eyes were lit. “How much of you, though?”
“How much of me what?”
“How much of you longed to see her die? I bet she made you relish her death.”
I stared at the fairy-tale queen with a burgeoning realization about the dainty spoon I held. I could use any fucking spoon we wanted to eat the bread pudding, and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to Liora.
“Yes,” I said, “she did.” That was the truth.
Liora nodded once, as if in approval. She pulled off her gloves, one and then the other, and laid them on the table. She studied them as though considering what to do.
I must have misstepped. Said too much. I set down my spoon. “Queen Liora—”
She kept her eyes down as she smoothed her gloves. “Mira.”
“Pardon me?”
She lifted her face. “My birth name was Mira.”
She let that sit between us. It felt like a secret.
“Why tell me?” I finally asked.
Blue eyes, piercing as cold water. “Because you’re the first queen in six hundred years who would understand why I buried it.”
That struck me right in the chest, sharper than any arrow. “Mira, I—”
“It wasn’t me.”
My brows rose. “What wasn’t you?”
“The mirror wraith. I didn’t allow it through.”
For some reason, I believed that. I believed it as much as the forward-leaning curiosity I’d just seen from her over Rhiannon’s death. “Who did?”
“That’s Noctere handiwork. In that court, the scepter and the shiv are never wielded by the same set of hands.”
Gawain.
Liora sat back. “I believe your veyre is investigating the details.”
“How do you know that?”
She tapped one tapered fingernail on the table. “Because he isn’t hovering outside this door.”