Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Eurydice
The handmaiden brought the second course out—a steaming meaty dish and a carafe of purple juice. Liora had long since unbuttoned the lacy neck of her dress. Now she poured from the carafe into my glass.
“One thing I should like to know.” Her eyes remained on the act of pouring. “Is why you chose to be your own champion in the Killing Fields.”
I stared at the three forks laid to the left of my plate as I debated my answer.
“The outermost, young queen.” Liora set down the carafe, lifted her own fork, and drove it into a piece of ham. She began cutting—quick, precise strokes. “Always outer to inner. Did your famous tailor and etiquette master teach you nothing?”
I lifted the outer fork. “He taught me a few things.”
“Did he advise you to be your own champion?”
“No—I chose that.”
Liora met my eyes, skepticism written there. “Do you know what they say about the gods in Feyreign?”
“They’re untrustworthy and out for themselves?”
She let out an amused breath. “Yes, well, the saying goes like this: ‘A god who doesn’t meddle is hardly more than a cloud.’”
“I have yet to see a cloud in Highmark.”
Her lips curled. “The dawn hawk’s wings are most powerful.”
I paused with a piece of ham halfway to my mouth.
“No exaggeration, young queen.” She took a sip from her glass. “Have you been much to see the spiritstag in his grove?”
“Once or twice.” Or three or four times.
“And did the antlered autumn god provide you with cryptic guidance?”
She knew. She knew exactly why I had made my choice. Perhaps she knew about my promise, and the desperation behind it.
She lowered the glass. Her lips were stained a beautiful plum. “You do know that the rest of us silly court queens will now have to meet your challenge.”
I bit into my rasher, chewed. Fear had been with me so long, the tightness of my chest almost felt like a friend. And truth felt like its companion. “That’s why the mirror wraith came for me last night.”
“Perhaps, or simply to test you. A proper mirror wraith isn’t even seen until the job is done.” She stabbed at her meat. “That won’t be your last tangle with death before the fortnight is through.”
No softening, no apology. Just a queen cutting her meat and informing me that people would try to kill me again, as if remarking on the weather. And that bluntness was more comforting than any reassurance.
“You have a terrible dining mask,” Liora said. “I can see the processing written all over your face.”
I focused on her. “Why help me?”
She let out that delightful laugh. “Oh, young queen. Do you know how many times I’ve nearly met with death in the last six centuries?”
I didn’t answer. Didn’t even know how to.
Liora sat forward, pulling the neck of her dress aside. A terrible scar ran along her shoulder, up toward her ear. The sight felt intimate, almost obscene.
“This is one of thirteen marks.” Her voice was low, gaze level on me. “The others are in more indecent places. Of course there’ll be more attempts where all four queens are gathered, and one of them is a fresh-from-the-mud changeling who slit her predecessor’s throat.”
Only one question rose to mind. I set my fork on my plate.
“How are you still here?”
She let go of the neck of her dress and sat back. “We Highmark fae may not have fangs, but we’re no less capable. Patience bears its own sharp edge.”
“Meaning?"
“If I accused everyone who tried to kill me, I’d have spent my entire reign at war with the other three courts.
” Liora’s voice was light, but her eyes were not.
“Great queens don’t confront would-be murderers over breakfast. We smile.
We let them think they’re clever. And when the time is right, we act—decisively, without a word spoken. ”
Rhiannon had tried to play a great queen. She’d had the right idea: destroy the other courts’ changelings in one night, thwart them without lifting a finger inside Feyreign. Yet she’d been too showy, wanted too much glory; she’d knocked down a wall and turned the sky green.
Liora nodded at me. “I see it in you, too, little blue eyes.”
She adjusted her posture until we were mirrors of each other, her hand hovering over the forks set beside her dish.
“That’s right,” Liora said. “You noticed it, didn’t you, the moment you entered this court? How alike we are. I could be your mother, your grandmother, your aunt, your cousin.”
She’d prompted a question that now rang through my mind—
“I’m afraid I’m not any of those things to you,” she said, her voice sober. “Even though changelings are chosen from among the lowborn. My village was destroyed by the reigning winter queen. Every last one of my family, except for me.”
I stiffened, rapt. “Why?”
“A petty dispute.” She lifted her fingers as though to inspect her nails. “We were a border village, easy to fuck with. Our destruction wasn’t even a footnote in history. I suppose that was why I rose to power in the first place.”
My throat had gone thick. How long ago had she swallowed down the grief, rendered it a footnote in her own long memory? If she were anything like me, she preferred not to dwell. “Why are changelings chosen from the lowborn?”
She lowered her nails. “Because most will die. If not as children in the human kingdom, then in the trials that follow.”
She lifted her glass, swirled it, gazed into the liquid center. “You should have died long ago,” she said, her voice distant. “You’re small for even a Highmark fae. You’re fine but not remarkable with a bow or a sword—”
Well, I had only had twenty years to Liora’s six hundred—
“—and you managed to piss Rhiannon the fuck off. Which should have been your true death sentence.”
“I—”
“And yet,” she went on, blue eyes meeting mine, “here you are. The first changeling queen since Carys. You from Highmark, she from Sylvanwild. It’s been four hundred years since I last spoke to that bitch, and still I hear her rasping voice. Do you know what you have in common?”
I thought maybe I did, but I only shook my head.
She leaned forward, set the glass down. Her hands went to the table as though she would climb onto it. “You both crave power. You crave it like your veyre craves your love. You would claw until your nails fell off if it meant touching the edges of it.”
Her words were like blows, all three sentences. She had only met Dorian once; how could she possibly know? But that was lost under the waves of everything else.
I found myself sitting bolt upright, part offended, but also…
Part seen. Part understood.
We were more than just mirrors of each other. Liora—Mira—and I were orphans. We were sacrifices to a great violent wheel that went on rolling and churning no matter who reigned.
She must have registered an expression on my face, because her lips parted into a wolf’s grin.
“I shall make you an exchange, young queen. It’s one you’ll want to consider carefully, because it will very likely mean the difference between your life and the loss of it.”
Hours later, Mirek’s fingers tightened on mine, his opposite hand cold at my waist. He’d insisted I wear my sleeping slip, to better feel my partner’s hand on my body.
He moved me around the fountain in our guest quarters with frustrated, workmanlike grace.
Every time I stepped on his fine leather shoes, he grimaced.
In one corner, Finch played a flute with several chambers. Haskel sat beside him, arms crossed and eyes shut. In another corner, Faun leaned against the wall, running a whetstone down the length of her rapier in long, unhurried strokes.
“What do you mean,” she said, coming into view as Mirek spun me around, “Liora will show you the way?”
It didn’t matter now if Theia overheard our conversation from outside the door. What could she take back to Liora that Liora hadn’t already shared with me herself?
I spun back into Mirek’s grip, and this time he moved his foot before I stepped on it. “She’ll show me the way to the dagger,” I said, half dizzy. “Carys’s dagger.”
“Eyes on me,” Mirek said. “The eyes are where the seduction lies.”
I forced my attention onto my tailor. I didn’t want to seduce anyone, least of all the young fae men at the Festival of the First Light’s opening ball, but apparently, like fighting, it was the only way to dance.
“How kind of her. Breaks her fast with you and offers you Carys’s dagger,” Faun scoffed. “Why doesn’t she hold it, then?”
Mirek jerked me along with the broken notes of Finch’s flute, and I decided dancing was more violent than sparring. “I expect she can’t retrieve it herself,” Mirek said.
“And Eury can?” Faun scraped the whetstone again. “Why her and not the six-hundred-year-old monarch?”
Haskel made Finch lower the flute. “Isn’t it obvious?”
Mirek’s hand left my waist. He snapped his fingers. “Music, please!”
“The boy’s lips tire.” Haskel sat back. “And the girl does, too. You’ve twirled her so many times, her head’s on backward.”
We came to a stop, and when Mirek let me go I dropped to a seat on the lip of the fountain as the world dipped and spun.
Mirek yanked a handkerchief from his breast pocket and patted his brow. “I pity the man who requests a dance with her.”
“Perhaps I’ll just go around with my canines out,” I said. “That should fix the problem.”
“What’s obvious?” Faun asked Haskel.
Haskel gestured to me. “If our Eury is the only one capable of retrieving this dagger, and it confers the kind of power Liora promises, then guess who’d ride atop the Sylvanwild queen once the trial is done?”
“Her only ally.” Faun’s gaze found me. “The queen she feels indebted to.”
Yes, that had been the trade-off. Liora, my mentor, my ally—the queen behind the queen—in exchange for the dagger.
She knew where it was hidden. Only she, because no other queen was alive both in Carys’s time and in ours. And Carys had trusted Liora more than the other grasping queens of the time.
Carys, the queen of storms. The changeling who’d cursed her own kingdom with acid rain. Who’d cut her fate line from end to end.
I could still feel the dagger in my hand. The pain of its edge on my skin. The reverent gazes of her soldiers—the respect one weapon conferred.
That blade was out there somewhere, waiting for me. The stag had let me taste its power, and now nothing else would do.
Once my body had settled, I stood. “I’m going to accept her offer.”
“You haven’t even heard our advice,” Faun said.
I crossed to the armchair and pulled my robe from atop it. “What choice do I have, Faun? She knows I can’t say no, unless I want the other queens at my back.”
“She speaks true,” Haskel said.
The front door of the guest chambers opened, and Dorian appeared.
He took in the scene in a second, his eyes lingering on me as I pulled my robe on.
His hair was a mess, his breathing fast. Dorian unclasped his cloak and strode to Faun’s side.
His voice was so quiet, I almost couldn’t hear the words. “Gawain is here.”
Faun pressed off the wall, her arms uncrossing. “You’re certain?”
I stopped tying my robe and glanced between the two of them.
“He’s on loan from Maeronyx.” Dorian threw his cloak over a chair. “Been doing Liora’s dirtiest work down below.”
“To what end?”
I stepped closer to them, tied my robe off, and listened.
“I thought Gawain was dead,” Faun said. “You told Rhiannon he was dead.”
“I thought he was.” Dorian crossed to the spread of food, picked up a bread knife, and began cutting into a loaf like an animal’s carcass. It was the first time I’d really seen him go near food since we’d left Sylvanwild.
Faun scoffed. “Look at the state of you. Both of them have already gained from his service.”
Dorian lifted a hunk of bread and tore into it with his teeth. “If she knew what he was, she wouldn’t keep him around. She’d have his head off in two seconds.”
The two of them shared a whole history, an understanding. They spoke so quickly, I could hardly follow. They hadn’t bothered explaining anything to me; I might have been a ghost.
Something Liora had said at breakfast drifted back to me. I’d asked her what it would mean for us to be allies, and she had told me she would teach me to be a queen.
“If your subjects ignore you, let them,” she’d said. “Don’t demand their attention—it’s the quickest way to lose it.”
“But how then do I lead?” I’d asked.
She half-smiled. “You make yourself unignorable.”
I didn’t know what that meant. Not exactly. Not until this moment.
Faun and Dorian didn’t notice when I passed into my chamber. They went on arguing about Gawain and Liora and Maeronyx.
I dropped onto my knees, opened the trunk that had ridden on the back of our carriage all the way from Sylvanwild. My black leathers sat folded at the bottom, left over after all of Mirek’s pretty dresses had been extricated.
I would take every lesson Liora had to teach me. I would be her sunlit protégé.