Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Eurydice
His hawk’s mask gleamed gold under the chandeliers. He wasn’t much taller than me, and the brilliance of his suit—spun gold woven through the brown fabric, like a hawk’s feathers—created an effect that was almost impossible to look away from.
Through the eyeholes of his mask, his dark eyes were almost childlike. They reminded me of Theo’s.
“I am Cyrus, a servant of the queen.” He extended his hand, palm up. He didn’t say which queen. Perhaps Liora had sent him to pull me away from Kane. “Might I have this dance?”
The sight of Dorian and Finch disappearing through that door flicked through my mind. Dorian had left. Good. Maybe I could finally breathe.
I set my hand into Cyrus’s, and his thumb pressed down over mine. I lowered my chin. “Well met, Cyrus. Which queen do you serve?”
He led me onto the floor as the musicians struck up something slow and sweeping. His hand found my waist—lighter than Kane’s grip, more careful. We began to move.
“You, at the moment. You looked like you needed rescuing.”
“From dancing?”
“From that particular partner.” A smile flickered beneath his hawkish nose. “Kane has a reputation for stepping on toes. Among other things.”
I almost laughed. He was clever, even if he was coy.
We turned through the crowd, passing other couples in their silks and masks. Cyrus danced well—not as smoothly as Dorian, but without any of Kane’s clumsy insistence. I found myself relaxing into the rhythm.
“What were you,” he asked, “in the human kingdom?”
I nearly stumbled, and he steadied me without comment. He’d asked the question so casually, and yet he was the only person who had ever done so since I’d entered Feyreign. He wanted to know about Eurydice Waters.
“What was I?”
“Your job.”
“A guard,” I said, and it felt good to say. I had been a night guard only a few fortnights ago; right now, they probably stood at the wall—what remained of it, at least.
Sometimes I wondered if they’d had a funeral for me, or if they were still picking through wreckage looking for bodies. Had held a funeral for my mother? Perhaps, if my almost-father had lived, he would have arranged one.
My eyes shut, and a strangling longing to return home came over me. Beyond my mother, beyond Theo, I didn’t even know who was alive and who was dead.
“So you lived in one of the outer districts,” Cyrus said, guiding me through the next turn.
My eyes opened. He knew about the districts?
His lips curled. “I was a clockmaker’s son.”
I nearly stopped dancing, but his hands kept me moving. “You’re a changeling?” And not lowborn. Clockmakers didn’t live in the outer districts.
His hand tightened briefly on mine—reassurance, not restraint. “It’s funny they call us that… changelings. As though we have any choice in the change.”
My thoughts fragmented, piled on top of each other. I stared up at him. “A highborn is a changeling?”
He chuckled, the sound low and pleasant. “You think a clockmaker’s son would be highborn?”
“Everyone inside the middle wall is highborn.”
He drew in a long breath, turning us past a pair of Iseris’s courtiers. “If that were true, I imagine I wouldn’t have stared so often at the inner wall and longed to know what it felt like to cross under the trellis gate.”
The inner wall. He’d seen it.
In the pubs, drunk men had spoken of the inner wall as the thickest of all. So thick it was as wide as the outer and middle walls put together. Beyond it lay the castle, and should the outer and middle walls be penetrated, no one would ever get through the inner wall.
Something occurred to me. A thing that should have been obvious from the start. “You were a boy.”
He grinned down at me, canines gleaming. “So you noticed.”
“Changelings are always girls.”
“Yes.” His grin faltered—just slightly. “Well, not—”
A ripple passed through the crowd. The music didn’t stop, but something shifted in the room. Dancers turned their heads. A murmur rose.
Cyrus’s hand tensed on my waist.
I turned to follow his gaze—and there was Dorian, cutting across the ballroom floor. Not walking. Stalking. The crowd parted around him like water around a blade.
His eyes were fixed on us. On Cyrus.
Faun followed a few steps behind, her face pale. “Eury!” Her voice was strangled. She pushed through the last of the dancers, her hand going to her hip where a blade must have been hidden beneath her gown. “Get away from him.”
Cyrus’s hands lifted from me at once. “We were only dancing.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “He’s—”
“Gawain.” Dorian didn’t slow; by now he was close enough that I could see his chest heaving beneath his doublet. Even in this light, even beneath his mask, his eyes gleamed with intent.
Murder. Murder under the midnight sky.