Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Eurydice
Green afternoon light poured into the cave. Outside its mouth, rain fell hard and fast. Astringent, stinging my nose.
I had gotten soft. I had been away so long, my body had lost some of its resistance to the acid. But the sting felt good. It felt like home.
Two minutes later, Dorian stumbled through the mirror like he’d fallen—or been shoved.
I rose from my crouch. “Lost your way?”
He straightened, glared back at the mirror as though it had offended him. “Liora had a few words for me.”
“She always does, doesn’t she?” Only now did I remember the stone still in my hand; I pocketed it. “What did she say?”
His face shuttered so fast, I hardly saw the change happen. “She told me to protect you. Keep you safe.”
A laugh scraped out of me, and I turned away. Some bullshit. “We have to wait until the rain stops.”
“Should be in about a half hour,” he said, and his footsteps took him deeper into the cave.
“How would you know that?” I said, twisting around.
“A bear hibernates here in winter.” He sniffed, deep and thoughtful. “That’s why no one ever found the mirror.”
I stared. He was talking as though…
“Did Liora mention how we’re supposed to get inside the wall?”
“We wait until night.” He kicked at some old moss on the floor. “Then we climb.”
“Climb what?” He couldn’t possibly mean—
“The stones. There’s handholds the whole way up.”
“That’s twelve stories.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know.”
He dropped to a seat and began removing things from his belt. He pulled out a small pouch, untied it, and held it up in his palm. “Chalk, for grip.”
Chalk? Fucking chalk?
I grabbed the pouch. “We can’t possibly climb the wall. We’ll be spotted before we’re halfway up.”
He snorted. “Spotted by whom? Those children who can’t see past their hands? Or perhaps your regiment commander?”
A jag of heat rushed through me. Was my regiment commander even alive after what Dorian and the wraiths had done that night? “Say we ascend the wall. There’s guard along the whole perimeter.”
He removed a second pouch from his belt, opened it, and stared inside. “Yes, the same children who can’t see past their hands and sit with dangling legs. Like sneaking past blind arthritic dogs.”
Bastard. Irreverent, foul—
I came to stand over him, but he didn’t look up. I crouched beside him. “How many times did you sneak over that wall?”
He pulled a knife from his belt, unfolded it and held it up to the soft light. “I didn’t count.”
“And you killed changelings. Killed them in their beds?”
He paused. Lowered the knife. “You want to talk about killing. Let’s do that. How was it you killed Rhiannon, again?”
“She was grown. Over a hundred years old. She forced me into that fight.”
“You slit her throat, as I recall.”
“She would have become a wraith.”
“And those changelings would have become—”
My eyebrows rose. “Become what? Farmers? Weavers? Guard?”
His eyes narrowed on me. “You’re painfully na?ve, even now.”
“And you’re a willing murderer. Guess which of the two I’d rather be?”
He flicked the knife shut. “We’re both willing murderers, Eurydice. Someday perhaps you’ll acknowledge that.”
“And someday perhaps you’ll show an ounce of remorse for the children you killed.”
His face bore a hardness that almost made me stand down. Almost. “You think because I don’t demonstrate remorse to you that I don’t feel it?”
“In that throne room, you said you relished it.”
“I do.”
My fingers clenched. “You can’t have both, Dorian.”
“Says you.”
I stood. “I’ll never understand you.”
He set the knife back into his belt. “Because you don’t understand yourself.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“You can’t accept all the parts of yourself, Eurydice. You push them down so deep, you almost forget they exist until you’re desperate for them.”
My hands shook. With what, I didn’t know—anger? Fear? Thrill? “You’re referring to what happened between us in the meadow.”
“Doesn’t matter if I am.” He leaned back against the cave wall. “I could tell you a thousand truths and you would only accept the ones you’re ready to.”
“How about the truth of who you really were, before you fucked me?”
His throat moved, and he met my eyes. For once, I’d pierced him. “I couldn’t. I told you—”
“Rhiannon’s magic, I know. You could have tried harder, Dorian. You could have built a circle of half-truths for me to figure out. Hell, you could at least have refused me that night.”
“I could have,” he said. “But I already…”
“You already what?”
His gaze stayed on me, wide and open. It was so full of meaning, it made my insides clench.
I turned toward the rain—familiar, easy. It never challenged me, never surprised me.
We stayed silent for a time, until his voice lilted through the cave. “You’ve no idea how beautiful you are,” he said.
“Leave off it. You couldn’t throw a stone without hitting a blond-haired, blue-eyed fae in Highmark.”
“That’s not what I mean, Eurydice.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. I felt suddenly cold, like I stood in the rain.
“Your beauty has so little to do with what you look like, though some men might not see past it. But that’s their fault.” He paused, and his breath out was uneven. “From the night I met you, I’ve been terrified of you.”
I burst into echoing laughter. That was the stupidest lie I’d ever heard. It wasn’t even believable.
“There’s a power in you,” he said. “It turned you toward my blade. It climbed you out of that wagon even though you were concussed. It sent you into the grove to look upon the spiritstag as though it were your equal and not a god.”
“Stop it.”
“When I found out we were paired, I thought we would die—and not because of you. Because of me.”
I shivered. “You told me I was your burden.”
“I said that because I was bitter. I was the burden, Eurydice. Every woman is paired with a man in those trials, and he is the burden.”
I could handle his softness even less than his hardness. This actually hurt. “We would have died without your magic in the Eldermaze.”
“No,” he whispered. “You called the rain. You’d have called it if you’d needed it before then.”
I turned. The sight of him made me want to yell and cry. “Why do you hate changelings?”
He tapped his fingers on his thigh. “Before I answer that question, I need to show you something.”
“Show me, then.”
“I can’t right now. It’s in the inner district.”
My arms tightened over my body. “The inner district? We can’t.”
“Of course we can, Eury.”
“We’re not—I’m not…”
He let out a soft laugh. “You’re not highborn?”
Yes, that was it. The thought of going into the inner district was as incomprehensible as breaking through the wall with our bare hands. It was completely, totally off-limits.
“You killed a queen, Eurydice.” A faint smile appeared. “Now you’d let one little wall stop you?”
I came forward. I dropped down onto the cave floor a few paces away and wrapped my cloak around myself. “It’s not little.”
“A wall stands highest in the mind.” He leaned forward, nudged one of the pouches my way. “Rabbit meat?”
“You’re joking.”
He half-smiled. “I wish I were.”
I reached out and took hold of the pouch. I said, looking down at the dried meat, “You can show me, then. But first I need to visit my home.”