Chapter 27
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Eurydice
Dorian and I stepped out of the cave after sunset.
Thanks to the hollow pool, I could see the outer wall from bottom to top.
It emerged from the night in grayscale, torchlight babbling at golden intervals atop it.
The stones stretched smooth and unbroken from end to end.
In just three fortnights, they had rebuilt the outer wall to its old height.
I had never stood on this side of the wall. I had never been the monster in the night.
Maybe I had dreamed that night. Maybe—
“I always thought it was beautiful,” Dorian said beside me. His finger traced through the air, following the wall’s line from mountainside to curving edge. “The perfect angle of it. Hard to think humans could make such an exact circle on that scale.”
“You don’t think much of humans, do you?”
His gaze was still on the wall. “I don’t think much of any sentient creature. But that has nothing to do with their intelligence.” He glanced at me. “Ready?”
I swallowed, gaze traveling up the wall. I had never been scared of heights, but this… “Yes.”
“We can wait, Eury.”
I shook my head and stepped forward. Fear was the only path to courage. “Where are these handholds?” I was doubtful even now that the wall—our precious wall—was compromised. I had seen it blown to bits, and yet the child in me still believed it impenetrable.
Dorian pointed. “The closest are where it joins with the mountainside.”
“The closest?”
“It’s a long wall.” He started over the barren ground. “You’ll go ahead of me.”
“Shouldn’t I follow you?”
“The handholds are marked. You can’t miss them.” He paused. “And I doubt you could catch me if I fell atop you.”
We walked, and the wall loomed. As we neared it, Dorian’s voice lowered. “Once you’re at the top, you’ll be about twenty paces from the closest guard. Move quickly to the stairs.”
“And if they notice me?”
“They won’t.” In the darkness, his lips kicked up. “You’ve changed, Eury.”
“They’ll be on alert, after the attack.”
“They won’t notice you. Listen—right now, listen for your footsteps.”
I couldn’t hear them. I couldn’t hear my own footsteps.
I stopped.
He turned back. “You do it automatically now, when you don’t want to be heard.”
“It’s not that,” I said.
He seemed to understand immediately, because he approached. He came so close, he blocked the sight of the wall. His hands rose, and he hesitated. When I didn’t move, he laid them lightly on my shoulders.
“You’re not going to fall,” he whispered. “Trust me.”
I stared up at him. “I can’t trust you.”
“You’re not the burden.” His thumb stroked my shoulder; I didn’t hate it. “How many times did you climb that wall as a girl?”
“That was different.”
“You did, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Hundreds of times.”
His head tilted. “How did I know that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you snuck into my chamber and read my mother’s journal.”
“Or maybe this is just who you are.” His hand came to my cheek. “You climb walls in the night.”
“There were stairs involved.”
“Think of these as steps, then. Little ones. Good for small feet.”
I hated his softness, and I hated more that I didn’t move away. “Any other sterling advice?”
His smile disappeared. “Once you’ve started up, don’t look down.”
We walked until we reached the base of the wall. Dorian stepped up to the great stones and set his fingers to one at chest-height. At his touch a small triangle illuminated, iridescent as though under moonlight. But the moon wasn’t out tonight.
The wall was marked. The fae had marked it.
How stupid I’d been, thinking us safe. Meanwhile, the fae were coming in and out, swapping babies by night. Had I been carried up this wall? That might explain my obsession with it.
Dorian stepped back and gestured for me. The triangle of light slowly diminished until it winked out.
I came forward and set my fingers to the wall. Cold, unforgiving stone. But the symbol came to life under my touch… and revealed a deep groove.
I set one hand into my chalk pouch and grabbed a handful. White coated my palms as I rubbed them together. I placed a hand into the groove. My other skimmed upward, searching until I found a second not far above it. The spot illuminated as soon as I brushed it.
Here was the start. Far up there could be my end.
Don’t think of it. If I didn’t go, I never would. And the only way into my own home was up this wall.
I pulled myself up until my boot landed in the first groove. As soon as my hands touched the wall above, another triangle appeared. I gripped the hold and pulled myself up again.
I didn’t know if Dorian had started climbing; I couldn’t hear him beneath me. I just had to trust, while his advice rang in my ears—
Don’t look down.
Every time I lifted myself, the wall reminded me of its purpose. Cold, rough, an unforgiving expanse. It scraped against my leathers. It pressed into my cheek. It gave nothing except three inches of hand- or footholds, and soon that felt like a gift.
My whole life depended on three inches.
The wind picked up, and I climbed. I climbed when my hands began to ache and my fingers grew stiff and numb. I climbed when my braid whipped into my face. I climbed when the clouds thinned and the moon came out.
Eventually, babbling floated on the wind. The babbling of firelight.
Faint voices came to me, and I ventured a look straight up. Until this moment I’d only sought out the next triangle of light, but now my face angled higher.
The top. The top wasn’t far off.
I reached for the next groove, leveraging myself up—and my foot slipped. I jerked downward, and my grip loosened.
A hand caught my foot. Dorian.
He had been right below me the whole time.
He pushed me back up—his hand slow, sure—until I was able to step onto the groove.
My breath tore in and out as I clung to the wall’s face. My hands were numb, and my toes, but my heart still beat a racket in my chest.
I climbed with aching arms and legs. I climbed because of who I had been—the girl who’d scaled the wall by night a hundred, two hundred times.
Eventually I reached the top—the place I’d spent my whole life longing to be. Fingers hooked over the ledge, I dragged myself over, arms and hands and thighs shaking, but I didn’t make a noise.
My knees hit stone, one, then the other. I stood and turned just as he came up behind me, rising like a shade in the night. The monster who’d taken me out of my home, and who’d now returned me to it.
There at the top of the world, gazing back at him, I realized maybe Dorian was right.
Maybe this was just who I was.
I stood between the mountainside and the district I had grown up in. The kingdom sprawled before me, the districts laid out under moonlight, buildings and roads all narrowing toward the high-spired castle at the center.
I’d looked over the Kingdom of Storms a thousand times, but never like this. The slanted rooftops with missing shingles. The torchlight glittering on the outer wall and the middle and the inner. The castle’s white flags drifting, slapping in the wind.
I felt its smallness, like a toy town a child might create.
Atop the wall, the guard were posted along the edge for as far as my eyes took me—and none were sitting. I felt an urge to find my spot amongst them. To find Theo.
But he wasn’t there. He would never be there again.
A hand touched my arm. Dorian, with his hood already up. He urged me toward the stairs down.
I lifted my own hood. We passed behind a night guard so young he must have been a child—and he never so much as raised his bobbing head.
All those years climbing the wall, and I’d never suspected. Never noticed, not once. All along, the fae came and went as they pleased.
We came down the stairs, switchbacking twelve stories to the cobblestones. The descent was so easy, so familiar. I stopped at the bottom—I couldn’t move my feet. I couldn’t breathe.
I was back. I was back in the southern district.
The night lay quiet except for laughter and clinking from a nearby pub. That was how early nights were: the pubs linked the district together in sound. It had always warmed me, to know happiness existed somewhere at any time of night.
Dorian stood by me, waiting, until I turned to him.
“Where to?” he asked.
I almost laughed. For once, I knew the way.
“The Dip.”
I took us through alleys, never along the main streets. This was how I’d navigated as a girl at night, avoiding all the faces that knew me; the alleys were almost more familiar than the throughways.
Before long we arrived at the street I’d grown up on. I turned a corner—and froze.
Dorian came around the corner behind me. He stopped beside me, quiet as ever, with a view of the street. He said nothing. Maybe he suspected anything he said would be useless.
Before us lay the crater. Its dimensions were the same—the depth, the sheer fucking radius. Except instead of buildings in shambles with sections of wall atop them, there was just… nothing.
It had all been cleared away. The buildings. The rubble. The bodies. My home. The door with the sun on its face.
It was real. It had happened.
My mother was dead and gone.
Until now, some part of me had believed—really believed—none of it had happened.
That it had been a dream, a delusion, and still, still I clung to the wild idea that she might be alive.
That I would return, find her, step into her floury kitchen and the smell of yeast and run my finger over the pale surface of her counter.
Mothers couldn’t die. They simply couldn’t.
Truth collided with longing. The scene before me blurred.
I turned toward Dorian before I knew what I was doing. His arms came around me, and he stepped us back into the alley we’d come from. He leaned against the wall and pulled me into him and held me so tight the breath was pressed out of me. I pushed my face into his chest and gripped at his shirt.
She hadn’t even been my mother, yet she’d loved me like one. She’d known, yet she’d kept me.