Chapter 27 #2
Whispered words drifted from somewhere close—his voice. It was his hand stroking my hair. Stroking it just like my mother did when I was a girl.
It didn’t feel quite the same. But nothing ever would.
He didn’t press me, didn’t push me away. He just kept murmuring and stroking until my fingers unclenched and I lifted my face.
Through wet eyelashes, I saw him. He looked down at me with sadness like I’d never seen. Like it was his mother who’d died.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I’m so sorry, Eury.”
“She didn’t deserve it.”
“No, she didn’t.”
I swallowed phlegm. Dorian wiped at my face with the edge of his cloak. Certain things were inviolable, and one of them was your mother. Somehow, I’d known Dorian would understand that.
He held me a while longer in the quiet of the alley, until the wetness on my cheeks dried in the fetid breeze and I shifted in his arms.
“There’s one other place I need to see,” I said. “Before we leave here.”
He nodded.
Ten minutes later, we stood near the entrance to the barracks. So small now, shabby under moonlight. The yard was quiet, empty—and the massive section of wall that had fallen in the center of it was gone. As was the infirmary, as if it had never existed.
“Was this where you trained?” Dorian asked from beside me.
I pointed. “That was where I slept.” My finger circled. “And this is where I ran.”
I started forward, half-expecting Dorian to stay me. But he didn’t, and he didn’t ask where I was going, either.
The well sat like a small round sentinel in the night, the bucket drawn up. I saw myself from the outside, the moment I’d shored up against it and had the breath knocked out of me.
I’d been thrown off the porch of the infirmary. Saved by someone who knew exactly what she was doing.
My steps carried me across the yard and stopped at the spot where she’d stared up into the sky. The ground met my knees as I dropped into the dirt and lowered my head.
I didn’t even know who Isa’s family was, whether she’d gotten a funeral. Those were rare in the southern district, reserved for those with a modicum of power. And an old nurse had none.
My hand went to my belt pocket, fished until my fingers closed over the cold iron of the guard’s pin. Drawn out under the moonlight, it gleamed with a strange pallor. Thalassa’s gift.
A shadow passed over the moon. Dorian stood above me. Then he was kneeling in the dirt beside me.
I set the pin on the ground. Isa should have a headstone, a memorial. Not a pin in the dirt. Not two fae kneeling for a woman who had spent her life distrusting what lurked beyond the walls.
But life rarely gave us what we deserved.
The middle wall stood so high, we used to say even our prayers couldn’t climb it.
When we came out of the barracks yard, Dorian stopped in the middle of the street, turned, and stared at the high middle wall like a tapestry. And for so long, it had been that to me: an impossible dream, an entry into highborn life none of us would ever know.
The street lay empty. Even so, we were exposed out here, potentially recognized. I stood close beside him. “I don’t suppose there are handholds up this one, too?”
He turned to me, sudden and breathless. “We don’t have to go on. You could stay here.”
I dragged my gaze off the wall. “What?”
His face was half-hidden in the shadow of his hood; only his mouth and jaw were visible. He gestured back, toward the southern district and the Dip. “You could stay. Live your life.”
“As what? Everyone thinks I’m dead.”
“Be anything you want. Go to another district, if you like. One of the inner districts. Be a highborn. You’ve been part of the Sylvanwild Court long enough to know how it goes.”
A jag of irritation tightened my chest. “We’ve been sent here by Liora. Someone will come looking for me.”
“I’ll tell them I killed you,” he said. “They’d believe that, from me. Far more likely a story than letting you go.”
“You’re my veyre. That doesn’t just end—”
He took hold of my arm, backed us toward the side of a building. “Didn’t you notice when we left Feyreign?” He let out a small noise like a laugh or a scoff. “The thread is gone.”
My hand came up to my breastbone. He was right; I hadn’t felt it since the moment we’d stepped through that mirror into the cave.
The stag’s spell was gone. We were free from one another.
“I’m not your veyre here,” he said. “That was why I agreed to bring you home, Eury. To give you a chance.”
Home. This was my home.
And yet…
My mother was dead. They were all dead. Should I live my life beside that crater?
I stepped closer to him, fingers clenching. “A chance at what? What is there for me here, exactly? Don’t say a life. You destroyed that.”
His lips pressed together. Good. Let it hurt.
His hand on my arm was gentle. His voice was even gentler. “Back that way is death. Not kneeling—dying. Three queens waiting to dismember you in the Killing Fields. Don’t think Liora has your best interests in mind because you’re flaxen and Seelie.”
“I’ve never been so stupid as to think any of you fae would have my best interests in mind.”
“And yet you’ve played into her wishes.”
“I’ve played into my wishes, Dorian.”
He stepped closer, chin lowering. “Is that it, then? Is that why?”
“Why what?”
“You could have a sweet life. You could have a husband, children. You could die in your bed whenever you so choose—or never, if you choose that. Don’t you know what you’re giving up?”
Fool. Fae fool. So he’d sat in the pub and walked the streets a few times, smelled the afternoon rains and thought he understood.
I bent, grabbed up a handful of dirt where the street was broken up and unrepaired and the acid had eaten through the stone. “Would you choose this?”
“Dirt?”
I squeezed my fist until the dust poured through my fingers. “Acid pouring from the sky. The green haze, the sting in your nostrils, the long stretch of barrenness as far as you can see.”
“Eury—”
“A world so fucking deprived, you can’t grow one sapling.”
“Please.”
“No, I don’t please.” I pressed closer, until our chests touched. “You took me out of here, showed me life. Abundance. Magic. Power. And you offer me this?”
His hand came up under mine, the palm closing over my own until my fingers closed over the dirt.
“I hear you. I hear you, Eurydice.”
My heart said otherwise, thudding in my ears. “Do you?”
“Yes.” His chest still touched mine. His voice had fallen to a whisper. “I won’t make you stay. But can I show you something, before you decide?”
I still felt like tossing the dirt in his face. “Show me what?”
He turned his face toward the middle wall. “It’s there.”
“Over the wall?”
“Through it.”