Chapter 29
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Eurydice
The old house was a tomb. It was Dorian’s home.
We retreated from the bedroom and his sister’s blood into the sitting room. We sat on creaking chairs, facing one another. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped, eyes down.
“That night, Gawain took me.” Gawain. Cyrus.
Maeronyx’s spymaster. “After he killed my sister, I attacked him. You can imagine how little that did—a twelve-year-old boy attacking Maeronyx’s best henchman.
Gawain shoved an herb from the winter court into my mouth, and I remember nothing until days later.
I woke up on the back of his horse, already in Noctere. ”
“Gawain.” The name now felt like a curse. I wanted to wipe my fingers of his touch. “But you’re of Sylvanwild. And you were a boy.” Changelings were never boys.
“Rhiannon wanted to see if it was possible.” He rubbed his thumbs together. “A powerful male changeling would be its own kind of weapon.”
I sat forward. “Was it Rhiannon, or the stag commanding her?”
He shrugged. “She claimed the idea, as she did with all others. But you and I know how easily she was influenced.”
My gaze darted around; I could almost see the shadow of Gawain passing through this room, into the hallway. “So Rhiannon had you planted here as a baby, then you were stolen. Maeronyx stole you.”
“You can see why Rhiannon wanted every changeling from the other courts dead.”
Yes. The attack on the wall, the slaughter that followed… Rhiannon had a vendetta.
“And Noctere’s god allowed that?” I asked. “Thieving another court’s changeling?”
He snorted. “The stag permitted a slaughter in your district, and you think the black maw wouldn’t allow for the theft of one fae child?”
I clasped my hands tighter, until my nails dug into my skin.
“Maeronyx is in closest league with her god,” he said. “And the black maw is a cruel one.”
After what I’d seen of Sylvanwild and Highmark… What the hell had Dorian encountered in the winter court?
I wouldn’t ask. I couldn’t.
I said, “Changelings tend more toward power.” In the Eldermaze, Thalassa had told me Dorian had an exceptionally large well of power for a man. I had seen it. Which meant… “It was no accident that Gawain killed your family.”
His red-rimmed eyes lifted. He said nothing, which said everything.
A mercy. It was a mercy my mother had died instantly.
And the pain of losing her, my friends, everyone I had known—it empowered me. It made me wrathful, a terror.
Because of it, I’d killed a queen.
“But I saw your home,” I said. “In the forest…”
He seemed to see past me. “I escaped the winter court when I was fifteen. Three years of Gawain’s training, brainwashing, torture. One night I stole a horse and rode for the border. When the horse fell from exhaustion, I walked.”
My chest felt like it would burst. My eyes stung with horror or anger or grief or all three at once.
“I made it into the forests, and then I collapsed. Haskel was the one who found me.”
Haskel. That was why Dorian loved him.
“He brought me to Rhiannon. Her rage was incredible—not over how chewed up I was, inside and out, but over the theft of a prized plant.” Dorian. Dorian was the plant. “I was barely sane. That was why she gave me over to my mother—my real one.”
His real mother. A fae. The paranoid one. She’d built a tunnel, and yet…
“She was lowborn, which was why she’d given me up. But when I came back to her, she swore never to lose me again. Gawain came and killed her, too.” His mouth twisted in the slant light. “My mother knew wards, but not offensive magic.”
“And Gawain is a spymaster,” I whispered.
A grim nod. “If anyone could break a ward…”
He’d spoken of the cottage in the Eldermaze. Just like every dream of that place, he had said one night, under the stars. Something was trying to get inside, and I was trying to keep it out.
“I tried to end him that day,” he said. “I still wasn’t strong enough.”
The scar on Gawain’s jaw. That was Dorian’s rage, the second time Gawain had come for him. He had lost both his mothers to the same man.
I clutched my head in my hands. “You told me you’d known the fae in the trials your whole life.”
“I spent twelve years in the Kingdom of Storms. Three in Noctere. Ten in Sylvanwild.” His jaw worked. “The boy from the inner district died in Gawain’s chains. Whatever crawled out wasn’t him.”
“Dorian…” I said.
“Don’t.” He pressed his eyes shut. “I can’t stand any more of your pity. I didn’t bring you here for that, Eury.”
We were alike. We were so alike.
Pity felt like its own loss. It was already a miracle he had allowed his feelings to come out in the bedroom; they must have been tidal, overwhelming.
He sucked in air, opened his eyes. “Rhiannon always admired Maeronyx. She wanted her own Gawain, but better. And so…”
He didn’t have to finish. Night-bitch. Sister-killer. “You were the prized plant.”
“But with more magic.” He scoffed. “Perhaps that was why Gawain hated me so much. And why he could never let go of me.”
I straightened with a tingling spine. The conversation, the dance, but most of all, the kinship I’d felt toward that fae in that gilded ballroom… “Gawain’s a changeling, too.”
He nodded. “With all the rage and little of the power.”
A powerless male changeling. Every time Gawain looked at Dorian, saw his potential, he must have felt burning envy. I couldn’t imagine the ways in which he’d taken it out on him. The powerless could be the most dangerous. The worst of us would take every scrap, every opportunity—
Dorian’s chair creaked. He pushed it back and dropped to the dusty floor on his knees.
“I wanted to give you a chance, Eury. Yes, it rains acid here, but Feyreign is fucked.”
My gaze had unfocused. Now he came into clarity before me, and those dark eyes had never scared me more.
This was my veyre without armor, without pretense, without excuse.
It felt like we existed in a not-quite-real place, of spirits and truth.
Only truth, because lying would be as obvious here as blood on fresh snow.
Before me knelt the boy he had been, and also the teenager, also the man. All three of them collapsed into the same battered body.
He had been thinking of me when he’d made that offer. Me and no one else.
“You’re going back to that fucked place,” I said. “Aren’t you?”
His brows lowered. “I have to.”
“Why?”
“You said it yourself. I’m a killer.” He raked his fingers over his chest like he wanted to shed his own skin. “The things I’ve seen, the things I’ve done… I belong nowhere else.” His hand dropped, and he slumped back onto his heels. His face disappeared behind the lanky veil of his hair.
This man was so raw, so terribly loathing, just the sight of him felt like touching lightning.
“You hate changelings”—I shivered in place—“because you hate yourself.”
His lips folded, barely visible past his hair. “If all the gods we believed in as children were real, every one of them would damn us for what we are.”
My eyebrows rose. “You believed in the gods?”
“Didn’t you?”
“No.” The answer came at once. “Never. I wanted to—I waited for evidence of them. But there was only us. Just humans.”
For a second, I saw him only as a boy. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, sitting on the stoop of this home with his eyes cast upward. Full of untainted wonder.
He was like my mother. Believing without proof, his heart unsundered. She was the best person I had ever known.
“I believe my mother is with me.” My hand went to my chest. “I believe that.”
“Eury—”
“And I believe you’re not damned.”
“You don’t know half of what I did.”
I wanted to reach out and touch him; I couldn’t. “Do you regret it?”
His face lifted. His eyes were wide. “I’m tortured by it.”
That was the truth. Here was the Dorian I’d longed for from the start, the one freed of secrets.
He came forward on his knees. Forward, forward, and I still couldn’t move; I didn’t want to, but I just couldn’t. He gathered up my hands. His were cold. “That night in the throne room, the night of the Thorn Rite—”
“I remember.”
“I told you I’d despised you. That you were my burden. But I meant it when I told you in the cave that I felt like your burden. I saw your power from the moment I found you standing there in the Dip. And when you turned toward my sword…”
I swallowed. Didn’t speak.
“I was afraid of you,” he said. “Everything about you shone, like a goddess sent to this plane. Fearless. And every moment I spent with you after that, every time you turned those eyes on me, it struck new fear in me. Like you saw right through me.”
Dorian—he’d been afraid of me?
“And fuck, when we were partnered by the stag…” His brows drew together, as though remembering in real time.
“I knew I was the sacrifice at the altar of your power—your ascent. I resented you, because no matter what Gawain or Rhiannon or the stag had seen in me, I knew it was dwarfed by what lay inside you.”
He let out a one-note bitter laugh. “And though you hadn’t yet tasted your own power, even though I was a bastard, you didn’t let me die. Twice in the Eldermaze, again under Virellan Falls, when you became Carys…”
Was that right? Had I saved Dorian’s life in every trial? All of it felt like a strange, bloody blur.
“I don’t expect you to forgive me.” He raised my hands. One by one, he placed his lips to the back of each. “But I need you to know that no matter what you choose—tonight, or in the years to come—I could never hate you. Never, never, never.”
His words rose into the air, hung in the stillness. His lips were still warm on my hands, though he had lowered them back to my lap.
I had expected a war in my chest, a refusal coupled with the longing. At my coronation, I had sworn never to trust him again. But the truth was the truth, and this was Dorian’s and mine.
We were two changelings, brought together by a queen and a god. The spiritstag had known, had paired us for that reason.
Our power was wrought through pain.
I knew now: we were the same. We had grown up on opposite sides of the same wall, run the streets in parallel, stared up at the same moon. We were tortured by the same desires, cursed by the same sky.
I forgave him. Completely, thoroughly, irrevocably.
I stood with my hands in his. His face lifted as I neared, just as mine had as we’d approached the wall. I set my palms at either side of his head, thumbs over his temples.
We met eyes. He searched mine. I lowered my face and kissed his forehead.
“If you’re going back,” I murmured against his skin, “I’m going back.”
He closed his eyes, and for the first time since I’d left my home, I didn’t feel alone.