Chapter 30 #2
When I did, she stood with her leathers on, untied, and tears on her cheeks. Her hair still hung loose over her shoulders. Her arms wrapped over her chest like she was cold.
Everything in me—the heat of my blood, the pulsing in my veins—shifted at once. All that mattered was the wetness on her cheeks.
“What is it?” I whispered.
“I told myself I’d never trust you again.” One tear slipped to her jaw, held there in the candlelight. “But I think that’s not true anymore. And…”
I stepped closer. The only thing I wanted was to hold her.
“I don’t know what to do with everything you said.” She shifted her face up to me. “I don’t even know if I deserve it.”
“Deserve it?”
Her chin trembled before she stiffened it. “My mother, she knew I wasn’t her baby.”
My hand came up, almost touched her jaw. “Eury, she was your mother.”
“Did she even love me?” A choked pause. “Could she?”
Now I did step forward. I closed her in my arms and set my head on top of hers. “Of course she could. She did.”
“How could you know that?”
I kissed her sweet hair. “Because it’s impossible not to love you.”
She grasped at my shirt and let out a small, guttural noise that I knew had as much to do with her own pain as with me. I knew she needed her hair stroked, my hand on her back, and so I gave that to her. Easily, gladly, whatever she needed.
We stood like that for minutes, until she raised her face and wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands. Her eyes were clear, intent. All the ghosts had drifted elsewhere, and the Eurydice I knew was back.
“We’re going somewhere dangerous.” Not a question.
I nodded.
“And we need to leave now.” Also not a question.
I nodded again.
“I’ll finish getting ready. Before I do”—her eyes narrowed—“if you don’t kiss me, I’ll name a new veyre.”
She was a menace. An absolute menace.
“That’s not how any of this works,” I said on my breath, already in motion. I slid one hand into her silky hair, lowered my face, and crushed my mouth against hers.
Her lips parted for me like she’d been waiting, and my tongue pressed against hers. Sweet, warm, mine.
Her fingers clawed at my shirt. I groaned, pulling her closer. I lifted her off her feet and backed us up until her spine met the wall and her legs wrapped around me. My hand found the bare skin at her hip, sliding into the waist of her pants, and she gasped into my mouth.
I wanted to devour her. I wanted to lay her down on that narrow bed and forget every promise I’d ever made.
Her teeth caught my lower lip. My hips pressed into hers, and the sound she made—gods, the sound she made.
"Dorian." My name on her breath. Half plea, half warning.
I kissed down her jaw, her neck, the hollow of her throat. Her pulse fluttered against my lips. She arched into me, fingers digging into my shoulders hard enough to bruise.
We had time. No one knew us here. No handmaidens, no court, no gods watching. Just a locked door and a bed and her body warm against mine.
My hand slid higher. She shivered.
The Killing Fields. The dagger. The trial.
We didn’t have much time. Every minute we spent here was a minute less to retrieve the dagger, to get back to Feyreign.
Curse the trial. Curse necessity. And yet—
"We can’t." I said it against her collarbone, not believing it.
She didn’t let go… until she did, by increments. Then, on a breath out, the tension went out of her body.
I lifted my head. Her eyes were dark, her lips swollen, her hair a wreck from my hands. She looked like a queen who’d been thoroughly ruined, and I wanted to finish the job.
"If we start this now," I managed, "I won’t stop."
Her gaze dropped to my mouth. "I know."
The silence stretched. My whole body ached with the effort of holding still.
She was the one who moved first—palm flat against my chest, pushing gently. Not away. Just… enough. "We need to leave," she whispered.
"You’re right.” But I couldn’t make myself move.
Her laugh was shaky, breathless. A brightness against the tugging darkness of our lives. "So let’s go." She rolled her hips against me, and her eyes flashed.
My grip tightened on her thighs, instinct warring against duty, before I let her down slowly. I kept her pinned against the wall because if I didn’t, I’d throw her on that bed. Her hands stayed fisted in my shirt.
"When this is over," I said, low.
Her eyes met mine. "When this is over."
A promise. The first one between us that felt absolutely true.
We left the inn after the sun had set. A raucous tune followed us out the door—glasses clinking, men laughing like tonight was the last, best night of their lives.
I didn’t have to ask Eury if the pubs carried the same intensity in the Dip; I had roamed them enough during my trips back, just to see for myself what the rest of the kingdom was like.
The outer districts were always edged with more. More want, more need, more desperation.
I felt that want in Eury. It flowed off her like her magic, visible in any light, nearly tangible. Back in the inn she’d been so hungry for me, just as she was hungry for everything. Power, touch, knowledge.
Her hunger was a drug.
She walked close beside me in the early night. “You aren’t going to tell me where we’re going?”
“Better I don’t say.”
“What if I lose you?”
“You won’t.” Not ever.
The middle wall loomed high over the pub. We followed it, walking the slanted street beside the sewers, until the pub noises had faded away. The perpendicular streets became narrower, the buildings’ facades less kempt, and the lights dimmer, less frequent.
We’d reached the poorest part of the inner district. The Sluice. The last place I wanted to be, the exact place we needed to be. And my fear had nothing to do with what lay above ground. I hoped she couldn’t hear my thudding heart.
I brought us to a sewer grate and stopped atop it.
“This again,” Eury said. “Here I was certain we’d be infiltrating the castle.”
I knelt over the grate. “Certain, or hoping?”
“Same difference in the Dip.”
I smiled as I slid my fingers through the grating. With gritted teeth and a groan of metal, I pulled it up and free. “Down we go.”
She didn’t move except to hold her nose shut with her thumb and forefinger. “There’s no way Carys’s dagger is hidden amongst acid-drenched shit.”
“And if it is?” I raised my eyebrows up at her. “Would you dig through it?”
“Of course.” She came around the hole, sighed, and lowered herself down the rungs attached to the stone wall beneath. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Which was?”
She glanced back up at me as she slipped into darkness. “I was four. Dropped my mother’s only good spoon down the privy hole.”
Probably wasn’t her good spoon after that. I lowered myself down after her and pulled the grate back over the hole.
At the bottom, she stood in a cone of slatted light. She’d already pulled out her crystal; the golden-white light illuminated her pale face. She gestured left and right to the ledge and tunnel running into darkness. “Left, right?”
“I haven’t got the first fucking idea. But it’s not the crystal you’ll need—it’s Liora’s stone.”
She pulled out the stone in her other hand, flipped it and caught it. “This?” My chest compressed, and I set my hand over hers before she tossed it again. “This is—”
“The sol key,” I said.
Her brow lowered. “This.”
I’d watched Liora as she’d handed it over. The preciousness with which she held it, the way her fingertips had lingered on its surface. “Yes. That.”
Her grip tightened on it. “It’s unremarkable.”
“I think that’s the point.”
She turned left, toward the darkness. “So we walk and wait for light.”
“That’s the long and short of it.”
She walked ahead of me, stone in hand. Her braid swung gently as she navigated the ledge. “Did you explore down here as a child?”
“All the time, once I could lift the grates.”
She glanced back. “Surely a group of you could have leveraged one of those up.”
Eury thought her childhood mirrored mine. I only said, “I suppose so.”
She didn’t speak right away; our footsteps echoed as she seemed to take this in. Finally, “You were a loner.” She half-glanced back. “Were you weird?”
I chuffed. “Probably.” Talking with her like this could almost make me forget the smells, and what we walked toward.
“I bet you liked reading.”
“You’d bet right.”
“You and Elisabet would have gotten along. The archivists’ college was about to admit her when…” She slowed, then resumed her pace. “Well, it doesn’t matter.”
Elisabet. The name was vaguely familiar.
Then the memory surfaced. Eury had told me of friends who’d died in the attack on the southern district. Elisabet was one of them.
The thought pierced me. When she’d first told me about Elisabet, the name had slid over me as easily as a breeze. Forgettable, like the face of a stranger.
That was one of her childhood friends. They had memories together, joys and moments and spats I would never know. All gone forever because of me. It probably wasn’t my magic, wasn’t my hand, but what difference did that make?
I was there. I had come to kill.
“Eury—”
“Don’t.” Her boots tapped on the stone, sharp and intent ahead of me; she didn’t look back. “Your apology won’t bring her back. It won’t change my feelings. So don’t.”
I would have rejected an apology, too. Neither of us knew what to do, it seemed, with pure, vulnerable softness.
But I wanted her to trust me. I wanted her to know she could. I just didn’t know how to show her that.
Time, Haskel would say. All things truly desired come in time.
“Dorian.” Eury had stopped. In her hand, the stone had begun to glow with white light. Not just crystal light, but sunlight. Solaire, so much of it and so terrible on the eyes I couldn’t keep my gaze on the thing.
It truly was the sol key—the bright key to the eternal cell.
I closed my eyes, breathed out. Some part of me had hoped the stone would always stay a stone.
Her footsteps started again. Ahead of me, the light grew as she neared the wall, until she stood in front of an iron door almost twice as tall as her.
Black iron, ancient, riveted with bolts the size of my fist. No handle, no hinges—as though it had been forged into the stone itself, meant never to open.
At its center, a depression in the exact shape of the crystal, carved deep into the metal.
I had never seen that door in my life. I had walked these catacombs as a boy, had traced my fingers along every wall. This door had not existed then—or it had existed, and the dark had hidden it from me.
I stepped up beside her, before the door that shouldn’t exist. The iron seemed to drink the light from the crystal in her opposite hand, giving nothing back.
She met eyes, hers a shimmering sapphire in the sol key’s light.
We don’t have to, I wanted to say, but saying it would be as pointless as trying to breathe underwater. She was here, and so we were here.
I nodded, and she pressed the sol key into the depression.
For a moment, nothing. Then the stone flared—blazing white, blazing gold—and a sound rose from deep within the door. Not a click, not a groan. A breath, as though something ancient had been holding its lungs for centuries and finally, finally exhaled.
The iron split down the center. The two halves swung inward, slow and massive, revealing nothing but darkness beyond.
Cold air rushed out, so frigid it burned my skin, carrying with it a smell I couldn’t name—old blood, older stone, and something else astringent in my nose, familiar but ten times worse.
Eury stood silhouetted against the black, the sol key still bright in her hand.
“What is that?” she said. “That scent.”
No use lying to her. She’d know, sense it in my tone or my breath or my eyes. I didn’t know what lay down there, but my fae senses did. Every part of me understood.
“Death,” I said. “Endless death.”