Chapter 33
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Eurydice
On one of my early nights in Sylvanwild, Dorian had given me a children’s book full of drawings—a long history of Feyreign’s trials. One of those drawings had frightened me so badly I’d had to shut the book, lock the sight away.
Now I remembered it. Now I saw it again.
Two fae, standing before a darkness so large, so vast, they stood bent-backed like insects in the night. Before them loomed an unseen menace.
I had prayed we wouldn’t face that trial. Because I knew—knew on that night—those two fae were long dead.
Under the earth, my braid whipped past my head, tugged straight toward the darkness. My cloak blew with it, cupping my body.
Then, silence.
Deep, long, until the wind threw my braid back, and my cloak pulled so hard the clasp pressed into my neck.
The smell on the wind was an astringent wall, so powerful my eyes stung. I had smelled this a thousand days and nights of my life, but not like this. Like being dunked in a vat of acid, the liquid sent straight up my nostrils.
The child inside me was terrified. Maybe I could still run. Maybe I could still escape.
But to what? To a life in this acid-drenched Kingdom of Shit? Or perhaps to a quick death on the Killing Fields, three queens taking turns stabbing me gently until every drop of my blood joined the rest atop the grass and stayed there, fresh and red for an eternity.
No. Neither of those worked for me.
The only future I would accept was the one the spiritstag had offered to me in the grove. It had shed its light on me and given me words I didn’t know I could live by.
Power is not granted. It is taken. So take it.
And a dream, a vision: a throne with a blue-smoke dagger on its seat. The grip of the dagger waiting to be held.
By me. By me.
I stepped through the doorway and onto smooth, unhewn stone. My boot nearly slid before I put weight on it. This was beyond the passage, beyond whatever man had made. The sound of my boot touching the ground echoed, a small tap that went on and on before it resounded back at me.
A cavern.
I took one careful step, then another. Dorian made no noise behind me, but I knew he followed. Once we’d gone through that door and into the catacombs, something had changed between us. Or maybe the better phrase was slotted into place.
Not queenslayer. Protector.
My only aim was the next step forward, then the next. If I could put all my courage into one step, that was all I needed. Forward into darkness, step by—
The breathing stopped.
I froze, the key held aloft, showing me nothing but my own hand and miniature cone of light.
Silence reigned, so deep my blood sounded loud in my ears. Thud, thud, thud; my heart felt ready to give.
Light appeared from the darkness. Ice-blue, like a pale sky etched through with cracks, and ovalline. At its center, a vertical black slit.
An eye.
The slit expanded, the pupil growing horizontal, shrinking the blue. Wider, wider.
Then it shifted.
Focused.
Saw me.
Blinked once.
For a second, nothing. Then the orb rose, and the ground under me vibrated. Up, up it went, rising higher and higher until I thought it couldn’t go any further, and yet it did. My face angled back and back and back until I stared nearly straight up.
There, so far above, two blue orbs now glowed in the darkness, each perfectly positioned to form a symmetry.
Slit eyes. Angular. Set at the side of the head.
A reptilian face.
Elisabet had taught me about reptiles, shown me their drawings in books. They were the world’s most ancient creatures, here before bears or birds or humans. Most were small, but some were large—longer than us by a few feet. Not too large to be hunted.
We had long ago wiped them off the surface of the world. Hunted, killed, eaten.
But this…
“Ssyth… kaer faen.” The words erupted in a sibilant hiss, slithering across stone and striking into my ears. “Vas ssu… ssen skavor?”
That sounded Faerish. I couldn’t parse the words, only the feeling: sharp, piercing anger. The kind of anger felt with the entire body, like lightning’s passage.
The fear was like nothing I’d experienced. Not when the wall fell, or when the wraiths sliced my people apart, or when I faced Rhiannon’s swords and her driving magic.
This was primal, ancient, inescapable by the reasoning and logic I’d always used to get myself out of a knot. This was nothing like standing before the spiritstag; in a god’s presence I’d been paralyzed by awe. Here, I felt only a prey instinct. I felt like meat.
Dragon. This creature could be nothing else.
“Ssu… zhent nokh,” the voice hissed. “Ssu… zhent kuhl.”
A third light appeared, just between and below the two blue eyes. A ball of blue light, flickering and dancing inside the throat of an enormous maw lined with teeth.
Blue fire. Blue death.
So much of it.
Dorian stepped up beside me, his arm darting across my body as though he could stop the approaching hell. “Vesth. Ssa… Carys vyrn.”
With his other hand, he pulled aside the neck of his jerkin. The spiritstag’s brand appeared, the lines of it glowing into the darkness of the cave. Brighter light than the key I held. Bolder than a midday sun.
The blue flame flickered, flickered in the creature’s enormous maw, held in a cruel suspension.
Then, with aching slowness, it receded. Disappeared.
“Var ssa ne szyl… ssu-sol?” the voice said.
“Ssa Vae-morn, vel Carys,” Dorian said. “Ssa szyl sol… Orakh.”
A pause. The icy eyes shifted—locked onto me.
Then, so fast I could hardly follow, the head arced down, forward. Toward me.
From the darkness, a black, gleaming maw appeared in the crystal’s light. Nostrils as large as me, the tips of white teeth emerging from a narrow jaw still three times as wide as me.
The maw hovered so close, I could have reached out and touched the pointed end of one of those teeth. The eyes were glacial, shifting pools of blue not ten paces away.
“Speak, child of storms,” the sibilant voice said. “Let me hear your fear.”
I didn’t have words. Right now, I barely had functional legs.
Speak. Speak. Speak.
My mouth opened. I spoke because I had to, because a cauldron of flame waited behind those teeth. “The tooth. The dagger. Was it yours?”
The words floated into the air, small and feathery. They’d nearly gotten caught in my dry throat.
Silence. Death hovered before me with unblinking eyes, my entire future dependent on the whim of a creature with teeth as large as me. The mouth didn’t move, but words came.
“Impudent sack of flesh and veins.” The hiss was so sharp, my ears rang. “All the blood in your body would slake my thirst for but a moment.”
I longed to step back. I didn’t dare.
In this moment, any bravery I possessed was tied to Dorian’s arm across my body. Warm, unmoving—living armor.
The maw came closer, until it nearly touched my chest. “I look upon you, and I see the viscera of your neck. I see your death—your head on my tongue, your blue eye cleft in twain by a single canine.”
As it spoke, I saw it. My head distended from my neck, the canine sliding right through my eye into my skull and brains. Everything I was, sliced in two. Gone because of an impulse.
The nostrils moved, widened. The current jerked my braid once more past my shoulder, toward the waiting teeth.
“I recognize your scent.” The eyes blinked, crushed ice disappearing and reappearing. “Girl of dirt. Child of my curse. Your skin will always stink. You may live forever, and you will carry it on you like the imprint of my tooth on your protector’s breast.”
The stink—meaning the acid. It smelled the acid on me. Perhaps it was a lie, a bluff, or perhaps it did smell twenty years of acid rain on me. Just like the creases of my mother’s hands, always tinged with flour. “I—”
The nostrils blew out, obscuring my voice. “But your blood—your blood. That belongs to me. Every day of your life, you’ve belonged to me. And the blood of the bitch that bore you, and she before her, all the way back to her.”
Her?
“Carys. A waste of a tooth, was she. What makes you any likelier to succeed?”
Through the thick murk of my fear, my gaze settled on one thing: one of the creature’s front incisors was broken—sheared off halfway up.
I understood.
She before her, all the way back to her. Her was Carys.
The story was real. The dagger was real. The dagger was a tooth.
“You gave it to Carys,” I said, the realization arriving even as I spoke. “You gave her one of your teeth.”
A hiss erupted, so loud I dropped the key and clamped my hands to my ears. Dorian’s hand, however, didn’t move from where it lay across my chest.
“Gave? Gave, you say. A dragon does not give. Foolish children live in the realm of give. There is only take. Take, and take, and take.”
Not give, take.
Behind my closed eyes, beneath my hands tight over my ears, beyond the frantic beating of my heart, I had begun to develop a hunch.
If this dragon had meant to kill us, it would have done so by now.
It had told me its truth almost right away: all my blood would satisfy it for a moment. Dorian’s blood might offer two moments. And then it would be alone again. Alone for a year or a hundred years or however long dragons lived.
Which meant…
This dragon wanted something from us.
I opened my eyes and lowered my hands. The creature had not moved; the eyes still hovered like two blue suns only paces away.
I breathed in, out. Then: “What would you take?”
“Now that”—a soft exhale from its nostrils—“is the first wise thing you’ve said, child of dirt.”
The maw moved back into shadow, and the head rose and rose once more to its grand height. Dorian’s hand finally fell away from my body, only for his fingers to find mine, to grip my hand tight.
“First,” the dragon said, “I would take your name.”
An easy take. A test. “Eurydice.”
A scrape and a thud from somewhere deep in the cavern. The ground rumbled under my feet. “That is only half a name.”
“Eurydice Waters.”
“Ah, yes. A daughter of scorn, of the hardscrabble folk. A cursed name for a cursed child.” For the first time, a certain pleasure had entered its androgynous voice. “And for that, I shall give you something in return. I am called Caustrix.”
Caustrix. The word thrummed through me, unforgettable.
“Now, you must give,” it hissed.
What could I give? What could a dragon possibly want? I had no gems, no valuables on me. Only myself.
Dorian leaned close, his lips nearly touching the shell of my ear. “Freedom.”
My gaze darted to him in the darkness. I couldn’t possibly offer this creature freedom. It resided so deep under the earth, I didn’t even understand how it had gotten down here. Or why.
A low chuckle resounded through the cavern. “I have lived a thousand years in silence, and you think you can whisper quietly enough to keep a secret. What is your name, fae?”
His face turned from me, chin rising. “Dorian Crowmere.”
“Another veyre. Do you know what became of the last one, Dorian Crowmere?”
“I wish I did.”
The eyes blinked. A breath out.
“I ate him.”
Silence.
Then a barking laugh rapped off the walls. “An entry for your history books. Or perhaps not, since it’s unlikely you’ll ever touch a quill or inkpot again.”
So many threats. The more that came, the less I felt them.
But the veyre-eating part… that had the ring of truth.
“You wish to be free.” I stepped forward without letting go of Dorian’s hand. “You think I can give you that.”
“And what makes you think you can read my mind, dirt waif?”
“Nothing. I only know two facts.”
“Oh?” The voice lowered, almost indulgent. “Facts are for the na?ve and idealistic. Do tell me your facts.”
“First, you haven’t killed us.” He didn’t speak, didn’t argue. “Second, you’ve been down here, alone, for at least four hundred years.”
Caustrix’s breath pressed my braid back and forward, back and forward. Quicker now. A growl emanated from his throat, and his mouth opened once more.
Blue flames, dancing in the darkness.
They rose, rose out of the throat and past its teeth. Blue flames erupted into the cavern, illuminating the space. For half a second I saw it, the creature in all its terrible glory.
A behemoth. Tectonic. Black-scaled, an elegant neck and a tail just as long. The fine-boned webbing of wings tucked to its body.
A dragon. Truly.
Then Dorian’s body blocked all sight. He wrapped himself around me as he ducked us both down.
A great, terrible wash of heat hit me from all sides, and I waited for it to take us. Waited, waited—
My eyes opened. The heat was terrible, but no pain came. No fire, no burn.
I raised my head. A wall of flames burned taller than me between us and the dragon. Beyond it loomed Caustrix, head raised high.
“At my feet lies my tooth.” The great black tail swept over the cavern floor, passing over a small, glowing object. “Now you can see it with your weak eyes.”
I rose, and Dorian with me. Our gazes met, and an unspoken thing passed between us. Invisible, nameless, but palpable.
He had been ready to die with me. No, he’d been ready to protect me—for the second or two his body might take to crisp—from dragonfire.
Dorian, protector. Dorian, truth-teller.
This time I was the one gripping his hand as we turned toward the creature.
Caustrix watched us, eyes narrowing. The angular head tilted as though considering the two fools who had chosen to stray into the tomb of a dragon.
“What would you give, child of dirt,” Caustrix said from beyond the dancing flames, “to have this bit of bone?”
What would I give…
I had already given up my whole life. Who I was had died in the rubble that night of the attack. Eurydice Waters was just a name now, a thing I carried with me but didn’t own. My life had shrunk in the fortnights since to a smaller and smaller sphere. Life, death, survival.
I no longer wanted simply to survive. I wanted to live.
The truth came quick, easy. It always did when it aligned with what you wanted.
“I’d give all but one thing.” My fingers tightened around Dorian’s. “All but him.”