Chapter 34
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Eurydice
Caustrix regarded me from his imperious height.
“Spoken like a true daughter of scorn.” The black scales on his back rose, shifting in the blue firelight.
“I will give you a choice, Eurydice Waters. In exchange for the tooth, you may give me either one moment inside your mind. Only a breath, little queen. One heartbeat in your mind, one thought to taste. Or…”
I held my breath.
“A piece of your soul.”
Beside me, Dorian tensed. I knew from the tightness of his grip what was in his mind.
The choices were totally unbalanced. Ridiculously so. And if I had learned nothing else from a childhood spent in the Dip, an offer like this was never what it seemed.
Bargain. Dig in.
“Is there nothing else you’ll accept?” I asked.
“Nothing.” The answer was quick, practically a hiss. “Give, take. I will give you the tooth only for an equal offer.”
Dorian stepped in front of me, his back to the dragon, and his hands cupped my face. “Neither. Take neither.”
Caustrix could hear him. No doubt Dorian knew it, too.
“We leave,” Dorian said. “We leave, and we find another way.”
His hands were so gentle, his entreaty so careful. Like I was glass, like I could break. Here was a thing I thought I could never have, what existed between us. Unnamed, but undeniable. I wanted nothing more than this—nothing else.
But that wasn’t true. Not entirely.
The realization twisted in my chest, equally undeniable.
That night the wall fell changed me. I hadn’t known it then, and not for a long, long time.
I hadn’t known it when I stepped into the spiritstag’s grove, hadn’t known it when Dorian gripped my hand and led me into the Eldermaze.
I hadn’t known it when I moved inside Carys’s body, held the dagger.
Not even when I climbed over Rhiannon’s prone body and set a blade to her throat.
But I knew it now.
Everything had been taken from me. The world had warped, shifted, turned irrevocably thorny. And the only way to keep safe was a fucking moat of power around me and anyone I loved.
I had to dig that moat. There was no other way. I couldn’t live without the dagger. If I didn’t die in the Killing Fields, then I’d die a week later at breakfast, or on the privy, or riding a horse.
Kneeling wasn’t an option in Feyreign. Only power.
The dragon’s chest rumbled, and a croaking laugh sounded. “You will not leave.”
Dorian spun toward the creature. “She will take neither.”
“Oh, veyre. Don’t you know she’s already chosen?”
I stared at Dorian’s back, unseeing. My throat tightened; I barely perceived his head turning, his eyes catching mine.
Please understand.
My gaze lifted to the black-scaled behemoth. “I choose the first.”
A noise came from Dorian’s throat, something broken. He dropped to his knees. “Avos… Vrakh-sar.” His voice was hoarse. “Zhal ssa.”
“Zhesh,” Caustrix hissed. “Ssa veyr.”
Dorian turned toward me on his knees. He gripped my hand with both of his. “Eury, you must trust me. We’re alike. You won’t understand now, but remember this. Think of a door. A door. No matter what happens, you must think—”
A roar erupted in the cavern. Guttural, obliterating, mind-rending. Our hands clapped once more over our ears. I crushed my eyes shut.
Through the shell of my ears and my fingers, Caustrix’s voice rumbled off the walls and ceiling. “Speak again, veyre, and I will drill your tongue into your jaw with my littlest claw.”
I opened my eyes. My ears might never stop ringing. Worse, we might never leave this place.
“If you wish to have the dagger”—the dragon’s voice lowered, went sinuous—“then step into the flames, little queen.”
The blue flames still burned hot and high between us and it. Now I felt the sweat coating my body, trickling down my spine. “That’s death,” I whispered.
The glacial eyes blinked. “Not for one of mine.”
One of his?
Caustrix’s words rose to the surface: The bitch who bore her, and the one before her, all the way back to her.
A flash of memory—a dagger cutting into an archer’s fate line. Twelve archers outside the Kingdom of the Plains on that day. The day Carys cast her curse of acid rain.
“Yes, child. Now you begin to see it true. The dagger tasted more than only Carys’s blood that day. Do you know why the rain you called didn’t melt your skin, girl of dirt? Because your blood is hungry.”
Hungry…
“It recognizes its own kind.” If a dragon could smile, this one was.
“Put a normal fae in a vat of my blood, and they dissolve. Put you in it, and you would only drink.” He leaned closer.
“That is why you are dangerous. You are a vessel that cannot be overfilled. You will eat whatever power is poured into you—even death itself.”
I lifted my eyes to Caustrix. The world felt unsteady, unmoored.
“I see your bloodline. Sylvanwild to Highmark, an archer and a lowborn. A lowborn and his small blond wife. And then you, given up to tradition, raised under the acid curse in exchange for a few gold pieces.”
No, he couldn’t see all that. He was bluffing.
But how else to explain the acid rain in the Eldermaze? In the meadow, when I stood before Rhiannon and watched the droplets tear her skin away?
A twisted tree brought me all the way back to that archer. All the way back to Carys setting her dagger to one woman’s fate line.
A fate changed. A daughter changed, and the one after that. One droplet of a dragon’s power given over, mixed into the blood.
Into my blood.
Caustrix let out a one-note laugh. “The world turns for a bit of coin, one night’s food. And you, daughter of scorn, must pay its price.”
Before me, the flames shimmered like a spell. Like magic. Inside them, I saw the Dip. My street. The sun emblazoned on my mother’s front door.
“Step in,” the dragon said. “Step in, and give so that you may take.”
I unclasped my cloak, let it drop to the cavern floor. One step forward, then the next. Wait for me, Dorian. Just wait a moment.
The heat rose until it felt cool, until it swept over me like a frigid breeze. The past beckoned; the future called.
If the dagger depended on knocking on the door of my childhood home, on seeing my mother’s face one more time, I could do that. I could do that a million times.
I stepped into the flames.