Chapter 38
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Dorian
“She is pretty, isn’t she?” Caustrix’s eyes danced with the flames. “Almost prettier on the inside than the outside.”
I opened my eyes. My cloak lay bunched under my head. My hip hurt. How long had I slept? Impossible to know, except grogginess swept over me as I sat up.
Before me, the blue flames burned high. Eury stood inside them, unseeing.
I reached for my canteen and took a long swig. My only real marker of time: the canteen was nearly empty.
Caustrix’s tail swept across the ground. “She can’t live forever without food and water. Acid may lace her veins, but she’s no dragon.”
“She’ll escape.”
“You’re less certain now than you were. I can hear it in your wavering little vocal cords.”
“She’ll escape.”
Caustrix’s gaze flicked to me and narrowed. “You love her.”
The words hit me like a wall. “I—”
“Desperately. More than the last veyre. You wear it like that brand on your chest.” His head lowered, approaching. “Desperation is good. Desperation makes kingdoms rise.”
I corked the canteen. “I don’t want to raise a kingdom.”
“But she does. I’ve seen inside her head. See it now.”
I flicked a hand at him. “Eat me or leave me be.”
He let out a gravelly chuckle. “Would you like to make a deal, veyre?”
“Absolutely not.”
“If she escapes, she’ll face all three of them in the Killing Fields.” He’d already seen everything, plumbed the whole inside of Eury’s head. “No kneeling—it’s certain death. And you can’t save her. You’re but a male of your species.”
I stared at the dragon with tight-pressed lips and grabbed my bag of dried meat.
His tail flicked. “Your well of magic is larger than most males’, changeling, but nothing compared to her. Or any of the other queens.”
I uncinched the bag and drove my hand into it.
“I smell my blood on you, veyre,” he whispered. “You grew up under the curse, didn’t you? A son of scorn. You crave power. The first time you saw her, I can’t imagine the sting of your jealousy. It must have filled you from crown to soles.”
Not entirely true. The jealousy had risen off me in waves, like smoke off an ice cube under the sun.
There she was, so pitiful and na?ve in the night, shaking and frozen.
And yet all that power coalesced around her, waiting for her to discover it.
All because of her blood and the blood of her mother and the woman before that. All because of one queen with a blade—
No. You’re done with those thoughts.
I set my fingers against my eyelids and rubbed. “You’re a vile snake.”
“Vile, yes. A snake, yes. But I see truth and I speak it. The Dorian who craved power is still the Dorian who sits before me. Except now his want is sharpened by love.”
The ground rumbled. My eyes opened.
The dragon had taken a step closer, his head dropping lower. We regarded each other through the veil of blue flames.
“You can save her,” he said.
“She’ll escape.”
“Not here. You know exactly what I mean.”
I lifted a piece of meat to my mouth, inserted, and chewed. “Eury can save herself.”
“Now you’re lying to yourself, veyre.”
“If she has the dagger—”
“The dagger won’t be enough. She doesn’t have the training Carys had. I’ve seen her whole life inside that skull, veyre. She has grit and power, yes, but Rhiannon was the weakest queen in centuries.”
I almost smiled. If Rhiannon were alive, she would have hunted this dragon down and dined on his corpse for saying that. Or died trying. Died, more like. Because she was in fact the weakest queen in centuries. The strongest fae in Sylvanwild, but only because she had killed off all her sisters.
Since Carys’s time, the autumn court had fallen far.
Caustrix was right. The bitter bastard did speak truth.
I chewed on the stale meat. Swallowed. Lowered the bag to the ground. “Tell me your offer, snake.”
He blew air out, riffling the flames toward me. A wave of heat hit me and pushed my hair back. “Proffer your hand. Do it, and I will give you the same power as her.”
I didn’t move. “That won’t change the depth of my well.”
“No, but it will change how it responds to you. It will change how much you need. She calls the acid rain without any training, veyre. Imagine what you could do with all your years of diligence. You could save her, keep her at your side.”
My chest expanded despite myself. The old longing rose in me, always a wishful dream. All the things I could do with magic like that—
But at a price. Power always had a price.
“What would you take?” I whispered.
“One thing.” The tail flicked back, forth. “After you have taken power, you must keep Carys’s promise.”
“To bring down this kingdom?”
“Bring the sky down on their heads. Bury them under it.”
That would mean… “You’d be buried, too. Alone in this cave, forgotten.”
“Perhaps”—the lips parted, the teeth gleaming—“but at least I would have the satisfaction of hearing their death cries ring through the tunnels before they collapsed.”
I had called him a bitter bastard. He was more than that—far more. This dragon must be the most miserable creature alive. He lived only for his own resentment.
But what he offered was beyond anything I had ever imagined. My imagination had always been tempered by the knowledge that I could not possess the power to do as I pleased. To punish those who deserved it, to save those I loved.
Now, here it was. Power, offered.
In the flames, Eurydice didn’t move. If she were here, with me, she might beg me not to accept. She might take my face between her hands and kiss me and make me forget about those old longings and the sting of jealousy.
But she wasn’t here.
I stood, an insect before a predator. The frosty eyes watched, watched.
Deep under the earth, away from the reach of Feyreign and her queens and the world I had always known, I extended my hand, palm up.